Nerding Day: The (Devil’s) Workshop 🌭

Blue Comet Press was an independent comic book publisher founded, staffed, and terrorized by Craig Stormon. Craig has a tough vibe to pin down, he’s kind of like a child granted a Zoltar wish to be big, and then sent six hundred years into the future to fight in a time war he had no chance of understanding. Now he’s back, and he has PTSD from robot attacks that haven’t happened yet. He is a madman standing at the edge of infinity, and instead of therapy he slowly burned down a comic book imprint over the course of a decade. He started BCP in 1986 and ran it until the mid ‘90s, and he never published a title that went beyond three issues. Craig Stormon himself was BCP’s most prolific and most canceled creator, and he was in charge of cancellations. They say if you hate yourself you’re probably not alone, but only Craig Stormon has a choir of alternate universe Stormons heckling his every move.

The (Devil’s) Workshop was one of many Blue Comet Press titles that didn’t make it past the first issue. That makes it lucky – some titles didn’t make it beyond issue zero. He canceled them before they started, because his child-brain has been tragically shattered and spread across the chronoverse. The (Devil’s) Workshop was Stormon’s response to the ‘90s edgy comics craze which, like all of human existence, Craig Stormon both despised and desperately wanted to be a part of, but couldn’t figure out how.

You might remember the main character, Windraven, from Blue Comet’s flagship title, L.I.F.E. Brigade – a team of bewildered superheroes fighting every comic book plot at once. Windraven was the Indian psychic magician who got her powers twice, once from the fact that all Indians are magic, and twice from a living comet who’d never met her and didn’t realize it was granting her the exact same set of powers again. Her primary personality trait was bikini, and she lost half of it for The (Devil’s) Workshop. Windraven is an embodiment of the saddest thing that can happen in comic books: When a nerd falls in love with a sexy lady he made up. She shows up in multiple titles, surviving several cancellations. She’s the one thing Craig Stormon can’t let go of – well, her and the pinless handgrenade he carries everywhere for arguments.

Like all Blue Comet Press titles, The (Devil’s) Workshop opens with a completely insane frothing manifesto from the editor, Craig Stormon, ranting against the very artists he’s working with in this issue, often including himself.

Craig Stormon writes like the moment after a child falls into an ape enclosure. Just pure shrieking chaos. Every Stormon editorial feels like a man in a dynamite vest is screaming over your shoulder while using you as a human shield against a wary SWAT team. The opening sentences of this comic book blame you, the reader, for assuming Craig Stormon was selling out to the edgy comics craze. He invented the concept of bad girls in 1991, maybe 1992, you idiot! They didn’t exist before that! Also the penciler for this issue was a son of a bitch whose ghost almost certainly haunts the trunk of Craig Stormon’s 1981 Buick Electra. It’s a good thing we’re not even naming that son of a bitch or this would be libel.

Craig Stormon’s mortal enemy this week is a cowardly penciller named Dick Bonk. There’s no way that man exists outside of Craig’s own quivering brain. This is definitely a Split situation. When co-writer Paul Birch walked into the office one day to find the walls smeared in shit and Craig Stormon introducing himself as Dick Bonk Pencilman, he knew better than to question it. That’s how you get a Stormon Bite, and those always get infected.

It gets overshadowed by the mad fury reserved for his own pencilsona, but Craig also throws digs at the painter of this issue’s cover, promising that all future issues will be MUCH better than this shitty one. That’s the kind of burn that doesn’t fully land until Craig Stormon cancels the whole title, ensuring there will be no future issues.

Hold on, Craig Stormon is not done clawing at the walls and cursing at the unrelenting sun.

Craig knows what you’re worried about: You think he’s too afraid to say “FUCK.” Well, you little dick bonk, he’s not! He’ll say it, plus any other word. Butt! That’s just an example. BUTT AGAIN.

I’m not sure what he means by listing other books he’s worked on before they got “too scared of competition.” Wait, I am sure: He got fired for hunting the other artists like Lance Henriksen in Hard Target.

The (Devil’s) Workshop is a comic book for ADULTS… who are also children brain-zapped into huge bodies and doing their best in a society full of loud noises. It’s about hardcore stuff like sex, drugs, and satan worship! It’s all so pure and naive. By sex Craig means looking at a butt, by drugs he means the stuff he learned about in elementary school puppet shows, and by satan worship he means the stuff he learned about in home school after he attacked the puppets.

