I don't have the energy to do a full on review, but I gotta note that this may be one of the worst comic books I've ever read. And that's saying a lot because it came out the same week as DEJAH THORIS AND THE WHITE APES OF MARS #4, a series which has been practically incomprehensible at times. I mean, COMEDIAN #2 isn't just bad compared to the original work. Somebody who'd never read WATCHMEN would still think it stinks.

Mike

What?!? Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's a bad comic!

Scott
@barbariancomic

In this case, yes it does. It is absolutely painful to see what Azzarello is trying to do and how badly he sucks at it.

Mike

WHY DOES THIS STUPID SCORPION KEEP STINGING ME.

I am seriously close to considering not picking it up and putting it in my mouth anymore.

Writes the man posting the same thing on the same subject on a comic book message board. Self-awareness not your thing?

Mike

Why would I stop posting? I'm enjoying myself.

You, on the other hand, are apparently enduring absolute pain when an issue of Before Watchmen turns out to be (SPOILER ALERT!) not worth reading.

How many stings do you need before you realize "Oh, right! It's a scorpion! They sting people, don't they?"

Let's assume that some of these Watchmen prequels will be awful, some okay, and some goodish, but none being anything like as enjoyable as the original. That seems a fair bet to me as to how things will pan out.

Going on from that.... I wonder if it will convert any readers from following characters to instead following writers, artists, and basic story premise??

I'd love to think a few fans would be "converted", it would be one positive out-turn of this whole shebang.

That's the part I can't get past. What do any of these people think they're adding? It's possible they're that deluded enough to think they could possibly contribute anything of value, I suppose, but for most (if not all) of them it has to be just the money. Although Len Wein may have also a personal axe to grind with Moore (professional jealousy, more than likely); and JMS has always been a Moore-wannabe, so his involvement came as no surprise.

Got Minutemen #2 and SS #2 in my downloads for last week and this week, respectively. The former is more expansionary junk, the latter more Hidden Years-esque meandering with lifted material. The word "skank" was not in use in the 1960's, by the way.

Alt covers by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Josh Middleton. JLGL pre-dates Moore by a few years and probably doesn't give a rat's ass about the significance of Watchmen. I always liked his work, slick if a bit bland. Like a mutual cousin of Nick Cardy and the Buscema brothers.

I appreciated Middleton's sort of standing up to Mark Alessi in the Crossgen ant farm experiment. I liked the smooth quality of his lines and the naturalistic, yet not overly photo-traced looking poses. He's obviously into "young girl" material, and I would not be at all surprised if a story ever arose that he was another Justiniano.

It's also odd that associate editor (coffee boy) Mark Doyle takes another opportunity to point out how much hard work this endeavor is. I never knew rapists had such a strong work ethic.

Two common mistakes I notice by lazy comic book writers:

1. Using slang or idiomatic expressions in early time periods before they had been introduced into common usage.

2. With British/Scottish/Irish writers, putting their own slang into the mouths of American characters who ordinarily would not go on about mates, tossers, arses, cheers, daft, naff, snogging, sod all, ta, taking the piss and so on.

Garth Ennis is among the many offenders of No. 2 who perhaps could be forgiven for assuming we all spoke like him when he was young and hadn't set foot on an airplane. I've no idea what the excuse is once you're past the age of 25.

According to Merriam-Webster:

skank (noun) \ˈskaŋk\
Definition of SKANK
: a person and especially a woman of low or sleazy character

origin unknown
First Known Use: 1964

Allen stands corrected.

Depends.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/skank





Verify this, and maybe:





I personally don't recall ever hearing the word prior to the mid-90's, but it was apparently common British slang in the 80's. At any rate, not common American slang in the 1960's.

Either way, if it didn't start until 1964, it was certainly not common usage during the Vietnam War era.

Such anachronisms are indeed irritating. The one that's always bugged me the most for some reason is in "Back to the Future Part III". There is a scene where Doc & Marty ask the train conductor how fast the train can go, and the conductor replies "I've had it up to 55 myself".

Really? In 1885 someone would assume that "miles per hour" was implied?

I remember skanks from the '60's, but yeah, we called them skags.

Holy cripes, how old are you?

First time I heard the word was in 1991, the song "Monster Skank" from the album The Plague That Makes Your Booty Move by Infectious Grooves. Reviewing the lyrics, I'm pretty sure that was a reference to the dance. I can't remember the first time I heard it used in reference to a woman of low character.

who can remember these things? when did you first hear "fuck"?

I probably actually read it first, in Superfolks, which I first read in 1978. That was also around the same time my school started mingling separate grade groups, so maybe I heard older kids using it.

Late 1970s, when I was 7 or 8 years old.

Someone had written it in bold letters across the side of a telephone booth (remember those?) outside a store. I spotted it and, using my newfound phonetics skills, spelled it out. "FUCK!" I cried happily. "What's a fuck?"

My mother, standing next to me, was not enchanted.

"It's a very bad word for a very bad thing," she scolded me, and I never used that word in front of her again.

Now that I'm the parent of a young boy with excellent hearing, I find myself irritated by people who cuss loudly and endlessly when they're next to us in public.

I'm no saint myself, but I always tried to tone it down when there were kids in the vicinity.

I may be in the minority.

