Scooby-Doo Personalized Comics Review

By | Thursday, November 14, 2024 Leave a Comment
A week and change ago, I pointed out that you could get a Scooby-Doo "graphic novel" with you inserted in as a unique character. Although the quality of comic book storytelling seemed weak, I did break down and get a copy for myself, largely to see just how good or bad it was. The book arrived the other night.

The story is literally just that original Scooby-Doo episode "What a Night for a Knight" if you want to know how good the plot and dialogue are. (I haven't compared literally every line, but the graphic novel basically lifts the original script in its entirety.) And going through it more carefully, yes, the quality of the comic storytelling is not great. It's not terrible in that the story is told adequately and, with one exception, there's no real place where you might confuse the reader. While they didn't use screen shots, the art does look like it might have been scanned from the original cels and backgrounds. It probably isn't -- I can't imagine Hanna-Barbera has that much of the original material still available -- but it does very much look like it, and not like somebody redrew everything.

Which does make the insertion of a new character more impressive. It's certainly not completely seamless throughout the entire book, but it is very well done. The panels by and large remain visually balanced and the inserted character feels like it's interacting with the others and not just pasted on top. And despite the almost-doubtlessly-different approach to the actual figure drawings (the original figures all seem to be one traditionally while the new one is almost certainly made with vector graphics) there really isn't any stylistic discrepency to make the new character unnaturally stand out.

Also, despite the comic storytelling being uninspiring, there does seem to be some graphic attentiveness to the overall piece. The page and panel layouts vary. Dialogue balloons and sound effects never feel forced into place or interfere with important visual details. And several of the border graphics actually seem to tie into the narrative itself. So the end presentation, while not anywhere near the same league as a Will Eisner or Jack Kirby, still works from a visual perspective in general.

Is this going to win any comic book awards? Almost definitely not. But it is a nicely put together package and is a lot of fun. Probably even moreso if you like Scooby-Doo or Hanna-Barbera or maybe even animation just in general. The "base" cost of these is around $90 (after shipping, etc.) which does strike me as a bit on the pricey side. They were having a sale when I purchased mine, and they were only asking around $50. Plus I found a coupon code which brought my grand total down to $41.24 US, which seems much more reasonable to me. That's all just how I personally would value this, though -- you might place more or less value on the personalization aspect. But I mention the variability here to suggest to not dismiss this entirely if any of the initial pricing you see is outside your budegt; you might be able to wait for a sale or find some coupon codes to bring it down a fair amount.
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