The Crusades #7 (November 2001)

Another great cover! This one by Teddy Kristiansen, artist on Seagle's House of Secrets.

This series is fucking killing it on the covers. It feels like everybody was queuing up to get a chance at working on this book. It feels like maybe Vertigo had a far looser style that let artists get way more imaginative than the regular DC Universe covers. This doesn't usually feel like it but I believe it's supposed to be an urban horror book. It wasn't really until this cover that I felt that vibe.

The lyric that begins this month's comic is by a band called Nietzsche.

I'm not sure this is true but he expresses it so authoritatively that I can't help think, "What the fuck do I know?"

I suppose Nietzsche means that what raises our ire when he witness suffering is that the conditions under which most people suffer aren't senseless in the overall arc of the moral universe (or maybe he is?! I suppose one gets angry and screams at the stars when one finds their life has taken some tragic turn, no need to blame anybody expressly to be angry that this universe wasn't one that formed with all soft edges and kittens) but senseless in that the suffering people see is the kind that could be ameliorated by a more just populace and civilization. Why do people have to go without when there is actually plenty to go around? It's senseless that some should have so much extra while others have nearly nothing. And society doesn't form in ways that buoy everyone; they're formed by expressing opinions that people must earn the very basics of life in ways that aren't natural but society pretends are. Tradition, law, and societal convention are all just lies forming the fabric of some agreed upon list of ways to act. When somebody goes against these things, people see them as having stopped earning their right to the things civilization and society provide. They are left to suffer because they are no longer earning their way, however that manifests in the current age and mores. What Nietzsche is saying is that we don't get angry at the starvation; we get angry at the people senselessly hoarding food they do not need, at the cops keeping hungry people away from garbage bins where food has been thrown out, at those who would rather let fruit rot on the ground than allow the hungry to feed for free.

Or maybe he means something totally different. When's the last time I mentioned how stupid I am? Oh, you probably already realized that because I'm reading comic books.

So what's this got to do with this issue? I don't know! It would make more sense if I thought about the lyric after I read the stupid comic book!

Oh shiz! I forgot about poor Sara! I'm so mad at the senselessness of her suffering!

The knight, once again, doesn't murder the Russians but pretty much kills a bystander. It's gang warfare medieval style! The faux knight's whole point is to scare the Russians and get them to back off The Pope's territory. So he's not willing to kill the goons; he just wants to give them a message to send to the Russian gang leader, Bocc, while roughing them up quite a bit. But poor Sara suffers horribly by being dragged behind the cable car. The police get there just as the knight rides off. They find Sara one gigantic skinned everything unconscious behind the cable car.

While Sara's being dragged to her near death, Venus and Anton fuck. After they fuck, they discuss the Praying Mantis. Venus knows a lot about a lot of stuff so I think she's not just referencing how sometimes the female will cannibalize the male after procreating; she's also referencing that the longer the male remains copulating, the less chance he has of being eaten. She's fucking warning Anton that he'd better make her come or watch out!

I can't scan any of the scenes between Anton and Venus because they're all so naked and my blog is going to become Adults Only if I keep scanning naked panels every chance I get. But believe me, they're pretty racy! Whoo boy! So hot!

Oh no! Venus may start equating "having sex" with "my friend gets hauled under a trolley and nearly decapitated!"

Selfishly, I still want to see Venus have sex with Anton because it's so fucking hot! But if she does become too traumatized to have sex with Anton for the rest of the series, I'd be pretty happy about that too. That guy fucking sucks.

Detective Petronas finds out the knight was after Russian crime boss, Bocc, by scaring one of the two Russians attacked by the knight to death. It's supposed to be a pretty tense scene but it's opposite a page that kept distracting me.

You can bet I rushed through the hospital scene to get a gander at this page!

I'm not horny! You're horny!

I love when the kids criticize each other for being horny on main. As if there's any other place to be horny! Let your horndog flag fly! We're fleshy, lustful, sexual beasts! Express your wanton desires and major kinks! Unless your kink is disgusting and then nobody wants to hear about it. I'm not going to mention any of those because I don't want to kink shame people into missionary. Fucking weirdos.

The next day, the knight attacks more Russians on BART.

This fucking knight ain't got no chill.

It's about time the real knight got off his ass and made an appearance. His horse must be well rested and freshly watered. The blood's been washed off his armor. Some evildoer's making him look bad on the streets above since he's now gotten at least three innocents killed or nearly killed. The real knight will probably show up at the end of this issue. You can't leave the readers without the real knight for this long.


The Pope basically tells Father Trinidad that he's paying some guy to be the knight for him. He mistakenly thinks that means he's off the hook and has no more sins to confess. Father Trinidad is all, "Um, dude. Everything is a fucking sin. You accidentally glance at a choir boy's ass, that's a sin. You casually think about your mother while you're pissing, that's a sin. You make a jerk off motion every time you pass by a homeless guy, that's a sin. You hire a man to go around in armor killing innocents and threatening Russians, you'd better fucking believe that's a sin too." So The Pope is all, "Oh shit! Okay! I got some confessing to do then, if you put it that way."