Standing in line at the ATM -- walking around the grocery -- playing at the park -- browsing at the comics shop (!) -- sitting at a red light with the radio of the next car whump whump whumping its mournful dirge -- Junior and I are constantly treated to a chorus of fucks, shits, cunts, cocksuckers, assholes, motherfuckers and so on, to say nothing of the lovely racial epithets people feel comfortable calling each other, regardless of what color their skin actually is.

Junior's innocence may not last long.

I remember one day when I was in fifth or sixth grade and still naive about the world. I was sitting in my chair before the bell rang, zoned out, staring blankly at the wall. A rather large and coarse girl who had been held back a few years walked in and took a seat directly in my line of sight. I didn't even really notice her; I was lost in my thoughts. She glared at me looking in her direction and said, "What is it, fuckin' faggot? You want to eat my pussy?" Shocked, I could only blink and say: "Ah. No. Thanks."

Thanks, Lawson, some good came out of Mike's reading this comic.

Of course, remembering such the first time one hears a controversial word like "fuck", which for most of us was likely to be quite the event when we asked our parents about it, is not quite the same as remembering when we first heard the word "skank". For me, the first time I heard "fuck" was in fall of 1974 (when I was six) and the first time I heard "skank" was likely when I overheard my older sister commenting on a classmate in the early 1980's.

The first time I heard 'epidermis' was in 4th grade ... no, 5th ... or maybe 3rd. Chagrined is the only word that comes to mind. I've forgotten more than my callow self ever knew, surely.

Epidermis, fifth grade. An educational video featuring a guy in a leotard illustrating various layers of the body, called Slim Goodbody (who I later saw on Captain Kangaroo doing much the same schtick).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slim_Goodbody

I don't remember exactly when I heard any of these fun words, but I imagine it was before I could speak. I have very vivid memories of my father swearing up a storm while on the phone with friends and I can't imagine he'd have censored himself just because his infant son was crawling around.

Remember Ralphie's father in "A Christmas Story"?

"In the heat of battle my father wove a tapestry of obscenities that as far as we know is still hanging in space over Lake Michigan."

Then, when Ralphie drops an F-bomb, his parents are baffled as to where he learned it, and they blame the neighbor kid.

I don't remember the first time that I heard the word "fuck", but I did see "The Exorcist" (1973) at the drive-in when I was 6 years old. That had the word "fuck" plus a lot of disturbing imagery for a 6 year-old!

HEY QUIN: Are you a Grateful Dead fan? I am. Bob Weir and Phil Lesh of the GD are touring as Furthur, and I saw them in concert in Alpharetta, GA, on July 10. They played Quinn the Eskimo / The Mighty Quinn for the encore. It rained buckets all night at that show, but it was awesome!

Furthur - Alpharetta, GA, July 10, 2012 - "The Mighty Quinn"

Ha! Thanks for that H.O.M.iE.! Alpharetta is just down the road and across the state line from me. I didn't know they were playing there and I'm not especially a Dead fan. It must have been a fantastic concert though, just hearing a bit of that old school slightly rockabilly guitar considerably improved the day. I mean 'fuck' yeah! Uh, don't threads with this verbiage get flushed? Or are we protected by the almighty double and single quotes?

Haha, I was going to say that the show was "fucking awesome", but I don't talk that way.

There's hours of awesome live Dead, Furthur, and lots of other bands in the Live Music Archive at http://www.archive.org .

Here's a cool Furthur show:

Furthur Live at Radio City Music Hall on March 26, 2011 (Setlist)
Playlist (NOTE: The first track has around 3m20s of crowd noise before the music starts)

If we make an exception for COMEDIAN #2, we'll have to make an exception for everything.

Even held to the same standards as anything else, these prequels have thus far been complete horseshit. If you want to see a failed attempt at applying reality to the superhero paradigm, look no further than every alternative superhero comic published in the past ten years. Everybody seems to think they've got a clever take on "what if superheroes were real." They're always wrong. Watchmen doesn't exist in reality, it exists in its own set of rules.

Most of what I've seen online has looked like complete horseshit.

In fairness, I'll say the Silk Spectre series, by Darwyn Cooke and Amanda Conner, would have made a perfectly adequate Black Canary project, violating no rules of creative propriety and probably attracting few readers.

Of Marvel's defunct M2 line, I actually liked Larry Hama's Wild Thing series. Ron Lim's art on it was shit (the fact that it was *THE* Al Williamson inking him is something I still can't quite process) but Hama blended that slice of teenage social life with the superheroics really well. Far better than DeFalco on Spider-Girl.

SS is trying to do something similar, but adding in a Forrest Gump style historical element. Something like that might fit in perfectly at Archie Comics, if they were actually interested in expanding their product line and not just pushing cheap marketing tricks (Archie finally gets married! We've got a gay Riverdale kid now!) This might also require them being willing to pay for better talent than Dan Parent, but I digress.

Hahaha! Timothy Bradstreet! How could this wankfest be complete without one of the wankiest wankers who ever wanked??

Congrats to J.G. Jones on not tracing *every* panel from photo reference, but he really shows off his lack of understanding of foreshortening and just basically how a human body is put together. His inks couldn't get much more bland if he had used Adobe Illustrator.