The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1899: High Voltage #0, 1996

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I don't know a whole lot about the writer of today's comic, Mike Baron, aside from his involvement in the award-winning Nexus series. What comes across from this particular comic is a very right-wing viewpoint, one that I'm not entirely sure is meant to be completely ironic. The setting starts out with the old Shakespearean saw of killing all the lawyers, who then revolt and become action heroes as well as lawyers. This within the setting of a left-wing government that has taken political correctness to a lethal level. Par example, today's story sees lawyer Veronica Volt busting a porn magazine producer out of jail because he refuses to put at least 50% male centerfolds in his magazines.

Which doesn't seem like a bad idea to me. And this is where this strange right-wingness comes in. There are numerous mentions by various characters of the dislike for what look like social(ist) programs perhaps taken to extremes to which they should not be taken. And this reflects a lot of the rhetoric that I read from right-wing pundits these days - that social programs are simply there to keep individual liberties down, rather than being routes to individual liberty extending to all facets of society.

I could be misreading this comic, but it comes from Blackout Comics, whose primary output revolves around women with very little clothing on. The ads in the back for the Hari Kari series, about a woman who is an expert martial artist, highlights the word "raped," and only the word "raped," as if the term is somehow a draw for the story. Indeed, the promo tells us that the more graphic scenes of the issue are enclosed upon a CD-ROM packaged with the comic. It's not quite fridging, but it is using something like rape very cavalierly, rather than recognizing that it's not the sort of thing that turns people into vigilantes, but rather wrecks them for the rest of their lives.

B is for Blackout

With boobs that do bounce

Tons of flesh is on view

But story? Nary an ounce.

More to follow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1095: Oriental Heroes #17, December 1989

I'll get to updating yesterday's Nightcrawler tomorrow, but today's comic, the last of year three, doesn't need much said about it. Or, I don't have much to say about it. It was 56 pages of a bunch of guys with crazy names kicking the crap out of each other. I have no idea who was a good guy and who was bad, and there were easily 30 different characters I had to try to keep track of.

What is neat is that I think this is the first example of Manhua in the project. I don't have a lot of examples of these Chinese comics in the collection, and I'm hoping the next one I read will be a bit more coherent.

Tomorrow we start on Year Four, and get back to the Doom Patrol.

To be continued.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 993: The Punisher Annual #3, 1988

As I said yesterday, I'm not a huge fan of the Punisher in general. I've seen the character handled well, but more often than not he's simply a psychopath who sees the world in black and white - not a particularly realistic worldview, but sadly one that many people in the real world share.

This comic is just weird. It's a full-on action movie for a little while, and then it becomes a science fiction movie, and the switch is really jarring. Perhaps this has always been my problem with the Punisher - he doesn't really fit into the Marvel U properly, and I don't think he ever has. Likely this is because he's a "hero" in his own title, but shares almost nothing in common with any other character published by the company. Even Wolverine, who is known for his "berserker" side, doesn't kill indiscriminately like Frank Castle does. And before anyone takes issue with that word indiscriminate, what I mean is that he punishes criminals without really thinking about the consequences of that punishment. The young girl Frank rescues in today's comic, who turns out to be the daughter of the drug dealer he's out to kill, is a perfect example. She see's her father as a good man. There's no doubt, though, that the father does some horrible things in order to be seen as a good man. But now that he's dead, a good man killed by a maniac in a skull shirt, what's to become of the daughter? The Punisher doesn't ask these questions, and is thus not a great addition to the Marvel U, IMHO.

That said, I haven't read a lot of Punisher comics, so perhaps they do deal with this at some point. But, honestly, isn't it about time we stopped celebrating people who run around with guns? I'm amazed that we're going to be getting a Netflix series, regardless of how amazing John Bernthal is in the role.

To be continued.