Scotch McTiernan's Holiday Party #1

Thanks to my experience with their Halloween special, I was willing to give the Brian Posehn/Gerry Duggan/Scott Koblish holiday follow-up a try. I really wish I had saved my money.

The entire book is a stoner's Christmas Carol warning of the dangers of a 2024 Trump/Red Wave election victory. While I support free speech and I understand the fears of what MAGA candidates are going to do win OR lose after the November elections; it's just not appropriate for a Christmas themed comic book. (And if I am wrong about that- then at least put a warning label on the front cover!)

I'm okay with Christmas horror. I'm even okay with a little bit of Christmas dystopia. Usually with all those types of tales, there's at least a glimmer of positivity and hope. Not so here! There's not one single bit of joyful anticipation in this 2022 comic from Image. The writers are so angry that if this comic book could fester cancer from the bitterness, then the case would be terminal.

Maybe I should have realized from the shocks of the Halloween special that there would be no sacred cows here. Based on the cover, I didn't expect a reverent comic. Heck, I was expecting a lot of drug culture humor and Deadpool level violence. And I was OK with all that. Based on the cover, it all looked so cheerful and fun. I was instead sucker-punched with this woebegone tome. I really didn't expect this to be such a downer in expectation of what 2024 might bring. Hell, I wasn't even expecting the next election to even be a glimmer in the eye of the creators being published so far away from 2024.

January through October of 2024 is going to have enough fear and loathing on its own. I just don't need it during my holiday reads. That's my time to delight and wonder. The team of Duggan/Posehn/Koblish stole that from me with this book. 

Grinches....

Not Worth Consuming!

Rating: 2 out of 10 stars.

Scotch McTiernan's Halloween Party #1

I'm rather familiar with Gerry Duggan and Brian Posehn. Both were the writers of an epic run of Deadpool stories that saw the Merc With a Mouth gaining a daughter, taking on a zombie horde of dead presidents and the return of the demonically funny Madcap! With their stories, I've learned to expect the unexpected and that there are no sacred cows! But man, was the opening to the book a real punch to the face.

This Halloween special starts off with a maniacal clown about to kill a whole bunch of party goers. Yet, the fiend is beaten to the punch by a mass shooter and then another mass shooter and another. The whole opening sequence of this story was meant to ask the question 'whose is the real monster- those of our nightmares or the regular man on the street?' But with the gore and blood and language and that poor dead bunny rabbit, I was so dumbstruck and shocked; it was like a climate activist had come into my comic book collection and poured tomato soup over everything.

After the initial shock, things got less in-your-face but the wildness and impulsiveness factors never dwindled. When  the 'hero' of this story, Scotch McTiernan, finally appears, the theme of the story has already changed. Over the course of this special we go from biting social commentary to 80s action hero satire to a parody of the 1982 classic E.T., and then things wrap up with a skewering of the religious right while channeling The Most Dangerous Game and Suicide Squad.

In the 1990s, Frank Miller created a character named Lance Blastoff. This souped up rocket man was gritty, grim, bloody as hell- oh, and irreverent. Nothing was safe from Frank Miller's take on the overly testosteroned super hero. Critics claimed that Miller created the character as his form of nose-thumbing at activists who saw mature comics as something to be banned and abhorred. For a while, Miller's character was used in campaigns and fundraising comics produced by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and it seemed the more they did, the wilder Lance Blastoff got. I get the same vibe here with Scotch McTiernan. Only I don't think Duggan and Posehn are doing it for the CBLDF...

Scotch McTiernan first debuted earlier this year in a book called The Secret History of the War on Weed. I didn't know that it was a book meant to celebrate 4/20 Day. Regardless, it wasn't on my radar and if I had known that the former was based on that April tribute to pot, I probably wouldn't have placed a request on this special. Yet Duggan, Posehn and their Deadpool favorited artist, Scott Koblish, were listed as the creators and that was good enough for me. 

Now that I've completed this book, I've got a couple of decisions to make. Do I want to own The Secret History of the War on Weed since it is a 'holiday' book? And do I want to own the forthcoming Christmas special that Duggan, Posehn and Koblish have lined up about Scotch McTiernan? I'm going to say yes to both. However, I'm also going to be wearing a whole lot of armor when I do. Those first 6 pages of this Halloween special are going to haunt me for decades and the horror had nothing to do with the creatures of the night. 

The opening of Scotch McTiernan's Halloween Party will hit you like a ton of bricks. While those elements of this story, which as a teacher hits very close to home, are temporary, the irreverence and insanity that turned me into a Deadpool fan never wanes from this comic. Maybe if Wade Wilson was doing all of this craziness and not just some random dudes with guns and body armor, I wouldn't be so unsettled. If so, I might have really enjoyed the last 3/4 of this book much as well.

This is definitely not a Halloween special for kids! Mature readers only!

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 7 out of 10 stars.