Groo: Friends and Foes, Vol. 2 by Sergio Aragones with Mark Evanier

I don't really know why I read this.

I know how I came to read it: first, in the Hoopla app on my tablet. More fundamentally, because I tend to look at what's getting published on this blog - I'm running about eight weeks ahead - and think "do I want to read the 'next one'?" So I'm writing this not long after the post for Groo: Friends and Foes, Vol. 1 went live.

I suppose I thought, "Groo, huh? That will be quick and funny, just right for a Sunday afternoon." What I didn't think is "and what the heck will I actually write about it?"

Because I have very little, if anything, to say about Groo: Friends and Foes, Vol. 2. Groo comics are what they are, and have been exactly that for forty-plus years at this point. This particular series is covered in probably-too-much-detail in the first post.

OK, there's one thing different. Friends and Foes is an episodic series, in  each issue of which which the main character (Groo, if you've forgotten) meets once again a recurring character from this long-running series. Those characters are different in this book than in the first one, as of course they would be. And they are:

• Groella, Groo's older and smarter sister
• The Sage, a wise man who is still not smart enough to know to avoid Groo by now
• Chakal, a female warrior - supposedly sexy, though Aragones' style doesn't really bend in that direction - who is strong and smart and talented and organized and I think generally righteous and frankly more than a little boring
• Weaver and Scribe, who are word-wrangler [1] Mark Evanier and letterer Tom Luth transmuted into reporter-characters in the story

Other than the who, the what is pretty much the same as the previous book, and every other Groo story. Groo is dumb; Groo causes havoc; everyone fears and avoids Groo; Groo is clueless. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I do tend to forget how wordy these stories are in between reading them. They're heavily narrated, usually in deliberately-lousy doggerel, which I suppose adds to the humorous tone. But I find it just makes things drag. They take longer to read than their frivolous nature deserves, basically.

I am not a huge Groo fan, which may be why I've only covered three Groo books here in nearly eighteen years. (The other being Groo Vs. Conan, which I read because...well, I'm not made of stone, am I?) I probably will read the third and final book in this series - in about eight weeks; watch for it! - because I tend to do things like that. But don't expect further Groo-bursts unless I forget the things I just told you.

[1] Evanier doesn't write the series; Aragones is the main creator. And they've both been reticent to describe him as the dialoguer/scripter, which is what it looks like he does from the outside. Somehow, he adapts Aragones' original words into what appears on the page, and he's done that badly-defined thing since the beginning.