SOUND AND FURY: A review of SUPERHERO HUFF

Picture the scene: somewhere in the worst parts of the west side of Chicago, a drug deal is going down at a cheap motel. One thing: one of the guys is an undercover cop, and he’s got a lot of his compatriots waiting in the next room, just in case things get ugly. What no one knows is that this is going to be a rip, which is what happens when the bad guys just take the money-man’s cash and kill him. Shit goes wrong. Bullets fly. People die. And the undercover guy’s team comes crashing in.



One of his team is Pheadra Huff, and she’s so overcome with adrenaline that she develops super speed and the ability to wave her arms and knock people down with an invisible force. Yes, Ms. Huff has just learned that she is a superhero, and she can’t wait to use her powers in the fight against crime.


A noble thought. Not exactly a new one, but still pretty noble. Here’s the problem: the action is so slapdash it’s hard to figure out what’s going on. In fact, when Huff discovers her super abilities, it’s hard to tell what exactly she has done. The other unfortunate thing is how, at the end of the book, we meet the rest of Huff’s department, and they’re the usual stereotypical cops from the catty department rival to the angry police chief. The creators of this book all but put doughnuts all over the place.


Lastly, writer Yorli Huff has an unfortunate relationship with spelling. Not typos, SPELLING. She thinks “serenity” is “sirenity” and “all right” is “alright.” “Toss” is “tose.” You get the idea. She doesn’t seem to know what to do with punctuation, either, but so it goes with some books.


One more thing: she has a problem with her narrative style. She’s trying to get the reader to experience things through the undercover cop’s inner thoughts, as well as Huff’s, when they’re both in action sequences. But comics are a visual art form. The illustrations already puts the reader into the action. When done properly (which it was here), the reader doesn’t need to be told the character’s adrenaline is pumping. The reader gets this intuitively. The words here serve only to take the reader out of the action.


The writing problems aside, the book is very attractive. Derrell Spicy knows what he’s doing. The bad guys look creepy enough, the good guys look perfectly tough and righteous. The action is a bit muddled, but it gets the point across.

This isn’t a bad book. It has a lot of potential. The story could go someplace awesome, if Huff (the writer) would back off on the stereotype and let Spicy lead the reader around a bit more. Perhaps next issue, things will go a bit better.


SUPERHERO HUFF #1
Writer: Yorli Huff
Artist: Derrell Spicy
Publisher: Engengering Strength
22 pages
$4.95

NOT WORTH THE TRIP: A review of ONE WAY TRIP

Shane and Emily are newlyweds on their way to Fiji, where they’re going to visit Shane’s grandfather. They fall asleep, and when they wake up, the plane is empty. Where did everyone go? A cool concept . . . if it hadn’t already been done in THE LANGOLIERS. But . . . let’s see where this goes.



They get off the plane (because luckily, the plane landed before whatever happened, happened), and they wander around the airport, which is covered with blood. Maybe we’re headed in more of a NIGHT FLIER direction . . . . The whole vampire thing is backed up a bit when Shane finds a stranger who can apparently see every vein through his skin and hungers for fresh food, which apparently these guys haven’t had in a while (despite the fact that Shane and Emily arrived with a plane full of people, and there is blood everywhere, indicating that someone sure as hell has been "feeding").


Then, everyone else shows up, and our heroes escape and manage to make it to Shane’s grandfather’s place. As it turns out, the old man is a renowned explorer, and there’s a news story on about him. And here’s where the SPOILER ALERT begins:


What with all the natural disasters going on in Fiji, Shane’s granddad taught everyone on the island how to survive through cannibalism. Yes, they ate everyone and have now run out of weak and elderly people to eat. In the fifth to last panel, Shane realizes that because he’s a travel agent, his grandfather probably wants him to send more people to Fiji to become dinner.


WHICH IS ABSOLUTELY FUCKING ABSURD AND MAKES NO GODDAM SENSE IN THE FUCKING WORLD!


That’s not the worst of it. As soon as Shane realizes the truth, he says fuck it and eats Emily. WHY? Why does he just buy into this bullshit? It doesn’t make sense!


