FORGOTTEN COMIC BOOKS #3: STRAW MEN

When I was a very young comic book reader, I bought STRAW MEN #1 from a bargain bin. I thought the cover looked pretty cool, and I liked THEM!, so I thought it would make for good reading. Surprise, surprise, it turned out to be much more than a good read; it was fucking awesome. Writers Michael Vance and R.A. Jones wrote about things that comic books didn’t really go into in those days. Alan Moore was just starting to stretch the idea of what comic books could do. It was very adult stuff, but also super-intelligent and very socially relevant.



I had to have more. Unfortunately, no matter how far and wide I shopped, I couldn’t find any subsequent issues. Time moved on, years stretched, and so on and so forth. Fresh out of college, I learned about the INTERNET. I also learned that Mile High Comics had an online store, and they had just about everything. That included issues 2-8 of STRAW MEN. The entire series was finally in my grasp, and it was just as kick-ass as I thought it would be. Even more.


Contained within these eight issues is a story that stretches across decades. It all begins in a shit-splat Oklahoma burg, Gate, and the Experimental Atomic Plant One. This is where Dr. Jon Stonewall conducts his experiments in an attempt at genetically engineering the perfect human being, a person free of mutation and sickness. He’s got pretty good reasons for doing this, considering his son was born with a defect that made his left hand look like a jumbled mess.


Craig Stonewall, the aforementioned son, is the protagonist of this story. In his father’s eyes, he’s more than just physically defective. Jon sees Craig as a weakling, someone who stagnates in whatever misery he feels he’s in rather than doing something about it. He wants to make a man out of Craig more than almost anything else.


And this is very clear to Craig, who harbors a lifelong hatred of his father as a result. However, Jon is right about most of these things, even though Craig denies it. Yet Craig’s hatred with Jon is not unwarranted, either. His father will go to any lengths to ensure that his will is done, and that includes manipulation and murder.


Even more so, it includes the formation of political and religious organizations. Jon is the puppet master behind the Primacy Party and the Primacy Church (despite being a confessed atheist). Both have goals to bring human beings to perfection through scientific experimentation. Both also give Jon an incredible amount of support through money to fund said experiments. In charge of both organizations is the good-intentioned Robert Hughes, who believes this is what God wants, and he’s got his eye on the White House . . . . But Jon knows how willful his puppet can be, so he makes sure he has something with which to blackmail Hughes: an orgy that Jon orchestrated just so he could videotape the good reverend in a compromising position.


Have I mentioned that Jon has no trouble in experimenting with his son’s pregnant wife? In fact, that’s how the real story begins, with Carol in labor, and Craig speeding toward the EAP1, which has now been converted to Gate’s medical center. Craig worries in the waiting room, afraid that his own mutation might come out through his son. He has no idea that his father had been using Carol, who had actually consented through her own fear of defect (due to an earlier miscarriage before she met Craig, her uterus is no longer normal), to perfect his radiation treatments.


Long story short, Carol dies giving birth, and Jon kidnaps Craig’s son and tells Craig that the child also died. However, Craig finds out the truth and comes after his father . . . only to be too late. The child has been whisked away (we later find out to Canada), and in order to throw Craig off the trail, Jon frames him for murder. This also works in Jon’s favor, because the doctor he had murdered is the only other person who knows that the child did not die.


Which brings us to Jon’s instrument of destruction: Weeper. He is truly a fucked-in-the-head villain, as fucked in the head as they come. When we find out about his past, it’s no wonder. During the late ‘Forties, he was captured by Chairman Mao’s goons, and he was tortured for several months. Starved. Beaten. Raped. Repeatedly. “When is a man a woman?” the torturer asks. As he pulls his pants down and gets ready to rape Weeper for the first time, he shouts, “Any time I want!” After months of this, he is driven insane. When American soldiers rescue him, he looks like a concentration camp survivor, and he thinks in terms of song lyrics. By the time we meet him, his favorites are songs by the Doors and “I Am the Walrus” by the Beatles. He decides he is the Lizard King, that he can do anything. The man is absolutely vile and heartless, shockingly so for the period in which he was written.


Craig runs from Gate, and after many years of trials and tribulations, he falls in with a circus and starts making money off of his deformity in the sideshow. Soon, his closest friends are freaks, in particular a dog boy by the name of Growler. After a while, he even starts believing his father’s story about the death of his son.


However, in his absence, something very pivotal happens to Jon Stonewall: he is told that he has cancer. Malignant. He doesn’t have long to live. After years of experimenting with radiation, the disease has finally caught up with him. So, he comes up with a brilliant plan, very Machiavellian, and with the help of Weeper and several government connections, he sets it in motion.


It all begins when Craig sees the cover of TIME with Jon on it . . . and Craig’s son?! In the article, Jon claims to have genetically engineered the child to be perfect in every way. He’s finally achieved his lifetime goal.


Well, sort of. Nothing is what it seems, not even Jon’s plan. You see, he has a back up plan, and it’s pretty fucking grim. It leads to one of the most heartbreaking endings in comic book history. It hurts almost as much as the ending of EX MACHINA.


That’s a lot of territory to cover, and there’s a lot more I haven’t told you about. My favorite part is a speech Jon gives concerning his own childhood in issue 6. He tells a story of the good ol’ days, of happiness and cheer, of loving parents, and all of that. As he says these things, the artwork of Rob Davis shows us the reality, of how Jon constantly got his ass kicked by bullies, and how his ostracized father (a self-confessed Communist) brought his entire family down, which caused Jon’s mother to abandon them. It’s an ugly little story, and it explains a lot about how Jon became the man he is.


Jon Stonewall is, in fact, the most interesting character in the book. He has lofty, noble goals. When you get right down to it, he wants to save the human race from its own faulty genetic code. You can’t get nobler than that. But he is so underhanded and evil in his methods that one can’t help but think of him as a villain. This kind of complexity just wasn’t in comic books back then. Well, nothing mainstream, anyway. And like I said, Alan Moore was just starting to change readers’ minds with his own work at the time.


If there was any justice in the world, this book would be remembered as a major turning point in comic book history. It would have been canonized and filmed and everything. Writers like Garth Ennis and Warren Ellis would list it as a huge influence on their own work. Vertigo would have found a way to reprint it in a trade. As it is, I am the only person I know who remembers this book.


Good luck finding it. I bought the last copies from Mile High (unless they’ve restocked, somehow). I don’t even know if you could find it at C2E2. If you do manage to find it, I guarantee that the hunt is worth it.