Nerding Day: L.I.F.E. Brigade 3 🌭

In 1986, comic book writer, artist, editor, and amateur human cannonball Craig Stormon started his own comic imprint. It was called Blue Comet Press, and there were only a quarter million problems. One loomed larger than others: He had no idea what a comic book was. Not in the artistic sense, definitely not in the story sense, perhaps not in the physical sense. He might’ve thought comic books were a type of seasonal breeze that comes down from the mountains.

It didn’t stop him.

Blue Comet Press launched with its flagship title, Craig Stormon’s own L.I.F.E. Brigade. It was canceled after just two issues by Blue Comet Press’s own Craig Stormon, who was presumably struggling with some kind of potion that unleashed his id. Craig fought back Mr. Storm and relaunched L.I.F.E Brigade as THE NEW L.I.F.E. BRIGADE, but changed nothing, started on issue 3, and picked up exactly where issue 2 left off.

It was less a reboot and more just a boot. The New L.I.F.E. Brigade was also immediately canceled by the hormonal hulk who lives inside Craig Stormon’s brain, throwing pieces of Craig Stormon’s brain at other pieces of Craig Stormon’s brain. So in total, the whole series lasted three issues, was rebooted once with no changes, and canceled twice by the only man involved with it. This is the most turbulent piece of art ever produced, and this is its final issue. This is how it ends.

But first, how it begins: With a frothing rant at the many enemies, real or imagined, who have wronged Craig Stormon since issue 2. Included among them: You, the reader.

This isn’t technically page one yet. We are on page nothing. We are in the foyer of the comic book and Craig Stormon has lit it on fire, locked the doors, and is visibly erect at the prospect of dying in here with us. He hates his cover artist, he hates all of his other artists, he hates his distributors, he hates the retailers for having the gall to hate him just because he doesn’t pay his inkers (who he hates). And you? The person reading this, who bought and supported a maniac to his third issue? VERY POOR.

There’s an archetypal editor, a J Jonah Jameson, who employs fury and constant abuse to run a tight ship. Craig Stormon runs that ship ashore. None are safe from his fury, especially himself, and it is all in the service of failure. It’s like how Mussolini made the trains run on time, only all the trains are on the same track and pointed at each other.

That was the old Craig Stormon! This time will be different. This time he has an editor, Mr. Jeff O‘Hare, who you might not know from a little TV show called, I don’t know, THE NEW GIDGET.

Craig’s so excited he gives Jeff top billing. As in the top of a panel, totally out of place with all the other credits. The perfect way to introduce an editor.

Before we go any further, let’s recap the first two issues of L.I.F.E. Brigade:

Five lunatics who are all Craig Stormon get lost in space.

Recap successful. Every character rambles with the exact voice of Craig Stormon, except for the female characters, who do it with visible nipples. Craig writes with every hallmark of a total lunatic, by which I mean he uses footnotes.

We jump back into the story with a mysterious bounty hunter, Amaon, who saw the L.I.F.E. Brigade one time. He wants to sell this information to the evil alien emperor out to destroy them, Qualestro.

Craig Stormon makes writing a story look impossible. Like it’s never been done before. Maybe never even attempted. He’s the only writer who needs a safety net and that is not a metaphor. But he has help this time. He’s no longer a lone child trying to land a 747 in a thunderstorm, there’s a voice on the radio. The voice of New Motherfucking Gidget’s Jeff O’Hare.

The New L.I.F.E. Brigade can’t go wrong!

…

The plot has already been ruined. Irrevocably. On the first page.

Neither Craig nor Jeff, both men who boldly list Editor in their multi-hyphen titles, realize it yet. Let’s see if you spot this complex story snare when I recap those last two panels exactly:

The adviser tells Amaon their emperor has been kidnapped by the L.I.F.E. Brigade, to which he responds “oh no, I have to save him so he can buy my information, which is to watch out for the L.I.F.E. Brigade!”

Do you have your answer? Lock it in!

