Author: Robert Brockway

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Learning Day: Saskatchewan Wheat Pool Adventurer’s Club 🌭

Here’s a short list of some of my favorite comedy resources: 

-When a corporation decides to do a comic book. 

-Long roll calls of characters by people who ran out of ideas before they started. 

-Boring organizations deciding it’s time to get “badical… to the extreme!”

-When somebody wildly overestimates their own value and plummets straight into the dirt. 

Every one of those things, on their own, is a recipe for hilarity. Now meet all of them rolled together: The Saskatchewan Wheat Pool Adventurer’s Club!

“This can’t be exactly what it looks like,” you’re thinking. “There’s no way you found a superhero comic about staple crops.”

And you’re right. Tragically, you’re right. I did not find the comic books. Those were all lost to silo fires and farm suicides. I only found the promotional material for the fan club of the comic books. This is a new type of sadness scientists have been working on by nesting layers of sadness atop one another until they form a strong and flexible weave of despair. They call it Sadophene, and it’s so durable they’re using it to hold together Elon Musk’s quivering ego. 

The Saskatchewan Wheat Pool Adventurers were like The Avengers for 4H kids who’d been kicked in the head and left their imaginations on the hoof of a milking cow. The goal of the Adventurers wasn’t to get kids into farming, it was to show farm kids how awesome their lives already were. They did it through pogs!

If you’re not familiar, pogs were… 

Wait, what the fuck were pogs? No, I lived through this. I should know this. I had pogs. They were a game or something, right? Y-you pogged? Did we pog each other? Holy shit why did we buy so many circles of cardboard with pictures on them?

Imagine the child these pogs were made for. The bowl-cutted, overall-clad, ricket-afflicted boy sitting alone in a windblown field in central Canada cupping a soggy King Wheat pog, his most treasured possession. If I was making an arthouse film about hell that’s how I’d show you the Fate of the Unlearned — the section of limbo where good people who just never heard of Christ go, to suffer in the absence of something they never knew was missing.

Hey speaking of obscure parts of hell, imagine the poor freelance comic book artist who took this job and actually had to pen character arcs for barley. They sure knew their demographic, though. They didn’t call these things activity books:

They were called “Things To Do When You’re Bored Books” because they knew calling these sad time-killers “activities” would be an actionable false advertising claim. In Quebec they were called “La Mort De Ennui” and to this day Montreal existentialists write bitingly ironic ukulele songs about them for their six YouTube subscribers.

Those are your villains: The various molds and insects which can spoil a harvest. These are comic books for children about wheat fighting mold, and I don’t know a single better way to tell a kid that you lied when you said they could be anything they wanted. You could say “I’m sorry Young Callum, you’ll never be an astronaut. You’ll go to the University of Regina for two semesters, and then you’ll move back home and drive your daddy’s pickup truck when he dies,” or you could just give him a Saskatchewan Wheat Pool Adventurer’s Club membership and let his dreams wither naturally on the vine. 

Look at these thrilling Things To Do When You’re Bored!

-Discover “the Mighty Sprout” in a powerful science project!

-Check out the “A-MAZE-ING” Wheat Story!

-See inside a seed cleaning plant!

Hand a boy these and he will forget all about hope. He probably won’t even dream in color anymore. If you toss a kid one of these books and he has an absolute blast “seeing inside a seed cleaning plant,” then you need to get out of the house, barricade the door, and burn it down. An alien has cuckoo-ed you and tricked you into raising their offspring. Young Callum is excited about learning these processes because you are the crop, and the harvest is coming.

Let’s explore another of my favorite things: Roll call time!

Wendy Wrangler is a country singer whose tunes ‘wrangle’ her opponents. Yeah, okay. That scans. Good work, anonymous Saskatchewan freelancer. Buy yourself a pint of Everclear and drink it straight, you earned it.

Fantastic Flax can “blend in like a chameleon,” which is… is it because you can mix flax into so many things and it just kind of disappears? I’m being very generous by doing that legwork for this comic book, but okay. 

Now, following this template, what kind of powers would you say the Oat guy has?

Awesome Oats can see into the future? Like… oats, do? Is this why it’s impossible to get the drop on a bowl of oatmeal? Is it because the only reason people eat oatmeal is they have the foresight to realize they’ll struggle on the toilet later if they don’t? It is not explained!

