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 #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!

Swamp Thing Annual #7: The Children's Crusade

Tefé meets Jimmy Savile.

I don't know why this comic book isn't with all of the other Children's Crusade comic books. I guess I'm terrible at organizing my comic books (I say as if it's a debatable opinion while two stacks of random comic books sit on the book shelf next to a comic book short box empty of all but envelopes and bills to be shredded). So now this comic book won't make much sense and when I finally find the box with my other Children's Crusade comic books, I'll have forgotten this story and will become confused by the missing chapter. I'm a little bit upset about this. But I won't be upset for long because earlier I noticed I have some Kid Eternity comic books in this stack and guess who wrote Kid Eternity? Ann Nocenti! Holy shit, I can't wait to read that oubliette full of earnest confusion.

This is the exact middle chapter of the story. But I don't think I'll be too confused because I remember how the Dead Boy Detectives were searching for the Free Country where all the endangered and abused children wind up. It was easy to remember that once I read "The Story So Far..." bit at the beginning.

Tefé has found herself alone in the swamp because Swamp Thing and Lady Jane and Abby Arcane are all on adventures. Unless they're dead. I wasn't reading Swamp Thing back then. I don't think I ever read Swamp Thing. I know! I'm like the greatest comic book reviewer on the Internet and I've never read Alan Moore's "The Anatomy Lesson." It's possible that in another blog post somewhere in my thousands of blog posts I pretended that I read it. But that would probably have been early on when I was worried that people wouldn't take me seriously if I started announcing having not read a bunch of the landmark comic book series. I also never read that Green Arrow where Speedy was caught sucking dick for heroin. And I never read Miller's Daredevil or Batman: Year One. Also I never read any major Marvel moment prior to the late 90s. Unless Wolverine and Kitty Pryde was one of those titles. My friend Philip Newby had the limited series scattered all over his living room floor and I scrounged them all up and read them. It should go without saying that I don't remember them. I'm like that. Why should I remember the genius things I read when I can't even remember all of the genius things I write?!

Puck arrives to take Tefé to the Free Country because he's a nice guy who only wants the best for all the children of the world. Roland and Paine, the Dead Boy Detectives, arrive moments too late to follow them. Looks like they'll have to try following Dorothy Spinner over in the Doom Patrol annual.

Speaking of Dorothy Spinner, I can't wait until the second season of DC Universe's Doom Patrol! Bring on the Candlemaker!

Seems like a decent place, housing kids from the Holocaust, kids working out of coal mines, kids being sexually abused. Why then am I so suspicious of it?!

Like most annuals and stories about children, this tale has bored the ever-living joy out of me. Hopefully nobody is reading this and just thought, "Oh yeah? Cry me a river! I just got diagnosed with cancer!" Because then I'd have to admit that I care more about my level of boredom than somebody else's life and death situation.

The washed-out kid with Mark Buckingham face explains how Free Country began during the Crusades which isn't surprising because the entire idea of the Crusades should have been enough to cancel Catholicism. I tend to get annoyed with people who infantilize homo sapiens from hundreds or thousands of years in the past, as if our ability to understand the world around us only kicked off some time around the Industrial Revolution. But then I think about some of the atrocious things people did in the name of religion and I think maybe those people should be seen as less formed than modern people. But then I also think about how beautiful works of Gothic architecture were created by these people and I reach this conclusion: homo sapiens have always had the potential to create great and beautiful works while simultaneously having the potential for great cruelty fueled by greed, selfishness, and paranoia. It is only the coming together of those two things that could have built Notre-Dame. At least the cruelty toward "lesser" men was focused to create something beautiful in the cases of cathedrals whereas sometimes the cruelty was as simply front facing as sending as many people as possible to die in a foreign land for nearly no other reason than to kill as many different people as they could who already lived there. And then I remember that modern homo sapiens aren't really any different but when is the last time we built a fucking magnificent cathedral?! Oh, sure, we sent people to the moon! But I can't visit the moon while simultaneously being scolded by a German or French priest to remove my Goddamned hat.

This spoon sent me down a YouTube rabbit hole beginning at the opening theme to Vegetable Soup (because it had a funky cartoon spoon as host) and ended at The Banana Splits credits where I learned in the comment section that in 2019 there was a Banana Splits horror movie. Now I'm mad at everybody I know for not telling me about this.

Tefé and Maxine go on some mini-Lord of the Rings journey to destroy some goblin and save Free Country. They use their powers over vegetables and animals to save the day and everybody cheers. I don't know why Free Country, a safe haven for children, also includes an evil land full of evil Gobble-You-Ups. I guess you need some sort of conflict to distract the child populace from whatever true evil is going on in this place. The leaders of Free Country probably drink children's blood to survive.

It turns out it was all a game and then Tefé almost dies because she's been away from the Green too long. The kids reluctantly send her back home so that she doesn't die but Maxine decides to stay so she can have an adventure with Dorothy Spinner.

Swamp Thing Annual #7: The Children's Crusade Rating: I don't rate annuals. If I have rated an annual in the past, it was a mistake and/or a hallucination. Also there's a second story after the first one that I haven't read yet because I forgot about it. And since I've already stopped this review with the ratings paragraph, I will not be discussing it even if it has street walking flowers in pumps and bell bottom jeans wearing flower Johns and ends with Flower Superbaby being sent into space. Also there is a third story that I didn't forget about because I just realized it exists. It's a retelling of The Beauty and the Beast.

Speaking of The Beauty and the Beast, I was recently told that Gaston in the live action Beauty and the Beast was gay and my reaction was, "So he wanted Belle as a beard?" And the answer was, "Yes. That is the plot." And now I can't bare to watch it because if that isn't true, I will be devastated.

Warren Ellis Eats Babies

"Life is Short Part Three: Dance to the Music." Shade the Changing Man #57 by Peter Millgan, Mark Buckingham, and Rick Bryant.