Wednesday, December 18, 2024

The Crusades #10 (February 2002)


The Russians are not attacking him with hay; those are stylized bullets.

Arguing against my own caption, I don't know for sure what those yellow strands poking at the Faux Knight are. Maybe they are straw? I'm not the arbiter of all artistic interpretation! Maybe they're penises about to bukkake all over the Faux Knight as he jerks himself off with the Russian flag while one of the most famous gay penises of the United States strains over his left shoulder? What this actually looks like is one of those blank covers used for signings. I'm just going to scrawl Tom King's signature on the white space and send it to CGC for grading.

The lyric for this month seems proper rock and roll being that it references the devil.


I'd better limber up my artistic interpretation skills before tackling this one.

At first glance (and a shallow and narrow glance it was), I felt this quote was antisemitic. But obviously the places of worship would have to be flipped and/or flopped for that to be true. My next thought was that it was testimony to the strength of God versus the Devil; God's house is a temple while the Devil only manages a small chapel. But then I decided to research the singer who sang this quote and discovered his album, The Anatomy of Melancholy and assumed this was probably from that. So perhaps what Robert Burton means by this is that the Devil resides in us all. Joy and worship and love must always, at differing parts of a person's life, turn to sadness and grief and anguish. It's not a comparative but a simple statement of fact. God's temples always have a small chapel off to one side where the Devil has set up shop.

Reading the Wikipedia entry on The Anatomy of Melancholy (after looking up Robert Burton to make sure I was mixing him up with Richard F. Burton, one of my favorites (died at 69 years old, that memelord)), I became thoroughly interested in reading this 400 year old book. I became even more interested in it after it said some of the people who admired the work because I am, if nothing else, a child who of a world full of advertisements and a current member of the inspiration age where so many people believe that simply being inspiring is worth the stupid fucking "content" they "produce". Anyway, the people who admired this work which made me think, "Yeah, I definitely would enjoy this!", were Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Lamb, and Nick Cave. Plus one of my all-time favorite reads are the Richard F. Burton's notes to his translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, so why wouldn't I also enjoy this super old fogey shit? It probably has less pictures than all the other stuff I read though (including Burton's translations which have some really saucy images! He also translated the Kama Sutra!).

The real knight, searching for the hot and nubile and barely clothed intruder in his underground kingdom, sees the television news crew reporting that he's currently rampaging it up on the streets of San Francisco. "That is not me," he tells the burly bearded war vet who resists from making a jerk off motion when he says, "I can see that," because he doesn't want to lose his jerk off hand. The knight rushes off to beat up the other knight looking like one of Kelley Jones' best attempts at Bane living in a sewer like Killer Croc while wearing a medieval helmet.


I can't experience Kelley Jones' style without immediately thinking of the Knightfall story arc in Batman.

Once the knight rushes off, Venus decides to stop the interview and go snooping about the knight's demesne. Burly bald guy doesn't seem as worried as he was in the previous issue about her being a reporter and ruining his free living situation by alerting the public to it. He just warns her to be careful and goes back to watching television. Man, I get it. I just re-watched Rankin and Bass's The Return of the King for the first time in who the fuck knows how many years. My cousin had the soundtrack to it and we were constantly singing, "Where there's a whip, there's a way!" But this time watching it, I was shocked to realize I think I got my whole philosophy from the song "It's so Easy Not to Try", apparently thinking that it was life advice and not a warning!
"It's so easy not to try,
Let the world go drifting by,
If you never say hello,
You won't have to say goodbye.

It's so easy not to try,
Never stay around to cry
Move along when troubles come,
Like a mindless butterfly.

For what good is it to love?
When the loving always ends?
Travel on the road that's straight.
Not the one with hills and bends.
Back at The Pope's property, the Russians abandon their plan of "There are more of us than the knight and we have guns while he has a stupid, unarmored horse that we could shoot and a lance" for a new plan: run like motherfucking cowards while forgetting they have guns completely. It works out for the two Russians who the knight forgoes chasing but not for the one he does.


Oh, it also doesn't work out for the cop standing around going, "Something don't seem so kosher in dere, ey?"

It's so easy not to cry,
When a cop gets disemboweled.
When his guts they hit the floor.
Maybe I cry but cry for more!