Let’s meet our first character, a drug addict, handled with all the skill and sensitivity of a man who shoots nutria for sport.

Finally, Craig Stormon has found his voice, and its a hollow-eyed Maine fisherman’s suicide note. Hey Craig, real quick, why are all the dogs slaughtered at sunrise? Does that happen every sunrise, is it one of those brutal English aristocrat things, like fox-hunting or Royal Knockout? Since you felt the need to specify, I have to ask: Craig Stormon, do you think dogs howl in salute to you? Is that why you always howl back, you slavering fucking madman?

We’re looking for a live child in an apehouse if we’re looking for empathy and understanding in a Craig Stormon title. Maybe he does better with the female characters-

Most of the women in Craig’s comics are horny extroverts who get what they deserve. But that’s only to show us how the special one, Windraven, isn’t like the other girls. She’s not overtly sexual. She doesn’t want to be the center of attention. Yes, she has her whole butt out the first time we meet her, yes it’s in the same panel where she explains she’s not making an exhibition of herself, but contradiction and exposed asses are how you create deep characters.

Now that we’ve established our primary themes – junkies, dog slaughter, Indian butt – it’s time to break the whole comic for a three page flashback to the events of L.I.F.E. Brigade, which are not relevant to this story and will not come up again.

Here’s the only important new development in those pages:

In a two panel yadda, all of Craig Stormon’s “sexy women” get chrono-blasted across time, just like his own fragile child brain. This accomplishes three things: It lets him set the story in a more relatable modern-day world, it gets rid of all the gross unsexy men, and more butt.

What a butt! Like all the best butts, it’s two water balloons hanging from a back. Like only the greatest butts, it looks like Gleep and Glorp doing the Bump. Like only the most sensual of ladybutts, it’s a top down view of two pachycephalosaurs fighting.

This being the mid-90s, Craig has to strike a delicate balance. Every edgy female character has to be super horny for sex, but she also has to attack any man trying to have it with her.

The physical storytelling here is so bad I’m not sure what’s happening. I guess Shandazar magnetized that man’s cock so his best friend’s wedding ring was inexorably drawn to it? Otherwise I have no idea why that man took a plasma blast to the junk and his buddy started juggling his balls while quipping “what a quaint old British custom.” It might be a Monty Python reference. Wait, this is the art’s fault – that means this is Dick Bonk’s doing. The son of a bitch! Dick Bonk slipped a dick bonk in here!

So far we are missing the trademark Craig Stormon dyslexia blitz, but don’t worry- it’s coming.

He crowded that last word bubble so hard it overran its borders, only to spell the word he screwed it all up for wrong. He spelled “damn” with a B, then basically called his main characters a couple of cubts.

It’s worth pointing out Craig’s one attempt at a running joke – he named this team of all sexy lady warriors the Iron Cupcakes, then decided they hated it. That’s actually pretty funny until you realize it’s a tragic metaphor for Craig Stormon’s entire comic book career.

There are two plotlines running parallel in The (Devil’s) Workshop. One is this: sexy ‘90s women with prehensile butts lusting for and then attacking dong, and the other is a junkie for satan learning the cons of buying smack from the devil.

Yes, the drug dealers here are literal zombies and demons, obviously led by-

A woman’s crotch.

This is our main villain, and if I told you anything about her before posting the proof, you’d never know if I was joking. For example, if I said she deals drugs brought up from hell to save enough money to post the devil’s bail and her name is some fedora-tipping shit like M’Lady Doom, you would laugh, but part of you would secretly think Craig Stormon could actually write that.

Sometimes a pearl-clutching Satanic Panic scare goes so hard it comes back around to awesome again. M’Lady Doom rules. She’s just, she’s the baddest.

It turns out Murphy, the junkie every dog salutes as they die, has been skimming the devil’s hell heroin. M’Lady is a ride or die gal for Satan, so it’s good that Murphy is incredibly ready to die. He was practically bursting with mortality.

M’Lady injects him with battery acid and he curses her, vows zombie revenge, demands euthanasia, and then untucks his shirt to fire his guts at her like a lizard – all within the span of three panels. There’s no way her entourage was prepared for this dude speedrunning death like that. If they didn’t inject him with battery acid he would’ve died two seconds later spitting vile curses at a nearby rusty nail. He was a shaken-up bottle of Diet Flesh Coke just waiting for his Acid Mentos.

