Author: Seanbaby

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The Unofficial Holy Bible for Minecrafters 🌭

There is nothing more Indoor Kid than what we’re looking at today. Someone recreated the Bible, the Holy Bible, in its entirety, using Minecraft. The idea sounds like a homeschooled child’s desperate gambit to play more video games. It’s something you’d come up with if you were a nerd your entire life then suddenly tried to rebrand yourself as “cool” after becoming a youth pastor. And it’s fucking garbage. From concept to finished product, it sucks beyond the scope of God’s forgiveness.

Besides being a clear mockery of the authors’ creator, THE UNOFFICIAL HOLY BIBLE FOR MINECRAFTERS: OLD TESTAMENT: STORIES FROM THE BIBLE TOLD BLOCK BY BLOCK is completely unauthorized. It’s just baaaaarely not in violation of the game’s commercial use guidelines, and should serve as a lesson to all future media companies: include the line “not for use in weird fucking Bibles” in your terms of service. In fact, by continuing on to the Minecraft story of Creation, you consent to these terms.

The Christian universe doesn’t have a complicated origin story, but when it got adapted into Minecraft it got shortened to exactly 16 panels (and 4 of them are blank). And if you’re wondering if this book was the work of inspired artists expressing their passion for Christ using the limitless potential of digital sculpture, look at that weak shit. That gray cube on nothing is how they represented the majesty of the time God made the entire moon. It’s not necessarily terrible, but it’s clearly saying, “If there was a way to do less, I would have, God.” The artist obviously hated doing this and more obviously couldn’t have done a good job if they cared. Let me put it like this: if you were recently fired for being bad at teaching gorillas how to play Minecraft, this would be a D- project by one of your below average students.

This was the moment when God created Woman? This mental patient burying a sex doll? Can you imagine looking at this and thinking, “This is going great. I’m going to stick with it and do the ENTIRE BIBLE.” Even with stakes this low — a book sold exclusively to bad grandparents which will never be opened — this is an embarrassing effort. If this is what I had made and Jesus Christ Himself asked to see how my Minecraft Bible was going, I’d tell him I lost all my files in a masturbation accident.

The dialog isn’t much better than the set design. After Adam and Eve eat from the forbidden tree, they tear their own legs off and whine, “We are going to be in such big trouble!” Why are these naked, grown people talking like babies? I know this is intended for kids, but in what world does that mean every character has the mind of a child? Even Starscream had enough respect for his audience to shriek things like, “You are a coward, Megatron! I should lead the Decepticons!” He didn’t look into the camera and say, “My poo poo is more big boy than his! Clap, clap if I am right!” Wait, sorry, I accidentally undermined my point by making Transformers better.

There really is no better way to tell the story of man’s original sin than the skin of a nude guy stretched across three cubes and telling God, “She did it!” Do you hear that sound? It’s every oil painter in the world whispering a reverent “MINECRAFT” into the barrel of a shotgun. And if you were curious how this book’s crafty artist represented the serpent, they put a Creeper behind a bush and counted on the imagination of Minecraft players to replace the unseen parts of one of history’s most well-known video game enemies with “snake.” It genuinely wouldn’t have been any lazier if the caption said, “Sorry the game didn’t have snakes, and if you’re reading this, God, that’s in many ways on You!”

We all get this is a dumb thing made by untalented assholes who bet three weeks of their life on the idea of how Christians will buy anything. But with Cain and Abel, I think there is a danger in telling the story of the invention of murder using characters in a game where death is cute and meaningless. It’s, I don’t know… it’s like explaining the dangers of misogyny using sound clips from Big Natural Milk-Squirting Sluts. It gets the message across, but does it? Anyway, let’s skip ahead to the end of the Cain and Abel story.

