Written and Illustrated by Michael Kupperman
In this issue Quincy, M.E. makes his comic book debut, struggling through the fantastic landscapes of his own dreams in “Quinception,” in which St. Peter also gets his own comic book. Snake ‘n’ Bacon make an appearance in “Reservoir Dogs 2,” where the gang reunites for another caper. Twain and Einstein deal with some family issues, and a special section of History Comics presents the story of the Kennedy/Nixon debate and the incredible saga of Bertrand DeCoupeur, alias The Scythe! Plus a photocomic starring comedian Julie Klausner, “Voyage To Narnia.”
It’s the holidays, so this is all you damn well get in the way of content. (Well, that and it’s also a weekend.) In the tradition of hostage-takers worldwide, I will use this captive audience to point out a comic that you should be reading, but that you probably aren’t. This is different from Friday Recommendation because it’s Saturday, but more importantly, it’s a holiday miracle — after the jump.
Writing superhero comics — big-two ones, I mean — often seems like it wouldn’t be very much fun. There are all those, like, rules, maaan. A couple of them are even written down: write x number of issues until your contract runs out or you become unprofitable, whichever comes first. Take part in marketing initiatives when it’s time to give the line a booting (“aw, it’s just a little tap on the fanny”). Unspoken rules: please the readers, remain essentially true to the character they’ve invested a significant portion of their attention (even their lives) into, make sense where possible, go just crazy enough to fake it but not crazy enough to be crazy, give passive-aggressive interviews about how you deserve a medal for not killing a black guy or de-powering a woman guy, etc.
Humor comics, meanwhile, have one rule: god damn it, you’ve got to be funny.
Like everything else about comics, the sword cuts both ways. You can get away with the most bizarre dadaist moron tangents in a humor comic — if they’re funny. If they’re not, you’re done, and you’ll just leave a confused, repulsed readership that will shrink and shrink until you’re banging on Marvel’s door with a script where you poke snarky fun at the idea of Clor or something. Worse still, it’s even more of a highwire act because the patience for stories that aren’t “important” — and “funny for its own sake” is like shooting “important” in the eyeball Tony Blundetto style — is at an all-time low. Do you know what people want for humor? Infographics about Harley Quinn’s tits that reinforce their malice toward Jim Lee or Cully Hamner or whoever designed her new suit (and any editor who signed off on it to boot), or the entire contents of imgur.com. As a nation of readers, I’m not sure we’re ready to laugh again (as much as let out a sharp judder of breath that might count as half a chuckle), which is more than anything else a commentary on what a piss-poor, thoroughly not-fun nation we are.
Michael Kupperman, hopefully, doesn’t care about any of that. I like to imagine him sitting in some tiny hellhole of a studio apartment packed deep into the bowels of New York — these noble creatures lose their mystique when they own homes — doing mutant Thrizzle pages until they stop paying him or until he gets a gig in the back pages of Vice. Some feminine if not female voice of reason hovers next to his desk, thumbing through the newest set as he leans back in his chair, wondering if Fantagraphics paid him enough to afford blowing the budget on a beer, wiping entirely imaginary sweat from his brow. “So this Quincy, M.E. thing is, like… twenty pages?” she asks, the corner of her lip quirking into a tiny frown. “I mean, the only people who still know about Quincy are over thirty or the sort of insane person who watches local TV affiliates alone at three in the morning.”
“Well, we are selling a comic book,” Michael Kupperman replies, shuffling his pens.
Continued below“It’s just… you go into the bathtubs are evil stuff at the beginning, and that’s wacky, but it’s wacky in a way that’s not really connected to anything, you know? Like, who would ever think to connect Dracula and a hatred of bathtubs? But then the Quincy thing starts, and it’s such a specific joke, and it keeps folding back in on itself until it turns into the fumetti thing about people talking like Quincy…”
“But is it funny?” Michael asks, looking up, face earnest in its need to know.
“Yeah, it’s pretty funny,” the voice of reason says, handing the assortment of pages back. “You should put another Twain and Einstein thing at the end, though. People loved that shit.”
Final Verdict: 8.5 / Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, bye
