Tournament day! Up against their rival the Kettle Balls, the Jazz Pandas are struggling to stay alive in the competition. Sometimes, though, the worst curveballs aren’t the ones literally flying at your face.

It’s game time! While it feels like the series hasn’t spent enough time focused on the team practicing, Dodge City #3 is still beyond entertaining. I generally hated gym in school. But, the one thing I did enjoy? That’d be dodge ball. Writer Josh Trujillo delivers some solid action as the balls fly. While it’s not always totally clear as to what’s going on (we’ll get to that) the issue is action packed.

Trujillo’s strength with this series is finding grounded drama through all of the ball throwing. You can feel a tenseness about it all as you truly aren’t sure who will win the match and who will fail. There’s some nice twists and turns and none of it feels over the top. I really wasn’t sure what the outcome would be until those final few pages and even then wasn’t sure.

The art by Cara McGee with colors from Brittney Peer and lettering from Aubrey Aiese delivers the action and helps create the tension. I mentioned that at times it’s hard to tell what’s going on and that issue is that some panels are too tight. There might have been room to do panels that are further out so you can get a greater sense of where folks are and how the teams are interacting. Though the close panels really emphasizes the competition of it all. The lettering adds to that all helping the flow of the action and how the interactions are going. The art and lettering gives us the grit and hard work of it all.

This series continues to entertain and who’d have thought that a comic about dodge ball would be so good? The creative team has done a solid job of bringing the aesthetic of sports manga to a western audience mixing the two worlds together to create a product that’s fun and entertaining. I can’t wait to read more of this and who knows, maybe get in some games of dodge ball myself.

Story: Josh Trujillo Art: Cara McGee Cover: Cara McGee
Color: Brittney Peer Letterer: Aubrey Aiese
Story: 8.15 Art: 8.0 Overall: 8.1 Recommendation: Buy

BOOM! Studios provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review