Bucky O’Hare and the Toad menace

    (Vanguard, 2006)
™ and © Vanguard

A young genius fires up his photon accelerator, and rather than blowing something up, trips luckily into a parallel dimension where anthropomorphic animals battle a virulent Toad Empire for galactic independence. This manga-format book collects the old comic from the 80s into a new size and shape, but it’s aged well. Larry Hama is a rare talent that can skip immediately from disintegrating a heroic baboon to a wisecracking kid Einstein without tripping, and it keeps the threat real while the jokes are funny. Michael Golden strikes an equally deft balance of Disney, Kirby and manga (before manga was cool, no less). The repeated and reused panels seem to be a casualty of format conversion, which is forgivable, but it does seem to end rather abruptly.

— Brendan McGinley
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