Look at all the missing body parts! Phillip is to Seagle as Herr Starr was to Ennis.

The Russians, being driven off of Tony Cutone's old territory by The Pope's knight, decide to give up on it. Instead, they decide to take The Pope's territory figuring it'll be easier than dealing with that knight. Ha ha! Stupid The Pope! He fucked himself good!

Venus continues to search for the knight, heading out into the park area of the Presidio to an old stable. While sneaking around it, she's grabbed from behind by somebody with a big glove on their hand! It could be a gauntlet but it's probably a gardener's glove. Or a hawker's glove!

The book ends revealing that The Pope has been driving the guy in armor and his horse around town in a moving van. I guess the big confrontation between the knights will have to wait until next issue.

The Crusades #7 Rating: B+. The faux knight sucks. He keeps hurting innocents and making them suffer senselessly. It's really causing me some severe indignation! I can't wait for the other guy to come back because his murder feels way more black and white. What's he waiting for? Pope John Paul II to give him the go ahead?! Start cracking criminal skulls, you lazy bastard!

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!

The Crusades #5 (September 2001)

Ah! My old friend, Duncan Fegredo!

Duncan's not actually my friend. That was a figure of speech. He did quite a few covers for one of my all-time favorite comic books, Peter Milligan's Shade the Changing Man. He also did the interiors on Milligan's classic, Enigma. It's nice to see some of his work here. The artist's work on the covers of this series, just five issues in (six!), have been absolutely stunning: Bill Sienkiewicz, Christopher Moeller, Kent Williams, Daniel Zezelj, and Lee Loughridge. How did this series not do huge numbers looking so stunning on the shelves? Just gorgeous paintings sitting next to all those other four-color covers. Although it was Vertigo, so if it was sitting with all the other Vertigo titles, maybe they just didn't stand out. What with Dave McKean building fucking sculptures for Sandman and whatnot!

Last issue ended with loads of non-houseless witnesses catching sight of the knight just before he disembowels a bunch of The Pope's men. I only mention that the eyewitnesses aren't houseless because we must face the facts of the status quo: they will never believe anything a person filthy from living on the streets says. The status quo proudly wears the blinders of their peers and refuse to listen to somebody who may be mentally ill, or struggling with addiction, or simply down on their luck and unshowered. The status quo fucking suck dolphin dick. That's a multi-tiered insult because just imagine how horrified you'd be if you saw somebody sucking a dolphin's dick. You'd be all, "That's fucking disgusting! And yet they went through all the effort of finding a pod of dolphins in the ocean so that they could engage in this perverse way!" But then you're mind would clear a bit from the shock of the strange sight of a dolphin's penis being absolutely munched on by this weirdo and you'd have a much clearer thought: "That dolphin did not consent!" But then the dolphin would probably lock eyes on you and wink and you'd realize the dolphin was totally into it. Dolphins are horny!

This month's lyrics from Pope Urban II:

Oh religion! You take every opportunity to prove your arbitrary shittiness!

The worst leaders in the world encourage the worst people in the world every way they can. And by letting everybody know that their sins have been pre-absolved, Pope Urban lets them loose on the Jews and Muslims to do their worst. The Pope knows he's pre-forgiving murder, rape, theft, and blasphemy. He's proclaiming, "Anybody who wages a war of terror in the Church's name shall stand among God's chosen!" As if God had not already proclaimed the things His followers must not do. As if the living representation of God can say and do and proclaim whatever they want and God just has to sit there and shut the fuck up. Man, if the God of Christianity were real, and everything that led to the building of the Catholic Church was because of God, don't you think He'd have rained feces on Rome for forty days and forty nights? Don't you think He would have punished Pope Urban some...what's that? Pope Urban II died before ever learning of the conquest of Jerusalem? Praise God!

Let's play a fun game! Let's see what else Pope Urban II said while telling a bunch of Christians that all their sins will be forgiven if they die in this war against the Muslims and Jewish people:

All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am invested. O what a disgrace if such a despised and base race, which worships demons, should conquer a people which has the faith of omnipotent God and is made glorious with the name of Christ! With what reproaches will the Lord overwhelm us if you do not aid those who, with us, profess the Christian religion!

So big shot Pope Urban II immediately reminds people that he's allowed to speak for God so shut up. He also reminds them that the infidels are demon worshiping jerk-faces. And if that wasn't enough to get all the lazy poor assholes not suffering enough for God already off of their fat asses, he surmises, "Just think how worse God will make your life if you don't do this!" People love to defend religion because it brings hope to so many and I sometimes let down my militaristic atheist guard at that thought and agree, "Yeah, yeah. It must bring comfort, believing that nonsense." But that comfort is a selfish comfort where somebody cares only about their own immortal ego! And by caring so much about their ego surviving the terror of death and nonexistence, they'll do almost anything their spiritual leaders demand of them in the name of God! I know I'm ranting at shit that happened one thousand years ago but I also have eyes that can look out of my window today and ears that can hear the self-serving demands for faith and loyalty and a nose to smell the stinking rot of decaying souls perfumed up with patriotism and Christian pride!