Bearded Barley is from Asia! All of Asia. Still white, though. He can talk to animals! Like barley can! And his horses pull his chariot at the speed of light what the fuck? Where did that come from? 

Maybe I’m not giving this writer enough credit and they’re sourcing these powers from Asian (non-specified) folklore about the ancient Barley gods, or maybe he only knew two things about crops and hoped everybody else knew less so they’d just roll with the horse stuff.

Canola Crusher is from South America! Like canola! That’s why all of his dialogue sees him slipping into and then clumsily explaining basic Spanish! (Spanish is what South Americans call Mexican. -Editor)

Penny Pulse uses the secrets of herbs and spices to heal, just like the Middle East taught her. The middle east of Ireland, by the looks of her. Yes, she harnesses all the exotic healing spices of Dublin, like “salt” and “fried.” To be fair, 1990s Saskatchewan wasn’t exactly brimming with diverse life models. It’s entirely possible they thought ‘redhead’ counted as a race.

Let’s jump over to the villains:

Grasshopper overeats, which is totally in line with the theme, but right at the very end they tack on “thinks he’s better than everybody.” You know, like those arrogant fucking grasshoppers.

Rustin infects plants with her corrosive touch, which makes sense — she’s supposed to be leaf rust — but then she’s also a super genius? You think leaf rust is smart? You think farmers hate leaf rust because it’s a liberal? This is a weird dig to slip into a children’s educational comic no matter how little respect you have for dirt folk.

Blotch is the natural enemy of Bearded Barley, which he communicates by threatening to “get my sticky disks into your beard.” I can only assume “disks” was a typo there. His bio goes on to explain he’s “a great athlete, but a jerk. He stays up too late at night!” I’m not sure what it adds to the character, that we now know Blotch likes to facefuck bears and also has a sleep disorder, but there was only enough space for like four sentences and these were deemed two of the most vital.  

Ergot is a master hypnotist which — once again being super generous here — I guess could be an allusion to the hallucinogenic properties of ergot? Also she lies, cheats and steals just like that no good degenerate fungus. Oh, holy shit, wait: she replaces baby wheat kernels with her own evil children!

Your weird plantchild who loves the seed cleaning process – you’re being ergotted! Tell Young Callum to fetch his favorite toy (the shovel) from the basement and start pouring the gas. I know it’s hard to start over, but Lord knows it’s not your first fungusboy, and if you don’t plow and rotate the ashes it sure won’t be your last. 

We’re so desperate for new comic book properties you’d assume the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool Adventurers would be slated for a September release on Disney+ already. But no, somehow they went under despite all of their massive early success:

23,000 members of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool Adventurers Club! That’s officially an army. A whole army of grainwashed children willing to die for your wheat consortium. And led by a madman so zealous he began to dress as King Wheat! What could have derailed this unstoppable phenomenon? 

Nothing but a modest fee.

A grain conglomerate asked children for their attention — at a time when video games and television and just much better comic books existed — and by some miracle they got it. And then they also thought kids would pay for the privilege? $10 is an extremely modest fee, it’s true, but what family would get that bill and happily pay it just so junior would never again be without his seed cleaning plant tours? Only a family already ruled, absolutely devoured by Ergot Cuckoos could be tricked in this manner. 

And if you were counting on the Ergot Brood’s loyalty in exchange for including Queen Ergot’s seed packets in every Things To Do When You’re Bored Book, then the joke’s on you: She cheats and lies! Like all rye-based fungus!

…
This article was brought to you by a hot tip from the Hot Dog Tipline, and by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Nick Ralston, also known as the heroic RADICAL RICE whose superpower, of course, is CYBORG FINGERS.

Categories
REFLECTING DAY

Reflecting Day: Traxx Attaxx!

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Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: The Lawnmower Man 🌭

The 1980s were very worried that Satan was trying to get at their kids through nerd shit. Comic books, cartoons, and Dungeons and Dragons were all being influenced by the devil, because he needed dorks in hell to help invent the internet. The 1990s were very worried that our nerd shit would become Satan, and this mostly manifested as movies about the evils of virtual reality. None represented that extremely stupid genre as boldly and with their pants down as Lawnmower Man, a movie about your garden-variety idiot who becomes the digital devil thanks to video games. But we’re not here to talk about that.

The rogue video game scientist was played by Pierce Brosnan who brought a lot of class to this movie about evil polygons stealing our town dullards. The slow-witted Lawnmower Man was played by Jeff Fahey, and the movie handled mental disability with all the grace and subtlety one could expect of the ‘90s. 

