I don't know exactly what the editors over at D.C. were smoking when they decided to let Garth "Cannibalism, Perversion and Tastelessness" Ennis make his own team of hero for the DC universe proper, but I assume they must've gotten their hands on some more seeing as how someone thought it'd be a good idea to let him do it again. And so, from the deliciously diseased mind of Ennis himself comes "Section 8: Rebirth," a tale which shows a rather... different side of the new DC universe, a side that you didn't necessarily want to see but is kind of impossible to look away from, like your grandparent's collection of bondage gear from that one time in Amsterdam.
So, yeah, meet section Eight, DC's *actual* worst heroes ever. They're apparently what happens when the drunk tank at your local police station decides they wanna reform and be super heroes, although that might just apply to "team leader" Six Pack, who may or may not be a respected art critic who has gone back on the wagon harder than the Thing's Dick whenever he sees your mom. But yeah, no, like *most* of the team he doesn't have any particular skill or power, he's a fat drunk guy with delusions of grandeur and liver that's most likely in shambles at this point. The story proper opens with Six Pack deciding to restart the team after one the many major threats that pop in the DCU more often than pimples before date night. He finds several new members along with some old standbys, each of whom, needless to say, is more fucked up than the last, concept wise. You've got The Grapplah, who’s a putz with a grappling hook and a fondness for repeating his name ad nauseam. You've got drill face, who, yes, is literally just an asshole who has a drill helmet like the one from Dead Rising (except this one points outwards--fat lot of good it'd do to copy the one from game exactly). Also, funnily enough he’s probably one of the few rational members of the team. Moving on, You've got Guts (no, not that one—if only), who's literally a human digestive tract with sentience, like that scene in Invader Zim where Gaz wonders what it would be like if she came home with Dib but inside and out. You’ve got Bueno Excellente who is literally just a pervert, but so much so that he makes Jerry Sandusky seem tame by comparison. Baytor, who may or may not be the Martian demon lord of Criminal insanity, and whose—let’s be honest here—rather dimwitted gimmick is that he repeatedly goes “I AM BAYTOR,” or some variation thereof (ha-ha, because Marvel had a successful movie with a similar character), and because Ennis hardly has any dignity left whatsoever, he might as well go for cynical, Scary Movie style humor. And lastly, everyone’s favorite: Dog Welder. Yes, this is the sort of story that has a character named Dog Welder. Yes, this is an individual who welds dogs. And he welds them to people. To specify, there apparently used to be another Dog Welder but he died and now his… Dog Welding-ness sort of possessed his welding gear and is now a different person. I'm serious. This is an actual character in the DC Universe, he has a page on the DC Wiki and everything Getting back to the main plot now that I’ve gone through the indignity of describing these perversions, if you weren’t turned off at some point or are still trying to process how any self-respecting publishing company could have a character called “Dog Welder” in any of their publications, you may have noticed something: there are only seven members of this infamous team. So, lo and behold, Six-pack takes it upon himself to round out his motley crew of… heroes and looks to the Justice League itself for anyone willing to join them in their quest to… well, Six-pack kinda has a general goal to just do something about a vaguely-defined threat. Everyone from Wonder Woman to Martian Manhunter makes an appearance. Now why they didn’t just go and hunt down Sleaze is beyond me, because if DC made this, what could best be described as the super hero equivalent of “Naked Lunch,” then surely, they can squeeze the New god of Perversion in for good measure. and yes, they’re all rather out of character. Not that it really matters all that much when DC’s publishers are probably trying desperately to forget that this comic was allowed to happen. The scene that sticks out for me is the one when Bueno Excellente goes into the women’s restroom and walk’s in on Guts doing something (because he’d fuck anything with hole). Just as he’s about to [insert illegal activity here], a voice pipes up telling him to keep his hands off his woman. After some vague rambling and demands that Bueno engage the individual in person, the speaker is revealed to be none other than the sentient, speaking tapeworm that’s infected Guts and also just so happens to be her… lover. Dear reader, if at this point, your skin feels like there’s something crawling on it, or perhaps the need to shower off with steel wool and bleach, don’t worry that’s completely natural. I swear the scene where we see Sir Percival Orifice, Tape of the Wyrm, (yes, that’s his name), in person, I’m pretty sure it was the first time since Scanners that a fake image has made me physically ill. I don’t know what, exactly, happened when the artist and colorer were finished with their dark deeds, but I get the feeling that both felt the need to dip their hands in hydrochloric acid. It’s a shame to that it’s so revolting, because I’m genuinely tempted to make a joke about being inside the person you love, in spite of every fiber of my being telling me not to. If you'd like to see the dreaded for yourself out of morbid fascination, click here From here, the… subplot (because its not like there was much in the way of an actual plot) only gets worse. Bueno, naturally engages Sir Tapeworm in a perversion off and while the artist was kind enough to spare us the details just what went down, all we know is that it was the straw the broke the camel’s back and made Martian Manhunter not want to join, not to mention leave a hole in the ceiling despite the whole “intangibility” thing. Now, in spite of the last several paragraphs worth of too much detail about how messed up this comic is, I actually would recommend it… if you’re into that sort of thing. Yeah, it’s kind of fucked up, but it’s the entertaining kind of fucked up. And while I may have made some comparisons to Naked Lunch, I do so with the best of intentions. After all, as messed up as portions of Naked Lunch can be, it is, in its own way, a classic piece of literature. The kind that makes you want to keep watching, like a good episode of South Park, or the reaction to the Producers back in the day. Just… don’t let your significant other catch you
0 Comments
