Every Cover a World: On the Adventure Time Comics

Comics never really stuck with me. Superhero books felt like mythology with the meaning removed—all consequence stripped out, power fantasies for people who never had to live with consequences. Manga I could admire in the abstract but never actually sat down with consistently, which is slightly embarrassing given years of serious anime obsession. I’m a screen kid at heart. Moving images, sound, the rhythm of a soundtrack against a cut—that’s where my brain lives.

Which makes it strange that the Adventure Time comics are the ones that finally got to me. Specifically the covers and the anthology artwork inside each issue—illustrations sourced from artists all over the world, every one of them with a different visual grammar, all of them clearly made with actual love for what they’re doing. Some covers are dense and psychedelic. Some are quiet and precise. The variation is the point: this is what the show looks like refracted through twenty different imaginations at once, and the results are consistently better than licensed tie-in material has any business being.

If you haven’t watched Adventure Time—the animated series—I’m not going to pretend I can explain it concisely. The closest I can get: it’s what LSD, mushrooms, and MDMA feel like when they’re all going well at once, but in cartoon form, and without the three days of reassembling yourself afterward. Well—almost without. The show gets into you in ways that are hard to account for. The comics carry that same frequency into a different medium, and somehow they carry it intact.