Maybe that’s fine. The movie isn’t making fun of a specific birth defect or anything. They don’t specify what’s wrong with him, he’s just medically dumb as shit. Exactly smart enough to mow lawns, no more, no less. Like there’s a whole breed of maintenance dummies who like the taste of paint and keep America’s infrastructure sound. They call him the Lawnmower Man because he mows lawns… and also because he lives in a garden shed, and also because he prays to a cross he made out of lawnmowers, because this was originally a Stephen King joint and I love the man, I honestly do, but he’s never met half an idea he didn’t think could be 47 pages. 

But again, we’re not here to talk about that. We’re also not going to discuss how Pierce Brosnan’s character gets so excited about finding a largely unclaimed idiot that he immediately straps him into a VR rig and starts making him smarter by firing up the Make Smarter program, which consists of a brain and a hand that you use to grab Smart from the menu and drop it onto Brain.

Smart is the little red blotch. Be careful not to drag Grail onto the brain or you’ll wind up with a deluded video game messiah, possibly even some kind of Cyberchrist. Oh, and obviously don’t drop Mantis on there. Honestly, I don’t know why Mantis is even still on that menu — how many fat-fingered video game scientists must be pincered in half before we move “Forge Mantis Man” to its own menu?

I’m sorry. We aren’t going to talk about any of that. We certainly won’t cover how all VR in the film has to take place while wearing a Tron suit in a spinning gyroscope.

The VR so complex it has to be run by military-grade supercomputers even though it looks like a screensaver that came pre-installed on a Ukrainian bootleg Dell. 

“Is Doll computer; is just as good! You will be eight-tittied purple balloon in world of Peeps. You will love! $40. Follow to alley.”

Oh man, we are definitely not going to talk about the bored housewife who can’t wait to molest a yard dope. 

At this point enough Smart has been dropped in Lawnmower Man’s brain that he’s not getting lost in closets, but he is still way below the line of informed consent and the bored housewife knows this. She has to teach him how to kiss, even though she’s clearly still sticky from a threeway with Dunning and Kruger, because she thinks kissing is when one person sticks their tongue out like a curious earthworm and the other glomps it down like a hungry robin. 

Then she stops sucking off his tongue like a frightened anime girl trying to placate a Decepticon  and starts teaching him basic concepts:

And none of this is played for horror, or even laughs — it’s supposed to show the audience how much he’s grown: That he finally hit a maintenance groupie’s low bar for molestation, the ultimate goal of all grass morons and pool dipshits. Here’s the very next scene!

Let’s not talk about that.

I bet you think we’re going to talk about the VR sex scene, where Lawnmower Man lures his new girlfriend into the virtual world so he can segue out of real sex and into clumsy cybersex, the exact opposite dream of every computer engineer who worked on this film.

It looks like you wiggled the N64 cartridge while the intro was loading. Like something you’d see rendered by a water-damaged demo 3DO in a shuttered K-Mart. It looks like you failed a puzzle in Myst, but I assure you that’s supposed to be hot. Even when they grind so hard they meld together into a sexual cyber-dragonfly…

The soaring and explorative soundtrack tells us: This right here, this is the beauty of love in the age of computers, and not an unpopular Moby video that even MTV2 won’t play. 

Then Lawnmower Man gets so carried away with gyro-boning that he turns into an Oddworld enemy and barfs stupidity on his girlfriend-

Until she turns into a bed idiot.

You know me pretty well. You almost certainly thought I was going to talk about that. I am not. I’m also not going to cover the way Lawnmower Man develops psychic powers by playing video games two hours a week:

And oh shit, I would love to talk about the time Pierce Brosnan says…

And Lawnmower Man ominously whispers…

But there’s no time to even mention it! 

Because immediately afterward he turns fully evil…

And burns a priest in his church using the power of computer-fire.

Lawnmower Man gets revenge on his gas station bully — natural predator of the maintenance idiots — by mowing the man’s brain with his VR powers, which can’t be exactly what it sounds like, surely, but it is. 

It is.

Obviously Lawnmower Man turns into a floating virtual head.

Of course he kills a man by turning him into bubbles.

It almost goes without saying that he attacks a private security team with cyberbees.

If you can follow narrative arcs at all, you’ve already assumed that Lawnmower Man uploads himself into the supercomputer — which actually withers his body in real life since computers drink blood — because he wants to be the internet.

