My Little Pony: Friends Forever #13

Unexpected team up, in lack of a better term and because I love the term team up, yields lots of funny, heartwarming and cute moments. Just what I expected.

Writer: Jeremy Whitley

Artist: Agnes Garbowska

Publisher: IDW

Summary: With her little sister, Sweetie Bell, sick in bed it's up to the great fashionista Rarity to entertain the diamond in the rough filly that is Babs Seed. But how to do that when they like completely different things?

My thoughts: I like slice of life stories quite a lot actually, they're a nice diversion from some super hero epics I tend to focus on. The modern My Little Pony series is a great source for slice of life stories, that just happen to feature anthropomorphic ponies, and this issue is a great example of that.

First up, the pairing of Rarity and Babs Seed itself is something of a small and delightful marvel to behold. In the cartoon, the franchise's main outlet, the chance of these two characters haven't actually met and the chance of them interacting in any meaningful way is unlikely to happen. So to get a story where their interaction is the main focus is a treat that I didn't know I wanted.

The representation of both characters is accurate so the whole thing feels genuine and they play off each other really well. They're both nice and perfectly polite to one another but their sensibilities just don't match up and therein lies both the conflict and much of the humor of the issue. Babs Seed's reactions to getting dragged to a spa and a manic hair dresser are delightfully amusing. And even though Babs clearly doesn't like what they're doing you never get the sense that Rarity is being intentionally mean or anything. She's just trying to share what she enjoys doing and mistakingly thinks that Babs will enjoy the same things.

It of course all leads up to a happy ending and a life lesson, one that really works actually. It's that we are all different people and we won't always enjoy the same things. But instead of just rejecting what other people enjoy or arguing about what's best we could open up a little and let others share what they love with us, we may be surprised. I like that lesson, it's a good one as far as these things go.

The art is great. It captures the look and feel of the show nicely and is just downright adorable at places, the first panel where we see Babs Seed is insaney cute.

It's a funny, sweet, witty and well done comic that makes me smile. Thinking about it I actually like it quite a bit more than I first thought.

Grade: Great - 4