The Factual Opinion

Désastre Hurlant (T5): Like No Messing Around, This Guy Really Wants To Sleep With His Mom

It's not all Incal-verse science fiction in the Jodorowsky catalog, no matter what Jog tells you! This is a guy who tested the limits of what kind of genres he could use to write about incest fetishes, and he came away satisfied, one hopes, because...well. I don't know how much further down you want to go with that one. Anyway, that's enough of an introduction, right? This ain't The Incal, this ain't no Metabarons, and no, Technopriests is later. This is the story of Juan Solo, the baby who was found in a garbage heap by a transvestite dwarf prostitute, given a pistol to suck on like a pacifier...or, you know, something else that's got a long phallic end...and who grew up to be the risen Christ by way of South American crime.

Son Of The

Hold on for a second! I forgot something. He's also got a prehensile tail. Okay, you can start now.

Son Of The Gun #1-2, Sinner & Saint

Written by Alejandro Jodorowsky

Art by Georges Bess

Translated by Justin Kelly

Okay, Jodorowsky, I'm with you. This is the story of a boy who grew up wrong and went on to become a bearded, thorned crown wearing crucified type. You're not really taking on The Greatest Story Ever Told, are you? I've seen that movie. (Technically, I haven't seen THAT movie, who actually watches that movie?) Georges Bess is great, don't get me wrong, but you're not really going to try and outdo the Lord our God, right?

Right?

Don't worry. Don't fret your head for a second. If there's one thing Jodorowsky isn't going to do, it's the story of the Son of God. The crucificixation here, that's just a framing story, it's just the everybody-does-this-now show the end at the beginning, then work your way towards it. It's a bookend piece, and the rest of the story--how a baby with a gun in his mouth ended up making his way to a cross in the desert with a crown of thorns--that's the story that Jodorowsky and Bess tell with Son of the Gun. Now, it does have a direct reference game it plays, but it's one that predates the New Testament a bit. Oedipus. Which means....

Yes.

Incest.

I'm not going to spend too much time analyzing this little chapter of Jodorowsky's obsessions, mostly because I can't even fathom what exactly you're supposed to say about it. Analyze no, but address? No choice. Jodorowsky often has characters with weird relationships with their mothers, sometimes it goes so far as to include the characters having sex with their mothers, sometimes it's just something they want to do, sometimes it's more tangled up in the mother forcing the son through whatever degradation their control over their sons allow--but it comes up a lot. Sometimes, like in Son Of The Gun, it comes up in some pretty randy sex scenes that stop short of showing penetration, but still go a bit further then an R-rated flick would probably allow. The question seems to be, since Jodorowsky likes showing it so much, if it's really necessary to the stories themselves, or if it's just there because, well, Dude Likes It When Sons Bang Their Mom. Because really, you know--we're not talking about one single story at a time, we're talking about a healthy swath of Jodo-stuff here. Science fiction..with incest! Hardcore crime parables...with incest! Boy's pulp fanatasy adventure...with incest!

I'm pretty accepting with my comics intake when it comes to what you should or shouldn't do--I'm not going to throw down a comic just because there's animal torture or child molestation simply because, by some made-up "principle" that it's there, and That's Not Okay. I mean--who cares, you know? Just a comic. But when it comes up so frequently across the library, you start to question "Do we really need this much mom-banging?" 

In the story of Juan Solo, yes, you do. Hey, it may be icky--although Georges Bess is going to draw it in such a way that yes, it's very, very erotic and very, very understandable--but it's a huge part of the story. Question is...is this is a good story anyway?

That one is a bit tougher.

Juan's life is your standard young and angry orphan with a grudge type stuff. Here, in he's just finished raping a girl who he's now passing off to his crew. In a little nod to exploitation road work, they keep notches on the dashboard whenever they do this stuff--she's the 24th. Pretty simple, albeit grotesque, economy here. It's about this guy--this disgusting human being, born in the trash--making it to the guy on the cross. Now, the guy on the cross isn't a real sweetheart either, he's more Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant, roaring at the God who he believes in just a shade more than he hates Him. Juan's religious faith is actually one of the least developed parts of the story, and that's not due to a lack of space on the part of the team. Bess and Jodorowsky had plenty of space--four albums in total, all of which made it to America in two of the DC/Humanoids preferred softcover format. There's not much indication on the comics of when or where they came from, I had to rely on the kindness of commentators to to find out that the series began in 1995. Throughout it, you can see the seams of Georges Bess figuring out how he wants to draw the story--In some places, Bess uses so fine a line to draw facial features that it looks less like pen and more like scratch work, and then you'll get to later sections where he's decided to do everything in thick lines. It's not the most welcoming art because of the constant transitioning between style, and in the service of a story full of truly awful people, it makes for an at times difficult slog. 