Only he winds up looking like an early Aphex Twin video and moving like a puppet whose master is fighting off cyberbees. 

We cannot discuss any of that stuff, it’s all irrelevant, because what we absolutely have to talk about is the chimp murder. 

Zoom in on a lab at night, two scientists arguing:

They’re fighting about the ethics of science as an engine of war. We’re led to believe this is a super soldier training program, and then…

No, it’s so much bigger than that. They’re deciding the fate of the best damn chimp Pierce Brosnan has ever had the pleasure of knowing. He loses the argument, of course, and we smash cut to a supercomputer using virtual reality to train a chimp for cyberwar. 

Listen, what does a chimp care for graphics? Everyone knows the chimp eye can’t see above 10FPS. Why burn out your supercomputer rendering his little chimp hands when it’s widely known that great apes only care for gameplay? Strap the little bastard into that K-Mart waterlogged 3DO and he’ll be all-

I mean if you want to see something really funny you can make a little Tron suit for his chimp body and strap him into a gyroscope. If you wanna mess with an ape, that is like the second best way to do it. The best will always be basic sleight of hand. You ever done magic for an ape? They love that shit! Where’d the banana go? They have no idea. They don’t even have a guess. They just assume you’re a fruit wizard and they go nuts. But this is pretty hilarious, too:

You know this chimp fucking dominates at LAN parties. Little screeching son of a bitch hauling a gyroscope and an 8-ton supercomputer down the basement stairs just to dominate Devon at Quake II. Look how tiny that hitbox would be. It’s like he’s always Oddjob. 

But what’s the number one danger in teaching a chimp how to use a gun? Right. It’s that you taught a chimp how to use a gun. 

So when the chimp picks the lock on his own cage and dresses up in his best mallsoldier gear, you know somebody’s about to get their ass shot and their face torn off.

He fires up his APE HUD, which is weirdly full of human words instead of icons of different tire swings and various states of chimp genitalia.

Then he steals a rent-a-cop’s gun…

And here’s the best scene in movie history.

Remember, this is not within the VR program. This lab actually designed an augmented reality helmet just for combat apes, and then left it around unattended. You can’t even blame the chimp for this. This is an elaborate suicide-by-chimp scheme gone awry. Pierce Brosnan was two offices down with a half-empty bottle of bourbon and an insurance plan that pays double if a zoo animal accidentally discharges a gun in the workplace and he’s wondering what’s taking Mr. Tickles so long when he’s never been more ready for the void.

Combat Ape flees for the exit…

But oh no, another security guard spots him, takes aim…

And it’s game over, Combat Ape. 

RIP, we should have known you better. This movie should have been called Combat Ape’s Big Adventure, like a hyperviolent Curious George, and it should have ended with you bringing video games back home to your troop. But instead the saga of the digital murderchimp has ended in tragedy.

Then the title pops up. 

THEN THE TITLE POPS UP. 

All of this happened before the title! This is the cold open for Lawnmower Man! Scientists trained a warchimp to destroy robot gorillas in virtual reality so it stole a mallcop’s gun and murdered its way out of the lab, only to die at the exit. 

But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. I only want to talk to you about the combat ape’s adorable little “what’s up now, motherfucker?” head nod before he pulls the trigger.

Isn’t that just the cutest? 

I’m glad we could talk.

Categories
PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: The Worst Movie You Love, with David Bell 🌭

You have used your eyes to ingest far more than the FDA mandated Maximum Ocular Hot Dog Intake (2 franks/day). Let’s give them a break and switch to cramming tubed meats straight into your earholes. It’s Podcasting Day! Today the illustrious David Bell arrived on a palanquin carried by six fit eunuchs cut solely by natural causes (the rarest and most prized of all) to grace us with his royal presence. 

You might know him from Gamefully Unemployed, the excellent podcast empire he co-dominates with the cruel but beautiful Tom Reimann. Whether it’s Story Mode or Hype Cast, We Just Watched… or Fox Mulder is a Maniac, he casts pods so frequently you honestly have no excuse not to have heard and loved one by now. I would not admit to that in public if I were you, I’d just correct it right away. 

We had a simple but powerful prompt for David: What’s the worst movie that you unironically love? 

He brought Miami Connection, 1987 Florida’s love letter to electric guitars, ninjas, and friendship. 

