This book came out in 1989 and I wasn’t sure
what to make of it. As a kid, one of the highlights of collecting Marvel Comics
were the awesome Fred Hembeck cartoons that would occasionally be sprinkled in
select issues. He also had a rotating segment in Marvel Age: the official Marvel
magazine that was pretty funny. But some of his humor was contained of inside
jokes that unless you were older and really knew about the goings on of the
comics industry, you wouldn’t understand.
I found this book recently in a bargain bin
and since it was cheap and I remember owning it as a kid, I decided to make it
a part of my collection again.
In this one-shot, Hembeck crafts a tale in
which Death is tasked with killing off all of the characters of the Marvel
Universe in one day. Nobody is safe from Hembeck’s poison pen. Lawn work
becomes Ant-Man’s biggest nightmare while Asgard succumbs to the metal sounds
of Ragnorok & Roll music. Daredevil learns the difference between a sigh
and a sai while the X-Men face their most dangerous foes ever- Ninja Sentinels!
The book is absurd but it’s really fun. The
art is classic Fred Hembeck- cartoony and I suspect with everyone’s bulbous
eyes and oval heads, an influence on Matt Groening’s Simpsons. As the cover
says, this romp is a ‘Marvel Massacre’ but I didn’t feel that my time, money,
or intelligence was victims to Hembeck’s skewed view of the Marvel Universe.
Worth Consuming.
Rating: 8 out of 10
stars.
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