The American Jerk

EDITOR’S NOTE: Referencing events from waaaay back in classic Epic Fail issue 1 and issue 2! -Retarded Rob Reuter

If you don’t speak the language of comic books (EDITOR’S NOTE: The first person who says “Biff!” or “Pow!” will be cheerfully beaten and / or sodomized with my Frank Miller Dark Knight statue), you’re just not going to see a lot of what’s happening in Watchmen.

Take Dr. Manhattan. At face value, he’s a moody, self-absorbed prick with superpowers. But when viewed through the right eyes, you recognize that he’s actually a stand-in for the Superman archetype, which adds a whole new level to his actions. When you can get past saying, “Wow, Dr. Manhattan’s a real scumbag,” and start saying, “Wow, Superman would be a real scumbag,” you’re getting the entirety of his character arc. Without it, he’s just a douche with a blue wang, and that’s not entertaining for anyone outside of basement clubs in Haight Ashbury.

“Okay, smart guy,” you might be saying, “If Dr. Manhattan’s actually Superman, then who’s Batman?” Glad you asked. It’s actually two guys: Rorschach and Nite Owl. Rorschach’s the dark, obsessed part of Batman… and appropriately, he’s a broke motherfucker with mommy issues who lives in utter squalor with no treatment for his obvious crippling mental illness. After all: losing your parents would be horrifying, but something tells me little Bruce Wayne would be able to afford therapy, or at least enough Paxil to avoid dressing like Dracula and grappling with spastics in dirty alleys.

No, there’s only one reason a rich guy would piss away the family fortune building vehicles that look like animals when there’s a perfectly good Toyota dealer down the street: because it gives him a boner. Enter: Nite Owl, who apparently spent half a billion dollars on the Owlship alone, all to give him an excuse to indulge his spandex-on-spandex fetish with similarly unbalanced chicks. Looked at correctly, he’s one feathery cape away from being a fucking furry.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Don’t forget to read the thrilling secret origin of Epic Fail!

Now, I know that you might be reading at home thinking, “Gee Rob, you’re a borderline alcoholic from Boston, and when I say “Borderline” I refer ironically to the Madonna song, which is to say: terrible. You’ve had failed careers in stand-up comedy and radio, so with your dirt clod of a resume documenting a decade and a half as the lowest forms of show business life on the planet, who are you to comment on whether Watchmen will be successful or not?”

That’s an excellent question. Who am I? I’m fuck you, that’s who I am.

These are pictures I snapped around my house just before I sat down to write this. There’s no picture of my first print actual issues of Watchmen because I’m too hung over to be digging through twenty-five longboxes to find them. I’m showing you these to prove something to you, and it’s not just that I found it impossible to get laid in high school.

There are two things in this world that I know backwards and forwards:  where to get Internet porn, and Watchmen. And until somebody makes a 100 million dollar movie about the other one (Which would be impossible. It wouldn’t cost one million to make a movie that lasts fifteen seconds where you already know how it ends. Even if you shot it in iMax. Which I do not recommend. I’m digressing again, aren’t I?), you’re gonna have to believe me when I tell you that you’re on my turf here… and that you will not like it.

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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.

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