Welcome back to Indie February here at The Unspoken Decade! If you missed Dean Compton’s great look at Exiles in Part 1, I suppose you’ll just have something to look forward to once you’re done with this, Part 2, which delves into Topps Comics’ Satan’s Six! This comic is part of the Kirbyverse, made up of multiple titles released simultaneously that develop unrealized designs and concepts of the King himself, Jack Kirby. Darry Weight’s look at the whole of the Kirbyverse is coming up next in Indie February, so hopefully this glance in will whet your appetite for the whole enchilada!
Of course, that endeavor would probably be more likely if I had more positive things to say about Satan’s Six…
Before any fans of this work go reaching for their torches and pitchforks, as thematically appropriate as it might be for this comic, I should make the disclaimer that I won’t be wholly critical. There’s a lot of fun to be had reading Satan’s Six, and it injects a lot of humor into a traditionally horror setting. It’s got a great premise. All of the good so far, sure, but even from the first few pages, I would swear Satan’s Six is actively trying to get me to dislike it. For example, the word I kept coming back to in describing the art is abrasive:
I hope your eyes have not been too seared to continue reading.
The color palette is loud and garish, proportions distorted and grotesque. Much of the action is so heavily stylized that I can barely tell what is depicted in multiple panels. I’m sure some of the off-putting effect is intentional to reinforce the hellish subject matter, but the comic is so, well, just unpleasant to look at that I spent most of my time reading it going, “Gaaaaah” in my head.
My impulse to make that noise is helped not at all by the fact that of the three or four facial expressions characters make in this comic, one of them looks exactly like they are making that noise too. Seriously, this face:
appears over….
and over…
and over again.
The whole comic, however, does not look like this. Several pages were drawn by Kirby himself, which would be great (both because well, it’s Jack Kirby, and because they’re the only pages that don’t feel like the top layer of my eyes are being scrubbed off) if it weren’t for how awkwardly they are shoehorned in: the narrator basically just says not to mind the style change, this being hell and all.
This is not the only instance where the comic suffers from what I can’t decide is either lazy writing or attempts to be more clever than it actually is. The narrator herself, a Guardian Angel First Class of the Comic Book Division, is problematic in this vein, but before I get too deeply into those shortcomings I should probably, you know, say what the comic is about. I will kill two birds with one stone by showing some of Kirby’s work on the project and getting the premise across:
I will let you decide if that’s lazy writing or cleverness.
Pretty great premise, right? Being raised in a Pentecostal church, a denomination big on the fire and brimstone, I have always been fascinated by depictions of Hell and demons and different takes on the afterlife in general. The idea of a group of people trying to make it out of Limbo by winning souls for Hell is a great twist (made doubly great by them constantly messing up because they’re not evil enough), and the comic works best when it hews closest to this simple but brilliant idea. Where it starts to lose me is when they reach for the heavens.
I told you that the narrator, Pristine, is a guardian angel from the Comic Book Division, but what I can’t tell you is what purpose it actually serves to make her so meta, unless it is to highlight the gimmicky nature of the comic. She could just as easily be the guardian angel to these characters without explicitly telling you they are comic book characters, and I kept waiting for this breaking of the fourth wall to have a greater payoff than, say, allowing writer Tony Isabella to use the first six pages of Issue #2 to recap Issue #1 through Pristine.
I chose this page because this is a 90s comics site, and what could be more 90s than a beeper?
None of this criticism is to say that the character doesn’t work at all. When the winking at the reader is toned down and she is merely meddling with our anti-anti-heroes’ plans, she is quite entertaining. For instance, while the Six are assisting a professor who has sold his soul to stop an ancient archaeological find of his from breaking free and taking over the world, Pristine reminds Frightful that if any of the Six should die saving someone, they’d likely go to Heaven, forcing him to intervene. There’s something sinister behind her wide grin, the inversion of the angelic and demonic does its best to add back a satisfying layer of complexity that the meta-ness subtracts.
Had this comic gone on longer, these two would totally have been someone’s OTP.
The rest of the characters would have benefited greatly from a longer run, since they are thoroughly one-note in their introduction, but that doesn’t stop Satan’s Six from having some legitimately emotionally affecting moments. The third issue centers on one of Dezira’s old flames, everyone’s favorite hunchback Quasimodo, cutting loose from Limbo to save her from the Devil’s trickery. His own penance was almost up, and his act of self-sacrifice earns him an automatic ticket to Heaven, a sweet ending in a place I didn’t expect.