Brockway brought Equilibrium, the himbo’s treatise on like… how art is pretty good and stuff. 

Seanbaby brought Traxx, an absolute lunatic’s smeared suicide note of a film. 

Words cannot do it justice, which is too bad since that’s all we used on this podcast. 

This one right here!

Listen to it with both ears so it feels like we have you surrounded! Then please subscribe at your preferred service, don’t forget to leave us a review, and tell a friend or respected enemy about us. We really need your help to grow this podcast, and those are by far the best things you can do for us, who have given you so much and only ever asked for more in return. 

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: Malibu Comics’ Street Fighter – The Comic 🌭

Malibu Comics had all the quality control and undeserved tragedy of a child sweatshop but without the child part or the undeserved part. If you used gestures and crude pictograms to describe a good comic book to a Sentinel Island native who knew nothing of the modern world, they would kill you with a spear. And when they got back to their village they would describe a Malibu title perfectly, and their whole society would collapse because of your interference. And yet, because we’re talking about the 1990s – when everybody suddenly realized nerds had money, but had no idea how to get it – Malibu managed to get their hands on some major IPs. Capcom actually trusted them with Street Fighter at the peak of its popularity. Here’s the cover of that very first issue:

The art was pretty good for somebody’s nephew’s first try at airbrushing the side of a van, but we’re going to be here all day if we make fun of a Malibu artist’s liberal interpretation of “human face.” Story and character are not a fighting game’s strong suit, so it often falls to the adapter to fill in the blanks, and Malibu has a caulk gun full of their own feces for that purpose. Most of the characters are non-entities, and manage to be inoffensive. Even… awesome? 

Balrog is only in this book to do two things: Explode testicles and give Mike Tyson’s lawyers an easy win. 

Look at him just CHUDDing Ken’s airborne dick into the stratosphere. I actually have to give that one to you, Malibu: CHUDD is indisputably the sound testicles make as they break the sound barrier. What was Sagat thinking here? Sagat’s entire fighting style is crazy high kicks that expose his dong. If we could jump to Balrog-vision for this panel you’d see a glowing red spot on Sagat’s crotch indicating the weak point. 

Zangief also escapes the Malibu treatment. He’s only in the comic for a few pages, and all he does is dominate this weird bearhog monstrosity because that’s how Russians train to do anything. You want to be a Russian pilot? Better learn how to clothesline a bear so hard his testicles explode. Twice.

These are the only intentionally awesome moments in this comic, because Malibu used all the rest of their pages to drive Street Fighter’s characters into the ground like a Russian introducing himself to a fully-testicled bear. Malibu even got particularly brazen in one issue and tried to use Street Fighter’s popularity to boost their own shitty characters… while insulting Street Fighter’s. 

The Ferret was a thinly-veiled ripoff of Wolverine, as roughly 97% of all new comic book characters were in the ‘90s. He stands out for looking the dumbest and having the lamest name, as well as a secret identity that could be best described as “Tampa flotsam.” He doesn’t even try to justify his existence in these pages. He meets E. Honda on a plane and then embarrasses them both into a fat joke cut from a Chris Farley sketch for being too disrespectful to other cultures.

Let’s establish a little background: Ryu and Ken are the main characters of the Street Fighter universe – rival fighters from the same school with radically different philosophies. Ryu lives only for the fight, while Ken wants to use fighting to achieve glory. Guile is usually a central character in American adaptations, because he’s an unremarkable white army guy — the official mascot of the western world. Chun Li is usually a central character in any Street Fighter story, too – she just wants to avenge the murder of her father. Got all that in mind? All right, now blow it straight out your ass. Fuck you for even knowing it. Here are those character’s very first appearances in their own comic.

So Ryu is a superpowered MRA now? He’s an incel who figured out how to fire literal blue balls at the women who deny him? 

Nah, they’re just playing around. 

Ryu isn’t a molester — he’s just the kind of guy who does viral prank videos followed rapidly by viral apology videos, and Chun-Li is an arrogant dangerslut. She won’t put out for a mere slap on the ass, but infuse it with your chi and light it on fire first and she’s a Slip ‘N Slide. That is slightly better than Mystical Karate Rapist and his victim, but it’s weird you set that bar in the first place, Malibu.

