A Look Back on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Volume 1
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00:00It's hard out there for a conservative brony. Movie magic! Hi everyone, number one Marmaduke fan here.
00:07My nephew, he wanted a turtle book, so my niece, she wants a pony book. I picked up the IDW comics of My Little Pony.
00:15Friendship is magic. These were great! Big thumbs up. This is going to be the long video where I just talk about everything.
00:22So this is the omnibus edition. This is the IDW graphic novel format edition. Shopping wise, this is a little bit better bang for your buck page count
00:33because it's basically the equivalent of three books put together. You can see this one's a little bit bigger, which is nicer for my old man eyes.
00:41So this would be my preferred version. And this one had a special cover. There's no little bells and whistles like interviews or anything.
00:48It's all functionally the same except for that very tiny little difference. So I'll talk about the omnibus later.
00:54So we're just going to talk about volume one. Writing by Katie Cook. Art by Andy Price. Big thumbs up on the writing.
01:01Big thumbs up on the art. All cylinders are hitting. This is a high recommend. I was kind of lukewarm on the turtles book.
01:08Something I mentioned in my turtles comic review is sort of what you can, the best you can hope for when you write a comic adapting a very specific property
01:17to faithfully create something that fits with that property. So you basically want to make the best episodes ever of that show,
01:25which means you have to adopt, it's really hard because you kind of have to adopt the writing style.
01:29You've got to nail the characters' voices and the situations that they're in. And I just thought Katie Cook nailed it.
01:35If this had been four episodes of the show, they would have been four Dynamite episodes.
01:40Now, since this is an adaptation of a pre-existing show, I should probably talk a little bit about my thoughts on My Little Pony Friendship is Magic,
01:48the show, so you can sort of comprehend what I think of the comic. I think it's a great, I think it's a great show.
01:53Well, the elephant in the room is it was a giant meme when it first came out.
01:56Grown men started making, you know, goofy memes about it and edgy memes about it.
02:01And it was all over 4chan. So the joke became that most of the fan base of the show was grown men.
02:08The show even started to do like little nods and winks to the meme culture surrounding the show.
02:14I was a theater kid and I remember all the theater kids raving about it and peer pressuring me to watch it.
02:22And I finally caved and watched it. I didn't even like it that much at first, but they just kept peer pressuring me and it grew on me.
02:28It's a very charming, very smart little show. It became a meme for a reason.
02:33I wasn't like into the conventions or anything, but one thing I really respect about it is A, Lauren Faust's design sensibility.
02:42She was very passionate about the My Little Pony franchise.
02:46And when she put her spin on it, I think she wanted to kind of bring back what made the original franchise work so well
02:54and add personality and life back into the franchise.
02:59So my sisters grew up when the very first ones were coming out.
03:03And even when I was forced to watch it with them as a little boy, one of the things that struck me is,
03:08wow, this show kind of goes hard and spikes even like a good viewpoint character for the little boy who's forced to watch this with his sisters, right?
03:17So I really respect it as a girl's show that knows its target audience, even though like the joke about it was grown men watched it.
03:25I think the show did a good job focusing on its target audience, little girls, and making the show for them,
03:31even down to the fact that there are six protagonists with strikingly different looks and personalities.
03:37It makes it easier for a little girl to identify with one of them in particular.
03:42There's a lot of emphasis on conflict, flipped resolution, and friendship because girls love friends.
03:48They love having friends and they love solving their little emotional problems together, right?
03:52But then when it does an action bit, the action actually feels legitimate.
03:56The adventure feels adventurous.
03:58This was a show designed for parents to watch with their children and be able to be invested in it.
04:04So very, very smart.
04:07Let me think.
04:08OK, one more thing you should probably know about the show is the average episode of My Little Pony is a goofy slice of life comedy.
04:15And then at the start of a season and at the end of the season, they'll have an action adventure that involves usually a villain or some kind of quest.
04:23OK, one thing I really respect and appreciate is the villains need to be defeated.
04:28They don't just like, oh, please, oh, please, stop being evil.
04:31Oh, pretty please.
04:32You actually have to use force to stop the bad guys from being evil.
04:36I'll talk about Andy Price's art here because this is a good illustration of it.
04:39So Andy Price has what I would call a medieval manuscript style.
04:44Some people, you know, sometimes art history geeks call it horror vacui, which is it means fear of empty space, which is kind of a condescending term.
04:53But it's the idea that you fill every square inch of space you've got with something interesting.
04:58And Andy Price is a master of this because when you do it well, what happens is you get a very dense composition with a lot of interesting things going on.
05:06And you have to, like, very carefully use every little inch of space you've got.
05:10So he's constantly throwing in little, you know, cute background elements or, you know, secondary characters.
05:17Here you can see, like, he's even using the chrysalis.
05:20The bad guys are these sort of like Swiss cheese, vampiric monsters.
05:26And so he's even using, like, the holes in the monsters to highlight some of the characters.
05:31He uses the gutters between the panels to, you know, create interesting ideas like spider webs or oozing goo.
05:37He does a lot of great gags involving kind of characters, you know, pushing forward or backward in space in front of the panels or interacting with the panels.
