It doesn’t help that this is volume two of the comic, so I had no back story to go on, but I almost gave up on this halfway through issue 1. I’m glad I didn’t because I gradually warmed to its lunacy.
Sweetie runs the candy store her father started and in a crime-infested New York she’s determined to make life lovely again (“NYC will once again be sweet”). An admirable aim. Almost immediately as she and her friends walk the streets they run into a longstanding adversary Bart and his big bodyguard, who ends up getting his mouth sealed with some kind of bubblegum weapon. As more heavies arrive so do Sweetie’s mates in a vehicle. They are psychotic rabbits! It also turns out one of her mates if half man, half wolf. Grenades used are in the form of sweets. You get the idea?
It was the dialogue which was doing my head in, all protracted sweet-related drivel (“there’s going to be a lot more sweet stuff coming for Bart and his thugs”, “the sweet life is not vengeful” and so on), but that too sort of made sense after a while. And then they found out some of Sweetie’s bees have been murdered and she’s well pissed off. Issue #2 ends with Bart on the phone to some heavy called Bug and we find he has an army of killer hornets who did the dirty deed, and he’s about to up the ante.
You can’t not like it, despite its intentional odd style and that’s because … it exactly captures the spirit of the Batman tv show. Kitsch but genuinely clever.