Throughout their Minor Threats saga, Patton Oswalt, Jordan Blum, and Scott Hepburn keep coming back to the theme of how the past can shape our decisions, for better or worse. In the case of Playtime, her past as a supervillain affects every decision and every relationship she’s ever had, and usually not for the better. Minor Threats: The Last Devil Left Alive #3 shows that she’s not the only one dwelling on the past, or the only one who wants to move on.
Take Pigeon Pete, Playtime’s former mentor who betrayed her in the first Minor Threats series. Circumstances have led Pete and Playtime to work together once again, but while he’s struggling to mend their bonds, she wants nothing to do with him, no matter how repentant he is. The Searcher is also burdened with past glories, or rather regret about throwing in with Playtime and her crew. Even villainous real estate developer Cooper Scadlock says he’s been shaped by his past relationship with his father, which is driving him to murder and replace everyone in Redport with alternate universe versions of themselves.
The biggest example of someone refusing to let go of the past is Playtime’s daughter Maggie – who’s now known as Modder and a key part of the teenage superhero team the Action. Anyone who read Minor Threats: The Fastest Way Down knows that the Action is far more bloodthirsty than your typical teen heroes, and it looks like Maggie has carried some of that bloodthirstiness into her own life. A sequence by Hepburn shows her viciously attacking a training dummy that happens to have one of Playtime’s masks on it, while she tries to tell her fellow teammates that she’s burned out all of her emotion toward her mother – which sharply contrasts a panel where she kicks off the dummy’s head and then tears said head in half.
Dark Horse
That one moment shows how Playtime’s damage is slowly seeping into Maggie, whether she wants to admit it or not. But Minor Threats: The Last Devil Left Alive #3 also shows that the past can inspire us to do better, especially for one character. With one plot twist, Oswalt and Blum pay homage to the tried-and-true superhero tradition of passing on or picking up the mantle of a dead hero while adding the unique flavor that makes Minor Threats a standout in the comic world. They also feature yet another big twist at the end, and keeping with the idea of the past driving people to do great or terrible things, it looks like the last two issues will revisit Playtime’s sins.
I can’t end this issue without talking about Mar the Man-Car, who was described in the solicits as “the sensational character find of 2025” (or rather, 2026). True to his name, Mar is a living car, but not in the way you’d think. His insides are utterly demonic; there’s a row of teeth where an ashtray should be, a glowering eye in the stick shift, and the wheel is a human ribcage. On top of that, the entire inside is made to look like human organs. It’s the perfect example of Oswalt, Blum and Hepburn swinging for the fences, and I hope Mar gets his own spinoff series.
Minor Threats: The Last Devil Left Alive #3 explores how the past has helped or hurt its cast of characters, while also keeping up its subversive superhero stylings. One thing’s for sure; other comics are going to be hard-pressed to beat Mar the Man-Car.
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