Groo: In the Wild

Groo ended his last adventure in “Gods Against Groo” stranded out on the ocean with his faithful companion Rufferto.  It’s a rare bit of continuity between stories that doesn’t portend anything longer as he soon finds himself back on dry land, and hungry!  He’s got a craving for seafood, fruits, birds, or any kind of edible wildlife, really.  He’ll even take the fruits grown off the lands, too.  Except there aren’t any to be had as the local monarch has invested in the development of his kingdom at the expense of the local wildlife.

What sounds like a story that’s going to be about the dangers of demanding too much from the land winds up feeling a lot more unfocused than that.  While it may initially seem like writer Mark Evanier is going to start giving us some done-in-one stories around this theme, everything winds up feeling less focused than usual.  This scattershot approach does have some amusing bits, like the character being a dam nuisance, but the end result feels even more lazily strung together than recent “Groo” stories.

At least artist Sergio Aragones feels like showing off here.  You’ll never catch me saying a bad thing about the art in a “Groo” story because even when they don’t work, they still have this living legend’s artistry to fall back on.  Aragones delivers more splash pages, double and single, than usual, and they’re all worth scanning through to find the funny details he packs them all with. His sequential work is full of great detail overall, and it’s enough to make me disappointed that it wasn’t in service of a better story this time around.