Author: Merritt K

I tend to think of the mid-2000s as Peak Edge. After all, that’s the era that brought us Shadow the Hedgehog (the character), Shadow the Hedgehog (the game where a hedgehog shoots people with guns), and Bomberman: Act Zero. Remember when they tried to make an adult, hardcore Bomberman who says cusses? Shadow the Hedgehog remembers. He remembers everything, though there is so much he wishes he could forget… (CUE LINKIN PARK – IN THE END)

But there is truly nothing new under the sun. A decade earlier, edgy darkness was all the rage in the world of comic books thanks to the birth of Image by a disaffected group of artists who left the Big Two houses to start their own publishing company. One with drugs, and guns, and countless pouches, all presumably filled with drugs and/or guns! I tell ya, these Youngblood kids got more pouches than a Toluca Lake trout fisher’s vest, babe.

Grunge was on the airwaves and every comic book character was a chain-smoking, chain-wearing antihero. Spawn was the hottest thing since BoKu. Everybody loved him! It was like Everybody Loves Raymond, except with slightly more nudity and disembowelment. And thus, like a disgruntled protagonist’s cigarette burning through a newspaper headlined “World Doomed, Ineffectual Dogfucker Congressman Says,” the edgy darkness birthed by Image spread across the industry.

DC killed Superman and people were naïve enough to believe it actually meant something! They broke Batman’s back to try and keep up with the MacFarlanes and that’s why people are still doing impressions of a Tom Hardy performance to this day! Lobo was invented as a parody of grizzled fuck-off types and got over as an unironic cool dude! Fucking Lobo, who looked like Gene Simmons went on gear and read a single book on Rastafarianism in his freshmen year at NYU!

But who is the all-time edgiest superhero? Is it Spawn, returned to life by Hell’s infernal might to punish evil? Deadlock, who is Wolverine but also a vampire terrorist? Or Knifetime, whose every use of his blade powers tragically shortens his lifespan?

I think I’ve found the answer. He’s called The Creech.

Created by Greg “What if Batman Was Da Joker and I Guess Also Spawn‘s Whole Look” Capullo in 1997, The Creech only ran for three issues. But hey, he got a MacFarlane action figure, so that’s something.

In plastic he looks like a Resident Evil monster that doesn’t realize why his haircut is offensive, but on the page, The Creech really comes alive as the love child of Omega Red and the Hulk.

The Creech’s powers are large and large. He is the product of a genetic experiment to develop a version of Meatwad from Aqua Teen Hunger Force that can beat ass. But he was created to help mankind, not destroy it.

Or like, to be a tabula rasa or something? He’s half man, half alien, half Biblical Adam, half Creech, all Creech.

Doctor Battu created The Creech for reasons we’ll get into later. But his project was usurped by Dennis Dross and his minion, Bernard Chen. Dross looks like your typical evil ’90s suit. Chen looks like Greg Capullo was in a racism contest with a 1940s Disney animator and won in a stunning upset that was a heartwarming story for underdogs everywhere.

I know that looks bad. But try to remember that it was— wait, I’m reading this again and it says 1997? Huh. Well, Greg was probably a young man who didn’t know any b—

Oh. Well, if it makes you feel any better, Chen isn’t actually evil or anything. He’s just really, really excited about making a bioweapon out of someone else’s clone son.

Battu’s motivations, meanwhile, are less scientific. Haunted by the simultaneous loss of his wife and baby, he has created life in an attempt to make right what once went wrong.

But the public just hates Battu’s work.

What’s that about fetal tissue? Is my dude using stem cells to do his nasty business? Oh, sweet, gentle reader. The Creech comes from the mind that brought us 50% of Batjoker. It’s ever so slightly more twisted than that.

Are you getting the idea?

Here, let’s have Dross spell the whole thing out in a villainous monologue.

Yes, The Creech is a fetus Frankenstein. An abortion Avenger. A pro-choice Punisher. Chris Field is so mad he didn’t come up with this.

