Comic review: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic issue #26

It should have featured The Mailmare With No Name

Yes, I know, I'm so late with this one that another MLP comic is already out. I'll try to catch up, honest! Anyway, this comic is the concluding part of the two-issue arc that began with last month's flawed outing. Before reading, my guess was that it would give us a rather convoluted way out of the Twilight Problem™, that the artwork would be great and that I'd be giving it a slightly better score than issue #25 but not a fantastic one. Actually, since I'm using star ratings now, I can't give it the same rating as last month's effort! Not much to say this time, so here goes:

To be quite honest, things went pretty much as I said above that I'd expected them to. Twilight's criteria for when she can intervene with her Super Alicorn Powers are rationalised a bit, but not enough to make up for the utter mess which caused her (and us, the readers) to get into such a state in the first place. If she can throw cattle in jail for damaging an ancient monument, she can damn well do the same thing when they burn down buildings and physically attack the sheriff of a town! On the plus side, she makes the perfect pernickety town clerk.

I guess you could call this a... Ghost Variant!

Talking of that, Cook's writing is again a bit uneven: for example, since when could Rarity do illusions like that? While I don't think it's as bad as reviewers on... certain infamous sites tend to say, nor do I feel that it's her best work. Some might even say that she's never quite reached the heights she hit with the Big Mac arc more than a year ago. I've certainly never read anything quite as funny since, although issue #26 does provide quite a few chuckles, such as the sequence with Fluttershy the mailmare. (I don't think any quite live up to the "Bull" gag from last time, though.)

Price's art is by far the best thing about issue #26. His main cover is highly effective and the interior artwork is also often impressive, with lots of dynamism and some amusing expressions. Among my favourite panels is one showing Longhorn rearing up aggressively, towering over a clearly worried Pinkie Pie. There's no backup story this time, but Cook does provide us with a handful of ponified movie posters; these are in her usual style, which is amusingly out of place in a Western poster, so are mildly amusing, but not much more.

I found several mistakes in this story. Not the sort you mean, though...

The bigger-name reviewers seem to love this issue, but I'm afraid I can't go along with them. While issue #26 is a slightly more enjoyable and less annoying read than its prequel, it still suffers from bizarre tone shifts and the idiocy of its basic premise. I note that the same creative team will be bringing us the next story in the main series; I can only hope that they do a better job. This issue is better than its predecessor (being otherwise would have been hard) and so just scrapes a three-star rating, largely for the artwork. I hope for better things next month.

Update: No. I'm being too generous. The biggest problem is that this doesn't feel like Friendship is Magic. It's the same problem "Mare Do Well" had, albeit in a different way. As such, I'm reducing this issue's score to two stars.

Yays

• The artwork is once again very attractive
• Twilight's obsession to detail is put to good use
• Does provide several quick laughs
• Price's brilliant main cover design
  

Neighs

• The underlying problem of Twi's ethics remains
• The writing is rather uneven
• Sheriff Applejack was woefully underused
• Doesn't truly feel like MLP:FiM

★★