The Crusades #6 (October 2001)

Wild Second Knight appeared!

The First Crusade finished last issue. I don't know how or why it finished. Was it simply because it had been five issues? I don't feel like the knight accomplished anything. Maybe that's the point. Historically, the Crusades didn't actually accomplish anything either. I mean accomplish anything useful. I mean "useful" in the sense compassionate people who try to make the world better than the day before would use it and not the way some racist asshole would use it as in "The Crusades were useful because Christians slaughtered a lot of Muslims." Although in that sense, the knight's First Crusade was successful because he slaughtered a bunch of The Pope's henchmen? Perhaps that was the point of the First Crusade: to let those who would do evil know somebody will punish them. That's why he raised his flag at the end. The knight has a foothold, he's outed himself (with the help of Anton Marx), and maybe he even stopped The Pope's accumulation of more city property to be turned into a casino. Oh shit. Never mind. I just figured it out.

The knight's first crusade is over because he took Jerusalem (the New Jerusalem School!) and planted his flag there. Duh! How fucking stupid am I that it took this long to figure that out? By "this long," I mean 23 years. It's possible 30 year old me understood that but since I don't remember it, I can't actually claim to have figured it out until just now.

I'm gonna need some context for this lyric.

Antonio Porchia was an Argentine poet. His Wikipedia page describes him as an "very influential, yet extremely succinct writer." I'm not sure what the job of the "yet" is in that description. Are influential writers usually rambling and incoherent? As for the quote, it's above my brain's paygrade. I suspect it's being used, partially, because the knight haunts San Francisco, a phantom, of sorts, prowling the parks and alleys. And most people don't experience loneliness to such a degree that you'd imagine they have to make up people to cure their loneliness. So I suspect Antonio is suggesting that the people we know, the people we fill the empty spaces with, are phantoms created by us because we can't actually know them to the degree we believe we do. We project our own versions of people onto themselves, like a slide projected over a teacher at the front of the class. Perhaps he's suggesting if we didn't fill in all the gaps of another person's personality with our own imaginings, we would never feel close to them. We must believe they are that which we believe they are.

After the lyric, the Second Crusade gets going full swing when a couple of goons with guns flee into a diner believing a man in full armor on the back of a horse known for murdering the fuck out of people won't crash through the glass doors after them. They did not become goons for their brains.

What fucking evil did the waitress commit?! Was she pissing in the coffee?

The knight has proven that he doesn't take a whole lot of care in reducing collateral damage. And we've also seen the knight wearing at least two different helmets (if not more though it's hard to tell between the "real" sightings and the recounted sightings) so seeing this new helmet may not mean anything. But we've also just seen two knights on the cover so it's quite possible that we've finally got that copycat knight on the loose. Maybe that's why the Porchia lyric at the beginning! It's mostly just for the whole "remains alone" part. The knight cannot remain alone when other crime bosses begin filling the night with their phantom versions of the knight themselves.

After the night kills the waitress but nobody else, he says, in English, "Aye! Whatsa matta you guys? Dis ain't youse turf! Aye! Tella youse bosses to get lost, eh?" Then he says, "Evil to him who evil does," and his horse shits all over the corpse of the waitress who must have been skeet shooting kittens on her off hours.

I'm not scanning the page where the knight speaks but I assure you with my 100% guarantee of only lying about 80% of the time that I'm not lying about his accent and you shouldn't be mad at me for doing a bad Australian accent. Or Spanish. I don't know, Flemish? Wherever Mario is from!

I guess it's possible she was shot by the Russians. But the knight (if this is him) really doesn't give a fuck about bystanders.

It does seem weird the knight cares about gangland turf wars. He seems more the type to just kill people who are hurting innocents. But then again, he did claim the New Jerusalem School as his own. He's a home owner now and nothing aggravates home owners more than somebody jerk walking on their lawn. I don't own a house so I don't know if they get even angrier at other things. I do walk on other people's lawns though and, hoo boy, old men sure can yell loudly!

The police have publicly admitted that the knight exists but only because they suck at their jobs and everybody already knows the knight exists because it keeps killing loads of people and leaving corpses with mace-smashed skulls and axe cloven torsos. Cloven? Cleaven? Cloved? Cleaved? What I'm trying to say is the fictional police of this comic book are just as terrible as the real police of the not comic book.

The Russians have moved in on Tony Cutone's territory since Cutone was murdered by The Pope's men. They're the ones the knight threatened in the diner. Now they're trying to extort all the local business that Tony used to and the knight from the diner who probably isn't the real knight makes another appearance already to hack off some Russians for not listening the first time.

Two bloodthirsty attacks in ten pages when he barely showed his helmet that much across five issues previously? Yeah, this guy's a fake.

More evidence this isn't the real knight: he's way too mouthy and he stabbed a patron for simply cheering him on. That don't sound like the knight Chuck told nobody about!

Detective Petronas investigates the crime scene at the diner and discovers another clue that I would have noticed if I'd been given a chance to look around: the knight did not paint a cross in blood and shit at the scene. He always does that! It's his calling card from God! For once, the cover of a comic book didn't lie: there are two knights!

Anton finally drops by to see Venus after days of ignoring her as he tried to use the knight to propel his career forward. But now that the knight is common knowledge, he can go back to being regular old jerkface shock DJ Anton Marx. Venus allows him in even though she knows he's a turd and terrible at sex. Goddamn dick must be so super good if a woman as hot as Venus will put up with all this bullshit plus no orgasm just for a meager taste of it.

Anton knows he'll have come long before Sara does so he doesn't mind.

But Sara will never arrive! She's headed that way on a cable car with two additional passengers: the Russian mobsters! Suddenly, the sound of coconuts being banged together disrupts her daydream! Sara stands up to see what's happening as a massive man in armor leaps from his horse and onto the cable car. He shoves her out of the way, snarling in a very non-French way, "Move!", before he advances on the thugs. Sara's arms pinwheel! She teeters off-balance as the cable car trundles down one of The City's steep hills! She attempts to grab a brass pole but her fingers just graze it and she tumbles backwards out of the cable car! No! Not Sara, a character I didn't mention a single time in the first five commentaries!

Noooo! You were my 8th favorite character in this comic book!

The Crusades #6 Rating: A-. San Francisco now has two knights to deal with! Ha ha! In your face, tech bros! Angel investors soon gonna just be pure angels, amirite?! Let's go! Medieval justice, baby! Although I am sad to see that the new knight has no respect for innocents and only wants to kill Russians and is only concerned about maintaining his boss's turf. He's got to be one of The Pope's men, right? It would be fitting! The Pope sending out his own knight on his own crusade!