As everyone knows, comics are awesome. If you don’t know this, you do now. Another thing you should know is that I’ll be reviewing these comics, which means that they will be rated in one category and one category alone: awesome. Yes, story and all those other extras they keep putting into the comics I read are important or whatever, but not as important as how badass the people are, how big the explosions are, and how much stuff comes out of a guy when he’s punched. I think I speak for all of us when I say, “Let’s do this.”
This week I’ll be reviewing Rapture #6, the final issue in the series. Rapture has a pretty sweet concept: superheroes get into a megawar that devastates the entire earth, then take the fight to space. The survivors are trying to get by while fighting off cannibals.
The story follows two characters, an ordinary couple who was separated by the collapse of society. Both are given magic spears at some point, which are pretty cool because they’re like Frodo’s sword near Orcs except the spear doesn’t glow, the bad guys are cannibals and it turns the user into a killing machine. So actually not much like Frodo’s sword at all, because if Frodo went up in a fight against tofu, I’d put my money on the bean curd.
The girl’s name is Eve, and while she has her whiney moments, she’s overall not bad. At first she has some qualms about killing the cannibals – something about “morals” (I think it’s a term they made up for this comic) – but when she’s told that she’ll get to be with her boyfriend again, she dives into the manstabbing. One thing I think the comic does well is it reinforces positive behavior – whenever she stops killing, someone close to her ends up dead.
So far you’d guess that the comic sounds pretty cool, right?
Well you would be wrong. And here’s why:
Gil, the boyfriend. He’s the one that looks like a mopey turd with red hair. Where do I start? Gil is possibly the most obnoxious character I’ve ever seen – it’s almost worth reading the comic just to see what a human with the personality of a steaming poo that is still capable of bitching about his life is like. Almost. Gil is a guitarist, and not the awesome kind of guitarist that plays music that makes your head explode. The really lame kind that plays acoustic songs about how much he misses his girlfriend. He sings, too. At least once a comic. It’s… something.
I really feel that music loses something in the transition to a comic page. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it could be that comics are incapable of making music. On top of that, Gil’s songs are impossibly whiny and he just sits around doing nothing. Thankfully, he stops singing after his fingers are bitten off – but that doesn’t stop him from being a little wiener. Oh no, Gil’s natural talent for bitchery is too great to be stopped by a minor setback like losing appendages.
And then we have this guy. For every dark, there must be light; so too with Gil and this character. He is known by the righteous moniker “Old Man.” He is so ground-shatteringly awesome that I’ve compiled a list of his exemplary moments:
? By way of introduction, when Gil asks him if there’s anything worth singing about besides heartache, he replies “Yeah… booze.” Gil could learn a lesson from this guy. We all could.
? He has a grizzled white beard.
? As the ceiling collapses, he shouts, “Cold titties, I ain’t gonna go down like this!”
? When Gil’s fingers are bitten off and he faints, Old Man tells him to “stop being lazy.”
? “Fucking Rapture, shitting on everyone’s parade!”
? He punches a child superhero. He then throws the head of the same child’s mom out a window. Then he tells another superhero to “finish the little tyrant.”
? “I’ve killed a man before. And you know what I regret? That I didn’t make him suffer.”
I’m sure I needn’t say more about Old Man, but I will anyways.
…
OK, I don’t actually have anything more to say about him, but I’ll be damned if I give more text to Gil than to Old Man.
Finally, we have Word. He’s the one who gives Eve and the others their magic spears. He’s a pretty boring character, but I like him because he has a burning desire to kill cannibals. Why he doesn’t kill the cannibals himself is a little mystifying, but it’s pretty funny that his pastime is corrupting the innocent. There may be some symbolism here that I’m missing, but I don’t really care.
Another thing about Word is that his death noise is “pop.” Think of how much funnier funerals would be if that’s the noise people made when they died. I mean, don’t get me wrong, funerals are funny enough already, but with this they would be a laugh riot plus there’d be those little sandwiches they always serve. It’d be a pretty sweet deal.
Rapture is like a head-on collision between two trains full of delicious hamburgers: there may be a really cool explosion, but in the end you’re left with a lot of wasted hamburgers. This comic would have been godly awesome if all the main characters were replaced with copies of Old Man and instead of trying to find their boyfriend, they were all fighting to get to the last bottle of rum on the planet.
Why I don’t write comics is beyond me. It might be due to the restraining orders.
Final Count:
30 living things died (average 5 per issue)
1 baby stolen (average 1/6th per issue)
If you want to learn more about Gil, go here. Be warned that learning more about Gil means mandatory revocation of manhood.
Andy Rose thought that his idea for a crossover comic between Spawn and the Teletubbies was pretty great. Nobody would publish it, though, despite having hidden copies throughout their houses while they slept.
