Un-prone to regular viewings of the Adventure Time animated series and only ever to have seen it in passing as an unusual show his sibling follows religiously (a somewhat quirky and somewhat sublime show about a near sighted mutt and a "Furry", but did have a George Takei cameo as a tomato) the author of this article picks up the book he presumes designed for the 18 year old male sibling.
But to continue the analysis we need a short background on cinematic auteur Luis Bunuel, the surrealist collaborator and cinematic counterpart of Salador (the guy with the melty clock) Dali. Famed for his thematic works on surrealism, Bunuel's predominant preoccupation is with conventions of cinematic shooting, narrative story structure and socially accepted institutions of the middle class bourgeois, best surrealised in the first 10 minutes of one of his more memorable works "The Exterminating Angel." The systematic breakdown of logic, tradition, style and archetype is symbolised in the film by; framing a boom mike into a shot, repeating footage, including a live goat into a dinner scene and adding exchanges over the topic of "disgusting virginity" to name a few elements, in short he allows surrealism to be adapted into the confines of his cinematic medium.
The first three pages of Adventure Time has a very similar effect. With cover A innocently constructed to be an unassuming TV counterpart, the interior pages works on these lowered expectations by working its sequential barriers.
Page 1 opens with 6 of a 9 panel grid of the mutt filming the entire land of Ooo in a series of abstracted unconnected images that lack shadows, time frame, scenic cohesion from frame to frame, and theme thanks to its visually diverse cast members. In the final three frames of the page, "filmed" from a very unusual position above the bookcase for a comic, the mutt and Furry give each other the "bump," celebrating their cinematic debute, but when asked what mutt will do with it.. he has no idea, almost defying its television counterpart, because as we have seen a camera has no place in a comic book.
Page 2 expositionally introduces the cast across the land of Ooo in a single visually flattened frame with no regards to composition, distance to proportion ratio, style or logic involving mountain top gameplay on stormy days, defying its own artistic medium.
And finally Page 3 a 6 panel grid where a terrified snail enters a seemingly harmless bag and exits it happily waving to the reader only to be captured by a skeleton living in the bag, like Bunuel's "Exterminating Angel" the character breaks narrative convention. Here the snail does it within the confines of its medium by posing a question is he reacting before or after the narrative moment, how would we know since its presented here in 6 simultaneous images... while interacting with the reader, how meta.
Adventure Time is a pretty decent book in the first 3 pages, but as a surrealistic comic book experiment its hyper condensed with multilayers of information to the point where its terrifying, the author will probably take another day before he reads another 3 pages.