Still, it's the story of a kid on the way from Sinner to Saint, so you can't really be surprised that Juan isn't Chuck Chaplin, all googly eyed and steamboat dancing. Still, that mindset won't get you ready for when things get all Dick Tracy.

That isn't all, either. There's also "Pinocchio,"The Greek", "Cyclops", "Bigmouth", "Tutti Frutti", and "Elder. That's who Juan ends up crewing with after he executes his rapist gang in a successful bid to become a bodyguard for the local prime minister. I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff, and watching Juan go through initiation--torture, murder for hire and the requisite beat the shit out of all of the other bodyguards to prove his badassery--is pure gold, even more so when the requisite beat-shit scene takes place in the showers, where the reader first realizes that Juan's tail now reaches almost to the knee. From there, Son Of The Gun plays things by the book--he chops off a rival politicians head and serves it up on a platter, beats the head bodyguard to death and takes his spot, Georges Bess makes fun of Rocky...

...and things pretty much play out the way you would expect them too. Juan's reign as leader is a great success for the prime minister although it ups the savagery of the team to a level that's just savage for savagery's sake. Eventually though, Jodorowsky has to get somewhere, and having built no real reason or momentum to get there--if anything, the bodyguard team of killers portions of the story taste distinctly of something that could have run for a couple hundred issues, American serialized style--the story just abruptly takes a gigantic turn. After slaughtering his way through a group of renegades intent on killing the prime minister, led by the PM's own daughter, Juan is sent to protect the completely safe wife of the prime minister, who is so lost in her grief that she just barely is able to work up the spice to fuck Juan's brains out the first night he arrives.

There's still some violence to come, but it's mixed with erotica and degradation, all culminating in the moment when Juan discovers that the Prime Minister is his father, he was dumped in the garbage because of his tail by the head bodyguard he killed a while back, that was his sister trying to kill his dad, and blah blah blah, this naked hot lady he's been having sex with is totally his mom, icky icky poo. (He still wants to have sex with her. That's not even a question in his mind.)

If it seems like I'm just doing plot recap with sarcasm, well, that's because you're a smart reader and deserve a star. This is just plot recap, because that's pretty much what Son Of The Gun is, a story in development, a story in motion. When it slows down to try "character development", that's when you find out stuff like "This bodyguard is called Tutti Frutti because he is a homosexual wearing a pink shirt" and then you just have a couple of panels where he minces around. There's little else to it, so...moving on. Juan's decisions are never really explained--his initial seduction of his mother involves him breaking into her bedroom and standing there, his decision to abandon his success as a bodyguard to escape with his mother is tangled up in...nothing, really. He just does things, and sometimes it makes sense, but most of the time, he just. Does. Things. Often, they are bad.

Of course, he's still got to end up on that cross though. Which means that Jodorowsky had to come up with a way to get him up there, and that's where one starts to question how far out this story was planned. Georges Bess keeps changing how thick he wants to draw his lines, people's eyes start crossing for no discernible reason other than, hey, whatever, maybe they were making a joke at the time. The chronology of the story, which had at least maintained a relatively understandable pace, starts gyrating, the text starts saying things like "Months later..." and "Miles away..." and all of a sudden, Juan is a bearded alcoholic pimp, being paid to wag his tail in the air while some overweight Mexican tycoon is having sex with his mother on the top floor of a shitty desert bar. (And if you can figure out why the Mexican tycoon needs to hire a couple of jarochos to sit in the room while he humps Juan's mother, you're a comic book genius, and I salute you.) And you gotta ask: Jodo? What's going on here? You really want to make this drastic a shift in three panels?

But that's exactly what Jodorowsky wants, and this is the degredation that Juan is going to get. All of that murder, all of those rapes, pretty much every choice that Juan made? That wasn't the problem. He says it on the cross, early on "You only listen to violence!" He believes himself to be a victim of circumstances, and the pain he suffers here, the only real pain he knows, is that he has to watch as his mom fucks herself silly for food and shelter and he doesn't get to have a taste at all. She won't even touch him, but she won't let him leave. Over and over, and if you're wondering if she looks him in the eye while she's doing it, she does. That's his pain--not the murder of his sister, the exectution of his father. His mom. She won't have sex with him anymore. By the time the survivors from his old crew return, led by his adolescent brother, it doesn't even really make sense why he'd try to escape his fate. He runs, leaves his mom behind to die, ends up dying in the desert and finally gives away his gun.

