Heidi MacDonald may have been the best comics editor Disney Adventures Magazine ever had. Under her watch in the late 90's, the magazine's comic section gained several entries by ACTUAL COMICS ARTISTS, like Evan Dorkin and Jeff Smith. She also convinced Bongo Comics Group to let her run Simpsons comics in that section -- so a property owned by a company other than Disney was in a Disney magazine. We wouldn't see that again.
Heidi worked wonders, but she was also responsible for this.
Disney Adventures' first cartoon created internally for the magazine, that was not based on a TV show or Disney character. "D & A" was certainly ambitious, but the admiration stops there. This series was terrible, and it only took three stories for word to get to Heidi that we didn't want these two idiots in the Comics Zone.
Denise and Adam met in a park. He threw an open jelly sandwich at her face, then they were chased by aliens. They ran into a cave and discovered a door with a strange lock, that only Denise could solve because she was a genius. That's when they discovered an underground organization called, sigh, the "Secret World Saving Club." Maybe this is why the series flopped.
Or maybe it flopped because everybody's faces were always stuck with these annoying grins on them.
The Secret World Saving Club blew chunks. They were just as dorky as Adam, and they were the most pathetic offshoot of the X-Files Craze I ever saw. Anyway, Denise and Adam beat the aliens and were rewarded with membership in the club. It came in handy the following Halloween, because in the second story they run into a kid-eating ogre!
That's a pretty complicated way to say "I just boil up some water and stick 'em in there." Denise fools the ogre in the lamest way possible, and they all escape. The witch costume wasn't what Denise was originally going as....she was going as Disney's Pocahontas. What a geek.
The third and final story was even
worse. It was called "The Really Really Cute Monster That
Ate Tokyo!" Based on a bad caricature, Denise and Adam were
sent to battle a Japanese monster that was drawn cute, yet was
actually fearsome and out of their league. Adam shoots his
electric wrench at it while yelling the following: "Turn
around and go home, or I'll keep shocking you with it!!"
But the monster is pacified by...sigh again....Adam's walkman. It
turns out all the monster wanted was "some new tunes."
UGH!
It was curtains from there. Once again, we had another creation that underestimated kids' intelligence and tried to serve us dumbed-down sludge we couldn't connect to in any way. Generations change, though. DA runs some pretty bad original comics now, that the current crop of children apparently have no problem with. These kids today....