Category: NERDING DAY
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Malibu Comics was a 1990s imprint that specialized in ripping off better comic books without ever reading them. For example, their Wolverine knockoff was called The Ferret and they were only joking if you asked them “wait, are you joking?” A typical Malibu title made it to three issues before ending in a profuse apology and a hand-drawn coupon you could exchange for a better try next time.
Today we’re talking about the second iteration of Firearm, which started off as counterfeit Punisher and then became something… more? Less? Hornier, that’s the word I’m looking for. Firearm made it to the end of its epic 5-issue run though, so everyone at the Malibu offices got a personal pan pizza. Don’t worry: We were still owed and did receive several apologies.
The core story of Firearm is wildly unimportant: It’s a brainwashing deal where a superspy for one agency is, unbeknownst to himself, actually just a cover working for a rival agency. It’s the plot of the third episode of the tenth La Femme Nikita reboot on TBS. Alias would spice this up with something about Donatello’s Grail. You would change the channel on this unless Nic Cage showed up in an unusual wig. We’re not concerned with the plot, we’re concerned with the character dynamics.
It’s been said that you really only need one personality trait to make a truly great character – that was said by Malibu writers right before apologizing for getting canceled again. Let’s meet our protagonist, Peter Lopez – can you spot all one aspects of his character?
Our hero is a glum sadsack with a gorgeous and supportive wife, trapped in the rippling body of an adonis, his every inch covered in high tech weaponry. Pity him. “If I don’t contact my friends first, we’d never talk again,” he mutters, cyberblasting a city block with his atomic eye. I don’t know who greenlit What If Eeyore was the Punisher? but that’s one of those ideas like anal sex or renting a jetski that’s exactly as much fun as it sounds.
Here’s Peter’s first day on the job:
He thinks he probably shouldn’t stand in front of an obviously trapped door, doesn’t believe in himself about it, and eats lasers for his lack of self confidence. The very first thing he says to the man trying to kill him is “be careful of my soft parts I do NOT have superpowers,” then gives up on a fistfight midway through to instead mope about losing. How does he turn it around? Well, Firearm ran in the early 1990s, back before we learned the hard way it wasn’t awesome when you pushed a useless sadsack so far they snapped.
Peter accidentally burns a man with superpowers he never knew he had; his immediate impulse is to apologize. Then he decides no, you know what? For the first time since he held the door open too early and that old woman had to jog the last few steps into the Red Robin – he’s NOT sorry. With all the righteous fury of a thousand Mormons, he declares he’s not putting up with this CRUD any longer, puts a quarter in the Almost Swear Jar, then goes ballistic.
Brigham Youngblood’s berserker rage doesn’t last long. Here he is, pitying himself again for not-
For holy shit, for not taking a Junior High school girl’s virginity?? I don’t care if he meant “when I was also in Junior High” – an implication he has done nothing to earn – this is not a normal deathbed regret for a grown man with a wife and child.
Anyway, he finds time to pity himself once more before exploding.
That should be the end. And in a typical Malibu title, it would be. There’d be a black textbox pre-emptively blaming the audience for not liking the first issue and then an apology for the rude textbox on the next page. This is a self-contained story so far: Man sucks, dies. It should be the PSA they show superpowered children teaching them the first step to heroism is believing in yourself. But no, he lived through the blast.
Don’t worry, nobody hates that more than Peter.
Let’s cut straight to his wife calling him a sissy:
Peter wakes in the middle of the night, unsure of who he is but instantly sure his wife doesn’t like to be naked near him. The explosion reawakened his real identity, James Hitch, a psychotic badass buried underneath 210 pounds of insecurity muscle.
Hitch comes complete with a brand new Hitachi to satisfy his brand new wife, and a brand new name: Firearm. Hitch is everything Peter is not, here he is proving that:
He walks away from an explosion, threatening passing coyotes who better not even think about learning English. Hitch infiltrates Peter’s agency, kills a dozen men, and steals some kind of prototype. Now Peter and Hitch have to work together just to survive! I can’t even imagine a way to make you care about that- wait, Nic Cage in an unusual wig.
