In 1994, I had no idea who Christopher Priest and Howard Porter were so I have no idea why I purchased this comic book.
Although (continuing the thought from the caption which is just me saying, "Fuck the format! I can do what I want!") I was in my early 20s in 1994 so I was probably into that edgy fascination with freaks and body deformity. I hadn't seen Tod Browning's Freaks yet but I'm sure I would have jumped at the chance if I'd known about it. It's the only reason I can figure why I bought a comic book about a character I knew nothing about. Because it looks like he's a hero with a deformed baby leg. I probably picked it up off the shelf and yelled, "Fuckin' A, dude! Look at this ganky bastich!" It was 1994 so obviously I was emulating Lobo in my every day life.
Some of you might be thinking, "Ugh! You're so gross and problematic!" But I'm just being honest! I was a young man, masking like crazy in order to hide my vulnerabilities so I wouldn't be crushed by social interactions and existential threats to my psyche. I had to act tough to survive the crazy streets of Santa Clara, California! Back then, Silicon Valley wasn't like it is now! In 1994, hulking techno-nerds were roaming the streets with razor sharp circuit boards looking to cut the genitals off of anybody who criticized the Neo-Geo CD home gaming console. If you looked at them funny, they'd challenge you to a game of Cyberball and you'd better hope you won because they were also obsessed with Mortal Combat and if you lost, the last thing you'd hear would be a bunch of techno-nerds screaming "Finish him!" before you found yourself upside down gagging on the filthy water of an unflushed public toilet. The early nineties were some rough years! Especially when you were into heavy metal! People think grunge and rap killed metal but think about what people thought was "rock and roll" during the early 90s: Warrant's "Cherry Pie" and Extreme's "More Than Words." I mean, Feetal's Gizz! Metal was dead long before grunge and rap came by to fill its grave.
Anyway, you could totally be into freaks in the early 90s because the Internet didn't exist so your opinions weren't reaching anybody outside your small circle of friends. All the other people of the world who didn't know you at all didn't have a way to tell you you were a piece of shit because of one single thing that comprised the myriad facts of who you were. Fuck you, Internet!
No, no! I'm sorry! Don't be mad at me, Internet! I can't live without you!
Also, maybe I just bought this comic book because the cover was shiny and embossed and growing up in Santa Clara was so boring that it made this comic book looked exciting.
The issue begins with The Ray battling Brimstone. Remember him from Legends?
Some of you might be thinking, "Ugh! You're so gross and problematic!" But I'm just being honest! I was a young man, masking like crazy in order to hide my vulnerabilities so I wouldn't be crushed by social interactions and existential threats to my psyche. I had to act tough to survive the crazy streets of Santa Clara, California! Back then, Silicon Valley wasn't like it is now! In 1994, hulking techno-nerds were roaming the streets with razor sharp circuit boards looking to cut the genitals off of anybody who criticized the Neo-Geo CD home gaming console. If you looked at them funny, they'd challenge you to a game of Cyberball and you'd better hope you won because they were also obsessed with Mortal Combat and if you lost, the last thing you'd hear would be a bunch of techno-nerds screaming "Finish him!" before you found yourself upside down gagging on the filthy water of an unflushed public toilet. The early nineties were some rough years! Especially when you were into heavy metal! People think grunge and rap killed metal but think about what people thought was "rock and roll" during the early 90s: Warrant's "Cherry Pie" and Extreme's "More Than Words." I mean, Feetal's Gizz! Metal was dead long before grunge and rap came by to fill its grave.
Anyway, you could totally be into freaks in the early 90s because the Internet didn't exist so your opinions weren't reaching anybody outside your small circle of friends. All the other people of the world who didn't know you at all didn't have a way to tell you you were a piece of shit because of one single thing that comprised the myriad facts of who you were. Fuck you, Internet!
No, no! I'm sorry! Don't be mad at me, Internet! I can't live without you!
Also, maybe I just bought this comic book because the cover was shiny and embossed and growing up in Santa Clara was so boring that it made this comic book looked exciting.
The issue begins with The Ray battling Brimstone. Remember him from Legends?
Brimstone is as big as Godzilla and he's already killed hundreds of people, judging by the apartment buildings he's smashed.
I don't know who The Ray is or where he's from. What part of the United States of America uses slang like "gaffle," "put my serve on," "zoom this buster," "bone out," "feebs," and "rot." Is this just Christopher Priest trying to mimic youth speak? I would expect this kind of thing from an aging comic book writer like current Neal Adams but Priest was in his early thirties when he wrote this. Maybe The Ray is from another Earth and Priest's theory was that slang words would obviously differ between Earths. But not so much that you couldn't get the gist of what he's saying. Except for "gaffle." I don't know what the fuck he wants to do to Brimstone when he says he's going to gaffle him. I know what I would mean by it but that doesn't seem appropriate in this situation.
