The Crusades #18 (October 2002)

I used to play this game as a kid in the shared urinals at school.

Did anybody else call pissing at the same time with a friend "Criss cross"? I can't remember when we grew out of peeing with each other, my cousins and I, but it had to be at a really young age. The last time I remember pissing in a toilet at the same time as a friend was at my cousin's wedding reception in 2000. And that was mostly a non-consensual game of Criss Cross because I had to pee super badly but my friend Upright muscled his way into the bathroom to try to get in before me and we just wound up pissing at the same time in a single bowl. In a better story, this would have wound up in hot sex. But instead it just wound up with me being irritated with him!

I put in the caveat of "the last time I remember" because I have been black out drunk on a few occasions. Maybe more than I realize because, you know, black out drunk. The only reason I believed anybody about the first time I got black out drunk was because there was forensic evidence left over. No, not that kind, you perv. I mean, close to that kind! The way I'd remembered the night was that I felt like I had to puke so I got up from my bed where I was sitting, made my way out the door, up the steps, outside, and puked. But my friends were all, "No, no. On the way, you made out with your Christina Applegate poster." And I was all, "I did not, you liars! I hate you all!" But then I looked at the poster and there were disgusting slobber marks all over it and I was all, "Who did this? Why are you trying to frame me? What else happened that I don't remember?" Nobody answered and they all awkwardly looked away and walked out and never spoke to me again. So I guess, right in front of everybody, I fucked my refrigerator too? Who needed those friends anyway! Good riddance!

Feeling that my first story ended too tamely, I needed to punch that one up a bit. I didn't lose any friends that night and I don't think I fucked a fridge. But I did discover The Cure's Disintegration later that day and wept horribly for hours, heartbroken because I knew the girl I had a huge crush on for years didn't fucking love me. My fault, really! Billy Joel had told me to constantly tell her about it like a desperate Terrier yapping away day and night to make sure she knew how I felt and I never did that because I was satisfied that she had a crush on me too. But of course that crush died because I didn't follow Billy's advice! Stupid, stupid, stupid!

The best part of that party was finding Taco Bell behind my television the next day! Free who-knows-how-long-its-been-at-room-temperature Taco Bell! Score! Later my friend Larry told me he left his Taco Bell hidden in my room and I had to admit that some jerk must have eaten it. Larry killed himself 25 or so years later. I'm sorry, Larry. I hope it wasn't because of my lies and Taco Bell cravings.

I should make one of those Family Circus maps with a layout of my mom's house where that party was thrown and a dotted line showing my journey from the bed to the upstairs toilet where I ultimately passed out for a few hours. It would go in concentric spirals from my bed to my Christina poster. Then out the door, up the stairs, and off toward the bushes where I threw up a bit while my friends yelled, "Noot!", every time I went, "Arrragggaaaarrraagggh" (sound of throwing up), because they were huge Arnold Schwarzenegger stalkers and my noise and their noise made his name, I guess?. Then the line would go up the outside back stairs, probably bouncing off the railing a few times and into the back door where I collapsed on the kitchen floor for several minutes, and slurred goodbye to some guests like Lisa and the mythical Greg, her huge crush for so many years. I passed out there for a bit before I needed to throw up again and staggered into my mom's bedroom (she was out for the weekend!) where I interrupted my best friend and my sister's friend with the platinum hair and a penchant for Coors Light whose name I can't remember but we all had huge crushes on. They scattered like cockroaches caught trying to fuck each other while I went up the half-stairs to the master bedroom, threw up in bowl, and passed out for who knows how long. There may have been more steps that I don't remember (black out!) and which nobody witnessed or told me about.

My best friend was actually grateful that I cock-blocked him because his girlfriend showed up at the party not long after. Don't worry! His girlfriend dumped his ass not long after that because he was cheating on her with her manager. She has gone on to have a really fucking awesome life, according to her Facebook posts, and she's as gorgeous as ever. I love my best friend from high school still to this day but man he fucked up. I thank him for keeping his cheating to himself (until after the relationship was over) so I never felt compromised by his stupid actions. I'd known his girlfriend since elementary school and I might have had to punch him in the dick if I'd known.

Christ. Should I start this review over? Who's editing this shit?! Time for a song lyric!

The only Shakespeare quote I know is from King Lear: "Out, vile jelly!"

That caption was obviously a lie. I have a literature degree! I know more Shakespeare than is good for anybody! Whenever I do anything stupid, I'm always, "When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, speak of me as I am! Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak of one who loved not wisely, but too well; of one not easily jealous, but being wrought, perplexed in the extreme!" And whenever some small and insignificant hurdle manages to crop up in my daily life, I'm always all, "To be or not to be!" And every time I'm about to murder somebody, I'm always all, "Is this a dagger I see before me, the handle toward my hand?" But mostly I just go around poking people in the eye and saying my favorite King Lear quote as I do it. They usually laugh and say, "That was a good one!", after they're done screaming and getting medical attention.

I know I used pretty common Shakespeare examples for knowing more Shakespeare than is good for anybody because I haven't really read any Shakespeare in over a decade. I probably could have done something by Falstaff or that bit at the end of The Tempest where Puck is all, "If we shadows have offended" or when Macbeth goes on and on about tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. I used to know quite a bit of Malvolio's lines from Twelfth Night because I played the part in one of my classes. That Othello quote I used earlier I used to know complete because it reminded me so much of Stephen King's final paragraph in Cujo. Together, they're all, "Yeah, yeah. Me and this dog did some pretty bad shit. But neither of us wanted to! He had rabies and I was fooled by a big jerk and my lack of trust in the woman I loved! We're basically the same!"

Oh fuck. Yeah, yeah. The comic book! Right! Let's go!

So, "The Past is Prologue." That's a pretty good, if mundane, observation by a guy who made a lot of pithy and profound observations about human interactions with each other. The idea should make the present really pop; it centers it nicely. Now your past isn't wasted years or youthful mistakes; it's the story that needed to be told so the present story could unfold with all the pertinent information at hand. Like knowing that I have a literature degree and sometimes drink to excess! That's prologue for why I'm now writing biographical blog posts tarted up as comic book reviews! Alcohol plus college equals knows how to waste time effectively!

This issue begins in that centered present with Venus working Medieval Times. We have all the information we need to know what got her to this moment so that we can fully understand the last three issues of this series!

Venus has become an SCA nerd.

Whenever I see any incel complaining about not being able to get fucked online, I just think, "Join the Society of Creative Anachronisms, dumbass." That shit is full of the horniest nerds I've ever met. Of course, if you're going to be a self-pitying asshole sitting around doing next to nothing like usual but now dressed in medieval garb, it might not get you laid. The thing about the SCA is that the people in it fucking do shit. They do creative shit that's useful and impressive and makes other people think, "I would love to fuck that guy who makes that armor" or "I would love to fuck that gal who designs that jewelry" or "I would love to have an orgy with that couple that makes the tennis ball arrows for our battles at the next post-Court revelry!" Hell, maybe you don't even need to know a skill! The first time I ever saw somebody Lara Croft was visiting this guy who made medieval garments for the SCA. When we got to the house, we walked through the darkened living room where his greasy boyfriend was playing Tomb Raider. The guy who made the clothes was vivacious and friendly and really fucking excellent at what he did. I guess his boyfriend who never said a word to me, even when I sat in the dark and watched him, must have had a huge cock.

I know that look on Venus's face. That's the look of a woman who has discovered the power of being worshiped by clammy virgin nerds full of desperate sexual longing! Sometimes you just want to lusted after people whom you know can't satisfy you and, because of that knowledge, they aren't cocky assholes who expect you to trip all over yourself getting their masterful dickwork in you.

Later at combat practice, Venus shows off her new sword skills by beating Duane of the Shire, a man never bested in combat!

So desperate, so virginal.

When Venus gets home, she's attacked by Anton Marx who seems to think sexually assaulting a woman as she enters her dark apartment makes for some good foreplay. She smashes the shit out of him with her duffel bag full of Godfrey's armor and throws him out letting him know that not only does she have two new jobs that have nothing to do with fact checking his shitty articles but she also has three new guys willing to fuck her. She doesn't need Anton in the slightest at this point.

Readers are reminded that The Pope is still about trying to launch the casino where the New Jerusalem School was. Does this comic book have time for more of that story arc? Did Seagle know he only had three issues left when he began writing this issue?

Venus has begun carrying her duffel bag of armor everywhere she goes so she can quickly pop in an alley, change, and scare any douchebags she comes across. While the knight was intent on killing violent assholes, Venus has decided to put arrogant pricks in their place. After fucking up a jerk's car for parking in a handicapped space and running off some vandals, she finds her way back underground to search for Cela and Godfrey. It's been several days since the earthquake (enough time for Venus to have found the waitressing job and learned how to use a sword better than the best swordsman in the SCA but not too much time so that Cela and Godfrey have starved or died of thirst!). She manages to find Cela and Godfrey both still alive.