We’re only talking about Firearm because they’re doing Double Impact! But in one body! They’re doing long lost twins meet and are total opposites but find they have to work together, only they share the same dick. They share the same dick! THEY SHARE THE SAME-
You’re just not reading a Malibu comic unless the first issue ends with an admission they didn’t tell the story very well, and then some light begging for another chance. It’s a bold tactic they use for everything from storytelling to third date sex to ad copy.
Malibu kindly includes a “back-up story” in case the first story doesn’t work out, and I guess it doesn’t, because they felt the need to include a back-up story: Alec Swan is a hardass private detective giving LA a Yelp review while mangling henchmen (unrelated).
Kids! We know we let you down with the confusing Firearm, Issue #1, but… but do you want to know more about Alec Swan’s feelings on frozen yogurt? Come back in two weeks!
Disappointed? Don’t be!
The next issue sees him coming around on frozen yogurt!
Haha I thought I was kidding!
It turns out this killing spree was all to get some compromising photos of a woman’s husband for a divorce. You know, the basis of every private detective’s career – which they usually accomplish with a camera, killing zero people, earning possibly $200 if there’s embarrassing roleplay. The only thing this whole back-up story accomplishes across five issues is Alec Swan coming around on fro-yo and becoming medium-okay with the Mexicans in his neighborhood.
Alec Swan is maybe also Firearm? The first version of Firearm, who was a non-superpowered Punisher knock-off that killed superheroes. So I guess he quit killing superheroes to become a private eye and lent his identity to a different murderer, who himself lent his body to a coward. Confused? Don’t be! Just go ahead and don’t be.
The spy agency discovers Peter/Hitch’s treachery thanks to the one thing you can never cover up: your high school yearbook. I don’t know why I’d be kidding about that but it feels like you think I might be-
They convened a meeting of the top brass to assess the authenticity of every “have a great summer” in Jefferson High’s Thanks for the Memories, 1982. This is the thrilling storytelling you can only get from two issues and a sorry of Malibu Comics!
Wait, what was up with Peter having fire arms (fuck you) when Hitch doesn’t? Malibu is glad you asked:
Curious? Don’t be!
This is actually a great try for Malibu, and I would’ve redeemed one of my apology coupons from Exiles for this – but we haven’t even gotten to the core of Firearm. Which is the intense homoerotic dynamic between Peter and Hitch…
While living in the same body. They share the same dick! And they both want it! They share the same dick! THEY SHARE THE SAME-
I’m getting carried away.
The implied metaphor, if I was being so generous as to credit a Malibu comic with having a metaphor, is that Peter is having a gay awakening. But out of attraction for himself? And I guess he’s also being dominated by another man, so he’s a psychic sub within his own body?
Aroused? Don’t be!
Because we’re not done yet, this love story goes triangular when both men fall in love with Peter’s wife, and then folds itself through the 4th dimension when she in turn falls for both men-
Hitch throws Marilu a fuck at first just to keep her on his side, figuring if he makes her cum he can use her later. What he doesn’t know is that up until now Marilu thought orgasm was the state above California. She is instantly hungry for more Hitch cock, even as she’s also instantly sure this is a psychic imposter puppeteering her real husband – the oral gave it away, you fool!
So what’s Marilu’s next move? To investigate the true nature of this imposter? To call a theoretical mathematician to figure out which consents have been violated? To immediately do it again? To immediately do it again.
Peter watches, trapped inside his own eyeballs as Hitch satisfies his wife and Peter immediately understands he’s bullshit – his thoughts are in green above, Hitch’s reply in orange.
Peter: “Release me! Let me take over!”
Hitch: “Haha fuck that, Peter, you’re like my father. Just an absence where a man should be.”
Peter: “Oh shit you’re right! I’m sorry, I’ll go hang out in the parts of our brain that we never use, with long division and how to perform oral sex on a wife. Hey, what’s up, long division! Where’s oral s– oh.”
Of course we’re not done learning sexual trigonometry: Hitch’s former lover Claire returns, turning this inverted romantic tesseract into a quantum love polychoron.
