I Pledge Allegiance to the Mask

That this comic exists at all is surprising.  “The Mask” seemed like a concept that had run its course in the years after the 1994 Jim Carrey film brought everyone’s attention to the comics.  If you’re going to revive this property over a decade after the last comic saw print, then you’d best have a good reason for doing so.  That’s true in this case as writer Christopher Cantwell and artist Patric Reynolds have something to say about our country at this time.  What starts off as a bit of darkly comic revenge, as an awful mother is murdered via an excess of chocolate syrup, quickly takes on a political dimension as we find out that Kathy Matthews, Mayor of Edge City and ex-girlfriend to deceased original Mask-wearer Stanley Ipkiss, is running for president.  It looks like she’s going to go all the way, until we see no-hoper candidate Abner Mead get his hands on the titular object.

Abner quickly goes from political zero to hero of the polls after he starts spouting off outrageous promises, engages in some wanton fear-mongering, and murders his opposing candidates in an expectedly cartoonish manner.  It’s clear that Cantwell is trying to draw some specific parallels to our own cartoonishly monstrous president, and it mainly works because no one ever questions the fact that a green-faced living cartoon is running for president.  That the Mask’s once outrageous behavior has become an accepted norm is something that constantly hangs over the story and gives it a queasy kind of power.  Too bad that only Abner gets anything resembling a character arc, as the rest of the cast pretty much spends the story scrambling about at the mercy of the plot.

Worse is the fact that artist Patric Reynolds feels miscast on the material here.  A frequent collaborator with Mike Mignola, he’s got a detailed and gritty style that handles the normal stuff just fine, but makes the Mask look boring.  Maybe that might have been the point, yet it feels like the story’s goals would’ve been better realized if we’d had a genuinely garish and over-the-top cartoon-looking version of the character here.  That said, the end result of this comic is that it’s likely better than you’re expecting from a revival of the character, even if it’s more interesting than genuinely entertaining.