Tuesday, December 10, 2024

The Crusades #4 (August 2001)


Surprisingly, this is not a variant cover.

If this issue doesn't begin with the knight's demonic horse performing cunnilingus on Venus then I'm going to accept that reality has won over my demented fantasy life and slip back into the daily funk of mundanity. I would have liked the then of my if statement to have been more threatening, more catastrophic, but reality has ground me down to a smooth surface with hardly any more hard edges or thorns. I'm a husk of what I used to be; I'm the smooth and naked female form left over after some asshole beachcomber found my driftwood and took all the personality out of it so he could jerk off on it. I'm covered in society's cum shots and I've grown too sticky to be angry anymore. You've done it, universe. You've won.


Wait! Don't give up yet, Tess! The horse has decided on anilingus! I fucking win, universe! Me! I win! Get fucked!

Was it Walt Disney who first said, "Dreams do come true"? That thought had to have originated in the 20th Century, right? Sometime after electricity had been co-opted by Thomas Edison, the frontier had been thoroughly bought up by railroad tycoons, and Pinkertons regularly blew up factories with workers inside and blamed it on unions. A grand time when somebody could steal the labor of all those around them and turn it into a magical fairyland of high-priced hot dogs and wearily long queues! "Ah," some parent might think upon dragging their four screaming kids from Dumbo's Flight to the Spinning Tea Cups, "This time with my family is like a dream come true!" Mostly because getting away from their jerk of a boss to the heat and chaos-riddled expression of the dreams of a capitalist asshole were a far superior way to spend the ever dwindling days of their lives. Also they were definitely going to bang their spouse later in a piss smelling cave on Tom Sawyer's Island.

"Dreams do come true, right honey?"
"Well call me 'Dream' cause I'm coming pretty hard right about now!"
Kids crying, terrified of the sounds coming from the cave they wanted to piss in.

The horse turns out to be a cop on horseback which, um, was that a thing in San Francisco in 2001? I suppose I could see them riding horses through Golden Gate Park. Are there cavalry divisions in every police precinct across the country? Does that mean the universe actually did win? Turning my bestial oral sex moment into just a cop harassing a civilian? Fuck it. I had fun imagining what I wanted. The universe can go stick its dick in its own black hole. Oh shit! Is that why black holes exist? Are they the universe's glory holes?

Fuck. This commentary is going to get flagged because I used the phrase "glory holes." It's like the biggest red flag Blogger has!


Mein Gott. This pose aroused me so quickly I became German.

That panel's from the page where Venus has the short discussion with the cop stopping her from trespassing on the New Jerusalem school's grounds. It contains seven panels, five of which highlight Venus's ass. This is one of the things I haven't spoken about much but which I love about this comic book. Kelley Jones' perspectives and camera angles add so much to this comic book, and I don't mean that in a pervy way like "I love that he focused so much on her ass!" I mean, I'm pretty sure the focus on her ass is because Kelley Jones is highlighting the cop's male gaze. He's trying to shoo her along but he's also creepily eye fucking her the entire time. It's really fucking well done.

Meanwhile, Anton Marx continues to make the knight all about himself.


Whenever Marx plays Spin the Bottle, it always lands on himself.

Venus heads back to work at the Bay Area Review after spending all day tracking down eyewitness statements and leads on the knight. Once she gets to work, well after the work day has ended, her boss calls her into her office and fires her. Great! Now she has more time to spend hunting the knight and she doesn't have to work for Anton Marx anymore! She's free! Free to find a nice, muscular horse and let it go to town on her! But for some reason, she doesn't take it as a good thing and she spends no time looking for a horny horse.

Detective Petronas decides to issue an actual arrest warrant for Anton Marx after Marx gives his interview on the local news and all but admits that he knows who the knight is but won't reveal it anywhere except his own show. I guess Anton can be arrested for hindering a police investigation?

Venus decides to continue her investigation into the knight not because she needs to fact check Anton's bullshit but because she's encountered the knight twice and she wants to make sure she isn't going crazy from a mid-life sex crisis. What else could it be? She almost let a horse give her oral! The next eyewitness she tracks down is Chuck, the guy who didn't tell Anton about his encounter with the knight. He decides to tell Venus about the knight but only a little bit.


"And his horse is fucking hot."

Chuck wanders away when Venus is distracted by a call from her mother. Still having all the time in the world to kill, Venus heads back to the hole in the fence outside the New Jerusalem School. Inside, she discovers the priests who have refused to leave the school after The Pope's threats and Father Trinidad trying to convince them to leave before midnight when The Pope's men plan on killing them all. I guess midnight just clicked over because from Venus's hiding spot, she sees The Pope's henchmen bust in brandishing pipes. They're about to slaughter everybody when the knight breaks in behind them and tells them to get out. That's odd. I thought he just shoved lances into buttholes while muttering in French. I guess he doesn't always feel violence is the first resort. Although I'm sure the first resort is followed up by the second resort, violence, pretty fucking quickly.

The Crusades #4 Rating: B+. Oh, for those curious, the lyrics at the beginning of this issue were "The Freedom of the Press Works in Such a Way That There is Not Much Freedom From It" by Princess Grace of Monaco. Is that a reference to all these journalist types refusing to leave the knight alone so he can go about his killings with abandon? Here's another lyric by Grace Kelly: "I would like to be remembered as someone who accomplished useful deeds, and who was a kind and loving person. I would like to leave the memory of a human being with a correct attitude and who did her best to help others." Maybe that lyric will get used for the issue when the knight is eventually killed by some upstart squire looking to make a quick name for himself. I like the wording of "useful deeds" because killing can be useful if the right person is killed! And you don't have to forego kind and loving because when you're not killing, maybe you're hugging and doing the dishes? Also, killing the right person at the right time can often be a result of being a kind and loving person who doesn't want to see the person you've just killed go on making the world a worse place for those of us who want to be kind and loving! Get your heads straight, CEOs!

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