T-that’s the end? God gave them Emo Peter Pan as a replacement son, bye? Is this book even accurate? It’s been awhile since I’ve read the non-Minecraft Bible, but I don’t remember the story of Cain and Abel being two things long and one of them was Eve giving birth to a teenage Seth in front of a makeshift Arby’s. Oh, good. The next part is Noah’s Ark. I remember this one:

Honestly, when I first realized this book wasn’t kidding, the first thing I considered was how much effort it would take to do Noah’s Ark. I thought about the undertaking it would be to build every animal out of 3D blocks and the scale at which you’d have to do it. And then I turned to page 23 and saw Noah only rounded up the five farm animals that come included in Minecraft. This isn’t storytelling. This is a tedious expression of how you gave up on joy. If the Walls of Jericho stand for ten thousand more years, the children of God will never come up with a more stupid or slothful way to spread His word. If anyone reading this makes a bubble gum that tastes like the cry of the Israelites, you can put this quote on the packaging: “Absolutely not the worst Bible adaptation! – The Internet’s Seanbaby.”

When you read in an ordinary Bible how God tells Noah to put two of every animal on a boat so He can safely kill everything with a flood and restart the Earth with the incest set to max, it seems reasonable. To me, at least. But when you see that story play out in video game form, it doesn’t quite resonate the same. Watching this guy try to save all of Earth’s animals and seeing how all he does is lure a couple pigs into every five-year-old’s first Minecraft barn… it doesn’t look like he’s doing God’s will. Presented this way, it just looks like some old farmer lost his goddamn mind.

There are a few other stories that don’t translate well into Children’s Video Game…

Sodom and Gomorrah is no longer a city of hedonism, but a… what are we looking at? A summer camp for cranky baboons? A parade of peanuts marching at an anti-kindness rally? One of them is really letting Abraham have it with, “God shmod!” If a child made this, their loving parent might brag, “My oldest is so talented!” which is just the misdirect part of the joke before they add, “…his younger brother, on the other hand, is a do-nothing piece of shit who plays Christian Minecraft all da– no, don’t ask. You don’t want to know.”

These nude peanut monsters appear later in the book when they jealously tear off Joseph’s dream coat and throw him down an eighty foot hole. This is unrelated to the prison he gets thrown in for not sleeping with Potiphar’s wife. Stripped of all doctrine, context, narrative, and dignity, then illustrated with cubes, these stories really don’t make a lot of sense. For instance, the rest of this story is about Joseph taking a job as a prison dream interpreter.

I have no notes here. I love that the prison guards let the baker keep his costume. I love how dreaming about birds on your head means you’re going to die in jail. I love the baker’s sad body language when he hears and believes this terrible news. Pausing the Bible to let Chef Boyardee know he’s never getting out of prison is exactly the type of story meant to be told with Minecraft blocks. Ten out of ten.

Look, I don’t know if there’s a good way to illustrate the Angel of Death killing the firstborn of every Egyptian using only Minecraft. But I do know you can’t do worse than this. It’s the bare minimum of design required to say “this is a house” and a figure skating cookie trying its best. This book can’t be serious. If your school assignment was to draw a city and an Angel of Death, and you turned this in, the note from your teacher would read, “HEY, I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE EITHER, YOU SARCASTIC LITTLE FUCK.”

THE UNOFFICIAL HOLY BIBLE FOR MINECRAFTERS: OLD TESTAMENT: STORIES FROM THE BIBLE TOLD BLOCK BY BLOCK is at its best when the text describes the scope and glory of God’s might under a screenshot of a simple idiot’s half-finished diorama. Here, I’ll show you:

Whatever this is rules. To tell everyone to behold the power of the Lord and then show them this completely rules. It’s like 2000 years of sacred teachings were only put here to create the context for this perfect Moses comedy routine.

This “it’s a head on a box but please imagine it’s actually something else” art technique is used all through the book, like when Abraham’s wife gives birth to this moustached refrigerator. Look at this fucking 500 pound terror golem. Can even the most devoted Christians suspend their disbelief this much? It’s like the artist watched someone die in an iron lung and thought, “You know, if you squint your eyes, really squint, it kiiiiiind of looks like a newborn baby!”

Sometimes these hacks don’t even bother trying. Like when God punished Pharaoh with a plague of frogs, they didn’t build a bunch of frogs out of blocks and zoom out. Instead, they showed a picture of Pharaoh looking out the window and explaining to the reader he sees frogs. Like in the movie Jurassic Park where they hold on Sam Neill’s face for 40 minutes and the voiceover says, “Sam Niell is surprised to see dinosaurs. He’s looking right at dinosaurs right now. What has Man done, he probably thinks.” Wait, hold on, is the edge of that tree supposed to be the frog plague? Never mind, I stand corrected.

