Some comics I read in 2025: Battletoads: The Lost Adventure
Hands up: who knew there was a tie-in comic to the Battletoads reboot? Anyone? I know I was clueless!
I glossed over the plot when I talked about the Battletoads reboot, because it really is being pulled out of its ass as it goes. The Toads have been stuck in a simulation bunker for decades, and the Dark Queen has been out of the picture for just as long. Who put them out of the picture for so long, and to what end?
Somewhere underneath all the silly jokes it’s constantly making, the game was trying to establish a mystery of some kind, who the Topians are and what they’re up to. It’s ultimately a bit hamstrung by the execution, the heroes wandering aimlessly ’til the baddies come pick them up, but the effort to have a story slowly unfold is interesting, not one commonly seen in beat-em-ups to my knowledge.
And, uh, the comic’s basically attempting an encore! After re-establishing the status quo between the Toads and the Dark Queen (and even deploying some old baddies as fanservice), she’s just as quickly written out under mysterious circumstances so the Toads can do something else.
They hit up a tournament for heroes as a means of making a buck, and quickly hear of shady goings-on where defeated competitors are taken away and never seen again. What’s happening to them, what’s the tournament’s agenda, and who’s bankrolling this? If you’ve seen literally any Street Fighter adaptation, you can probably take a guess.
It definitely looks the part! Artist Andrés Genolet captures the style effortlessly, rendering the new and existing characters appropriately zany-like, and making the most of the fact it’s effectively three issues of fight scenes. Where the game’s cutscenes were largely just yakking, this does a great job playing with the elasticity of the Toads for both comedic effect or even conflict resolution, like Rash’s penchant for morphing into a missile when there’s the slightest hint of a roadblock.
Simon Furman is on writing duties and does an adequate job with the material, leaning on the same fourth wall-breaking self-referential guff the game does. It’s much more compact without gameplay intermissions to break up the action, allowing it to get its point across quicker and unfold its lightweight mystery across three issues relatively satisfactorily.
You can definitely tell it’s written by a 60 year old British man and not a room of comedy geeks in their 30s, though. Partly because the cadence of its dialogue reeks of decades of writing for superheroes, and that in lieu of sounding like gay podcasters (i say affectionately), the supporting cast instead talk like pompous Vikings (i say less affectionately).
I don’t keep up with modern comics, so I don’t know how many get to be as overtly weird and cartoony as this, but I love to see it. I’d talked about the old Earthworm Jim comics and the compromises they make in adapting such out-there material… but when the game is already an off-the-wall cartoon, it doesn’t take much to adapt that into still images. It makes the leap well, even if some of its more ‘meta’ jokes like Pimple pausing and rewinding the story to recap in issue 3 don’t hit as strong as it would in animation.
It’s a breezy enough read, but I wasn’t joking about it being an encore. It retreads the Toads’ individual character arcs from the game, complete with alternating focus in each act/issue, and even its plot hits the same chords as the Topians’ agenda. Speaking of, they cameo at the end to promise future villainy, and the Dark Queen is seen assembling a new robot army… but I’m just not compelled by this new status quo, nor confident in it as the new long-term depiction of the cast.
The Toads come across as one-trick ponies if every adventure is going to be tackling the same themes again and again, making meta commentary on their character development. You can only trot out the self-aware, self-referential schtick for so long before it reads like it’s got nothing to say, and the game was already brushing up against those limits.
That’s what kind of rankles me: the game ends teasing the Toads will be adventuring again… but has done nothing to establish future franchise material to work with. And whaddaya know, the comic has ten pages of Toads vs. Dark Queen to suggest things have actually changed, before putting her on ice and making them run the same script again.
I do credit the reboot with an amusing premise, at the very least: The Battletoads are not an idyllic definition of heroes. They’re all self-absorbed in some capacity; Rash is in it for the fame, Zits is neurotic with a fragile ego, and Pimple is working on his conflict resolution, trying to find a middle-ground between being a push-over and pummelling people into the dirt.
Very few of their actions in the game are done for a just cause, but out of short-sighted impulse and personal satisfaction; even the comic’s plot hinges on them looking for a quick cash influx. It’s only at the end of the game when they’re imprisoned do they wind up doing the right thing, and largely because it’s the only autonomy they have left in that situation.
The Topians bank on them being agents of chaos in some capacity, their incompetence and entertainment value reason enough to leave them to their devices… It’s only when the Toads bumble ass-backwards into doing the right thing, exposing villainy and undermining their reign, that the Topians treat them like an actual threat who can’t be left unchecked.
One could read it as amusing commentary on superhero jurisdiction — how much vigilante carnage does one excuse if they claim they’re doing the right thing? The ‘heroes’ being as destructive as any villain is an entertaining angle, best demonstrated in them wrecking the peace treaty between gymnasts and lumberjacks in act 2.
