It's hard to call Sky Ape predictable, because the stream-of-consciousness love of the bizarre that is at the heart of the concept pretty much makes that impossible. However, in one aspect, Sky Ape has become predictable, and that is that I know going in that I will get a variety of outlandish characters and concepts and plenty of belly laughs, and this third installment certainly delivers on that promise. It's the Sky Ape version of the super-mega-crossover, which means it's like Secret Wars if the creators went on a three-day drinking binge before they wrote it.
To some, this may seem a crass thing to judge a book on, but I'd buy a Sky Ape role-playing game supplement in a heartbeat. Amara, McCarney, Russo and Jenkins have a frightening imagination for coming up with new characters, and this issue Sky Ape, Mr. Fake Lion and the half-cyborg/half-ninja Francis Bird are joined by a legion of bizarre new villains and heroes. The creators jam-pack the book with new characters that come across as funny in just one panel, notably in the worldwide confrontation scenes between hilarious creations like "The Kung-Fu Fogies vs. Hall and Oates" or "Crafty Tom Drafty vs. the Iron Commodities Broker," and inclusion of elements like feral chefs or a doomsday weapon based on a mastery of literature and grammar are just as fun.
Really, the way this book works is that every page sort of tells a story in and of itself, and the larger plot is mostly something to hang a lot of gags on. All The Heroes is based on an old chestnut of a plot, the master villain organizing a mass escape and finding a doomsday weapon, but you'd be hard-pressed to call the story familiar or cliched. The participants in this super-hero crossover are unlike any you'll see anywhere else, and the dialogue is full of outrageous non sequiturs.
Inspired lunacy is really the best way to describe it. Though the story is told in a straightforward fashion, progressing along a recognizable plot line, much of the writing and art seems to run along the lines of "this is stuff that made us crack up, and we think you'll like it too." About half of the characters and ideas introduced in the book have no bearing at all on the plot, but that's OK because the idea of a man in a pirate costume buying a Russian sub for cheap (as just one example) is funny stuff.
The finale of this one sees Kirk Madge showing a little depth, a bit of a literary bent inside his coarse and blue collar exterior. That really can't be said of Sky Ape the comic, however, as I think what you see is what you get. Fortunately, what you get is a book that is full of imagination and hilarity.