END OF SPOILERS. Okay, with that mad bullshit out of the way, (and shame on you, Ryan Alexander, for trying to tell this story full of Swiss cheese plot holes), the art is actually kind of nice. Laura Williams maybe over-inks everything a bit, but she’s a very serviceable artist. When Emily looks at her wedding ring, she has a perfect look of bliss and contentment on her face. And when Shane does that last, horrible thing mentioned in the spoilers, there is an utter look of sadness on his face.


But the art doesn’t make up for the story. Don’t buy a ticket for this trip.


ONE WAY TRIP
Writer: Ryan Alexander
Artist: Laura Williams
Publisher: CCP
19 pages
$2.99

THEATER HOPPER HATES CRAPPY MOVIES: A review of the THEATER HOPPER sampler

Remember JOE LOVES CRAPPY MOVIES? About how he really did enjoy those hulking pieces of shit? Well, THEATER HOPPER is kind of the same thing, with the same clean, mainstream sensibility, but this one has a bit more of an edge. When the characters in this webcomic learn about Indiana Jones riding bitch in the KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL, they take Indy to task for it.



On the surface, this strip is about movies, but at its heart, it’s about friendship and relationships with women who should know better than to love their fellas. It’s also about a deep and abiding appreciation of Viggo Mortensen’s naked bath house knife fight in EASTERN PROMISES. No, really. Yes. Read the book.


And whereas Joe has his superhero group therapy sessions, writer/artist Tom Brazleton has the geek trauma center, where people go when they’ve injured themselves in pop culture ways. Get your hand cut off playing EMPIRE STRIKES BACK? Or perhaps you got your limbs chopped off playing MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. This is where you go to get that shit taken care of.


The best part, though, is when Brazleton gives movies shit for being stupid. The bit where he takes apart THE EYE is a sight to behold. But it’s not all a hate-fest. Brazleton gives White Castle a lot of credit for coming out and being honest by saying that they’re really stoner food (by attaching their name to HAROLD AND KUMAR’s first movie).


THEATER HOPPER is also about the enjoyable experience of seeing movies in the theater. If you love that kind of package, you should really check out http://www.theaterhopper.com/.


THEATER HOPPER sampler booklet
Writer and illustrator: Tom Brazleton
13 pages
Free at conventions

GLORIOUSLY TRASHY: A review of DOKTORMENTOR #1

If you saw DOKTORMENTOR #1 on the newsstands, there is no chance you could walk past it without at least flipping through the pages. It is so over-the-top trashy that it’s surprising Rob Zombie has nothing to do with it. It’s a comic book, but the panels feature live-action photographs. Many of these photographs are, as you can imagine, pornographic.



The writer is so into getting us to buy that this is the actual journal of the man known only as Doktormentor that he (and there is little doubt that it’s a he) doesn’t even put his name on the book. The inside cover details a little background information which actually sounds kind of plausible until they get to the end. The idea is that during the War of 1812, the building was a military prison where sadistic serial killer Willie Keller was held. Naturally, he escaped and was never found. Later, the building was turned into a hospital, then a prison again for the worst offenders. Then, in the ‘Sixties, it was converted to a female only maximum security prison, and before long, inmates started disappearing. Then, Doktormentor’s journal was found, and within its pages we learn about his horrible experiments.


Yeah . . . are you sure Rob Zombie didn’t do this?


Over the first half of the book, we get to meet #510215, one of the inmates who has been strapped to a chair for Doktormentor’s pleasure . . . er, rather his scientific endeavors. (By the way, did you know that even panties in jail are black and white striped?) Nurse Nawdy prepares her for the horrors to come by, naturally, removing #510215’s clothes. She “tantalizes” the captive with tales of Doktormentor’s previous experiments, all of which went wrong and ended in death. Meanwhile, in the subplot (yes, there’s a subplot!), Nurse Nawdy is working with the local police to get Doktormentor thrown in jail because she has just learned that #510215 is her sister.


