The Unexpected #1

You really only have a limited number of times you can use the catchphrase, "Nobody expects...The Unexpected!"

I'm not surprised I don't recognize anybody on the cover because you know why. You read the same title that I just read. Stop playing dumb.

The woman in the front who is about to engage in oral sex with the reader is named Firebrand. I vaguely remember her getting a scene in one of the previous "The New Age of Heroes" comic books (New Challengers, I think). She's a fighter who loves to fight in and out of the ring. That's a secret shortcut to writing a strong female character. You can tell she's strong because in the first page, she knocks out Killer Croc with one punch. You can tell she's female because of the boobies. I know that joke risks alienating the trans community due to erasure but sometimes you have to take risks to become a leading comedy writer known for their third grade humor. Plus it's empowering to the trans community that I think they're way too smart for my stuff, right?

Speaking of society's double standards for boobies, remember that scene in Mad Men when Ginsberg cuts off his nipple and gives it to Peggy? What if Peggy had cut off her nipple and given it to Michael? Would it have been too obscene for television to show the nipple in the box once it's been detached from Peggy's breast? Where is the line drawn between being able to show a nipple on television and not being able to show a nipple on television? What if Peggy had just found a detached nipple left on her desk? Would ambiguity make the nipple offensive to a censor's tastes? Can a trans man's nipple be shown? What about a trans woman's nipple? It can't just be that the nipple on fatty tissue is obscene because remember that show The Biggest Loser? There were a lot of exposed nipples on large breasts in that show but they were deemed acceptable for some reason. Why are nipples such a contentious aspect in the discussion on vulgarity and human body?

Don't misunderstand me! I don't think there is anything vulgar about the human body at all! I mean as long as I'm attracted to the specific human body we're talking about. I don't want to see stuff I don't want to see! You know the stuff! Gross!

I would describe the stuff I don't want to see but I don't want to be called a fat shaming homophobe. Anyway, I just got rid of all of the full length mirrors in my house and solved the problem.

Firebrand was a civilian killed during Metal. But she got a new futuristic heart that only keeps working if she gets into a fight every twenty four hours. Don't ask how it works. That's boring detail that doesn't really matter. Just know that her heart is called "the Conflict Engine" which is the only reason you need to understand why something this stupid would be developed.

Weird Doctor: "We have some good news and some bad news! The bad news: we brought you back to life by giving you a new heart. Welcome back to the pain of existence! The good news? You legally get to beat somebody's ass once per day to keep yourself alive!"
Firebrand:: "Wait. What? Why?!"
Weird Doctor:: "No time to explain! I have to rush off to give somebody a fake rectum who will then have to eat three large linguiça and jalapeño pizzas per day or they'll die! Good luck!"

Firebrand currently explains her life by being so contradictory that I don't care anymore. Not that I cared at all from the beginning. But I needed some way to end that initial sentence that didn't take a lot of effort to construct.

Every scumbag in New Jersey knows where to find her but the CIA and some black ops corporation have no idea where to look. *shrug*

I get it, lazy writer. The heart wants what it wants and what your heart wants is for readers to simply accept the scenario you've created without thinking about it critically at all! Although I will allow myself to be wrong in this instance. Because generally what comic book writers have found is that readers are so willing to accept every idea that they'll do all the critical thinking they can to contort reason and logic until they can explain away anything in a comic book they like. It's just too bad nobody has any reason to like this comic book yet! Unless you're one of those people who read one word from a new character and instantly claim "THIS IS MY FAVORITE CHARACTER!" just in case the character becomes super popular. Then you can claim to be the character's biggest fan! Good for you!

What I'm trying to say is that Firebrand is totally my new favorite character.

An evil guy named Alden Quench wearing a Project Runway outfit comes to take Firebrand's heart. He spouts a lot of stuff that would make people who read Metal think "That sounds familiar!" which ties everything together and satisfies my need for closure. It might not provide the link to Metal that other people need but remember how I said I don't care anymore? That makes me easier to please than other readers of this book.

Alden Quench calls himself Bad Samaritan which is a totally racist stereotype of Samaritans. The only reason Jesus tells a story about a Good Samaritan is that everybody in Jesus's time simply accepted that all Samaritan's were terrible people. He might as well call himself simply "The Samaritan" (except I think that bad guy was already taken by an enemy of The Outsiders (unless he was also called The Bad Samaritan! (double unless this is actually him!))).

A huge fight breaks out between The Unexpected (who arrive to help Firebrand for selfish reasons) and the Bad Samaritan putting everybody in the hospital at risk. So because Firebrand exists, regular people are endangered. I really don't want to be on the side of the argument that claims heroes endanger everybody but come on! I can't get any stories that don't prove the paranoid civilians are wrong!

