Saturday 4 March 2017

Comic mini-review: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic #51

Comics are coming thick and fast from IDW at the moment! I already have the Guardians of Harmony special issue, which will be reviewed soon, but for now we're back to the main series.

Main cover of MLP comic #51, showing the Mane Six and Shadow Lock
Tony Fleecs' cover appealed to me more than the "toga party" sub cover
A new writer this time! James Asmus, writer of much other stuff including quite a few X-Men comics, makes his Pony debut alongside regular artist Tony Fleecs and colourist Heather Breckel. In this arc, which will apparently somehow tie into Season Seven of the show,* Asmus gets off to a solid if unspectacular start with a fairly interesting story, introducing a suspicious new pony. Most of the character interaction is decent, though a bar scene is a bit odd and I can't see Fluttershy ever using the term "wrestly-doo". A bigger problem, given the importance of book magic, is the absence of even a passing reference to the Bookworm arc. Hopefully that was a choice, not a research failure. Fleecs' art is fine, though it's a bit weird having Fluttershy flying so much and Rainbow flying so little. Enough here for me to be cautiously optimistic, but not enough for me to proclaim Asmus a Pony comic genius. I await the next issue with interest! ★★★

* I'm being deliberately vague here. I know what was announced.

4 comments:

  1. Congratulations on spoiling yourself for season 7.

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    1. That particular S7 news was announced months ago, so I can't really avoid it. I did, however, avoid saying which aspect of the comic was relevant to the tie-in.

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  2. Forgetting the Bookworm arc ever happened is fine with me! So far my only quibble with this arc is _every_ pony in that town being a jerk.

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    1. I must admit that I'd more or less forgotten the Bookworm arc had happened until I saw the synopsis for this one. Looking back, I didn't outright hate it, but I wasn't exactly impressed with it.

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