"Terror on High..." (MST3K Comics)

Issue Number:  3
Release Date:  December 12th, 2018
Adapted From:  Johnny Jason, Teen Reporter #2; Black Cat Comics #1; Horrific #2
Original Publication Dates:  July/August 1962, June/July 1946, November 1952

Tom Servo, Jonah, and Crow are all trapped in three separate comic books and Kinga has her henchman Ardy create a lever that allows her to switch between the three.  She then switches the comic between Tom Servo's reporter tale, Jonah getting caught up in superheroics, and Crow's spooky anthology stories.

First up we check back in with Tom Servo in his issue of Johnny Jason right where we left off two issues ago.  Servo wakes up after that rowdy party and learns more about the actress with whom he is staying with/reporting on/wanting to "tap dat ass."  Her crazy party ways leave him uneasy, but she leads him on a tour of her country home and she takes him on a ride in her plane.  Unfortunately she runs out of fuel (because why would you check the fuel before takeoff, that's such an inconvenience) and the duo are forced to crash land.

TO BE CONTINUED...

We then check in on Jonah, and he's currently captured by supervillains and one Black Cat runs into their hideout to rescue him.  She beats up the bad guys and saves the day.  That tale concludes right there.

Switching over to Crow's scary tales, his new story features two lost climbers in the Alps taken in by a monastery for food and shelter.  The monks tell them stories of the frozen bodies they've found of lost travelers that they keep in the cellar, and the treasures they hold.  Being assholes, the two climbers beat up the monks and loot the bodies, escaping into the cold mountain.  Oh crap, they forgot they were lost!  They seek shelter but find themselves followed by the frozen corpses brought back to life, who want their treasure back.

We're three issues in and I am holding MST Comics with more confidence than ever, as each issue has given me some solid laughs.  Even though I wasn't crazy about the previous issue as a whole, that Crow story "Tail of Death" is still the bar in which I find myself judging these things.  Nothing in this new issue stacks up to that story.  Even another Horrific tale hosted by Crow, the idea of which had me salivating at the mouth, just wasn't as memorable as the shrinking man story.

There is a fault to these comics that I feel is holding them back though, and it's that they feel a tad too jumbled.  This third issue is more consistent than the second, but it has a similar flaw in by juggling too many stories it largely feels like too much is going on at once and so many short shifted stories make it feel unsatisfying in the long run.  This is one of the reasons why the first issue is still my favorite, because it told one story from beginning to end.  While that story wasn't concluded, I got more invested in the whole ordeal.  Here we spend so little time in each story that we switch before I can fully get into them.  When this run is over I might just have to read each story section from beginning to end without switching to a different one to see if they work better as a whole that way.

The one plus side is that the Jonah story has a conclusion here, and Crow's magazine is just a series of short stories, which always have a conclusion.  Meanwhile Servo's Johnny Jason story is still going and barely makes any progress.  It's mildly frustrating since Servo's is the story that kicked off this comic series.  But based on the time periods these comics came out I'm probably going to assume Johnny Jason's issues featured full length stories from cover to cover while books like Black Cat had multiple stories per issue (and that Black Cat likely had more pages, meaning there are probably more tales in that issue), so it's going to take longer to tell that story.

The saving grace of MST Comics is that they're reliably funny.  While Crow's story doesn't come close to his from the previous issue, it's still the highlight of the book, with some grand macabre humor.  Kinga and Max also manage to work in their Totino's ad into his story, and Crow's resulting temper tantrum is a goldmine of laughs.

"My comic will not be turned into a den of corporate sponsorship!  Unless I get some sorta residuals!"

Jonah's Black Cat story also made me laugh a bit, which surprised me because his story in the previous issue was the lowlight of the MST Comic so far.  But while it's still a bit of a cluttered mess, I felt the humor was more spot-on than in the previous issue.  I especially liked the line "It's Black Cat!  And she's recreating the splash page from the beginning of the comic!  Why didn't I see this coming?"

And remember, folks at home, there is just no cool way to land on your butt.

That leaves Servo in Johnny Jason.  There's not a whole lot to say because barely anything happens.  There are a few laughs and I was happy to check in on him, but I would have liked just a little bit more, you know?  Ultimately issue three of MST Comics is a bit like one of those serialized episodes in any sort of TV show that just barely moves along enough to keep you from not watching the next episode, but in retrospect you realize maybe it's just padding itself out.  Good thing it's funny enough to recommend.

Good