HAMMER

Young Stud gains a new ally but has his prized bag snatched when he teleports into a new kingdom.

The pseudonymous author barely nudges the main storyline forward but at least offers a fresh bevy of monsters in a new setting as he sends his reckless Swirl, a human boy, barreling through the jungle after a gang of bumbling nonhuman thieves—aided by a mysterious swaddled girl named Brymm with (natch) secret powers and an agenda of her own. Amid outsized sound effects, frequent exclamations of “crap!” and tangled, hard to make out action sequences drawn to extend invisibly far beyond the squared-off edges of the mostly monochrome panels, Stud battles past humongous turtle wolves, gator pigs, and other challenges on the way to a climactic brawl with hulking, scarred Jungle King Brutus Elefanté. He still doesn’t get his bag back by the end, but no doubt he will in some future volume after walloping a few more foes with his outsized sledgehammer fist. The human or humanoid figures in this episode have varying skin tones and hair textures and colors in the rare full-color chapter-heads; most of the manga-style volume is in black and white.

The pithy dialogue and punchy action, if not the plot, continue.