Is that a facile reading of it, I wonder? Is that a surface analysis, ignoring the brilliance of a comic book writer par excellence? Well, I'm sure it could be, it is me after all. But that's what the text provides, that's what the drawings show. There's no reversal for Juan until he places his lips on the milk-heavy breast of a young mother who, like the villagers he hides amongst, believes him to be the fated tail-having saint they were waiting for. He sucks at her breast only to realize he's possibly dooming the crying infant across the room to become just like him, because all he wanted as a baby was a mother's love, a mother's sustenance. So he calls for a cross, and he screams and bitches, tells his story, and then calls out to God like Tyrese in that shitty Transformers movie. "Bring the rain", he cries. His problems? That's all on the man upstairs. Shouldn't have left him crying in the dumpster.

I'm sorry Jodorowsky, I know it's your week and all.

That's pretty fucked up.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

DC/Humanoids Index
T1   Introductions & Miss: Better Living Through Crime by Joe McCulloch
T2   Fragile & The Horde here at TFO
T3   Sanctum & Transgenesis 2025 Vol 1: The Ancestor here at TFO
T4   The Incal (Preparations) by Joe McCulloch
T5   Son Of The Gun here at TFO
T6   The Incal (Execution) by Joe McCulloch
T7   White Lama here at TFO
T8   The Technopriest here at TFO
T9   Bouncer, Megalex & Metal Hurlant by Joe McCulloch
T10 The Metabarons by Joe McCulloch
T11 Memories here at TFO
T12 The Chaos Effect here at TFO
T13 The Bilal Trilogy here at TFO

Désastre Hurlant (T3): I've Seen This Movie Before & Why You Should Never Try To Make God "Hardcore"

Originally, the schedule was going to be a full on back and forth between the esteemed Joe McCulloch and I, but upon my submission of pieces on Horde & Fragile, a fury erupted in the usually-jovial Jog, the likes of which I'd never seen. "This is Humanoids, Tucker! An Italian and some Ukrainian immigrant? That shit doesn't count!" Fearing an exile to the dusty corridors of DeviantArt, I yanked from my shelf my still pristine copies of the first available French collections my trembling fingers could grab and thrusting them forward, I cried "What about these? Will they do?" By then it was too late. Jog had left, off to find more background information and interviews, determined to add legitimacy to a project he had just realized was sure to crash upon the wreckage of an ill-chosen partner. Was Timothy Callahan still available? Could Dick Hyacinth be called in for a pinch on 17 volumes of Jodorowsky? As of now, no one knows how it will play out. But somewhere dark, Jog let out his cry for help. Someone has to respond.

Honestly? I'm pulling for Olav Beemer.

Sanctum

Written by Xavier Dorison

Art by Christophe Bec & Homer Reyes

Translated by Justine Kelly & Sasha Watson

DC/Humanoids, 2005

Originally Published....I don't know. Before.

Okay, so here's a little fill-in-the-blank game for you. A ship of some kind, any kind. It picks up a distress call. It goes towards the distress call and finds another ship, and on that ship, everybody is dead under mysterious circumstances. Then mysterious circumstances start happening on the new ship, people start dying...you see where this is going. Hell, you probably figured it out at "picks up a distress call." That's because it's a formula, a formula that happens all the time, and it's probably on that list of the seven available stories that they use to come up with wrestling pictures, Barton Fink style. That's Sanctum for you in a nutshell, and it isn't very good.

End of review!

....

Okay, goddammit.

Sanctum has two openings, the first of which contains information that will be directly referenced in one panel about 145 pages later (and only for that one panel), and then it jumps to another opening, this one having a direct connection to the story that will take over the majority of the book. That second one is set inside a submarine deep underwater in the Mediterranean sea, where a group of Russian soldiers are on a secretive mission determined by secretive reasons under the watchful of eye of secretive secret agent types. Because that isn't enough, the sleazy Russian officers in charge have led them here at the order of Stalin himself, who is interested in finding out whether the Nazi occult research found in the Soviet archives will help create new magic weapons. The tough-minded Russian soldier character can't get the answer he wants out of the Russian guy in charge of their secret mission, so he immediately blows up a hand grenade inside a submarine, killing everyone on board. And when I use the term "immediately", I mean he decides, mid-argument, that he isn't going to get the answer he wants--which is to end their secret mission so that no more of his men die--and so he kills everybody on board. It's not that the guy he's arguing with is saying "no, let's kill everybody on some interval system for the next couple of weeks", it's more that he's playing the whole Paul Reiser in Aliens role of saying "let's let some of the cannon fodder die and then us company men will survive, along with whichever grunts we need to keep the submarine working." Either way, the discussion is cut off, because of the "What the hell" decision to just say "Nah, fuck it, I feel like this conversation isn't going to go the way I want as fast as I want it too, let's all just die RIGHT NOW HA HA." It's always nice when your meaningless prologue characters don't waste any time ending the prologue as quickly as possible. Unlike the reader though, you'll find yourself thinking about those lucky dead Russians for a good long while. They don't have to hang out for another 200 pages. Because they're dead.

