Oh, so that’s what it would’ve been like if Watchmen was written by F.A. von Hayek
COMICS YOU SHOULD READ: “Squadron Supreme” (1985)
Showing posts with label Marvel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Marvel. Show all posts
Friday, January 3, 2020
Tuesday, July 2, 2019
My Seven Favorite Things About Spider-Man (2002)
A fond look back at the very simple things that made Sam Raimi’s original Spidey movie so much fun
Monday, July 1, 2019
The Ten Greatest Spider-Man Video Games of All-Time!
From the 2600 to the PlayStation4, we count down Old Webhead’s greatest forays into the interactive medium!
Saturday, February 9, 2019
The First Annual Internet Is In America Movie Awards!
Forget the Oscars … the Golden Jimbos are the only cinematic celebration anybody ought to care about.
Saturday, August 25, 2018
Comic Review: Marvel's "The Toxic Avenger!" (1991)
In the early 1990s, the house Spidey built ran a comic based on Troma’s flagship character for 11 issues … and surprisingly, it wasn’t half bad.
By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
I know I’ve said this before, but it absolutely BLOWS my mind that somehow, someway, The Toxic Avenger — a no-budget splatter movie whose highlights include children having their heads squished by drunk drivers and morbidly obese men having their intestines yanked out of their stomach cavities — was transformed into a children’s property, complete with Nintendo games, a toy line from the same people behind Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and, of course, a short-lived cartoon on Fox Kids. To this day I have no idea how such an arrangement came to be, with seemingly the only reasonable explanation being “cocaine, and a whole lot of it.”
But no siree, the kidification of Toxie didn’t stop there. The Toxic Avenger also managed to land not just one, but two different Marvel Comics series. While the second was based upon the Toxic Crusaders cartoon (and thus, was naturally inclined to be a little more subdued, thematically), its forerunner was based explicitly — and I mean that in more ways than one — on the original Troma film trilogy.
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| Millions of fans? That seems like a bit of an overestimate, don't it? |
With artwork supplied by Rodney Ramos and Val Mayerik, the series looks WAY better than you’d expect. And while the comic does play it fast and loose with the official Toxie canon, that’s not to say it didn’t get away with some pretty risque material. Indeed, for a comic published by Marvel in the early, pre-Image 1990s, it does push the boundaries pretty far, complete with a few uncensored swear words sprinkled in with the exploded limbs and gruesome zombies whose skin is so rotten it’s practically gelatinous.
The series does a pretty good job of keeping Toxie’s personality aligned to the movies, even if his created-for-the-comics catchphrase “omgowa” feels really forced and out of place. After recapping the character’s origin — it’s close enough to what we see in the first movie to avoid any complaints — it doesn’t take long for the comic to start blazing its own trail, introducing a new central antagonist — a devilish CEO named simply “The Chairman” who has two demonic dragons flying in and out of his mouth — who immediately begins plans to take over Tromaville using a bevy of toxic waste-spawned atrocities.
And admittedly, we do have some pretty cool original villains show up. The first couple of rogues are by-the-numbers goons and thugs with generic mutation gimmicks, but things pick up considerably when The Chairman contaminates the health club from the original movie with a toxic juice that turns all of those hardbodies into undead killing machines. And once Toxic has made mincemeat of them, The Chairman ups the ante by digging up the graves of the dispatched mutants and patchworking them into a ten foot-tall, hulking anti-Toxie called Biohazard … which is actually a pretty badass villain, if just in terms of aesthetics alone.
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| Of course, showing a body explode into a shower of limbs and appendages is just peachy as long as no bloods or innards are visible ... |
But really, the highlight of the series has to the the “Souvlaki Sewer Syndrome” two-parter in issues seven and eight. In this mini-arc, The Chairman concocts a wild plan to turn half of New York into irradiated, sewer-dwelling zombies via tainted souvlaki, with the hideous creatures eventually pooling together into a mammoth wad of rotting adipose tissue. As I said earlier, for Marvel in the early 1990s this is actually some pretty edgy stuff, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find the artwork here at least partially unnerving. For me, the zenith of the series has to be when Toxie gets devoured by the souvlaki monster, and he has an internal dialogue about how oddly serene it is to be sloshing around inside it as it rampages through New York, as if he was peacefully gliding to and fro in a rotting womb. Yeah, the way I put it is really unartful, but trust me, the execution in the book itself is WAY better than my crappy description.