I'm so much happier when I just ignore it all! But especially those jerks who express disdain for atheists as if they live in a world where atheists are forcing their opinions down their throats on the daily. I wish atheists were as vocal as Christians and pseudo-Christians! The status quo are so attuned to hearing daily Christian messages in the most mundane aspects of their everyday lives that they just don't even register them anymore. They're fucking constant and everywhere. But then one person responds to some religious thing quoted at them with, "Enh, I'm an atheist," and whoa Nelly! Look out! How dare an atheist express their areligious status! What a fucking whiny narcissist! What an overbearing chud of a human being! How dare they shit all over the comfort people gain from religion by saying, "I'm an atheist!" Bah! Go fuck yourselves!

I'd like to point out that I'm writing a blog post on my blog not directed at any person. It's impersonal. But anybody responding to this with attacks against me are personal attacks and they will not be permitted! I do not permit them! You are not remitted in entirety all penance for all your bully sins!

Oh shit! I forgot there was a massacre taking place!

I don't think this is the real knight. He's missing his snake horns!

Is this the first time the knight's been shown from a perspective that wasn't explicitly somebody else's story or Venus's frame for reference alone? We've seen how she sometimes daydreams and gets lost in her own fantasies. Could her witnessing of the knight have been exaggerated by her imagination? Could this be the same knight but seen more realistically? Or is it a fake? I think it's a fake because I'm one of those Internet dudes who doesn't believe anything just so that I'm never fooled by anything who then goes on to believe every shallow conspiracy theory by some YouTube crackpot. "I'm too intelligent to be fooled by mainstream ideas! I only believe theories formed from the fluffy cobwebs of some nutcase's mind that have never been tainted by the process of experimentation!"

The knight gets shot in the helmet a bunch and it looks like the bullets have gone right through yet he keeps on fighting.

And he's got the voice! I'll admit, there's a 3% chance that I could be wrong about this being a fake!

On closer inspection of some previous panels, it looks like the bullets are ricocheting off of the helmet. So I'll lower my chance of being wrong to 0.03%.

All the priests running screaming into the hallway forgetting that God has their back even more than regular people. Unless maybe they never really believed that? They find the door barred from the outside and begin sweating like a priest trapped in a dead-end hallway with a paranormal knight slaughtering people just around the corner. Is that a saying? If not, I guess I just coined it. You can use it if you want. It's about as comprehensible as any of Jesus's parables! Probably more so. It's plainly stated; it's just not catchy.

The knight winds up killing one of the priests as the criminals throw him in the knight's way and flee further into the school. That's okay. If he's an actual knight from the Crusades, he's got carte blanche to commit as many sins as he wants in the name of his mission. I just learned that like five pages ago!

Meanwhile, Anton Marx has been hauled into the police precinct to be questioned by Petronas again. But this time, the detective has a warrant so he can hold Anton as long as he wants. Or until Anton's lawyer starts talking about suing the city.

The Pope's men have one move: throwing more of The Pope's men into the knight's weapons.

Father Trinidad (the priest being paid by The Pope) discovers Venus and leads her away from the carnage. One of the other priests remembers Jesus once said, "I kick ass for the Lord!" So he's going to help himself and go take the school back from The Pope's thugs. It's possible he became brave because he heard all the criminals being slaughtered by the knight and then it went quiet and now he's all, "I'm going to do something!"

Venus didn't actually want to move away from the carnage so once Father Trinidad runs off to help the other priests, she wanders back into the school where she, once again, comes face to face with the knight.

What the fuck was Kelley Jones on when he drew that first panel? Or should I blame the inker, Jason Moore?

After that panel in which Venus looks like Ms. Plasticman, Cameron Stewart takes over on the inking. Maybe something terrible happened to Jason Moore as he was drawing that panel?! Maybe he just got frustrated because Seagle hadn't given him a panel to draw Venus's nipples and this was already halfway through the comic book. He had to take some time off to draw some covers for The Dead to get right with the world once more.

Cameron Stewart takes over just in time for some people to die!

This doesn't look anything like hipster Batgirl!

That's the priest who decided to take back the night. He shoots the jaw off some thug's face and then gets got by the knight for having done justice in the name of the Lord while not having Pope Urban II's blessing. Evil is evil so you gotta pay, you know? I mean evil is evil if Pope Urban II hasn't pre-forgiven you!

