The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1532: Futility #4

Red Hayes manages to bumblingly survive a full-on interstellar war and that most horrible of things that those of us with penises can imagine: having a parasite swim up it.

This series is fucking nuts.

I am excited to see where it goes, especially as this issue ends with Red sort of getting home, but sort of not. The next book, "Orange Planet Horror" hopefully will give some insight into the strange new world that Red returns unto.

It's rare, I think, to see a squishy outer space story. So many of them are very clean and clinical, so it's nice to run into a story where the aliens are every bit as gross as we are, and sometimes, most times, even more so. The last series I remember doing this organicness well was the reboot of Prophet from a few years back. Everything was food for everything else in that series, as far as I could tell. Futility isn't far from that either.

On to something new tomorrow, but we'll definitely return to the adventures of Red Hayes.

"Slimy tyrant! You thought to control me? A god!?"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1531: Futility #3

Futility is a really gross comic. You may be able to tell that from the cover. It's everything the EC comics wanted to be but couldn't because there were just still some thing that you couldn't do back in the 50s. Cam Hayden and Rick Overwater have no such qualms.

I read the first 2 issues of this series a little while back but didn't get around to blogging them, but at the recent Fan Expo I snagged signed copies of the next 3 issues, because it's just that good. Now, bear in mind that when I say that, it's not necessarily a nice comic. It's not going to leave you feeling good. Red Hayes, farmer and amateur astronaut, is not a good guy. He's a redneck from the middle of Texas in the 1960s. But I get the suspicion that the weirdness he's encountering on his journey through space is maybe opening his mind a little more than it used to be. And then there's the art - visceral and bloody, hearkening, for me at least, to the grossest of the undergrounds. Space is a weird, slimy place, and poor Red just isn't equipped to handle it.

Tomorrow I'll read issue 4, after which the creators have decided to do graphic novels instead. Which I'll get back to one of these days, really.

Futility is a local comic to Alberta, and is definitely evidence that we're not all conservative nightmares out here. This is some high weirdness.

"But it could -- uh -- end with the enslavement of your entire world."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1516: Futility #2

Yeah, yeah, so I'm not keeping up as well as I'd hoped. Lots of interesting things going on, though.

Before I get to the comic, some shameless self-promotion: I'm curating an exhibit at Lougheed House in Calgary that is a partial history of the queer community in Calgary. I'm also curating a queer comics exhibit at the new Calgary Central Library at the end of May. If you're in town, you should come and check them out. I'm pretty proud of what we've done.

A few months back (and I can't remember if I've told you this story yet), I get rid of 9 boxes of books from my shelves and storage. It was a very cathartic moment, and now I just want to get rid of things. When I took the books to a local independent store, they gave me just over $200 credit. And they have thousands and thousands of dollar comics in their basement. I think you can see where this is going. The way I reconcile it is that 200 comics takes up waaaay less room than 9 boxes of books.

I picked up the first two issues of Futility as I scoured through the boxes last week. I'd decided to only get things that filled in holes in my collection - dollar bins are a great place to track down the stuff that you'd like to complete, but that you're not so invested in that you spend huge amounts of money. I filled in most of the old DC series The Warlord from dollar bins. But, to be honest, when I saw the cover of this issue, I had to get it. Comics very often offer a combination of intrigue and shock on the cover. And today's comic is very much pulling on the old EC comics that perfected that technique.

The story is good, and I'm very much hoping I'll be able to track down the last two issues. Will Red Hayes, mid-20th century small-town American farmer, be able to navigate the unrelenting weirdness of space and return to his home and family? Maybe. I'm not going to definitely say this one has a happy ending. I will say that the representation of alien life and culture in this issue is really great. Rather than the Star Trek route, where alien civilizations seem to simply be versions of human civilization from different periods, the aliens in this series are really alien. And they look it.

If you like weird space adventures, 50s sci-fi comics, or if you just want to support a couple of talented local creators, see if you can track this down. (I read issue #1 yesterday. Many of the same thoughts as with today's comic.)

"Hairy people! You can't just die like this! This is tyranny!"