Scarab #8

Scarab fucking Eleanor.

You know that toilet paper commercial with the bears who apparently use toilet paper? They constantly run around the house naked. Like that one commercial where the parents are afraid to touch the little one's underpants and he runs in and smears them all over his face, shaking his naked ass, and says, "They're clean because I wipe my ass correctly!" Then his parents nakedly show their pride in him while standing there naked. You never see them wearing underpants at any other time in those commercials which obviously means they're furries. Their clothes are under the bear suits. And while I wasn't going to purchase whatever brand of toilet paper airs those commercials based on the asses of bears being clean, I'm super not going to purchase any of their toilet paper while promoting the furry lifestyle. I have some standards!

If you are a furry and you're reading this, don't be a stupid idiot furry and claim I'm kink shaming. I didn't come into your Instagram feed full of disgusting pictures of foxes rubbing their empty nether regions on the faces of wolves and say, "This is gross!" I simply expressed an opinion on my own blog not directed at anybody! I can dislike kinks just like you can enjoy kinks! When the fuck did people get so stupid that they can't tell the difference between somebody expressing an opinion and somebody shaming somebody else for their likes? If I were to Tweet, "J.T. Krul's Green Arrow was a fucking disaster and terrible in every single way," somebody would probably respond, "Let people like what they like!" And then I'd have to hire a hitman to murder that person because I wasn't hurting anybody's enjoyment of an objectively shitty comic book by pointing out how shitty it was. Now if I'd responded to somebody proclaiming their love for J.T. Krul's Green Arrow (probably because they're a fucking dumbshit) with my tweet, the person responding "Let people like what they like!" has a point. The problem with the Internet is that nobody fucking understands context anymore. They see something awful in one context and simply extrapolate that lesson they learned to every other fucking context imaginable because they're fucking assholes who don't understand logic. I blame Tumblr!

Sorry about that. I mean, I'm not sorry for letting people know about how terrible J.T. Krul's New 52 Green Arrow run was. I'm also not sorry about disliking furry culture. Especially since I actually never really think about it one way or the other. I'm actually just upset about those fucking bears and their stupid bear cub who loves sniffing his disgusting underpants.

This issue is called "What the Rabbit Saw." One of the Cosmic Plumbers from the end of the last issue had a pet rabbit under one arm. So I guess we're going to get the story from the rabbit's point of view. Hopefully the artist, Scot Eaton, decided to draw all the characters as giant carrots.

It's hard to admit that I believe a toilet paper commercial was written better than this psycho-blather.

John Smith may have over-corrected on the balancing act between Vertigo phrasing and techno-gobbledygook used to explain plot advancements. When the Vertigo phrasing is used simply to show a character is fucking weird so it says stuff like, "Ergonomic celestial tampons bloated from the cosmic rays to staunch a black hole," you can let it go. But when it's used to explain what the fuck is happening, it just becomes another shitty episode of Star Trek. Although "Ergonomic celestial tampons bloated from the cosmic rays to staunch a black hole" makes for better plot explanation than "Agnostic angels of the quantum mesh safeguarding the integrity of the world-mind."

Just as Scarab begins suspecting these two guys aren't what they seem (although what they are seeming to be is too confusing for me to even bother with contemplating that it's an obfuscation of their true selves), Eleanor begins to wake and he flies off to make sure he doesn't help out at all. Maybe everything that has gone wrong so far is because of Scarab's blue balls. It'll all right itself when he and Eleanor finally fuck (as depicted, grossly, on the cover).

Is he suggesting these feelings are similar? I'm going to throw up now.

Eleanor has transformed into some sort of ectoplasmic vagina which must be what Louis is into because he rushes into her room naked.

That's what a vagina looks like, right?

I'd really like to say that the last few pages of the series are just Louis fucking that thing. But even non-Comics Code Authority approved Vertigo probably couldn't get away with that! Also, the rabbit wasn't around to witness it, so it wouldn't fit the title.

Okay, so he's fucking it on panel. But I wasn't wrong! This doesn't continue until the end of the comic book! Also, Harvest was definitely meant to be vampire Tim Drake from the future!

