Shazam! #3 Review

Eat Until You Puke!

Written By: Geoff Johns

Art By: Dale Eaglesham, Marco Santucci, Mayo "Sen" Naito, Mike Atiyeh, Rob Leigh

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: February 27, 2019

The Magical Lands are waiting to be explored, but will our Shazam Family want to now that they've come to the Funlands?  That's right, it looks like our heroes have found paradise and who would want to leave that?  Well, it looks a lot like Pleasure Island from Pinocchio so right from the start I'm a bit worried about this world and the so-called leader, who goes by the name of "King Kid".  Let's jump into this issue and see if all is as it appears or if there's a darkness behind the scenes in the Funlands.  Let's check it out.

For our third issue of Shazam! we leave all the subplots about Billy's father and the forming of the Monster Society of Evil behind so that we can deal specifically with King Kid and his origin of ruler of the Funlands....... not to mention, get worried at his pushy nature at wanting to know what the Billy's magic word is so that he too can have the power that our heroes have.  

With that though, there really isn't much going on in this issue besides for the majority of our family pigging out on all the best of junk foods, while Mary looks on disapproving.  Yeah, you get the so-called origin of King Kid, but who knows if it's real or not or if anything he says about the other lands is real because something about this issue just feels off in the creation of the Funlands and how kids just seem to show up there.  It's not the biggest deal, but I just felt that we should have had some more info about the Magical Lands we'll be exploring with our heroes.  

As you'd imagine though, things don't work out and this leads to our heroes being separated to different lands and while I like that idea more than going through and having to visit each one individually........ since it would take forever, it just kind of makes this issue not as appealing as the previous two.  Now that doesn't mean that there isn't fun to be had here....... we do get our heroes turning into their superhero personas, but things just go from bad to worse out of nowhere and I don't know how our heroes even got to where they ended up.......... I guess in other worlds you don't have to have a train to get there, but it just felt odd.

All in all, the art work continues to be amazing in this series and I love the change in artist when we deal with the back stories, but this issue felt a bit off from the rest and I hope that it doesn't continue as we go forward because while we have more focus in this issue than we had in the previous one, it just didn't pan out to all that much beyond what you would have already seen coming when confronted with King Kid previously.  I still love this series, but hope for more next issue.

Bits and Pieces:

It's time to discover what the Funlands are all about, but sadly that doesn't exactly mean all out fun.  Yeah, there's some fun bits here, but for whatever reason, this issue came off feeling weird compared to the previous two and while I like where we get to by the end, it seems like we could have gotten there a little faster.  The artwork is great though and I love these characters and even with my misgivings, I can't wait for what comes next.

7/10