Dastardly & Muttley

Maybe I should just stop bothering with Garth Ennis’ comedic works.  “Sixpack & Dogwelder” was awful, “Jimmy’s Bastards” best bits didn’t involve comedy, and now “Dastardly & Muttley” looks to have been hamstrung by its association with DC’s “Hanna-Barbera Universe.”  I may be being a bit generous with that assessment because there are parts of this miniseries that make it seem like it would’ve been a better body-horror story than comedic satire.  That’s because it’s all about cartoon logic leaking out into the real world and the chaos that erupts as a result. So you have scenes where a man’s eyes bug out of his face and he can’t get them back in, the president taking a big cartoon hammer to a political opponent’s head and caving his skull in (off-panel), and then running into a harpsichord to escape only to emerge in slices seen for the horrors they actually are.  DC’s other “Hanna-Barbera” titles have shown a willingness to go into some crazy places, and it’s disappointing that this one didn’t fully commit to its horror leanings.

So what are we left with?  The story of two military pilots, Col. Richard “Dick” Atcherly and Capt. Dudley “Mutt” Muller, trying to stem the cartoon chaos as the former turns into a cackling mustache-twirling villain and the latter deals with becoming a human/dog hybrid.  As protagonists they’re sympathetic enough, particularly with Muller’s desire to become normal again to be with his family, but they spend the majority of the miniseries at the mercy of the whims of the plot. Which isn’t all that interesting as it hinges on the MacGuffin-esque element known as unstabilium that allows all that cartoon logic into our world.  I at least get the feeling that Ennis is trying to do something interesting with this material, but he can’t quite pull it off. Or even stick to the “Hanna-Barbera” cartoon character canon if that’s important to you.

Artist Mauricet does deliver some lively cartoonish art that I probably would’ve enjoyed more in a different setting.  The problem is that as the artist’s style has a lot of cartooniness in it already, Mauricet struggles to sell all the more cartoonish elements creeping in on top of it.  What this miniseries needed was either an artist who could do serious and cartoony at once (someone like Mike Allred) or a colorist who could clearly delineate the two separate realities colliding here.  So the art, like the story, just can’t commit to the most interesting parts of this setup leaving the whole thing a confused mess that’s unlikely to appeal to anyone.