I want to say, first and foremost, that this is not a
review. This is a outright attack,
mostly because I’m a huge Evil Ernie fan, and I think this is an attack on his,
uh, good name. Back when I was in high
school, EVIL ERNIE was one of the three titles that got me back into reading
comics. I have known Ernie’s creator,
Brian Pulido, for many years (in fact, he invited me out to my first comic book
convention), so it would seem natural for me to side with him when it comes to
this, rather than the fools over at Dynamite.
I’d like to say that I came to this issue as a professional,
meaning that I was objective, but I just couldn’t do that. Ernie’s not just one of my favorites, he’s in
my DNA. Any betrayal of him, I’m going
to take as an offense against me.
To be fair, if anyone was going to attempt this
resurrection, Jesse Blaze Snider isn’t a bad choice. Remember back in the day when STRANGELAND
came out? Part of that movie’s promotional
material included references to it in Chaos! Comics. Dee Snider was behind that movie, and Jesse
Blaze is, indeed, his son. It makes
sense for the younger Snider to helm this project, no? Well . . . he did write about the Muppets
once upon a time, but that can be forgiven, right?
No. I firmly believe
that we did not need any more Evil Ernie stories. When he perished at the end of EVIL
ERNIE: WAR OF THE DEAD #3, and even when
the Chaos universe ended at the conclusion of ARMAGEDDON #4, thus taking Smiley
with it, I thought it was a very satisfying finale. It had been a great story, a fabulous story,
one of the best horror had to offer at the time, and I didn’t need to know
anything else.
Chaos! started it when they rebuilt the universe from
scratch, including a new Ernie title. It
wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great, either.
Years after Chaos! went bankrupt, DDP tried bringing back our favorite
teenaged undead psychopath, but it was so terrible that no one had a good word
to say about it.
At least Dynamite’s attempt isn’t that bad. This doesn’t make what they did right, but
still.
Right off the bat, they turned me off with the stupid
cover. Take a look above. Is that some kind of joke? I’ve seen junior high kids with more talent,
but forget that for a moment. Look in
Ernie’s eyes. HE IS NOT SUPPOSED TO HAVE
PUPILS! His eyes are supposed to be pure
white. That’s one of the many things
that makes him unsettling. And stop
trying to make his grin look realistic.
It’s supposed to be inhuman, which, again, is another thing that makes
him unsettling.
There is one problem with rebooting this series, and that’s
Lady Death. It would seem she is the
only character that Dynamite doesn’t own, so they had to do this whole thing
without her. Admittedly, that’s pretty
hard to do, since without her, Ernie would not have become what he did. That should have been a sign to turn back
while they still could, but no. They
just had to plow on.
How did they fix this?
By changing everything. We start
out with the night that Ernie was born.
His parents and brother were in a car wreck, killing his brother and
fucking up his parents pretty badly. He
still managed to make it into the world, and we later come upon him as a
teenager, walking twenty miles to visit his father at a maximum security
prison. He seems innocuous at first, but
as it turns out, he’s there to kill his old man. He slices him up and stabs him, screaming,
“Who’s smiling now?!” A shock? No, because Ernie has been killing 665 people
in his home town before coming to kill his father, so he’s had practice.
First of all, who can take that line seriously? You might as well have gone full-Bruce Campbell and said "laughing" instead of "smiling." Secondly, this story loses power because
Ernie’s father (all right, step-father) is now a known criminal. The thing that made the original Ernie
stories nasty was that no one ever suspected his white-bread, goodie-goodie
parents of being the depraved lunatics they really were. Ernie could be living next door to you. Now?
Everyone talks shit about the loser son of a psychopath who is rotting
in jail as we speak. We don’t think much
of this kid. That's not frightening at all. And lastly, if Ernie had
really just killed 665 people, why the fuck didn’t the guard recognize him? Surely a story like that would be on the
news. Besides, do you realize how
difficult it is to kill that many people?
This kid’s only thirteen. Not
even the real Ernie killed that many people to get him committed.
Also, remember that we’re supposed to sympathize with
Ernie. It’s hard to get on the side of
someone who killed 665 people and tried for 666. Snider tries to fix that problem by having
Ernie believe that all of them were evil and had to die, especially his old
man, who was supposedly the worst of the bunch.