Since the comic is designed to closely follow the movie pitch idea that it so obviously is, it's time to meet the actual characters, the people you'll spend the rest of the book with. Word of advice, if you go the whole "I'm going to see if Sanctum is bad as this blog person I don't know says" route: memorize the hell out of these people's faces and take copious notes. You're going to meet roughly every person it takes to staff one of the largest military submarines in the world (according to the comic), and artist Christophe Bec never saw a face he didn't like reusing for a minimum of three characters. Hopefully, if there really is going to be a movie of Sanctum, (it's in the works!) they'll stick to the script, and each actor will play three to four roles, and the only way to tell them apart will be whether their facial hair is pencil-thin or goatee'd.

Of course, you could always just rely on whatever one or two major personality quirks are doled out. For example, the first time we meet the commander, he's on his way to his final mission as submarine commander of the USS Nebraska. On the way to his "last mission", he stops by the hospital to check on his comatose son, who he hates himself for neglecting. Then he hooks up with his crew and meets the new ship doctor, who is struggling with the memory of a young girl he who died after a simple misdiagnosis and continues to haunt both his dreams and waking moments. Of course, it's not all depressing background, because one of the ship's crew, a recently promoted officer, has his first baby on the way! He's even got pictures of his wife showing off her 'bout-to-pop belly and everything, which is really sweet, because he's having some trouble with his old friends on the ship viewing him differently now that he's been promoted, and he wishes they understood he's the same guy he used to be. No time to get distracted though--the XO on the submarine is one of those sort of crazy types who puts the "mission" above all other petty concerns, like the lives of the crew, that sort of nonsense. Better watch out. This XO guy seems like he might all of a sudden do some crazy shit near the climax of the second volume where he tries to escape all on his own in a fit of lunacy, thereby forcing his subordinates to make the oh-so-difficult decision of whether or not they should disobey orders and play a game of "Frag the crazy lieutenant before he dooms us all."

Oh, before I forget, there's a black guy who is really scared of spiders. Phobic-scared. Other than that, he ain't scared of nothing. He's Arnold Schwarzeneggar in Commando, except he's black and scared of spiders. Hopefully he won't end up in a situation where all his bravado and training will fail him due to his worst fear--spiders--showing up in some kind of underwater haunted house. (It happens!)

Oh, yikes--did I mention that the ship's head mechanic "loves his machines more than his kids"? He's a real superstitious kind of guy who spends a lot of time alone in dark wet rooms talking to himself. That might come up later, like when he goes apeshit and kills some people with a wrench. (He does!)

One more, there's a guy who had two choices in life: priest or soldier. His brother handled the priest thing, so he picked up soldier detail, but he still has a gigantic cross that he kisses and fondles whenever people are having a conversation with him. Faith is really important to people in tough situations, like situations where Tim Curry from Legend shows up and kills people who wear gigantic crosses that they also fondle. (Hope you were a good person!)

Okay, let's stop for a second. Is there anything in this comic that is original? It's like watching Family Feud when they flip all those...flipper things, and the category was "military type characters" and somebody turned to Xavier Dorison and said "You got all those, right?"

That's Sanctum, over and over again. The specifics are sort of unique, in that I haven't seen any of those Brenden Frazer Mummy movies, maybe those are all about ancient Sumerian curses. But everything else, absolutely everything else, has been done before, and it's been done so often that it's patently impossible for anything in the comic to come as a surprise, which, correct me if I'm wrong, is kind of part of your fictional goal when you're doing a horror/action story.

I'd like to say: Hey, there's stuff in here that's not bad, and on a singular page basis, there is the occasional striking image of a gigantic gaping tomb with tiny military dudes. The thing is that there's roughly 20-30 of those in the book, and none of them--not a one--ever has anything happen in them except for whichever of the characters that haven't died yet using a different version of phrases like "My...GOD, mother protect us" or "What...in the HELL is this place" or "It's..INCREDIBLE, do you SEE THIS". And yes, those ellipses are in the text. This is the comic. Over and over and over and over again, until it ends in an explosion, and that explosion is set off by a laptop computer in the desert, because apparently, in the near future, gigantic nuclear warhead missiles on submarines will be easily detonable in the time it takes to punch the space bar on a laptop.