The leader of The Unexpected is a guy named Neon who is probably an Aurakle like Halo because he gets cut in half and rainbows slosh out. The Bad Samaritan splashes this rainbow blood on Firebrand and then chops her in the heart with Viking Judge's axe (Viking Judge might not be her real name but I sincerely hope that it is). In so doing, he kills himself and creates a new Nth Metal isotope.

Meanwhile beneath the surface of Thanagar, a guy named Onimar Synn eats a dinosaur guy and then settles down for a nice long pout. I guess he wants to eat Firebrand's heart but its too far away. FOR NOW!

Anyway, The Bad Samaritan created something called Destruction Metal. It's going to blow a hole in the multiverse if Neon and Firebrand don't do something about it. Viking Judge and Ascendant (the woman with the horns and the blue guy on the cover) apparently died in the conflict. I'm glad I didn't declare they were my favorite characters!

Rating: You know what? Going against my screaming brain, I'm going to buy the second issue of this comic book. It's interesting even if it's relying on that same old lazy premise that I keep shitting all over: heroes that exist only to be targets of super villains. In this one, people want Firebrand's heart and they'll hurt the entire world to get it. Neon might be trying to save the Multiverse though which is one reason I'll hang around for a bit. I would like The Unexpected to be some kind of multiversal freedom fighters. Apparently they haven't been doing too good a job so far though because worlds keep dying around them.

P.S. Subscribe to the E!TACT Newsletter for even more reviews of whatever I find lying around the house.

Deathstork #10

I wish Deathstork were real. I think it's okay to hire a pedophile for the contract I'm thinking about.

The Review!
The current story is called "Four Rooms". I'm repeating that because I don't want to just start this commentary with the following sentence and then have everybody think, "Why the fuck is Tess talking about Four Rooms?"¹ Remember how they found the corpse under the mattress in the movie Four Rooms? That may have been the first time some of you heard about that Urban Myth. I have loved Urban Myths for most of my life, especially when you learn something you thought was true was actually an Urban Myth. Some people never mature enough to realize that sometimes things get reported by actual news agencies which never actually happened and will hold on to certain beliefs for most of their lives. People don't like to acknowledge that they were foolish enough to believe false information. They will stick to their beliefs and even retrench further into their bunker when told by other people how silly the things they believe are. Some people think you shouldn't drive people into those bunkers by being aggressive with your dismissals of their false beliefs. I think the exact opposite. Drive them into their bunkers of ignorance where they will either think on the thing or just fucking hate me. If they think on the thing and eventually emerge, chagrined but grateful, I will accept them with open arms. If they choose to hate me forever and see me as a despicable, lying, monstrous piece of shit, I'll fucking accept that too. I don't have any time for people with no critical thinking skills.

Although sometimes, I just sit in my bunker and wonder why nobody is talking to me.

Oh! About Urban Myths! The first one I ever heard was the one that Mikey from the Life Cereal commercials died from eating Pop Rocks and Coke at the same time. I also remember the one where Rod Stewart collapsed on stage and had to have his stomach pumped. They found it was full of semen. Years later, a couple of the neighborhood kids who hung out at the 7-11 (who used to watch me complete Super Mario on one quarter with no warps) told me the exact same story but about Bon Jovi. I was thoroughly entertained.

I've told that story before. But what do you expect? I've written like thirty-five hundred of these things!

Me on Facebook.

Here's a helpful hint if you want to add footnotes to your own terrible blog! If you want a superscript one, you hold down the alt key and type 0185 on the keypad. Guess how you get a superscript two? WRONG! It's alt plus 0178! You can figure out superscript three because it follows the pattern you probably thought would be a pattern starting with the one. Guess how you type superscript four? WRONG! I have no idea how to fucking type that. I usually find one online and copy and paste it. I guess you're only supposed to have three footnotes per written work.³ I suppose I could learn the HTML codes for them but that's being too rational for a paragraph that was meant to engage in some hyperbolic elements for humorous effects.

Don't you hate it when you say something in an exaggerated manner and then somebody matter-of-factly corrects you? Like when I say, "Donald Trump is an asshole!" Then somebody, probably a conservative cousin, says, "Actually he's just a human being like me or you and not a sentient anus that has removed itself from the original organism, swept some long butt-hairs across the top of its sphincterish shape, and squelched its way into the White House."

I want to amend the previous paragraph. There is no way a conservative cousin could come up with that response.

Fucking hell. This is all I've ever fucking asked for out of a Deathstork comic book! Don't make his morality easy! The reader doesn't need to feel comfortable liking him!

Popular entertainment loves to tell stories where the audience automatically knows who to root for and who to denounce. I like my characters to be more complex. I suppose there isn't any real evidence for that being that I'm still reading comic books in which complex is a dirty word.