Nearly everybody dies except Venus and Father Trinidad and a few nameless priests of the New Jerusalem School. Also the guy who got his hand cut off earlier gets his leg cut off too. He escapes because Seagle's giving him the Garth Ennis treatment. He's still got plenty of body parts to lose in subsequent issues. Priest Rambo gets his brains blown out as well. Ultimately, only four major witnesses survive (the priests of New Jerusalem School don't count. They didn't really see much): Venus, Father Trinidad, Mr. One Hand and One Leg, and one other of The Pope's men. He might have a name but what am I? His father's keeper's keeper of his son's name?

The knight paints another cross from blood and shit and flies it over the New Jerusalem School. Is that his headquarters now? Venus doesn't get any answers about who he is; Father Trinidad tells her he's "the knight," like some smart-ass motherfucker who needs a mace to the skull. And Anton admits to everybody that he didn't ever know the identity of the knight but that he wasn't lying because what he meant was he knows the kind of guy the knight is. He's another smart-ass mother fucker who needs a medieval weapon bashing.

The Crusades #5 Rating: B-. So that's the end of the First Crusade. It ended with a bit of a whimper which might be why, ultimately, I found this title pretty forgettable. The knight's just some medieval Batman who may or may not kill you as soon as rescue you being that his code of ethics are a complete fucking mystery to everybody. What if he begins killing street masturbators? Are those a thing? Those must be a thing, right? Am I protesting too much about knowing about street masturbators? Heck I barely know what masturbation is let alone streets! I'm inside like 95% of the time! You're a street masturbator!

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!

The Crusades #3 (July 2001)

From morality tale to Lovecraftian horror.

The first page lyrics have been pretty philosophical up until now so Seagle wanted to throw a little spanner in the machine that doesn't like spanners being thrown into it. A toaster, I guess? For this issue, we begin with a diss track from Lord Capulet. It's a pretty simple diss but still hard enough to win a beef against Drake.

I don't know why the image is of Sumerian bowling champion, Enkidu.

Last issue, Detective Petronas arrested Anton Marx for unknown reasons. Was he the knight? Was he behind the gangland murders happening across the city? Did Venus press charges against him for being a terrible lay? Not knowing was the best way to keep the reader's interest because if Seagle had added one more panel where Detective Petronas explained why he was being arrested, every reader would have made a wet fart noise with their mouth and an extended jerk-off motion with their non-dominant hand. Petronas has arrested Anton Marx because he wrote an article entitled, "The Knight: I Know Who He Is." Seems like Anton Marx might be bringing a lawsuit against the city for the most egregious case of unlawful arrest ever perpetrated against a white heterosexual male! If the noun ("male") or either of the adjectives ("white," "hetero") were different, no lawyer would touch the case. Cops have that bullshit immunity thing, remember? Unless they harass a white heterosexual male! Because white heterosexual males who run the country know laws don't apply to them so if a cop tried anything with one of them, it's going to blow up in their faces. It's why white heterosexual males, even the least powerful among them, rarely get harassed by cops (unless they have serious poverty and/or class markers that scream, "I have no power to sue your stupid violent ass!"). You ever see any video where a white heterosexual male screams at a cop who's ticketing or questioning him? If the cop has a tail, it tucks right up between his legs and instantly gets soaked from the piss pouring out of the cop's crotch. And if the white heterosexual male winds up being a judge or politician? That cop fucking quakes right out of his boots, which is lucky for him because of all the shit that instantly flowed down his pant legs and into them.

What seems to have happened is that Detective Petronas brought Anton in for questioning about a case they're currently working on. That's why last issue ended with Petronas showing his badge to Anton and saying, "I'll have to ask you to come with me." He didn't arrest him at all! It was all sleight of hand by Steven T. Seagle to let the reader assume an arrest was being made! And that the arrest was for sexual assault because you know Anton's done a few of them, right? He practically eye-fucks his lesbian coworker on the daily which has to be, at the very least, a misdemeanor in San Francisco, right?

While Venus's rivals for her sexual attentions cockfight (metaphorically) in a police station, she's out chasing down eyewitness accounts of the knight.

I saw Neil Gaiman give a reading at the Palace of Fine Arts many years ago. He did not try to fuck me.

For a city with such a bustling night life, it's strange that only unhoused men and Venus have laid eyes on the knight. I have a feeing he's being seen by far more people than are admitting to it because they're also not admitting to seeing the naked guys roller skating down Castro with their dicks tied together or the little lady herding goats through heavy traffic by the 101 onramp or three-headed dwarf that escaped the backroom of the Ripley's Believe-it-not Museum. There's some weird shit going down in that town; a guy in full armor on a horse ain't so strange. Everybody who's seen him so far has probably shrugged and thought, "This that time of the year those rich assholes go fuck that owl up in the Grove?"

Venus looks like she was modelled after Johnette Napolitano.

The man Venus interviews is one of the houseless guys Anton disrespected on his show a couple of issues ago. He tells Venus about the second time he saw the night.

This story has a lot of justice applied via butthole.


