IDW Friends Forever issue #1: The Pie's the Limit

[Rabukurafuto]

My Little Pony: Friends Forever is IDW's replacement for My Little Pony: Micro-Series. Each chapter focuses on two characters and their interaction together.

Friends Forever begins with "The Pie's the Limit", the featured characters being Pinkie Pie and Applejack. Pinkie enters the dessert-themed ninth annual Equestria Super Chef Competition for a 50,000 bit prize. Applejack ends up competing too.

Applejack didn't intend to enter; she is mistaken for the chef Marine Sandwich. The other contestants are posh Manehatten Earth Pony mare Summer van der Hoof, excitable Las Pegasus Unicorn stallion Blade Sparxx and cutesy Dodge City Earth Pony Toffee Truffle. The event is judged by a stern elderly Griffon female named Vermouth Roux, a kindly Buffalo female named Big Angie and an unnamed red Earth Pony mare with an Indian appearance. Hosting the contest is an unnamed tan Earth Pony stallion and a Unicorn stallion named Jumbo Don who broadcasts the show through his magic. Finally, Marine Sandwich is an Earth Pony mare "food performance artist" who is rather unstable.

Pinkie and Applejack take pity on Toffee since she entered to get enough money to reopen her restaurant, sabotaging their own efforts to make Toffee look better. Meanwhile, Marine plots violent revenge on Applejack for replacing her, and everyone else for not noticing she was replaced to begin with.

Like the second Micro-Series chapter showed, Equestria apparently has a magical form of television, but since the image must be sent by specialised Unicorns it probably is saved for special events. We finally have a new Buffalo character, and Big Angie is quite different from any of the Buffalo seen in "Over a Barrel", being more of a Southern American sweet old woman type. I thought her design was very cute in its simplicity. Vermouth is amusing, being so jaded that it takes a dessert made of rubbish for her to be impressed. Toffee is cute, but she is too similar to any number of sad characters that need help so the Mane 6 can make a friendship lesson. Blade is amusing even if he has exactly one personality trait (setting his food on fire to increasing degrees, to the point where attempting to eat it would cause third-degree burns). Marine is a bizarre character who builds appropriate food-themed weapons, like a fondant gun, but she is really there just so Toffee's food would have an unfair reason to win the competition.

The competition itself is fun, but even I liked Marine I think the story would have been better without her to focus on the antics of the chefs and judges. Toffee herself points out that she wants no unfair advantages so she can prove herself worthy of winning, yet that is exactly how she wins in the end (although not in a way she was thinking). The art by newcomer to the Friendship is Magic comics Carla Speed McNeil is cute and rather crude, reminding me of Tony Fleecs' work. The cover is quite nice, but is utterly misleading, giving the impression that Pinkie and Applejack competing is the main theme, which never happens. Like with the start of Micro-Series I found it amusing enough but not brilliant.