Did I say Venus had three other dicks sniffing around her front bottom? Make that four.

This is where the story ultimately had to wind up: Venus stepping into the position of the knight to ensure her own safety in The City and the safety of the less fortunate, like Cela and that wall that was getting spray-painted. She has the ability to bring the morality and ethics of being a knight into the 21st Century. It's just one more way to prove that she doesn't need a man, specifically, in this case, Detective Petronas. Who, by the way, is turning into her #1 antagonist as of this issue since his boss thinks the knight might still be out there and if the knight is, Petronas will lose his promotion. I guess that's the main conflict at this point! So the climax of the story will be Petronas finding out and Venus turning down his proposal.

The Crusades #18 Rating: B. There's a new sheriff in town and she's got a much better ass than the last one. Hopefully Godfrey remains unable to patrol the city since he's a violent maniac. Venus just goes around putting assholes in their place and making them shit themselves. That's the kind of justice San Francisco really needs! I didn't mention that Detective Petronas suspects that Venus may have more to do with the knight than she's let on. Although I don't know that there will be time to deal with that in two more issues. What I want for the last two issues is for nothing serious to happen and just allow Venus to move Godfrey and Cela into her apartment with her while she fucks her way through the ranks of the SCA. That's not too much to ask for, is it?

The Crusades #17 (September 2002)

Did this motherfucker draw that chainmail or is that photo rendered to match the drawing? Who cares, really. Fucking gorgeous.

I mentioned the Third Crusade might have a hint of a theme of Daddy Issues running through it which I'd like to explore a bit before finding out that the knight definitely isn't Venus's father (but wouldn't that be fucking great?). Venus's mother (has her name been mentioned? It's possible it's been stated three times every issue but I'm as perceptive as a bat in a rave) fled from her husband to Sydney, Australia, taking their three children along, when Venus was six years old. She had caught him kissing another woman and possibly some other problems that have not been mentioned in the sparse "Researcher's Flashback" which Venus has had since her mother dropped in. At first, Venus fears the knight. He's a mysterious masculine figure who punishes those who have been bad. Seems like exactly the kind of 20th Century image kids like Venus from "traditional" families would have had of fathers, especially if you only remembered your father in the brief snippets of memory that from in a child not yet seven. These would have been accentuated by an angry wife who no doubt shit on Venus's father every chance she could get. The belief that Venus's mom would do that is based on her character so far and not on my own childhood memories of what my mother said about my father who left when I was two. I don't remember her shitting on him all that much until later years when he basically disappeared from our lives and stopped paying child support. Anyway, the early knight equals early memories of her father: an intimidating and scary presence best avoided and fled from.

As Venus gets older (meaning the Second Crusade), the knight becomes the man Venus pursues. I'm talking about society's idea of Daddy Issues and not saying, "Hey, world! I think Daddy Issues are massively real and we should boil all women's motives down to wanting to fuck a father figure." Not that Venus knows she wants to fuck the knight yet (that comes in the Third Crusade!) but she is "pursuing" him in her research as she tries to find out who he is and what he's up to. In her second encounter with him (her first major, face-to-face one), she sees him as a heroic knight trying to save lives and punish criminals. He's mysterious, masculine, massive, and, apparently, morally just. Venus is intrigued. She now finds alluring that which she feared as a child. She also eventually discovers that the knight really is a Daddy, taking care of a blind girl in their home in the sewers. So not only is the knight a representation of her father but a better version, one that looks after his child (even if he does keep her in a cage in a sewer).

By the Third Crusade, Venus's friend Sara points out that Venus wants to fuck him. And in a sense, Venus has entered into an intimate relationship with this man. She has taken care of him, undressed him, kissed him (his hand only but still!). But she still doesn't know him. He's a cypher and a fantasy, (mal)formed by her experiences of men like her father and Anton and Addas, placed on a pedestal because, being unknown behind plate and helmet, she can project her wants and needs onto this medieval lump of clay. But then it begins to fall apart as she learns who this man might actually be: a homicidal killer of San Francisco's gay population. Daddy? Daddy? Is that you?!

Anyway, he's probably not actually her father. How stupidly ridiculous would that be?! I'm going to guess her shocked expression at the end of the last issue was because of maggots crawling out of his nose.

Lyric time!

That must be Venus's gay brother. I can tell by the tucked-in muscle shirt.

Anybody who's gone to college feels this quote pretty deeply, I suppose. I also felt this when I Ghost Worlded myself out of my hometown in a bus (VW Volkswagen, not a mysterious bus waited on by a confused old man and a lost pair of pants) at twenty-five. Anatole makes it sound more dramatic than it probably is but also possibly spot-on? It's hard to say from my point of view as my point of view is linear and I've always been part of it. But from my grandparents' point of view, whom I saw almost daily my entire life? And now they saw me once, maybe twice a year? That's a kind of death, no? I don't think Anatole is saying you have to blow shit up so irreversibly that you can't help but be a new person. Although maybe?

Here's another quote by Anatole France from his Wikipedia page that seems pertinent to our country full of stupid, scared conservatives: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread."

Based on the brief bit of dialogue that always appears after the lyric on the first page (in this case: "What...happened to you...?"), Venus was reacting to maggots.

Okay, not maggots. He's just horribly burned. Probably like that cop whose badge he had on him that died in the collapse of the burning warehouse! One thing Venus realizes is that she should have seen his burns all down his chest previously but she did not. His skin was smooth and taut and nipply before. The knight explains why that is and how Daddy Issues tend to work.

Seems a little mansplainy to me.

Oh yeah! The Anatole quote works for the knight as well as Venus! Because the quote, I mean lyric, was topped by Venus's family photo, I just thought it was referencing her move from Sydney to San Francisco. But the knight was a cop who died in a fire to become the fucked-up crazy-ass vigilante he is today! Just to be clear: that's definitely a step up. But then anything is a step up from being a cop.

The knight almost tricks Venus into seeing him as fuckable but she stands firm on keeping him chained up (for restraint purposes and not fuck purposes) and taking his weapons. She'll release him once more gay guys get murdered tonight!

Seems to me there's a huge bunch-of-dead-gay-guys flaw in that plan.

Meanwhile, Anton Marx has lost his chance at a television show and has been unceremoniously booted from Hollywood. He's on his way home as Venus goes in search of him (for some reason. Oh! Daddy Issues, probably). She checks out his weirdo (no judgment) hangout, the coffee shop Slice of Heaven, and meets one of his friends, Lyssa, the woman who writes erotic fiction. And to prove that maybe I was on the right track with the underlying Daddy Issues theme, Lyssa asks Venus what she's looking for in a man.

These are the two types of men she's looking for: one entirely made up in her head or one that is real but never there for her.

Venus, having taken on the mantle of the knight by taking his helmet and sword (although not consciously, mind you), decides to do a good deed: save the Incest Twins' show. Addas had mentioned getting it shut down now that they've moved up to legitimate theaters and she wants to warn them. So she goes to meet them in the Geary Theater as it's closing. Sitting in front of the stage waiting for them to come down from the dressing room, she has one of her family research flashbacks.

Interesting phrasing: "after he left her mother."

It's really just semantics. Yes, Venus's mother "left" her husband and took the kids. But her father had basically "left" the family by engaging in extramarital affairs. This is where I'd say that tomato thing that doesn't really work when not spoken so I'll leave it for you to say softly to yourself instead.

Braden and Blair, the incest twins, meet with Venus who gives them the warning. She also mentions they're supposed to leave by the back of the theater through the alley. And since the narrative has been pretty clear what happens to men who enter back alleys in this town, and that Venus has allowed for one more gay murder in this town, everybody knows what's about to happen except Venus, Blair, and Braden.

This guy's the knight?! He's barely even trying!

Normally that caption would be underneath a scan of only the first panel. But then Jones had to go and do the other sexy damsel-in-distress panels with the cleavage shot and the sneaky underwear peak and I got all weak in my penis knees and couldn't help but scan them. But more importantly, the page ends with the panel of Venus looking dead into the knight's helmet as her need to play hero suddenly goes from unconscious to fully medieval.

The Hate Crime Knight (now that I've seen him, he isn't really worthy of that name. The Hate Crime part, sure! But Knight? No way) explains to Blair and Braden why he's doing it and, I suspect, most readers yawned even more lengthily than I did. Yeah, yeah. He's a self-loathing homosexual. Understood that since the Golden Gate Park incident. But he does point out that he's killing gay people so he's not tempted to fuck gay people because they'll all still be gay but also dead and he's a homosexual and not a necrophile. But before he can murder the Incest Twins, Venus is all, "Soit qui mal y pense, motherfucker!"