Most of the books of the Bible are cut down to three or four pages of unrelated screenshots and nonsensical, half-remembered plot points, but sometimes they indulge in a long action scene, like when Samson beats the shit out of a cheetah for two pages. He carries it around, breaks it over his leg, climbs on top of it to taunt it, and piledrives it ass-erect into the ground. Then it… turns into a beehive and he pulls honey out of its butthole? Whoa, I don’t remember any of this from Sunday school.

There’s probably some kind of symbolism in this. Slamming a monster so hard until it stands erect and then eating something sweet out of its ass? I’m starting to see the appeal of Christian theology. Anyway, look at the intrigue that happens later in the same story:

This Samson scene demonstrates the kind of adorable minimalist storytelling they could have been doing this entire time. Look at their little conspiratorial lean! The thoughtfulness in the camera angle and architecture! Something about watching a super ripped guy suck honey out of an asshole really inspired these creators. And to be fair, this also isn’t a bad whale:

Unfortunately, most of the Jonah whale story takes place inside the whale and these authors weren’t about to try to draw this giant damn thing a second time but inside out. So instead of getting swallowed, in the Minecraft version of the story, Jonah sits patiently inside the whale’s gaping mouth for three days.

Look, drawing the interior of a whale’s digestive system must be hard. Whenever I ask someone to do it they say no because their NSFW commissions aren’t open, whatever that means. But Jonah is just sitting there. What are you doing!? Move fifteen feet in any direction, Jonah! What’s the goal here? Are you hoping you’ll die and St. Peter will say, “Hey, there he is! Guys, look who’s here! Earth’s most cooperative leviathan hostage! Ha ha, how’d you figure out we were using Pointless Whale Mouth Patience as a standard to measure morality?” Oh no, this is crazy. All this shit I’m typing is crazy. I don’t think THE UNOFFICIAL HOLY BIBLE FOR MINECRAFTERS: OLD TESTAMENT: STORIES FROM THE BIBLE TOLD BLOCK BY BLOCK is good for my mental health. Maybe let’s turn to one last random page and see if it gets less ins–

aiiieEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!

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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Eric Spaulding: who has cast out that vile ender dragon, Satan, and rejects the vile temptations of The Nether!

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Golden Age Comics: Lash Larue 🌭

In 1949, Hollywood star Lash Larue, King of the Bullwhip, got his own comic book. And for twelve years, he and his whip tamed the frontier! Do you think you would have had what it takes to do that? Now you can find out! I selected over 700 hair-raising, cliff-hanging moments from some of Lash’s greatest adventures. See if you would have handled things the same way!

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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Eric Spaulding: Who has personally taken 863 medically significant conks and can still work a spoon!

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! 🌭

In 2005, using only Comic Sans and a questionable sense of reality, Katharine DeBrecht wrote a book about her dodgy conservative values for kids. She called it Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed! and it retailed for $15.95.

The back cover’s first blurb came from Melanie Morgan, a radio host who, let me look her up… said a New York Times reporter deserved the gas chamber, accused Barack Obama of being a Muslim, threatened to kill Nancy Pelosi, and said George Soros worked with the Nazis “in order to further his own career.” And speaking of working with Nazis to further careers, Katharine Debrecht has used every shameless, MAGA culture war trigger word she could think of to promote herself, and she has 13 followers on Twitter and two on Facebook.

So look, if you’re new to this, being “conservative” means you live in a world too complicated for you, so you simply refuse to believe in all the confusing parts, replacing them in your imagination with crazy shit you hate, while also demanding everyone take you serio– you know what? You get it. I don’t need to spend all this time explaining a thing you already know. Besides, I can sum up Conservatism in one word: windmill safety. *windmill safety. Sorry, autocorrect kept changing my punchline from “whitesupremacy.”

Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed! is about Tommy and Lou, two small town, Chrstian, hardworking, great American boys. If this was a movie, book, TV show, video game, or any other media produced in the last 150 years, you would have no doubt in your mind they and their town hid a dark secret. Katharine says Tommy and Lou are good little boys whose only flaw is sometimes they pray a little too fast. You know who talks like that? A woman who isn’t mentioning a third son getting the sin whipped out of him at gay camp, or the many village daughters given to The Man In The Well. If you’re looking for the perfect tone for the opening of a story about a cute small town that eats outsiders, ask any conservative “baseball mom” to describe her idea of Perfectville, USA.