The knight is like Columbo but instead of asking one last question, he always jams his lance up the suspect's butthole one more time.

Remember, this isn't necessarily what happened! The guy telling Venus this account might just like to sauce up his stories with nonconsensual anal penetration.

The houseless guy overheard the guy being skewered by the knight say that The Pope ordered a couple of hits on kids from the New Jerusalem School. Man. A ghost knight riding about the city seeking justice. A criminal overlord trying to scare people away from a piece of real estate he wants to buy. A woman with an ass that doesn't quit and great boobs trying to solve the mystery. This is one of them Scooby Doo cartoons, isn't it?

Yes, the woman with the ass that doesn't quit and the great boobs from the Scooby cartoon is Velma. Daphne can go suck one of Shaggy's heroes.

This is an advert for a video game. I do not understand it.

Does research show that if somebody jerks off to an advertisement, the product somehow burns itself into their mind and they're more likely to buy it? If that works, don't you at least need to know what the fucking product is? Is this for a videogame where you fuck people in the spa at a party? Is the mascot of that website a little sperm guy?

Sorry I got distracted by that advertisement. The image you were probably waiting for was the one from the end of the guy's story about the knight.

Remember how earlier I couldn't tell if a cross was painted out of shit and blood? Question answered.

If you were wondering which pages were inked by Mark Buckingham, they were the four pages with the knight shoving his lance up the guy's asshole.

We learn a little bit about Anton's set up at the coffee shop. He writes his columns there. The people who hang out with him claim they're his friends. He claims they hang out there because they want to be his friends. And since Anton Marx is never wrong, I guess they're a bunch of hangers on. Except none of them seem to like him particularly. That would indicate they're his friends then!

A character I haven't mentioned because it didn't seem too pressing the few times he's shown up is Father Trinidad. He's the priest at a local gay friendly church with a drag choir who's been roped into The Pope's criminal business dealings through threat of violence and large sums of cash (not a threat; actual sums!). He's become The Pope's spiritual advisor because The Pope still wants to believe he's absolved for his sins for some reason. I guess because the good guy would be concerned with that kind of thing? And if he's concerned with his immortal soul, he must be good! When he asks for pre-forgiveness for the people he's going to have murdered, that means he's pre-remorseful and pre-repenting! Father Trinidad helps him with those things.

Later that night, Venus goes to investigate the piece of land where the casino is going to be built (which is right next to the New Jerusalem school). She climbs through a hole in the chain link fence and then the issue ends on a panel that made absolutely sure that I was going to buy the next issue.

Even if it's just in a comic book, I've never seen a horse do oral!

The Crusades #3 Rating: B+. Fairly certain the only comic book I'd read by Steven T. Seagle prior to this was House of Secrets. It's almost certainly why I purchased this book, House of Secrets being one of my all-time top comic books. This series I don't remember quite as well. It could be because of the time of my life I was reading House of Secrets and how it seemed to speak directly to things I was going through. I identified with Rain far more than Venus. This series has all the same hallmarks of House of Secrets: a woman at a crossroads in her life feeling lost but able to set some personal things aside as she investigates some paranormal mystery. Plus it revolves around the characters and their motivations more than the mystery of the knight. Just as Rain's story was more about her relationships than whatever the fuck was going on in the house and her job to witness the trials. I feel kind of bad that I forgot so much of this series when it's really pulling me in. I blame my having been older (30!) at the time of reading this and beginning to have trouble fully remembering the stories from month to month. It's one of the main reasons I quit reading comic books the first time! And it's the reason for this blog! So that I could refresh my memory of every issue of The New 52 a month after having read the last part! But now comic books just cost too much so I'm re-reading all of my old books instead of reading new books at like $5.00 a pop. Yeesh!

The Crusades #2 (June 2001)

This ain't weird for San Francisco.

The only real question when seeing a knight in armor standing on top of a taxi in San Francisco is this: is he part of Pride, part of the drug scene, or is it Renaissance Festival season across the Golden Gate in Marin County? It's also possible Gwar is playing at the Cow Palace but the odds on that are pretty low compared to the others.

Man, I just made myself so sad and nostalgic for the Bay Area. If I had to guess, I'd say at least half the concerts I've been to in my life time were at the Cow Palace.

For those curious about the lyrics that begin this issue: Missy George Eliot!

It's been so long since I've read Middlemarch, I doubt I'd be able to pick it out of a line-up if it stood on stage in front of me next to Vanity Fair, Bleak House, and Jude the Obscure. It's weird knowing you've lived life and done things during that life but have no memory of them whatsoever anymore. Am I still responsible for everything the me did when I was reading Middlemarch if I can't even remember the fucking plot? I think every terrible thing I did around the time should be attributed to a me that isn't me anymore at all. Um, not that I did anything terrible around that time! I don't think this was terrible but one time, I told this gay guy Michael once that I wasn't interested in having sex with him and then lay on the couch in the dark with him on the floor nearby thinking, "Do I want to have sex with him? My penis seems to want to!" But I didn't have the nerve to wake him up and say, "You know what? Let's do this! Please go easy on me, sir!" Man, if that had been the plot of Middlemarch, I bet I'd remember it then!