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| Unfortunately, "The Toxic Wigger" just didn't have the mass appeal Marvel hoped for. |
Still, on the whole, I’d say The Toxic Avenger is nonetheless a better than average tie-in comic, especially for Marvel in the early ‘90s (anybody remember their series based on Pirates of Dark Water, Bill & Ted and even WCW by-god ‘rasslin?) While it doesn’t perfectly mirror the attitude or spirit of the Troma films from which it’s based, the writers did a pretty good job translating the material into PG-reading, and I thought the artwork was just plain snazzy.
I wouldn’t call this a “great” series by any stretch, but it’s certainly better than it had any right to be. Granted, I haven’t checked out its spiritual successor in the Toxic Crusaders follow-up, but if that one is at least half as decent as The Toxic Avenger … well, actually, that’s pretty much what I would expect it to be, I suppose.
Regardless, this is a fun, moderately overachieving series anchored around a seemingly impossible premise. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s a way better take on the character than what we saw in The Last Temptation of Toxie. Sigh, if only it lasted long enough to give us that long-awaited crossover with Robocop we had no idea we both wanted and retroactively needed …
Kudos my hero, leaving all the best ...
Sunday, February 11, 2018
Comic Review: 'Black Panther & The Crew' (2017)
In which we celebrate Black History Month by taking a look at one of the biggest flops in recent comic book history (P.S.: come for the tie-in to the new Black Panther movie, but stay for Ta-Nehisi Coates' incredible anti-Semitism sneaking past Marvel's radar.)
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX
Anybody who says comic books have only recently started injecting SJW-flavored politics into their stories clearly haven't been paying attention to the medium over the last 50 years. Just take a look at Marvel's work in the 1970s, which definitely sided with the progressive liberals on issues like civil rights (X-Men) black identity politics (Black Panther, Luke Cage) environmentalism (Man-Thing) and gender equality (Ms. Marvel), and D.C.'s work in the 1980s, which was championing gay rights in books like Hellblazer and Swamp Thing years before the mainstream media declared its own jihad against whatever they thought "homophobia" consisted of that particular afternoon.
Alas, in the 2000s, the industry decided to go full retard with the leftist politics, to the point comics stopped being low-culture, instant gratification juvenile junk and turned into full-fledged, foaming, anti-white, anti-male, anti-conservative and anti-Christian agitprop. Over the course of a decade nearly half of the X-Men roster was turned homosexual, Spider-Man turned into a half black/half Puerto Rican 12-year-old, Superman boldly declared his endorsement of open border governance, G.I. Joe have been turned into morbidly obese Hispanic lesbians who hate guns, and Archie - perhaps the ultimate emblem of apolitical junk culture - was literally gunned down by a racist Republican NRA member during a botched attempt to assassinate a gay black politician and his white male lover.
Not that you really need me to tell you this, but despite all of the back-patting that surely arose from turning Captain Marvel into a Muslim woman, M.O.D.O.K. into Donald Trump and Iron Man into a black teenage girl, none of these SJW-enthused works have translated into commercial successes. As it turns out, hardcore comic readers are actually in it for decent stories that expound about the decades of their favorite character's back stories, not identitarian dreck pandering to the latest leftist outrage du jour. That's kind of the inherent problem of propaganda - you spend so much time trying to fellate the base that you often forget to make your agitprop, you know, entertaining.
And that is VERY much the case with the (in)famous Black Panther & The Crew mini-series from 2017. Originally meant to be an ongoing series, the project got cancelled two issues into its run and ultimately crapped out after six issues. The big hook for the ill-fated comic was that it was written by Ta-Nehesi Coates, a longtime The Atlantic columnist who - outside of writing articles ranting and raving against Bernie Sanders for not supporting reparations and berating Daniel Moynihan for being 100 percent right about father absenteeism being the single most important factor behind black underachievement - is probably most famous for penning Between the World and Me, an astonishingly popular tirade against contemporary racism in which the only two examples of "racism" the author could pinpoint was a time a white person told him "come on" to get on an elevator and when one of his friends was killed by a cop ... who was actually black.