In the desert.

Oh, yikes, you are not a good comic book Sanctum. You aren't a good comic book at all.

Transgenesis 2025 #1: Ancestor Program

Written by Anne Ploy

Art by Loic & Color Twins

Translated by Jonathan Tanner

Published by DC/Humanoids, 2005

Jog and I both knew getting into this that there were going to be some real turds in the mix, some comics that were just Bad News everyday. But considering the two of us pretty much had a ton of these books already, and it wasn't going to take that much expense to fill out the reminder, we figured why not, do them all. He'll have to correct me in his own post, but I'm pretty sure that he didn't have any advance knowledge about these Transgenesis books, of which Humanoids/DC published two volumes. I know I didn't, and while it was pleasantly surprising to find out that both volumes were available at prices that started around $1.39, it also didn't engender a huge amount of excitement. Why in the hell where these things so cheap? Why can't you find anybody whose ever heard of them?

Why in the hell do they have that terrible, terrible name?

The answer was pretty simple, actually. Because Transgenesis 2025 #1: Ancestor Program is just a straight up mishmash of ideas for a story smashed up against each other, glossed over with a "this is the future" paintbrush and handed off to an artist who seems to have set his sights on being the best possible version of somebody who really wanted to draw Grendel comics back when the Pander Brothers drew Grendel comics. While Transgenesis isn't as overt in its rip-off of science fiction standards as Sanctum is of its Alien/Abyss/Anything thievery, it's still a comic that can be summed up like this: a computer has decided to take over the world from human beings. This is the story of how that computer plans to do it, which, unluckily for the reader, involves an intensely convoluted plan centered around giving a guy a tumor in his sleep that looks like a flower, so that he will have nightmares about the flower, which is shaped like the flower that was in the flower vase that accidently slit his mother's throat, and eventually those nightmares will deplete his health by percentage numbers like a video game, and then the computer will embalm him and make a video where he admits to some criminal behavior before shooting himself on camera after putting his entire company up for sale on the stock market without telling any shareholders, which hey, that isn't how the stock market works. Then, the computer will crash some space cars into a diner. I didn't know I was going to be praying for the flawless logic of Alphaville at any point in my life, much less years before I start shitting myself without understanding why, so thanks, I guess.

I'm sorry, I realize that I don't have a big relationship with science fiction, because I don't really enjoy science fiction, but this...this is bad, right? This sounds stupid, yes? Like--Star Trek doesn't do this, does it? (I don't want to know.)

There is one thing about this comic that I will say I quite liked, and while that doesn't extend to me being willing to pony up another two dollars to read the second volume of Transgenesis, it did give me something to look forward to as I struggled to read this piece of shit.  It was this guy.

Not the kid with the tentacle hair. The Monopoly guy! He was great. Sure, he's another face of the evil super computer, and this little plot he's running is based around teaching all the children to work really hard--at their homework--and acknowledge that the Sun is a star that they should spend recess praying too--but he looks sort of like the Monopoly guy crossed with Yosemite Sam. I'm a sucker for that, and I didn't even know I was a sucker for that.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

DC/Humanoids Index
T1   Introductions & Miss: Better Living Through Crime by Joe McCulloch
T2   Fragile & The Horde here at TFO
T3   Sanctum & Transgenesis 2025 Vol 1: The Ancestor here at TFO
T4   The Incal (Preparations by Joe McCulloch
T5   Son Of The Gun here at TFO
T6   The Incal (Execution) by Joe McCulloch
T7   White Lama here at TFO
T8   The Technopriest here at TFO
T9   Bouncer, Megalex & Metal Hurlant by Joe McCulloch
T10 The Metabarons by Joe McCulloch
T11 Memories here at TFO
T12 The Chaos Effect here at TFO
T13 The Bilal Trilogy here at TFO

Désastre Hurlant (T2): Necrophilia & Blood On The Kronstadt Ice

You're here now, and yet we started without you! Check out Jog's first two posts on this little shakedown: he's got a state the facts introduction on what we've planned and a review of Miss: Better Living Through Crime. I'll keep it simple: this is all of the DC/Humanoids collections. This is the kids who showed up on the playground with a pack of Gitanes instead of Camels five years ago only to find out that America still wasn't ready for them. They didn't slink off though! They stormed out the way they came in, and when it was all said and done, they'd left a stack of softcover collections behind them that proved they'd been here, whether anybody cared or not.

