Groo: Friends and Foes, Vol. 3 by Sergio Aragones with Mark Evanier

The modern era of comics is built for short attention spans, all miniseries and limited runs and hot new creators, emphasizing new "jump-on issues" and trying to ignore that vastly more people are jumping off, every chance they get.

Some of that is effect, some of it is cause; it's been a spiral since the '90s crash fatally injured the viability of the long-running series. Frankly, long series always tended to dip and (if they were lucky) rise over time - it's just the "rise," unpredictable as it used it be, got eliminated from those calculations forever sometime in the early Aughts. [1]

So a comic that's published anything like regularly doesn't look regular. There's this twelve-issue series and that thrilling relaunch and the other one-shot tying into something else. And each one of those "new" things has to be new enough for the fabled "new reader" to start there, which means we get a lot of repotted origin stories and returns of fan-favorite characters and "here's my favorite Batman story from childhood, done totally awesome!"

This is tedious for anyone who isn't an utter neophile, but it's the world we live in. In the case of Groo, it's why the big series for 2015-16 was Groo: Friends and Foes, a twelve-issue extravaganza in which each issue saw one of the idiot adventurer's most popular secondary characters returned to do the same things that character (and Groo) does every single time.

Now, Groo was always formulaic: it's a comedy, and comedies are all about the bit. Groo's bit is that the title character is deeply stupid, though well-meaning, and that everything he touches goes wrong and gets broken. It's usually heavily narrated by The Minstrel - that guy with the jester cap on the right of this cover - in verse that is usually almost as funny as it aims to be. And it's been running for about forty years now, so there are a lot of recurring characters and running jokes (cheese dip, mendicant, and so on).

That all sounds unfriendly to new readers, but it's still a light comedy: running jokes are still jokes, and you don't realize they're running until it runs into you for the second time. Groo was always built so anyone could drop in anywhere and get basically the same experience; it still is.

So there's only a thin through-line for this miniseries: it's basically ten mostly standalone issues, with a recurring character in common, and then a two-part finale. Volume 3, the book I just got to, has the finale. (See my posts on the first two books for equally random musings about Groo, comics, and comedy.)

This time out, the special guests are: Pal & Drumm, a swordsman nearly as dumb as Groo (though beefier) and his handler/friend; Taranto, the scheming leader of a bandit band; The Minstrel, who I've already mentioned; and the recurring new character for this series, whose story gets wrapped up and whose name I won't mention here to give some very slight suspense for anyone who might read these books. As I said, the first two issues are just like the eight that preceded them, but the last two see the subplot turn into main plot, all of the guest stars for the whole series return for several grand melees and finales.

Like all Groo stories, it's more good-natured and sentimental than you would expect from a series of stories about a deeply stupid murder-hobo. I'm not a huge Groo fan, so I may seem lukewarm here - and, frankly, I am lukewarm - but this is just fine for what it is, and as dependably Groo-esque as it could possibly be. So those of you who like Groo will be very happy.

[1] Apropos of nothing: in a recent piece I wrote for work and was adapting for UK use, I learned the standard term on that side of the pond (at least according to my organization) for the first decade of this century is "noughties." I had to believe this out of organizational pride; I can't require that you do the same.