Joshua Malbin

Zack Whedon, Joss’s considerably younger brother, seems like a faintly tragic figure. For one thing, when I bought Dr. Horrible and Other Horrible Stories I assumed he must be Joss’s son, nepotistically handed the Horrible franchise to make a few comic book bucks. But in fact he co-created Horrible (along with third brother Jed, a composer), and has been gainfully employed as a writer for a couple of TV shows. It must be rough to be the younger brother in a family in a profession, following the footsteps of one of the most famous auteurs in the medium, especially when you share such a distinctive name. (Though according to Wikipedia, Joss and Zack’s father and grandfather were also both screenwriters, so what do I know.)

On the other hand, he seems to have banged out this Dr. Horrible book without putting a huge amount of thought into it. There’s exactly one new idea in the whole of the book that really tickled me: Evil League of Evil member Fake Thomas Jefferson insists he’s the real thing and defeats a low-rent hero with a quill. Some of the rest was good but basically rehashed, extensions of what we already knew from the Web series. The remainder was blah. Certainly there’s no attempt to make the comic anything more than a pale reflection of the video version.

Dr. Horrible on the Web was an inspired half-hour of funny, earworm-inducing, ultimately heartbreaking story. This offers nothing of the kind. Skip it.

Preview here.

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