Wait, What's going on?Welcome to a new segment here on Jacob's Latter. So we live in something of a Platinum age of television adaptations, with everything from the Hannibal Lecter novels to the most politically incorrect comic series this side of the graphic novel adaptation of "Story of the Eye" to adaptations of "Rush Hour" and "Lestat" of all freaking thing. Naturally, I, like many nerds on the internet, feel that there are series that I wish would get a proper adaptation, whether on television, the big screen, etc. While I was, initially going to put this in list form, I feel like that wouldn't quite work for my style. So, I decided that instead, I'd just make it a new segment here on the. Okay, but What's a Saga?Now I know what you're thinking: "Which Saga?" Because there are thousands of sagas out there, but let me assure you that the actual name that the actual name of this series is, in fact, "Saga." And yes that is about as generic as calling your movie "Chronicle" or "Legend," but trust me, in spite of the name this is good stuff. Although they probably could've done a better job at selling people who may be uninterested. It doesn't help that if you were to hear the basic premise of the Comic series “Saga,” you probably would assume the worst. It goes a little something like this: two races have been at war with one another for generations, one winged from the tech-savvy planet Landfall and the other, horned, from Wreath, Landfall’s only moon. Over the decades, the two races have dragged several other races down into war with them. One day, however, two soldiers from these races fall in love and desert their respective armies. Yeah, it does sound rather wrought doesn’t it, but when I put it like that, of course it does. You might not even blink when I mention the rather unique art design with creatures ranging from TV faced fellows, to arachnoid bounty-huntresses to one-eyed authors. That being said, any concept can sound wrought when described in person. Heck, there’s a reason that Obi-Wan considered Star Wars space gibberish when he was reading through it. But that’s memorable, if only due to the unique world, the pitch perfect pacing pacing and epic space battles. What I’m getting at here is that set-up only counts for so much when it’s the execution of something that really matters. And let me tell you that execution matters considerably. Specifically, Saga begins not with the two star-crossed lovers, Mark and Alana, meeting but with the birth of their baby. Not ten minutes later, the two are surrounded by armed soldiers, hunting them for unknown reasons. It is only later that we learn of the political situation the two are in the middle of, not to mention when we learn that each faction has decided to keep knowledge of their affair, and the subsequent child, a secret by getting rid of the evidence, so to speak. Landfall sends Prince Robot IV, a trigger-happy member of the TV race, and Wreath sends The Will, a brutal mercenary. As the story goes on, though, the two hunters eventually become, in their own ways, side-tracked from their original mission and even cross paths with their initial targets here and there. What I like about Marko and Alana’s relationship is that they feel like a couple, which is more than can be said for most couples in fiction. They don’t always agree on things, they can argue here and there, but at the end of the day, they still love one another, even if you do get the feeling that they barely have any idea just what the hell they’re doing. The story is also full of some genuinely fun characters, who are just as human in their characterization as they are alien looking. One exchange I like in particular is between the will and a pair of naked-molerat-gangsters. When the Will inevitably kills one of the pairs, the other screams in rage that he murdered his brother. Maybe it was the little detail that it was his brother that had been killed, but there was something rather poignant about that moment. Something else of note is that there is plenty intersectionality in this series. Intersectionality, I should mention that feels natural, and doesn’t, necessarily, feel like it was thrown in to add token characters (Penny Dreadful and American Horror Story, I’m looking at you.) Marko and Alana themselves aren’t “white,” not to mention two of the characters are a pair of reporters investigating the two are gay themselves. In a universe full of talking plants drug addicts and giant praying mantis kindergarten teachers, however, it hardly matters. Technically, theyr’e not even the same species anyway, so there’s little point in thinking on it too hard, although on the aforementioned gay couple’s planet, homosexuality is kinda, sorta frowned upon. Another thing I like about this series is it's messages on the current state of war. While the war between Landfall and Wreath had been going on for a while, it has started taking place on various other planets, so the citizens of the two don’t really give a damn in the end. War is ever-present in this series, and not inherently in violence either. People are always referring to how someone someone loved has died here or there, or how this or that person died. It also talks about just how much war effects people on a personal level, not to mention how hard it can be to get people to understand what it’s like to be a soldier. Indeed, Marko had a girlfriend on Wreath before he decided to enlist, a girlfriend who, when talking about his uncertainties when it came to the cause he was fighting for, just told him to “fight the good fight?” Eventually, this leads him to turning himself in as a prisoner of war to the Landfallers, and, subsequently to falling for Alana. Conversely, Prince Robot is a brutal motherfucker, and we get the inherent feeling that this came from his experiences in war. As you may or may not have been able to tell from my synopsis, this is an strange, sprawling tale, filled to the brim with interesting characters—both in terms of design and in terms of personality—who we care for and who we feel sad for when they die. What I'd do if I had creative control of said adaptationI suppose like any shmo on the net, it's worth putting in my fifty cence as to what a proper adaptation would look like.
With that being said, let’s be honest here: there’s no way in hell this is ever going to get a proper live-action adaptation. There are hardly any “human” characters in the series and you’d need more make-up and 3-d effects to make everyone look right that you’d be destined to lose money working on it. Instead, I’d recommend going either with a rotoscoped style like the “Scanner Darkly,” film or Waltz with Bashir. I don’t really think that something in the style of Archer would be cool, but I do think that it could work. While there isn’t that much of a market for western animation that’s both adult-oriented and action-packed, I do think that it could work. Game of thrones, and I’m sure people were having their doubts. All it requires is the right studio and director. Possibly Greg Weisman, the guy who did Young Justice, Spectacular Spiderman and Gargoyles, he seems like someone who’d be really good at this sort of story. Although with his luck, the show will end faster than, well, any of those shows. |
Details
AuthorHello all and Welcome to Jacob's Latter. Here I will be giving my opinions on everything from movies, video games and books to my general outlook on the world. Archives
January 2018
Categories |