Of course, that sweetness is somewhat tempered by other weirdness going on in this issue, including a plot in which Quasimodo becomes a movie star after running into Lloyd Kaufman from Troma Entertainment. It’s a completely random-feeling and wonderful cameo, and the story gets in some nice satire of Hollywood, but like a lot of things in this comic, its many disparate elements feel like they were tossed in a blender, mixed up, and thrown at the wall to see what stuck rather than carefully thought out. There’s a haphazard feel to these proceedings that sometimes work and sometimes don’t but always make me feel frantic.
Just to further illustrate how many inconsistent parts make up this Frankenstein’s monster of a comic, I’ll mention, but not go into any great detail about an unfortunate incident involving Dr. Mordius drinking a potion of his own concocting and turning into a dog. On its own, that transformation wouldn’t be so bad, but the “what the fuck?” quotient is upped when he is chased around by another, amorous dog. Yeah, that’s all I’ve got to say about that…
Yep, that happened.
How about we look at another page of Jack Kirby’s, just to cleanse the ol’ palate?
That’s better.
The fourth and final issue in its initial run also tells a pretty emotionally satisfying story in which Harrigan schemes to negate a former colleague in crime’s contract with the Devil, but once again, the sweetness is undercut by a pretty silly gimmick. This time it’s another cameo, one that could actually make more sense, given the hellish backdrop of the story, but is somehow integrated worse into the story than freakin’ Lloyd Kaufman.
The gist is that Odious Kamodious, the demon who made the deal to send the Six back to Earth, is unhappy with Freightful’s performance as Team Leader and threatens to replace him with Jason Vorhees. Everyone fights for a bit and then Odious sends Jason back to Hell, but not before hanging a lampshade on the gimmick. Once again, I don’t know if this is supposed to be clever, but it just feels half assed. They could have legitimately inserted Jason into a story a million better ways, which I know to be true because one of Dean’s favorite things to do is talk about Jason showing up to machete irritating people, and it’s always more entertaining than this diversion.
I should not be this inclined to call a comic named Satan’s Six cutesy.
I feel like I’ve spent a lot of time criticizing Satan’s Six, but the more I’ve written about it and read sections of it again, the more I actually like. It’s worth reading for its premise and humor alone, and given more time, I think it would have suffered less from its gimmicks, since the non-gimmicky stuff seems so outweighed in only four issues. It’s frustrating to read something that doesn’t live up to its potential, but its flaws make it almost more intriguing than if it were just good, which is probably why I took up so much space discussing them. I can honestly say I’ve never read anything like Satan’s Six, and sometimes that’s the most ringing endorsement I can give.
Something else I enjoyed about this comic were the mini comics that closed out each issue, my favorite being one from Wolff and Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre. (Such a great name.) Wolff and Byrd turn up again in the main story of Issue #4, and at the end of Issue #1 they defend a demon summoned and abused by a professor. I’ll leave you with one of my favorite context-less panels ever and remind you one more time to be sure to come back for more of the Kirbyverse as Indie month continues!
Hello there, Legions of the Unspoken! We hope you enjoyed the Super Blog Team Up and all that goes with it! I am still sifting through the great offerings myself! it’s truly an honor to be a part of something so great! I already cannot wait for four months to pass so we can play with those cats again!
We have decided to dedicate this month, though, to the independent publishers of the 90’s, in what we are calling Indie February! What a cosmic storm of creativity it took to come up with that title! For real, though, we didn’t want to fancy up a title and draw any attention away from the great indie work that we are covering!
I think it might be impossible to explain just how hot comic books were at one time in the 90’s, but to say that the center of the sun was the only thing hotter is not only an appropriate thing to imagine, but I am sure it was literally true.
This is what comic book stores looked and felt like in the 90’s.
The state of the industry meant that those of us who were there got to see lots of comic book companies spring up, some for better and some for worse. No matter how bad someone perceived a Dagger Comics to be, though, their existence and the constant explosion of new comic book companies and universes made for an era of excitement. This part of the 90’s felt like anything could happen. We felt like any comic book company could just be the next Image or Valiant, as unlikely as that would be. That feeling, though, is what led my friends and I to constantly scribble ideas or doodle images in our notebooks.