Tommy and Lou want a swingset for their yard, and their loving mother tells them to go fucking buy one. She does this while standing right next to their living room portrait of Ronald Reagan, and I know decoding symbolism in right wing cartoons is like putting diarrhea back into a cat, but telling your children, “I’m keeping all the money and you can go fuck yourself,” is actually a really elegant way to explain Reaganomics to kids.

Luckily, the good little boys are resourceful and clever. They saw their mother point to a lemon tree, tell them to make lemonade, and it gave them an idea: offering her to The Man in the Well to bargain for their lost sisters. Then they had a second, better idea: asking God to pleasemakeSpanishillegal, inJesusChrist’snameAmen. Then, after seven more outrageous joke ones, it hit them: lemonade!

“We’ll make lemonade and sell it!” Tommy spelled out. It wasn’t a complex idea, but the boys had it for hours. They had it all day, and nearly had it past their bedtime. If they weren’t such good little boys, they might be awake still, just having the shit out of the idea to make lemonade and sell it. Anyway, after passing out with all that capitalism adrenaline in their veins, Tommy and Lou each dream the same 34 page (I had to count because there aren’t page numbers) political cartoon.

The boys find themselves in Liberaland, an assault of mixed messages and nonsensical parody. You can tell the artist has picked a side in a culture war, but it’s not clear why or what the win conditions could be. I’m sure Katharine DeBrecht thinks she became the way she is for logical reasons, and I’m sure she has strongly wrong opinions about any wedge issue that turns up on her Facebook feed, but her mind is an empty toilet where grifters dump their propaganda.

When left with the wide open topic of “stuff liberal people do that sucks,” she couldn’t come up with a single coherent criticism. Is it decadent wealth? Discount prices? Working together? Eating Dean’s cream? This picture requires six years of right wing radicalization to even know what she’s referencing and four more to learn why you hate them. And it’s meant to indoctrinate kids? Their skulls aren’t soft enough for this Boomer shit. Here, young boy, enjoy this pun about a talking point used to explain to grandparents how the ACLU will take away churches. If I was six I would assume this was a coffee table book of bad kidnapper tattoos.

Let’s skip ahead a little bit. Their lemonade stand is a success!

The dumb fucking idiot kids can’t read or write, but they’re amazing lemonade chefs and even better businessmen. The town loves their lemonade stand. “Not too sweet!” they scream as they fill the street, blindly wandering into traffic in every direction. I’m not sure how the kids keep their overhead so low when they’re giving away $1.36 worth of glassware with every 25ï¿  purchase, and I get these are a lot of notes, but I think it’s interesting the author of this book doesn’t know how children, alphabets, lemonade, sidewalks, economics, or streets work. And here this dingbat is, writing a blueprint for navigating all of life.

At this point you might be wondering how these children are the good guys. They’ve turned a public street into a non-stop lemonade riot and they did it for money. Sure, that’s fine. Noble even, but Tommy and Lou also champion the most conservative of all values. No, not drinking your liberal tears. No, not fucking your feelings. No, not measuring skulls with calip– look, if you’re not going to take this seriously, stop guessing. I’m talking about social welfare, of course. In order to make these free market capitalist boys the heroes of this story, the deranged right wing author has them set aside $1.75 to buy shoes for local “kids with no shoes.”

It’s sort of sweet, but should they be doing this? Wouldn’t those shoeless children love their shoes more if they worked for them? I can’t remember which book I read that in.

Now that the boys are successful, a liberal tax lover leaps from behind a tree. “Hellllloo,” he says, touching himself with his meaty hands while he gazes at their money. These are the author’s words, not mine. One of the cool things about being me is I know “fat Democrat jerks off on little boys’ lemonade stand money” isn’t quite right for a children’s book.

The kids, who I mentioned earlier are total fucking idiots, have never heard of taxes. The mayor explains it’s money we give to liberals so they can take care of us, which is a perfectly right wing way to describe something in that it’s kind of not “wrong,” except when you think about it in any way. It’s basically a reworded version of, “I’m exhaustingly uneducated except for conservative talking points and I refuse to apply nuance to anything other than every man’s sexual misconduct charges.”

