FLORIDA! HIPPOPOTAMUS! COCAINE! MASSACRE! Advanced Review
- Blake Donaldson
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
Publisher: Mad Cave Studios
Writer: Fred Kennedy
Artist: James Edward Clark
Where to Buy: Direct from Mad Cave or Your Local Comic Shop (LCS)
Price: $4.99
Release Date: February 18, 2026
Solicit:
A no-nonsense federal agent and a lone-wolf cop chase down a brutal drug lord in a flooded amusement park swarming with blood-crazed hippos and cut-throat mercenaries.
Disco Hippo Wonderland is the number one amusement park in Flamingo City. But few realize its corpulent owner, Jans M’jor Discau, is about to release the most potent drug ever created: Coke45! Fortunately for humanity, Agent Clarke Nebraska is on the case! She’ll bring down Discau come heck or high water! That was the plan, until her undercover agent, Tico Senecoza, was captured! And before she can rescue him, Miquel—Tico’s sexy loose cannon of an older brother beats her to the punch, storming into the park with bullets flying. Discau panics, dumping the Coke45 into the hippo enclosure and letting them loose on the park, before fleeing into Wonderland’s tunnel network! Nebraska’s plans are totally off the rails, and things get worse when a marijuana smoke fueled hurricane drowns the park in torrential rain! Now it’s up to Nebraska and Miquel to create an uncomfortable truce to bring Discau down before he escapes!
REVIEW
Are you a middle-aged stoner who once D.A.R.E.d to Keep Kids Off Drugs?
Have you ever wished there was a Disney-level theme park solely dedicated to large semiaquatic mammals?
Do you enjoy brightly colored comics full of action, comedy, and 70s buddy cop movie tropes?
If you answered “Hell yes!” to any of these questions, boy howdy, do I have the book for you!
The Florida Hippopotamus Cocaine Massacre is a nostalgia-drenched after school special to end all other after school specials. By-the-book federal agent Clarke Nebraska has spent 18 months actively working to take down drug kingpin Jans M’jor “Disco” Discau and is finally closing in on him. That is, until plays-by-his-own-rules police officer Miquel Senecoza crashes Clarke’s operation to save his brother Tico who’s being held hostage by Discau! And where does all this action go down, you ask? At Discau’s hippo-themed amusement park, Disco-Hippo Wonderland, of course! Can Clarke and Miquel work together to take Discau down amidst the chaos of a drugged-fueled hippo rampage and an impending hurricane before he can escape and unleash his new drug, Coke45, upon the world and turn America’s youth into a “mob of fornicating socialists”?! There’s only one way to find out!
The Florida Hippopotamus Cocaine Massacre is a surreal anti-drug mock-PSA where the only truly likeable characters are the titular hippos. Luckily, you don’t have to particularly like anyone in this book to find them all hilarious. I was smiling ear to ear before I finished the first panel on page 1 and by Discau’s villainous introduction on page 4, I actually laughed out loud. While some of the more politically-tinged jokes reminded me a bit of Mark Russell’s Prez and The Flintstones comics from DC, there’s an absurdity to author Fred Kennedy’s writing that immediately sets him apart. He’s not just willing to jump the shark (or the hippo, in this case), he’s launching a red convertible over it and shooting it with a 9mm in slow motion!
As clever as Kennedy’s writing is on its own, artist and letterer James Edward Clark pulls double-duty with his energetic linework and hilariously misplaced sound effects to drive the humor home on every page. (I’m not joking when I say page 4 of this book is probably the single funniest page of a comic I’ve ever read.) While Clark’s artistic acumen is on display every panel, the real highlight of his art are his crowd scenes. There is one such panel that contains nearly 70 individual crowd members, all with their own distinguishing features and facial expression, reacting to events off-panel and that’s just one of several such panels throughout the book. The sheer amount of time and dedication that had to have gone into illustrating those panels alone is staggering to consider.
In a world where mainstream comics are bogged down by everlasting monthly deadlines, event tie-ins, and the haunting remnants of kowtowing to the Comics Code Authority, The Florida Hippopotamus Cocaine Massacre rises above the rest to look conventional storytelling in the face and then shoot that face in the face! Tell your friends! Tell your mom! Tell your friends’ moms! But most importantly, tell your local comic shop that you want FLORIDA! HIPPOPOTAMUS! COCAINE! MASSACRE!
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