The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1545: Cud Comics #1, November 1995

I was, I'll admit, very disparaging of Terry LaBan's The Unseen Hand, a series I reviewed earlier this month. I just didn't think it was very good, but that's just my opinion. I was intrigued, however, by the mention in Mr. LaBan's biography of his "Archie meets underground" series Cud Comics. That very weekend, the always-reliable Purple Gorilla Comics had this lovely example hanging on the wall. Of course I snatched it up.

Of course I did.

And now I'll have to track down every issue, because I love Eno and Plum. LaBan is telling stories here of people who were my age in the mid-90s, in their early-20s trying to figure shit out. I think Generation X had a bit of a crisis around this point. We had that youthful optimism that generations have, that we could effect real change, but we were also realizing that we were a small generation. A lot of pop culture from the 90s is very grim, and I think it's from a recognition of not being able to change things. Cud Comics is an extreme reaction to that, moving from anger to irony, trying to find the humour in a feeling of ineffectualness.

Damn. Sorry. That was a downer.

Eno and Plum are great characters, and I cannot wait to read more about them.

"If we have sex, it'll lower my sperm count!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1536: The Unseen Hand #4, December 1996

*sigh*

Pretty sure things could not have had a more cliched ending. Mike finds his sister, it's the woman who's been helping him, and he sleeps with her! They try to drive a nuke into a government building. Mike is the only one who escapes, and he ends up joining the conspiracy, reasoning that it's better to have a good person there rather than a bad person.

I picked up a copy of Terry LaBan's Cud Comics from Dark Horse. They're fucking funny. I really like them. But this sucked.

"The best we can hope for is that those who take it feel a responsibility to something more important than themselves."

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1535: The Unseen Hand #3, November 1996

Soooo....Rasputin shows up and he's got a conjoined twin that speaks to him through is heart and there's an underground (literally) civilization of Tsarists and Mike has psychedelic sex with one of them and agrees to help them buy a nuke. And then Lenin's corpse talks to him.

I think the thing that's not sitting right about this series is that I don't think it knows the tone it wants to strike, so it strikes a whole bunch of them, but none clearly enough for anything to stand out. So it seems toneless. The art, which is great, does a similar thing, though, as the photorealistic characters are set next to utterly stylized representations. Perhaps this is intentional, the central conceit of the piece being an international conspiracy that is everywhere and nowhere, everything and nothing, all at once. Is the text itself mimicking the slipperiness of The Unseen Hand?

You never know.

"You...you don't honestly think you can turn the clock in this country back two hundred years?"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1534: The Unseen Hand #2, October 1996

Things get worse for our intrepid hero. It's a strange time in history for Mike to be making his way across Eastern Europe. The region was in turmoil in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, even after almost half a decade. Countries were breaking apart, along old lines from before the U.S.S.R., and old rivalries were allowed to once more take root. Amid this, Mike manages to play bass for a crazed Croatian captain desperate to play some live music.

The conspiracy continues much as you might expect. I'm wondering now if the story itself is background to Laban and Ilya's examination of the chaos of Eastern Europe. Mike is heading toward Moscow, and the conspiracy he is trying to dodge are determined to bring Western-style capitalism to a newly-opened region.

Which, now that I type it out, seems actually far too believable for comfort.

"I don't even need you passport to tell -- you look just like James Dean!"

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1533: The Unseen Hand #1, September 1996

The Unseen Hand is the sort of thing Vertigo was publishing just as I was getting back into comics. By this point, they'd started separating from the mainstream DC Universe even more. Doom Patrol and Animal Man had wrapped about a year prior, and the final issue of Swamp Thing came out the same month this issue did. There were only a few holdovers from the days of Vertigo being the dark little corner of the DCU, which I found disappointing, though I'll admit that Vertigo brought some amazing comics into the world after they stopped doing superhero stuff.

Today's story is a bit run-of-the-mill. Young man finds out he's the inheritor of wealth from a father he never knew who was part of a global, Illuminati-style conspiracy to enslave humankind. Even in 1996, the story was old, and I think I spent too much of this comic waiting for it to differentiate itself from the other stories of this sort. I'm still waiting.

Don't misunderstand; this is a good comic. It's exciting, it's nerve-wracking, the art is kinetic one moment and then beautifully still the next. It's just that it's not a novel enough retelling of this old story to really stand out. But then, I've only read the first issue. You never know where things are going to go.

"There aren't many times in our lives when we can pinpoint the exact moment when everything changes."