Anyway, Coates - who gets paid $1,000 a minute to harangue almost entirely white audiences about how their very skin tone automatically makes them perpetrators of hate crimes by biological default - actually wrote a couple of issues of Black Panther back in 2016, so you really can't say he doesn't have any comic book writing experience. But by that same token, I also think it's safe to say we ain't exactly dealing with an Alan Moore or a Howard Chaykin here, either. Fuck, the guy can barely make a 1,600-word diatribe on The Atlantic sound coherent, so I guess it's not really a surprise the guy isn't any more more deft with the sequential art medium.
But the big problem, as you will soon see, is that Black Panther & the Crew tried to make a "serious" political statement inside the framework of the single most ludicrous low-culture art form this side of pro wrestling and monster trucking. The series' Black Lives Matter pandering already made it dated as soon it hit news stands, but the fact Coates tried to insert that real world polemic inside a comic book world filled with super powerful God-like beings and robotic martial law death squads just made the thing a big, fat muddled mess of a "social commentary," one that's too stuck up its own ass to be fun and too fantastically absurd to be taken as a sincere statement about anything.
But hey - why don't we let this spectacular failure of a series speak for itself, why don't we?
Issue one is titled "Double Consciousness." Get it, because it's a reference to W.E.B. DuBois and shit? Anyway, it's 1957. There's this black dude named Ezra (aka, The Lynx) and he runs the Harlem version of The Avengers, alongside his super-powered crew Flare, Brawl, The Gates and Glass. He looks a lot like Malcolm X, which I'm sure is 100 percent totally coincidental. Anyhoo, he roughs up a drug dealer and tells him if he doesn't vamoose, next time he's going to incinerate his intestines or something.
Well, fast forward to today's Harlem, and Misty Knight is walking through a #BLM protest over the death of Ezra, presumably at the hands of the local po-po. So for those of you wondering just how long it would take the series before it devolved into shameless black power identity politics propaganda - well, it wound up being page nine of the very first issue.
Oh, and since this is a Marvel comic, the cops in the comic also include a unit of Robocop-wannabes called the Americops, which were created by PRIVATE INDUSTRY and therefore evil as all fuck by default. Just figured you folks needed to know that.
So Misty Knight has breakfast with Ezra's family and they refer to cops as "pigs" about half a dozen times. Then she investigates Ezra's jail cell and of COURSE there's video missing from the time of his death and then Knight and this other black chick have a discussion about mayonnaise and that's when the AMERICOPS attack them for breaking curfew, which, obviously, is codeword for "being black." Knight uses her metal arm to kill a couple of robot cops, and just when she's about to get fucked up, here comes Storm out of the blue to make the save.
We resume the "story" in issue two, titled "Afro-Blue." You'll see why in just a few.
It's 1955 in Indonesia and Ezra is at the Bandung Asian-African Conference. He talks about Africans, Asians and Harlemites having "the same enemy" but never explicitly stating who (hint: it's Whitey.) Zip to the modern day and Misty and Storm walk into a crack house in Little Mogadishu and fuck up a bunch of ruffians. Then We learn Storm grew up in Harlem (now THAT's what I call a retcon!) and Misty is almost blown up on a train and she goes back to Storm's apartment and tells her to not give her any "intersectional privilege crap."And then Black Panther shows up on the very last page.
Oh, and by the way - the title is a reference to Storm's "beautiful blue black skin." No, that's literally what Coates tells the readers himself.
Issue three is titled "Black Against the Empire," so you just KNOW it's not going to be a bunch of paranoid, hysterical preaching-to-the-choir nonsense.
We travel back to Harlem, circa 1956. Ezra is in an underground bunker, staring at a bunch of "people of color" who might be candidates for some genetic experiments to make 'em into Wakanda super soldiers or some such shit. Then we jump to modern day and this old black woman named Marla tells Black Panther to stick it where the sun don't shine because of his bad manners.
Then Black Panther walks around Harlem, looking at all the gentrification going on and says "an empire is a plague - insidious and relentless" while looking DIRECTLY at two Jewish characters. And no, I am NOT making that up, as evident by the photographic evidence below ...
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| What the? Blacks, being openly and unapologetically anti-Semitic? Who'd thought such to be the case in a million, billion years? |
Anyhoo, Storm is still pissed at Black Panther and they talk about their divorce for a bit. Wait, where they ever canonically married in the regular Marvel universe? 'Cause last time I checked, she was getting boned by Forge from X-Factor. I mean, not that it really matters, I guess, but still. Then they get a hotel in a place literally called "The Renaissance" and read a dossier on the property manager, whom Black Panther assumes killed Ezra. Hey, isn't Donald Trump famous for being a property manager and a multi-billionaire entrepreneur, too? What a funny coincidence.
