My Little Pony: Pony Tales

That's right, I'm revisiting an old topic here, but every now and again, after dealing with something as emotionally soul-crushing as Max Payne 3 or remembering something like Plumbers Don't Wear Ties (ugh), you just need something light-hearted, jovial, and just plain fun.

However, if that source of happiness is also something much better than it has any right to be on any level, that's good too.

Such is the case with the My Little Pony: Pony Tales comic series.  Yes, that's right, there's currently two comic books being printed in trades at the moment about these characters, and I believe there's a third in the works.

For anybody interested in what that title is supposed to reference, I present the following.

Alternatively:

This, folks, is why cosplay is awesome.

Where was I?  Oh, right.

This trade collects the first six issues of the My Little Pony: Pony Tales comic, each issue spotlighting one of the main six characters.  You have a story about Twilight Sparkle meeting and helping the librarian of the Royal Library, Rainbow Dash trying to get rid of some gremlins putting dark clouds in the sky, Rarity spending a week at a hippie ranch stuck in the mud, Fluttershy's love of knitting, Pinky Pie at the circus, and Applejack trying to track down what's messing up her crops.

Hey.  HEY.  Wake up.  Seriously, it's not as dull as that makes it sound.  ...well, okay, the Fluttershy knitting one isn't the most exciting one, but there's some seriously dark subject matter happening in some of these.

For instance, let's look at just one reference put into the Twilight Sparkle issue.  In it, they reference a title called "I Have No Snout Yet I Must Whinny."

...seriously, nobody gets that reference but me?  Okay, how's this.

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is a science fiction story by Harlan Ellison published in 1966, the winner of a Hugo award, and quite possibly the most disturbing short story I've ever read.  Imagine a story that takes place 109 years after human civilization has fallen.  There are only five living humans left in the world, because during the Cold War the three superpowers (Russia, China, and the US) each built a supercomputer to fight the war on their behalf.  One computer turned sentient, absorbed the other two, and pretty much performed global genocide.

The five survivors are repeatedly tortured every day, genetically altered (one man is turned into a demented primate with enormous genitals), their personalities are twisted (the lone female is turned from a chaste woman into a sex-starved fiend that the others alternate between protecting and abusing), and their entire sense of identity slowly stripped away.  Finally, at the end of the story, they manage to kill each other to escape the computer's torture, only it stops the last one from killing himself and turns him into a giant blob it can focus all of its hatred and rage upon until the end of time, not even leaving him a mouth so he can scream.

You know, the kind of reference you'd expect in a comic book for kids!

Or how about the Pinky Pie story, which is completely based around Pinky Pie attempting to bring joy back to a clown named Ponyacci.

Yes, Ponyacci.

Nothing from the audience?  Nobody gets it?  How about this?

I suspect everybody out there is cultured enough to recognize the opera about the clown whose wife has an affair on him, so he winds up stabbing her to death in front of an audience and then stabbing her lover to death as well.

For kids!

For the most part, however, the stories carry a lot of the same messages in the cartoons, about the importance of letting friends help you, of trusting your friends to appreciate what makes you unique, and other messages that's important to keep in mind if you feel down.  The humor is quick, the pacing is well done, and the artwork is extremely detailed, allowing all sorts of little jokes and funny moments in the backgrounds of any scene.

But man...even hinting at something that at one point was fleshed out to a video game by having one of the characters turn out to be a Nazi doctor who operated on people in concentration camps is just... man.