That’s right, aliens don’t need advisers! They only listen to their hearts. If you spotted that error in under an hour, earth time, please write Blue Comet Press in regards to their recently vacant editorial position!*

*That son of a bitch, Jeff O’Hare, demanded a paycheck.

Craig Stormon writes women like he’s only heard about them secondhand. That’s not specific enough, because that’s how he writes everything. Like every single facet of human existence is something he overheard a guy talking about at a bus stop one time. Take Amaon’s girlfriend, Shandazar – he left her with “the police of another planet” because “some trouble had happened.” That’s adorable. If a five year old said that to me I would encourage them to really use their words. That belies a total lack of understanding of how girlfriends, trouble, police, and planets work. It’s rare to whiff every single word of a sentence, but I’ll argue Craig Stormon swung at “of” and missed.

Windraven, our token Indian, token female, token double-psychic wants to have a trial for the evil emperor Qualestro, whose first name might actually be Evil Emperor. Captain Long John Lazer, who has Billy Idol disease and two different strains of pinkeye, agrees.

But Ray Gun Kid, whose personality is equal parts Ray Gun and Kid, disagrees the only way he knows how: With ray guns.

I know what Craig thinks he’s doing here – he wants to capture that loose cannon, Wolverine-style berserker rage. He wants to write Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon: a playful maniac who could fly off the handle in a real, dangerous, non-charming way at any moment. What he’s actually writing is Mel Gibson in reality, a playful maniac who could- hold on, that’s a bad example. Shit. I don’t know how to get out of this.

Luckily, giant missile robot.

This was the correct story decision, Craig Stormon. I have no complaints about a surprise giant robot who interrupts failed character beats with every missile ever manufactured. I’m going to incorporate it into my own work and write a mumblecore drama about spending a difficult holiday with my family that ends in a giant robot just obliterating the whole house with rocket after rocket after rocket for twenty straight minutes. I’ll try to thank you in the Oscar speech but I’m planning on using most of it to condemn everyone who ever worked for me.

While the L.I.F.E. Brigade are distracted dealing with the transformer Raytheon turns into, unrelated robots kidnap Windraven and Qualestro. They bring them to Shandazar: The Girlfriend in Trouble!

Craig Stormon can draw one type of woman in one pose, and I have absolutely no basis for saying this, but I bet if you squint that alien computer looks a lot like the center console of a defunct RV and if you draw a Pall Mall in her weirdly outstretched hand the woman looks a lot like Craig Stormon’s mother that time her bathrobe slipped.

I’m not being fair to Craig Stormon, that’s something me and life have in common.

Back on the robot moon of infinite explosions, the L.I.F.E. Brigade can be forgiven for just now noticing half their group are gone. They were too busy playing rocket hopscotch to suffer such trifles, that’s the magic of Surprise Missile Robot writing. Long John Lazer and Ray Gun Kid decide Tim “Blue Comet” Buck should go check, by virtue of being the fastest member of the team as well as the one they least want to hang out with.

Craig Stormon doesn’t quite get the visual storytelling of comic books. He doesn’t understand that if you write a sound effect right next to somebody’s open mouth it looks like Blue Comet shouts “BOOM!” when he takes off, like he’s his own NBA Jam announcer.

I don’t know why I’m focusing on such little failures when there are such grand ones to come.

Blue Comet finds and invades the enemy base instantly, it practically happens off panel. That would take 316 episodes of One Piece and some nerd would insist you can’t skip that arc because Gorbo the liquid panda joins the crew later. But here we handwave away what should be the high-action setpiece because we have to focus on more important things: women be crazy.

Shandazar is a well rounded female character, in that her tits are perfectly round.

Obviously, an upset woman is too much for Blue “Tim Buck” Comet to handle. He calls for backup.

He gets his team name wrong.

So do they!

This is issue 3.