Anyway, Black Panther wipes off some dirt and, yep, there's a HYDRA logo, right there in plain sight, in the basement of the apartment. Then a dude bazookas a condo and Luke Cage walks out unharmed, because he's Luke Cage, damn it, and being hard to kill is like his gimmick or something.
Issue four is called "Nothing But A Man," which isn't really applicable to Storm or Misty Knight, but asides, motherfucker, asides. We flash back to 1964, where Ezra is basically written into the real-life Mississippi Burning case. He brings his crew of super-powered black people with him and they unironically use violence to force a bunch of white cops and bureaucrats to confess to murdering a bunch of civil rights workers.
Fast forward to modern day Harlem, where Luke Cage is literally punching Hydra helicopters out of the sky. Then he and Misty talk to this one black dude who was in the holding cell when Ezra mysteriously died. But he's not really much help, because all really wants to do is play pinball. Then they visit the CEO of Paragon Industries, the manufacturers of the Americops. Then its revealed that it's a subsidiary of Paragon Properties, which is uprooting all of the black people in Harlem for rich white Jews and their ilk.
Issue five is titled "Down These Mean Streets," which, unfortunately, isn't a thinly veiled reference to the theme music of the Fabulous Freebirds.
Now it's 1969 in Harlem, and all of the Black Avengers look blaxploitation-tastic. Then we hop to present day, and some black dude in a robe with billy clubs destroys some Americops while they're trying to apprehend this Puerto Rican kid. Anyway, he's some half black/half Aborigine mutant I've never heard of before called Manifold. He talks about being mentored by Ezra, and how Ezra's black super soldier experiments were actually being bankrolled by Hydra, because they were trying to start a race war or something.
And that brings us to our sixth and final issue, rather optimistically titled "Everybody Loves the Sunshine," which to me, sounds extremely prejudiced against the thousands of white people on the planet who are deathly allergic to sunlight. But hey, fuck those ultra-honkies, ain't that right, Ta-Nehisi?
It's 1972 and Ezra finds out he's been double crossed so he shoots his partner who was actually a Hydra informant and also looked a LOT like John Shaft.
Then we return to modern day Harlem. There's a big protest over Ezra's death, and of course, it isn't long before the fists start flying and Storm has to make it rain to keep everybody from rioting. The crew deduce that Whitey is using some sort of experimental mind control weapon to make everybody go bananas, but it's actually the work of this black dissident named Malik, who is secretly a double agent for Hydra. You know, Marvel's neo-Nazi, super racist terrorist network that has no real world analogue. Now, as to why the Fourth Reich would want to hire a black dude, or why a hardcore black identitarian would even think about aligning himself with people trying to clone Hitler, though, Coates gives us the following explanation: absolutely fucking nothing at all, whatsoever.
And then the comic just ends with the crew declaring themselves "the streets," with no final battle, no resolution about Malik or the Americops or the Paragon subplot, nor Hydra or even who really killed Ezra. We get four pages of fan letters, then the editors talk about the comic getting cancelled earlier than they'd like, and that is it for the whole god-dang experiment.
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| But seriously ... why is that bad advice, exactly? |
Boy, did that end on an anti-climactic note or what? It's obvious that Coates had planned out a much larger story, as evident by the mountains of loose ends left unresolved at the end of issue six. For example, we never even scratched the surface of who Ezra's super-P.O.C. were, whom seemed pretty rife for a spin-off at some point. And it seems like that Malik guy was being positioned as a Kingpin-like uber-villain, who probably would've commandeered scores of his own super-powered negroes to do battle with Black Panther's all-Melanin Avengers. Now, I'm not saying the series had potential, per se, but it seems like the thing could've gone on for another 12 or so issues, easy. Hell, if you had a real comic writer at the helm, it might have even turned into a pretty fun little series. Alas, with Coates calling the shots, it's pretty much a guarantee the thing would've crashed into the ground in a hurry; shit, just half a dozen issues in and it was already running on fumes.