We were supposed to be further along, I think, in 2004. Long live the new flesh, that sort of thing. But that's who we were, and we have what we gave ourselves--Humanoids Publishing, DC Comics, together for a brief moment. They stood in the wrong place for America's stereotypes of Frenchmen--as Eddie Izzard once put it, America likes the French to smoke, to have sex with your family. We can't abide them being cocky on the rooftops, that's where Steve Rogers belongs, it's the spot for Japanese dragon kids wearing orange jumpsuits. Humanoids knew they couldn't rely on people fiending for diacritical markings too. They knew that America fears the freedom of the beret, the steely silliness of Anna Karina, hell, we fucking hired the director of that porno Archie movie to remake Breathless--the Humanoids catz knew they couldn't win us over if all they brought was the guy that Denzel Washington makes fun of in Crimson Tide. So DC made sure that one of the Humanoids reprints would be from a guy who had done an issue of Birds of Prey, and that another would be from some crazy Ukrainian ex-soldier. That's how you beat xenophobia. You use the Birds of Prey to gild the lily.

Let's go.

Fragile
Art and Story by Stefano Raffaele
Color by Dave Stewart, Charlie Kirchoff & Matt Yackey
Translated by Piero Tonin
Originally Published in Metal Hurlant, 2003
DC/Humanoids Publication, 2005

There must have been a time when being a connossieur of zombie stories was a charming private hobby, but I imagine, now that zombies have become something of a fictional category all to itself, with every major and minor form of cultural output having a profitable zombie universe, it's a bit irritating to find a whole bunch of unwashed proletariat types showing up with their tents and vegan trail mix to steal your porridge. What used to be a swampy homeland populated by Fangoria subscribers and Italian VHS traders is now packed full, with Spider-zombies, video game buffs and the cardigan wearing tea-slurping World War Z readers. (Remember how Barnes & Noble put that book on the "Popular Fiction" table? We've come a long way from drunken 80's road trips to the Monroeville Mall, oh yes we have.) Fragile probably believed itself as a part of the cherry trips of the past, a more pure re-imagining of zombie apocalypse story tics, but then again, nobody likes to openly admit they're jumping on a bandwagon. Well, admit it or not, it was. Additionally, Fragile is a solid example of what happens when the rote standard tries to go in a New and Fabulously Innovative Direction, fails completely with all the new twists it brings, and is only tolerable in so far of the portions it leaves genre-standard. It's a bad comic, and the length only serves to hammer that point home, over and over again.

The story prefers an almost antagonistic relationship with the concept of simplicity, throwing out ideas every three or four pages, most of which last about as long as the three or four pages after which they are introduced. The ones that last aren't that much better, and only one that is rewarding, a couple of zombie-killing monsters, zombies themselves, who play the part of comic relief in the same way that Jeff Smith relied on a similar pair of Stupid Rat Creatures--are pointlessly abandoned twenty pages from what the book treats as a climax. Roughly speaking, Fragile is the story of a post-apocalypse zombie-fied world, where the uninfected live in walled cities, protected by a government sponsored program of "Disinfestors", or "zombies that hunt zombies". The plot focuses on a newly infected young man--a sort of Paul Pope-ish hottie with an expensive haircut and a retro v-neck t-shirt--who meets and falls in love with an ex-super-model turned decaying zombie. Separated by fate and horrible plot twists, one ends up following the young man as he tries to take a serum of zombie cure to save his new girlfriend from evil before her body completely falls apart. His traveling companions are the two bonehead Disinfestors, a post-op transsexual who loved him when he was just a lad, and some random friend from the walled town he escaped following his infection. The zombie cure is in the post-op transsexual's bloodstream. Invention, thy name is boring the shit out of me while writing down a synopsis of your plot.