We even get treated to a scene in which we see how Ernie views
the world. To be fair, it was well done,
but this is still not OUR Ernie. No, our
Ernie snapped and killed his parents. He
lost his shit and went on a killing spree, driven by a spirit named Lady Death,
who we originally believe to be a figment of his imagination. (Those were the days!)
So . . . how does Ernie become supernatural in this
one? Guess. Ah, fuck it.
Never mind. He gets sentenced to
the electric chair. In this moment, we
meet Dr. Thomas, who seems to be the only good person in the room. We also meet the warden, and it’s strongly
suggested that he broke himself a piece off of some underage Ernie. And then, he gets zapped. The problem is, there’s a weird green light
anomaly, and it gets into Ernie. It’s
suggested that it might be the souls of the people who he killed. Anyway, it turns him into an undead
psychopath bent on . . . well, certainly not megadeth.
How mind-numbingly lame.
The first time out, Ernie was fried in a misguided attempt to cure
him. Mary Young had only the best of
intentions, and instead of fixing him, it killed him and turned him into a
killing machine guided by Lady Death.
With this scenario, we have complexity.
With the electric chair, we have business as usual.
What is Ernie guided by this time? Apparently, there is a war between, are you
ready? Heaven and Hell. Go fuckin’ figure. Whenever someone good dies, they join
Heaven’s army. Whenever someone evil
dies, they join Hell’s army. Ernie is
supposed to go through his undead life, killing people he believes to be evil,
completely unaware that he is actually helping out Hell. It’s kind of an interesting idea, but nowhere
near as interesting as the original. The
first Ernie sought to kill every single human being in the world—megadeth—in
order to bring his beloved Lady Death to earth so they can be together. In other words, he did everything for love,
as misguided as it may be.
Incidentally, many of you may be wondering if any of the
other original characters will be returning.
It seems that Dr. Young has been replaced by Dr. Thomas. However, Dr. Price was mentioned as the
prison psychologist who allowed Ernie to go to the chair wearing his favorite
leather jacket (and Smiley). Personally,
I hope that’s the extent of it. Leonard
Price was one of my absolute favorite comic book characters EVER, and I don’t
want to see him raped by Dynamite. My
longtime readers will know this (anyone else here remember my comic book
reviews in the Elmhurst
College
All right, Snider fucked up pretty badly, but does the art
at least look good? Uh . . . no. Sorry, but Jason Craig tried to make things
look too realistic. Granted, Steven
Hughes is a tough act to follow (he’s still one of my favorites, and he’s been
dead for maybe ten years), but when it comes down to Ernie, none of us want a
realistic picture of him. We want the
exaggerated, fucked-up images. Even
Smiley kind of sucks. The button’s teeth
shouldn’t be needles, they should be just plain old teeth.
The worst thing about all of this: Dynamite clearly intends for this to relaunch
the entire Chaos! line (minus Lady Death).
That means Purgatori and Chastity aren’t far behind.
We don’t need any of this.
The entire Chaos! universe came to a satisfying ending in ARMAGEDDON
#4. We don’t need anything after
that. I felt kind of turned off when
Chaos! brought in the new universe (although I liked that Bedlam was still
around, and he remembered everything that had happened before, unlike the
others).
Will this win new Ernie readers? Maybe.
Provided that they don’t remember the original, that is. For the rest of us, I’m sure I speak for us
all when I say I hope the venture fails.
I’m not usually this malicious when it comes to art, but I feel the need
to defend Ernie’s sanctity. I keep
trying to tell myself that it’s just a completely different story, that I
shouldn’t care so much. Forget it,
Bruni. It’s Chinatown . But I just can’t let it go. Imagine if a close friend of yours had died,
and a bunch of people came along and fictionalized his life. You’d feel pissed off, wouldn’t you? That’s how I feel right now.
I didn’t mean to ramble on this long, but it’s a subject I
feel rather passionately on. Fuck
it. I don’t ordinarily quote Forrest
Gump, but “that’s all I have to say about that.”