There’s an editor for this one! Part of The New Gidget Dream Team! It’s amazing this kind of mistake got through. Ted Lange would bite your fucking head off if you screwed up like this on the high-stakes set of The New Gidget, just ask Don Stroud oh wait you can’t, he doesn’t have a fucking head.

This lover’s quarrel is the finale. Your conventional story-expecting brain is waiting for a space battle. No, Amaon and Shandazar have a falling out about the ethics of prisoner ogling, because, like an excited dog on a faulty leash, Craig Stormon will chase a stray thought straight out into traffic.

I love it. It seems like I’m being sarcastic because this is how I am, but I genuinely love that he invented this fantastical science fiction universe full of living comets and artillery bots and it’s all just trying to understand what mom and her new boyfriend Corvette Ron are fighting about.

So Tim “Maybe Timothy” Buck is once again immobilized without accomplishing a single thing. All the powers of a comet, all the weaknesses of a Tim! I shouldn’t drag him so bad, he’ll do that himself.

Haha, do you call yourself “wild one,” Tim Buck? In your internal monologue, do you refer to yourself as the wild one? Are you a bolder man in that headspace, do you actually vocalize your complaints to your landlord in that alternate dimension? Are you the one who wears the comets in that relationship?

Anyway the end.

That was it!

Here’s everything that happens in the final issue of L.I.F.E. Brigade: One of our heroes, the least one, is immediately captured, witnesses a shitty relationship, and I really thought there would be another part to this sentence.

Thus ends the epic saga of L.I.F.E. Brigade, or possibly Force, the sci-fi fantasy space opera superhero comic that was mostly about Craig Stormon fighting to make the idea-shapes in his brain turn into words. It was a fight he would lose. Angry pink triangle round mommy orb, Craig. Sad blue square frustrated society squiggle, Mr. Stormon.

We did not resolve the primary conflict, which was between Craig Stormon and his mother. Luckily there’s still time to address the other big issue.

It’s an anthology! L.I.F.E. Brigade only got ten pages in their own final comic, the rest of the space was given over to origin stories for… the L.I.F.E. Brigade. Who had just been canceled. Welcome to our series finale, it’s the series premiere we forgot to do.

Let’s see if you can guess the origin story of The Ray Gun Kid given only this information:

This section left intentionally blank.

Ah shit, you guessed it. His evil father killed his distant mother, leaving him alone in the comic book industry, I mean savage alien wilderness.

It does actually get interesting when Ray Gun Kid* meets an older, more experienced** wasteland superhero*** named…

Brandon.****

*Craig Stormon

**powerful, musky

***Gym Teacher

****This part’s the same.

I worry you think I’m doing that 2003 thing. That “isn’t it funny to pretend this is a gay romance?” thing. I’m not doing that. I’m not even going to say anything.

Not a single god damn thing.

As beautiful as that is, this was the 1980s, so we definitely still had to Bury Our Gays. Well, Ray Gun Our Gays.

Ray Gun Kid’s lover, mentor, and Brandon dies in his arms, forcing him to vow revenge against his own father, whom he already had vowed revenge upon back on page 2. I guess the dead mom thing didn’t take.

What a powerful moment. I can’t wait to see what he does with this tragic backstory, what dire mission he embarks on, what bloody destiny he writes across the stars-

Wait. Zoom and enhance.

Oh right, we already know what happened next: Ray Gun Kid took two months of grievance leave and then went into space for the government, where he forgot about all of this and it never came up again-

WAIT. Zoom and enhance.

A whole world takes place in that maybe, hidden in tiny font in the lower right of the last panel on the very last page. Did evil win? Did Ray Gun Kid’s father get away with butchering his mother and only Brandon? Did he then sweep across the universe forming the New Space Reich? I think you know the answer. It’s maybe. Only smaller.

Finally, we simply must learn the origins of Tim “No, Just Tim” Buck. How did he get his fantastical comet powers, and why doesn’t he ever use them? Is there even a path left for him to learn to like himself? Should he try? Did he oversleep, what day is it, Sunday? Does he like milk? Not really? Then why does he drink it every morning? The adventures! Of! Blue! Comet!