I just scanned three panels in relatively quick succession so I'm going to pass on the panel I really wanted to scan: another raccoon! Scot Eaton is quickly becoming my favorite artist from the 90s!

While the entire world begins its end in Iceland, Louis and Eleanor fuck. They fuck and they fuck and they fuck. And it's fucking gross. I can't believe my caption on the cover was correct. It was supposed to be a joke, John Smith! A FUCKING JOKE! I did not want to see Scarab fuck his greasy ectoplasmic bubbling oil slick of a lover!

While Scarab and Eleanor fuck, the rabbit goes mad, Bobby Dazzler dies, and the portly guy with the hands for wings passes out. When he awakens, the chrono-storm has subsided and their sea horse drones begin to fix the collective unconscious of everybody in Reykjavik to make it seem like nothing happened. Much like the rest of this comic book.

The Cosmic Plumbers were from the Labyrinth (which they called the Gyre) which is why Scarab sort of recognized them. So I guess the Labyrinth is sort of like where The Endless live but for Time Soldiers? Eleanor tells Scarab that he's the Minotaur, so I guess he's the main Time Soldier. He just doesn't know it yet. And he never will because this series never went any further than eight issues.

Scarab #8 Rating: C-. Scarab achieved nothing in this series. He merely sat around waiting for Eleanor to get better and she eventually did. Then they fucked. The end!

Scarab #7

What a surreal cover. Babies don't have skeletons.

I just got blocked by Mark Millar on Twitter. "How is that possible?" those of you new to this blog are asking. I know, right?! Sure, sure. I have a history of being a dick when I'm reading something written by a supposed professional who decided they would waste everybody's time by not putting any effort into a product that they knew people were going to pay for. The audience has a right to be angry at the lack of effort put into something the audience loves, right?! But even then, I still have never directly interacted with any of the creators to tell them how I feel. That might be the one rule I have! I don't mind theoretically discussing how many genie wishes I'd use on making sure any writing instrument Scott Lobdell touches turns into searing hot melted sugar or what kind of abuses I'd do to the timeline if I had a time machine simply so Ann Nocenti wouldn't exist in the 21st century. But I'd never @ them on Twitter because I don't want to hurt their feelings (unlike Cullen Bunn's apparent dick friend who used to tweet him all of my Cullen Bunn reviews. Cullen blocked me for that when he should have considered punching his friend in the groin instead)! I once Googled Howard Mackie to see how old he was because his writing was so amateurish only to have Google present to me a picture of an old man which meant I now had to feel awful every time I harshly and vulgarly criticized him! You might be thinking, "You know, Grunion. You could have not criticized the old man, you know?" But then you'd just expose yourself as somebody who has never had to suffer through his terrible writing and punctuation!

Anyway, we're not discussing bad comic book writers here! I'm talking about a great writer! And if not exactly great, at least better than decent and quite marketable: Mark Millar! Why would I ever say something so awful that he'd block me when I've read and enjoyed so many of his comic books?! The answer is probably that he doesn't have a sense of humor. No, no! That's probably not right! The real answer is that he probably gets people trolling him on Twitter and being generally awful to him all the time so obviously he isn't going to spend any brain power trying to decide if the person responding to his Tweet was some stupid jerk or a totally hilarious genius jerk.

Here's the tweet he sent out that I replied on:

And here was my reply:

I don't blame him for blocking me. Twitter is a giant shithole where nobody should be spending any time at all and the block feature is all that makes it bearable. He probably couldn't see just how funny I was being about how boring his fact was because he was — inexplicably — fascinated with it! It was so boring that I'd already forgotten it the next day when I discovered Millar had blocked me! And since he blocked me, I couldn't see the tweet which I had responded to. Which worried me because I thought, "Damn. What kind of a dick was I being?!" But then my friend Doom Bunny took a screenshot of the boring fact and I was relieved. I read it and thought, "Oh yeah! My response was hilarious! That fact was so boring I'm going to forget about it again almost immediately!"

