Review by Frank Plowright

Tom Fowler is best known as an artist, yet he writes the three chapters of ‘Head Space’, which is Volume Three’s main feature.

As in the TV show, Jerry is insecure and impatient, and because he wants his toast just so he triggers a change in the universe, and each of the three parts is essentially a clean slate, sweeping aside the earlier scenario in a frying pan to fire situation. Strangely for an artist, Fowler supplies an extremely wordy script, and the pacing can be very slow, but considering this is his first writing assignment and the difficulty of coming up with page after page of gags and ludicrous situation, it’s an ambitious effort. However, despite the usual excellent art from CJ Cannon this doesn’t hit the spot overall, and the idea of Summer as a resistance fighter was prominent in Volume Two.

Fowler writes and draws ‘Big Game’, yet doesn’t reduce the word count and doesn’t capture the cast as well as one might expect. In one early panel Rick could double for Monty Burns, and Morty is strangely thin. There’s so much going on in some of the panels that it’s difficult to make out what’s important to the story. That concerns Rick determined to show Jerry what a real sports contest looks like, in this case alien parents throwing their children into a battle contest and betting on the outcome. It’s a bleak idea, something Alan Grant and John Wagner might have dismissed as too dark for Judge Dredd, and once the concept has been revealed, it’s absolutely certain that Morty is going to end up fighting for his life.

‘Ready Player Morty’ is by Pamela Ribon, with Marc Ellerby having a rare chance to step up from the back-up features and draw a full length story. It’s a clever script with two threads. Rick considers high school is a waste of time, so hooks Morty up to a simulation machine aiming to have him graduate in a day. Meanwhile there’s the problem of Summer and Jerry switching minds. Ribon maximises the embarrassing possibilities of both in a sometimes laugh out loud episode, and Ellerby drawing Jerry’s head on Summer’s body is genuinely creepy. It’s by some distance the best of this collection.

These stories are also available in the first bulky Rick and Morty Compendium, and if you’d prefer them in hardback it’s Rick and Morty Book Two. Kyle Starks begins his long run in Volume Four.