As for the rest of the creative team, the series was penciled by Butch Guice (the same guy who drew Micronauts back in the day), inked by Scott Hanna (who has inked pretty much everything) and (people of) colored by Dan Brown, who, ironically enough, is not brown, but white. Aesthetically, I've got nothing bad to say about the series. I mean, it's not the most amazing art you'll see in a comic book, but it's still pretty crisp and clean and never really devolves into that oh-so pretentious abstractionism that so many modern series wind up falling into. Tis a pity they weren't given a decent story to wrap their drawings around, though.
If you're looking for some painfully unaware, crypto-reverse-racist agitprop, you'll probably be disappointed here. That's not to say the series is devoid of some heavy-handed and clumsily ham-fisted lecturing (because lord knows, it isn't) but it seems like Coates never really had the momentum nor the space to really start hammering home the political message he wanted. Maybe if he had another five or six issues to work with he would've gone completely overboard, but as is, Black Panther & The Crew is hardly anything more than a crappy superhero ensemble origin yarn, with some woefully inarticulate "social commentary" wedged in there. So it's propaganda that's too pussy to come out and announce itself as propaganda, which I think we can all agree is pretty much the most insufferable kinda of propaganda there is.
All in all Black Panther & The Crew is pretty much what you'd expect it to be. It's bad, but it's not brain-breakingly bad, which makes the whole package all the more disappointing. It's such a horribly uneventful series, that doesn't excel at anything - or, really, rise above mediocrity whatsoever. Instead of being an all-time, monumental dud, it's just another boring, unremarkable Marvel offering with hardly any distinguishing characteristics.
Which, yeah, I suppose makes it the epitome of late 2010s, multiculturalism-uber-alles comic books, now that I think about it ...
Wednesday, July 26, 2017
Kool-Aid Man on the Atari 2600!
Oh yeahhhh ... is definitely NOT something you're going to say while playing this antiquated sack of shit. (And also, some stuff about a comic book from the early 1980s.)
By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX
Video game/consumer product tie-ins - sometimes colloquially referred to as "advergames" - are hardly anything new. In fact, the Atari 2600 was eat up with such games, including titles based on dog food, tooth paste and literally killing the word "Pepsi." Alas, as brass-balled exploitative as those games may have been, they pale in comparison to the utter shamelessness of Kool-Aid Man, a video game based on ... well, what the fuck do you think it would be based on?
Granted, the idea of turning a recurring advertising character primarily known for flippantly causing massive property damage to spread the gospel of artificially flavored sugar water into a feature-length video game sounds a bit of a stretch, and the end product we got on the Atari 2600 certainly demonstrates that some ideas simply don't make for interactive virtual experiences.
Now, do keep in mind that two Kool-Aid Man-branded games were released around the same time. The one on the Intellivision had far superior graphics and gameplay, as you commandeered some kids trying to collect all the accouterments to make Kool-Aid while avoiding these little gremlin motherfuckers who traipsed around the house like Michael Myers in that awesome Atari iteration of Halloween. Even better, once you finally DID collect all the Kool-Aid ingredients, you could summon Kool-Aid Man himself a'la Captain Planet to enter the fray and proceed to brutally murder said gremlin motherfuckers before advancing to the next stage. Man, that game was fuckin' awesome.
Unfortunately, the Kool-Aid game we got on the 2600 was nowhere near as much fun. It's about as rudimentary of a video game as you can imagine, yet it's also frustrating as all fuck. And to top it off, the core gameplay is so minimalist that I'm starting to wonder if I can even stretch out my review beyond two paragraphs. Alas, we here at IIIA love us some challenges, and if we can get 1,000 words out there about this thing, we can assuredly churn out twice as many words on literally ANY other topic in the universe.
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| So, uh, is it about gay pride or something? |
After a cold opening that depicts the titular character (whose stature, interestingly, keeps fluctuating) crashing through a brick wall, the game begins proper. The gameplay is really, really simple. You play a mini pitcher of sugar water and there are multicolored "Thirsties" flying all over the place. Every two or three seconds, one of 'em will halt in their tracks, extend their penis-like proboscises into a pool of what I presume to be water and start slurping up the agua. If they suck it all up, it's game over - and to make the game THAT more difficult, the depleted water doesn't refill from stage to stage. So basically, every time they drop their cocks in the drink, you're supposed to bump into them, thus instantly killing their water-thieving asses. The catch is, if you touch any of the Thirsties when they're not drinking, your avatar will start flying uncontrollably across the screen like a Pong ball. This is made a billion times more aggravating because every time you hit another Thirstie while flying across the game space, the bouncing animation continues for another two or three seconds. And with all those motherfuckers speeding across the screen (like in Galaga, the fewer enemies there are on screen the faster they get) there are points in the game where you're basically going to get stuck in an infinite "bounce" loop because you keep getting pinballed by bad guys. And to say this is just mildly irritating is kinda' like saying taking a drink from Bill Cosby is just slightly dangerous to your butthole.