I guess I should apologize to Mark Millar. But should I be sincere or should I do one of those wise-ass apologies where I say something like, "I'm sorry you were so thin-skinned that my totally hilarious joke on Hellspace...I mean Twitter hurt your stupid feelings." Or I could just go on living as I had been living where I never see anything Millar tweets anyway because I don't follow him and haven't cared about anything he's written since he did the whole Todd McFarlane thing and started having other people write Hit-Girl and Kick-Ass while still somehow taking all the credit. Some day in my reading of old issues, I'll get around to The Ultimates and then I'll remember this day! I remember loving that series back around the turn of the Millennium but oh boy will I give it what for this time around! I'm already remembering that it probably sucked!

My brain is really terrible with remembering names and even words that I often know I want to use but have to reverse Google search them by looking up the definition to give me the word I can't come up with. So when I was trying to remember who wrote Spawn, I just couldn't come up with Todd McFarlane. So I Googled him and this is the picture Google decided was the fucking Platonic ideal of Todd McFarlane:

I believe I own zero comic books by Todd so this is the only chance I have to look at his picture and think, "Really? REALLY? No, no. But really?!"

You know who I blame for me thinking I'm funny when I'm probably just a huge Internet troll that's making life miserable for a ton of comic book creators? Fucking Gail Simone! Why did she have to have such a good sense of humor about my blog?! Now I expect that kind of good natured ability to laugh at oneself from all creators instead of this tired pretentious bullshit that their art is above making dick jokes about!

I should get blocked by somebody on Twitter every few days! It really gives me something to write about!

Apparently the "Scream Over Hiroshima" story isn't finished. I guess Scarab still has a chance to do something — anything! — before this is over.

Russians super excited that their pacifist weapon destroyed London and taught everybody that war is Hell.

British Madame Xanadu fills Scarab in on what's happening so he can stop the next Scream Over Hiroshima attack. Not that she's worried about it destroying Reykjavik. She's more worried about what it's going to do to the astral plane. And, well, we all know how important the astral plane is having spent all those years playing Dungeons & Dragons instead of jerking off some peer in the bushes outside of the junior high school cafeteria. The astral plane is like the connective tissue of all the other planes, like The Happy Hunting Ground and the Abyss and the Negative Plane and Acheron and Gehenna and all the elemental planes too! This Scream Over Hiroshima situation is dire! It's also a good idea for my next Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

Louis isn't really worried about saving the astral plane. Remember, he's spent the last six issues not giving a shit about anything except saving Eleanor.

See? Exactly like that barn owl Madame Xanadu!

While Scarab begins to realize that Madame Xanadu (even the British version!) always gets her way because how can you prove she's not being totally honest and just manipulating you for her own ends unless you risk the entire world by not doing as she says, one of the Russian scientists begins to have doubts about their plans for world peace. He's suddenly gotten philosophical and he's all, "How many dead babies is world peace worth?!" And his assistant is all, "All of them, you idiot! Every single one! Because all of the new babies won't have to worry about war anymore!" And the one feeling doubts is all, "But why do we have to be responsible for killing all of the babies?!" And the other guy is all, "We're not responsible! Science is responsible! Fucking murderer! But, you know, a necessary murderer! Because science is important!" Then the other guy starts losing his doubts and he's all, "You're right! Science is important! Imagine not having toasters! I'd probably kill three or four babies just to make sure science created toasters!" And then the other guy is all, "That's the spirit! Let's kill more babies for world peace!"

Just to be clear, I was paraphrasing the actual conversation in the comic book! I know it was probably hard to tell because I used the word "fucking" and discussed killing babies and since this is a Vertigo comic, those kinds of things are totally expected.

Actually, the scientists never really have time to come to grips with what they're doing before the Russian General shoots them both in the face. His mind has been taken over by the Glory Boys which probably means the entire world is in some serious shit now.

Scarab travels through the astral plane to arrive in Russia so he can stop the Glory Boys from destroying the world. It'll probably be the easiest fight of his life because I'm sure the Glory Boys simply want to die.

