Hitman #10 (January 1997)

This would be me if my stupid neighbors would appreciate me more.

Hitman #10 (January 1997)
By Garth Ennis, John McCrea, Carla Feeny, and Willie Schubert
Cover by John McCrea
Edited by Peter Tomasi and Dan Raspler

I've learned that the people closest to me (meaning my friends and family) seem to appreciate me less than strangers. Just a few days ago, some bloke on Bluesky hunted me down to lift me up on his and his friends shoulders in true appreciation of my amazing genius.

Personally my favorite bit from Crazy Asian Drinks was from my review of Non-Carbonated Soft Drink: "Somewhere, children are asking if they can have more soft drink on their mashed potatoes."

Like an unneutered cat, I have sprayed my stink all over the Internet for 30 years and every now and then, a voice will reach out to me and say, "Hey, remember that totally stupid thing you did? My friends and I fucking loved it!" A year or so ago, a kid who was too young to remember the wild west days of the Internet tracked me down on tumblr to ask if I was behind Future Retard and I had to proudly admit that, yes, I was one of the geniuses behind that all-too prescient web comic. When I first registered to Twitter as Grunion Guy, I was messaged by a junior high school girl who was all, "Are you the Grunion Guy who wrote "A Really Scary Story"? My friends are constantly quoting it!" And then I befriended them (not in a weird way) and watched them graduate and head of to college and be super funny online all the time and felt proud that I could be a creator of something that made an impact on somebody else's life and then also not turn out to be a total piece of fucking garbage! Some might argue that I am a fucking piece of garbage but I'd have to say the fact I'm Gen-X and so far left that even the Democrats think I'm a terrorist is something I'm proud of! Of course, now I'm going to have to have "Hey! Hey! I invented shit drink!" as the epitaph on my tombstone. I guess I could be remembered in worse ways. Like maybe having "Creator of Future R-Slur!" engraved on marble marking my still sexy corpse for all eternity. Or at least until they dig up my grave to build a row of cheaply made luxury condos on the land.

No wait! I've changed my mind! I think my favorite bit on Crazy Asian Drinks (by me! I have favorite bits by Ken and Brent too!) was in my review of Yeo's Soya Bean Drink: "I've never considered distilling my grandfather's underwear into its pure essence and packaging it in a can for ingestion but apparently some Malaysian named Yeo did."

Last issue ended with half of Gotham's cops pulling up outside Tommy's apartment (or Pat's, I guess. But whatever) and yelling through a bullhorn, "Come out and we'll shoot. But first we'll yell, 'Look out! He's got a gun!' whether you have one or not. Then later the District Attorney will be all, 'Look, members of the grand jury. Not only should a cop never be convicted because if one is, they'll never work with me again and I'll never win another case but a cop should never even have to set foot in a courtroom because, well, remember that thing I just said about how I'll never win a case if they stop giving witness testimony for me? So we're just going to throw out this case where fifty cops put five hundred bullets into a guy holding a butter knife dripping grape jelly and half a sandwich stuck in his mouth stuck together from the peanut butter so that nobody could for certain say he wasn't shouting, "I'm going to murder all of you with this butter knife!"'"

I'm not going to double check to make sure I got all those quotation marks correct. If the editor could give up on the last 100 pages of the Dungeon Crawler Carl book This Inevitable Ruin so that it's just littered with formatting errors, I'm not going to bother editing this shit little "review" of a Garth Ennis comic book that I won't know if anybody read until twenty years from now when somebody will message me and say, "Hey, are you that hot guy who said all that real shit about cops twenty years ago? My friends and I are constantly getting our ass beat by the roving 'A.I.' super cops when they hear us laughing about your Wicker Man bits!"

Like Dungeon Crawler Carl, Hitman solves a lot of his problems with explosives.

I need to learn to say "God out of the Inventory" in Latin because I think, due to the Dungeon Crawler Carl books, deus ex machina will soon be replaced by that.

Tommy's grenade was just a Diarrhea grenade meaning it wasn't fused to explode; it was just meant to make the cops shit themselves. After the cops dive for cover with loud "FRRRRRRRPPPPP!"s blasting from the seat of their pants, Tommy steps out and shoves a piston under one of their chins. I bet when he doesn't kill them, they'll all realize how he's actually a good guy and they shouldn't hold it against him that he held them hostage with a loaded weapon. They'll just think, "He's a better man than us because we would have killed him in a heartbeat's heartbeat!" But Tommy, being a charming and good-looking dude, lets the police know that he doesn't hold it against them that they're corrupt and cowardly pieces of shit. He understands that's just a requirement for the job.

It's statements like that previous one that gets me another kind of attention from strangers on the Internet.

Proof that not all strangers appreciate me more than my friends and family. Some treat me exactly like certain family members treat me!

Tommy lets the cops know that he knows they were sent to murder him in a "resisting arrest" confrontation. The cops are all, "Well, that's not great because now he really is resisting with potentially lethal force and he knows we were going to kill him without using that lethal force and, um, man, shitting yourself is really uncomfortable!"

