[A series on the Madman Library Editions by guest reviewer Zach King. Zach writes about movies at The Cinema King and about comics on Instagram at Dr. King’s Comics.]

“I can relate to Frank Einstein. He tries to just stay cool and roll with this thing called ‘life,’ and then just as you get comfortable, the temperature changes on you. But, hot or cold, he keeps plugging away no matter what.” — Mr. Gum

After a slightly underwhelming experience with the third volume of “The Madmaniverse Library,” I’m relieved to say that Madman Library Edition Vol. 4, is a welcome return to form for Michael Allred and his merry mutated misfits. The winning formula seems to be a redoubled emphasis on Frank Einstein and his peculiar earnestness, even while the plot both goes everywhere at once and nowhere in particular.

The fourth volume collects all 17 issues of Madman Atomic Comics, along with a trio of one-shots that effectively held Madman fans at bay during an elongated pause in production. While the final issue of The Atomics was cover-dated November 2001, Madman Atomic Comics didn’t debut until April 2007.¹ In the interim, Allred kept the Madmaniverse alive with issues devoted to It Girl, Spaceman, and Mr. Gum, offbeat members of The Atomics on their own adventures. What’s more, these issues find Allred turning over artistic duties to, respectively, Chynna Clugston-Major, Lawrence Marvit, and J. Bone. And in a way, this creative jam session augurs the shifts in tone that Vol. 4 will bring to the Madmaniverse.

I hadn’t said much about It Girl (Luna Romy) in my last review, partly because I didn’t see what all the fuss was about. I was aware that she was prominent in Madman iconography, and I knew that she’d eventually headline her own series, It Girl and the Atomics, in the fifth hardcover volume. Yet aside from a striking visual design, I didn’t connect with the character, even while her superpower allowed her to assume the properties of anything she touched — granting Allred, in the process, the ability to draw whatever he wanted. Fortunately, this opening It Girl issue flips the script; where she had been merely the object of Metal Man’s affection, here It Girl struggles to free her boyfriend from the hypnotic clutches of the Cadaver.

Throughout the volume, It Girl becomes one of the faces of the Atomics, even so far as to assume cosmic prominence when she becomes one of four heroes able to defeat the Crimson King, an omnivorous being of unfathomable evil whose downfall is the stuff of prophecy. It’s the sort of lofty mythos that reminds one rather of Jack Kirby, though Kirby never did anything as head-scratchingly weird as the subplot where It Girl absorbs the essence of Joe Lombard, Madman’s girlfriend, just before the latter perishes. (Worry not, loyal readers, Dr. Flem manages to separate them again before long.)

In the Spaceman one-shot, Allred teams with artist Lawrence Marvit. The division of labor is curious, as Allred draws Spaceman over Marvit’s backgrounds. The effect is something like staring at animation cels, with foregrounded figures really popping with an effect that puts one in mind of another of Allred’s great influences, Alex Toth. (Or maybe it’s just that Spaceman’s visual design looks more than a little like Space Ghost.) Yet that Saturday morning cartoon vibe belies this volume’s overall heightened sense of fun and wonder; with as incorrigible a protagonist as Madman, it’s hard not to feel the joy pouring off the page.

In terms of visual language, Vol. 4 represents a quantum leap for Allred. While his Madman comics have always been freewheeling, transgressing beyond the boundaries of the panel, it’s that and more in this book. Yes, Frank can still be found cartwheeling over the gutter, but several issues push the formal envelope in delightful ways. In one issue, Madman teams-up with his favorite comic book character Mister Excitement for an existential trip through his own soul, while Allred draws each panel in a different style from the long history of comics. For example, one panel recalls Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, while another recasts our duo as Calvin and Hobbes; still others imitate Joe Shuster, Jim Steranko, and Mike Mignola (among many, many more). The original issue included a full list of creators, but I would have loved an annotated version in this edition

In another issue, Allred anticipates the “long panel” gag from Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo’s Nightwing run, with an issue that scrolls down a city street with each double-page spread. Cameos abound, including Jay and Silent Bob and even Michael Allred himself wielding a pool cue, but the real star is Allred’s dynamism and sense of rhythm, even as each spread is given over to a single image of Madman and the Atomics struggling against colossal tentacle monsters.

The final one-shot features Mr. Gum himself, and Allred teams with J. Bone, a frequent collaborator with the late, great Darwyn Cooke. Bone and Allred prove quite a pair, particularly in a story about the rubber-band antics of the surprisingly lovelorn Mr. Gum. Early in the story, Mr. Gum tries his hand at online dating, and I kept waiting for things to go awry until I had to remind myself, to paraphrase the gruff words of Harrison Ford, “Kid, it ain’t that kind of comic.”

Instead, things generally go well for Mr. Gum and his new flame. We get a deeper sense of his personality and his friendship with Madman — two aspects that would have made the third volume a whole lot stronger. And in that trusting friendship, we see echoes of the close collaboration between Allred and Bone and Cooke, who does a few pages. While the book has its plot — and even an eleventh-hour reunion with Red Rocket 7 — it’s always been much stronger when it’s about a group of affable weirdos and the ways that they support each other unreservedly. Madman Library Edition Vol. 4 will give you that ginchy feeling, true, but it will also give you the warm and fuzzies when you’re least expecting them.

In the next volume, we’ll put that theory to the test as Michael Allred takes a step back for “It Girl and the Atomics” by Jamie S. Rich, Mike Norton, and Chynna Clugston Flores.