Written By: Erik Burnham and Louise Simonson
Art By: Erica Henderson and Derek Charm
Published By: IDW
The Super Secret Crisis War involving Cartoon Network characters certainly has an interesting premise. Basically, Aku (of Samurai Jack fame) wants to control the entire world/universe and has created robots to go in and capture heroes from various cartoon universes so that he can ensure total domination. Along the way he plans on collecting villains so that he can make his team of bad guys even stronger. For example, he intends to enter the city Townsville to destroy the Powerpuff Girls and also enlist Mojo Jojo for his mechanical prowess.
Johnny Bravo’s story follows a separate arc of one-shots that’s planned for this series. A few of Aku’s robots have spilled wine on Aku’s warp console which makes a few of them warp off to completely random universes to hunt heroes rather than the ones Aku has planned. Aku decides to make the most of this mistake and capture even more heroes. Thus every month while this event is going on we get one main story-line issue and one random universe one-shot issue.
Johnny Bravo’s issue basically entirely revolves around how completely idiotic and incompetent he is which is fantastic. These robots have been programmed to accept any and all challengers and beat them until they admit their loss and submit. The problem with Johnny Bravo, however, is that he refuses to admit he’s lost and keeps challenging the robot. And since the robot must accept whatever Johnny chooses, he’s stuck doing a bunch of stuff that won’t ever lead to Johnny’s destruction such as carnival games and chess (which Johnny doesn’t even know how to play).
The story really only works so well because Erik Burnham has nailed Johnny Bravo as a character down to the very last detail. Coupled with Erica Henderson’s artwork, this is the closest thing to a new episode of Johnny we’ve ever gotten. Henderson’s art style resembles the show so much that I legitimately double checked who the original animator of the show was to make sure they weren’t attached.
In fact, the only major complaint I had with this issue is that Johnny’s womanizing takes up a large amount of the comic. I understand that that’s what his character does and everything. Let’s be honest, that’s the number one thing Johnny is known for. But the first woman he hits on has to deal with it for a ridiculous amount of pages and panels and I actually found myself desperately hoping that the evil robot would come just to end the situation that was getting progressively more creepy and less funny. And considering Johnny Bravo had an episode in which he gets turned into a woman and learns that the persistent cat-calling women face is a huge annoyance, I wouldn’t say that expecting his behavior to not go on so agonizingly long is a silly wish.
Ultimately the issue delivers some pretty big laughs towards the end as the robot can’t possibly imagine why in the world a man like Johnny is considered this world’s “hero” and his resulting complete breakdown as he attempts to destroy Johnny leads to some hilarious lines that had me laughing out loud. It’s a good comic, not great, but Johnny Bravo fans will feel right at home within its pages.