Not that Slade Wilson killing people who might kill him makes him complex! But Deathstork writers have a history of making sure he kills the bad guys and ultimately does the right thing so that he can be seen as a hero (or, for want of a word that losers don't love, anti-hero). Killing people shooting at him is par for Deathstork's White's Only course. But killing people who are innocent victims of a genocidal war against their people because he's desperate to get paid for a job they want to stop? That's a bit to ambiguous to defend. He's adding to the misery of a people for his own pocketbook. That's the Deathstork way but no fan ever really wants to accept it. They're all such sycophantic ass-kissers.

The Room Four story ends with Slade getting a promotion to Captain and walking past Dex, the interrogator from Room Two. That's how those tie in! Anyway, Dex from Room Two explains to Slade how they have enough evidence to convict him of some political shenanigans. Right. As if something won't come up where Dex will be all, "You know what? We could use Deathstork's help right now! We won't convict! EEE!"

Meanwhile over in Room One, Jericho is learning some medical mumbo-jumbo from Doctor Villain. He's all, "Deathstork's sword is coated in Promethium! That shit is whack! Now you got super powers!"

Over in Room Three, Xia (Rose Wilson's Hmong name) meets her mother Lillian's family. She also beats the crap out of a disrespectful gang-banger and deftly fends off the advances of her cousin. Not in the usual way with a sword but just with her words. There are a lot of entertaining words in this comic book. Isn't that interesting that the best Deathstork comic book is the one with more words and conversations than bullets and corpses?

Finally, the Red Lion comes to break Slade out of prison. But first Slade has to read something about the new Flash and alternate universes to remind readers that this comic book still takes place in the same universe as all of that other boring Rebirth shit.

The Ranking!
+1!

_______________________________
¹Not that any regular reader probably ever questions why I suddenly begin discussing anything. If you do, I apologize for making my commentaries so confusing.²
²I had to make that comment a footnote since the sentence it footnotes stated "the following sentence" which would have been wrong if followed by the footnote.
³Take that, David Foster Wallace!

Deathstork #9

If this were me, they'd have to stick my cock in one of those arm shackles too. Mostly because I'd have requested it.

I don't know how much longer I can be funny because I'm just getting angrier and angrier at what the Republicans are doing. They were anti-Trump when they feared he might bring some liberal ideas into the White House because he's one of those Hollywood types (plus he expressed quite a few liberal ideas previous to running as a Republican) but now that he's carrying out their hateful and selfish agenda, they're happier than pigs in shit. They are pigs in shit. Hell, they are shit. I don't want to demean pigs. Here's what I just posted as a Facebook status because I'm ready to burn down all of my relationships with people who think Mitch McConnell basically telling a peer who is a woman to shut up (and then not doing the same to my Senator from Oregon, Jeff Merkley, because why? Oh, wait. The why is the easy part, the fucking coward. I wonder how many times Little Mitch got his nose bloodied at school by another boy for being a dick to a girl? Too bad some girls didn't bloody it to (additional note: oh look. More white men were allowed to read the letter on the Senate floor. Go fucking figure):

If you agree with what Trump and the Republican toadies are doing, you are:

A. Ignorant.
B. Sexist.
C. Racist.
D. A Coward.
E. All of the above.
F. Fuck you.

Liberals are constantly accused of playing politics when it's quite the opposite and there's an easy way to spot why that's true: use your fucking brain. I'm not a liberal because I wanted to choose a side and then win the game. I'm a liberal because I don't view the world through my own selfish desires. I don't look at a government safety net program and think, "How many fuckers are abusing this?" I think, "Who fucking cares how few people are abusing it because it actually fucking helps people in need, you piece of shit motherfucker." I understand how the tax code works and while it gets complicated in the details, the overall system couldn't be simpler and yet nobody seems to fucking understand how people are taxed across their range of income. This leads to a rallying cry that the tax code is too complex and needs to be changed to some kind of disastrous straight percentage across all incomes that would lead to the biggest deficits this country has ever seen. I don't fear for my life so much that I think freedoms should be exchanged for illusory security, especially when that security is aimed at keeping cowardly white people feeling safe from brown people. And I don't even fear for my life so much that I think all guns should be taken away but holy Christ's jizz in alphabet soup something can be fucking done to tighten up regulations on who can get their hands on them and what kind should be in mass circulation. If you approve of a ban of immigrants from seven countries where no terrorist attacks on American soil have originated in the last thirty years and also approve of lifting restrictions on people with mental illnesses buying guns, you're the political one. You're the scared racist who thinks you need a gun to protect yourself from the brown people. You are almost certainly one or all of the above in my previous survey.