Oh wait. The Ray was just writing fan-fiction about himself.
So the Brimstone fight didn't really happen. Or it did happen but The Ray is using it as fodder to write comic books about himself. So he's like Clark Kent writing articles about Superman? At least writing comic book stories about your own adventures isn't unethical. Fucking Clark Kent. What kind of a journalist uses his soap box to simply promote himself? No wait. Journalists fucking suck. I despise journalists for the same reason I despise police officers. If you're just letting your profession go to shit because a bunch of people are abusing their positions of power and not actually doing the public service they're supposed to be doing, you're just as bad as the worst apple in the barrel. There's a reason that whole apple/barrel thing is still a saying even though nobody really associates apples with barrels anymore.
Maybe The Ray isn't writing comic books although it seems like the super edgy postmodern take a writer in the 90s would think was fucking mind blowing. We got Kyle Rayner, comic book artist, as the new Green Lantern. Why shouldn't we also get a comic book writer in there as well? Or The Ray might just be writing stories for his college paper which would mean he's just as unethical and terrible as Clark Kent, I suppose. But in an amateurish way.
The Ray (whose name is Ray Terrill so it was lucky he got light-based powers) stops trying to write and decides to tell the readers about the last few days. He's a young guy who works at a fast food chicken joint and has just leased his first apartment. It's a piece of shit with some garbage and/or artistic sculpture in the middle of the room but he doesn't have any credit or money so he's stuck with it. I bet there are corpses under the floor boards as well as other things too boring to mention (but which I'll mention anyway) like rats and cockroaches and dried semen stains.
Maybe The Ray isn't writing comic books although it seems like the super edgy postmodern take a writer in the 90s would think was fucking mind blowing. We got Kyle Rayner, comic book artist, as the new Green Lantern. Why shouldn't we also get a comic book writer in there as well? Or The Ray might just be writing stories for his college paper which would mean he's just as unethical and terrible as Clark Kent, I suppose. But in an amateurish way.
The Ray (whose name is Ray Terrill so it was lucky he got light-based powers) stops trying to write and decides to tell the readers about the last few days. He's a young guy who works at a fast food chicken joint and has just leased his first apartment. It's a piece of shit with some garbage and/or artistic sculpture in the middle of the room but he doesn't have any credit or money so he's stuck with it. I bet there are corpses under the floor boards as well as other things too boring to mention (but which I'll mention anyway) like rats and cockroaches and dried semen stains.
This is Ray's narration of the place which I read after I wrote the previous paragraph. Was I writing comics and named Christopher Priest in 1994?
The Ray spends all day handing out flyers to Clucky Chicken while standing right outside Clucky Chicken. Is that what flyers are for? To remind people about the thing they can totally see right in front of them? I guess they could be coupons. While he's handing out flyers, his super cool cousin Hank stops by to gaffle some swang all up in through him.
This must be Earth-15 where they say things like "Yo trip dat frum, golderboots!" and "Swank on into my PQs, Flub Daddy!"
The Ray is disappointed that he's a man now because responsibility sucks. Kids can't stand curfews and rules but man is it sweet to be able to come and go as you please (within curfew, of course!) while doing whatever the fuck you want and not worrying about money for food or rent. The Ray can't even fuck his girlfriend because she saw him in the chicken suit and is all, "Oh, um, I just came by to say I can't come by! Bye!"
The Ray can travel at the speed of light anywhere he wants while carrying other people. That makes sense because comic books. He takes his cousin Hank Fonzerelli to see a volcano shaped like a hand in Hawaii only to discover that it's another Brimstone. It's activated by a henchman of Darkseid while The Ray and Hank are checking out a surf competition or a luau. It's at this point when The Ray gets back to the beginning of the story where he was failing to stop Brimstone from destroying a city. As he picks the story back up, Superboy arrives to save the day. Not the boring Superboy who used to be Superman and learned a terrible secret about himself on his sixteenth birthday about an extra candle. The new Superboy who arrived on the scene after Superman died. He might also be boring but I wouldn't know having never read any comic books about him.
