- Countdown #49 of 52 (backwards), by Paul Dini, Tony Bedard, Carlos Magno & Jay Leisten (DC)
- Wonder Woman #9, by Jodi Picoult, Terry Dodson & Rachel Dodson (DC)
- newuniversal #6, by Warren Ellis & Salvador Larroca (Marvel)
- Satan’s Sodomy Baby, by Eric Powell (Dark Horse)
Eric Powell writes and draws the comic book series The Goon, which is played partly for horror and partly for off-color laughs. The Goon is the leader/enforcer of a local mob, dispatching evil while running rotection rackets. Sort of like Hellboy through the crack’d mirror. No doubt about it: Powell is a terrific artist, with a top-notch sense of layout, form, motion, and execution. His writing, though, is very iffy: Sometimes he captures some real pathos, and other times he’s quite funny, usually when he’s being just plain silly. But his scripts are often pointlessly crude and/or gross, and the long-term stories seem not to be going anywhere, and I find a steady diet of the lightweight silliness gets tiring after a while.
So now we come to Satan’s Sodomy Baby, which is really just an especially gross issue of The Goon, with extreme violence, nudity, and a devil-child with a really big shlong. All of which, as you might guess, is… neither very funny nor very dramatic. And certainly not very clever. Why bother? (I wish I hadn’t bothered picking it up.)
Brian Hibbs is a little kinder to it than I am, but he’s not too fond of it, either.
A small week, otherwise. I am still enjoying newuniversal, perhaps more than I ought to, but every so often Ellis grooves a book right in my strike zone. I wish he’d get the last issue of Planetary out, though!
Recent Comments