COMICS REVIEW: Annoying Orange Vol. 1: Secret Agent Orange

The billion-view YouTube series and top-rated Cartoon Network show comes to comics, as Orange jumps out of the fruit bowl and into his first graphic navel! Has Orange gone insane – or insaner? He believes he’s always been a top secret agent for the CIA and his mission has been to take out 1,000,000,000 targets by any means necessary, usually with a kitchen knife. Can the virtually unstoppable Orange really manage to pull off a billion hits before someone is able to end this madness?

Some Spoilers Below

The Annoying Orange franchise has had a hell of a 2012 and the brand continues to grow with its first foray into print comics and overall the franchise translates quite nicely from the animated world to the hand drawn one. To be quite honest, on initial read I wasn’t quite sure if Papercutz would be able to pull off all of the crazy mannerisms that Orange is famous for, and the few strips more or less confirmed this. You see, Orange has a trademark grin, and for him to start off the very first short with a frowny face was a bad move in my opinion because having watched every single episode on Cartoon Network, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him upset about anything and even if I did he certainly didn’t have the droopy eyes and such. The next two shorts on the other hand might have been a change for the positive as both featured a rather adorable take on Nerville that we are not used to seeing because ordinarily we get resident douche bag Toby Turner playing the part.

The meat and potatoes of this issue is the James Bond inspired ‘Grape Finger’ where I think the writers were finally starting to merge Orange’s personality with the pages because we start to see his silly puns and his ‘nuh, nuh, nuh, nuh’  all over the place akin to the program. And also similar to the program is we start to see Orange’s spoofs on popular franchises and in the case o ‘Grape finger’ the depictions are uncanny and the plot is so wholesome that I hope they do all of the James Bond movies.  ‘The Salad Days of Grandpa Lemon’ is also a very good yarn featuring Lemon telling a story from his yesteryears none too dissimilar to when the Simpsons’ Grampa does it.

Now with a $7 price tag this entertaining read comes with a hefty price, but it only comes out every couple of months or so making it not a terrible value if you are a fan of the Annoying Orange franchise. That said, I’m not sure if Papercutz could have done a much better job at translating Sir Orange into 2D and if the writers keep it up then there should be no problem in putting Danebo’s stamp on another medium. The show has its faults, the comic provides merit.

 

 

(9.0 out of 10)