Dark Horse, $3.50
Story: Joss Whedon
Art: Fábio Moon, Dave Stewart

Sugarshock! originally debuted as part of the Myspace Dark Horse Presents project, from which it somehow went on to win an Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic. The only possible reasons I can come up with for Sugar Shock (not entirely sure on the exact spelling of the title) winning such an accolade are:

a) it was written by a big name writer, and therefore more likely to prosper from the award, b) it was at the time one of the few webcomic produced by a prominent publisher, and therefore got noticed more than other, better efforts, and c) whoever judges these things considered the category as completely trivial, and nominated whatever piece of fluff entered their periphery.

Anyway, the planet-hopping adventures of Dandelion and her fellow rock chicks have been compiled into this here volume. Sugarshock is the kind of pretentious nonsense that revels in its own quirkiness. Joss Whedon is indisputably talented, but here he casually shoves numerous pop culture elements into one colourful package and utilises the old “it wasn’t supposed to make sense” clause to justify a comic that is so in love with itself that each zany one-liner and stupid, stupid plot twists will probably be considered genius by pink-haired fifteen year-olds.

… or maybe I’m just old, and Sugarshock’s blue bugglegum flavour (taste your copy and see for yourself) just wasn’t designed for my palate. The outstanding art by Fábio Moon and Dave Stewart just about manages to hold everything together, and there’s likely to be more than a fair share of people who dig what Whedon has done here.

5/10