Some companies got involved in creating the atmosphere that predated the era altogether. One of those companies was Malibu Comics, a stalwart publisher that was born as a black and white publisher in the late 1980’s, which was not a great time to attempt to break into comics as a black and white company. They came onto the scene following a glut of black and white material flooding the market in the wake of the huge success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Malibu, however, due to some luck and the hard work of guys like Tom Mason, Chris Ulm, Scott Rosenberg, Dave Olbrich, and many others, kept their operation afloat, and eventually became fairly successful. I knew what Malibu Comics was before I got into comics, although my knowledge of them was fuzzy. Not as fuzzy as the soup my brother made three weeks ago that lurks in the back of my refrigerator trying to kill me, but fuzzy enough that I would only claim cognizance of their existence and no more had I been asked.
Malibu also holds the honorable distinction of being the original publishers of Image Comics. I think Image would have been a success regardless of whether they immediately published themselves or had been with Malibu for the year that they were, but I do feel as though the year that Image spent with Malibu helped ease their transition into the world of comic book publishing. Eventually Image would leave the Malibu umbrella, but Malibu had been preparing, and they gave us the Ultraverse! They let us know the Ultraverse was coming, not just via house ads in trades, Wizard, and other comic book magazines, but they let the whole world know by buying TV commercials!
One of the many things that I find gets glossed over when it comes to the explosion of new universes and imprints in the 90’s gets touched upon in this commercial – how exciting it felt for the fans to get in on the ground floor of a universe. It wasn’t that the DC and Marvel Universes weren’t cool, but for my young friends and I who were into comic books, we wanted something that could “be ours.” We had fun learning the character histories and rivalries within the DC and Marvel Universes, but to be there when it all started was a fun all its own. We didn’t know what would be the next big universe, whether it was Triumphant, Lightning, or a revamped Now! Comics. Malibu seized this feeling with their Ultraverse by telling us directly that not only was this going to be a big deal, but we could get in now. They come across, and I mean this in a complimentary fashion, as a 90’s Marvel Bullpen Bulletins in their self-promotion. To be reading Ultraverse comics would place one in an echelon unreachable for comics fans who were only attempting to belong to a not-so-exclusive club called “EVERYONE.”
Malibu and all the parties involved built a world full of fantastic characters, concepts, and settings that made for a very interesting shared universe. The creators and the company worked hard to keep everything straight, fun, exciting, and most importantly, built to last.
Except one team. One team…was built to die.
He’s doing the twist, but he’s doing it in the 90’s, so it’s EXTREME!
The first time I heard or saw anything of The Exiles, the Ultraverse wasn’t around, and Image Comics was still under the Malibu Comics umbrella. I was a huge Protectors fan, and I saw two different house ads in those books for a book called Exiles. This book was seemingly just going to be a part of Malibu. There’s nary a mention of the Ultraverse. There’s nothing about Hardcase, Prime, or even NM-E! There was a house ad with just Exiles, and then there was a promo poster that I feel greatly solidifies the Exiles as having been conceived as properties of Malibu proper.
You just know Evil Ernie killed everyone on this poster mere moments later.
There in the lower right we see Exiles. There’s Ghoul, Tinsel, and basically everyone in the group but Deadeye. Of course, you don’t know who any of these folks are yet! (Maybe you do; I mean, I dunno if who is reading this right now has read this book or not. I shouldn’t claim such knowledge!) You don’t even know who Amber Hunt is. But here’s a hint as to who she is – she’s sort of a bitch.
Notice how Amber’s word balloon when she says “maybe” has those icicles that everyone knows signify that this lady is unpleasant, in the same way drinking swamp water is unpleasant. She reminds me of that popular girl from high school. You know the one. The one who was attractive, self-centered, and expected you to dote on her because she was attractive and self-centered. If the girl I knew in high school is reading this, I just want to ask her, why? I mean, you hate comic books. You told me so EVERY DAY.
Whew! Guess I need to let it go. Or I need to congratulate Tom Mason, the late Steve Gerber, Chris Ulm, Dave Olbrich, Paul Pelletier, and Ken Branch for doing such a fantastic job on creating Amber Hunt, because that’s pretty much the reaction they are looking for. I guess it is possible I am just an easy audience as well, but I’d rather just call them geniuses. I bet they feel the same way.
I also want to salute them for the arrows showing folks the progression of the panels. Many times, I hear my pals who don’t read comic books bemoan not knowing “how to read” comic books, or complaining that “I don’t understand the order in which the panels are supposed to be read.” Actually, most of my pals end that last sentence in a preposition, but the point is this is an impediment for those who have those issues. And I don’t begrudge the folks who say those things; it can be a legitimate complaint. If I read panels in the wrong order, though, I just re-read them in the proper order.
