Epic Fail, Part I

Let’s say you’ve decided to buy your very first comic book. Why? I don’t know; maybe you were blown away by The Dark Knight. Maybe Heroes piqued your interest in the genre. Maybe you’ve suffered a grievous head injury and your former voracious love of dense, Shelby Foote-style historical tomes has been scoured away by cranial shrapnel and road gravel, leaving only the parts of your brain that responds to brightly-colored underwear perverts. Who gives a fuck?

Anyway. So you want a comic book. You understand intellectually that comics are really magazines and not books, so you go to a newsstand and… nope; no comics. Dude at the counter says he hasn’t had any comic books since around 1983… or at least that’s what you think he says, since he’s Korean and only speaks English as a second irritation. To be fair, when you asked for “comics”, he tried to sell you Trojan Tight Fits, so you’re clearly not in the right place, no matter which of you is more racist.

You go to drugstores, supermarkets, and convenience stores, all without a single comic book to be found. So you wander into Borders and find a shelf labeled “Graphic Novels” filled with big, thick paperbacks that look like giant comic books if they were written by, well, Shelby Foote. You don’t know what a “Y The Last Man” is, and “Preacher” sounds like children’s Jesus propaganda, so you look for something you’ve at least heard of… ah! Iron Man! You saw that movie! Robert Downey Jr. plays himself had he been paid the $20 million he deserved for Weird Science, only with a suit of armor!

So you flip open the book and… Robert Downey Jr.’s the leader of some government agency called SHIELD. What the… you thought Shaft was the leader of SHIELD! So you flip a few more pages and… huh: Bob seems to be able to retract the Iron Man armor into his butthole or something. But where’s his buddy Terrence Howard – ah! There he is… half man and half machine with his own Iron Man suit, except it has a giant phallic gatling gun on the shoulder; Terry must be compensating for something. So you flip the book over and look at the price and Jesus Fucking Christ! You are not paying thirty dollars to read about Iron Man doing government paperwork.

Buy hey! There’s Spider-Man! So you grab that book, and… he’s wearing the black costume? You thought he got rid of that in Spider-Man 3! And who shot Aunt May? And… why is Spider-Man spending 30 pages talking to the fucking Devil? Aaaand at the end of it, the Devil sends him back to the middle of the first Spider-Man movie. You flip to the climax to see… Peter Parker asking Aunt May to make him wheatcakes. You stand corrected: it’s the middle of Spider-Man 1, only with 75 percent more boring suck.

But even after that disillusioning experience, you’re not deterred… which points to your having brain damage instead of general curiosity. So you type “comic books” into the Yellow Pages app on your iPhone, and… hey! There’s a comic book store right here in Cambridge! It’s called Million Year Picnic, and it’s in Harvard Square! Might as well check it out; it probably won’t be busy. After all:  it’s only Wednesday.

So you get to the address, and walk down a flight of stairs to the basement and find the door. As you open it, you’re blasted with a wave of techno music, and the place is packed. You elbow your way in, and ask the kid behind the counter if they have Spider-Man. He looks up from a book which seems to star someone with a dude’s head an a gibbon’s body named “Spaceboy“, exposing a facial race between piercings, acne and cold sores. He sighs heavily and says, “The books are all alphabetical, sir,” with dripping sarcasm. You thank him by not yanking out one of his lip rings.

You shoulder your way through a crowd of college guys who are emitting every bodily odor ever cataloged by science except sex to the “S” section, and… no Spider-Man. Irritated, you look right, and then left, and there! All the way down under “A”! Apparently it’s called “The AMAZING Spider-Man”. As you begin to muscle through the mass of humanity toward the “A’s”, you idly wonder if you should look for Batman under “V” for “vigilante”, or maybe “D” for “Christian Bale is a Douchebag”.

After edging past a fat kid who’s drooling blankly at the cover of a book called All-Star Batman and Robin (Yeah, why file Batman under “B”?), which features a drawing of a blonde in fishnets with gravity-defying tits and fuck-me eyes drawn by some obvious pervert named Jim Lee, you’re face to face with the comic’s cover: Spider-Man with President Obama. You’re not familiar with the comics world, but this strikes you as an obvious sales-booting publicity stunt along the lines of when Vanessa Williams was in Penthouse. As you reach for the book, you idly hope that the President wasn’t drawn by Jim Lee.

You finally get your hands on the book, and as you’re checking the cover to see who drew it you notice the price and fuck me sideways, they want four dollars? For a fucking twenty-four page magazine? You toss the book back on the shelf and head back to the street, passing a newsstand that you notice carries a magazine promising a hundred pages of glossy photos of skanks bound in “erotic” positions with every form of tape known to man, including Memorex… for $3.50.

As you walk away from the comic store toward your car, you think, “Four bucks, huh? I’m gonna use that four dollars and rent all the Batman movies. That’ll kill the entire weekend. Fuck comic books.”

And, as much as I hate to say it, that is why you are not going to like Watchmen, and why it will fail at the box office.

TO BE CONTINUED…

[tags]Watchmen, comic books, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Zack Snyder, dark humor, satire[/tags]