Written by: Katie Cook
Art by: Andy Price
Publisher: IDW
The My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic comic staff is actually comprised of multiple teams, and I consider Katie Cook and Andy Price to be the A-Team. Their artwork and stories have, historically, been my favorite, though in the case of MLP:FiM #25, I feel like they haven’t quite hit A-game material.
Don’t get me wrong; Issue 25 is good. I had a blast with it, and it’s absolutely rife with excellent art, solid jokes, and the best kind of bad puns. But…
Here’s our story: The main six head to a wild-west inspired ranch called Canter Creek to help a distant relative of Applejacks. As it turns out, said relative is nowhere to be found and Canter Creek is being assaulted by a gang of giant bulls. The bulls ride little goats, by the way. It’s as awesome as that sentence makes it sound.
But there are problems. The first is the amount of exposition. The comic moves by really quickly, and it almost feels exhausting, but there are moments of high explanation. Background gags and oneoff jokes help break them all up (as does some handwaving), but it doesn’t change the fact that there’s a lot of text to be had here.
There’s an art form to cramming a lot into a little, and this doesn’t quite hit master level.
The second problem is one of Twilight Sparkle herself. She has magic, and magic is powerful. She refuses to use any of it against the bulls though, and her explanation doesn’t jive with me, especially not after the bulls physically attack Applejack.
Twilight’s endgame plan, which doesn’t involve magic at all, was also terribly stupid and clearly wasn’t going to work. I get that this is the first issue in an arc and that the first plan isn’t supposed to work, but this was just too obvious.
There’s a lot of good here, but there are some major storytelling problems that offset that good. On the whole, I had fun, but this one is far from perfect.