Fragile is the sort of comic that would probably most benefit from a wikipedia page that summarizes its plot, as that would be a quicker read--the only problem would end up being that the only reason to spend any time with its world at all is the occasional piece of art. The story is fractured in the worst possible way, with the most interesting ideas abandoned time and time again, and the more important story tics dealt out between the panels. Primarily, one has to deal with what may or may not be DC's choice to focus the collected editions blurb copy on the most underdeveloped part of the story--the love between Alan, the could-be-a-model, and Lynne, the used-to-be-a-model. There's only five pages between when the two meet and when Alan blurts out "We were together, and I was ready to fly, to face the storm with her." As their relationship progresses from that moment--delivered in the same splash page that makes up the covers primary illustration--Alan's love is described in singular turns of phrase all bent around shallow assertions of how hot Lynne was, because, well, now she's a fucking zombie and her body is falling apart. So she's not hot anymore. There's no concept or idea that the girl--who has so little personality that she comes across more as a bitter writer imagining the mentality of some STUPID GIRL who NEVER called back--has any attraction to Alan at all beyond how her decaying flesh has made her that much more desperate to prove she's still got something going on in her vapid, stupid head. You've never seen an empty, blood-caked eyesocket look this good! Hopefully! By the climax of the book, which is handled in an epilogue that depicts the transsexual and the hero's pal having a discussion in front of huge statue produced by the same company that made that Superman statue in Metropolis following his short period in the ground--it's difficult to say anything nice at all about this comic whatsoever. At least American trash lasts around 22 pages. But it does make it clear, once again, that if you're going to tell a post-apocalyptic zombie story, and you don't care enough to develop the world the characters live in, you really shouldn't be telling a post-apocalyptic zombie story. The setting is always the best part. At this point, a nine year old can write stories about why you need to shoot the things in the head.

The Horde

By Igor Baranko (credited as Baranko)

Colors by Dave Stewart & Charlie Kirchoff

Translated by Pat McGreal & Igor Barnanko

DC/Humanoids 2004

We'll have to change things up just a bit, I think, for this Jog thing to have some flow. While the two of us will definitely handle a bit of the "why are you doing this" in the Savage Collaborators, I'd like to note that Horde, along with Jodorowksky's first volume of Technopriests, are the two books that cemented the imprint for me, and they are the reason I'm one of the random fools that bought so many of these books when they first came out. The initial launch of titles that I came across were Bilal's Townscapes, the aforementioned Technopriests and this, The Horde. Those were the only three that I bought at the stand--after reading Horde and seeing Bilal's art, I "signed up" as it were for the Humanoids line en masse. For those who haven't ever been to a comic book store, that means I made a gentleman's agreement with the owner that if he ordered them for me, I'd buy them each week.  I stuck with it a lot longer than I should have and was eventually broken by the glut of Jodorowsky that made up the middle of that time period. (That's not to dismiss all the Jodorowsky, I'd hate to spoil future reviews, but there came a point where the stack of unread Humanoids that "I'd get to later" threatened my collection of Flash Gordon movie stills for prime shelf location.) Upon the initiation of this project with Jog, I came back to Horde for the first time in years. I'd hate to tell you in these early posts that it's "all downhill from here", but hey. This is some of that good shit.

This is the first time you get to see people killed on panel. There's an off panel russian roulette mishap a couple pages earlier. That's a Muslim Chechen in the Time Trapper's cloak, by the way--one of the last of his kind. He just showed up and said he wanted to sell all these Russian soldiers some vodka, which is good, because they had just run out of vodka. Then he changed his mind and decided that he'd rather kill all of them instead, because hey, why not. They were just going to accidently kill themselves anyway, Deer Hunter style.

(Sorry abut the color striations in the below scans. They seem to be a technical issue on this end, and I'm trying to get it fixed.)

These aren't the last people that will die before this comic is over. But first, Baranko has to tell his story--and it isn't an easy one to summarize. Set in the year 2040, where an ex-science fiction writer has taken over as the dictator of Russia, The Horde is focused on four separate protagonists. The first is the dictator, whose whims and worship of the past-as well as a copious amount of drugs and drug-like virtual reality simulations-have led him to believe that he must capture the "sulde" of Genghis Khan so that he can extend his control and rule across the boundaries of Russia. The second protagonist is our Muslim Chechen friend, who has just achieved enlightenment, Satori style, in the mountainous nuclear wastelands that Russia left his Chechen home, and who believes he is protected by Allah in his search for a version of the afterlife called "The Heavenly Chechnya." The third is a group of Russian military spies, searching for the corpse of a Lama they believe to be the last reincarnation of Khan. The final is a naked Mongolian girl who can levitate in the lotus position. Along the way, they're going to run into the robotic servants of the clone of Isaac Newton, who believes the path to pure reason is paved with cutting off one's penis, a clone of Abraham Lincoln who may or may not be an American spy, and a naked woman hundreds of years old who claims to be the female counterpart to the long dead Khan.

