Gun Fu: Show-Girls are Forever No. 1
Image Comics
It's a name that shows up in a rather unexpected place this week—attached to Gun Fu: Showgirls Are Forever, the latest of writer/inker Howard M. Shum's comics about Nazi-fighting super-agent Cheng Bo Sen. During World War II, the Gun Fu story goes, England's most powerful weapon against the Hun was a Hong Kong police officer who, for some reason, speaks entirely in late-1990s-era hip-hop slang, although no one save the readers ever seems to notice.
The plot of this latest pulp adventure-meets-Cartoon Network story involves showgirls from Vichy France, trying to drop a bomb on the U.S., but that's not really what the book is really about—it's simply about weird, random, comics fun.
Every Girl is the End of the World For
Top Shelf Product-ions
There are two things I've often wondered about confessional cartoonist Jeffrey Brown, who has chronicled almost every intimate, unflattering detail of his love life in his so-called "Girlfriend Trilogy" of graphic novels. The first is why he's always such a needy, emotional wuss. He answered that question in his hilarious self-parody Be A Man, in which he rewrote scenes from his book about a difficult long-distance relationship so that he came out looking much more manly (hence the title).
My other question was how exactly the girls he dated felt about ending up starring in his books.
Relationships and breakups are hard enough without having to read about them in your ex's comics, or having random strangers come up to you and ask if you're the woman who deflowered cartoonist Jeffrey Brown.
Brown answers that question in his latest, Every Girl is the End of the World For Me, an epilogue of sorts to the Girlfriend Trilogy. Set during a two-week period over the holidays, it follows Brown as he suffers from a bad cough and good luck with the ladies, with girls coming at him left and right.
One of those girls is Allisyn, who appeared in Brown's book about losing his virginity, Unlikely. She gets in touch with Brown after his book about her was released and we get to see her react to it.
Brown's girlfriend books are always great fun to read, no matter how sad they get, because they're so personal they can't help but be universal. And they're often hilarious (for the readers, if not the characters), and it's certainly sadly funny to see Brown fall for Allisyn all over again, only to get screwed over once more. It's a very Lucy/Charlie Brown sort of thing: You feel bad for good old Charlie Brown as his head hits the ground, but at the same time, he should've learned his lesson by now.
Maybe every girl actually is the end of the world for Jeffrey Brown, but they're also apparently the start of his next comic.
Caballistics, Inc.: Going Underground
2000 A.D./Rebellion
And speaking of World War II, aren't comics ever going to stop fighting it? This British-made graphic novel is about an insanely rich, possibly insane entrepreneur who uses his considerable resources to purchase the U.K.'s long irrelevant Q Department, which was originally founded to combat the Nazi's occult warfare initiatives. Adding two professional mercenaries, a sinister warlock and a suspicious handler to the mix, he creates the titular organization, a sort of corporate ghost-busting business. The trappings are stock ones we've all seen a thousand times—secret organizations, vampire slayers, Lovecraftian monsters—but writer Gordon Rennie makes them all feel fresh by adding healthy doses of cynical black humor and gritty realism (well, as realistic as this stuff can get). Illustrated in striking black and white by Dom Reardon, it reads an awful lot like Mike Mignola's Hellboy, if you excised all of Mignola's tongue-in-cheek loopiness and replaced it with visceral horror.