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Maybe it’s about a battle of the bands.  Or maybe it’s about and alien princess and the band of heroes who protect her.  Or maybe it’s about vikings and Abraham Lincoln.  Joss Whedon and Fabio Moon’s Sugarshock makes the transition from web comic to print and still remains as elusive and absurd on paper as it did on the computer screen.

Joss Whedon is given to flights of fancy.  Sometimes it works like “Hush”, the silent episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and sometimes it doesn’t as evidenced by any number of episodes of his latest television series Dollhouse (what does that man see in Eliza Dusku, anyway?)  Sugarshock is as flighty as its main character Dandelion, the lead singer in the band Sugarshock, whose bassist is a robot and whose drummer and guitarist are aliens (but Dandelion doesn’t know that but she does know about the bassist robot.)  One of the few examples of the band’s lyrics we get are “... I’m not saying I’m rubber, now did I in any way suggest you’re glue…”  It’s no wonder that the band Sugarshock loses the opening competition of bands to a singer only known to us as “Sensitive Guy.”  Even Dandelion can cheer for the winner as the rest of her band shuffles offstage.

Much like its main character, Sugarshock quickly loses its focus and becomes about nothing even as it wants to be about something.  What that is, I’m not too sure.  Even as Dandelion starts going off on non-sequitor tangents, the robot bassist asks “were you even here?”  You’ve almost got to ask the same thing of Whedon as you go from one page to another; was he even here to see what he wrote two pages before?  Sugarshock is the writing of an author who has earned the freedom to do whatever he wants and all he wants to do is play around with words and characters without creating any kind of recognizable narrative.  Sure, there’s a loose story here but it exists secondary to allowing Whedon, through Dandelion, to throw out ridiculous and incoherent dialogue like “By the spirit of my in-no-way-Viking ancestors… You… Will… Be… Legs!”  Really, Dandelion says “you will be legs” but it’s is kind of amusing in the story.  Everything outside of Dandelion’s ramblings exists just to provide the illusion of a story.

While Whedon goes off and plays with his oh-so-clever dialogue, Fabio Moon brings everything together.  Dandelion, as written by Whedon, may be one of the most annoying characters ever but Moon gives her a willful innocence that keeps her from being completely insufferable.  There’s one beautiful drawing of Dandelion and her guitar.  For the supposed intergalactic battle of the bands, she’s playing the “saddest song in the world.”  It’s a really nice, quiet image in the rest of the chaos that Moon draws.

Sugarshock is a comic book with the attention span of a 5 year old.  I’m sure that Whedon had something in mind when he started writing this but then got distracted by a shiny penny or an awesome infomercial on TV.  Much like his internet hit Doctor Horrible, there’s a geeky charm to Sugarshock, mostly because it revels in its own geekiness but, in the end, it ends up being a forgettable diversion.

Sugarshock
Written by: Joss Whedon
Drawn by: Fabio Moon
Colored by: Dave Stewart
Lettered by: Nate Piekos

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