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| NOW you motherfuckers are going to pay ... for like, three seconds, then it's back to not being able to do Jack Shit in this P.O.S. game. |
Thankfully, the game is pretty liberal with its power-ups. Every 15 or so seconds a random letter (sometimes it's an "S," sometimes it's a "K," sometimes it's "W" - all allusions to the three primary ingredients of the product, sugar, water and Kool-Aid, I suppose) flies by and if you touch it your avatar will momentarily (as in, for about five seconds) get three times as big, develop facial features and - most importantly of all - become totally impervious to enemy attacks. Granted, you've got to be fast as a motherfucker to snatch the things up, and you better be one hell of a navigator, too, since the items usually blaze by virtually unavoidable clumpings of Thirsties. While the letter you pick up changes you a different color, your abilities (and the duration of those abilities) remain the same no matter what hue you are, which I guess could be taken as a coded message about racial harmony. Well, that, or the game designers were just lazy as fucking hell. Your call.
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| Welcome to Kool-Aid purgatory. Pity-a-plenty for the whippersnapper that can't figure out how to restart the game from here... |
Your guess is as good as mine as to how long the game is or just how many stages are included. I got up to level four and just stopped giving a shit, so for all we know, maybe the game takes on some sort of radical genre shift beginning with stage five - like a snowboarding simulator, or maybe even a real-time military strategy theme. Alas, it's more than just a little bit likely that the game just loops on forever and forever until there's no more water left, at which point your avatar is thrust into a nightmarish, pitch black purgatory and you have to hit the reset button. So there's no way to technically die, but there's no way to technically win, either. So, uh, what's the point of playing the game again? Oh yeah, that's right - there isn't.
I suppose, structurally, the gameplay is decent-ish. The controls are pretty responsive and if you have super autism and/or are easily entertained, you might be able to squeeze a half hour of entertainment out of the experience. But this thing is clearly not built for longevity, and what you've seen after five minutes of gameplay is literally all there is to it. Certainly there are worse 2600 games out there, but even compared to the bare bones nature of most games released on the console, this shit is just absurdly basic. It's pretty easy to see why this one was initially launched as a mail-in premium - anybody who paid cash money for this fucker got gypped worse than Enron shareholders.
Alright, is that 1,000 words yet? I don't even fucking know and I really don't even care at this point. I just spent an entire afternoon emulating a fucking Kool-Aid Man Atari game for a stupid comedy website, so literally anything else I could have been doing for the last two hours would be a step-up. That said, since we've got some virtual real estate to fill up, I'd like to turn your attention to the following:
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| ...but wouldn't that kill the kids, too? |
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| Eh, it's still better than Black Panther & The Crew, though. |
Obviously catered for the elementary school set, there's not a whole lot of depth to the comic (a shocker, I know.) Regardless, it nonetheless introduces us to the Thirsties - basically, these fuzzy yellow motherfuckers from outer space who get their sexual jollies making people sweaty and miserable. Of course, their plans are really, really short-sighted - for example, instead of depleting the world's fresh water supply, they decide to spend their afternoons shutting down the snack bar at little league baseball games and, gasp, getting sunshine in people's eyes while they're up to bat! Still, there's something unsettling about the creatures gagging and bounding a food vendor, and something VERY unsettling about Kool-Aid Man returning the favor by tying up the Thirsties with a 30-foot-long sausage link. But it's still not as creepy as the part where the giant, anthropomorphic dishware WHISKS several children away to his top-secret Thirsties-surveillance headquarters...