Venus attacks the man while wearing the knight's armor but she loses the fight. She stabs the man in the leg but then he stabs her in the calf. She falls and he's about to finish her when an earthquake hits and a building collapses on the Hate Crime Knight. It's an acceptable God in the Machine moment because as everybody who doesn't live in San Francisco knows, earthquakes are hitting it right and left all the time, with buildings falling over and fires breaking out and sections falling out of bridges. They've learned all that stuff from watching the television they lost in one of the weekly tornadoes or hurricanes the rest of the country suffers from.

The earthquake might mean something more than just a casual deus ex machina but do I have the patience to suss it out? Maybe my brain will work on it and I'll mention what it means while I'm doing Deadman reviews next month. But I do know one reason why Seagle had the city save the day itself: Venus was wearing armor way too big for her and has no experience with a sword so it wouldn't have been proper for her to defeat this man. Also Seagle probably doesn't want her to have murder on her conscious. Also, the main point of the encounter was that Venus had the courage to do what was right. She stood up to protect The City and the people who make The City what it is. And The City responded in kind by squashing the Hate Crime Knight with a ton of bricks.

Venus flees immediately leaving Braden and Blair to exclaim, "Who was that masked sexpot?!" And it's left me with a women in armor fetish. Gonna explore that one a little later! Thank you Incognito Mode!

Venus's mother flees San Francisco because of the earthquake and Venus tells her not to give up on her gay son Dmitri the way she gave up on Venus's father. The father stuff was well done by Seagle across these five issues in that he was mostly invisible, as shown in one of the first family photo introductions where he's been torn off the family picture. He sets up this idea that the father was a terrible father but in reality it just seems he was a terrible husband who was separated from his daughter against her will. He does eventually leave the picture entirely in that Venus has the memory of the last time she saw him. No judgment on her father, though, as his story is barely told and who knows his situation and how hard it was for him to see her when she was taken half a world away. There's one more family research flashback that shows Venus crying and praying while watching her mother put the final touches on pushing her father away. Venus's mother looks stern and unyielding; Venus's father, sad and broken.

But what about Godfrey and Cela, you might be wondering? According to Syd, crushed to death by the earthquake. So sad!

The Crusades #17 Rating: A+. This story arc wrapped up well and the amount of shit I'm realizing Seagle put into this just makes me feel stupid as hell. I never feel like I've missed shit when reading superhero comic books because, for the most part, they're superficial fantasy fun with right there on their sleeve ideas about morality and ethical behavior in a black and white four-color world. But this Vertigo shit sometimes does more than tits and swearing. And they expect me, a person who loves tits and swearing, to understand the deeper meanings and themes?! What do they think I am?! A person with a degree in literature and three credits short of an American History minor?! I mean, yeah, I am that but I'm a stupid one of those! Stop being so full of the smart stuff, comic books! Man, I can't wait to read some Deadman!

The Crusades #16 (August 2002)

Is this one of those five and a half minute staircases?

Almost speaking of infinity, I was lying in bed trying to come up with more reasons to think Christians are stupid as hell and I began poking the festering wound that is the idea that they can believe in infinity but only if infinity is a big magic Creator that looks just like they do and probably has the fattest dick. They'll scoff at the idea that matter has always existed or time or space or whatever has Who knows? Scientists? Soon enough, they'll pull out a pen and paper and do one of their magic riddles that proves God exists by saying, "Nothing is infinite." And then because they're like a close-up magician with this shit and it's been tested over and over by, like, C.S. Lewis and shit, you'll be all, "Um, a circle?" And they'll go, "A-ha, you stupid heathen, you have fell into my trap! Watch me draw a circle!" Then they're all, "See? A beginning as I, the creator of the circle, put my pen to the paper! Not infinite, you stupid bitch! Where's your faith now, you evil penis worshiper?" And then you'll go, "So you, a human, created that circle that isn't infinite? Just like a human created a God that isn't infinite?" And they'll turn bright red and go watch a Chicago Bears game. That was mostly a true story. Anyway, why don't they ever think, "God is Infinite and has always been. But He made us in his image and we, like, procreate and shit. So somebody must have created God with their omnipotent fanny, right? Some Mother Creator? And God also must shit and piss and get horny?" They can never comfortably sit with not knowing something because the answer "God!" is always right in their front pocket next to their private area which God also has plus the other one probably.

I suppose what Christians are thinking is that God doesn't have sexual organs or places to evacuate waste because he doesn't need nutrition so he doesn't have a heart or a brain or a stomach or a kidney or a liver or any of the other stuff we have that I can't remember. Like a pancreaum maybe? So just like all of their beliefs, the idea that God made us in His image is purely superficial. And what they're also thinking with their dirty little pervert minds is that God fantasized about creatures that put their doohickeys in similar creatures wonkpockets until they both experienced the love shivers (or just the one with the doohickey did way too often than was respectful) and then a baby, made exactly in their image, fell out of the wonkpocket nine or so months later. If God is infinite than God never experienced any of that stuff because he doesn't grow or die because that's a side effect of reproduction because — guess what, motherfuckers — evolution was the best way for life to survive because it allowed for growth and change of organisms across the long term in the way they're formed from the start. So, yeah, God made it all up like a horny fanfic writer on tumblr. He was all, "What if there were a wee creature that looked like Me but it wasn't infinite like Me. So, let's see, I have this mouth that I don't use for anything at all because I don't eat and there's nobody to talk to so what is language? What if this creature shoves stuff in it like fuel (I'll figure out what 'fuel' is later). But the fuel isn't perfectly burned as it travels through the gross shit I'm going to put inside this wee guy so I'll put a tight little hole with loads of erogenous nerve receptors down at its other end (the place where I just have a smooth patch), and foul smelling leftover fuel will fall out of it at semi-regular intervals. Sometimes it'll be hard and sometimes soft and sometimes practically just dirty, smelly water. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea that won't force them to spend a good portion of their lives dealing with! Oh, and what if sometimes they strain too hard and a vein bulges on them and kind of falls out of the orifice and hangs there like a snake sticking out of a hole with an undigested rat halfway down its gullet? Ha ha! They're going to hate me, aren't they?!"

But also God didn't just do that with wee creatures that looked like Him! He made up a bunch of other weirdoes with strange genitals and ways of reproducing and also fucking sharks. Why would a good God make sharks?! I mean, sure, sharks are fucking awesome. But why make a bunch of cool shit and then think, "I need a swimming, living, organic wood chipper to fuck up all my cool creatures!" Oh man. Do I think God is cool now?!

That was actually more related to this comic than you think. Remember, it's called The Crusades! And now, a lyric!

My cynical nature read this way too much like a Wayne's World quote.

It took me far too long to realize Aeschylus (that guy probably hated his parents for that name, amirite?) was saying, "I have no fears when a match has equal partners", and not, "I don't believe it at all when somebody says a match has equal partners." More to the point because I don't know what to say about that, what the fuck is up with that picture from Venus's past? Is that her rolling her eyes at the concept of marriage? Is she rolling her eyes at the two people getting married? Is she rolling her eyes about how long it's going to take to become a sexpot which she'll only regret later after she becomes a sexpot and spends the rest of her life thinking, "Why was I in such a rush to become a sexpot?" Is the groom Addas Petronas going through a Greek arranged marriage? Is the quote tacked on to point out how hard it actually is for a relationship to have equal partners? A fable even? Beats me! I'm still thinking how fucking metal God is for making a living woodchipper!

The issue begins with Father Trinidad and Venus fleeing from the Universal Church of Light and Love because it actually was an alley outside of their church where the Hate Crime Knight just murdered his gay hook-up and lit everything on fire. I was confused last issue because the Hate Crime Knight told his potential sex partner to meet him at the Universal Church of Light and Harmony. You can see how I would have been confused being that the two names were very different and yet super similar, espousing basically the same sentiment. Sort of like when I was an even-stupider-than-I-am-now early teen reading The Lord of the Rings and I couldn't keep Saruman and Sauron straight. Bakshi's animated movie fixes this by calling Saurman exclusively Aruman and also by leaving out the entire siege of Orthanc. I rewatched it recently, as well as Rankin and Bass's The Hobbit and The Return of the King and was surprised that they left out my three favorite parts of the books: Tom Bombadil, the Ents absolutely shitting all over Saruman, and Shelob. Rankin and Bass surely could have added Shelob or Orthanc if they'd just left out all the long-ass fucking scenes of Sam fantasizing about his future, either as a bad-ass ring wielder or where he fucks two kids out of Rosie.

So five pages later, everybody is out of the burning church and the firemen have discovered a dead body with a gray cross on his forehead. Seems like a bit of a waste of pages but I'll trust Seagle's pacing. Was this around the time when editorial began demanding that every story arc be five or six issues so they could easily be packaged in a collection? Or had that been going on forever?

Venus has a theory!

Father Trinidad's about to look inward and have a spiritual crisis. Having aligned himself with a medieval killer, is he any better than The Pope? Has his dog slipped the leash (which was never really there anyway and only built from Father Trinidad's delusions which he shares with every other mortal person that they're in more control of their lives than they ever really are)? Is the knight suddenly killing off his people?! Well, he must be stopped then!

