HAPPY!

For a comic ostensibly about an imaginary friend helping a man find a kidnapped child, “Happy!” has taken an awful long time getting to what you’d think is the meat of the story. But after several issues of Nick refusing to believe Happy is real, “Happy!” #4 finally rolls up its sleeves and showing the rescue. Or at least, that’s what you’d assume, right? What Grant Morrison and Darick Robertson present instead is another strangely paced issue, with the turning point that readers have waited for (and continually teased as having happened at the end of each of the three previous issues) held off for just a little bit longer. In doing so yet again, the issue ends up as a slightly unsatisfying comic the more you think about it. By making the eventual rescue attempt happen so late into “Happy!” #4, what readers end up with is a strange almost-admission from Morrison that there wasn’t a lot of depth to that part of the story. By virtue of Morrison’s pacing, it’s not even worth an entire

The first issue of “Happy!” by Grant Morrison and Darick Robertson was fun if a bit of a surprise in places; it was much more dark and grimy than we’d seen from Morrison in a while. With “Happy!” #2, though, the pace has slowed down a bit, and in doing so, some of that initial excitement has inevitably faded. The bulk of “Happy!” #2 can be divided into two parts: Nick escaping the hospital and Nick refusing to believe in Happy’s existence. The first half feels a little overly long in places, but on the whole that’s not the real problem with this issue. If nothing else, it tells readers the level of power that the mob wields in “Happy!” and how deep their influence runs. The scene is Maireadh is fantastic, and on the whole I enjoyed the sequence. Once the second half gets rolling, though, “Happy!” grinds to a halt as Nick refuses to believe over and over again. At this point, there’s one of two options available for Morrison’s intent. The first is to try and plant doubt into the mind

The first half of “Happy!” #1 by Grant Morrison and Darick Robertson doesn’t feature the titular character but focuses on the world of the other main character, hitman and eczema-plagued former cop Nick Sax. A large cast is introduced, all of whom curse like sailors. At first glance, this felt like a poor copy of Garth Ennis’ approach to dialogue. Ennis liberally salts his scripts with profanity much more resonantly in “The Boys” and “Preacher.” There, the swearing is dropped at appropriate points in the text or rhythmically punctuates the distinctive speech of some characters like in a Mamet play. The profanity also heightens tension, although even with Ennis, the effect deadens after too many successive repetitions. In “Happy!,” everyone dips into cursing haphazardly, and the mob characters swear like callow twelve-year-old “bros” trying to prove they’re hard instead of actually being intimidating. The use of profanity isn’t effective, but I suspect that is the point. In retrospect