Heck, their aforementioned ‘imprisonment’ is being made into celebrities, and though it’s a serious leap, I can’t help but think of cases like Greta Thunberg — the media enraptured by this colourful crusader who stands for what’s right, up until they start pinpointing and calling for action against those causing the injustice. (i edited this review back in May and hope to fucking goodness my throwaway mention of a political figure is not in bad taste should recent events go a certain way. we live in an exhausting world)
But again, the Toads themselves are rarely rich enough to carry this by themselves. If this is the angle they’re intentionally shooting for, then they need a world and a cast that can comment and reflect on it, more viewpoints than just three dopes not paying attention to what they’re doing.
To go on a tangent: In recent years a story bible for the series was leaked, presumably used by publisher Tradewest for marketing and licensing needs, and it’s a fascinating insight to the merchandising empire they’d hoped to build.
It really hammers home the “Gamescape” concept, where the “furries in space” setting is actually a digital realm of science and sorcery accessed by VR video games, and anyone who enters is seemingly granted a battle-ready alter-ego.
“The Gamescape is a world where anything can happen – where the timeless battle of good versus evil is fought with a unique mixture of powerful sorcery and high-technology. It is a world that has always existed, but which can only now be visited via the portal of computer data.
“Programmers hold the key to this portal — a key not of metal but of mathematics — giving us access to the virtual reality beyond the screen; a world of weirdness and wonder, of gigantic games played against a backdrop of galaxies, a world of mystery and magic, frights and fantasy…
“New worlds demand new and original heroes – adventurers and explorers to chart the territory and from which its legends and myths are woven – such are the BATTLETOADS; a unique mixture of man, amphibian and computer technology.”
Three game testers are permanently changed into the Toads thanks to a virus, while characters like Professor T. Bird and General Slaughter are shown to be humans who merely gain animalistic forms in the Gamescape.
Princess Angelica, the Dark Queen and her goons are seemingly the only cast members who hail from the Gamescape, with no alter-ego attached (at least in the “characters” bible, another one containing a novella of backstory makes the Dark Queen the persona of the testers’ humourless boss). A whole swath of humans seen in no other media fill out the cast, from various tech company staff to the mandatory kid sidekick and his parents, who also get furry forms.
To its credit, making the Toads game testers does feel thematic to the games themselves. Having discussed the two so much, there is a similarity between Battletoads and Earthworm Jim, in that they’re both no stranger to hurling new and unexpected challenges at the player every couple of minutes…
Except where Jim‘s come across as weird for the sake of weird, designed to be creative and unusual above all else (to describe it charitably), Battletoads is very much a gamer’s idea of a challenge. Running, jumping, brawling, twitch reaction turbo-biking… it makes sense for the Dark Queen’s challenges to be based on the reflexes of a professional button basher!
Otherwise, though? I stinkin’ hate it. The game manuals, the Nintendo Power comic, and the cartoon pilot are all in agreement that the Toads are young adults changed into these forms (the result of a computer virus in the first two, the work of a transformative spray in the latter), and I truthfully don’t know what benefit it gets from such a backstory. I don’t care about their human selves! I don’t care what connection this far-out space setting has to Earth or corporate politics! I am here for the fat rats, gross monsters, and Jessica Rabbit physiques! But mostly the fat rats!
Adapting old material and shaking off its baggage can be freeing, and I certainly can’t blame the reboot for ignoring that backstory; it’s a load of guff I can’t imagine anyone is remotely interested or invested in (and if you are, write in and explain your reasoning, you monster). But in ditching Professor T. Bird and the Dark Queen’s stable of underlings, what do we get in their place…? Not an established or coherent sense of world-building, that’s for sure, nor replacement characters for them to meaningfully bounce off of.
(At a stretch, you could say the reboot pushes the anthropomorphism to its logical limit as a theme…? The Dark Queen’s toy-based minions, the lumberjack boss being a tree stump with arms and legs… but none of these I could even identify ’til I read the art book, it’s all too abstract to tell what I’m looking at!)
By no means am I loyal to Battletoads canon. The game and the comic both riff on how nobody knows or cares about their backstory — are they related? Were they human? Doesn’t matter, not important. But to jettison the series’ entire cast and iconography is an egregious decision, especially when the crux of the reboot is built on “nobody cares about these guys.”
It leaves the old fans feeling estranged, and for new fans… well, the fact they’re nobodies means it could be any characters in these roles. It’s no longer a world built for the Battletoads, but just any washed-up IP willing to take a self-deprecating grasp at relevance. Old material can benefit from new blood, but at what point are you better off just making something original instead?
This is not the comic’s fault by any means; it does perfectly fine with its assignment. These are flaws endemic in the reboot that a comic can’t resolve, and it’s hard to say how one could fix it without just wiping the slate clean again.
And I hate saying that! As expressed in my thoughts on the game, I well and truly laud the work put into it, the fountain of talent and creativity it puts on display. It’s… just not Battletoads! Not satisfactorily, at least!
It’s why I say it would’ve been perfect as animated shorts — here’s a fun little thing that costs you nothing, shows we’re still thinking about this franchise, and can be workshopped if there’s enough interest in taking it further. Instead… well, here we are five years later, not talking about the Battletoads reboot.