Ha ha ha the mayor levitates away with their money screaming, “Boo-yah!”

Is the villain supposed to be fun? What a strange and amazing decision from the mind of a truly impenetrable writer.

There’s something I should have mentioned by now. In this vivid and very long dream, the boys are full-time, around-the-clock lemonade men now. Their entire day is running the lemonade stand and their entire night is squeezing lemons. And while they are doing their late night lemon squeezing, they see the man who robbed them come on the TV to announce he is going to take their shoe charity money and spend it on, what’s this? D-dustpans!?

So we all get the criticism this is trying to make– liberals are crazy wrong! They don’t understand shoes like good boys! But what events took place that made Katharine think this? When you’re taking a stand against a thing no one would ever want to do and you have to imagine it inside a child’s dream for it to take place, maybe you don’t need to have this fight? Maybe your enemies don’t exist? This isn’t even my field of expertise, but I can think of a few ways unregulated charities run by children could go wrong. Until I saw this book, I would have assumed anyone could have.

So okay, the book made its point, right? Leave the free market alone and trust in the eventual generosity of the wealthy. Without opening a browser, I’m 98% sure it’s a bad idea, but it’s not like any kid ever read this. I’m just glad this lesson on taxes is over and an author this stupid and clumsy didn’t try to tackle any of the more delicate cultural divides in our country.

Ha ha ha, holy fuck.

Alright, so the kids wanted to thank Jesus Christ for the gift of, and I quote, “Mom and Dad let[ting] them stay up one hour later to squeeze lemons.” So they hang a picture of Him on their lemonade stand, which causes a second liberal to appear. This one is part snake and he tells them the Jesus offended a man in a limousine and now they have to hang a picture of a big toe instead, because conservative grievances are extremely real. To any kids reading, it’s like this: we all know snake men won’t really come in and replace your God with feet, but how dare the liberals try to send snake men in to replace your God with feet! This is why your mommy and daddy are mad all the time, pal, and why you had to watch one of them die on a respirator over FaceTime.

You might have seen this one coming. Hillary Clinton shows up next. She yells at the kids for not following health codes and tells them they have to use less sugar and include a side of broccoli with their lemonade. Again, this is a child’s dream in a book by a maniac, but what’s the ultimate stand being taken here? I don’t think you should trust anyone fighting so irrationally for their right to put whatever they want in your drink. Katharine desperately struggled to come up with a circumstance where “inalienable freedom of drink ingredients” was a smart idea and I would argue she did not find one.

In a series of analogies too graceless to be of any use, the insane politicians have destroyed the lemonade stand. They have turned it into a permanent press conference, but also an overpriced health food stand, but also a socialist commune, but also now their property. There is no longer any messaging and the best case scenario here is that a young reader learns all liberals are mentally ill because they’re crazy. What a waste of $15.95 when you could do the same thing by choking your child to sleep every night from behind a Jimmy Carter mask.

This is a kid’s book, and we’re now twelve pages into an extended satirical argument against business regulations. It’s like Katharine got fired for sneezing into a salad bar and then arrested for starting a fake charity and a voice in her head spent her entire prison sentence explaining how it’s actually the universe that’s wrong and she needs to tell the kids.

Oh my god, it’s still going. Broccoli and dustpans litter the liberal dystopia and I think one of the kids is dead? I feel like whatever political debate was going on was beaten to death half a book ago. I get not everyone is going to agree on how much lawlessness it takes to make the best lemonade, but anyone taking a side in the battle at this point is nuts. Have your wasteland of unsweetened broccoli lemonade. Or your kids running a fake shoe charity scheme endorsed by Jesus. No one cares. Kids, if you think the author is right about those being the two sides of a thing, I have bad news about your piece of shit brain and how hard your life is going to be for you.

Tommy and Lou both wake up from their identical dream, and sure enough, after 34 pages, they never found an opportunity to get the remaining money in their SHOÆŽ FUND to those shoeless children. I’m not saying it was a scam the whole time, I’m just saying in a wild fantasy designed specifically to showcase the superiority of conservative ideals, our heroes were defeated by enemies who don’t and will never exist and broke a sacred promise they made to destitute children for 87ï¿ . Or the author forgot, but that’s silly. Everyone’s right to give money to charity seemed so central to her anti-liberal beliefs.