Now for some action! To make up for biology being boring, Amber Hunt gets a full-on superhero (should I say “Ultra” here?) brawl right outside her high school!
This is what my high school parking lot looked like every day, but there was MORE spandex.
Look, I will be the first to admit that there at least a dozen dudes who look like Deadeye. They had the big gun. They had the cyborg eye. They had the big build. AND I LOVED THEM ALL. First off, just ask Emily, the amazing editor of this site (also my girlfriend and a great contributing author here!) about my obsession with cyborg eyes. You will never believe the amount of time I have spent going on and on to her, my brother, my friends, light poles, non-shady housecats, and anyone/anything who will listen (or just can’t move) about how amazing cybernetic eyes are. They are just amazing, and I want one the very second that technology catches up to give me that. I figure I can just pay for it with the eye I am giving up to have the cybernetic eye implanted. That’s why I have to be first, you see, because regular eyes will be dropping in value the way your NES did when the SNES came out. Point being, cybernetic eyes are great, so Deadeye is great to me.
Also, I only have two regrets about the Sinister Supreme Soviet, and one is that he isn’t covered in hammers, sickles, and CCCP in block letters. The other you will see later. For now though, you have to understand that our heroes and the Sinister Supreme Soviet are both after the same thing – Amber Hunt.
That’s right, the snotty homecoming queen is the object that these forces are fighting over, and she does not really care for it one bit.
That arrow on his chest is not pointing to his head because Trax is a genius.I like how Amber Hunt believes the proper recourse to deal with kidnappers is civil court. Aw, honey, kidnappers go to jail.
I am not normally one to be on the side of a young lady like Amber Hunt, but I will say that she probably deserved better than just being taken away in the middle of an ULTRA fight right outside her biology class. Deadeye has her over his shoulder like he is a Visigoth that just conquered Rome and she is his booty. That doesn’t engender Amber Hunt to trust these folks, and she already wasn’t nice. They should have planned this out better. Then again, perhaps the Sinister Supreme Soviet gave them little choice.
Now that she has been apprehended, it’s time for someone to explain to Amber Hunt exactly what is going on, which is nice, seeing how a cyborg manhandled her. Also, something tells me she probably isn’t as enamored with Deadeye’s cybernetic eye as I am. The Exiles also decided to blindfold Hunt, and then they make sure the first thing she sees is comforting.
Or they make sure the first thing she sees is their teammate Ghoul, who is basically a dead guy who looks like The Creature from the Black Lagoon ate a graveyard salad.
Look, you put the blindfold on her; you do not get to then tell her how much better it is now that you have taken it off of her.As much as I dislike Amber Hunt, Dr. Deming is being very evasive. I’d be upset as well.Now De. Deming GUILT-TRIPS THE TEENAGER SHE JUST KIDNAPPED! Never mind all the bad stuff I said about you, Amber Hunt; I am totally on your side now.
Dr. Deming is sort of going about this all wrong, and that surprises me. Not because she is somehow bereft of potential to be mean, but because she has done this before! How could she be so bad at getting folks acclimated to their new surroundings after being kidnapped? Of course, she did convince Deadeye, Tinsel, and Trax to join up, so perhaps she knows more about this than I do…
Malcolm Kort is the mastermind bad guy in this series, and I love him. He has the big office requisite of the corporate villains of the late 80’s and early 90’s. I also approve his hair as being delightfully appropriate for a corporate villain. However, I do disapprove of one thing he does. Remember when I told you that there was only one thing I regretted about the Sinister Supreme Soviet? That regret is that he is gone so quickly.
Kort misunderstands communism, but I will admit that for someone who talks up the USSR all the time, SSS is very concerned with capital. When he isn’t talking about hating it, he is talking about wanting some. Triple S sounds cooler than SSS; I’d say I would call him Triple S from now on, but he’s gonna be dead in a page or three, so what’s the point?At least if Kort had kidnapped Amber Hunt, she would have gotten an explanation of what is going on. I mean, he’s a murderer, but at least he is a better host than Deming.I can’t judge him for keeping the creepy hand; I’d have done the same thing. How can one be a dastardly villain without macabre trophies?
The Exiles have a purpose though, and said purpose isn’t just stopping sleazeball supreme Malcolm Kort; they are sort of like the X-Men, in that they want to find youngsters with this Theta Virus and train them to use and control their power. That’s what the Beta Team Tinsel was talking about is doing. Sadly enough, though, Malcolm Kort is doing the same thing. Of course, when he has his goons kidnap kids with the Theta Virus, they are kind enough to introduce themselves.
