Monster Motors Review (Brian Lynch, Nick Roche)

I really liked Brian Lynch’s Everybody’s Dead comic from a few years back (an irreverent take on the zombie apocalypse), and the Monster Motors summary made me smile because it’s so damn silly. This book stars: Cadillacula, iGor, Frankenride, Minivan Helsing, Wheelwolf, The Lagoon Buggy, The Invisible Sedan - these are literally the car equivalents of the Universal Monsters! 

And yet - and yet. It made me smile because it’s the kind of wacky premise you come with in the pub with your mates that’s good for a few yuks but that’s it - you don’t take it any further because it’s too flimsy to be serious. The difference is that Lynch has actually gone and turned it into a comic and one that basically has the one joke which is: these are the car versions of the Universal Monsters. I’ve mentioned it twice now and already it’s not as good. 

Then again I’m looking at it from the perspective of a some might say overly critical grown-up reader and I think Monster Motors is aimed at a younger audience. The story isn’t very complex and, if you know anything about these monsters, the cars act in the exact same way as their more famous monster counterparts. Cadillacula drinks petrol and flies, Frankenride is big and strong, Wheelwolf changes from a small car to a larger, more ferocious one, and the Lagoon Buggy is very nifty on water. They fight and it’s pretty predictable stuff. 

Beyond the initial sense of novel humour, Monster Motors gets bogged down in an uninteresting story where some of the MMs are good, some are bad, and one group is chasing the other. Because the story is so flat and the characters so unengaging (Vic’s eccentric, Minivan Helsing’s daughter is Strong Female Character, the MMs are vehicles), my attention was flagging long before the end when I was glad to have finished this short book. 

Monster Motors is a case of the pitch being far better than the finished product. I can see why it might sound good to a publisher (“It gives a whole new meaning to ‘monster trucks’!”) but the comic itself is quite boring and forgettable.

Monster Motors