Burn the Orphanage vol. 2: Reign of Terror

Back when I reviewed the first volume I expressed my hope that they’d get a new colorist for this series.  One who knew how to make the colors as vibrant as the console and arcade brawlers this title draws its inspiration from.  Well, writer/artist Sina Grace and co-writer Daniel Freedman replaced John Rauch with Renee Keyes, but the coloring still isn’t as vibrant as I was hoping for.  It is less murky, and that’s unfortunately the only real improvement on display here.  Instead of telling three shorter and varied stories, “Reign of Terror” tells one longer tale about Rock, Lex, and Bear’s fight against a resurrected Manncorp, led by Mann Jr. and his army of killer robots.  They’ve taken over the city and Junior is looking to extract some revenge on Rock for killing his dad.

The story is just as ridiculous as you’d expect from one that features stripper ninjas along with the aforementioned killer robots.  Unfortunately Grace and Freedman don’t find enough humor in their premise to sustain the story for the entirety of its length.  There are some fun riffs on genre tropes, but everything on display here never got more than a warm smile from me.  That’s likely because a lot of the material feels like its played a bit too straight for its own good.  As a result, this story feels exactly like the kind of narrative we’d expect to find in an arcade or 16-bit brawler without the kind of self-awareness needed to either transcend the material or make it truly funny.  Grace’s art really doesn’t push the needle in one direction or the other there, so it’s really hard to really get worked up about the idea of a third volume after it’s teased at the end of this one.