There’s no bait and switch with Guile, though. This is his actual introduction:

They didn’t rework his role in the comic. He’s still supposed to be a good guy. And his very first appearance shows him wildly overreacting to an extremely common accident, and then using his superhuman fighting skills to cripple every barfly in sight. Now, passions were surely running high – dude in the hat went from zero to chairstrike in no panels. But the actual offender did nothing. He didn’t even get a chance to apologize before Guile started taking teeth for trophies. And it’s not the drunks that escalate the fight from here — Guile keeps demolishing uncles until the whole bar is trashed and everybody in it has to steer with a straw. 

Guile is boring. His whole fighting style is based on squatting and testing his opponent’s patience. Give him Lululemon and a Passatt and he’s the biggest bitch in a Scottsdale yoga class. But he’s still meant to be a hero. The ‘intro with a bar fight’ thing is a cliche way to introduce a tough guy character, but those heroes only defend themselves. They knock out everyone who comes after them and leave a few bills on the counter to cover the damages — they’re so used to being attacked that they have a bar destruction budget. They don’t follow up that barfight by using their superpowers to demolish a small business and then give the owner a concussion.

All of which Guile does.

Holy shit! 

Guile really brought the war back with him, huh?  

There’s no way to spin this that isn’t psychotic.That’s the full interaction – the owner didn’t pull a gun on him, or jump in the fight. He got three lines which he used to ask for reasonable compensation, then ask a superman why his family’s only source of income just exploded, and then describe the sound of his brain bouncing off his skull.

I really have to reiterate: These are the introductions.

I’m not skipping around to show you the worst parts — the first few issues are all just debuting the many characters of Street Fighter and explaining how they’re all insane now. Chun Li thinks safewords are only for first dates, Ryu responds to rejection with fireballs, and Guile thought First Blood was hilarious. Wait, we’re still missing our other main character, Ken Masters. 

Let’s see how he’s doing.

Ken gets scalped in the first issue. 

I’m not exaggerating. 

It is not implied.

Comic books and video games are not just for kids, but remember that this was 1993 when yes, they were. Society sure thought that, anyway. I’m not saying that’s right, I’m just saying that when your dad bought you a comic book because you were extra brave at the dentist you probably didn’t expect to see Ken’s bloody scalp on the last page. 

The Malibu Street Fighter comic book adaptation was a lean and mean affair. It only lasted three issues, but Malibu managed to degrade every single character in it like the writers owned stock in World Heroes and were hoping to retire.

So how does this epic saga end? The same way most Malibu comics end: Abruptly, and with a written apology.

Holy shit! They really copped to it!

“… due to complications with Capcom and their dislike of our adaptation of the most popular game in the world, concluding with this issue, Street Fighter the comic book has officially been cancelled. We formally apologize…”

You never see this kind of honesty. Malibu straight up admitted in plain terms that they got almost immediately fired for sucking too hard. 

At a video game adaptation.

In the 1990s! 

Just for reference, here are the cast from the Street Fighter movie adaptation, who did not get fired by Capcom for sucking too hard:

Say what you will about Malibu — for example, they’re the comic books you find on drugstore shelves in plywood towns built for nuclear bomb testing — but you have to give them some credit for owning this. Any other company, any other anybody would not clarify in the first sentence that they got fired for doing a bad job. The phrase ‘creative differences’ exists solely for this exact scenario. They could have said anything and yet when kids flipped over the last page in issue #3 they saw “hey, sorry we shit the bed here sport, but if it’s any consolation we just got real fired for it.”

And then they go on to explain the rest of their terrible story! That they just got fired for! 

Nobody dunks on Malibu like Malibu. 

Things to note:

They spelled Chun-Li wrong, in bold, in the header of her section… which consists only of her name. This is not a localization issue: They spelled it correctly in the text below, and all throughout all three of the comics. They just figured “shit, we already got fired — like fuck are we spellchecking our middle finger on the way out.” 

They were going to introduce their own Street Fighter, because when you have no idea how to adapt a story you resort to shit like “new characters with an easier narrative” and “evil clones.”

They were going to introduce evil clones.

Ken isn’t actually dead, he’s just bald now. That’s how Malibu thought scalping works, like it’s a rowdy haircut. 

I worry intensely about the little section in Ryu’s breakdown where they repeat — three times — that Ryu would definitely, for sure resolve his relationship with Chun-Li. I know Malibu. I know what that means. That means full penetration. Maybe you think that’s hot, but keep in mind they’d hire somebody’s cousin to draw it and it would wind up looking like two trees fighting. 