In order to make things right with his dead wife, Dr. Battu performed countless abortions and then scooped the medical waste out of the trash and smushed it together into a huge dude-shaped pile. It’s unclear if there was a box the patient had to tick to say they were cool with it or not. Kind of fucked up if there wasn’t. Ever heard of informed consent?

Dr. Battu works for The Agency. Sorry, it’s actually The A.G.E.N.C.Y., because Greg Capullo never saw a hat he didn’t want to adorn with another hat. What I’m saying is that Greg Capullo has the worst case of Hatris I’ve ever seen. The A stands for “Agency”, by the way.

The Creech was the first thing Greg Capullo ever wrote, and it shows. Shoehorning abortion into the story is an amateur’s attempt to make a statement, but The Creech emphatically does not make one, and the implications of its titular character being a fetal chimera are never explored in any way. Greg evidently got bored with the concept almost as soon as he introduced it, since he brings aliens into the mix next.

Battu brings this journalist, Chris Rafferty, into the lab to take pictures of the monster, the aliens, and their spaceship. Chris has one defining characteristic: he won’t shut the fuck up about Walter Cronkite. That’s literally his entire deal.

Chris is the worst. His dream is to be or at least suck off the then-still living Cronkmeister. He believes that getting photos of real aliens will bring him closer to this goal, which, I guess probably it would. Battu gives him a speech about how like, things aren’t real, maybe? We just think they are, or something.

Between this and the abortion stuff, it feels like Capullo took half a semester of Philosophy 101 and decided he’d learned all he’d ever need to know. Not even a good class, either, the kind where you mostly just discuss episodes of The Simpsons because the professor is too busy building a future #MeToo case against himself to bother actually teaching.

Battu’s plan is to “ruin” his clone son’s utility as a living weapon by transferring his mind into its body. Unfortunately, Dross shows up, kills Battu, and captures Rafferty. The Creech, however, escapes. And here I want to take a second to just appreciate how unapologetically, unflinchingly fucking ’90s the graphic design of this comic is.

Hell yeah, dude! You can practically hear the Korn coming off the page.

The best part of The Creech is the wall of text Greg Capullo wrote at the end of each issue. Like, here’s the letter from the first one, where he explains how the whole thing came into being.

I kind of figured it was just a contraction of “creature.” Man, being a white male creative in the ’90s seems like it was the fucking best. Like uh… here’s my new guy, “The Mons.” He’s made out of the medical waste from cosmetic labiaplasties and he is the ultimate weapon of war, unburdened by morality or lengthy refractory periods.

When they successfully clone a pussy biobeast that destroys New Jersey, I will be hailed as a modern Nostradamus.

Some of these letters nearly reach Craig Stormon tier pettiness. In issue two, Greg takes pains to explain why the first one cost $1.95 whereas the second was $2.50.

From there, he launches into a diatribe about how he’s the hardest-working man in comics, how much he despises those who would dare to call themselves his peers, and how he nearly wept at the thought of being asked to take a month off from drawing Todd McFarlane’s spooky devil man.

The attitude of a talented but needlessly confrontational young man. I’m sure Capullo grew out of this whole “bleed for your art, which is drawing pictures of clown monsters that will eventually be portrayed on the silver screen by John Leguizamo” attitude. Back to The Creech, who finds himself the target of a hate crime.

The Creech kills these neo-Nazis and saves a black baby they were trying to do a drive by on. Meanwhile, the aliens have broken out of the lab because they’re somehow connected to our protagonist who, I should mention, has this thing where whenever someone attacks him, he has to kill them or he’s wracked with unimaginable pain.

The climactic sequence that follows is extremely confusing and stupid: the aliens threaten to blow up the world if they don’t get their DNA back, Dross and his goons kill the aliens in the sewers, then The Creech gives the baby to Rafferty and saves the world by interfacing with the alien ship, which he can do, stopping the radio signal causing everyone to believe that nothing is real, which would have otherwise dissolved the planet. Oh, and Dross finally gets the point that the religious guys protesting the Agency were trying to make.

