RODEO HAWKINS AND THE SONS OF DISASTER

The only surviving Sidney Poblocki on all the many parallel Earths finds his loyalty to lively, enigmatic Rodeo tested by a villain’s evil scheme.

Despite efforts to bring them up to speed, readers unfamiliar with the series opener may flounder as the mildly surreal continuing storyline takes a few more dizzying spins in this second entry. Being the last of the murderous Paladins still at liberty after Rodeo’s application of the Plunger of Truth, bad guy Athelstan concocts an uncharacteristically clever ploy to steal the powers of the “fiendish tweenzilla” who wielded it by exploiting her friendship with the multiverse’s last living Sidney—newest and only boy member of her closely knit posse, the Daughters of Mayhem. The trap is sprung, naturally, just as a tiff has Sidney questioning the depth of that friendship. Breakneck visual pacing and the frequent use of silent sequences and reaction shots to enhance both comical and dramatic moments give Miles’ cleanly drawn frames an appealing cinematic feel as events hurtle toward a tumultuous climax. At the head of a cast that is, thanks to incremental differences between worlds, wildly multicolored and multispecies, the two brown-skinned leads come through swimmingly for one another—and also deal just deserts to Athelstan with an assist from Rodeo’s large and astonishingly versatile wad of bubble gum.

Daffy, inventive storytelling on any world. Or worlds.