• By Jonathan Liu
• March 10, 2011  | 
• 10:00 am  | 

Ah, science. Some comics are pretty picky about the laws of physics and biology, but let’s face it — a lot of them aren’t, particularly those involving superheroes or epic battles between good guys and bad guys. These two kid-friendly comics fall into that category: they both play around with some pseudo-science, but they’re mostly an excuse to have some weird fun.

Missing Linx, a slim graphic novel written by Dale Mettam with art by Courtney Huddleston, is a pretty fun action-adventure comic starring a very big quartet. You’ve probably heard of them: Big Foot, Sasquatch, Yeti and Skunk Ape. It turns out that they were brought over into our world from the Mythical Dimension by Erasmus Q. Bedfellow, an evil semi-genius with a soft spot for “Titanic.” Of course, they were supposed to help him wreak havoc and take over the world, but they turned out to have morals. So now Bedfellow brings over a slew of other mythical monsters — Cyclops, a fire-breathing Hydra, a Manticore — to do his bidding, and the four primate powerhouses work to foil his plans.

It’s a very silly premise, but Mettam and Huddleston pull it off with aplomb and you can tell they’re having a lot of fun with it. The four heroes are all different from each other, both physically and personality-wise: Big Foot speaks with what appears to be a Bronx accent, Yeti is more like a surfer dude, Sasquatch is the largest and talks like the Hulk and Skunk Ape is actually an intellectual in a white lab coat. (And a note about that: when many comics try to put words in a hyper-intelligent person’s mouth, they usually come out sounding, well, stupid. Most of the time it’s just a jumble of big words but the sentences aren’t actually put together properly. I was pleased to note that Skunk Ape actually does sound like a smarty-pants, pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo aside.)

In this first issue, while chasing down a loose Manticore, the foursome encounter a dad on a camping trip with his two sons. Before they can decide what to do with the witnesses, they have to deal with Bedfellow’s latest scheme and the family tags along. The interactions are pretty great: the dad (despite reassurances to the contrary) is just convinced that they’re going to be eaten; the teenager is bored and guesses that the whole thing is a plot set up by his dad for some “quality time”; the younger brother is just having a terrific time. And so will you.

Missing Linx comes out in April, a joint publication of 1821 Comics and Viper Comics. You can pre-order it now from Amazon.