05:45I just thought Price nailed it.
05:47The other thing I like about Price's style is it's not 100% on model to the show, which is actually good because in a comic you sort of need them to be a little bit more expressive and exaggerated to sell the humor.
06:00And he has just enough cartooniness to sell the character comedy and the, you know, silly reaction shots.
06:07So the premise is Queen Chrysalis attacks.
06:11If you watch the show, you'd recognize her asâI think she was the villain of season two.
06:15It would help to watch the show to know about their first interaction with Queen Chrysalis.
06:20But you don't really need to watch the show.
06:22You know, she was a bad guy.
06:23The good guys beat her.
06:25The bad guys back for revenge, right?
06:27So you can follow it very well.
06:29And then everyâanother thing I appreciated is every individual issue felt like a self-contained story, like a self-contained episode.
06:37So collectively they're coming together to form a big adventure, but each chapter has warmth and has resolution.
06:44So after the initial episode where the girls getâjoin together and they discover that the three little kids have been kidnapped and they got to go rescue them, there's one of the classic.
06:56The villain's plan is to drive the heroes apart.
07:00Oh, and I'll just mention this because it's here.
07:02So they even do like fun things, like they'll reference classic Looney Tunes, like this big troll who loves pretty little ponies.
07:09He's like a reference to the Abominable Snowman in Looney Tunes.
07:14The whole adventure feels like a giant homage to the Mines of Moria in Lord of the Rings.
07:20So it's doing two things.
07:22It's an actual adventure where the stakes matter, but there's constantly fun, whimsical little elements toâit's almost like it's trying to say to the kids,
07:31don't worry, kids, it's not going to be too scary.
07:34There's danger, but the heroes will be all right.
07:37But yet the villain is actually genuinely evil.
07:40I think she kills a character offscreen at some point.
07:45So the classic setup is the villain's plan isâthey can disguise themselves as other things because they're changelings, right?
07:51So they disguise themselves as each other and say mean, nasty things to each other so the heroes have an emotional falling out, right?
07:57So classic plot, I've seen this done over and over and over again.
07:59Then Kitty Cook does something really nice, which is the heroes, after their big falling out, they actually take some time to think about it,
08:06use their heads, and realize that that was kind ofâit was a bit silly to just break up over one little argument.
08:12And then they get back together.
08:13So it's not a conflict that relies on the characters being idiots forever.
08:19As soon as they get a chance to have a break, theyâeven different characters think through it in different ways.
08:25Like the way Twilight thinks through it is she thinks, you know,
08:28we shouldn't have broken up and I shouldn't have left them just after one little argument.
08:32Rainbow Dash thinks about it and thinks, wait a minute, I bet the changelings were up to this, right?
08:36So they come to similar conclusions through different paths.
08:39This leads up to kind of like a cool, you know, what's-his-name?
08:44Who's the guy who wrote it?
08:46And what's his name?
08:48Stephen King.
08:49So kind of like a sort of freaky Stephen King adventure where they have to sneak past all of the evil monsters, horrors,
08:55and a climax where Twilight, the protagonist, is up against the villain.
09:00And Twilight, her arc is all aboutâshe's very talented, she's very smart, she's very studious, but she doesn't have friends.
09:07And so Princess Celestia, who wants Twilight Sparkle to develop to her full potential,
09:12insists that Twilight Sparkle needs to have friends, right?
09:14So, you know, it's the power of friendship.
09:16But it actually works.
09:17We've seen how her friends have helped her get to this point.
09:22So it all comes down to one big magic fight.
09:25It's her love of her friends that inspires her to have the courage she needs to beat a bigger and stronger opponent,
09:32which is really genuine action-adventure writing, right?
09:35That's similar toâyou know, a boy's story of courage is always about a three-foot-nothing kid with a sword
09:44has to beat a seven-foot-tall monster in black armor, right?
09:48Courage is doing what you have to do, knowing that the foe you face may be stronger than you,
09:55because you have to, because you're motivated by love.
09:57So great stuff.
09:59I even like how this ties into the theme of the show at the time.
10:02At this time, you know, Twilight Sparkle hadn't gained all her, you know, super magic powers later in the show.
10:07So it's really looking at this kind of like in context of the show.
10:12It's building the idea that Twilight Sparkle has some greater potential she hasn't fully realized yet,
10:19which is obviously why Celestia has taken such an interest in her and wants her to develop her talents, right?
10:24She has great latent magical abilities.
10:27But her talent really isn't just that she's magically more talented than anybody.
10:32Her talent is that she's so studious and so hardworking, and that's what lets her help her friends.
10:37So absolutely fantastic.
10:39Big thumbs up.
10:40I can't believe I missed these.
10:42I think they're out of print now, so you're going to have to go to eBay to find them.
10:46Big, big thumbs up if you've got like a little girl who loves unicorns and ponies.
10:51They're like hobbits, the ponies.
10:54They live in this little well-ordered society, you know, baking cakes and having apple pie contests.
11:00And then when evil strikes these adorable, you know, high-trust society of little fellows who live under a beneficent divine monarch,
11:10they destroy them with extreme violence.
11:13I love it.
11:14Check it out.