A silly end to a silly series.
Creative Staff:
Story: Mark Evanier, Sergio Aragones
Art: Sergio Aragones, Thomas Yeates
Colors: Tom Luth
Letterer: Stan Sakai, Adam Pruett
What They Say:
Tarzan artist Thomas Yeates teams up with Sergio Aragones and Mark Evanier to deliver a unique crossover experience! Each detailed page is colored by longtime collaborator Tom Luth and lettered by multiple award-winner Stan Sakai. Also–Rufferto the dog remains ready to impress in his usual backup strip!
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
The pairing of these two characters has been a hard thing to wrap my head around and at the end of it, I really don’t think it worked at all. With two very different characters and the modern incarnation of Tarzan being treated as it is, the two really don’t mix in just about every way. While they existed separately in the first two issues, the third one brought them together and the finale goes all in through a couple of ways. Evanier and Aragones handle the writing for the whole thing and Aragones delivers us Groo as only he can, but we get some great pages from Thomas Yeates with an intriguing version of Tarzan that may be the first time people see it this way.
The real-world storyline following Aragones and Evanier is a weird highlight to things because they just get to be silly and all. With Aragones at the zoo still, he’s now found that most of the creatures have people wearing costumes because the animals died or something, so he’s now been given an alligator costume to wear for a bit by another zoo player. At the same time, Evanier is busy doing panels but offhandedly mentions what’s going on at the zoo and that rallies the cosplay crowd to go and find and rescue Aragones. Which overruns the park and just turns everything to chaos. It’s cute and silly but completely nonsensical in so many ways. It’s a delight to watch Aragones get to draw so many different things and his take on Evanier is surely a good shared joke between the two very long-time friends.
Within Groo’s world, it’s just surreal once again. He’s made his way back to his world and the nearby village, and after spending some time consuming flea-remover, he’s got his army rallied thanks to Rufferto and is leading them back to help his “new friend” from the strange place. Not that the locals are keen on this for obvious reasons and it’s just a mess of a strange battle that takes place where everyone should legitimately be screaming in horror upon seeing each other. Of course, it all wraps up nicely with Groo and company helping to save the day and returning home while Tarzan tries to deal with his prisoners, only for them to escape to the Bad Place in a comical twist that’s very Groo-like. I do like the way the paths worked and seeing Tarzan and the others on it, but I’m also glad that this particular connection point is gone.
In Summary:
I love Groo and even at the best of times Groo can be a challenging book. Groo and Tarzan is not a crossover I expected to see and it really doesn’t work a lot of the time. So much so that it’s incredibly jarring to go from either a convention scene or a Groo scene and then to something with Tarzan. Both in terms of storytelling and visual design – enough so that I really lost interest in the Tarzan storyline because I came to read Groo. I’m sure this book worked for a lot of fans for a lot of reasons but so much of it just proved to be a challenge. It still worked in giving me some weirdly comical meta stuff with Aragones and Evanier’s storyline and there’s just enough Groo being Groo in his own world, along with Rufferto, that I enjoyed it. But everything involving Tarzan simply made it a slog to get through. If they do another crossover I hope it’s one that blends better.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 12+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: November 17th, 2021
MSRP: $3.99
