Exclusive DC Preview: 'The Ruff and Reddy Show' #5

02/22/2018 11:24 pm EST

DC has provided ComicBook.com with an exclusive preview of The Ruff & Reddy Show #5, due in stores next Wednesday from writer Howard Chaykin and artist Mac Rey.

The Ruff & Reddy Show is a genre-savvy send-up of entertainment culture, child stardom, and the reboot fever that has taken over Hollywood.

Showbiz in general seems to be the name of the game in DC's Hanna-Barbera comics, which currently include not only The Ruff & Reddy Show but also Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles, in which the title character as well as Huckleberry Hound and others gets reinvented as Broadway stars during the Red Scare.

Chaykin knows a bit about Hollywood; a veteran comics writer, many of his projects have been considered for film and TV treatments over the years, with the most recent being American Flagg!, which was recently optioned for television.

Chaykin has also made recent headlines with his Image Comics series The Divided States of Hysteria, which seems to have the uncanny ability to offend...everyone.

Chaykin's own politics are left of center, and much of the satire in Divided States of Hysteria is aimed at the normalization of formerly-fringe elements on the American right. Still, it has managed to attract a number of left-wing detractors for its graphic depiction of crimes and discrimination against minority groups. In an odd twist, some conservative critics have responded by standing up for the book in the name of free speech.

It is unlikely Chaykin will bring that kind of politics to bear in Ruff & Reddy -- but not impossible, as DC's recent The Flintstones series from Mark Russell and Steve Pugh taught.

You can check out the preview pages in the attached gallery and the official solicitation text below.

In the business of show, they say nothing succeeds like excess—and that imitation is the sincerest form of television. In a flurry of days that make their heads spin, Ruff and Reddy find themselves spread all too thin in a slurry of pilots—while a bad decision comes back to haunt them like a bad blind date on a Saturday night.

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