Except Scarab fucks it all up and his kill shot on the General just knocks the General into the lever which fires up the Glory Boys and releases the Scream Over Hiroshima over Reykjavik. That's where all the world leaders are meeting for some summit. The whole purpose of the Scream is to hit them with their own abuse of power. So maybe Scarab fucking up is good. Fuck the politicians! I hope the Scream Over Hiroshima makes them feel as bad as I felt when I realized Mark Millar blocked me on Twitter!

The Earth is fucked and Scarab couldn't help. The issue ends with two cosmic dudes walking out of the chaos to fix everything. They claim they're Bobby Dazzler and Benedict Creed. They're cosmic plumbers or something. They work for the Cosmic Coincidence Control Center. Sounds like some real Doom Patrol shit.

Scarab #7 Rating: B-. Once again, Scarab doesn't do shit. He's mostly just an observer of the horrors of the cosmos. He didn't even have to be in this story! And it looks like he doesn't need to be in the next issue either because those cosmic plumbers are there to stop the astral plane from overflowing into our reality. Unless they're actually the bad guys and Scarab needs to punch them a few times!

Scarab #6

I don't know what's happening on this cover but I definitely have a new sexual fetish.

It's difficult to engage in your new sexual fetish when you're not entirely clear as to what it is. I think I'm horny for being compressed, upside-down, in snot, naked like the day you were born, in a spinning tube almost certainly on display at a Midwestern state fair.

This issue begins with the bomb exploding over Hiroshima (you know which bomb! Don't make me get technical!). It's almost as if time died on August 6th, 1945 and the only thing anybody should ever talk about any more ever is the capacity to end all life on Earth in the shrug of a pair of shoulders. It's almost as if every story after that date is really only about one thing. When people bitch about postmodernist art, I always scream at them, "WHAT DID YOU FUCKING EXPECT?! WE CAN ALL BE OBLITERATED AT ANY SECOND! WHY AREN'T YOU PAYING ATTENTION?!"

Not really speaking about postmodernist art but having typed the phrase "postmodernist art," I recently say It Chapter Two. Since I know you're intelligent since you're reading my blog, I know you're now thinking, "How do the two halves of that sentence relate to each other, you fucking asshole?" (I also know you're vulgar since you're reading my blog.) (I don't know how to punctuate statements in a stand-alone parenthetical reference that don't end in an exclamation point or question mark. Do you leave them without punctuation as you would in a normal parenthetical reference? Or do you need to punctuate them because they're standing out all by themselves without any support from punctuation outside the parentheses?!)

Let me try again: So, I recently saw It Chapter Two. I have two main criticisms of the film. First, if you don't already feel tremendous love and nostalgia for the book, I'm not sure the movie would do anything for you. But if you do, the movie invokes so many moments that make you think about how well they were done and portrayed in the book that it actually works by making you remember how good the book was. My second criticism is that when Bill tells the kid with the skateboard, "Be careful," the kid doesn't reply, "You can't be careful on a skateboard." I'm lucky there was only one other person in the balcony at the theater it was playing who was there to hear me yell, in anticipation of saying it with the kid, "You can't be careful on a skateboard!" But that's not what I was going to talk about when I mentioned postmodernist art! I think I have to start this paragraph again.

