Scooby-Doo! Team-Up #42 Review

Writer: Sholly Fisch

Artist: Dario Brizuela

Colorist: Franco Riesco

Letterer: Saida Temofonte

Published by: DC Comics

After reading this issue, the first realization I had was: wow, there are a lot of gorillas / apes / chimps themed characters in the DC Universe. Like, a lot! And Sholly Fisch makes absolutely sure to include every single of them in this issue.

These team-up issues follow a pretty basic story structure: drop the Scooby gang into the middle of some crazy plot and see what comes of it. This time around? Monsieur Mallah and Pryemaul (a nazi vampire gorilla. Awesome!) want the city and will do anything to get it.

The Scooby gang? They are just there to do the Scooby gang things of trying to unmask the gorillas (doesn’t work) and play sidekick to the heroic apes in Congorilla, Sam Simeon and Detective Chimp.

More villains join in later (if you’re a fan of DC, you’ll know one glaring omission from my list above that shows up later) and it just becomes a free-for-all until the conclusion.

One thing I really enjoyed about this issue is that Fisch does a few callbacks to previous issues allowing the reader to know that these aren’t just one-shot deals and that for the Scooby gang, this truly is their own little slice of the DC Universe. It’s a small thing, but it makes you want to go check out older issues.

Brizuela and Riesco do a wonderful job of keeping the art simplistic enough and very close to the cartoons throughout. It’s always difficult trying to review the art for this type of comic because you buy it expecting to see the Scooby gang how you know them in the cartoons and not necessarily reimagined - we’ll leave that to Scooby Apocalypse.