Oh look! It happened on the very next page!

Meanwhile Anton Marx blah blah blah having a shit time blah blah blah losing his show blah blah blah hating life blah blah blah ha ha ha! Suck it, Anton!

Cela has become too much for Sara to handle so she sends her back to Venus. Cela wants to go back underground but Venus isn't quite ready to do that. Even if she thought it was okay to send her back to living in a cage under the eye of a murderer, she's not ready to send Cela back while the knight can't even move. Or thinks he can't move until he gets the urge to kill some gay guys. Venus tells her mom she's going on a date with Addas so her mother doesn't fight Venus when she leaves Cela with her. But actually she's just going on that date because she needs the knight's fingerprints run.

Oh, and maybe she wants some dick.

The knight solves his problems by manipulating a sword and Venus does the same, in a manner of speaking. That's probably why she'll eventually hang up her sex object hat and begin wearing the helmet herself. Then she can kill Anton Marx while pretending it was in the name of God!

Before going on the date, Venus asks her mother why she faced her fear of flying (read the novel by Erica Jong, 1973, to know why this is an important detail about Venus's mother. I don't have time to read everything for you!) and learns that her brother Dmitri (the man in the photo not getting married (the other man is her other brother)) is gay. Venus's mom panicked and now thinks Venus is the only chance for a grandchild. I don't know why the other brother doesn't count. Is he infertile? Does the oldest son in Greek families only fuck their wives in the mouth and ass?

Venus's mother is disturbed by gay men so it's lucky she came to the City by the Gay. Maybe she's the Hate Crime Knight!

Gross. I wish there were a knight killing hetero couples!

Addas believes that the best way to get a woman into bed is to show her all of your red flags at once: jealousy, over-committing, creepy intenseness, homophobia. Oh, the homophobia wasn't on that page! It was on the next page where he's suddenly called away to investigate the murder at the Universal Church of Light and Love/Harmony before Venus can refuse his offer. Basically he says homosexuals are okay with him as long as they know their place and don't get too public about it. Or maybe he's just weirded out by the creepy incest because he is talking about the twins who fuck each other in front of an audience.

Once Addas leaves, Venus goes home, gets Cela, and takes her back underground. She discovers the knight still lying where she left him. But he has ash on his fingers! He tells her a story about how he tried to get up and fell and knocked a torch down but she doesn't buy it. To find out once and for all if he's the killer, she chains him to Cela's cage. If a murder is committed while he's still chained up, she'll know he's innocent. Which seems bad because now she has to wait until somebody dies to prove he's not the Hate Crime Knight? You know how I'd prove he hasn't been killing gay guys and has just been lying there all this time? His pants must be full of piss and possibly shit, right?! Take his pants off, Venus! Take off his pants and check!

Instead, she takes off his helmet.

The Crusades #16 Rating: B+. Wait! You can't end there, Seagle! Who is the knight?! How could Venus recognize him if there aren't really any other character that she knows in this comic book that he can be! Unless it's her father. Could it be her father? Is that why all the family pictures at the beginning of each issue? Could this not only be a story about how the gay lifestyle must subvert the status quo in various ways to keep the status quo from ultimately destroying it with torches and swords but be a story about Daddy Issues?! Are we going to get some kind of morality tale about Venus being a sex object because the last time she saw her father, she was eight years old? Oh man, I fucking hope not! I'd take a guess at who the knight is and why Venus would recognize him except I really can't think of any other people she knows well enough to be shocked at seeing them down here. Maybe she's just shocked because his face is full of maggots!

The Crusades #15 (July 2002)

The Knight, when not drawn by Kelley Jones, is just a medium-sized person. Is that true of Bane as well?!

When I first glanced through my issues of The Crusades, I saw this cover and thought, "The knight's a lesbian!" But now I see that my ability to read visual art must be hampered by my desire to see two women kissing and my brain decided Venus's hair was the knight's hair. But just now I thought, "Why wouldn't the knight have long hair and be male, like all males before Reagan took office?" But, no, that's Venus's hair. I wrote that more to myself than all the Status-Quo people who were like, "Yeah, no duh that's Venus's hair. My eyes are actually attached to my brain. Also, all males didn't have long hair before Reagan, you dumb hippie freak who grew up in California watching Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell and Hair. Maybe watch some Dragnet sometime to know what real fucking short-haired men thought of you long-haired faggy acid freaks!"

Whoops! Now everybody knows how much I despise the Status Quo! Well, it's not like I was ever trying to hide it and anyways have exposed myself plenty of times before this. Yes, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yes, I watched the Pride Parade every year on KOFY TV-20. Sure, I read Armistead Maupin's Tales of The City. I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons in 5th grade through the Gifted and Talented Program. I listened to XTC's "Dear God" without ever thinking there was anything controversial about it. My 6th grade teacher had records in the back of the room to play during rainy days and one of them was AC/DC's If You Want Blood. KTVU Channel 2 ran segments during commercial breaks where they showed kids going about their day that ended with the kid saying, "I'm proud to be a Japanese-American!" or "I'm proud to be a Black American!" or even "I'm proud to be an Italian-American!" For a long time, I attributed that sense of freedom and diversity and openness to growing up in the '70s. But when I met the Non-Certified Spouse who is exactly my age but from Nebraska, I learned that, no, maybe a lot of that sense of an unlimited world where everybody could live as they wanted was based on the location in which I was raised. To a lot of Status Quo assholes, they might start thinking that I grew up surrounded by liberal propaganda and that my brain was ruined by it. But the actual fact of the matter is that the Status Quo feeds you the propaganda. Those who think the Status Quo is reality are the ones with the brain rot who have been subjected to mental barricades and made-up rules, living in a labyrinth of pure societal bullshit. I was not taught to believe anything, really: areligious, amoral, a latch key kid who was left to experience and interpret life without judgment or a list of terrifying spiritual punishments made up to limit that life. And even in this open environment, kids picked up hurtful phrases and awful stereotypes. But inevitably, somebody would explain to you how you were being a stupid dick (maybe in nicer terms; sometimes, though, being adults, they just yelled at you not to say whatever you just said and you were left to figure out why (obviously not as helpful but at least they still made you think and take more care next time)) and, hopefully, you'd grow. Sure, bigoted assholes are everywhere. Maybe I should be less thankful about the area or the time I grew up and be more thankful about the people who helped raise me, my grandparents and my mother and my nearby Aunt and Uncle whose house was basically a second home and even the parents of some of my friends, especially their dads who, along with my grandfather and uncle, were more alternate father figures in my dadless world. Because I certainly had friends then who have become Right Wing news junkies. But maybe that's part of the point. They were more than free to choose that themselves. I know for a fact they didn't have anybody raising them to be that way but they wound up there just as I wound up in an opposite place. They just wandered into the weeds, either through fear or brainwashing or bad relationships or nearly being blown up in Iraq. Who knows why people who can't stop thinking that other people's contentment and happiness somehow takes away from their own? It's fucking mind boggling!

I never thought it wasn't crazy Mrs. Singer had this in her classroom. But it was pretty fucking cool.

And with all that, I just remembered there's a lyric to discuss, and, well, I think I've already done the work so we'll just move on after I post it.

Mrs. Descartes makes a good point!

One thing I'll add as succinctly as I can about this lyric: using your mind well, I'd surmise, isn't entirely up to you. You know what? Forget succinctly. Using your mind well suggests that how we think is entirely up to us and not predicated on outside factors. On one side, people understand that our minds are useful only so far as the things we've learned by standing on the shoulders of those who came before us, who made mistakes that we'll never have to make because the lessons were passed on (this, changing the subject completely in this aside, probably accounts for things like vaccine deniers and Flat Earth thinking (not that literally those that think the Earth is flat but those that think everything learned previously must be re-learned and re-proved and re-experienced by yourself, the individual, and that your experiences and interpretations of reality become reality itself, sealing yourself in your own Matrix-style delusion when you've absolutely convinced yourself you've freed yourself from one)). And freeing ourselves from having to commit those mistakes to learn something, our minds begin on a new level to make new mistakes and raise the overall knowledge and intelligence for the next generation. In this context, I think about Ayn Rand's short novel, Anthem. It's the only Rand I've ever read because it's short and because Rush wrote a song about it and I wanted to see why fucking Rush spent some time bamboozled by the whole Randian myth of selfishness. The protagonist has a good mind that readers believe he uses well to see through a system that hurts everybody and keeps everybody from being who they could be. But it's presented as "a system that cares about community hates the individual and thus community is bad," thus exposing Rand's bias almost immediately. It's a bias that continues to live by people who can't see that community's are made of and by people so a healthy community helps the individual. But if you've got Flat Earth brain, you believe everything you've ever accomplished was all by yourself and not predicated on communal safety nets and shared infrastructure and the compassion of neighbors, friends, and family. So this protagonist, the only one who recognizes how harmful community is, goes out on his own (with a woman but she's not allowed to be an individual, a point proven by the end where she introduces him to the pronoun "I" and yet she isn't allowed to choose her own name; he does that). He learns so much all on his own! He lives by the power and strength of his own mind and his own hands! He proves that the individual is worth more than community! Ha ha, no, no. I'm lying. He actually finds an old house with loads of modern technologies that he winds up living in. In the house is a massive library with loads of previous knowledge of a "forbidden" previous society where he learns loads, especially that thing about learning the pronoun "I" (that I guess was outlawed because Ayn Randians hate pronouns?). In other words, he goes off on his own and becomes the greatest man who ever lived by standing on the shoulders of the community knowledge and technology that came before him and then declares, "I did it all myself!" Fuck you, Ayn Rand. Just fuck off.