Lou’s takeaway from the dream was, “Fuck everything if liberals exist, man.” And the lesson Tommy learned was, “No, brother. We must grind our bones on the mill of capitalism.” And maybe they were both a little bit right because the book ended with them getting right back to work, “like the good little conservatives they were.”

Has the phrase “like the good little conservatives they were,” ever followed something positive? It sounds like something you’d only say after, “They explained to black athletes how they were wrong. . .” or “They sure had a lot to say about transgender people using the bathroom. . .“

I just feel like any sane author would have proofread this and said, “Oh no, I forgot to have a point or a plot or a lesson. Oh no, I think my entire ideology is morally bankrupt. Honey! Honey, I reread my book and saw the reflection of my beliefs and I… I might be a soulless moron! What? What do you mean, you know!?”

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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Dr. Awkward: who only uses their meaty hands to steal from the children of lapsed Catholics.

Categories
PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: Dirtbag Jeopardy! 🌭

On today’s very special roboquiz edition of The Dogg Zzone 9000, we invite back friend-of-the-🌭 and host of the Secretly Incredibly Fascinating Podcast with Alex Schmidt, Alex Schmidt!

The rules are simple: Brockway and actual-Jeopardy!-champ Schmitty face off in a game of Jeopardy! reprogrammed by Seanbaby in the Weiner 2600, only they’re not facing off, many of the rules have been changed, and the stakes could spell doom for all of us. It’s not simple at all! Listen here, or wherever you fart-sound, arooga your earholes, ba-boing sliiiiide whistle!

After the show, Patreon hot dog champions and better can listen to the bonus podcast featuring Seanbaby and Alex really struggling with an action-packed episode of That Guy From Airwolf. It’s all games today, so if you like fun: subscribe and review! Slide whistle us on Fart Sound!

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The Shield 🌭

Last month of this very year, Archie Comics published The Mighty Crusaders #1: The Shield. It was a lifeless reboot of a 60-year-old knockoff superhero team, which isn’t as mean-spirited as it sounds since that describes most comics, but the reason we’re talking about it is because it was written and illustrated by Rob Liefeld. And it may very well be the most Liefeldian thing ever made, which is absolutely as mean-spirited as it sounds.

If you’re not familiar, Rob Liefeld was a comics illustrator from the ’90s who could sort of draw a few human parts and nothing else. Everyone noticed this, talked about it, and hated it, but they just kept letting him do it and here we are. The Shield’s second page shows a group of superheroes who look like they were mocked up this morning under the words “The Pinebrook Nazarene Youth Camp Super Duper Squad (Option Four).”

It’s okay if you don’t know the classic Archie heroes Flygirl, Captain Commando, Jaguar, Black Hood, Comet, Fox, and Lancelot Strong. They don’t do anything in this issue other than stand here hiding their difficult-to-draw feet behind their (maybe) office’s only furniture– a rectangle drawn by a 4th grader learning how to draw shapes. One hallmark of Rob Liefeld’s writing is that every character gets one small text box explaining which superhero archetype they are, no second part to this list, and then the comic gets cancelled.

Let’s talk about superhero archetypes for a second. Comic writers have been using them as shorthand for decades, and we’re fine with it. A character in a third party superhero world might run into a “clearly Batman guy” or “whatever their Fantastic Four is.” We don’t need to know everything about them; they’re just there to establish the setting so the author can show us his unique take on the genre. Rob Liefeld doesn’t do it like that. He thinks his idea of an 85th Captain America guy with no interesting twist totally rules. The Shield isn’t even his first “exactly like Captain America guy.” He was so good at drawing Captain America he produced a comic called Fighting American, who was a guy in a Captain America costume who carried a round shield.

The Fighting American had a team just barely not called The Avengers with a guy named Smash who turned into a giant monster when he got angry and a viking god of thunder who doth verily spaketh like this. You probably believe me, but I feel like I should make it clear I’m not kidding:

If you’re wondering how they got away with this, they mostly didn’t. They were sued and Fighting American was legally prohibited from throwing his shield which didn’t matter because the company went bankrupt and Rob created another Captain America called Agent America which also didn’t matter because lawyers told him to stop fucking making Captain Americas. Every entertainment industry blindly regurgitates the same idea over and over hoping it will work again, but it’s rare to see this pathology in one specific person. Which brings us back to The Shield, the (at least) fourth Captain America Rob Liefeld illustrated. 

