Rogues Rebellion #2

In Which The Parasite Gets Kicked Out of the House on Real World: Keystone City.

Call of Duty: Clan Wars began last week so I fell behind in my reading of comic books to earn some virtual patches that nobody will ever see. I wonder if I can get Sunset Embroidery (my aunt's business) to make some real world versions of my First Place Clan Wars Patches! Then I can affix them to a nice sport coat and pretend I attend a really hoity-toity Country Club where most of the members are probably racist and have never read a work of fiction in their adult lives. Hmm, if my Country Club is imaginary, why can't I imagine it better than every other Country Club that has ever existed? You can't say "Country Club" without "Cunt!" Or "lube" if you have a bit of a weird accent or speech impediment.

Last issue, the Rogues had one job to do and they fucked it up because they allowed their empathy and their ethics to get in the way of their greed. But The Crime Syndicate sent the 2000 Assassanition Bureau Committee to slap their wrists. But apparently they couldn't get the job done fast enough because now Power Ring and Deathstorm have appeared to take away The Rogues' powers and give them a rather severe tongue lashing.

Hmm. I've seen worse tongue lashings than this on Little House on the Prairie! Although to be fair, Laura Ingalls often deserved to be whupped. That child was a true monster. And yet Nellie Olsen gets all the bad press.

Remember Perfect Strangers? Man, no wonder so many Hollywood executives were doing cocaine in the eighties. They could put anything on television and the populace would watch it. "Hey, look at this, Ma! There's a guy with a funny accent on the television! And he's trying to live in America! What a hoot!" Advertising money would pour in faster than anybody in Hollywood knew what to do with it, so they just shoved it up their noses and thought up more half hour comedies where two to four characters with catch phrases argued with each other until wacky hijinks ensued. Some people may think that this country lost its innocence after we dropped a couple of nuclear bombs on Japan while still others believe that Vietnam brought the country into a cynical state of adulthood. But I can point to one single factor that shows most of our country had yet to lose its innocence well into the eighties: Growing Pains had a character named "Boner" on it without the slightest bit of tongue in cheek irony. That's some fifties era level naïveté right there.

I think that every organization should hire one person to be a cynical smart-ass, piece of shit motherfucker. That way, she'll be there to point out when they're putting out a product or starting an ad campaign that could be misconstrued as in bad taste or silly or just fucking messed up. I find myself inadvertently laughing at serious ads or news stories a few times a week because nobody sassed the people in charge about their stupid idea. Too bad I can't think of any examples right now to make my point seem legitimate! But seriously! Companies! You really need a Board of Cynics to look over every single thing you do. It'll make life much easier!

I know I called The Trickster "annoying" and "Toto" last issue but this made me change my mind.

Power Ring's paranoia takes over and he decides The Rogues need to be killed before they begin killing him. So a brawl breaks out between The Crime Goons and The Rogues. This scene already took place in Forever Evil #3 with some minor changes to the dialogue. In Forever Evil #3, Trickster replaces "You guys, obviously he's crazy--Am I right?" with "My mask has been itching all day!" This version is much better. I mentioned earlier that the Rogues had lost their powers but I was wrong. That happens in this fight and took place in Forever Evil #3 which my brain simply assumed happened in Rogues Rebellion #1. Go figure!

A little bit more of the action is covered here since the focus is on the other team members whereas the focus was on Captain Cold in Forever Evil #3. So now we get to see Trickster call Deathstorm "Skeletor" (he says, "Eat metal fist, Skeletor," which I, of course, first read as "Eat metal, Fist Skeletor."). We also get to see this juicy piece of non-information!

What are these two up to? Oh wait. Mirror Master just meant the fog. For a second there, I thought they were Nightwing and Damian disguised as Mirror Master and Heatwave. But then I remembered those characters are both dead. Or as good as, anyway.

Next on the agenda is to recount the pages from Forever Evil where Deathstorm removed Captain Cold's powers. Even though I've already read this bit, I like it much better with Hepburn's art over Finch's as well as some of the slight modifications in the writing. Also, Forever Evil doesn't have a post dick sucking shot of Captain Cold when all is said and done.

Somebody's got dick breath!

I'm sure this comic book isn't going to continually repeat everything that happens in Forever Evil, so my guess is that this comic book will continue to follow the other Rogues as they escape the Crime Syndicate while Captain Cold teams up with Luthor and Bizarro and Black Manta and Black Adam in Forever Evil.

