Written by: Jeremy Whitley
Art by: Andy Price
Publisher: IDW
I keep forgetting that all things My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic have a tendency to end poorly. The comics—including every four-issue arc I’ve ever read—do this the most for one reason or another, but the show isn’t sin free either. Let’s not forget that “The Cutie Remark Part 2,” which ruined what could have been an awesome villain.
So I’ve just finished Issue 37 of MLP:FiM and sighing because some things never change.
The problem, at least with the comics, is that many want to end with big, explosive battles but then remember they cannot at the last minute. This is a kid’s property first so no, Twilight Sparkle can’t blow her enemies into chunks with a spell or two. Main characters also really can’t get hurt outside of a bump on the head. It just doesn’t work that way. As an adult, I wish it could, yet as a fan of the show, I’m glad it doesn’t go that route very often.
With, you know, “The Cutie Remark Part 1” being an exception, since that episode showed outright war and the closest thing to brutality that the franchise has approached.
So Issue 37 is our climactic battle between the rebels and Sombra’s army of Umbrum, who still look amazing and are some of the best designs I’ve seen this comic series produce. Twilight Sparkle and Cadence have been captured and will be turned to stone—a process that is of course, reversible because kid’s comic.
It’s all well and good, and on the whole, I enjoyed what was there. Until the final battle. This comic arc has been on the more serious, darker side than some of the others, so when Applejack shows up with apples to shoot/throw and Rarity shows up dressed in glam to blind the Umbrum via reflections, I just couldn’t do it. It was too stupid for what was going on, and really, just lazy.
Must every character be reduced to her most basic of obsessions again and again and again? If you want Rarity to blind the Umbrum, have her carry around a magical mirror or something. She’s perfectly capable when it comes to magic, and it still fits in with her vanity too.
Because the climactic fight is not the place for lazy jokes.
Though I’ll reluctantly tip my hat for the way Mr. Whitley inserts Discord into this. That joke was not lazy, and the execution was pretty much exactly how fight sequences in this comic should be handled if they cannot hit a certain threshold for violence. Do that!
On the whole, I’m kind of confused about the whole thing, because Issues 34 and 35 both had some nice fight sequences between the main six and Chrysalis’s army of Changelings. They were cartoon violent to be sure, nothing crazy and with more accidental harm than real harm, but at least they made sense and were treated with the gravity they deserved. Is it because the Umbrum are actually kind of scary looking, so taking that fight too seriously would violate some Hasbro thing? I mean, I get it if true, but dang. It’s a huge waste of a good idea.
As to the last few pages and the comic’s end, well, it goes about how you expect it to. It’s my own fault for wanting a kid’s property to not wrap itself up so cleanly and happily, but it’s also the franchises fault for playing the same hand over and over again.
The comics are the one place where the norm can be broken—because Hasbro knows it has—but it’s never broken enough. It’s always safe and easy and in some cases, lazy.
