Five Weapons #3 – Review

By: Jimmie Robinson (story & art), Paul Little (colors)

The Story: All of us would be more motivated to race if there was a kiss waiting at the end of it.

The Review: I knew from the start that Five Weapons isn’t really aimed at the adult reader.  With names like Jade the Blade and Joon the Loon, you know that Robinson’s appealing to a more innocent demographic.  Even so, I continued to labor with the idea that this title would fall along the lines of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-type series: upbeat and fun, but with a serious side as well, open to more angst and violence than, say, something from Johnny DC.

This issue forces me to recalibrate that understanding.  Five Weapons sits comfortably between TMNT and Tiny Titans in the maturity spectrum of comics.  It’s not quite as frothy as the works of Art Baltazar and Franco Aureliani, but it doesn’t seem given to moments of sobriety the way TMNT frequently does, either.  In other words, it has just enough narrative complexity to occupy the mature mind, but not enough to challenge it.