Meanwhile, across town at the sexy ‘90s butt rave for chaste women, Windraven’s barely named friend made the mistake of going out for a cigarette. Because Craig Stormon’s brain is a whirlwind of howling ghosts he can never escape, this means she deserves to get kidnapped by a satanic cyborg drug dealer.

There’s a lot to deal with here: The reiteration of “damb,” which means that wasn’t a typo earlier – Craig Stormon really thinks that’s how you spell it. Do you think he pronounces the B? There’s the slutty cutouts on her already short skirt that make it look like she has a spare butt. The fact that she reacts to killer cyborgs like Helen Keller walking into a sprinkler. But I like the little details: Hell’s Robocop is so bad he bought a Bic with a little skeleton on it. I think I had a hackeysack with that exact logo on it, and ironically enough I traded it for cigarettes.

Whoever this lady is, she’s so irrelevant that her friends, the main characters, never actually realize she’s been abducted. Even after her kidnappers nearly run them over. Man, I’m starting to get Stormon’s enmity. Penciller and Enemy of the People Dick Bonk’s only reference for “big tittied woman diving” is a vampire lunge-

He really bonked this dick up.

Finally we see the titular workshop (devil’s). It’s the vicious dungeon where the blood of 13 innocent victims must be spilled to free Saragar!

From jail! Hell jail! The demon judge set Saragar’s blood bail at 13 victims! And he’s almost free. He’s so close! Saragar is trying to spend the last of his commissary fund on erasers and tic tacs, because he’ll be damned if the hell prison is keeping a penny of his baby momma’s paycheck!

The barely named friend is sacrificed nude and upside down, forced to stare up the very cooch of her captor as she dies. In fact, she’s beheaded at that exact moment – so the last sight her brain imprints as she spins up eternity is a pap smear of the devil’s girlfriend.

Across town, her best friends sleep as all women do – full makeup, same bed, tits out – totally unaware of the satanic drug orgy being held in honor of her death. The devil’s cyborg uses her skull for a gag to a non-existent camera while a caped man spit takes through a handjob. Everyone’s college roommate, a guy named something like AJ, gets head from one of the devil’s concubines, just happy to be gettin’ some.

Fucking AJ, man. He’s not even a satanist. He’s a registered pastafarian, he has the bumper sticker and everything. You could call him out on his hypocrisy but you know he’d just say “head’s head, man!” and spill bong water on the carpet while going for a high five.

And that’s it, somehow that’s everything that happens in this comic. It’s way too much and not nearly enough. A woman gets beheaded by a Chick tract while her friends sass up a ‘90s rave, and every single one of them shows their whole ass, especially Craig Stormon.

I’m pretty sure Craig even writes the ads in the back, because if not, he has found his people:

RAW Comics is so anti-establishment they’ll shun Valiant, which I think was an MLM knife scam that got out of hand and accidentally turned into a comic book press. RAW’s tagline is “COMICS THAT BITE BACK!” which sounds edgy until you think about it, and then it just implies they’re so stupid they eat comic books.

And then there’s this full page splash for GEOFFREY’S COMICS, where Craig Stormon drew a custom character named Captain Greed shaking and then punching the head off a child for shopping at a rival comic book store.

So are we rooting FOR Captain Greed here, Craig? It’s good and right that he’s rocketing the faces off children for capitalism? Oh hey everybody it’s Bone Daddy, the contextless janitor hermit! Tell your local comic book clerk Bone Daddy sent you, and get a free kidnapping! It’s how you tell a total stranger “I have no family to care if I’m found in a bathtub full of ice later.”

There’s no way Geoffrey Comic knew what he was getting into when he took out this ad space. Craig Stormon promised him something tasteful and then sent him this page covered in barbecue sauce and ants. I don’t know if Geoffrey complained, but we’ll find out in the next unhinged editorial starring Craig Stormon’s brain mites.

Craig’s final note is one of baseless optimism undulled by ten straight years of self-inflicted failures and invented enemies. It’s a teaser page for issue 2 of The (Devil’s) Workshop.

“12 women, no blood, no heads. Who’s 13th? The future at stake,” Craig Stormon writes.

“That’s great!” His neurologist says, “we’re getting some fine motor coordination back. The words will start making sense eventually when we teach your speech center to reconnect with your hands. Trust the process, you were lucky to survive that tractor accident.”

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Craig Lemoine, the original Bone Daddy, now a proud Bone Granddaddy to two little Bone Daddies and one Bone Mommy.