I rant and I rave about the state of comic books today but I don't think I've ever offered any real solutions except for having Batman and Superman comics subsidize all of the other comic books. And I'm often hard pressed to explain what exactly I can't stand about a comic book and what I really like about another. I suppose that's because the real, initial, primary lure of comic books is rarely intellectual. It's visceral and emotional and feelsy. Buccelato tends to write comic books that satisfy my Comic Book Love Zone (yes, it's as disgusting as it sounds). And this here art of Scott Hepburn, who sounds familiar but I'm not sure where I've seen his work before, really rubs up against my Comic Book G-spot. And this page I'm about to scan in is a prime example of the things I love about comic books. This here ruins my Comic Book Underwear. I wish I could say that last sentence was metaphorical.

Trickster has flying shoes, so they'll probably be okay.

Not only is this page tense and fun, it also utilizes the medium of comics in a way that Kenneth Rocafort's staccato, crazy panel layout never can. We get depth and height and the seriousness of the situation in the first panel. It's also static and tame. They are safe for the moment. But it's the next series of panels that really make the page shine. We see the upward, hopeful movement of Mirror Master pulling Heatwave to safety in the first two. But the movement slowly shifts so that when Heatwave and The Trickster finally do slip through Mirror Master's fingers, the panels help to make the reader feel the downward movement. And to top it all off, the whole design feels natural to the eye because the panels also mimic the perspective of the windows on the building. Gorgeous stuff, this.

Trickster's flying shoes don't save them because they have Weather Wizard who is able to create a safety funnel and deposit the Rogues on a nearby roof. The Rogues dust themselves off and find that they're in Metropolis now after being rejected from Mirror World. That would make more sense than Captain Cold running into Lex Luthor in Central City like I thought was going on during Forever Evil #3. It also makes more sense for Black Manta to come swimming out of the ocean with Black Adam in tow! I knew there was something fishy about the set up in Forever Evil!

Captain Cold leaves the Rogues to figure out how to get back to Glider while he runs off to play with Lex Luthor. The next incident in the Rogues life is meeting up with an idiot with a death wish.

Ha ha! That's extra funny because Green Arrow is already low-budget. It's like calling somebody the uncool Aquaman!

The next person, if I can use the term "person," that attacks them is The Parasite. It seems that everybody's magic coin has proclaimed that the Rogues are wanted by the Crime Syndicate. And the Crime Syndicate is actually paying for this job instead of filling everybody's clutch purses with hope and promises. Did Twat Lobo get a coin? Because I think just hearing about a job that pays means that he has to complete it due to his ethics or something. Unless Twat Lobo is less ethical than Regular Flavoured Lobo.

Time for a What Not to Wear, Super-Villain Edition? I would vote for Signalman to be on the show.

Parasite usually fights Superman so I would recommend to the Rogues that they get the fuck out of there as fast as possible. Weather Wizard blasts the Parasite with lightning (not "lightening," Internet) and fills him super full of tasty good potential energy which he's just dying to make kinetic all over Weather Wizard's face. Weather Wizard desperately calls for a new plan five times although I already told him the best plan! In the immortal words of the Amityville Pig Ghost: "GET. OUT."

They decide to go with my (and the Pig Ghost's) plan and escape into the Mirror World. Which Mirror Master has no ability to control anymore. So they're quickly rocketed out of it into another random location. Although not the real type of random. The kind of random where they don't get to choose but the writer has already thought out and planned for them all along.

If it were truly random, they probably would have come out in San Jose, California.

Rogues Rebellion #2 Rating: +4 Ranking. Do I have to justify my rankings at this point? This blog was never supposed to be a review site and yet sometimes people feel incomplete if I just make jokes and don't actually give my opinion. I suppose it's the same sort of feeling people experienced when walking out of The Blair Witch Project. That movie made people physically ill and, I suspect, many of them probably blamed it on the way it was filmed. But I'll tell you why they really felt ill. Because the movie offered no catharsis. It built more and more tension throughout the film, building up to a crescendo and what should have been a huge scare or epic reveal. Instead, it just ended with a guy possibly masturbating in the corner and the camera falling on the floor. There was no huge release. No scream to get out the built up tension. Instead, it remained a tight ball in the pit of the stomach. I'm surprised more people didn't walk out of the theater and vandalize cars in the parking lot. Oh, I almost forgot my justification! This comic book was fun and I like fun comic books and I'm a big fan of Captain Cold.