Rugrats: R is for Reptar 2018 Special Review

Writer: Nicole Andelfinger
Artists: Esdras Christobal, Laura Langston, Sarah Webb, Ilaria Catalani & Brittney Williams
Colorists: Fred C. Stresing, Meg Casey, & Joana Lafuente
Letterer: Jim Campbell
Publisher: Kaboom!

After not falling in love with the recent Rugrats comic book series, I did find the idea of this special interesting. Nicole Andelfinger wrote the entire issue while five different artists illustrate different parts of the story. I always enjoy comic books that have multiple pages from multiple artists because I enjoy seeing different styles of the same characters back to back. This issue delivers a great variety of artwork to follow a fun story written by Andelfinger.

One of the main things that kept me from continuing to read the recent Rugrats series after the first couple of issues is the writing. I did not enjoy how the dialogue was written because it basically had the babies speak intelligently but in their attempt to capture the baby talk, they sprinkled a few annoying ways to mess up a word in the middle of the dialogue. Well, Andelfinger solves this problem in this special. The dialogue that she wrote for the babies feels way more in line with how they spoke on the show. Andelfinger also perfectly set up the story of a long comic book issue that provided an outlet for five artists to show off their work.

Each artists illustrates a different story being told by one of the characters about Reptar. None of the artwork is even similar and that makes this special so much fun to read. Some of the art is totally different from the way I see the Rugrats characters and it was it really interesting to see how they were able to still capture the characters’ emotions and attitudes perfectly. I definitely liked some stories more than others because of the artwork, but they are all entertaining.

I still don’t know if I love the attempts to make Rugrats comics, but this is better than the first few issues of the recent series in my opinion. The fact that they were able to put together this team to make a 48 page comic book that I enjoyed with characters I grew up with and still love gives me hope that they can get the series right. This issue’s story is entertaining and the artwork is neat, so it definitely isn’t a bad comic book at all. It still isn’t my ideal portrayal of Rugrats in a comic book, but I still had fun reading it and would recommend it to other Rugrats fans.