Marceline Gone Adrift #1
Written By Meredith Gran
Illustrated By Carey Pietsch
Kaboom!
Many critics wont to sing Adventure Time’s praises admire how much gets packed into each episode’s 11-minute run time. It’s difficult to reconcile that with the very slight beginning of Marceline Gone Adrift, the six-issue kaboom! series focused on the show’s vampire/demon princess.
Or maybe it’s the six (!) covers the precede the story itself, which only add to an impression the series may be more about servicing Adventure Time completionists who already bought the earrings and mugs than further clarifying Pendleton Ward’s (sometimes bafflingly) dense universe.
We’re not condemning the whole enterprise based solely on the first issue, however. Marceline hasn’t been seen much in season six of the series, so some elaboration on her character is welcome, and that does seem to be the intent here. Marceline’s growing restlessness with the banalities of life as roommate to Finn and Jake has left her creatively blocked. She’s interrupted mid-rant by a mysterious force of energy that carries her off to Princess Bubblegum’s place.
The force has also had a magnetization-like affect on Marceline, allowing her to evade capture by the Banana Guard. The Princess manages to snag her with an “orbital capsule” but the energy force threatens to destroy the device, and perhaps cause wider damage; the exact problem isn’t made clear. So, the Princess opts to fire the device sending Marceline into space, where the story will presumably continue.
And that’s it. Writer Meredith Gran does fine work here though, again, the sequence described above fails to create any sense of what was at stake and why the Princess acted as she did. Then again, trying to make too much sense of a post-apocalyptic fairy tale prominently featuring anthropomorphic foods is probably a fool’s errand; you either get it or you don’t. Illustrator Carey Pietsch stays true to the show’s esthetic, as you’d expect. That’s not damning her with faint praise, but rather an acknowledgement of the limitations inherent in adapting TV for comics.
There’s reason enough here to anticipate better ahead but the initial impression is decidedly “meh.”