24 Hour Comics Reviewing Day, Hour Thirteen: Krypto the Superdog #1

KRYPTO THE SUPERDOG #1: This comic is fun. My baby sister Marshall wandered out to mooch some candy beans off me and to remind me to review the Krypto comic. Hooves off my beans, sis! The Krypto cartoon series skews a little younger than some of the other DC-based TV series and so does the comic book: this is a good intro comic for young kids (like you, Marshall...hey, stop eating my candy beans!), but there's definitely some gaps here: in adapting two early episodes from the series, a handful of info gets left out, and maybe that's not important to the target audience. Me, I wondered how Krypto understood and could talk to Kevin until I spotted an unexplained two-panel sequence where Krypto pops a device out of his dog tag and Kevin puts it in his ear. I'm assuming it's an animal-human translator. It wasn't mentioned or explained at all in the script, however—it might be an obvious item from the TV series, but it needed to be very briefly explained here. My main quibble was that the first story tried to cram in a huge amount of exposition for half an issue. I'd rather have had a one-page recap at the beginning and then leap right into the adventures. And in the second story, Streaky and Ace appear with no explanation. The gap explaining where they came from obviously is a result of adapting two different TV episodes, but again that's where a recap page would have come in. "Banding together with his friends Streaky the Super-Cat and Ace the Bathound..." But if you ignore some minor quibbles (hey, aren't those hyenas actually Harley Quinn's pets, not the Joker's?), it actually is a pretty sweet and delightful comic. I was especially fond of Superman's cameo appearance and his suggestion that Kevin help him out by letting Krypto stay with him: the best Krypto stories have a strong sense of the love between boy and dog (Eliot S! Maggin's "Starwinds Howl" short story is the ultimate version of that connection). Clean, crisp art, the slightly lower price point, done-in-one stories, the portrayal of Ace as a stoic and right-to-business crimefighter (just like his master), the Superman cameo, and the concept of a spaceship being a secret headquarters all definitely contribute towards making Krypto #1 a fun comic.