…And then Malibu has the absolute balls to cap it all off by saying you can pay extra for super exclusive Gold Editions of the series! The series so bad they got fired in the middle of an issue and had to end it with a written apology! The apology you’re reading right now! Haha remember? This is still the apology! That’s how the apology ends! By trying to sell you a goldfoil version of the apology!

Those Gold Editions cannot exist. Nobody owns those. Nobody fell for that. If you bought these they were lost at sea when you tried to start your own island. They perished in the fire with you when you tried to deepfry a turkey in the bathtub. 100% of these comics were lost to idiot tragedy. 

But listen, if you somehow survived that blaze and have gone mad from the pain, from the rejection and the mockery of your hideous scars, if you have gathered together the sad pieces of your old life and retreated to the storm drains with them and somehow still have the Gold Editions of Malibu’s Street Fighter comic book woven into your shrine of the Above Times, I will buy them off you for two shiny bits of mirror and a photo of a sunset. 

Standing offer. I await your carrier rat. 

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, 3 Finger Louie: Who would like to apologize for this crappy dedication and also offer you the opportunity to buy a gold-foil special edition of this dedication.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: The 13 Crappiest Demons 🌭

Demons are terrifying. They’re the beating heart of evil manifested on Earth. They’re fucking awesome. Without demons what would our heavy metal album covers be of? Just dragons and tits and dragons with tits and that’s great art but it could be better with a demon riding it. In 1863, Colin De Plancy put together the Dictionnaire Infernal, an exhaustive list of every demon he could find. I know the name “Colin De Plancy” does not exactly shatter the nerve of man, but luckily the version I bought was edited by Diablito Ordo Al Ghoul, a clear demon expert and also how you order a Spicy Loaded Nacho Taco in Abyssal. Obviously when you’re cataloguing every demon, not all of them are going to be winners. So this article is for them – the silly demons, the stupid demons, the demons who get shoved in hell’s lockers. 

Furfur is what an idiot child names their first cat. He’s a flying deer with human pecs and his only enemies are priests with unwavering faith and pickup trucks at night. He only says lies unless he’s locked in a triangle, so he can be defeated with basic shapes and his whole deal is that he really respects the sanctity of marriage. FurFur the Fidelity Elk is less like a demon and more like the least popular character on a Scandinavian Christian cartoon. He understands losing out to Heblokk the Respect Your Elders Raccoon, but OppOpp the Stop Touching Yourself Monkey? OppOpp doesn’t even speak! He just screeches his own name and isn’t allowed to take off his mittens!

Adramelech is a super sick burn on himself: he thinks he’s a peacock, but he’s really a jackass. It’s pretty hard to bleed terror into the hearts of men when your head is a dunk on your butt. He takes care of the other demons’ clothes, no doubt reserving the choicest pantaloon huffs for himself. Wait, fucking really, Assyrians, you burned your children for this guy? What did you get in return, knit ties and culottes? Those better have been some shitty kids. Those better have been OppOpp kids, if you know what I mean. 

Ipes, you look like a drunk Jim Henson sketch. You’re a lion with the head and feet of a goose? The head and feet are the best parts of a lion, and the worst parts of a goose. It’s such a weird turn: Give a lion a goose’s wings and innate hatred, and this world would fall in a day. I have to believe this is a The Fly scenario, where the teleporter accident actually output two monstrosities, and somewhere there’s a goose with the head and claws of a lion just fucking dominating the pond behind the old folks home. 

Also please note Ipes gives ‘audacity’ to men — not bravery. Just gall. He gives you the nerve to unleash ribald quips at cocktail parties, and all it will cost you is your soul and some wet bread.

This is just a bird with a job.

This is your Great President of the Underworld? This guy commands even more legions than the jungle goose? No, Malphas is an old-timey racist British cartoon whose stereotypes have been lost to time. This guy is a union rep in Redwall. This is what replaced Rabbit in the Ukrainian version of Winnie the Pooh. 

Wait, this guy gets control of storms? You’re sure? This guy? He’s made of seventeen different things I don’t want in my kitchen. This looks like something that did a bad job selling mayonnaise in 1960s ad copy. You’re telling me the Thor of the demon world is a naughty salad? 

