Saturday, April 5, 2014

COMICS IN THE CAN- Episode XXXXIV (Revival #19)

COMICS IN THE CAN
I used to have time to read my comics in a coffee shop. Now I have to read them in the bathroom. Then I write reviews of them. I wash my hands in between.

REVIVAL #19

In the spirit of full disclosure, and of educating the reader before they spend a minute to a minute and a half of their hard earned time reading the crap that spews out of my head, I feel I need to give you fair warning that the lion’s share of this review will concern itself with whether or not Tim Seeley can be categorized as legally insane. Now, note, I said LEGALLY insane, not CRIMINALLY insane. There’s a difference. There’s what Tim does and then there’s painting your Transformer s toys to look like the members of KISS.


Let’s take a look at Exhibit A, the only real exhibit at hand, that’s this issue of Revival, the popular ‘rural noir’ that Tim and Mike Norton crank out on a monthly basis. Now, there’s a lot of crazy stuff going on in this book. Crazy is kind of its stock in trade.  We got a whole rural Wisconsin town that is on federally mandated quarantine because one day a bunch of its dead residents came back to life. The people that return seem to heal from injuries at a superhuman rate. There was a ring of criminals (The Check Brothers) selling pieces of revived townsfolk on the black market. And, in the woods, there are some sort of glowing, alien looking light beings hanging out and menacing anyone that crosses their path. So yeah, crazy is, apparently, the number one export of Wausau, Wisconsin. Seeley should know, he grew up there. But he doesn’t live there anymore. So IF crazy is the number one export, and Tim Seeley has been exported from there, then, quid pro quo, ergo sum, Tim Seeley MUST be crazy.

Let’s say my iron clad logic and reasoning from the above paragraph doesn’t convince you. I have more examples. See the photo below:

Nobody that grows up looking like that ends up sane. It just doesn’t happen. Often they end up billionaires, and Tim is not one of those, but they are still crazy billionaires. Example #2: how Tim Seeley came into my life personally. It was near on ten years ago and I had just opened the stage show that would ultimately alter the course of my life. It was called ‘Boomstick! A Musical Parody of Darkness’, basically an Army of Darkness Musical. Basically I copied the screenplay and threw in 9 or 10 songs that had been created by writing lyrics to unused radio background music (beds) provided by my friend Brian. I thought it was awesome, but I also liked the ‘Daredevil’ movie so my taste is questionable. Tim shows up to see the show one night and follows me to the local watering hole afterwards. I didn’t know Tim from the next guy, never heard of him. Hack/Slash (his previous claim to fame) had barely hit the stands and because he loved my Army of Darkness musical, he wanted me to put Hack/Slash on stage. Think about that for a minute. You just saw some ragtag show in a storefront theater under the Loyola L tracks, and you want to entrust your exciting new publishing project to the yahoo who directed it? That’s CRAZY. He went on to date and ultimately marry one of the actresses from the Hack/Slash show that eventually happened and that is a whole alternate universe of crazy that I do not have the time to go into here. You’re going to have to trust me on this one. CRAZY. Or as the young punks today say: cray-cray.

“So, what’s the point?” you’re probably asking yourself right about now. Clearly this is the first review of mine you’ve read if you’re looking for one of those.

The point IS, in this issue of Revival, Tim is approaching the stratosphere of crazy reserved only for the kinds of folks who take those above mentioned painted Transformers and make stop motion videos with them. Dana Cypress, the main character of the book, her son, who Tim gave an incredibly heart wrenching perspective to last issue, well, this issue he has a video game in which you can kick an opponent’s dick off and if you kick it hard enough, it launches into space.

Just take a minute and read that again.

Then when you see Tim Seeley walking down the street or at a convention, maybe don’t make eye contact.

There’s also something called a ‘dubstep gun’ in the same video game but that’s clearly Seeley pandering to all the dubstep fans that read his comics.

Also in this issue the light beings can enter people’s bodies and control them, a militia type wipes his ass with a ticket, Jesus rides a skateboard, and an FBI agent that looks remarkably like Dana Scully show up.

The end.

No comments:

Post a Comment