With Season 3 upon us, the Rick and Morty phenomenon is at its zenith. You can tell this from the pause for breath converts take before revealing just how much Adult Swim’s top-rated series has saved their souls, cleaned out their basements and generally enriched their lives with its anarchic odyssey through geekdom in a comfortingly Back to the Future-styled format.
Another way to tell something zeitgeisty is topping out is the ‘merch’, which has landed with a vengeance and includes this nicely tooled colouring book. Here are the first two years’ worth of mind-dumps rendered as fiendishly fan-servicing collages for you to colour-in. Even if you never get around to finishing it, you’ll admire the how well each page harnesses the uniquely deranged scenarios Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon deliver with each episode.
And like the series, the pages are often psychotically busy which makes filling them in by turns frustrating and entertaining. Many pictures consist of semi-repeating, highly-detailed patterns of multiple plumbuses, meeseeks, butthole plants or galactic prison cells which means a lot of repetitious colouring-in of pretty much the same thing. This is intentional, but you’ll be working an hour or two a day for a couple of months if you want to complete it all. And while a lot of love has clearly gone into the design, some sections are oddly lacking in key detail to guide where separate elements meet or to judge the degree of colour required. Connoisseurs of the colouring book oeuvre may also gripe at the lack of pre-filled black areas in these mad vistas, so it’s up to you where to put that all-important contrast. Better get those decisions right or every picture here will end up looking like an explosion in a pickled rat factory.
Absolutely not suitable for minors or Daily Mail readers, the Rick and Morty colouring book is a real challenge and potentially the most avant-garde time you’ll spend with pencils this side of an art class with David Lynch.
RICK AND MORTY: OFFICIAL COLOURING BOOK / PUBLISHER: TITAN BOOKS / RELEASE DATE: 25TH AUGUST