By the way, I now try to link all of my URLs through the Wayback Machine at Internet Archive because I don't trust anybody but them to not eventually kill a link. I've probably got so many dead links across my 4000+ entries.

"Goddamn, Grunion Guy. Or Tess. Or The Red King. Or The Red Lizard King. Or whatever the fuck your name is. Are you ever going to read the comic?!" That wasn't me simulating what a reader might be thinking. That was a transcription of a thought my brain just sent to my, um, other brain? How do thoughts work when you think them in your head? One part of your brain thinks it and another part of your brain interprets it? And I guess if the part of the brain that connects those two has some janky wiring, that's schizophrenia and you think some other person is projecting those thoughts into your head? What the fuck am I doing? I'm still not fucking reading the comic book! I have still have actual life shit to do today, brain! Get off my nuts!

Should I talk about the picture over the lyric? What is that? Venus watching her mother get her face melted off and her eyes steamed out of her head? Is that why her eyes look like Sandman's The Corinthian's eyes?

Venus has arrived at the part of the story where he begins having sex dreams about the gay knight.

"Please, Venus, I have made a fat sausage for you. And hash browns which is what I call my butthole."

Venus wakes up on the couch with her mother declaring she needs to get up and prettify herself because Detective Petronas is coming over for breakfast. Addas knows Venus isn't interested in him yet he's allowing Venus's mother to facilitate his sexual harassment of her. She has rejected his advances multiple times across the series and yet he won't give up because he sees Venus's mother's interest in him as consent to keep trying with Venus. Mostly she's been cold to him because she came to San Francisco to escape her Greek Australian world. But Addas seems to have followed her to America (maybe she followed him? No, that doesn't seem possible), disrespecting her choice to have separated herself from her previous life. And now, just as she's broken up with her asshole boyfriend to begin pursuing a 900 year old medieval knight vigilante she can never possibly have a life with (read: a gay man), her old life has crashed down upon her.

Ah, the Butt-Boob Showcase! How I have missed thee!

Addas drops by to decline breakfast because the Hate Crime Knight murdered three drag queens in an alley the night before. Venus, sitting in her still gooey from her dream about the knight underwear, doesn't see it as a bad thing that Addas is interested. I guess losing her regular fuck sections with Anton, being horny for the rampaging knight, and then watching two twins fuck each other on stage has her thinking, "Where's another fat dick I can sit on?" And look at that! Addas's fat dick is readily available! Too bad her mother will probably be there to help guide it in.

No wait. Venus is just using Addas for his fingerprinting technology. How stupid and careless of me to think the sex object wants sex! She's too busy investigating the sex object with whom the sex object wants to have sex. If Venus can just make sure he's not a 900 year old knight with some really fucked up medieval venereal diseases, she can casually remove his chain mail to give him a sponge bath and accidentally spill the water all over her clothes so she'll need to get out of them so she doesn't catch a cough in the cold sewers and then she'll accidentally fall on his erect and throbbing Zweihänder!

Meanwhile Anton Marx is having trouble in Los Angeles getting his radio show turned into a television show. Ha ha! Who cares? Get fucked!

Venus finds a badge while visiting the knight (who's back on the floor and unable to walk) and gets the badge number from one of Addas's coworkers. Turns out it's the badge of a cop named Bud Stafford who was killed when a burning Chinatown warehouse collapsed on him. Has she discovered the identity of the knight?! Is that why he won't take off the helmet? Because his face is burned beyond human recognition? She doesn't ask the cop if Bud was into super old and boring books of quotations though. That would have been my follow-up question after "Was Bud gay?" If I was Venus, I mean!

I don't remember if the stable boy ever mentioned the name of the cop whose blind horse lived in the police stables but maybe it was Bud? Hopefully, because I want the knight to be 900 years old, the knight just found the badge in the wreckage after the building collapsed and parts of it wound up in his underground city/closet.

Meanwhile, it seems the Hate Crime Knight has taken up gay Internet dating sites to find more victims.

Can the Hate Crime Knight be more obvious? The Ash Wednesday killer going by the name Lent? Come on, man! Lent meets the man outside the Universal Church of Light and Harmony, kills him, and then sets the whole thing on fire. Meanwhile Venus meets with Father Trinidad at the Universal Church of Light and Love to let him know the knight is dying. She finally realized he must have been working with the knight and she's correct. I thought the next scene would be her and Father Trinidad fleeing from a fire but as I noted explicitly, the two churches have different names. But maybe next issue?

The Crusades #15 Rating: B-. This very much felt like a middle episode of a five issue arc. A few steps were taken toward the climax but mostly it was a lot of repeated actions: visiting the knight, Marx pursuing his career, the Hate Crime Knight killing somebody else, Sara still babysitting Cela, the knight vomiting out ancient quote after ancient quote, Venus's mother trying to get her laid. Just a whole lot of the same that finally ends up with Venus and Father Trinidad finally getting back together, the only two people who seem to have had close contact with the knight. So while this issue meandered and repeated plot points to make sure the reader knows what's what, next issue seems to be building to some exciting revelations. Although let's be clear about one thing: this issue had a load of panels with Venus in her pink panties and I, a person who just typed the word "panties" and liked it, fanatically approve! A+ on that scale!

The Crusades #14 (June 2002)

Somebody, sometime, crashed through that flimsy grate and died.

I'm the worst visual art critic in the world which probably means that I shouldn't be reviewing comic books. But instead, it means I look at an image like this and think, "Did Venus phase through that woman in the skirt? Maybe she's running backwards but her hair thinks she's running forwards? Does the knight often lie underneath this grate jerking off to upskirts? Did Venus just come from a bowling alley or does she wear bowling shoes in some kind of hipster, ironic way?" But seriously, anybody walking over that grate doesn't value or respect their own life.

Once again, I forgot about the song lyrics right up until opening the comic book and reading the song lyric! This one is from a band named Jewish Proverb.

Even in their proverbs, Jewish people are taking shots at God!

At first I thought this was an image of Venus's mom dragging her toward some imposing figure in the foreground blocking out half the picture. But, being the super observant person I am who notices almost everything that other people easily notice, I realized it was a torn photo, removing Venus's dad from the image. Also Venus's mom looks like a mushroom. Kelley Jones' visuals usually mean something so that probably means Venus regards her childhood "down under" as having been Wonderland-esque, as in down the rabbit hole, as in everybody was crazy and she fucked a white rabbit.

I don't want to shit all over that Jewish proverb unlike how I often shit all over the Jewish Torah. But not because it's Jewish! I'm just partaking of the Rabbinical tradition of arguing about the meaning of it all and, like the proverb above, shitting on God's omniscience and omnipotence and overall intelligence in general! Can you imagine a religion where the followers wind up being atheist but don't see it as a conflict of interest? That's fucking metal, man. Rabbis everywhere just tearing the shit out of the Torah's asshole, poking holes in it, pointing out paradoxes and hypocrisies, but ultimately embracing it because — let's face it — the Torah's really just a document to prove the Jewish right to the land in the Middle East. That chapter where Sarah dies and Abraham takes her body back to her homeland to bury her is less a loving story about a husband's fealty to his lost loved one and more a long story about Abraham's negotiating a payment for the land where he's going to bury Sarah to prove that the Father of Judaism owns that land. It's just a long-winded receipt!

