I love Scooby-Doo, so when DC added a Scooby book to the Hannah-Barbera revival line it immediately caught my attention. In Scooby Apocalypse, we get a glimpse of what it would be like if the Scooby gang met for the first time just as the world ended. It’s a kind of sci-fi version of The Walking Dead, where the Mystery Inc gang is cast as the survivors of a nanotech plague that transformed the whole world into monsters. The main characters are indeed named Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, and Scooby. They do indeed ride around in a green van they call the Mystery Machine. Their visual models even show inspiration from the classic characters … and there ends any resemblance to anything remotely Scooby-Doo.
The original cartoon endures due to the formula of the mysteries and the chemistry of the characters. They’re obviously tight knit friends who work well together and look out for each other. The Scooby-Doo cartoon mysteries are some of the most well-crafted stories in the business, building on a series of action and character beats to reach a logical climax. The Scooby Apocalypse comic is instead a series of set pieces tied together through the use of common characters. It’s actually the exact opposite of the cartoons in terms of story and character construction.
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| Scooby Apocalypse (2016) #1 |
In fact, “exact opposite of Scooby-Doo” is a pretty good way to describe this comic. The characters are caricatures of teen drama stereotypes that bear no resemblance at all to the classic characters. Fred is a cowardly, helpless, doe-eyed simp, unable to think for himself. Daphne is filled with a reservoir of bitterness and anger married to a domineering and antagonistic mistrust. Velma is self-obsessed and socially non-functional. Shaggy is a prevaricating pacifist that waffles between apathy and anxiety with bipolar intensity. Scooby is used as both comic … relief is really not the right word, “attempt” perhaps? … and as a deus ex machina plot device. And they constantly fight amongst themselves. I’ve always found the Mystery Inc gang endearing and likeable, something impossible for the cast of this comic. Except for one brief moment in the first issue’s backup story, Shaggy and Scooby are simply not interesting enough to evoke emotion from the reader, and I actively hate the other three with a side order of resentment for the time spent reading about them.
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| Scooby Apocalypse (2016) #7 |
I’d take a minute to describe the plot, but I’ve already summed it up. The gang fights and bickers with each other constantly, about everything, and with zero consistency of character. The book is little more than a series of set changes where the cast moves from scene to scene continually sniping and being nasty to each other. I got sick of it very quickly.
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| Scooby Apocalypse (2016) #3 |
The rest of the book is a parade of gore, violence, and grotesquerie without reflection or purpose. Elements of the world seem to be presented solely for their shock value, without even the barest attempt at literary device. Issue #6 set another distressing pattern for the book by spending the entire issue in a flashback that was meant to reveal Velma’s involvement in the events that set off end of the world. The resulting story belabored a clumsy and blatantly obvious plot point while obsessing over Velma’s inability to behave like a functional adult. Issue #10 wasted the whole book exploring Velma’s fetishistic power fantasies without even attempting to be relevant to the rest of the series. We’re less than a dozen issues into the series and they’ve seemingly abandoned all pretense of telling a cohesive story in favor of finding increasingly shocking and offensive ways of portraying their main characters.
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| Scooby Apocalypse (2016) #10 |
The worst part is that writers Keith Giffen and J.M. Dematteis have continually and consistently turned out some of the best stories in comics literature. Giffen’s work on Legion of Super-Heroes remains some of my very favorite stories ever. He handled a diverse cast of characters deftly and through at least three incarnations (that I’ve read), telling a variety of stories from lighthearted fun to deadly serious. Giffen also helmed Marvel’s Annihilation event, telling a series of often brutal and occasionally touching war stories and elevating characters such as Rocket Raccoon and Star-Lord from forgotten relics to fan favorites.
DeMatteis first came to my attention during his run that concluded the first Ghost Rider series. Johnny Blaze’s struggle against the demon literally inside of him resonated with me when I first read those books and continues to define for me the character of the Ghost Rider. His work on Captain America introduced to me Deathlok and the post-apocalyptic world of the Nth Command. His climactic battle between Cap and the Red Skull dug deep into the truly twisted depths of that villain. I was glued to the Spider-Man books when DeMatteis penned Kraven’s Last Hunt and later tortured Peter Parker with the loss of his friend Harry Osborn to the spectre of the Green Goblin.
Giffen and DeMatteis, of course, are unquestionably best known as a team for their creation of Justice League International, a book which postulated that superhero comics of the time were taking themselves far too seriously and catapulted obscure characters such as Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, and Martian Manhunter into the mainstream. They proved that superheroes can be funny and likeable and still deal with serious problems on a very human level. In fact, the Giffen and DeMatteis duo is pretty much my dream team for a story that casts Scooby-Doo and the gang as serious investigators in a world full of dangerous monsters … which makes this kind of epic failure baffling and disheartening.
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| Scooby Apocalypse #2 |
So what can we pull out of this dung heap? Is there anything here worth further consideration or discussion fuel? Not really. Velma confesses to being a central figure responsible for the nanite plague that transformed the world into monsters. Her primary defense is that she was trying to save the world and that others corrupted her work. But the book never follows up on the ethical question to any kind of resolution, nor does it even pretend to prompt the reader to do so on his own. Beyond that … I’m just writing off the series as an utter waste of time and money.
I usually cut books like this some slack, assuming they’re meant for a completely different audience. In this case, I can’t even imagine who that audience might be as I can’t imagine anyone voluntarily continuing to read this garbage. I give Scooby Apocalypse a Quality score of “Terrible” and a Relevance score of “Just Barely”.
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Winston Crutchfield has loved comics ever since he discovered his older brother's stash of Spider-Man and What If? books forgotten in a dresser drawer. He blames his mother for teaching him to read and his grandmother for fooling nobody by “accidentally” picking up new comics at the drugstore with her crossword puzzles. He is the publisher and small business service provider at Critical Press Media, and may be found in the Christian Geek Central forums as “MindSpike”.
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