Whenever I list my five all-time favorite books, it's riddled with postmodernist literature and also Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (and the sequel, of course! But I include them as one book, really). And yet, Stephen King's It is absolutely one of my all time favorite books. I don't do a lot of repeat readings and/or viewings of media I love. But I think I've read It three times which is more than I've read my other favorites like Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Hell, I've only read House of Leaves twice (which is probably four times more than I should have read it (I think that was a postmodernist joke because I don't really get it but it kind of makes sense?)). And yet I never include It in my list of favorite books. And watching the movie (see? I've gotten back to my point somehow!), it finally dawned on my why it just doesn't fit. My other top books are about the protagonists escaping a broken and terrible system or reality instead of battling back and changing that system and/or reality. But It is the exact opposite of that! A bunch of kids who escaped the worst place in the world to become successful adults actually risk everything to go back to that terrible place in order to change things for the better for future generations! It's also about a scary clown from outer space or some other astral dimension but that shit is believable compared to the premise I just described! In the movie, the motivation for the characters is partially that one of the Losers has seen the future where they all die young and horribly if they don't stay to fight Pennywise. I hated that because it takes away a large part of why you love these characters and what they're fighting for. It gives them a selfish motivation that works against everything the book tries to convey. I mean, it's also Stephen King so I think the book is really about nostalgia and listening to 50s songs and drinking pop out of a bottle or something. It's also about the loss of innocence and adult responsibility and the transition from childhood to adulthood which, in the book, is represented by the one female friend fucking all of the male friends in a filthy sewer. Stephen King makes weird choices sometimes.

The movie also makes sure to talk about how Stephen King's endings are terrible which is really weird because the movie changes the ending to actually make it even worse than the book's ending (which I still don't think is all that bad. How else do you expect to defeat an immortal cosmic horror if not by yelling "It thrusts its fists against the posts and still insists it sees the ghosts" at it over and over again while an even greater cosmic presence, in the form of a turtle, doesn't help at all because it choked on its own puke sometime after the kids left Derry. I mean, sheesh. Some people are so overly critical about everything!).

Yes, I see the irony in me calling people overly critical. You don't have to point it out, jerko.

Anyway, this issue is called "Scream Over Hiroshima" and begins with a quote from somebody who was there. Don't worry about the quote of a survivor. It's less important than this thing about myself I want to discuss. In some ways, I'm always envious of people who have survived near death experiences because of the excitement of it and the story and the feeling that, "Yeah, dude, I totally just lived life to the fullest, man!" But then I think, "In many ways, you have to intentionally risk death to gain a death defying experience and maybe fuck that? Fuck it a whole lot?"

Now it sounds like I'm comparing a survivor of Hiroshima to somebody who free climbs Half Dome in Yosemite! And maybe I am! Would that be so completely inaccurate?!

I don't even think the quote was real. It reads more like one of Douglas Coupland's end-of-the-world short story scenarios from Life After God (see? More postmodernism that is about the only thing worth writing about since August 6th, 1945!). It might be a character speaking whom Scarab will meet later and not help because he's busy thinking about Eleanor's lifeless corpse leaking long ribbons of oily black bubbles.

This comic book stars a raccoon. Rating: A+.

Most of the weird dialogue in this comic book probably comes from John Smith's high school notepads full of terrible poetry. I mean, this part about winter isn't too bad! I kind of like it. It's almost as if William Carlos Williams and H.P. Lovecraft were caught in a Star Trek transporter malfunction where their minds were melded but they had to overcome the horror of their new two-dicked physical existence to continue writing poetry.

I knew John Smith was English from his previous work on 2000 A.D. and other British comic book periodicals but then he uses the phrase "Chinese whispers" in this issue and I think, "If I hadn't already known he was English from his previous work on 2000 A.D. and other British comic book periodicals, I'd now know he was English by his use of the phrase 'Chinese whispers.'"

Here are some of the ideas John Smith throws into a two-page account of Scarab's recent adventures that he couldn't bother writing into full scripts but wanted everybody to know he thought up anyway: a television at the Waldorf haunted by the 20th Century, a pervert breaking the spirits of kids with his Zoo of Shame, The Phantom Barber stealing scalps from runway models, the world's sexiest man raped by Tarot cards, and the Electric Fetus Machine which manifests as a large organ whose music foments rebellion in fetuses. Is this how the British writers took over DC's adult comic books? By occluding our minds with so much random and weird pseudo-philosophical garbage that we couldn't think straight? Sure, I guess an Electric Fetus Machine sounds like a way better story than Batman beating The Riddler near to death. But is there really any substance there? I suppose there could be if the idea were fleshed out and some kind of theme built around the idea of fetuses rebelling. Maybe all of these ideas John Smith throws out are just a game of Chinese whispers where he takes, say, a story by John Barth from Lost in the Funhouse about the thoughts of a sperm considering how the race toward life is pointless and, maybe, they should all just give up, and he turns it into the Electric Fetus Machine so that when I read it, I don't instantly think, "Isn't this a John Barth story?" Instead, I think, "That's a better sounding story than the one where the guy is raped by the Three of Wands!"