Holy Crusades! This issue begins in the past. It's only the second (third!) issue and we're actually going to get some back story?! Will there be a worm hole? A Legion teleportation accident? A holy fucking miracle?!

Content Warning: The Crusades were 98% racist.

The Crusades were probably 100% racist but I'm going to allow for a slight margin of error due to so many poor and uneducated people being swept up in the fervor who maybe just thought they were joining a parade of racists.

Check out the side-eye on his Jew. He's all, "Fucking this shit again?"

I was first introduced to The Fiddler on the Roof in middle elementary school due to the way television worked in the '70s. That is, there were like nine channels worth watching (if you don't count that one channel on UHF that showed the scrambled porn station, Private Screenings. Seriously. Look it up!). Three of those channels were network affiliates. Two were PBS stations. And four were local channels that showed a bunch of syndicated stuff (two on VHF (channels 2-13) and two on UHF (all the other numbers!)). In the San Francisco Bay Area, channels 2, 12, 20, and 36 were the main local stations. Channel 4 was NBC, 6 was CBS, and 7 was ABC. Channels 9 and 54 were PBS stations. I don't remember what channel Private Screenings was on but I tried to watch it on occasion!

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, on the weekends, you had those channels to choose from. As a kid, I didn't like sports, so that cut down on some choices. Movies and musicals were big fare during the day on Saturdays and Sundays. It's where I first saw The Fiddler on the Roof and I mostly remember loving the first half and being bored to death by the second half. I definitely didn't understand the context of the movies and I certainly didn't learn and retain the word "pogrom" for at least a decade later. I just knew the first half of the movie was fun and the second half of the movie was a huge downer! Oh, I bring it up because that side-eye Jewish fellow made me think of the word "pogrom" because he definitely can tell it's, once again, fucking pogrom time!

Oh sure. Sign me up. You look like you're having a fucking blast.

One guy answers this fanatical crusader with some smart words and the crusader isn't happy about it.

Oh, by "smart words," I just mean they were all, "No thanks, sir! I'm just going to keep doing Jewish stuff!"

Judging by the snake-horned helmet, the crusader questioning Christo-fascist angry dude is our Knight of San Francisco. We're learning either he has a different moral code than your typical crusading Christian or he's just lazy. I'm not sure if his problem is with killing Jewish people or killing 600 Jewish people.

Back in San Francisco, we learn the scene wasn't technically a flashback although it probably was anyway. What it was was Venus reading a book entitled Crusades and Crusaders which apparently is a history book and not a role-playing game. She's learning about how ruthless and terrible and racist the crusaders were because she's curious as to how racist her soon-to-be new boyfriend might wind up being. You know she's gonna fuck the knight! This is a Vertigo title!

Last issue ended with Venus stumbling upon another gangland hit. This issue begins with Venus reading more about crusaders and waiting in the office of her therapist because she's convinced she's hallucinating the entire thing. In the middle of the issue, as she's talking to her therapist, she recounts what happened just after last issue ended and the gang members saw her seeing them doing their killing. And while the reader gets the story in visuals, the dialogue that goes along with it belong to Anton Marx and his co-host, April the Lesbian, as they discuss Anton's theories of the knight.

As a white male, Anton Marx doesn't worry if this guy's agenda is his own because he's probably racist. He's only worried if he's working for somebody else that might have a beef with mouthy radio personalities.

In the middle of the fight scene where the knight chops off the hand of one of the Pope's men, DC has purchased a double page advert for 7th Edition Magic the Gathering. It's not that I find it weird that Magic the Gathering took out such a large advertisement. It's the tagline they use that begins, "Back in Black," on the left page, and then finishes with this on the right.

Um, whut?

True story: one time at a Magic the Gathering tournament in San Jose, I used my Maze of Ith ("Target attacking creature becomes untapped. This creature neither deals nor receives damage as a result of combat.") against an attacking Serra Angel. This must have been in '95 or '96. The kid across from me was all, "You can't do that because Serra Angel doesn't tap." And I was all, "Excuse me? What kind of nonsense is that, you stupid mother fucker? Don't make me get up and shove the rest of your deck up your virgin asshole!" Okay, maybe I wasn't that angry. But I was confused. I was all, "The maze targets an attacking creature. The angel is attacking. Therefore it does no damage. The tapped or untapped bit doesn't matter." But he was a stupid motherfucker and could not be swayed by my ability to read a fucking Magic card. So he called a judge over and the judge was all, "Oh yeah. That's a new ruling. The Maze works on the angel." And since the judge ruled for me, I did not flip the table over out of irrational anger at the thought that somebody had previously ruled that the maze couldn't work against the angel?! What kind of shit stupid ignorant motherfucking motherfuckers live in this world with me?! READ THE FUCKING CARDS, YOU MORONS! Anyway, I lost in the next round because a guy who was about to be decked played Feldon's Cane which I'd never seen and didn't know what it did and by the time I'd read the card, he'd already shuffled his library back into his deck and I decided I didn't want to have to shove his deck up his virgin asshole as well and just decided not to argue that I Counterspelled it and just decided, "Fuck Magic the Gathering tournaments and the fucking bullshit cheating stupid motherfuckers who play in them."