Look, if there’s a hell I’m definitely going there anyway on account of all the everything I’ve ever done. But I’m actually looking forward to it now. I’m going to wipe the floor with these chumps. I’m going to rule with an iron fist. This is going to be the McDonald’s Play Place debacle all over again, only this time little Madison won’t slip past my guards to tell her precious mommy about the “conditions” in the ball pit. 

I’m not looking at a Great Duke of the Underworld here, I’m looking at a bashful horse boy that is visibly horny in three different ways.

A flying dog isn’t a demon, it’s the plot of one of those Air Bud sequels that only poor children watch. This is a good boy who can get the ball off the roof himself, not an eldritch terror that torments the afterlife. Wait, literal Air Bud up there teaches Women’s Studies and Homicide. They say the key to holding onto a teaching gig is to diversify, so between West African Fiction and Hobo Murder I guess Caacrinolaas is recession proof. 

That Dobby the House Elf looking champion invented frying and the Fourth of July and he has to hold a maintenance job in hell for it? There truly is no justice in God’s wrath. Ukobach, I’m sorry that I called you a crappy demon — and you are; you look like a promenade caricature of Adrien Brody and your demon weapon is “big spoon” — but I would love to call you… friend. I could hang with Ukobach. Shit, I have hung with Ukobach: If he was wearing loud Chef Pants and always had weed, Ukobach is every line cook I’ve ever worked with.

Lechies is a shy neckbeard who buries himself in his oversize hoodie when things get too real. I definitely know Lechies. He kept trying to get me to listen to System of a Down and I wasn’t allowed to be friends with him anymore after we caught him in my sister’s room. He’s just a fat low-confidence goat, no additions, and he murders by non-consensual tickling. He is the infernal king of fleshlight tech support. He’s the demon who tortures you if your death was masturbation-related. You summon Lechies by cracking six RC Colas and saying something incorrect about Babylon 5. 

Buer the mighty demon comes to Earth in the form of a legwheel with a lion face, and his weaknesses are soft punts and shoe costs. Buer can be defeated by just hopping over him on your way to pick up the Holy Water. Imagine ruling amongst the legions of hell and then googling your unholy name to find you’re most famous for being barely an annoyance in Castlevania. Don’t summon Buer unless you need help finding a good butler, a dime bag with no stems, or a spare for your Big Wheel.

Belphegor has big ‘Stepdad the Day After Thanksgiving’ energy. Look at that cranky hellbeast, straining. You just know he calls for you to fetch him toilet paper and then insists you open the door all the way to hand it to him. I love that he has to hold his own tail as he shits, because you know he learned that from experience. He’s the patron demon of astonishing discoveries and donut pillows. You are reading his bio correctly: Belphegor eats shit that you toss him through a hole, so he’s both on a toilet and is a toilet. 

Flaga was just a bewildered dude stuck on a bird. 

No powers, no legions, no weird boons to grant. If you helped him off the bird all he’d give you was his sincere thanks and maybe $20 if he remembered to get cash back at the Fred Meyer before this whole bird incident. 

Leonard. 

The demon. 

By this dark moon I do inquire, of a force most grim and dire. I bring ye forth the blood of child, given here in dark and wild. I revile god and stillborn Christ, I spill my seed upon His Mary. By these bloody graces do I summon… 

Gary.

Fuck you, Leonard. When they asked what infernal title you answered to, you were supposed to think of a cool demon name. Viscikar or Morlax or something — you’re like the asshole that names the band after himself. You could’ve been MOTORPUSSY, Dave Matthews Band, you could’ve been anything. You are a failure of imagination and you deserve to be the official state music of Nebraska. 

Everything about Leonard sucks out loud. He stands like he’s sarcastically cutting the ribbon on a Medieval Times and he has both upper and lower pinkeye. If you summon him on a Sunday he waddles up goose-legged like he’s hitting the coffee shop in comfy pants and slippers. 

If I slit the throat of a lamb on the equinox and Leonard answered I’d pretend like the reception sucked and say I’d call back.

I would not.

I’d let all of his calls go straight to sacrificial voicemail and if he tried texting me I’d look up how to say “who this stop texting my daughter” in Spanish so it seemed like my number changed. 

I’d tell you to eat shit in hell Leonard but that’s kind of the problem here. How about this: Eat Loaded Potato Skins in a Wilmington TGI Friday’s, you fucking Leonard. 

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This article was brought to you by a tip from Alpha Scientist Javo, and by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Brianne Whitney: The demon who teaches English 97 night classes in the annex and commands 73 legions.