I have been called paranoid because of my criticisms of Trump and the Republican majority. It's actually vigilance. Paranoia was when people saw a black man governing the country and expressed all kinds of "What-if" scenarios about what he was going to do to the country without any evidence. Vigilance is when you see the fuckers in Congress doing everything your government shouldn't do and pointing out how it's fucked up. If you're not, at the very fucking least, concerned with their war against transparency, you've proven to everybody around you that you really don't fucking care about America. Hell, if you don't care about that, I don't fucking know what you give a shit about. I guess you just care about living in a world where nobody points out that you're an asshole.

The Review!
Last issue, Superman captured Deathstork and was all, "You'll rot in Coast Guard prison, you miscreant!" This issue, Deathstork probably escapes from Coast Guard prison.

This issue begins like this:

All of Trump's cabinet picks could have had similar names and nobody would have batted an eye, apparently.

Dr. Villain is waiting to speak with Jericho for probably innocent reasons. But currently, Jericho is out sitting on a bench in his Ikon superhero outfit. At least his body is. His mind is inside of a nun.

Doctor Super Villain tells Joseph that he's Slade's personal physician. I know when I was a doctor who totally wasn't a super villain at all, I used to hunt down my patients by bothering their family members when I thought my client needed to see me. I felt it was better than waiting for my patients to alert me to a problem.

Dr. Villain can't track down Slade because he doesn't know Slade is locked up.

And apparently guarded by cyclopes.

Things you learn from playing Dungeons and Dragons for so many years: A. A little something about courage and B. the plural of cyclops.

This multi-part story is called "Four Rooms" but it does not take place in a hotel. The first room is Jericho's office where Doctor Villain is waiting for Slade. The second room is where Slade is being interrogated at the Coast Guard's supermax detention center in Florence, Colorado. I don't know how they get their prisoners there by boat.

The man interrogating Slade calls him "Death Strike" which is stupid. He obviously should have called him Deathstork. The man's name is Dex and he's all, "Oh! Oh! So you think you're Jesus Christ, do you?! Well, la de freakin' da!" Actually, he might be a little more adult about it. I can't help but perceive everything through the eyes of an immature asshat.

The third room is Northern Vietnam. That's a big room! The star of this room is Xia (the star of the first room was Jericho and the second room, Dex). This is the room I'm going to like the most because Xia has breasts.

See? This room is the sexy room if you're into breasts, face kicks, and camel's toes.

Room Two is the room for you if you're into chauvinists. Some might read some of the things I've written and snarkily say, "Well then that must be the room for you, you buttfaggot!" No wait. Those are the things Deathstork fans generally say to me. What the other "some" might say is "That sounds like the room for you, Tess! You sexist jerko!" To them I would say (and have said!), "You've been reading me completely wrong if you thought that!" I have been known to make sexist jokes on occasion. But they're almost certainly and almost definitely quite probably making fun of the people who think that way. But then that's sort of the problem inherent in satire. Those who don't realize you're making fun of them wind up embracing you as a hero of their chauvinism. I've always been a huge fan of satire because it's generally more intelligent than just calling somebody a cunt but in the current climate where spectacularly dumb people are celebrating the causes of dumbness, racism, sexism, and lunacy, satire might not be the best way to go anymore. It's time to simply look people in the eyes, call them an asshole, and leave it at that.

Finally we get to room four! That's the room where they're playing poker. In the pot is an ancient sword called Deathstork. This room also takes place "years after the massacre" in Srebrenica. If I weren't an American and were able to remember things from just over twenty years ago, I would probably remember what that was. But who can remember it since 9-11 happened? That was the worst thing to ever happen to anybody in any country ever.

Sorry. My satire is showing again. Unless that's just steamy, bloody, fetid sarcasm. It's hard to tell when you're as angry as I am at the ignorance of my fellow countrymen (and countrywomen! They're no smarter than the men!).

The poker game is where Slade gets the name Deathstork (and the sword!). It's also where he meets up with his team of international muckrakers, including Wintergreen.

Slade teams up with Wintergreen's men to find General Dragas, the man behind the orders to commit genocide. As they search for him, they run into a little hitch. Wintergreen's translator is Bosniak and wants to see the general dead. Slade wants to the general alive so Slade can pay next month's rent. Usually Slade would win this argument but this is early in his career as Deathstork (the beginning, to be precise). And also the translator has a small army on his side.

The Ranking!
+1! If you were exhausted beyond belief of searching for an intelligent Deathstork comic, you can finally stop being exhausted! That's because this comic book exists. If you haven't been reading it, you'll have to be a little more exhausted as you hunt down all of the back issues (or just get off your lazy ass to get the trade (or just fucking order it on Amazon since you're already on the Internet, you lazy jerko)).