Groo: In the Wild #2 // Review
The king's soldiers are approaching. What they must do, they must do on orders of the king. What they smell is...delicious. The soldiers are invading a village in order to slay an invader...a barbarian who sits in plain sight...eating. It's a small army sent against one man. How difficult could it be for them? They are about to find out in the opening pages of Groo: In the Wild #2. Veteran writer/artist Sergio Aragonés and equally veteran writer Mark Evanier take the astonishingly long-lived barbarian through another adventure in his latest series. Aragonés' delightfully silly comedy continues.
Groo and his spotted dog Rufferto greet the king's soldiers the only way they know how. Unfortunately, the soldiers cannot stay, and so it is that a barbarian and his dog continue to wander until they find themselves in the land of Marfim. It's a place populated by delicious Ortix antelopes. Unfortunately, the legend of the Ortix has passed into the realm of legend exclusively, as it is the case that the kind had hunted the beast to extinction in favor of hoarding as much valuable Ortix ivory as possible. This angers Groo quite a bit. And so he is off to have a word with the king...
Aragonés and Evanier's scripting style in the second issue is a bit difficult to adequately describe. On the one level, it's very obvious, often silly humor that plays on the idiocy of the barbarian. There's a deeper satirical level to the humor that really is VERY obvious. It couldn't be more apparent that the king and his society are a spoof on progressive capitalism. They're being SO obvious about the nature of the satire, though...that the deeper meaning of it actually sneaks up on the narrative more than a couple of times. The dynamics of this are as bewildering as they are stupid.
Aragonés' art hasn't really progressed a whole lot in the sixty years since he'd started working for Mad Magazine. That's actually a really, really good thing. It's a reliable, friendly style that has warmed the page for a long time and continues to do so admirably in the latest series of stories. There's very little to be said about Aragonés' style that hasn't been said a million times before. It's as charmingly goofy as it is reliable.
In the second issue of the current series, the artist's big, flat tapestries of massive crowds of people serve a story that involves the oppressive mass of the masses in the service of commerce. The big crowd shots serve a deeper meaning in another satisfyingly simple adventure for one of the longer-lived satirical characters on the fringes of pop cultural fame. Sixty years is a long time to be working in ANY industry. Aragonés' style is charming enough to maintain for another sixty years or more, though it's undoubtedly the case that this is likely to be the later period beloved artists' impressively long career. The guy IS 85. It's just cool that he continues to produce stuff with such resilient heart.
