click it! click it good.Ok, so as usual I'm starting my review with an image taken from a comic book, and as usual that image has been selected because it made me giggle when I saw it for the first time. Unusually, this panel has not been spirited away from a mid-Sixties comic novel, but rather from an issue of Shade the Changing Man, c. 1993. Now, it's not that contemporary (oh shit, '93 isn't that contemporary anymore, is it? Curse you, Father Time!) comics to not bring the laffs with them when they come to visit, it's just that we've all become so much more aware of our senses of humour since der Sixties. The above panel, featuring Ernest Hemingway clobbering a mutated alien police officer while James Joyce eggs him on, could certainly have occurred in a 1965 issue of Superman, but if it had, it wouldn't have been because someone had realized ahead of time that it'd be hilarious (well, probably not, anyway). It would have just happened. Superman would be dicking around in the past - telling people about the future, getting involved in important events, daring the laws of causality to be true, the usual - and he'd run into Hemingway and Joyce, and there'd be a scrap, because there always was. And that's why it would have been funnier to have found this exact panel in that 1965 Superman: because nobody involved meant for shit like this:
so very funny. They just wanted a picture of Clark Kent wrestling some guy, 'cause it was part of the plot. The result: comic gold. Cheap comic gold. Comic fool's gold. Yeah.JOHN APPROVED
Wait, what did I just approve of?
Posts
3 comments:
You just approved a comic of a guy on the back of another guy. What would Freud say to that? Now if we took that same image and played with it in Photoshop, placed Stephen Harper's head here and George W.'s head there... now that would be funny, according to Shartacus (not to say that it isnt funny now because, really, it is). Perhaps there's potential for a Counter Strike spray??
I've been reading the second Showcase: Superman collection. Every single panel is laugh-out-loud funny. You can't beat Superman for hilarity.
He's so dumb and in love with himself in those old comics - about a third of his thoughts were basically, "Oh noes! There's a bird flying overhead! If I don't act like the downdraft from its wings is forcing me to the ground, everyone will think that I'm Superman!" Even though Clark Kent is like seven feet tall and built like a pro wrestler, he overcompensates so much that Archie Andrews could beat him up.
Post a Comment