How long does Bloodbath spend on that hair everyday? It sticks up and it has the long braids? I guess he does have to maintain the pristine aesthetic appeal that goes with being a villain named Bloodbath.
The kid is named Timothy Halloran, and as you can see, he is in big trouble. Bloodbath is truly not be messed with. I recall when I got this issue back in the day, I was so upset because they had taken my name. I had a villain named Bloodbath, and he was so much cooler, better, and (insert the hyperbolic and egotistical self-inflation of a 14-year old here) than what this guy was. Incidentally, he was also the first Ultraverse card I ever got, so I know that Tom Mason, Dave Olbrich, and the rest of the gang basically just did this to spite me. There’s no denying it, fellas!
Timothy was just taking out the trash and minding his own business when all this started. Things don’t get better when the Theta Team turns up because, as you will see as we keep going in this series, the Exiles don’t really know what they are doing, and it costs everyone. It costs the people they try to help, the people they try to stop, and ultimately it will cost the Exiles.
In the meantime, this Theta Team rides in on cool skycycles and attempts to save Timothy.
I see Timothy’s hand and all I can think of is the Violent Femmes. “Big hands, I Know You’re the One”!
As has already been stated, the Exiles just do not know what they are doing. Take Mustang. He has a cool electrocution style power, but he just has no clue how or when to use it. He and Catapult (who is good at throwing things) comprise the Beta Team taking on Bloodbath and Bruut, and they fail in the same way that the Arch Deluxe failed. Spectacularly.
I love the subtext of the comic book, in that we rarely see the character talking about their failures, but instead, we see them as headstrong. They don’t know how bad they are sometimes, and they don’t know that they don’t know. That’s the dangerous part. In our world, which (sadly) has a dearth of cyborgs and supreme Soviet mercenaries to kill us, a lack of knowledge can still be insanely dangerous and/or fatal. In the Ultraverse, it can be even worse, because lack of knowledge in conjunction with power means innocents get hurt.
See that? They just proved how hapless they are, and their only thought is to go and re-tackle the guy who just manipulated them into killing an innocent. Not just any innocent, but the MOTHER of the kid they were sent here to, well, kidnap.
Bless their hearts.
Their ineptitude does not stop them from sporting a fun pose on a badass cover to #2. I am a sucker for dynamic poses. It’s the 90’s kid in me! Hell, it’s just the cool kid in me! I never get why folks hate dynamic poses so much. I especially like it when people tell me “no one stands like that”. Of course they don’t. That’s sort of why I am reading a superhero comic book, bro, y’know, so I can see THE IMPOSSIBLE.
The “Featuring Bloodbath” blurb reads like that is something that has been added to laundry detergent or something. Like this is “Tide w/Bloodbath.”
The Exiles continue down their path of ineptness, and it is comically predictable. These guys are a secret paramilitary group who were just involved in major property damage and a murder, and yet they seem surprised when San Diego’s finest arrive on the scene to investigate what is going on.
Also, notice Catapult’s sort of blase attitude about the fact that Timothy’s mother was just killed due to their carelessness. Again, we are seeing little signs that while these guys have power, they do not have what it takes to be heroes. That saddens me, but it also makes perfect sense. I have always enjoyed the Guy Gardner character, and one of the primary reasons for that is because he is one of the few super nice/super mean people to ever get super powers. Even more rare, though, is the person who never really learns to use their power properly, and truth be told, that person would be ubiquitous in a place like the Ultraverse. Even with the small number of folks with super powers there, they would almost all certainly have to go through a period where they didn’t know how to use their super powers. Sort of like how when you were a teenager and you didn’t know how to use your best features. Later you learned, but man, you were annoying until then! Now imagine being annoying and deadly! Now imagine being annoying, deadly, and blase about the impact you have. You’d have Catapult, or me in high school. He and I are sort of similar, although my antics usually drew fewer cops AND caused fewer deaths.
I am fairly sure this is the last time anyone said hurl.
Bloodbath has absconded, but Bruut now gets to show what he can do, which is mostly getting shot.
They are firing every caliber of bullet possible at Bruut, as evidenced by the different sound effects being made by the myriad bullets being fired.