Nothing, absolutely nothing, is taken seriously in this book. The dialogue is so purposely godawful it would make even George W. Bush grimace. For example, Nurse Nawdy starts playing with #510215’s nipples and explains why: “By inducing sexual arousal before he pulls the switch, your own heightened sensitivity will keep your genitals intact. Otherwise, the blast of cosmoelectricity will fry your nerves causing breast and vaginal leakage.” Really? When #510215 is trying to escape her bonds and can’t, she says, “Can’t break free from this chair! There must be dental adhesive on these buckles. There’s no slipping or shifting, and no fear of falling out at an embarrassing moment.” And it really doesn’t help that the models are really, really bad at showing fear. #510215 goes through the book with a look of sexual amusement on her face. She might as well be saying, “Oh no! Don’t put that there! I might like it too much!”

But the best part is the second half of the book . . . WHICH IS IN 3-D! That’s right, the book comes with 3-D glasses so you can watch a girl hook herself up to a dildo machine and get fucked while reading the same kind of horrible dialogue as previously mentioned.


Most of you will probably think this is just the usual, boring garbage. You know how Dr. Dirty raises obscenity to a new level of art? DOKTORMENTOR does the same thing with trash. Make no mistake, it is trash, but it is the most glorious trash you will ever come upon.

THE DISTURBINGLY PERVERTED DIARY OF DOKTORMENTOR: JAIL BABE SURGEON #1
Writer: Doktormentor?
Models: Did this really happen?
Publisher: Shh! Productions
32 pages
$10

NOT THAT AMUSING: A review of OBJECTS OF AMUSEMENT #1

OBJECTS OF AMUSEMENT follows the wacky hijinks of the Gas House Gorillas, a band whose members are full of half-witty comments and not that many brain cells. The book has its moments, but they are crowded out by the really lame stuff. The creators (they don’t say who does what on the book, so we’ll have to settle for just “the creators”), Donovan Klingel, Kyle Lawler, and Donny Hills, have a few interesting observations about certain kinds of bands on the first page, but it all goes to hell with stupid vaudeville-type routines on the next page.



They regain some ground on the third page when they go into an honest appraisal of their appreciation of women who might be a little too young, but they lose out again on page four when they go into a drawn-out bit just so they can say, “Thank you for the punch, Mr. Donkey.” Yeah, right. After that, it seems like a cheap shot to bring up the lame Escalade/Escalader joke on page five.


Needless to say, the crap outweighs the good shit here, although the art seems to match the material pretty well. It has just the right kind of indie look to it. However, the key part of an indie book is actually having witty insight into what it’s like to be young, brilliant, and marginal to society. This book has none of this.


Although it does have a nice ball-gag joke. And Dex’s pick-up lines do rate a chuckle. (All right, one of them gets a downright belly laugh: “So, are you illegal or just frowned upon?”) And there is a scene where Broady goes to a poetry night and reads heart-felt limericks to the crowd, which would be really awesome if someone actually did that.


But the end sucks soooooo badly.


Ultimately, the book’s not a total loss, but at $5, you’d be better off giving it a pass.


OBJECTS OF AMUSEMENT #1
Creators: Donovan Kingel, Kyle Lawler, and Donny Hills
14 pages
$5

A MIGHTY IMPRESSIVE WANG: A review of ERECTION YEAR

Eugene Wang leads a complicated life. He works a dead-end job at an underhanded brokerage firm. He lost his most recent girlfriend to his mother, who is, oddly enough, a right wing religious fanatic. He just found out that his father was not actually murdered, but is working as a security guard in the building where the above-mentioned brokerage firm is located. Eugene’s best friend is a bullshit-slinging, slut-banging motivational speaker who, despite having graduated from college, is still living the frat-boy lifestyle. And Eugene spends a lot of his time feeling sorry for (but also trying to avoid) Sue Ann Potts, the perennial psycho/sucker.



Got all that? Good. That’s just the tip of Stan Yan’s comic strip, THE WANG, here represented by the collection, ERECTION YEAR. With this group of characters, Yan examines what it’s like to live in dysfunctional America. All right, maybe that sounds kind of bland in this modern era, but he looks upon the subject with an honest eye, exploiting a lot of horrible situations for a hearty gut-laugh. Along the way, he also has a few chuckles talking about what it’s like to be Chinese-American surrounded by white society (the latter usually represented by George Gedaladapus, the motivational speaker mentioned above).

