July 4th 2008

One of the comics I look forward to each month is THE BOYS, a completely over the top book by Scottish writer Garth Ennis and artist Darrick Robertson. You can't get past two panels without seeing more graphic dialogue or art than in most scenes of PULP FICTION. One Supes--or Superhero--fights crime with a hamster stuffed up his ass in a roll of toilet paper. Another, based loosely on Batman, fucks anything in sight to avoid screwing his sidekick, a Starbucks coffee cup on his shrink's desk, the shrink's cat, and his own equivalent of the Batmobile's exhaust pipe. In the recent issue, an old comic artist--certainly a thinly-disguised Jack Kirby-- called The Legend explains the history of the superhero from the 40s until post-9/11 in typical Ennis fashion. I always write about the strange world of Earth-14 I visit in my dreams, but in one (maybe more) of the ossery of Earths in the multiverse, I can only hope there's a Fourth of July without George W. Bush as president because he cut his own head off with a chainsaw. If there is a multiverse, there must be an Earth with an extra five thousand US soldiers and a million peaceful Iraqis still alive, and worries of another Great Depression only happen in dystopian short fiction in the pages of Fantasy & Science Fiction...Wayne