I’m going to take a little break from the frantic film slobbering and tackle A COMIC BOOK today! Have you heard of these before? They’re pictures and words that run in a sequential order to make up an entire story. It’s all the rage these days. The title out of the box for this review in particular is the blast of fun to the face entitled SCUD: THE DISPOSABLE ASSASIN. The series has only recently been released in one volume and it’s the first time the entire story has been collected after being out of print for a painfull eight years. It’s the action, comedy, science fiction, horror funny-book you would love to make if you weren’t completely lazy and untalented. Sorry, not you, I mean the other guy...the one with the hat.
SCUD is a vending machine assassin that is efficient, tough and witty. It's also helpful because explode after the termination of their designated target. The story begins with a lowly executive hiring a SCUD to kill a pesky problem. The pesky problem is actually an abomination of science named Jeff and it aint’ going down without a fight. After a frenetic action scene the Scud finds itself in a bathroom where it spots the marking on its back ‘THIS UNIT WILL SELF DESTRUCT AFTER TERMINATING ITS TARGET.”. Thinking fast, the SCUD blows the creatures arms and legs off and puts it into the nearest hospital’s critical care ward. As long as the Jeff is alive, Scud lives, but keeping it in Intensive Care doesn’t come cheap. Scud has to become an assassin for hire and he’ll do anything to keep himself alive. That includes flying to the moon, getting into John Woo gunplay on a daily basis, going mad and thinking he’s Jesus (WITH A LASER GUN!) and finding his one troubled Robot obsessed lover. Ain’t life grand?
My vision is probably skewed slightly from falling in love with that rascally Yellow Robot assassin from a young age (after only reading one issue) but after plowing through the whole eight hundred page tome, I can admit without an inch of doubt that this is one of the most creative and exhilarating reads I’ve ever had in a long time. You could argue “Well Mr.Decloux, you are an odd duck indeed! Don’t you like, violent, things?” so I’ll paint a multi-colored picture and let you make up your mind. Here are a few storylines you’ll find squished between the nifty covers:
- The Cyborg Mafia fending off an army of Zombie Dinosaurs controlled by Voodo Benjamin Franklin. After a frantic gun battle in a high rise building our heroes jump into a giant robot (With a giant sword!) for a little undead slice and dice.
- A toughest tough guy competition that has anti-gravity bullfighting (Featuring a bull with chainsaws for horns and rockets for hooves), Lava Hockey and Construction Crane death matches.
- An Evil Astronaut Werewolf that turns into giant sentient Evil Werewolf Black Hole
- The finale involves our hero being hired by three renegade angels (Who have God in Chains) to assassinate the entire world if he wants to see the woman he loves. If he doesn’t, it’ll all be over. There’s no heaven for robots.
Sadly, crazy off the wall concepts do not necessarily spell success, so it’s a good thing that Writer/Artist Rob Schrab brings his incredible A-Game to the table with crazy clever cinematic visuals and an almost unreal sense of action movie timing. Off the top of my head I can’t name another comic book this year that had me sporting such massive grin during its entire run. I read this bad boy in one entire sitting and I never felt the need for it to wrap up. Sure, his first issue is a little rough around the edges, but it’s smooth sailing from then on out. Characters and dialogue aren’t Shrab’s strength (Unless you count one liner pop culture references as dialogue) but in the long run it’s like a warm familiar blanket in the fabric of the rest of his whacky universe. His mix of cartoony characters with a hint of realism creeping in is crisply original and only gets better as the issues run on. The fact that they packaged the whole sheebang in one volume is pure brilliance. It’s easy to see the fun “I’m making a comic book vibe!” that began the series morph into the more depressing mood the book took on as the author’s life got into the way. The final four issues (Published EIGHT YEARS LATER) are a breath of fresh air after the dour final ‘98 issues. Everything gets wrapped up in an increasingly satisfying way without ever disappointing in the creativity department. Schrab has only got better over the years and has ironed out a lot of the chaos that sometimes cluttered the page in his earlier work. I hope to all that is four-colred that we get more comics from the man in the near future! Until then, we have Scud, and dont' believe the side of the box, this is anything but disposable.
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