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| So nobody's going to question how a sentient jug of sugar water is able to monitor literally EVERYBODY on the planet in real-time ... or why he feels the need to do so? |
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| You know what I'd like to do with an inflatable Kool-Aid Man? That's right - everything. Well, except for fuck him. Come on, now, that's just gross. |
Of course, it's still just a front for shameless Kool-Aid propaganda. There's a good eight pages in the middle dedicated to nothing but various branded merchandise and to be totally honest, this stuff is some grade-A kitsch I'd LOVE to have in my collection of all things "stupid outdated shit." I'd be ecstatic to possess a vintage Kool-Aid Man key chain, and I'd be envious as a motherfucker of anybody who had a tote bag with the words "beat the Thirsties" inscribed upon it. But to own an INFLATABLE KOOL-AID MAN like the one pictured above? Not only is that shit easily worth 45 proofs of purchase, I'd probably stab somebody to get one.
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| I love how they tell you to charge more for the larger cups. As if anybody is dumb enough to charge people less for more of the same product! |
The comic isn't limited to crappy superhero theatrics involving copious amounts of child endangerment and shameless product pimpage, though. Just like those McGruff the Crime Dog comics, the comic also has quite a few special activities, including a page showing you how to set up a Kool-Aid stand (hooray, capitalism!) and another one that gives you a secret language to decrypt in order to find a super special message about what position the Kool-Aid Man would hypothetically play in baseball (and for fuck's sake, if you can't figure the pun out automatically, do us all a favor and please KYS.) All in all, though, I think it's a sturdy enough language and I think we should adopt it as secret tongue to trade sensitive and inflammatory intel back and forth online - anything to keep all those damn
from nosing around in our business, ain't that right? |
| "Joey _____ all his baseball cards." Aw, shit, that could literally be anything, you terrible clue-giving motherfuckers. |
It comes with a standard crossword puzzle, too, although I've got to say I think they're being just a tad too oblique with the clues here. For example, look at 2 Down:" _____ causes sickness that keeps you from playing ball." Well sweet fuck on a cracker, I can think of hundreds of diseases that could feasibly keep you off the baseball diamond. Is the answer "AIDS," or "herpes" or "Ebola?" 'Cause every one of them logically checks out. Let's see if any of the other clues are any easier. How about 4 down? "You need a ball and ____ to play." Well, this one's pretty easy, actually...
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| Well, that, or "dick," I suppose... |
I mean, what else could it be? Speaking of fun and games, you have GOT to check out this "connect the dots" puzzle included in the first issue.
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| Well, if it excites a cross-eyed, retarded looking kid, you KNOW it's got to be something good! |
Looks rather innocuous, no? Well, not when you actually complete the portrait. Needless to say, Kool-Aid Man's top secret message is - well, more than just a little concerning...
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| So does this mean Kool-Aid Man's working for Hydra now? |
Well, if nothing else, I suppose it explains why that blonde and blue-eyed kid at the bottom of the page is so excited. Still, you have to second guess Marvel's decision to include Nazi propaganda in a comic book intended for elementary schoolers, and I'm sure it's something the manufacturers of Kool-Aid were none too pleased about. Or were they?
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| Now THAT is how you end a story ... very, very poorly. |
There's a lot more I could say about this Kool-Aid Man comic. Indeed, the last two pages beseech me to dwell upon the following matters:
- How is Kool-Aid Man able to burst through a spacecraft wall without the vacuum of space sucking him and everybody else into the vacant vastness of the cosmos? Furthermore, does Kool-Aid Man even need to breathe oxygen? Is he just entirely self-sustained by Kool-Aid? Can he reproduce, sexually? How did he learn English, and how is he able to talk without anything even remotely resembling vocal cords?
- If Kool-Aid Man is impervious to thirst, does that mean he's technically immortal? And where did he get that jet pack? Come to think of it, where did he get the money for anything? That high-tech surveillance compound couldn't have come cheap. Is Tony Stark or Hydra bankrolling this motherfucker or something?
- Did they mean for the exploded Thirsties to look like minstrel show characters?
- Is it just me or does that scientist look LEGITIMATELY concerned that a sentient fruit punch bowl figured out the fundamentals of outer space rocket travel? And whatever happened to that kind of iffy in hindsight brand slogan "the one for kids?" Does Kool-Aid still have the patent, and at what point did they decide to abandon it so as to not alienate adult product purchasers? And for that matter, is it true that black people foster a peculiar fondness for said product, and if a white politician serves said product at a fundraiser for black supporters, is it really technically racist?
Eh, like I said earlier, this is just too much shit to wrap my head around at once. Instead, I'm just going to end this whole pointless spiel the only way that's sensible - with a whole bunch of old Kool-Aid commercials from way back when. Watch 'em and weep with nostalgia, kids!
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