So yeah, there's a lot of ridiculous bullshit here. But that ridiculous bullshit looks like this sometimes:

There's all kinds of interesting stuff in comics involving cartoonists and writers purging themselves of their anger. Garth Ennis, Peter Bagge, and Evan Dorkin come to mind as a contemporary artists who have used their actual revulsion towards various subjects or people as the fuel that fires their work. The trick, because there's always a trick, is to do it in such a way that it doesn't just come across as a jetstream of fire, a breathless polemic of rage pointed at the demons that sputter up their conversation. Baranko had some of those same rages--pointless wars, the domination of the young, the tyranny of faith--but unlike the relative luxury complaints of a white American cartoonist, his stem from being a young Ukrainian artist who served two years in the Soviet Army during the Cold War. Hey, his biography on the back of The Horde doesn't screw around, here's an actual quote: "Baranko served for two years in the Soviet Army, where he developed a great hatred of military life." When he created Horde, it was after his 1999 move to America, a move made possible by the US Immigration Lottery. (The numbers are different now than they were then, but it's still a lucky break, especially for an artist.) Don't make the mistake of thinking that his depiction of Russia's dictator as a revolting sociopath is the only contempt he displays towards power. He's no wide-eyed immigrant drawing America like he's a mouse in an oversized red sweatshirt.

This is the America of the future, the one that the impoverished of Russia turn to in The Horde's illegal movie theaters. It's 2040, and we're still watching super-hero movies--thankfully, they've stopped being like The Dark Knight and started being more like 2009's actual super-hero comic books. Blatant exploitation abounds, gigantic collagen soaked lips dangle, nipples--not in this shot, but others--beckon the eye, and it's so enticing that Russia's poor are willing to enter the Gulag just to catch a glimpse of the West. A land where Americans watch shitty super-hero movies about women with gigantic breasts and steroid arms. The future! It's coming!

The other nice thing about The Horde too is that, although it doesn't mince around with subtlety, it doesn't care much for simple explanation either. Although the story's plot eventually centers around whether or not our Chechen ronin--which is what he is, if you're paying attention--will choose faith or power, a choice that each of the other protagonists have to make as well, it's not a story that pushes too hard for the idea that it really is going to matter in the first place. There's a sense of social failure seeping into everyone in the story, shown when the ultimate practitioner in faith--the naked Mongolian nun--has rejected any sort of possible future that isn't tangled up in her benign spiritual quest, a quest that succeeds only in redeeming the soul of a long-dead tyrant who would have been rejected by the latest of his hosts anyway. The Chechen finds his afterlife, yes, but in the way Baranko depicts it, that afterlife is merely dissipation into nothingness. It's an empty death, and it's--within the context of the story--pretty much meaningless.

See, but he's not his opposite. As is made clear right before what could be termed his "ascension", the Russian dictator and the Chechen both carry the same vigorous lust for power that motivated the dead Khan. They have the same goals, and the balance that is spoken of is a balance only found when they die. The balance is that what happens here, right now, because the future doesn't matter to the dead, and the lust of men--one for power, one for an end, will both leave the world in the same condition it was in before they left it. The names change, but power doesn't leave the horizon. The Horde is a story that says all kinds of things, but what it says to me is that Baranko saw this passion for conquest as a negative, but not a negative that could be treated as a cancer to be removed. It's just bad, and bad will either be destroyed, or it won't be, and it's foolish to pretend that it might not be replaced by something even worse. Even the conclusion of the story sees the Mongolian nun asking for meaning in the story just told, and when the responses-first an intellectual one, the second a flirtatious "let's fuck?"-fails to be correct, she departs with nothing but a first year version of Descartes, asking whether or not any of us can even prove we were here in the first place. Which: yes, that's fucking cliched stuff, it's the cries of teenager who wishes he could fight ninjas in church because it's a better life than the one he has. But it works, and it works in no small part because A) this story has Abraham Lincoln, B) Isaac Newton wearing biker clothes and C) a border guard who has the powers of Jean Grey, only better.

Oh, and this guy gets kidnapped by aliens and resurrected, and then he becomes a living angel.

Hello to you.

-Tucker Stone, 2009

DC/Humanoids Index
T1   Introductions & Miss: Better Living Through Crime by Joe McCulloch
T2   Fragile & The Horde here at TFO
T3   Sanctum & Transgenesis 2025 Vol 1: The Ancestor here at TFO
T4   The Incal (Preparations by Joe McCulloch
T5   Son Of The Gun here at TFO
T6   The Incal (Execution) by Joe McCulloch
T7   White Lama here at TFO
T8   The Technopriest here at TFO
T9   Bouncer, Megalex & Metal Hurlant by Joe McCulloch
T10 The Metabarons by Joe McCulloch
T11 Memories here at TFO
T12 The Chaos Effect here at TFO
T13 The Bilal Trilogy here at TFO