A few grumbles and gripes  this week from people who didn’t appreciate my April Fool’s prank. Well, why not cancel April then? It’s not like the month has any other noteworthy holidays, except the egg one.
And besides, we are all victims of that cursed day and it’s occult powers. I myself was the victim of a comic related April Fool’s Day prank of a most unexpected sort. Wednesdays are when new comic books arrive in the shops, and April 1st marked the release of the latest issue of The Boys, an over-the-top experiment in decimating the superhero genre written by Garth Ennis. I was dancing on my pinky toes waiting for this issue, but what followed was the biggest bummer since Ralphie Parker found that his Little Orphan Annie decoder ring only dispensed Ovaltine ads.
This may be inside baseball talk for a lot of you, but comic fans know Ennis, author of the never to be duplicated comic series Preacher, is a usually reliable guarantor of appaling comic book reveals. Depravity squared is his leitmotif, which could get tedious if he wasn’t both an artful storyteller and extremely funny.
However, the writer who once portrayed a man fucking a woman constructed out of ham, brisket and turkey and later wrote a story where a Superman ejaculates so hard he shoots the wing of an airliner is apparently having trouble competing in  a world where half the population will willingly watch 2G1C and then skip merrily to a YouTube video of Daniel Pearl’s beheading. In other words, Garth’s arms are too short to box with Garth, and his grotesqueness is obviously retreating back into its shell.
This is the only conclusion I can draw after the letdown of the year that was the conclusion to “We Gotta Go”, a seven part storyline in The Boys that I have been following for months. Promised was the unbelievable secret behind the disgustingly amoral G-Men (Ennis’ X-Men). What does team founder John Godolkin do to make his team so cretinous? What is the dark secret that makes the G-Men “by their very nature…an atomic reactor waiting to explode?” (to quote one ominous hint dropped in the penultimate chapter). WHAT??
Well, he rapes them.
Okay, good, good. And….?
And nothing. Please exit the ride through the doors on the left. $21.00 please.
For those of you who are not sure why this shouldn’t at least cause one’s eyebrow to arch, you need to know something about Garth Ennis stories: they always feature rape. Acts of brutal sexual degradation are usually his storylines’ appetizers, a Bloomin’ Onion to get you ready for the world’s cleverest decapitation or a climax where a the villain takes off his sunglasses and reveals that his eyes are actually anuses that talk and spit geysers of radioactive feces
So finding out that John Godolkin is a child molester is like discovering that water is wet. I waited over half a year for this?? And people want to know why I haven’t rushed out to see The Watchmen.
This on top of the fact that the storyline could easily have been wrapped in four issues made for quite the April Fool’s prank. But a prank on one’s customer loyalty? Well, that is the foulest molestation of all.