The Shield is in his (maybe) apartment, sitting alone on his rectangle. A hot dog menu levitates? Rob Liefeld, without exaggeration, one of the biggest successes in modern art and he has remained incurious about how to draw any single thing in 30 years. This chair’s existence is very much like if Richard Donner asked a makeup artist which side the camera things film from.

Because art is life, this world-famous illustrator drew The Shield watching a panel of himself from later in the comic on his TV. He lives in a cement box decorated with only a shape and a lamp, and yet even this was too much clutter for Rob to remember to draw the levitating hot dog menu.

Agents wearing the kind of shoulder pads Rob knows how to draw burst in through The Shield’s open window and knobless door! Chunks from unrelated objects follow them in! They’re here for his invincible armor and, wait did they say invincible armor, oh no, that explains why none of their weapons are going to work.

In stakes Rob Liefeld seems to think are high, these faceless agents from an organization we don’t know harmlessly shoot the superhero for reasons not made clear. He barely has to move to beat them, which is good because Rob thinks he knows how a human arm connects to a torso at this one angle. He’s wrong, but my main point is this isn’t storytelling. It’s something a bored nerd would look down at during Algebra class and not really remember drawing.

Rob seems to have lost track of shit himself. The Shield brags about how he is super duper like his suit, explains to the reader how no he’s not, then headbutts and punches through everyone’s helmets with what is clearly super duper strength. Maybe? We’re not told what their hats are made of. They’re not quite motorcycle or SWAT helmets– they’re more like what you’d draw if you were an untalented artist falling off a bridge and almost had time to draw one last human head. Anyway, over the course of five pages of low effort storyboards for a Ugandan kung fu movie, we are told and shown several contradictory things about our main character while learning nothing about anything. It’s magnificent. If you showed this to the kindest comics editor in the world, they would say, “Tell the kid who drew this they should maybe be a fucking dentist.”

This goddamn fight is still going. He punches one guy so hard they leave the confinement of his 3000 square foot cement box apartment and land on a Frank Miller spatter paint background. If you were to interpret this as real art, you’d say it was revealing something about a dark brutality within this hero. But it’s not that. This art says nothing more than “I didn’t know how to draw The Shield’s love seat from the side.”

Jesus Christ, he is still handing out this one-sided beating while he thinks the Wikipedia entry for The Shield to himself.

After maiming whoever these men were, he rides one of them out the window. It’s not clear what floor he’s on, but his building is a mid-century cement rectangle in the city’s Gray Nothing District. There’s something more amazing happening here, though. Rob Liefeld is known for his reluctance to draw feet, and it’s almost genius how he managed to hide The Shield’s feet three different times on a single page. He had to savagely murder one cop(?) to do it, but there it is– a master at work.

It’s not over! The Shield gets shot a few times by a Pictionary drawing that was going to be a helicopter, so he leaps up onto it. Which means, wait, mounted aircraft guns don’t even jostle him? And they sent in eight(?) dudes in egg carton helmets to take him down with small arms? Holy shit, do I know more about helicopters than Rob Liefeld?

I’m being silly. Rob Liefeld knows parts of the helicopter I couldn’t even conceive of. Like how The Shield is clinging to the helicopter’s… I guess you’d call it its dorsal fin? Then he reaches into the windshield, pulls out its important wires, and raises them up above his head. I have no notes about raising your hands while you’re on a moving helicopter’s windshield and can’t think of a single very specific thing Rob Liefeld is forgetting about helicopters.

You know what? This all seems weirdly familiar like I’ve seen it before. And not in the usual Rob Liefeld way. I mean a Captain America guy spending entire pages beating the fuck out of a room full of government(?) agents… that’s from Civil War, the extremely popular Marvel comics event they based a billion dollar film on. Here, I’ll show them side-by-side:

The similarities end there, though. It’s not like in Civil War, Captain America jumped out the window and punched through the windshield of a helicopter. It was a jet.

