WALL-E #3
Written by J. Torres
Art by Morgan Luthi
Colors by Digikore Studios
Letters by Deron Bennett
BOOM! Studios
Release date: February 24, 2010

Some people think bugs and rodents are pests, others think they’re pets. I happen to fall into the latter category, having owned several pet insects and a rather large lab rat named Cornelius. Wall-E #3 tells the story of how everyone’s favourite trash compactor met his pet cockroach and only companion in a terrible trash-filled world.

Much like the Pixar animated movie, Wall-E #3 tells its story with almost no dialogue. This works well on some degree, but the comic suffers due to the lack of movement available to the character. One of the ways WALL-E was able to demonstrate so much emotion in the film without even having a face was through his frantic arm movements. It’s harder in a drawn still shot to demonstrate that same range of emotion.

Despite that, the J. Torres script still carries much of the charm that the original film did. The complicated Rube Goldberg-like traps that WALL-E concocts in an attempt to catch his six-legged friend are hilarious, and you can sense the loneliness of WALL-E through the pages as he attempts to make his first real friend.

Morgan Luthi’s illustration is light-hearted and fun, but it was still rough and paled in comparison to the incredible graphics of the film. One of the great things about the Wall-E movie was the incredible attention to detail, in particular when creating the mountains of garbage that now cover the Earth. Luthi’s art fails to create that sense of another world.

All in all, it’s a fun comic for kids with a well-told story that builds nicely on the Wall-E film.

RATING: 3.5 out of 5 robots.