Sorry. Was that inappropriate? I guess I was just working out in the yard on my Wicker Man this morning and I'm all juiced up on anti-cop fervor!

Bocc and one of his men finally realize the Faux Knight's greatest weakness: the mortal beast he rides upon. They manage to trip it up and the Faux Knight flies off and lands on his face. If he didn't just Christopher Reeve himself from that fall, he's probably not long without a bullet in his head.

Do I need to apologize again? Sorry about the Christopher Reeve thing. But the guy knew what he was doing when he decided to ride a horse. That's dangerous shit and if I've inspired just one person to not get on a horse, saving them from a catastrophic injury, by being so cynical and dismissive about Reeve's accident then I'm a Goddamned hero.

Underground, Venus re-introduces herself to the blind girl and her dolly.


Two things I learned about Mrs. Marjoram from this interaction: her sight works and she's gay.

Venus and Mrs. Marjoram engage in some small talk where they decide that Mrs. Marjoram and the little girl (Cela) will spend some time above ground with Venus if they can get Godfrey the Knight's permission. Venus seems to think that won't be too much trouble because the little girl is blind and Venus can just get some lockpicks for her cage and pretend she got the key from Godfrey while speaking in a deep voice, "I am Godfrey and you can go with this lady with the huge tits."

The Faux Knight gets shot three times in the breastplate at point blank range. He gets back on his horse and runs from The Pope's property. Is his armor bulletproof or is he already a dead Faux Knight riding? The cops arrive by helicopter but they're so interested in the Faux Knight that Bocc and his right-hand man decide to take this opportunity to invade The Pope's house and murder him. This Second Crusade still has two more issues to go after this one so I don't think it'll be that easy.

Bocc makes it to the door to The Pope's panic room so that he can yell through it that he's got the devil on his side (because The Pope has, you know, God on his side). Then he looks at Philip who seems to need a little more of the Garth Ennis treatment and shoots him through the throat. I'm sure he'll live because that's his lot in this series. Seagle just decided to out think the readers and have Philip lose his voice over all the other things I listed he could lose last issue. Then they finally make a run for it before the cops make it onto The Pope's property.


I had no idea I was going to wind up siding with the Russians but they fucking own a VW bus! Team Russia all the way!

Anton was supposed to meet Venus at her place at eight but I guess she got confused what with the big adventure she's been on and all. So she drops by Anton's place where he's getting a blow job from Channel 3's Christine. So while I'm happy that it looks like they'll be breaking up, I'm not happy that Anton got a blow job out of it. Fuck that dirtbag. Venus storms out only to run into Detective Petronas who's still badgering her about getting into a relationship with him because they're both Greek and from the same community in Melbourne, Australia. Nobody ever mentions Venus's accent because she's mostly lost it while Detective Petronas gets picked on by other cops all the time because he hasn't lost his accent and also cops are jerks. So now Venus has to deal with two assholes. Maybe three depending on how horrible the guy from The Chronicle is. Being that he's a man, odds aren't great that he's much better.

I'm not a self-hating man! I love myself and my male gaze. Have you not read anything else I've written? Have you not seen the panels I choose to scan that don't matter at all to plot but have a fine lady ass in them? It's just — and I think most men would agree with this because so many men are of the "No Homo" variety — guys are fucking gross! I'm not saying penises are gross. Penises are the only decent part of men. But any man who thinks they have to somehow portray "manliness" are generally the worst kind of people. Men who don't give a shit about people attacking men because they see themselves as individuals and not living up to some stupid toxic idea of masculinity? They're okay in my book! But I still don't want to kiss them! Gross! We could exchange hand jobs though. That'd probably be okay.


I don't even know what's happening in this scene. Did I read the words? Who fucking remembers?!

The Crusades #10 Rating: B. Look at that ass in the panel above! Based on that panel, I think if you lined up two bald guys just right and took a picture of their heads, I could masturbate to it. Am I going to continue the farce that this is somehow a review site? I don't have anything intelligent to say about anything! But some people just want to see the grade I gave a comic book they've read. Not that I've ever met anybody who has read this comic book! Anyway, next issue, I think the knights are going to fight. So if you want to see how that turns out, be here whenever the fuck I write the next "review"! I have a sinking suspicion that the knight's are going to cross swords, if you get what I'm saying being that this story takes place in San Francisco and people sometimes use the word "sword" as a slang term for "penis".

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