I'd just like to point out: I don't shit on the Jewish Torah because it's Jewish! I shit on it because it's fucking ridiculous! Before Genesis is even over, you've got three generations of couples having the exact same adventure over and over. Unless it was family tradition to pretend your wife was your sister so you could fool some leader of a nation out of all his riches and asses (and maybe stealing his wells while you were at it), it just reads like a poorly edited manuscript! I will say this though: reading The Bible really does make you understand where all the really antisemitic tropes come from and it made me feel like a horrible person applying logic to this document because I felt like I was leaving an online comment of "Totes agree, dude!" on a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Look, I don't believe any of that antisemite shit (I'm even woke enough to spell "antisemite" the correct and unracist way!). But when your foundational text is just a bunch of chapters of God saying, "Yeah, all that land where everybody else already lives? It's yours! Go get it!", you can understand how people were wary of that sense of religious entitlement. Plus you know that when dealing with the writers of The Bible, you're dealing with that high school debate club asshole who always dreamed about being a lawyer because they could argue so well, especially when you read the story of Onan. You go into it thinking, "Oh yeah! This is that story that explains why you shouldn't masturbate!" And then you come away thinking, "What the fuck? That was just about contract law? How do you make a story about some guy fucking his sister-in-law and then ejaculating all over the ground about a father and God being angry that the spoogy little bastard broke a contract and not about his gross, lecherous mess on the bedroom floor?" But then why am I even mentioning that when Lot's daughters got their father drunk so they could fuck him and Noah cursed his son's sons because that son walked into Noah's tent while Noah was passed out drunk and naked and saw his penis? What the fuck is going on, man?! Maybe if you want me to understand why some guy got so butthurt about somebody else seeing his penis, you should add further details to the story. Was Ham running around town making stubby pencil jokes about Noah's wiener? What's so wrong about seeing your dad's dick? It's a good thing I never had kids because, according to the story of Ham and Noah, they'd be cursed due to that time my step-sister and I were being loud in a hotel room and my dad came out naked to yell at me! The good part of that story is that we kept being loud so then my step-mom came out to yell at us too and she was only in her panties. So I saw step-boobies!

When we last left our non-knight characters, they were all bunched up in Venus's apartment ready for some good old fisticuff style conflict.

I thought Detective Petronas was going to beat the shit out of Anton. This is better.

It's weird. I don't remember a whole lot about this comic from 22 years ago. But I absolutely remembered Venus's mom when she appeared. Maybe because she's so cartoonish? She feels like a Tiny Toons character.

I just want to mention, because Kelley Jones has been doing such a fantastic job with the art of this comic book, how he deals with the confrontation between Anton and Petronas (just before Venus's mom explodes onto the scene swinging her purse like a medieval flail). Let's take a look at it:

I'm ruining the spine of this issue to get this scan!

You almost never see a comic use the gutter between pages as part of the art, let alone use it so literally. Venus becomes the gutter, the gulf, the border between her two worlds she's been trying to keep as separate as possible. And here they are, still on two opposed pages, but finally meeting and facing off with Venus serving as the white space between panels/worlds. Fucking tremendous.

Detective Petronas de-escalates the situation the way no cop would ever do by pretending he has to get back to the station instead of shooting Anton with his service revolver and then never having the murder go to trial because most District Attorneys know that if they ever convict a cop, no cop will ever testify for them again and their careers will be over. Although, have District Attorneys ever thought about how not having a cop for a witness might make their lives better? People hate cops and, last I checked, juries, like Soylent Green, were made out of people! Who needs to get a miserable, lying cop on the stand when you can just submit their lying, bullshit, overtime-tacked-on reports to the court?

After Petronas leaves, Anton discovers one more person who can't stand him.

Cela using her personal connection to the knight to throw her weight around.

Oh! More Alice's Adventures in Wonderland references with the chopping off of heads. Was I really not that far off with the whole mushroom thing?

Detective Petronas actually was called away and didn't de-escalate on purpose which totally makes sense based on that thing about cops I said earlier. He was called to Golden Gate Park to investigate the murder of the guy the knight caught "tilting windmills." I wasn't expecting the knight to become a gay basher but if he thinks he's working for God and he's 900 years old, I suppose it makes sense. Not logical sense, obviously! Twisted, stupid, irrational, religious sense! The kind of sense that if you tried to explain to an alien visiting Earth for the first time, they'd simply wind up saying, "What?!", about fifty times before disintegrating you.

My entire life, I've been able to ignore Ash Wednesday and now this comic book is going to make me learn about it? Feh!

The ashes in the shape of a cross on the forehead are Catholic shorthand for "Repent, and believe in the Gospel." That motherfucker. Here I was believing he was some good guy bringing evil to justice and now I find out that his idea of justice is butting into people's personal lives and forcing them to live the way he's living? Oh wait. I think I already realized that when I suspected the knight was gay and closeted and self-loathing. Now we're seeing the dangerous consequences of society's condemnation of mundane bullshit that's outside the "accepted Status Quo". The only reason anybody feels their lives are somehow hampered by the personal lives of other people is this: they are miserable and they hate seeing other people joyous. And they aren't miserable due to chemicals in their heads being off; they've chosen their misery and hate that other people have chosen not to be miserable. Sometimes, no matter how complicated any situation might seem, I just feels like it all boils down to that. People simply hate that other people seem freer than they are to choose things that make them happy. Dude, you do know you don't have to be super religious and follow ancient dogma that didn't account for about 93% of the things that exist in modern society, right? But even if you want to choose that, you don't have to be so fucking bitter about all of the people who don't choose that. Be happy with your choices and you'll absolutely never concern yourself with the lives of other people!

Stupid knight! He's got me all worked up with his religious homophobia now!

Venus's friend Sara gave her an idea about figuring out who the knight is: get his fingerprints. So she heads back down to the sewers where Syd the Bear is all, "Fuck, this chick again? Can't she leave us in peace?" While talking to Syd, Venus mentions how the knight is currently paralyzed. So if that's true, maybe he's not as homophobic as I thought. Although why would Seagle pull the whole "It's a different knight!" twist two stories in a row? Maybe because the reader wouldn't expect it! It's the perfect bluff!

I can't believe Venus is actually wearing the same thing she's wearing on the cover! It's a Christmas miracle!

It's a Christmas miracle because I'm writing this on Christmas and no other reason. Also it's a miracle in the way most people define miracles: something absolutely normal and controlled by humans but seems out of the ordinary based on one's typical experiences in life.

I just took a break to shower and shave getting ready to go to the sister-in-law's house for Secular Christmas Dinner and I had a thought about the homophobic knight: could it be Syd? Did he steal the knight's armor and go out using the knight's reputation to act out his own self-loathing? Because like the knight, he lives in this underground city that I suspect (and may be entirely making up but I have a degree in Literary Theory and so feel like I can say this as an expert) represents the so-called "closet" in which homosexuals have often been forced to hide their true selves. And, yes, I've read this before so if I'm right, does that not just mean I'm remembering the story from 20 years ago? Sure, I suppose. But if you ever spent any time in my head, you'll have discovered that memories, for me, are cracked, twisted, dried husks of disused brain matter.

Venus and Godfrey have a little discussion about his life back in the 12th century and how Venus can't be evil so doesn't need to fear him and how Venus might be a little bit hot in the crotch of this shirtless beast of a man. But he's still lying helpless on the floor of a sewer dying from a serious infection (which she gives him antibiotics for, so he'll probably be fine). Although just wait until she hears how he killed a gay guy in Golden Gate Park! She'll be so mad he lied about being paralyzed! Oh, and about the gay bashing!

Speaking of hate crimes, there's a weird bald Fester looking motherfucker that's been hanging out at the scene of the murder.

Something I learned from shitty thrillers in the '00s is that the guy you see on camera in one scene with one line early on is the murderer.

The scary bald guy got a line earlier in the comic after which the reporter on the scene says, "Who's that guy?!", and then winks at the reader. I'm not convinced that guy's the murderer because I trust Seagle more than that although Seagle did do the Faux Knight story arc so why the fuck am I defending him?! The Hate Crime Knight is either Syd or that creepy guy. Either way, it's a bald man. I don't know if Godfrey is bald as well or else I'd keep him as a suspect too. I'm only looking at bald people for this hate crime because who has more hate in their hearts than bald people cursed by God?

Venus's mother sets her up on another date with Detective Petronas. Venus agrees but insists they go see Anton's twin friends, the brothers who fuck each other on stage.

Venus becoming more and more intrigued by the incest show is so fucking adorable! Also her mother looks like The Corinthian from The Sandman.

If the Incest Twins wind up dead after this show, the Hate Crime Knight is Detective Petronas! Except he declares while not enjoying the show, he wasn't offended by it at all. Venus, probably hot and bothered from all the twin fucking she just watched happen on stage, begins to warm up to the Detective. But she has to call the night short to go check on her ward, the little blind leper girl.

After the show, some of the Incest Twins' drag queen friends head back home and take a short cut through an alley. The Hate Crime Knight appears, tell them God hates the way they're living, and kills at least one of them. At the same time, Venus, having used checking on Cela as an excuse, has gone to check on Godfrey. All she finds is a puddle of blood! Oh no!

The Crusades #14 Rating: B+. Is it just a coincidence or is Godfrey actually the Hate Crime Knight?! I'd like to think it's a coincidence and a means to get the reader to start doubting the Godfrey. But it could also be the theme of this Crusade! Those who go on religious crusades only do good by accident, doing as much harm based on their religious morals as good. Is that the theme?! I really should read the entire story before commenting on it! Nah, that's how you do academic papers. I haven't been academic since the late mid-'90s! That shit is over for me! I'm a free wheeler now, baby! I wonder how well I would have done in college if more of my papers had the occasional dick joke? Probably even better based on my professor's reactions when I wrote humorous papers! They were always so thankful for some entertainment mixed in with the stupid research!