The new Superboy is an arrogant dick and The Ray hates him. That's probably why The Ray winds up killing him. Or he thinks he killed him. Everybody reading the comic book probably thought The Ray killed him too (because we were all dumb-dumbs who actually believed DC Comics had killed Superman off for good. Why wouldn't they?! He was a big boring boy scout whose powers kept fluctuating because editors and writers thought the problem with writing Superman stories was that he was too powerful. But the real problem with writing Superman stories was that those same writers and editors were unimaginative assholes who didn't actually understand Superman. Why else would Superman have died from a fist fight?! Seriously, Dan Jurgens. What were you thinking?! Superman should never have been killed because he encountered something more powerful that could just beat the shit out of him. Superman should have been killed because of a philosophical or ethical dilemma where he realized the only way to save the world was to allow himself to die. He should have been Jesus but instead he was just Apollo Creed. Who I think was a metaphor for John the Baptist?
The issue ends with the narrator letting the readers know that Superboy isn't actually dead and why would the idiots think he'd be killed in The Ray when he was currently starring in his own popular monthly comic book? Stupid dumb comic book readers! But the narrator also mentions that The Ray is out of power (I didn't know he had to recharge) and Brimstone is kind of mad. Then he's all, "If we were you," (I don't think a proper editor in 1994 would have allowed a writer to use the plural pronoun "we" as a non-specific gender singular pronoun so now I'm picturing the narrator as a small group of old people), "We'd be back here in 30 days!" And I guess 22 year old me agreed with them because I purchased Issue #2.
The Ray #1 Rating: C. C is average, right? I didn't find anything I particularly loved about this issue but I also didn't find anything I absolutely hated. Except for Superboy but I think I was supposed to hate him so that's a positive critique. I probably purchased the next issue because I wanted to find out what happens to Hank Fonzerelli. What a cool dude!
The letters pages don't have any letters but it does have a story by Brian Augustyn about how Christopher Priest changed his name from Jim Owsley. It also explains that Priest's idea for The Ray was to have a teenager suddenly have to deal with god-like powers while still being a teenager. I think before this that was called "Spider-man". Except for the god-like powers! Those were more spider-like powers.
The Ray can travel at the speed of light anywhere he wants while carrying other people. That makes sense because comic books. He takes his cousin Hank Fonzerelli to see a volcano shaped like a hand in Hawaii only to discover that it's another Brimstone. It's activated by a henchman of Darkseid while The Ray and Hank are checking out a surf competition or a luau. It's at this point when The Ray gets back to the beginning of the story where he was failing to stop Brimstone from destroying a city. As he picks the story back up, Superboy arrives to save the day. Not the boring Superboy who used to be Superman and learned a terrible secret about himself on his sixteenth birthday about an extra candle. The new Superboy who arrived on the scene after Superman died. He might also be boring but I wouldn't know having never read any comic books about him.
The new Superboy is an arrogant dick and The Ray hates him. That's probably why The Ray winds up killing him. Or he thinks he killed him. Everybody reading the comic book probably thought The Ray killed him too (because we were all dumb-dumbs who actually believed DC Comics had killed Superman off for good. Why wouldn't they?! He was a big boring boy scout whose powers kept fluctuating because editors and writers thought the problem with writing Superman stories was that he was too powerful. But the real problem with writing Superman stories was that those same writers and editors were unimaginative assholes who didn't actually understand Superman. Why else would Superman have died from a fist fight?! Seriously, Dan Jurgens. What were you thinking?! Superman should never have been killed because he encountered something more powerful that could just beat the shit out of him. Superman should have been killed because of a philosophical or ethical dilemma where he realized the only way to save the world was to allow himself to die. He should have been Jesus but instead he was just Apollo Creed. Who I think was a metaphor for John the Baptist?
The issue ends with the narrator letting the readers know that Superboy isn't actually dead and why would the idiots think he'd be killed in The Ray when he was currently starring in his own popular monthly comic book? Stupid dumb comic book readers! But the narrator also mentions that The Ray is out of power (I didn't know he had to recharge) and Brimstone is kind of mad. Then he's all, "If we were you," (I don't think a proper editor in 1994 would have allowed a writer to use the plural pronoun "we" as a non-specific gender singular pronoun so now I'm picturing the narrator as a small group of old people), "We'd be back here in 30 days!" And I guess 22 year old me agreed with them because I purchased Issue #2.
The Ray #1 Rating: C. C is average, right? I didn't find anything I particularly loved about this issue but I also didn't find anything I absolutely hated. Except for Superboy but I think I was supposed to hate him so that's a positive critique. I probably purchased the next issue because I wanted to find out what happens to Hank Fonzerelli. What a cool dude!
The letters pages don't have any letters but it does have a story by Brian Augustyn about how Christopher Priest changed his name from Jim Owsley. It also explains that Priest's idea for The Ray was to have a teenager suddenly have to deal with god-like powers while still being a teenager. I think before this that was called "Spider-man". Except for the god-like powers! Those were more spider-like powers.
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