Meanwhile, Scarab spends his downtime watching Eleanor turn into a Dr. Seuss tree. Or a mushroom cloud (because remember the theme established by the beginning quote and title?!).

Try to ignore Scarab's ass in the previous scan. It's phenomenal.

If you're training to be a comic book artist, you need to spend a lot of time getting the ass right. And once you do, you'll never get an ass in pants right again because all you have ever learned to draw is a naked ass which readers will know is actually under skin tight Lycra unless the colorist completely shits the bed.

The guy in the jar on the cover is a Russian experiment in psychotropic warfare called a Gloryboy. There are three of them and they're some kind of pacifist dream come true. They constantly mutter Vertigo phrases in a tonal frequency that makes normal people vomit and shit themselves. It's the Brown Note theory of winning battles but taken to the Vertigo extreme. Instead of a whomping bass sound system, the noise comes form a naked albino in a jar composed of dream matter.

Maybe they're not composed of dream matter. And maybe they're not about pacifism at all. It seems they've been altered and experimented in such a way that they can give voice to "the Scream over Hiroshima!" That sounds pretty bad. It's probably some form of psychic bombardment, comparable to a nuclear blast, which drives everybody in the vicinity completely insane. Or maybe it really will just be a thing that pacifies everybody because have you ever tried to do anything while shitting yourself? I mean other than read the ingredients in your shampoo. And even then, I bet you take your eyes off the bottle for a moment to really be in the moment.

As an aside, do women find shitting as enjoyable as men or is it just the fecal matter pressing up against our prostate as it passes that makes a big shit feel so good?

The Russians test the Scream Over Hiroshima on London. What it does is project into the minds of everybody who hears it the entire reality of what happened in Hiroshima. It's the truth of war. It's pure horror and death and consequence. It probably also makes everybody shit themselves. But when it's done, they'll all understand, on a physically primal level what war is. And the assumption is that everybody will finally be against it, I guess? I've been on Twitter for many years and the one thing I know is that even physically experiencing the horrors of the bombing of Hiroshima isn't going to change the minds of most idiots. I mean, if you didn't become a vegan pacifist hug machine after hearing Sting's song, "Russians," why would you become one after living the horror of fifty thousand lives snuffed out in an instant?! Some people, you just can't reach.

London turns into a burning chaotic mess as everybody flips the fuck out from suddenly experiencing the most painful thing they've ever experienced. Scarab arrives after it's all over and everybody is afraid of him. Surprise! There's nothing he can do. He just observes the mess and meets a psychic who tells him that Eleanor is coming back. And isn't that the most important part of this eight issue story? That Louis the Scarab's love returns to him while the rest of the world falls into death and chaos?

Scarab #6 Rating: C. Smith seeded this issue with more story ideas than story. The main story is an idea that really goes nowhere as well. It's a thought experiment. It's a minor philosophical musing. And Scarab doesn't do anything but distract himself from his wife's condition. But it also wasn't uninteresting. So I think that means it's a C? What am I, a high school teacher? I don't know how to grade shit!

Scarab #5

Scarab just learned how to use "whomst'd" correctly.

Don't fucking bother me asking how "whomst'd" can ever be used "correctly" because I've never fucking galaxy brained, okay? I live over here in "peaks and valleys on an electroencephalogram so mild that they look like rolling hills." Whomst'd you expect to know how to use "whomst'd"? Me?! Fuck off!

It's only been a week since I read Issue #4 and I've already forgotten everything about this comic book except that it featured an old man named Louis Somethingorother and his dead wife Eleanor's ghost. I also think Scarab might have been a member of the Justice Society but only in the Vertigo version of DC Continuity. It's basically the same continuity as the regular DC Universe except with more female nipples and the occasional use of the word "cunt."

