Skull-Kickers #2 – Review

By: Jim Zubkavich (writer), Edwin Huang (art), Misty Coats (colors) & Marshall Dillon (letters)

The Story: The big-bald-dude/rampaging-dwarf continue their adventure to recover the body of a murdered noble.

What’s Good: “Romp…”  That is the word that best describes this comic.  The first issue of Skull-kickers was a little hard to review because of the hype surrounding it (with the first issue getting bid up on eBay before it even shipped).  In reading #1, there was a tendency to have a, “Well, it’s good, but it isn’t all that.” And some of that reaction was probably just blowback against the hype-train because (in a vacuum) issue #1 was just fine.

Ironically, this second issue is much better than issue #1, yet it is getting no hype.  There were no breathless pantings on message boards about how “Wednesday is the big day for issue #2!!!!”

What makes this issue such fun is that it just keeps bouncing along and alternating between action and humor.  First we get a big fight scene of our duo trying to reclaim the corpse they’re looking for from a troll and horde of bad guys. Then we see them interrogating a survivor for information about the bad guy’s hideout by pretending to eat him (trust me, it’s funny), then there’s a battle with orcs and we wrap up with the comical image of these two guys sharing a horse.  The action is pretty good, but the humor is really this comic’s calling card.