Rick And Morty Verses Dungeons & Dragons II: Painscape #3 - IDW Publishing

RICK AND MORTY VERSES DUNGEONS & DRAGONS II: PAINSCAPE No. 3, November 2019

Plush with plenty of the slapstick humour which helped make Adult Swim’s animated television programme so critically acclaimed, Jim Zub’s storyline for Issue Three of “Rick And Morty Verses Dungeons & Dragons II: Painscape” certainly bounds along at an enjoyable pace, as the Smith Family desperately battle the demonic forces ‘wonkily named’ by the fantasy role-playing rule-set’s creators to try and convince parents that it was not “Satan’s game.” Yet whilst such a narrative creates a few laugh-out-loud moments, such as Jerry’s son using a sneak attack to annihilate Sorcerick with a standing lamp, it also arguably contains some rather lack-lustre moments which help explain the mini-series fall in sales to just 11,936 copies.

Foremost of these frustrating flaws is the way Rick Sanchez is seemingly wasted just wandering around his old, incomplete campaign setting, trying to determine whether there truly is “no way home” from the “little burg of graph paper regret” he created in his younger days. This initially slow, sedentary sequence does momentarily appear to contain a real gem of a plot idea when it forces the scientist to negotiate the Caves of Klang – a “masterpiece dungeon” the central protagonist forgot he wrote.

However, rather than depict the Level One Wizard using his wits for once as he encounters obstacles he was far from expecting, the storyline quickly degenerates into a series of simple conflicts between him and a quartet of his failed, previously rolled characters; “Man, you are the worst f*****g Rick I’ve seen since Doofus Rick from J19 Zeta 7…” Indeed, by the time Sanchez finally encounters the Level Six Elven Fighter, Warriorick and his cursed intelligent longsword, the utterly insane battle inside a busy, modern-day shopping mall involving Jerry, Summer and Beth has become much more entertaining.

Possibly this publication’s best asset therefore, alongside the excellent layouts of artist Troy Little, are all the nods to the extensive lore established by Gary Gygax’s co-creation which are scattered throughout its twenty-two pages. Much of this background is seemingly taken from the Second Edition sourcebook, Monstrous Compendium: Outer Planes Appendix, with the comic’s illustrator not only going so far as to pencil a recognisable likeness of the book’s cover, but also ensuring that its contents describing the Outer Planes are all clearly hole-punched.

Written by: Jim Zub, Illustrated by: Troy Little, and Colored by: Leonardo Ito