Review: Kid Cosmic Struggles to Separate Itself from Modern Superhero Fare

Netflix’s animated series Kid Cosmic, about a bunch of misfits turned superheroes trying to stop an onslaught of alien attacks, essentially mashes together parts of creator Craig McCracken’s The Powerpuff Girls and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. When powerful cosmic stones make their way to a dusty desert hamlet where Kid (Jack Fisher) lives with his hippie junk-artist grandfather, Papa G (Keith Ferguson), lives are upended—or, in the case of the show’s antagonist, the aptly named Stuck Chuck (Tom Kenny), fused to the floor of Kid’s backyard trailer after only half his body passes through a portal.

Kid often camps out in his trailer to read old comic books, and upon finding the cosmic stones and turning them into rings, the rambunctious boy finds himself able to fly. But others, too, gain superpowers when they get their hands on one of the rings: Papa G is able to multiply himself; teen waitress Jo (Amanda C. Miller) can summon portals; four-year-old Rosa (Lily Rose Silver) can become a giant; and Tuna Sandwich (Fred Tatasciore), a large cat with an oddly prominent butthole, sprouts a third eye that allows him to see the future.

However familiar its setup may seem, Kid Cosmic never feels like a transparent attempt to capitalize on the current superhero-saturated media landscape, and largely because of its vintage aesthetic. The characters are rendered in weathered colors, their pleasantly rounded designs redolent of old comic strips, and the title cards lean into that influence, with freeze frames adopting the Ben Day dots of yesteryear. The music is all fuzzy, shouty garage rock that sounds piped through speakers on their last legs, and though Jo has a cellphone, the characters spend one episode recording their antics on tape, complete with archaic VCR font.

As a result, Kid Cosmic draws a conscious line between itself and the glossy modern superhero blockbuster, coming across more like a sly bit of counter-programming. Rather than celebrating extrajudicial violence and swearing fealty to existing power structures, the series is careful to center its stories around regular folks, with superpowers and without, learning to navigate the world. For a field whose most popular works tend to be irreparably tangled up in the military-entertainment complex and the U.S. government’s propagandistic relationship with Hollywood, Kid Cosmic maintains a healthy skepticism of a self-interested government and other cultish causes all too eager to rally against an “other.”

Unfortunately, the show’s structure is about as modern as it gets, with Netflix written all over it. Each of the 10 episodes furthers a longer plot, with initial installments assembling Kid’s crew together and even the most apparently one-off episode seeding an eventual conflict that dominates the season’s latter half. Kid Cosmic cultivates a nice hangout atmosphere only to do too little with it, never making space for the sort of adventure-of-the-week shenanigans that, in the best episodic shows, further endear us to a concept and cast of characters.

The series does come up with some fun uses for the characters’ superpowers. At one point, Jo tries to stay at her day job while keeping tabs on the gang through portals, while Papa G starts to brute-force his way through problems by using his endless clones for amusingly fatal trial-and-error experiments. Elsewhere, Rosa must be coaxed into usefulness so that her innocuous, childish thrashings gain considerable power when she becomes a giant. Which makes it all the more unfortunate that Kid Cosmic ultimately leaves so little room for us to get to know the characters as it barrels ahead and leans into the through line of its overarching plot.