The monsters strike!
Creative Staff:
Story: Adam Glass
Art: Diego Yapur
Letterer: Sal Cipriano
What They Say:
Nick discovers that his missing sister is not only NOT missing, but she’s also the LEADER of the Lollipop Kids. The last thing Mia wants is her little brother in the park tonight, and she orders him to go home immediately. Nick has survived a few monster clashes and wants in, but Mia has no time for this and has him locked him up in the brig until they can lock up all the monsters again…but does one of the most infamous monsters of all time await their emergence from the prison?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
I’ve been digging Lollipop Kids pretty much from the start as Adam Glass made Nick accessible in a way that a lot of books have a hard time doing. But we’ve also got an amusing array of other kids that he’s dealing with that are more personality quirks that fit with the lives that they’re leading and we got the nod toward Morgan Le Fey the last time around. With an interesting history provided as well for how all of this came to be, the setup has been strong and Diego Yapur has had a lot of great material to knock it out of the park with. And since so much of it takes place in the park in the middle of the night, he’s been able to really deliver a strong looking book mired in all of that darkness that has clicked wonderfully.
It was a lot of fun to see Nick confront his own family history the last time around and take on one side of the family and then decide that he’ll double up since he can get both. The reveal that Mia is a Lollipop Kid just adds a certain kind of fun to it all in terms of how siblings interact with each other as well. But the real complication is that Mia is hours away from turning eighteen and forgetting all of this and she intends to protect Nick like she has for years in playing at this role. That takes away some of his agency with this but there’s a pretty good if brief back and forth over her protecting him and how far she should actually go in trying to keep him safe. But it’s understandable where she’s coming from and why she’s trying to ensure that he’s not involved in all of this because it is dangerous and she thinks she knows him best. And he has been a bit wishy-washy with all of this to begin with.
Of course, her carrying him out of the park is going to go only so far, but the arrival of Morgan Le Fey and her intent to deal with Mia and all of her family gets in the way. Glass gives them a connected history going back to 1777 with why she’s after them so specifically and why Morgan has had such a limited window to really do anything about it, so it kind of wraps all of that up. But what we get is a lot of good action material as she and the couple from her coven push back on the Kids in general here, and then deal with some of the pushback by drawing on a larger array of monsters that have assembled here. It’s a solid series of action events but part of you kind of aligns with the creatures as they just want to be able to break free of the darkness that they’ve been sentenced to for so long. Whether they can be trusted is another thing altogether, but it’s not hard to feel sympathetic toward them.
In Summary:
Lollipop Kids continues to be a great time. I adore Yapur’s artwork on it as it has such a dark of night kind of feeling about so much of it that it just hits a certain sweet spot for this particular kind of story. I also love the range of kids we get here and all the monsters now that lets him just really go all out with so much of it. Adam Glass does some nice historical tie-ins that I always appreciate with his work and how it tweaks history for its needs, giving us something that feels rooted and part of something larger, which is elusive for a lot of Americans in general. This is another very solid entry and I’m looking forward to more of Nick’s journey and seeing what’s in store for Mia as her hours wind down.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 15+
Released By: AfterShock Comics
Release Date: March 27th, 2019
MSRP: $3.99
