Husbands is an internet series about two high profile gay men who recently started dating, but wake up one morning to find themselves married. This week, Dark Horse releases a collection of the online comic by Jane Espenson and Brad Bell, creators of the series on which the comic is based. While going through their wedding gifts, they find a magical book which sucks them in and sends them on a series of adventures crossing the whole spectrum of genres. I usually enjoy reality jumping stories like this, but this one just didn’t live up to my expectations.
The story starts with the main characters from the web series, Brady Kelly, a professional baseball player, and Cheeks, who is… a vague celebrity of some sort? They aren’t really specific on that matter. Anyways, they find this magical book and are pulled into a rapidly shifting series of parallel worlds. They begin in a superhero world as a hero/villain pair, the tale of the Prince and the Pauper, a Sherlock Holmes style mystery, a scifi space adventure, Archie Comics and lastly a spy thriller.
Honesty, I was less than impressed by these comics. Usually, I expect good things from any world hopping story as there is so much to work with, but this fell flat. The stories are bland. I think that they are just so short that it doesn’t really allow for much more than a bare basic plot. Eleven pages simply isn’t long enough to establish a mystery to be solved, employ deductive reasoning, do a big reveal, and impress the audience with how clever the investigator’s reasoning was.
It’s not a good sign when the “making of” section is your favorite part. I thought it was very interesting to see practice art, early scripts in the development process, and rough scene sketches, since I’m always interested to take a peak into how different people approach a project and see what ideas got scrapped before they could make it to the final product. I was, however, dissatisfied with their explanations of the lessons Brady and Cheeks were supposedly learning in their adventures about how to make a relationship last. They weren’t obvious from the comics, and they were fairly cliched pieces of advice, from the importance of communication to learning how to cooperate.
My conclusion? This comic is $14.99 from Dark Horse. I wouldn’t pay more than about 50¢. And that’s pushing it. That being said, I DID enjoy the web series the comic is based on. It, as a contrast to the comic, is adorable, witty, and has a little thing called plot development. Watch that instead.
Matthew Bryant, aka Baker Street Holmes, was expecting so much more from a comic with a foreword by Neil Gaiman praising it as “smart” and stating “the jokes are good”. You can follow him on twitter at @BStreetHolmes or e-mail him at HMCrazySS@gmail.com.
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