As I begin reading this issue, I start to think, "I'd love to get addicted to fucking opiates." I'm a pretty relaxed person as it is contrary to all the evidence in my comic book reviews that suggest I've had two or three strokes a month since 2011 due to reading comic books by Scott Lobdell and Ann Nocenti and J.T. Krul. But a few times, I took Vicodin after having a root canal. I was at home playing around on the computer the first time so my initial reaction was, "How do people get addicted to this shit? I don't feel any different." But then later that week, I took one at an old 9 to 5 job I used to have and it was fucking glorious. My annoying bosses maniacal cackle was like a gentle cat purring and nuzzling me on the back of the neck. My idiotic coworkers who made me realize that shoving sharpened pencils into my ears might one day be a legitimate option were suddenly silent ghosts passing softly beneath me as I floated about the office on a serene cloud of cotton candy flavored fuck-it-all. And that was just from one lousy Vicodin! From that one single experience, I know why people get addicted to opiates and I don't fucking blame them one bit. It would be so nice to just shuck the world and tend to your own little garden of no shits given.

Now I'm annoyed that I'm not on opiates! You know what would quell that annoyance?! Damn right!

Maybe the sudden need for drugs was due to this character with my name trying to kill himself.

I hadn't actually gotten to the part where the guy notes he's on drugs or that he's surrounded by poppies so I think I just have to give credit to John Smith's writing for setting up a real "I'm fucking overdosing on pain killers" tone. Now I'm also jealous of a fictional nobody. If only I had too many painkillers right now, um, well, I'd probably never hit publish on this blog post and all five of my readers would be wondering, "When the fuck is Grunion Guy (or Tess (or Jeff (or whoever the fuck this asshole is))) ever going to finish reading Scarab?"

According to my Non-Certified Sister-in-law, nutritionists have to report people for suicidal ideation. She told this to me because she's a nutritionist and I said to her one night at karaoke that my current retirement plan was to do whatever the fuck I wanted until my bank account was dry and then kill myself. But she never reported me so I guess she doesn't realize that's actually my retirement plan.

Speaking of karaoke, I knocked another song off of my karaoke bucket list this week: "Like China" by Phil Collins. I fucked that song so hard on stage, some woman high-fived me and some other guy came up to me and thanked me for reminding him that the song exists. He was super drunk. Super drunk guys love me at karaoke. One time this guy whose name I believe was Creepy Kevin asked me, after I'd just sung "Everybody Knows," if I was doing it in the style of Leonard Cohen or Concrete Blonde. I said Concrete Blonde and he said, "Your voice really suits it." Which is when I stabbed him in the throat and tossed him in the dumpster out back with the leftover spring rolls from the night before because how dare he insult Johnette Napolitano! She has the voice of an angel and I have the voice of the person the angel walks on so that they don't have to get their feet dirty at the angel orgy.

I know nobody is reading this and thinking, "What the fuck are you talking about?! What has happened to Scarab this issue?! Has Eleanor found her way home?!" How many people even remember that this comic book ever existed?! I just read four issues of it a week and a half ago and I almost forgot it existed!

This issue is called "Paradise Defiled" which I just read although maybe my subconscious read it earlier (due to the comic being opened to that page and just sitting there on the scanner) which is why I was thinking about angel orgies.

This guy Jeff is somebody Louis knows. An old woman — maybe his mother? — phones Louis to ask if he's seen him. So that's how Scarab gets involved with Jeff's suicidal problem. Meanwhile, Eleanor is sprouting ecotoplasmic rivulets. It's super gross.

But this issue isn't about Scarab and Eleanor! At least I don't think it is. It's about Jeff waking up from his pleasant and relaxing overdose to find himself in an afterlife torture garden sex party. He totally hates it and I understand why. The place is first described as "a literal incarnation of a littoral world" and I have to stop myself from Googling "home lobotomy." The first tortured sex victim he meets is a guy strapped to a wheel with a bunch of knives in him spouting "Vertigo phrases." I explained "Vertigo phrases" in a previous commentary (or all of my previous Vertigo commentaries maybe?) but for those who somehow just stumbled upon this commentary because "every blog post is somebody's first" (although why Scarab #5 would be somebody's first is beyond comprehension), here's a nice example of "Vertigo phrasing."

