Nerding Day: The KFC DC Crossover🌭

Remember when comic books had dignity? No? Me either. I kind of love that DC will whore Superman out to anyone with enough money.

Today, I want to talk about the Colonel Sanders DC multiverse promotional comics that were given out for free at Comic-Con in 2015, 2016, and 2017 because anytime a marketing company has to expand an original IP so far beyond the realm of the original idea, it will inevitably snap.

It’s like they’re trying to perfect teleportation, but all they’ll get from the end product is a deformed Jeff Goldblum monster. Here’s a good example of what I’m talking about. In issue 2 of the KFC/DC crossover comic, there’s a response to a fan letter that clarifies for readers that Colonel Sanders, the KFC mascot, is a real man who has risen from the dead.

I am a real man; I died, yadda yadda, then came back. You’re yadda yaddaing some pretty important shit there, Re-Colonelizer. I need to know if the chicken mascot is supposed to have died for my sins, or what is the deal? They didn’t have to specify that this superhero Harland Sanders is the real, original Harland Sanders of our Earth, a human man with the godlike ability to return from the dead and fight alongside superheroes.

The KFC marketing department also gave us a breakdown of the special equipment that Colonel Sanders has on him at all times, including his Gravy Pen accessory. This is a “highly specialized fountain pen that supplies fans with tasty autographs and dresses up mashed taters,” which is all fine, but why is it eighty-five thousand dollars? It’s a squirt gun. A squirt gun filled with Colonel-temperature Kentucky Fried Chicken gravy.

I’ll tell you why because DC Colonel Sanders is not just a mascot for terrible, truly dogshit fried chicken that tastes like maybe someone accidentally fried a seagull. He’s the mascot of capitalism. He’s a ninety-year-old man who never ceased being productive. This isn’t even me being abstract. Literally, the moral of the comic sounds like a Russian propaganda poster from the Cold War.

“The easy way does not pay, so heroes do it the hard way.” What a moral. All I can picture when I hear this is The Colonel appearing in shadow to say, “Walking on your normal unbroken legs? Looks pretty easy.” (He pulls out his cane.) “Let me fix that for you.”

The main villain of the KFC/DC crossover comics is Colonel Sunder, and he does things the easy way, which is evil, I guess? Listen, KFC, we all know Colonel Sanders is the real villain in any universe. He’s an old southern white man who demands your labor. Also, he’s obsessed with chicken in the exact same way The Penguin is obsessed with penguins, Cat Woman is obsessed with cats, and Cat Man is also obsessed with cats. There aren’t enough cool animals to base your villain personality around.

KFC has to do all of this zany marketing so that we forget the fundamentally unlikeable qualities of its mascot, and they’re doing such a bad job of it here. We can’t have universal healthcare, but Colonel Sanders can have an $85,000 gravy pen and 3 million dollar glasses that violate people’s privacy? Ok.

They want you to look at stuff like Colonel Sanders calling Colonel Sunder his finger-licking foe and find it so quaint and random. They want you to see Colonel Sunder say, “How easily I drown your mash-potato minds in the grim gravy of your own worst nightmares,” and be charmed, entertained even, but I will not.

I will instead be angry that, as punishment for working with Colonel Sunder to… make KFC slightly worse, Colonel Sanders manages to convince The Green Lantern and The Flash to force The Rogues to work at KFC. So the Colonel believes in forced labor as punishment, and the worst punishment he can come up with is working at one of his restaurants. Wow, KFC.

I thought labor would set us free, Colonel Sanders? Make up your mind. I thought The Colonel’s biggest fear was retirement. He literally came back from the dead just to do more work. Shouldn’t The Rogues be thrilled with the opportunity to do sweet, purifying labor? Checkmate, plantation zombie.

This isn’t a one time thing. Colonel Sanders regularly conquers his foes by forcing them to work for him. Structurally, this is a great way to end the comic with everyone eating KFC. Spiritually, it’s because Colonel Sanders is a monster who infects its host and makes it part of him. Of the three KFC/DC crossovers that exist, Colonel Sanders’s villains end up working for him in two. In the third, they are straight-up dead. Colonel Sanders murders Colonel Sunder in issue #2, and half of the word bubbles over his corpse are about getting back to work.

Larfleeze, the Orange Lantern, you all know him, everybody knows Larfleeze, is the villain of issue 3. He suffers a fate worse than death or conscription: He becomes a KFC franchise owner. He’s never going to get the grease smell out of planet Okaara, which as everyone knows is where Larfleeze lives. Someone should be protecting this poor alien from Colonel Sanders, but the Green Lantern just stands there and watches this happen.

I expected more from the Green Lantern because on the cover of issue three, he’s destroying a bucket of fried chicken. This is what I wish would happen to me every time I think of eating some KFC. If I could hire a superhero to blast a KFC bucket out of my hands twice a year I would, and my digestive tract would thank me.

The third and final adventure of Colonel Sanders and The Green Lantern is where DC crossed the line. They abandoned the Sanders multiverse and did a simple plot where Colonel Sanders wanted to deliver his zesty chicken sandwiches to the hungry aliens of the universe, so he enlisted the Green Lantern Corps to help him. The Green Lantern Corps is a public service and he turned them into an intergalactic UberEats. Then, when Larflezze steals all of the sandwiches for himself, The Colonel hunts him down, using The Green Lantern as a Pinkerton to demand payment.

We already know how this ends. Larfleeze is consumed into the Colonel Sanders symbiote. The Orange Lanterns Corps, famously the lantern that represents avarice, extreme greed, yeah, they all work for Colonel Sanders now.

The KFC/DC comic book universe is canonically Earth 1 (the one WE live on), which is the most threatening way this comic book could have phrased that. In Marvel comics, our universe is Earth-1218, where Superheroes don’t exist, and the Marvel Universe that we read about in comics is Earth-616. In DC comics, the DC universe is called Earth Prime, or Earth 0. Earth 1 is the most dystopian version of Earth in these comics. The Daily Planet is reporting on Colonel Sanders’ battle for chicken supremacy. Was it a slow news day, or does the resurrected chicken man have that much power and influence over the world? Maybe next issue the writers could consider The Colonel throwing some delicious, affordable sides to distract a bank robber rather than enslaving a galaxy in his chicken franchise.

All of these mascots that are powerful, rich men are about to fall way out of favor. I’m looking at you, Mr. Fucking Peanut. We don’t need that shit right now. Don’t give them a multiverse and an intergalactic goon squad. Nobody wants that, KFC. I don’t want to purchase chicken from the best possible version of this man, which is a cartoon with a big head and a tiny stick figure body instead of his weird little bow tie. This intergalactic oligarch might get me to swear off fried chicken forever, or at least hire The Green Lantern to blast it out of my hands.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Yvonne Clapham who found asylum on Earth-43, where the bloodsucking overlords at least have the decency to call themselves vampires.