Eugene Wang has difficulty with his job because he finds it hard to take advantage of elderly people with limited incomes. As a result, his only customer is his father, who has a few heart-to-heart talks with his loser of a son (one of which was about how Santa is not real; apparently, his mother told him that she thought Santa was a burglar, so she shot him, thus explaining why he doesn’t come around anymore).


This is to say nothing about how Eugene will put up with his ex-girlfriend’s complaints (because he still has a thing for her). And how his mom is still stalking his ex-girlfriend, even though the two women had been broken up for some time. And how his ex-girlfriend went to his father to help investigate said stalking. And then there’s his ex-girlfriend’s dog, Dildo, who exists only so she can get hot chicks’ numbers.


Sex plays a prevalent role in this strip, but surprisingly, it’s never really crude. Which isn’t to say it’s not dirty (it is), but not even a cad like George talks about “fucking a broad,” for example. Looking back, the harshest word in the strip is probably “bitch.” Dildo humps legs and licks his own balls (and a dick and balls actually shows up at some point), but these characters are pretty . . . clean. Weird, right?

You’re not likely to see THE WANG in your Sunday funnies anytime soon, but there’s a lot of commonality of experience in these characters. They’re easy to identify with, and if you’re not one of them, you probably know one of them (at the least).

Just hope that you’re not Sue Ann Potts. Poor, gullible Sue Ann Potts . . . .


THE WANG: ERECTION YEAR
Writer and illustrator: Stan Yan
Publisher: Squid Works Comics
49 pages
$6.95

EVERYONE'S GOT ONE #7: GALL BLADDER BLUES

It was the worst pain I’ve ever had to deal with, ten times worse than the stupid fucking abscess. It was even worse because whenever I got an attack, I would spend the entire day puking my guts out every other fifteen minutes. I had to go to the ER 10 times and wound up staying in the hospital twice. Do you know how much money that’s going to cost me?



Not even I can count that high. But the doctors couldn’t figure out my problem. They came up with a multitude of theories, from ulcer to allergic reactions to medications to rare flus, but nothing ever panned out. Not until they started looking at my gall bladder. But the problem was, I didn’t have stones, and when they gave me the test for sludge, someone forgot to inject me with the CCK (which would actually help detect the sludge).


But they figured it out the second time they gave me the test. When they told me my gall bladder would have to come out, I didn’t give it a second thought. “Take the fucker,” I said. I didn’t want to suffer through this pain anymore. I never considered that they’d actually have to cut me open and remove a part of me, that I would no longer be a complete human being.


Before you mention it, yes, I did have a tooth extracted. But they put an implant in to replace it. When they remove an organ, they don’t put a balloon or something in its place. The other organs sort of squish together into the vacuum (which causes a bubble to form and float up to one’s shoulder, where it pains one for a couple of days before it gets absorbed into the body).


I didn’t think about it until much later, when I had a lot of time to think. (Being out of work gives one a lot of time to think. And agonize. And think.) It was a relief to discover that they weren’t actually going to cut me open and yank out the gall bladder. Instead, they were going to make four very small incisions in my belly. Three were used for scopes and cameras and stuff, and the fourth was where they would insert an instrument that would suck out the offending organ. These cuts would be measured in millimeters, so that relieved me a great deal.


Better yet, they were going to knock me out for the whole thing. My previous experience with such things actually helped me look forward to the experience. I thought it was cool how they’d knock me out, and the next thing I knew, I’d be waking up with the procedure done. It wasn’t like going to sleep, it was like missing a segment of time. It was also guaranteed sleep time for me, which was important, since I’m an insomniac.


I went to the hospital on the day of the surgery. They set me up with my gown and hair cap and everything. They went over my information a hundred times, and they set me up with an IV. Then, they led me into the operating theater, and it was a truly impressive set up. They’re not lying on TV medical shows. I thought I was on the set for NIP/TUCK, it was that impressive.