We meet Tim as he always is, vaguely unhappy at the prospect of whimsy and excitement. Pictured here in the first panel of his own origin story, Tim Buck is lashed to the outside of a speeding spaceship and griping like he has to clean the soda machine.

When what’s this, adventure is afoot?! God damn it. Why is adventure always afoot to me.

Tim Buck is the last hope for a sexual comet blazing at him from deep space, and only his khaki-flavored hog can tame the flaming celestial libido of Cometra, the Last Comettess!

Let’s see how Tim Buck feels about that.

“Ah fuck,” Tim says, as the colors of the cosmos ripple together into an abstract representation of pure sex, pleading for his penile help to save the tittyverse. “God damn it.”

Cometra, a name you probably thought I was joking about, charges at Tim nipples-first because she needs his mediocre beige cock to live, a plot device you hopefully thought I was joking about.

It’s a little thing, but Craig Stormon lives in an old Winnebago parked so far outside of reality that he has heard of, but never written the word “whoa” before. He takes a guess.

Nice catch, Jeff O’Hare. No wonder you were chum in the New Gidget feeding frenzy.

Together, the last living comet and the last guy at the office to chip in for a birthday cake plummet through dimensions into a tekno-Aztec world whose sole purpose is helping guys named Tim get their dick tanned.

Haha, Tim keeps his grumpy little face while sleeping.

This whole ancient society, these cyber-Mexican priests, this erotic space jungle – it’s all just a waterbed for nerds to lose their virginity on. Seriously, this dimension exists for no purpose other than to convince Tim Buck to bang the nude living comet who needs Tim cum to live.

And it almost doesn’t work.

It’s like that scene in The Little Mermaid where Sebastian the crab engineers an impossibly romantic scenario to get Prince Eric to kiss Ariel, only if Prince Eric was kind of a dipshit and it didn’t work.* Wait.

Holy shit!**

*This analogy was brought to you by Brockway’s daughter, who has just discovered the Little Mermaid and won’t stop watching it.

**Brockway doesn’t have a daughter.

Cometra brought Tim to the special ziggurat heavenly bodies use for fuckin’ and he’s more into the masonry. “What is this, grout?” He asks, as Cometra’s vagina goes thermonuclear.

She burned across the universe on a desperate mission of love only to run into a guy who writes his congressman to complain about parade routes. Cometra has to give Tim her mystical comet powers just to bribe him into first base.

It almost doesn’t work!

This is Tim Buck’s origin story. It is ten pages long. The only thing he does in it is not fuck for nine pages.

It’s made perfectly clear that Tim is only getting laid because Cometra would literally die if she held out for a Cincinatti 7 or better. She had to hurtle through space crotch first hoping to land on the one cock that could cure her, by some miracle actually found it, brought it to a special planet built to celebrate penetration, gave that dick all the mystical powers of a comet, broke down and outright begged for sex, then finally had to settle for soft consent and a Gomez Addams dip.

She doesn’t explode, so maybe it counts if Tim just creams his unitard when they smooch. I don’t know the rules of high-morbidity space ejaculation.

Tim makes a classic Buck Fuckup: He tries to ghost afterward, saying he needs to use these new powers to save Earth, like he’s the one cutting it off. But here’s the resistance Cometra puts up:

That is not a woman who wants you to stay for waffles. That is a woman who might call you again in 7 years if she hasn’t found another penis that will keep her from exploding, but Tim? Hey, Tim? She’s going to look as hard as she can. Like that search starts now, right now.

Oh, and Cometra also gave Windraven, who she’s never met, another set of psychic powers. Windraven already had psychic powers because of her Indian ancestry. Now she has a spare. This all happens in a single panel. Not even a big one.

Guess how Tim feels about it.

Zoom. Enhance.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: ND, who has proven before, and will again, that they’d fuck the comet.