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Buddy Cops One-Shot Review

By Zak Edwards
March 13, 2013 - 16:40

“I just want to be entertained”
“I want something I can just turn my brain off for”
“I don’t want to have to think about it”

These are all comments that apply to Buddy Cops, a one-shot from Dark Horse Comics that I would call simply entertainment.  The comic is a series of short gags of varying degrees of wild abandon that I’m sure most people will pick up, enjoy, and promptly forget ever existed.  The disposability of comics is at the forefront of this book, written almost with the intention of immediate gratification.  This isn’t a book that you’ll want to reread and think about.  Take this from someone with that very experience.

The thing is, Buddy Cops is mindless entertainment.  It isn’t designed for consideration because, when that part of your brain clicks on, you start to notice how unsettlingly juvenile it is.  Take for example the obsession with anuses throughout.  Sure, just a gag here about officer URANUS (always all caps), a shot here about same-sex coupling, but added up all together the book takes what is a bit of fun and places firmly in an adolescent fascination.  It’s no longer a gag here and a joke there, it’s actually a bit unnerving how the book relegates gay culture to a forbidden other; an other to be joked about and viewed from afar, where it can’t hurt those making the jokes.  It gets aggressive at times and wanes because of this focus.  And yes, I am reading too much into this, but that is one of the reasons I review comics: to read them with a critical eye and mindset and evaluate them based on what I discover.  Here, I discovered a pretty scary and adolescent attack on male coupling.

But the book does wear its heart on its sleeve, beginning with a premise that very openly sounds like an elevator pitch of a bad TV show: A bad cop gets coupled with a do-gooder cop.  One operates entirely outside procedure, the other is obsessed with it.  Oh, and it takes place in the future and one is a robot, the other’s drunk a lot.  Buddy Cops isn’t breaking boundaries or doing anything other than exactly what it sets out to do: put a few extended gag strips together for a one-shot comic.  And it does that, just nothing else.  If this is actually a pitch for an ongoing, I certainly wouldn’t read it, but I’m sure people would pick it up and be amused.

Grade: 6/10    Read it, enjoy it, forget about it.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12