One other thing the cops forgot because they're arrogant bastards who believe they deserve respect and believe they get that respect because they have guns and will use them on anybody who shows any amount of disdain towards them: they're not just in Gotham where people hate the cops, they're in The Cauldron where people really fucking hate the fucking cops.

I'd say, in military terms and not Lobo terms, this is a great opportunity for a fragging situation. And you can see the Captain knows it too.

Tommy convinces the Captain to convince his men to disarm by using a combination of his x-ray vision and his finger on the trigger of the pistol to the Captain's head. Meanwhile all of the local residents stand around cheering and screaming out more ways for Tommy to humiliate the police.

You fucking tell him, Tommy!

I've always had a healthy distrust of authority but I wouldn't blame people if they read Hitman and watched the original The Wicker Man and gasped in shock (much as the woman sitting next to me at The Matrix in 1999 gasped when the trenchcoated Keanu began lighting up people with automatic weapons and muttered, "This is just like Columbine!") as they said, "This is why he hates cops!" I think I really began hating cops when that local Santa Clara cop tried to lecture me and my friends for climbing on the school roof. He thought we were vandals but realized we were just kids playing with Star Wars figures but still couldn't shift his tone from "I'm busting vandals" to "I've made a mistake and caught some kids playing". So he took our names and when he recognized my name, he was all, "Is your father so-and-so? I went to school with him. How do you think he'd react if he knew what you were doing?" And being that my dad left when I was two, I basically said, "He wouldn't care?" The cop, realizing he couldn't shame us and had no real reason to yell at us because we were dumb kids playing with dolls, he finally just admitted defeat and left. And we went back to playing with our toys.

Fucking cops are just pieces of shit made sentient, I swear to Christ.

Since the cops have failed, Mister Truman, government agent of some other secret Suicide Squad-esque agency, takes over the operation to murder Tommy. But only after giving him one more chance to accept the job as superhero assassin working for the government. That's important because you always need to give the bad guys a reason not to immediately kill the good guys or else the protagonist's story would simply end ala The Sopranos at any fucking random moment. A good example is The Walking Dead. Every time Rick and his group ran into the "bad guys", the "bad guys" would give them every chance to live and then Rick would just murder-hobo the fuck out of everybody who could potentially be a threat. I'm not saying Rick was the bad guy but I'm also not not saying that Rick was the bad guy. It's, um, complicated!

I saw Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at The Crystal Ballroom in Portland, Oregon, in 2002 or so and I can't imagine another time a band's tone ever matched a venue to that degree. Just fucking perfect.

I think Nick Cave and the Bad Seed's "tone" and the feeling of seeing a show at The Crystal Ballroom can both be summed up in one word: "cigarettes".

The Captain crashes the cop car that Tommy forced him, at gunpoint, to drive as a getaway vehicle. Just as Tommy crawls from the wreckage, Tiegel pulls up to help him escape. She's wearing a mask so that nobody will recognize her but Tommy instantly recognizes her. Granted, Tommy also has telepathy and x-ray vision so, um, you know. That probably explains that. Also her big titties, maybe?

Tiegel, a cop, explains why she, a cop, has decided to help an assassin get away from a bunch of other cops.

Those are her reasons but I suspect maybe she has x-ray vision too and she's noticed Tommy's big peepee. Also her mom is like totally into Tommy.

Because Tiegel's mom discovers the faucet on her lady parts still runs, and also because Tiegel's Nazi grandfather embarrasses the fuck out of her, Tiegel opens up to Tommy a bit more than she probably should. Also the big dick thing and her being super horny, probably. They decide to work together for the time being to expose Mr. Truman and get Tiegel's police captain fired for working with this government agency to murder a man using her cops. After that, they'll either fight or fuck. Or do both the way Batman and Catwoman do it. Fuckfighting is a Goddamned Gotham tradition.

While Tommy sits on a roof thinking about his youth with Pat and trying to come up with a plan to defeat the entire Gotham Police Department and a secret government organization, one of the government organization's assets confronts Tommy.

Ugh. Fucking Rayner.

I never liked Kyle Rayner but not because I liked Hal Jordan. I fucking hated Hal Jordan. I just didn't like Kyle because he was, um, so Kyle-ly. Just a big try-hard dope. A fucking Everyman reader insert who could handle the ring better than anybody ever! Me? I was a big fan of John Stewart and Guy Gardner. I think I liked Guy over Hal because Guy understood that he was using violence to solve all of his problems but Hal acted like he wasn't resorting to violence to solve all of his problems when, like, he did do that. All the time. He never entered a bar where he didn't wind up slugging somebody in the jaw. And John I liked because he was smart and an architect and not a fucking marine at all. Fuck you, modern take on John Stewart making him a military man! Ugh! Lame! So disgusting!

The Ranking!
Super horny and anti-cop and cool! Plus Kyle's baby leg was hilarious! Ha ha!