It doesn't have to mean anything. It just needs to sound weirdly profound while making the reader feel like a real fucking smarty pants.

Jeff is taken to some Herod-like angel named Lord Colouris. He's also a bit like a cross between John Lennon and Jabba the Hutt. Did I just describe David Crosby? Lord Colouris declares he's going to make a new man out of Jeff and I don't think he means it figuratively.

In the middle of the Garden stands the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It bears the fruit of truth and whispers as skulls pile up beneath it from those feeding on its devastating pronouncements. Also, I sort of agree with what it's saying here:

Ninety-eight percent of this blog is me screaming from the anguish of losing the bliss of nonexistence.

Not that I think I'm evil. Nor do I believe in souls. But that whole anguish over the loss of nonexistence? That hits me fucking hard, bro. Look, it even made me call you bro. I'm hurting here, dude. See? I said dude too!

The rest of what the tree says is meaningless gobbledygook. Something about sex tearing the flanks of God and a snake jerking it into a pot of clay like my junior high school classmate Chris Huff beating off in a breadbox. Maybe it makes sense to guilt-ridden Catholics but it's all wasted on me. I'm just wondering if I should do a Google search on a snake ejaculating. I've done it before for bats and let me tell you: there's a great video of a bat at a zoo sucking itself off in front of some kids! Truly a work of art. So privileged to live in this modern age and able to experience such wonders of this world!

Lord Colouris turns Jeff into a monstrosity because he's trying to reform the lost souls that wind up in the Garden of Pain into his image before he fell from Heaven. But he can't do it because everybody who enters the Garden is tainted by their boring and uncreative lives. To finally make a work of art equal to his previous state of being, Lord Colouris releases all of his Frankenstein monsters into the world to hunt down a truly innocent and beautiful person who can provide the raw material for Lord Colouris's sculpture. Jeff is now one of them.

Being uncreative morons, the monsters raid nurseries all over New York. Idiots. How many babies does it take to create an angel? Probably like millions!

Some of the monsters seek out Eleanor because her leaking bodily fluids smell succulent and, I guess, virginal? I don't know. Like I said, she's gross. I hope they take her.

Instead of Eleanor, the monsters accidentally take Scarab back to the Garden where he's quickly defeated by Colouris with a tree grown up through his guts. Then Scarab, like a true super hero, remembers that he can't be defeated if he just summons one last burst of strength and hope to overcome his enemy! Which he totally does by biting Lord Colouris's tongue off (because Lord Colouris was doing naughty things to Scarab. So naughty that I was embarrassed to discuss them). Then he punches Colouris in the throat and he barfs up the keys to all of his monsters' souls. Plus the key to his own soul which Monster Jeff helps Scarab find. Scarab recognizes him and thinks, "Fuck. Okay, I guess I'll just have to tell Jeff's mother he's dead." Then Scarab sticks the key in Colouris's head and the Garden dissolves into an empty room with a ticking metronome. That probably makes really smart people go, "Holy fuck! That's fucking brilliant! What a great reference or theory or idea or intelligent bit of philosophical scat!" And, um, that's totally what I said too. I'm not one of those morons who don't understand Vertigo comic books. Pshaw! Can you even believe uncool losers like that exist?!

Scarab #5 Rating: You know how many things I had to look up on the Internet while reading this comic book? At least two! Maybe more but even two is a lot! Remember, I first read this in 1993 when most people didn't have Internet (and those that did were spending their time in AOL and Prodigy chat rooms with names like "Horoscope Lovers" and "Remember The A-Team?!"). So that's two things I definitely didn't understand when I read it the first time because you can believe that I was too lazy to pick up a dictionary in the middle of reading a comic book. And that's even assuming that I'm the type of person to own a dictionary! Man, stop embarrassing yourself with your lousy assumptions!