The Crusades #13 (May 2002)

Why does it feel like the 3rd Crusade is going to tackle Civil Rights in the '60s?

A black and white cover automatically means a story from the past, right? Plus, black and white? Is that too obvious a way to go with the cover when you're going to write a Civil Rights story? Hopefully I'm not wrong because then I'd either have to rewrite this entire introduction or live with the shame of thinking up a loser theory. Although scientists would probably tell me that dumb theories are helpful in eventually coming up with the truths of the universe. But those are loser scientists and why would I listen to them?

On to the lyric of the month! I'm going to read this one to the tune of "Smells Like Teen Spirit".

Just add "Yeah!" after suffragist and it works pretty well!

Do I get partial credit if this is about women's suffrage? The whole "suffragist" thing might be a red herring; this lyric might just mean that Venus's mother is going to drop in for a surprise visit to try to get her little sexpot married off so she can start producing little sexpots. I mean eventually they'll be sexpots and not babies are sexpots! Babies aren't even cute like everybody pretends they are. Is it a mass hallucination of some kind? Those big alien wobbly heads on little emaciated bodies with bloated bellies? Who thinks that's cute? Plus they're loud and they stink. Maybe it's just me who thinks babies are gross but for the life of me, I can't figure out how it's just me.

Was that my narcissism talking? That I can't imagine people think differently than me? And also that I'm too self-involved to ever contemplate being responsible for another human being and so I overstate how much I think babies are ugly and disgusting?! Enh, I'm probably lying about that anyway. There's no way anybody'll ever know because they don't remember how I fell in love with my nephew that time my sister had to run out early in the morning before I was really awake and just stuck him in his walker next to my bed and we just stared at each other for like ten minutes and he made this face where he looked like he was trying to imitate Popeye and then I put my Van Halen cap on his head and then I was like, "Nobody can ever know how much I love this baby."

Look at me! Lying again! I never thought, "Nobody can ever know how much I love this baby." Any good and decent and caring thought should always be communicated no matter how vulnerable it will make you feel and you should never think, "People cannot know that I'm decent and caring." I believe that but I probably don't live it as much as I should because I have a phobia about being earnest. I think it took hold of me when I was leaving for college and my best friend from high school said, "What am I going to do without you?" and my heart broke but my brain also shouted, "Should he be saying something this forthright and earnest?! Are we going to kiss now?!" We didn't kiss! He's married with three college aged kids now! I don't see enough of him. But the good news is: he figured out what he was going to do without me! Shack up with a woman, get her pregnant one night because they were both too high to give a shit about condoms, and raise three cool kids with her!

Anyway, the comic book answers the question about the quote on the next page.

It's Venus's mother! And she's brought a sack full of phalluses to emphasize her reason for being there: to get this sexpot a husband!

Remember, Venus is named Venus because she represents sex and love and boobies and a great ass. So it's okay if I remind people that she's a sexpot. It's basically Kelley Jones's whole job thinking up various angles to draw Venus so that the reader thinks, "Oh yeah! I have a libido!" Some readers don't think that because they don't have a libido but I think they still get the general vibe Jones is after anyway. Just because somebody is Ace doesn't make them stupid! I think it might be the opposite because I know I think way better after I've jerked off and my concentration isn't constantly at odds with me doing web searches for "Chrissy Snow No Bra".

Venus's "Fact Checker" moments are now being utilized like Lost flashbacks to explain why she's in the Purgatory she's found herself in at thirty-something.

The Purgatory on Lost was actually Purgatory until the writers pulled a DC's Armageddon on the fans and made the island not Purgatory because too many people had guessed that the island was Captain Atom. Venus's Purgatory is Anton Marx.

Venus's mother discovers Cela and Mrs. Marjoram hiding in the bathroom. Maybe taking care of a blind child will cool her jets for becoming a grandmother. She and Cela have one of those relationships where you hate the person but then they offer to make you food so you love the person but then they try to kiss you with their prune face and you scream your fucking head off. Oh! I just realized why people compare relationships to roller coasters! But that doesn't explain what part of the relationship is the corkscrews.

That's what Venus is wearing to her interview with The Guardian. Because, you must remember, her main role is as a sexpot!

I've always said I learned how to socialize from the children's song, "Where is Thumbkin?" But I think I'm going to revamp my social game to add some of Venus's mother! From now on when I'm introduced to somebody at a party, I'm going to immediately say, "He is leper." It's so much better than giving up my ground by running away after introductions! Now they'll be the ones to move along and I don't have to awkwardly find another corner to stand in and another cat to pet.

Turns out Venus changes on her way to the interview and, for some reason, Seagle didn't write in those pages for Kelley Jones to draw. Fucking bullshit! What was he thinking when he wrote this? Comic books are art? Comic books can tell engaging analogies about our society? Comic books shouldn't be full of women in their underwear?! And to top it off, I have to endure Venus in a skirt suit instead of her bra top? Has anybody in the world ever suffered as much as I'm currently suffering? Other than me at earlier points in my life, of course.

Speaking of suffering, Anton Marx realizes that he's probably going to need to apologize to Venus. Why he thinks she's going to accept his apology after she walked in on him with his dick in some strange woman's mouth, I have no idea. It's like that aphorism they say in Alcoholics Anonymous: "God grant me the serenity to accept the losses that I can't come back from, the courage to pretend those losses don't affect me, and the wisdom of a cat who just missed a jump to the window sill and sits on the floor casually licking his paw as if nothing catastrophic just happened."

After her interview, Venus changes off-panel again. It's like Seagle and Jones want to see my balls explode! Although I'll accept their apology of Venus once again in sexpot mode.

She's lying! She's returned to help the knight with his wound. Johnny's going to be jerking off on a horse.

The knight's name is Godfrey which we should probably discuss. See, it's God Free and this is a book called The Crusades which were supposedly an event backed by God but in reality were things commanded by a Pope which is just a man free from God like every other man because, in the end, we all act of our own volition no matter what excuses we use to defend those actions. So Godfrey may state that he's bringing justice to evil doers in a way you'd expect God to want done. But in the end, he, too, is free of God and acts of his own free will. He's doing what he's doing for his own reasons, even if he's lying to himself about those reasons. But the big mystery of this comic book is that question! Why is the knight doing these things? What is his purpose? What does he have to gain? Does he just like murdering people with a mace?

Some of you might yawn at all the womanly cheesecake in this comic book so here's a slice of manly cheesecake for you as Venus applies, um, pressure to the knight's, um, wound?

Hopefully Godfrey doesn't have some weird chaste kink.

As Venus bandages Godfrey's wounds, she discovers that the knight is supposedly 930 years old. Obviously she doesn't believe him because he was wearing Kevlar under his armor and what kind of old ass knight knows anything about Kevlar? Maybe he's updated his battle techniques for the modern era but if that's the case, why does he keep quoting old ass quotes? Can't he do a little more reading across 900 years? You'd think he'd at least spout some Twain once in a while. But no! It's all Cicero and Aurelius and fucked-up Pope quotes instead.

Venus stitches up the knight and agrees to return to him tomorrow to see if he's succumbed. He asks her to bring Cela, "his light", but I don't see that happening. Not like he's in any position to demand anything though because he admits that he can't move his legs. He's going to have a hard time making evil do what to him evil does without his legs!

The issue ends with Venus's mother inviting Detective Petronas over for dinner to surprise Venus. This dinner is interrupted by Anton Marx dropping by with flowers and an apology. I'm sure as soon as he realizes Petronas is in the apartment, the flowers will get tossed and the apology will turn into the most sexist rant anybody's ever heard. But before that happens, the knight has decided to recover by doing a little gay bashing in Golden Gate Park.

Okay, forget the Civil Rights stuff. I guess we're sticking with the self-hating gay knight on a Crusade to hurt those who remind him of who he really is.

The Crusades #13 Rating: B+. I don't know if that's the real knight but I'd guess it is. It looks like him and speaks like him and why would Seagle pull the whole "another fake knight" thing immediately after the last one? Makes no sense. What probably happened was Seagle realized people weren't getting the subtleties of his story (in the same way I didn't get the subtleties of his story until Issue #12) and he decided to bring the themes right up to surface level. The scene also doesn't show the knight killing anybody although it ends in a scream. Who wouldn't scream if this happened to you while you were still sporting a boner from your random hook-up in front of the Cervantes bust? Maybe the knight's recruiting this guy for his underground (read: closet) kingdom? Maybe that's why Sydney's so afraid of him. I was pretty sure Sydney was a big gay bear and maybe that's how he found his way down there. The knight caught him sucking dick in Golden Gate Park and demanded he repent. Sydney admitted there were many more people living down there. Is the knight running a huge gay conversion camp underneath San Francisco? Does he need to be saved by some random white woman who comes along and will be all, "This isn't right! You're gay! Accept who you are! Be free! Let all these gays be free!"

