Want to see a video of this review? GOOD NEWS! It’s at the bottom.
Words: Patrick Hickey Jr
Art: Josh Adams
Colors: Josh Adams
Letters: Josh Adams
Publisher: Legacy Comix
Let’s get one thing out of the way real quick about Dem’ Gulls. It’s not for kids. I know it has bright colors and animal characters that sort of remind me of high school age versions of Tiny Toons. There’s crude humor both in visual and linguistic form and situations that you probably don’t want to explain to your 8 year old. But assuming that you’ve cleared those hurdles Dem’ Gulls is an attention grabbing start leading into to what I hope is a longer story.
6 pages is a small amount of time to grab a reader’s attention. Especially when you’re trying to introduce a new IP. Do you set up the world? The conflict? The characters? Something else that I can’t think of right now?
Patrick Hickey Jr. and Joshua Adams chose to set up the characters. I can’t argue with this choice at all. I know for a 100% fact that Patrick is around my age with a lot of the same cultural touchstones as me. Joshua is pretty close. So seeing the group shot that opens the issue instantly makes me think of the Goodfeathers from Tiny Toons. For all of you really young people, the Goodfeathers are a mob parody with pigeons standing in for humans.
At this point to be excited for more Dem’ Gulls I don’t need to know what kind of hijinks and shenanigans these guys have gotten into or their plans for the future. I grew up on 90s cartoons so the archetype is already there for me. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Part of why we as humans keep watching the same types of movies and read the same books and listen to the same song 30 times in a single day is because we like familiarity. Dem Gulls is going to hit that familiarity button for people who grew up on the slightly gross out and inappropriate humor of cartoons like Beavis and Butthead and Ren and Stimpy.
You’ve got the leader, the tough guy, the weird guy, and the wild card. There’s room for backstory on everyone but it’s certainly not something we need to enjoy the stories. Well, except for Load Eye. But I always want to know how the weird one got to be the weird one so that tracks perfectly.
Short intros like this are always a tough sell when they’re on their own. It’s basically a test screening to see if the audience is actually there. It’s a movie trailer being shown to check the hype level. It’s totally understandable if you want to wait for a full issue. But keep in mind that the audience reaction here is part of what decides if full issues happen, and that spending money is a form of reaction.
I’m buying it. I want Legacy Comix to know that I want more of it. And like Patrick has told me before about multiple projects: “If sales are good, anything is possible”.
Other bylines include:
Gate Crashers
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