“Curse Words” #7

Jacques Zacques returns for a second showdown with Wizord. Will Interpol’s finest Frenchman taste victory, or will he face a fate worse than death?

Cover by Ryan Browne

Curse Words #7
Created by Charles Soule & Ryan Browne
Colored by Addison Duke & Ryan Browne
Lettered by Chris Crank

“EXPLOSIONTOWN,” Part Two Wizord is in a tough spot, as the leaders of Earth have decided they’re pretty fed up with wizard battles tearing up the joint all the time. They want to shut him down! Selfish, right? They really just don’t get it. Expect intense magical action as the second arc of CURSE WORDS continues!

Let’s be real – Charles Soule and Ryan Browne’s intrepid, highly hyper-animated, Interpol agent never really has a swinging chance when he steps up to bat against Wizord. For all his fervid animosity – simmered to a delicious intensity by Browne’s knack for capturing frothed and still-seething emotion in a character’s eyes and teeth-clenched grimace – it’s just never going to happen for Zacques. As “Curse Words” #7 opens, it seems he might have the drop on our wicked wizard. He’s got a gun held to Wizord’s furrowed brow; he CRICKs the hammer back.

But in the blink of an eye – and with a “Shazoom” from the lips of Wizord – Jacques Zacques’ hand, and the gun held therein, are transformed into a stapler. And it’s quickly snapped off at the forearm to be placed next to the stationary on Wizord’s desk. The humiliation doesn’t end there, though. And despite a button-tearing, chest-bearing protestation from Zacques that he’d rather die than live in a world polluted by Wizord’s mere existence, our hero lets him live.

After a diamond-blue snap, crackle and sizzle released from the wizard’s staff, Zacques’ face is transformed into the seat of an office chair. On that face, Browne captures a fleeting moment of horrified indignation, wreathed in the dissipating electricity of Hole World magic, before Wizord kicks away his old chair away and jumps his ass into the new one with a punitive flourish. And all this occurs before we even learn, albeit with little surprise, that Wizord’s favored tactic in his realm’s ultra-violent analogue for baseball was that of humiliation.

So, yes, “Curse Words” #7 is still filled to the brim with Charles Soule and Ryan Browne’s irreverent, magical, bat-shit insanity. And I don’t think this issue is exactly showing a softer side of the denizens we’ve all come to love – I think Jacques Zacques could definitely attest to that. But there is a rather healthy vein of self-awareness and self-actualization that comes across over these 20-odd pages.

Ruby Stitch has a literal moment of self-reflection as Browne and Soule place her in front of a shop window so that she may take in a vision of her new appearance. The scene plays out with a stark simplicity, in contrast to the bombastic, angular paneling that has characterized the bulk of the series’ page layouts. In one panel, single tears draw from each eye down her cheeks. In another, she fingers a tuft of her now black, lifeless hair. The page construction itself is surprisingly evocative of that new reality, stripped from all magic as she is.

While Ruby faces moment of powerlessness, “Curse Words” #7 goes out of its way to show Margaret taking her first platypus-steps towards self-defined agency. She’s rubbed raw by Ruby’s suggestion that she’s nothing more than one of Wizord’s possessions, something to be given out as he pleases. “Give me?,” she’s says in her own moment of indignation (and if you’ve never seen platypus-claws-on-platypus-hips style indignation, then you’re missing out on a real treat). “No one gets to…,” she trails off. But it’s enough of a moment to perfectly show why she spends her time here sussing out whether or not to tell Ruby where to find the magic in this world.

But if there’s one image from the issue that’s indelible – besides Zacques face as a seat cushion, which leaves a lasting impression of a different kind – it’s Wizord using an anthropomorphized plume of wizard-smoke to flip a towering, double-bird to the Earth-based forces dogging him with intercontinental ballistics. And it’s in that moment, at the height of his hubris, that he realizes that’s the exact same look he’d use to curry favor with Sizzajee in the past.

Browne and Soule are clever enough to allow the Margaret-Ruby Stitch story and Wizord’s own in “Curse Words” #7 to glance off each other without directly intertwining. As such, Ruby catches sight of a certain, gigantic mystic apparition in the sky giving two middle fingers to his enemies. So while Margaret explains the face-turn Wizord experienced in coming to Earth and argues that he’s indeed a changed wizard, Ruby can do nothing more but gaze into the sky and state, “That sure looks like him to me.”

In their letters column this week, Charles Soule and Ryan Browne address the fact there’s nary a filthy, four-letter word to be heard in their book. For all the nasty, mystical shenanigans, this is a relatively clean read. On the flip-side, though, those trappings are just arcane, interdimensional-chicanery trying to hide a story that’s truly about self-awareness and self-actualization. “Curse Words” #7 takes some massive strides in that regard – including the ultimate fate of Jacques Zacques – all while remaining one of the most visually arresting and continuously hilarious books out there.

Final Verdict: 8.5 – Charles Soule and Ryan Browne, you clever sons of…