Chester 5000 XYV
For decades, comic stories have featured uncanny super-beings with precognitive powers. Now we are all mutants who can see the future, thanks to the traffic jam of comic-book-derived movies forming a procession on to our screens. The looming Captain America: Civil War movie is based on the mini-series from 2006 and pitched as a massive ideological ding-dong between Cap and Iron Man.
But when the first trailer was released, what seemed to resonate with audiences was the intense relationship between Cap and his childhood friend Bucky, now a brain-scrambled, part-cyborg, all-emo Hydra assassin. Deliberately or not, it seemed to go beyond bromance. Indie comics artist Jess Fink took the hint and posted some raunchy panels on Twitter that imagined the cold war between Captain America and the Winter Soldier suddenly becoming extremely hot.
This wasn’t the first time Fink had imagined a character unexpectedly returning from the dead with a metal arm and a fluid sexuality. She recently wrapped up her five-year project Chester 5000 XYV, an erotic steampunk webcomic that started out telling the story of the unorthodox relationship between a gallant robot butler and his sexually frustrated mistress but expanded into a Victorian epic of love, loss and libido.
Fink’s gorgeous, clean-lined art is a good fit for some unashamedly dirty content, and Alan Moore is a fan. The first arc has been collected in print but last week Fink launched a Kickstarter campaign to self-publish a second volume. The entire saga is also available online, and while it’s probably not the sort of thing you should access at work, Fink’s storytelling is as likely to pluck on your heartstrings as get you all steamed up. Steve Rogers might be too square to put it on his hand-written list of pop culture to catch up on, but you can imagine Tony Stark being totally into it. Marvel is launching a series of bombastic Civil War II comics in June, but Chester 5000 XYV makes for some very appealing counter-programming, especially if you’d rather see characters make love, not war.
Criminal 10th Anniversary Special
It was the writer Ed Brubaker who contentiously brought Bucky back in 2005, reimagining him as a brainwashed Soviet assassin. You can also briefly spot him lurking next to Robert Redford in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Sadly, Brubaker hasn’t reprised his signature role of Hydra Science Stooge #2 in Civil War, but that’s probably because he’s too busy working on his own comics. Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips have been collaborators for almost 15 years, and last week released the Criminal 10th Anniversary Special, a one-off celebrating their hardboiled series.
Flashing back to 1979, it follows Tracy Lawless, one of Criminal’s collective of nervy, desperate antiheroes, as he goes on a traumatic childhood road trip. Trapped in the poisonous orbit of his lowlife father, young Tracy finds solace in a random issue of Fang The Kung Fu Werewolf, a groovy (and entirely fictional) pulp comic. The story then juxtaposes a grim revenge quest along lonesome desert highways with pages from Fang’s authentically 70s adventures, a riot of street slang, generous flares and thought bubbles bursting with heroic angst. The contrast heightens the sense of impending doom that haunts the story, a fitting way to mark Criminal’s decade of darkness. Brubaker and Phillips have announced a new ongoing series, Kill Or Be Killed, about an angry twentysomething coerced into killing someone every month, suggesting they’ll be partners-in-crime for a while yet.
Hot Damn
Hot Damn has an impressively rooting-tooting title but writer Ryan Ferrier and artist Valentin Ramon mean damn in the old-fashioned sense. When feckless hedonist Teddy, hero of their just-launched five-part mini-series, wakes up from a bender, he finds himself in actual Hell-with-a-capital-H. While there’s less torture and torment than he expected, Hell turns out to be a deeply squalid place with mind-numbing regulations, enforced therapy sessions and a horrorshow cabaret called Butt Stuff. Even worse, the buskers sing OMC’s 1995 earworm How Bizarre on loop. While it’s not the first time the underworld has been reimagined as a clapped-out bureaucracy, Ramon crams every panel with fetid detail in a style that evokes the expressiveness of Fungus The Bogeyman and the gross-out yuks of the Garbage Pail Kids. For his part, Ferrier laces the script with proper LOLcanos, while hinting that deadbeat Teddy might have a shot at redemption. If the idea of at least 22 more superhero movies by 2020 sounds like hell, you could do worse than sample this version.
