IDW Friends Forever issue #2

[Rabukurafuto]

Today's character team-up is the Cutie Mark Crusaders and Discord (!). Compared to last month's conventional team-up of Applejack and Pinkie, IDW went for weird very quickly.

This one worked much better than the first issue. While Applejack and Pinkie together is nothing unusual for Friendship is Magic and resulted in a fun but generic story, a combination like the CMC and Discord is bound to provide something interesting. It's also the first appearance of Discord in the IDW titles, and the book uses him to very good effect. It's rather light on plot: the CMC complain about how none of their attempts to find their cutie marks have worked, and Discord happens to be outside, changing the apples to have random flavours. The CMC realise that Discord's powers can allow them to experience all sorts of scenarios, and he agrees, whisking the girls off to a variety of increasingly dangerous activities. His magic makes a dome of reality-warping power that steadily expands to meet the CMC's demands, endangering Ponyville.

The writer definitely knew how to utilise these characters, doing a good job of combining elements from episodes like "The Show Stoppers" and "Keep Calm and Flutter On". A fun touch was the CMC's refusal to be impressed with Discord's antics, informing him how they tried those activities already, forcing Discord to get more and more extreme in his efforts. He clearly has a lot of pride in his unpredictability, so calling him boring is something he won't stand for. The Mane 6 and Spike show up too, but add very little to it; they just fill out the page length. Celestia's appearance is rather more interesting, shedding some light on her relationship with Discord. The resolution is a little too much like "Keep Calm and Flutter On" and once again IDW shoves in a lot of references to things the author likes (although Discord dressed as Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation and commenting on the familiarity of it was kind of cute, if obvious), but I thought it was a nice improvement over the previous story.

Also of note: this might be the first time Star Swirl the Bearded appeared as an actual character, albeit as an illusion conjured by Discord, so I won't be too surprised if his look here is contradicted in future stories.

[Rhoo]

I'll have to check these out.

Might buy both at once as it sounds good.

[Rabukurafuto]

They are both very cute.