What I'm saying is, "Yeah, yeah. I can see the stupid jerks I played with and traded cards with loving the shit out of a 'the Serra Angel is old enough to be fucked now' advertisement.

Vertigo-mandated tits and ass.

Earlier, Venus had an issue with getting lost in thought while doing research. Now it's becoming worse as she's daydreaming (or hallucinating) random events. It's probably brought on by the stress of seeing a knight hack off the hand of another human being. Or because she became super aroused after seeing it. Or maybe she just finds therapy super horny.

Later, Venus heads over to the New Jerusalem School to ask the priest who ran out to stop the criminals if he'd seen the knight as well. When she gets there, she's turned away because Pope's men are already in the building using violence to get the priest to sign the school over to The Pope. I guess so they can sell the land to the casino? Or build there own? Or something.

The issue ends with Venus ambushing Anton Marx at his coffee joint. He seems super embarrassed to be seen with her for some reason. Is she hideous? Are Anton and I looking at different women?! Why wouldn't he want everybody to know he's having sex with Venus?! Before she can tell him that she was the knight, Detective Petronas shows up to arrest Anton. He doesn't say why because it's the last panel and it's like a big twist to get the reader to buy the next issue. "Why was Anton arrested?! You'll have to spend another $2.50 next month to find out why! What's that? You were already going to buy next month's issue because you love seeing Venus naked? Oh, okay. Maybe we should have ended with her slipping off her underwear!"

The Crusades #2 Rating: A. It's like the knight's just a big, weird, interesting red herring to get eyes on this comic book. Readers curious to see why a knight crusades around San Francisco pick up the comic book. Then they get interested in the characters and the mystery and the mob violence and the boobies and mostly forget about the knight. The knight's just flavor text on a Summon Boobies and Mystery Magic the Gathering card of a comic book.

The Crusades #1 (May 2001)

San Francisco must be so soaked in LSD-tainted piss that The City itself might be hallucinating the knight.

This issue is labeled #1 but it's not the first issue. In the first issue, Urban Decree, we met a guy with a big mouth named Anton, a woman with big nipples named Venus, a crime lord with big aspirations named The Pope, a medieval knight with a big lance, and two twin brothers who fuck each other on stage for money. I'm assuming they have big pricks but it wasn't revealed so I didn't want to assume it by mentioning them in a statement that was just pure fact. Now I'm wondering if the preponderance of male twins compare their penises? You'd have to, right? Also, I'd be all, "I wonder what my butthole looks like? Get over here, bro!" Except I'd say it in our secret language and be all, "Chicka, chickabee, tay an may sees feliss, no tata!"

I forgot to introduce Anton Marx's Robin to his Howard Stern, April. She's a smart-ass lesbian who's contractually obligated to tell Marx, "You're never wrong," at least five times an hour. I almost introduced her last issue when she grabbed her tits and licked her lips but I thought, "It would be disrespectful to the lesbian community to rub my male gaze all over their bodies." You're welcome, lesbian community! I'm such a staunch ally!

If I don't get a GLAAD award for my self-control, I'll probably turn into a right-wing Nazi Comicsgater making YouTube videos where I interview Ethan Van Sciver about his stupid frog comic book that I have to love because it's the only comic book left that allows boobs. I mean, it doesn't but if my brain has gone right-wing, I'm going believe a lot of really stupid and untrue things.

Which Santana song was this lyric from?

According to last issue and this issue, the first page will always contain a song lyric. Urban Decree's lyric was from some band named Goethe. I didn't think it was important because I'm reading a comic book and large chunks of text without colorful images surrounding them barely register on my brain anymore.

The issue really begins on the next page where hyper-violence occurs amid brightly colored panels full of exaggerated physiques. You know, nobody likes to admit it but Fredric Wertham was right. Comic books are totally full of all the horrible shit he said they were full of. But he was wrong in thinking it causes children to become juvenile delinquents. It caused them to love comic books and get lost in stories and feel the kinds of feelings a kid can only feel when reading horror stories and romance stories because life is mostly fucking boring. But who knew that Fredric Wertham would be right about comic book readers becoming scourges on society in the modern era when they began to realize that they were the baddies that super heroes were battling against. Instead of thinking, "Shit. Superman would totally lecture me about the way I'm behaving! Maybe I should look inward and change myself?", they responded by saying, "Hitler was right! How quickly can I order a Klan hood on Amazon?!"