The Creech is a comic that stands as testament to what happens when a visual artist thinks “yeah, I could write my own story,” without knowing anything about narrative or hiring an editor. Thus, we get all kinds of fun Capulloisms, like “breech,” “outa hear,” and “gauged out your eye.” But my favorite is the repeated substitution of “vile” for “vial.” Greg Capullo went three issues never learning how to spell a word that’s central to the story he was slapping together like so many wet abortions.

We close with a touching dedication.

Let me just Google “greg capullo wife” real quick.

Oh, man. Well, let that be a lesson to us all. No one is irreplaceable, least of all Greg Capullo’s collaborators.

Ah whoops! He didn’t grow out of it! He still thinks you need to be willing to die for pictures of the Wolverine!

Here’s something you might not know: I’ve actually written a Marvel comic before! I got $640 for the story and eight-page script. I’m glad I was given the opportunity, and I’m sure artists are rightfully paid more than writers, especially a longtime vet like Greg, but maybe the line from established industry insiders should be more about organizing for better contracts rather than telling young artists to go fuck themselves if they won’t destroy their bodies and lives for the sake of Disney Publishing Worldwide?

So ends The Creech…

…is what I would say if Greg Capullo hadn’t re-launched the comic four years after its initial publication for another three-issue run. So what changed? Well, for one thing, Greg got a copyeditor!

The only notable Nadine Kohler I can find online is a German Instagram model who probably would have been an infant when this comic was written. And that actually checks out. Greg fixed the recurring “vile” issue, but if anything, the typos seem to have gotten worse.

What else? Dross survived being curbstomped Dracula-style because it turns out he’s a member of an alien species called the Proteus which is at war with the other alien species from the first series, who are now called the D’Troden. He wants to clone The Creech to create an army of unstoppable warriors, but he can’t do that while Battu’s consciousness is still in the mix. His true form looks like a big gross bug with stupid hair.

Chris is still obsessed with Cronkite, but he gets two new traits to round him out. First, he has a hot ex-girlfriend who is inexplicably a psychiatrist and a ninja.

I’m sure it goes without saying, but there’s a scene where she apologizes to Chris for running off with a football player years earlier and he tries to act all cool about it.

I doubt this will surprise you either, but for the crime of rejecting his weird dick that stirs only for Cronkite, Cynthia dies at the claws of a bug monster.

The second new thing about Chris? He’s literally the most important person in the world.

See, Chris thinks these guys stalking him are from the Agency, trying to shut him up. But they’re actually time travelers who he sent back from the future to prevent an alien war from destroying the planet, which means The Creech has now also become a Terminator. And in the future, everyone in the resistance will have gouged out one of their eyes, because the aliens replaced them with cyber-eyes that act as surveillance cameras!

I feel like we’ve lost the plot a little. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but can we get back to the weird abortion stuff?

Actually, I’m good.

Anyway, there’s another confusing final sequence where Chris and his future pals clone Dr. Battu but the NRA captures The Creech, then Dross gives a big stupid villain speech about how he orchestrated Dr. Battu’s whole life. There’s a time traveling janitor who is also the baby that The Creech saved in the first series. There’s also a guy named Skimbo. Skimbo, everybody!

Skimbo!

So obviously the Creech gets laser titties and kills Dross.

Unfortunately, the continued existence of The Creech means that The Future Refused to Change.

The end! Greg Capullo never wrote another comic, and I don’t recommend you read this one. If you want a story about a genetically-engineered superhuman in which glowing green viles — I mean vials — play a prominent role, I suggest you check out Cybersix. No abortions, time travel, or aliens, but you do get crossdressing and a banging opening theme out of the bargain.

[Sean, go ahead and delete the whole article because I just saw that issue three of the 2001 run closes with a picture of The Creech draped in an American flag to commemorate 9/11. I retract all comments making fun of The Creech, The Batman Who Laughs, and Greg Capullo’s writing abilities. This image of an abortion cyborg solemnly standing up to defend America against terrorism amidst the burning wreckage of the World Trade Center is the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.]

[No problem. You thinking something like this?]

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