Bruut is too much for the SDPD, but with the help of Catapult and Mustang (and possibly 22178921789789 bullets), the SDPD manages to stave off Bruut, who then decides to take a nap on top of a tractor trailer, which is something I have always wanted to do. While it seems dangerous, it also sounds like fun to me. I am a man of simple tastes.
Not only did Bruut land this helicopter on the big rig, but he then kicked the chopper into traffic. If you say you have never wished you could kick something large into traffic, you are a liar.
Dr. Deming finally gets around to explaining exactly what is going on to Amber Hunt. Dr. Deming fascinates me. I like her look, and I also enjoy her self-awareness. I am pretty sure that may be her actual super power. Her other super power may be that she can’t explain anything well, despite being a scientist. We all know that kind of person, and Gerber does a great job of conveying that personality type.
We learn a little bit more about Theta Virus as well. I wonder how some folks would handle that. There’s a lady in my family who constantly whines about being ill all of the time. If she has the flu, she would complain to the point where you’d think that she had Ebola. If she actually got Ebola, she’d tell you she had cosmic ringworm syndrome or something worse than Ebola, which since I could not imagine anything worse, I had to make up a disease. If someone did have cosmic ringworm syndrome, I bet I could do a better job of telling them than Dr. Deming.
“Come see me when you decide whether or not to live or die from something I could cure you of.”
I also want to give R.Phipps a great deal of praise for making each character have great physical personality. Their expressions are wonderful, and they also look their part. Dr. Deming looks like an intelligent lady who is in over her head. Amber Hunt looks like a spoiled brat. Deadeye looks like a guy who would get right to the heart of the matter of why life is rather tough for the Exiles in one sentence!
To be honest, though, the Theta Virus being contagious would upset people for a little bit, until they realized NOW THEY HAVE SUPER POWERS.
Malcolm Kort and his cohort have Timothy captured, and there’s a sort of odd analogue going on here, in that Dr. Deming is much more opaque about giving Amber information, but other than the initial kidnapping, has more or less been nice to Amber. I guess there was also that whole showing her Ghoul right as Amber was blindfolded. There’s also this:
“Sorry, but I am too busy with my stuff to save your life. I am sure you understand.”
So other than those three things, she’s been nice to Amber Hunt. Well, nice may be too strong of a word, but at least she did not expose her to insane indoctrination techniques as Malcolm Kort does, as though he were attempting to become the Jim Jones of the Ultraverse.
I can’t do anything but imagine him comically hitting people with that GIANT hand.
It really seems as though the folks interested in the Theta Virus and the people who have contracted it have made plans to go about everything the exact wrong way. I will take Deming’s methods over Kort’s, because she does seem to have a better heart, but also because she has Deadeye on her team. Kort’s stature diminishes in my eyes as well due to the late, great Sinister Supreme Soviet. If there were a way to play Sarah MacLachlan’s “I Will Remember You” here, then I would do so. Wait, there’s totally a way to do that!
The Exiles head off on a mission to rescue Timothy, which I will cover in Part Two of this entry. I also have an interview lined up with Tom Mason in regards to Exiles that you will be seeing in the next 10 days or so! Indie February keeps heating up as well, when Emily Scott brings you Satan’s Six later this week! Enjoy, and we will see you Legions around here again for Part Two!
Hey there Legions of the Unspoken! I thought that I’d hit you guys with a quick post while I continue work on Exiles! I love freebies from the comic book store. I am the guy who nabs every button, bookmark, and butterscotch when I hit the LCS (which sadly, is too infrequently these days…), and I am sure you do as well!
In the 90’s, DC used to put out this great freebie to comic book stores called Direct Currents, which was named after their “Bullpen Bulletins” page. This had upcoming titles, an article or 2, and usually an interview.
Well, how about you take a look at Direct Currents #27, from March of 1990? Just for fun, tell me what you’d be pulling out of the checklist in the comments below! And stay tuned for Exiles, Legions!
appears over….
and over…
and over again.
The gist is that Odious Kamodious, the demon who made the deal to send the Six back to Earth, is unhappy with Freightful’s performance as Team Leader and threatens to replace him with Jason Vorhees. Everyone fights for a bit and then Odious sends Jason back to Hell, but not before hanging a lampshade on the gimmick. Once again, I don’t know if this is supposed to be clever, but it just feels half assed. They could have legitimately inserted Jason into a story a million better ways, which I know to be true because one of Dean’s favorite things to do is talk about Jason showing up to machete irritating people, and it’s always more entertaining than this diversion.
The Unspoken Decade: 90's Comic Book Blog Extraordinaire 