Let me guess! The knight is going to say, "Pisser sur celui qui fait pisser," before stabbing him in the kidneys!

The knight cuts the man's arm off and that's the grisly end of the scene because the boy telling the story to Detective Petronas (I forgot to mention meeting him! He's a detective with a big fat Greek toxic masculinity!) ran away at that point and doesn't know what happened. Detective Petronas, having heard so many stories about the knight lately, and investigated so many crime scenes where people were cut up by a sword, argues that because he's seen and heard so much evidence and eye witness testimony, the stories must be false. Yeah, that checks out. That sounds like typical police work.

Scene cuts to Venus at work telling coworker Patsy or Patty or something, one of the few people in her life who knows Venus is dating Anton Marx, about her wonderful relationship with the biggest creep in the city (after Detective Petronas and maybe The Pope and probably the Knight). It seems Anton is not good at conversation, not good at making her feel welcome in his home, not good at sex, and not good at sharing the covers. Either he's good at some secret something or I'm suspecting that Venus kind of hates herself.

Hey! I used to watch Creatures Features on KTVU channel 2 growing up! Which isn't cable, by the way. And I thought Venus was good at researching things!

Venus learns from coworker What's-her-name that their newspaper's going all-in on the Knight of San Francisco story. They're apparently just learning what the Weekly World News knew for years before anybody: clickbait sells like heroin-flavored hotcakes! Venus's coworker needs help researching orders of knights to fact check all the editorials being sent in by crackpots and people who think their views of reality are somehow better than other peoples when they're almost blatantly the opposite (which is why they drive so much traffic to the papers because people love to call other people stupid! Especially when the editorial writers really are as stupid as the people calling them stupid say they are). Apparently Venus has plenty of time to do research for Patsty because Venus's only job is researching Anton Marx's column which she won't get from him until the end of the day.

Over his radio show that morning, Anton Marx reveals that Tony Quetone (now Tony Cutone for some reason) was gunned down by The Pope's men. But then the Pope's men were killed by somebody with hand-to-hand weapons. But he won't reveal what he thinks that means because saying it over the radio doesn't earn him any extra cash. He's going to write his theories in his column for the masses high on knightmania to read. Detective Petronas calls into the radio show for some reason, acting concerned that Anton is revealing things to the public that the cops didn't want revealed without realizing that calling in to argue with Anton simply confirms what Anton's saying. As we've seen, he's not a great detective. Another thing Anton doesn't reveal: who gave him this information. Venus was a witness to the whole thing but I don't think she told him.

Meanwhile The Pope does more killing and crime while ignoring the possibility of the knight's actual existence.

Oh, Anton's circle jerk of friends meetings are to bounce ideas off of each other and get their critiques of his columns.

Anton believes the knight is bullshit. But Anton strikes me as the sort of blowhard who thinks believing the opposite of what the masses thinks constitutes intelligence. If the city wasn't so excited about the possibility of some vigilante knight roaming the streets at night butchering evaduhs (sorry! my twin language sometimes comes back to haunt me) and they thought it was all nonsense, he'd be proclaiming the knight was real and declaring he lives in the sewers! In other words, he'd be spot on.

Anton doesn't respect the opinions of any of his artist buddies. But some normie named Jasper also hangs out at the coffee shop so he asks his opinion.

I know after that lead in that I should have just scanned the last three panels but then nobody would see the glory of the twin fuck brothers.

Anton couldn't see what Jasper easily noticed about him because Anton jerks off over his own opinions. Changing his opinion to be more popular rather than screaming his opinion so loudly that his rabid listeners believe it wholeheartedly? What a concept!

Being that this series is called The Crusades, and Venus is a researcher, it's inevitable that Venus will let us, the ignorant readers, in on some history of them good ol' crusades.

The problem with conservatives and the religious is that they never have interesting enough lives to not do whatever stupid shit the leaders of their ideologies suggest.

Anton titles his column, "The Knight: I Know Who He Is!" He explains his plan to Venus before boring her, watching television she hates, fucks her selfishly, and steals the blankets.

What?! I have to let my male gaze off its leash occasionally!

Walking off her frustration, Venus winds up, yet again, stumbling onto a gangland murder. Oh that crazy woman! How does she do it?! The Pope's men have strung up some kid and are gutting him on the site of an indigenous casino's construction site. That's where the comic book ends because it would be too exciting to get the knight twice in one issue! He'll kill those men in front of her next issue. Maybe he'll start following her around the city seeing as how she's so good at stumbling upon murders?

The Crusades #1 Rating: B. It's keeping my interest! So some of the characters might be shallow archetypes. And some of the characters might simply exist for the shock level to rise to Vertigo standards. But there's a medieval knight murdering people around San Francisco and nobody knows why or how?! So exciting! Maybe we'll eventually learn who he is and why he's doing it in issue #14!