The Crusades #12 (April 2002)

Where do I shoehorn in this line: "Who brings a gun to a knight fight?"

Don't stop groaning about my stupid pun. You're going to need to keep it up for the lyric Steven T. Seagle chose for this issue.

Hey Comic Craft? Why'd you capitalize every letter and add a period?

Using the lyric in this context makes me think some kinky knight sex is about to take place. Otherwise, Seagle's definitely using it for the stupid pun, right? Or does he expect us to stroke our chins and nod along at the idea that we should all be dressed in medieval armor raging against the injustices and evils of this world rather than silently and sheepishly trot to our graves via the heavily barricaded path set before us by old men's traditions, laws, greed, and disdain? I mean, fuck it. I'll stroke my chin over that!

This issue gets right to the action, preferring to rage than go silently into the dying of the Faux Knight. Pages 2 and 3 are a double splash of Godfrey slicing the shit out of the Faux Knight with his big ass sword. Violence simulating gay sex? Of course! I'm just interpreting through the use of the lyric about not going gently "into" that good knight. This climax has me thinking I've been lax in my interpretation of Seagle's story. Has it been an analogy about being gay this entire time and I was too fucking dense to pick up on it? It takes place in San Francisco. The knight couldn't be a more camp figure, as I've noted numerous times when pointing out he'd go practically unnoticed on the streets of The City looking like that. The people he kills are racists and homophobes (mostly because all mafia types are essentially that, right?). He hides his true self away from society, choosing to live underground in a sewer than risk the judging eyes of the status quo. Venus has been played as a sex object (Duh! Venus!) just as much as she's been shown to be an intelligent, independent woman with an addiction to terrible cock. I think those are the major requisites for being a gay person's beard! Anton is the ultra-masculine male screaming about how male and alpha he is while constantly trying to out the homosexual who just wants to be left alone? The Pope trying to destroy the knight simply for being who he is while the knight fights back against The Pope's oppression of himself and the other oppressed peoples of San Francisco? How did I miss it?!

I think I missed it because I was too busy making dick jokes and salivating over Kelley Jones' body shots of Venus.

The knight sure is talkative when he meets one of his own.

Usually the knight just mutters his catch phrase. But here he meets another knight and has a full blown conversation with him. It's like he lets his guard down, perhaps feeling safe to expose his true feelings and intentions around another like himself. Oh, and I forgot to mention: the Order of the Garter? Come on! How did I fucking miss the entire point of this comic book?!

While locked in Cela's cage with her and Mrs. Marjoram, Venus struggles to reach her phone which she dropped when Godfrey shoved her beautiful ass into his cage. Cela mentions that she's been with Godfrey ever since Godfrey rescued her from a dragon and Venus goes into one of her Fact Checker Daydreams that has more cock in two panels than most R. Crumb comics.

Sometimes a cigar (and a dragon (and a pretentious twat)) isn't just a cigar, you know?

Should I be embarrassed that I never thought of dragons as phalluses until I read Beowulf in college? Man, I sure learned a lot about phalluses in college!

The Faux Knight calls The Pope while locked in a shed as Godfrey starts breaking the door down. He tells The Pope, "I would like you to send back-up before the knight kills me and my last words are your fucking address, you stupid mother fucker!" The Pope decides Andrew, the Faux Knight, has become an acceptable loss and calls the police to let them know where the knight(s) is (are). Once again, The Pope thinks cops are best used for oppressing minorities and homosexuals. The Pope is a fucking Karen!

Thanks to The Pope's tip, Detective Petronas has a chance to save his job by catching the knight before the end of his work day. That has nothing to do with all of the phalluses that Kelley Jones decided he needed to sprinkle all over this issue like Sergio Aragonés cartoons in an issue of MAD. So here are a few more, including one of San Francisco's most famous phalluses, Coit tower.

This is a gay heterosexual relationship where two avid women-fuckers basically suck each other off for cash.

One of the reasons we know this relationship between Chad and Anton is being portrayed as some kind of gay intimacy is because of where they've decided to meet (I mean along with their cigarette and stick shift erections).

Total hook-up spot in a car in the dark park areas surrounding Coit Tower.

Seeing the comic book in this new light in which I should have seen it before, Anton's refusal to go public with his relationship with Venus takes on another aspect of the closeted homosexual in a public facing job. He can't let the public know who he's dating. Yes, it's a woman in this case and he's trying to protect his identity as a bachelor. But gay celebrities have long been forced into one of two situations: date a beard or be seen as uncatchable by any specific "woman". Plus, he's dating a woman named Venus. Which could be an analogy in itself. He simply must hide his "love" from the public gaze.

I'm going to have to re-read these first twelve issues after this! I suppose this is strong evidence for how I've always been doing this blog wrong (and pretty much knew it) in that I should become familiar with the things I read and then only blog about them on a second reading, after fully thinking about the entirety of the story.

Back to the knight fight, one of the knights wins and you'll probably guess which one if you think about it for even a second.

Is this . . . a blowjob?

Oh yeah! The knight also has two phalluses on his helmet. He's basically just wearing homosexual sex on his head!

We interrupt this discussion of why The Crusades is a comic book about homosexuality based on a lot more than just its name to bring you this panel of Venus jerking off my male gaze!

Oh yeah. That's some good jerking.

If you were jerking off a guy and he muttered, "Oh yeah. That's some good jerking," would you be flattered or irritated?

Maybe that panel isn't just for satisfying the male gaze and tricking Alpha Hets into reading a story about homosexuality. Maybe there's a message encoded in the blind girl not being able to see the amazing pussy from behind ass shot that the reader is being forced to also not see but know that it's right there not being looked at by a blind girl and her frigid doll.

The doll is named Mrs. Marjoram. Of course it's a prude.

Venus calls for help from Burly Beard Syd (he's both a bear and a beard. Also his name is Dys backwards which connotes all sorts of stuff if you're into reading too much into things) who arrives, grabs the key to the lock on the cage from a nearby table, hands it to her, and then runs for his life, terrified of being caught outside his little closet hovel.

Oh! This is it! This is the place. *ahem* "Who brings a gun to a knight fight?"

Before the knight can kill all of the Russians, the Faux Knight, whose neck wasn't slit as well as it should have been (which is totally a gross thing and I once knew a guy who tried to commit suicide by slicing his own throat and then woke up in a pool of blood unable to speak after having not sliced deep enough), stabs him in the kidney. Or "penetrates him from behind," wink, wink. The knight is all, "I am undone! Evil to him whom evil does evil and ow!" He hops on his horse and flees the scene moments before the police arrive.

The knight arrives in the sewers just in time to stop Venus and Cela from escaping. In an attempt not to be killed by a medieval weapon, Venus declares Cela needs medical attention and if the knight doesn't let her take Cela, the knight will have to kill himself for being evil. The knight is all, "That checks out! Get out of here!" Venus notices he's been stabbed but he yells really loudly at her to get the fuck out and she decides maybe this adventure has come to an end for the day. She can check up on the knight later.

The issue ends differently than it would have ended and now I'm curious as to how it would have ended if some jerks hadn't flown some planes into the World Trade Center. This is another thing they took from us: a proper ending to the 2nd Crusade!

What are you saying? My problems don't matter because 9/11 happened?!

I'm not even sure Kelley Jones did this page! But one of the things I like about this final page is that Anton Marx is a Howard Stern insert character. And many, many people in America sat with Howard Stern on that morning as he discussed it sat not too far from the destruction. I was one of those! I'd gone into work early that morning (like 6 AM on the West Coast). I had a meeting with my manager for a small raise (she didn't yet realize I wasn't being her friend so I got the raise this day!). Then when I walked out of the meeting, a coworker said to me, "America is under attack!" I got on my Walkman radio as I began work listening to Howard Stern live as he talked about the planes hitting the World Trade Center. Usually we would get Stern live up until six in the morning when the show would revert back to the beginning. So it took me a bit to realize they'd scrapped the show for the day and were just playing Howard live, three hours or so into his show already.

Another thing I like about this final page? The ominous "To be continued." Because this is the final issue of the 2nd Crusade, it can only be read as "Will there be more attacks and how the fuck is America going to respond?"

The Crusades #12 Rating: A-. I just read The Authority which was published before and after September 2001 and I kept thinking, "Are they going to address it at all in the comic?" I don't think they did. But then I picked up this series and realized, once again, I was reading comics that were published across that time. So I thought, "Will they acknowledge it?" And they did! They pretty much had the perfect way to address it in this series with Anton Marx being a clone of a guy who actually addressed the attack live on-air. How could they not shoehorn in this final page? Aside from all that, I think maybe I finally figured out what this comic book's about? I need to re-read the first year of books again to see if I'm reading too much into it. Doesn't feel like it, though! Seems like a really spot-on analysis. Which would be a first for me!