I got up on the table, and they put a few blocks under me so I’d be in the most uncomfortable position ever (but it was to stretch out my belly so the doctor could properly operate on me). Then, they put the mask on me. I remember straightening out my nose so it would fit better, and the next thing I knew, I was in recovery with an ice pack on my stomach and my grandfather by my side, telling me everything went well.


But the nurse was in a hurry to get me out of there, since they were getting ready to close up for the day. Still groggy from being knocked out (and from the painkillers they’d just injected), the nurse had to help me get dressed while my grandfather got the car. By that point, I just wanted to get dressed, I didn’t care about my own nudity. I tossed my gown aside and stood up to pull my boxers and jeans up. The nurse, who was putting the leg of each around my feet, looked up in horror and pulled a blanket up to cover up my cock, since I was out in the middle of a hospital hallway with a bunch of people around me.


After a struggle, she got me dressed and in a wheelchair. Just moving caused me the greatest amount of pain. By the time I got home, I was eager to get back in bed and fall asleep. When I woke up, my grandfather had gotten my prescriptions for me, and I began gobbling painkillers.


And they made me sick. I spent the next few hours hovering over a bucket (because I couldn’t get to the bathroom) begging my own guts to stay down. As much pain as I was in, I couldn’t imagine how much worse it would get if I actually puked.

I managed to keep everything in and fell asleep again. When I woke up the next day, I got my first look at my belly. There were four huge bandages on me, including one over my belly button. And yes, they’d shaved my stomach. I am a very hairy man, so it looked very strange.


I started getting around a bit better then. The pain still kept me in bed for the most part, but after a few days, I felt strong enough to go Wizard World (as will be depicted in this column soon). That may have been a mistake, especially after eating their shitty pizza. The worst of it, though, was when I put on jeans with a belt. The nurse warned me against wearing a belt so soon, but that sounded stupid to me. As a result, about four hours into the con, I felt a bad pain under my belly. When I went to the bathroom, I saw that I had developed the world’s worst bruise in the shape of my belt buckle. It looked bad, like the sky at sunset with a hint of dusk creeping in.


Whoops.


I took off the bandages the next day. They told me to keep the sani-strips on, but they came off with the bandages. This freaked me out, so I quickly found some Band-Aids to put over the incisions. Surprisingly, the cuts were indeed very small, all except the one in my belly button, through which they pulled out my gall bladder. The way it was healing, it looked like my belly button had been disfigured. That’s not so good. When I was younger, I was prone to yeast infections in there. I hope they don’t come back as a result of this operation.


The only other problem I’ve had so far is the first bowel movement I had after the procedure. I was told that my shit would get so runny and wet that I’d be shooting diarrhea out of my ass for the next few weeks. As it turned out, the opposite happened. A lump of shit so big and hard built up in me that I couldn’t pass it. I sat straining on the toilet, and it just remained stuck in my asshole, too tough to come out. I tried prying open my own anus with my fingers to get it out. No dice. The doctor said I needed some milk of magnesia and mineral oil. In the meantime, I was stuck in the bathroom, in utter pain and desperation. Thankfully, my grandfather was around, and he went out to get my stuff for me.

I downed the awful concoction, but nothing happened. Three hours later, still on the toilet, this plug of shit finally came out. When I got a look at it, I gagged. It was the size of a child’s fist, rock hard. It was so tough, the toilet wouldn’t swallow it down. It stuck to the side of the porcelain like a barnacle.


After that, I got the expected diarrhea, which wasn’t pleasant. Too much blood from its predecessor. I never want to have to shit like that ever again.


Now, as I write this, I’m getting ready to go back to work. There is still a slight pain in my guts, and it’s there whenever I do anything except lie on my back. The painkillers do nothing for me unless I triple up on them. The bruise is finally starting to clear up. So things are good, I guess.


How about you guys? Anyone here ever have surgery? What did you have taken out? And did you get to keep it? I didn’t get to keep mine, no matter how much I pestered the doctor. Please leave a comment below.