Obviously I’m not accusing internationally known haver-of-original-ideas, Rob Liefeld, of plagiarism. There are still some major differences between these two sequences. For instance, The Shield was attacked in his apartment and Captain America wasn’t. But wait, oh no, I just remembered Luke Cage’s scene in Civil War.

Oh fuck, I think that rectangle graveyard might have even been Rob trying to draw Luke Cage’s couch from a less interesting angle. So look, maybe it wasn’t on purpose that Rob Liefeld did a shot-for-shot ripoff of one of the most well-known comic events of the last fifteen years. But whether he knew it or not, something inside him said, “Let’s do exactly the thing everyone saw, only again, and worse in every way. Again.”

Oh, this must have saved him a few minutes. The page after the helicopter crash is just a The Shield pin-up.

Since it’s just a quick sketch of The Shield standing near the color orange, Rob has to explain in the text box that he is searching through the wreckage of his tenth(?) recent murder “for survivors.” If you’re wondering if it’s normal for a comic to do this -describe all the action because it’s faster than drawing it- no, it’s not.

Another hallmark of Rob Liefeld’s art is frantic nonsense instead of anatomy or design. It’s why the plain concrete walls of The Shield’s building have random cracks and bricks(?) every few feet, or why his indestructible costume suddenly has a bunch of super cool battle damage. Wait, oh yeah, fuck, indestructible costume. Well, no worries, they can add a text box explaining it has, I don’t know, “limits” and “self-repairing nanites” now. What I’m getting at is that Rob Liefeld will rewrite an entire character and his origin story if it gets him out of forty seconds of work.

The comic ends with all the superheroes voting to kill The Shield including this lady version of a Captain America guy. Like many Rob Liefeld drawings, it’s hard to tell if Dusty Simmons, “former boy detective current Crusaders liaison,” is three feet tall or if Rob’s brain made some kind of mistake during its understanding of perspective. It probably doesn’t help that they are standing on nothing in a dimension made only of primordial America.

There’s one more thing to talk about. Obviously, I’d never claim a comic was Maximum Liefeldian without another important aspect of Rob Liefeld’s work: petty, stupid behind-the-scenes drama that leads to him leaving the project.

Apparently, Rob was furious when an alternate cover by Tone Rodriguez was “leaked.” It revealed the surprise that would have shocked The Shield’s longtime fans*! A version of The Shield from the future, a big gun-carrying one, was going to come back to the current The Shield’s time! That’s right, the guy known for creating Cable and also the same things over and over, created Cable again!

* ha ha

What’s great is that an image of Old Gun The Shield was already being circulated in promotions for the comic for months. And the first page of this issue I’m talking about, the very first page, has a picture of him, battle-damaged indestructible suit and all:

It’s not a sudden twist at the end! Even assuming you had any expectations for whatever the fuck a The Shield story might be, knowing an old time-traveling version of him was going to show up only spoils the brief moment between picking up the comic and opening it. And Rob Liefeld quit over it! That’s like walking off the set of Transmorphers 2 because the first one’s DVD box told everyone it was 86 minutes long. There is nothing more Rob Liefeld than abandoning a knockoff Captain America comic after drawing eight lazy splash pages, one foot, and even fewer backgrounds. Even trying to imagine something more Liefeldian would risk shattering our reality and L-Liefeld Liefeld Rob Liefeld Liefeld. Liefeld. Rob Liefeld.

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PODCASTING DAY

Podcasting Day: The Human Tornado 🌭

In 1976, Rudy Ray Moore made the perfect film. He took everything he learned from Dolemite, forgot it, added tits, refused to do anything that wasn’t fun, doubled the tits, and the result was a kung fu art film about a male prostitute superhero called The Human Tornado. It rules.

We discuss its intentional successes and its accidental successes with our own Lydia Bugg, who had never seen it until the night before recording this. She loved it! Who wouldn’t!? Listen to it here or wherever you like to Dogg Zzone. Also, as you know, rattlesnakes have bit us and crawled off and died, and it helps our podcast if you motherfucking like and subscribe.

Because there’s no wrong way to discuss The Human Tornado, Seanbaby designed an Action Question Quiz to test Robert and Liddy’s Human Tornado quote quotient. It is fun and it’s fierce because we are cool and we’re steady, and if you’d like to play the home version, fucking scroll down already.