So Hitch has fallen in love with Marilu, who is married to Peter, the other man in his body. Peter is in love with Hitch, the man who owns their body and uses it in ways Peter has only read about in Quantum Leap slash fiction. Marliu loves Peter, but wants to live atop Hitch’s dong now that he’s shown her the power of medium thrusting. Claire is in love with Hitch, and possibly vice versa, but she wants Marilu dead-
This is it, Malibu! This is the prime storytelling you’ve been missing. This moment is critical drama: does Hitch return to his old life, or does he give up control of the body to save Marilu, even though nobody, including the other owner of this body, wants that?
Intrigued? Don’t be!
It’s a spinning top ending. We cut to the Lopez family much later: Peter seems to speak in his own voice, but calls Marilu by her full name which, much like standing up to the mailman and having sex on a weeknight, is something Peter never does. Marilu notices this, but does not call it out – perhaps happy that one of the best murderers in the world psychically destroyed her husband to pilot around his corpse so long as he brings her to climax every Wednesday after Jeopardy.
Anyway, they get hot dogs!
Maybe this made more sense if you read the first Firearm, which… had a prequel comic book that came packaged with a movie that was a prequel to the prequel comic?
So this is the movie that came before the comic before the first comic and explains the back-up story in the second comic, you know, the one about frozen yogurt!
Confused? Don’t be! Stop being that!
I’ll explain everything next time on Firearm, Part 2: Firearm 1 Part 0 the Movie! I’m sorry, I fucked up that title. I’ll get you a free coupon for my next try.
…
This article is brought to you by our fine sponsors and Hot Dog Supremes: Timmy Leahy and Matt Reiley, trapped in one body THEY SHARE THE SAME-
Categories
Nerding Day: Bokee’s Trek
Imagine you wanted to build a Lord Of The Rings resort, but you don’t want to pay Lord Of The Rings licensing money. What do you think the best solution to this problem would be? Build another kind of resort? Raise money? Or, write a terrible Lord Of The Rings fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off and base the resort on your very own IP. Since option three is both stupid and still illegal, you’ve probably guessed I’m going to talk about that one.
Nestled deep in the enchanted hills of Knoxville, Tennessee sits Ancient Lore Village. A fairytale themed resort based on the book Bokee’s Trek: Outcasts Of Inner Earth, a book with two Amazon reviews and a grand total rating of two and a half stars.
You might be thinking; sure, this sounds like something someone would try to pull in the 1970s when no one would find out about their little illegal theme park until it had been running for thirty years and the original Bokee character actor was long dead of syphilis. Part of what makes this resort so unique is someone had the audacity to try it in the year of our lord 2021. In 2021 they built a resort around a book with one positive review that said they didn’t like the book, but the resort made them feel like a real Hobbit. Hobbits don’t exist in Bokee’s Trek.
I agree the book does have a good premise. It’s about a magical guy traveling around a world of fairytale creatures on a noble quest. It’s the premise of Lord Of The Rings. Katy should try reading that because Bokee has nothing on Frodo. For one thing, Bokee looks terrifying.
Most of the creatures in the book are non-copyrightable fairytale staples like leprechauns, gremlins, yetis, etc. It does have some LOTR crossover species, including Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs… you know, the free ones. If you add big hairy feet to those leprechauns and make them high as hell, the Tolkein estate is coming for you. There’s exactly one species created for the series. They’re called Willows, and they’re just elves with weirdly long earlobes and arms. Stay tuned for my next great character: Tall Mickey Mouse.
I barely have words for how bad the writing in this book is, and it’s my whole job to have words for bad things. It reads like a hotel brochure, occasionally interrupted by yetis that the reader probably doesn’t care about except to hear about the exact dimensions of their house. As we all know, the most entertaining part of any fantasy story is the painfully detailed mathematical statistics.
So, a Willow converts to precisely two yards, or “this is pointlessly useless” in English.
That’s not very much in WoM dimensions, but very spacious in Willows. Maybe? The point is, they use our exact same rulers, but call it a dumb name every six feet. Which are often used as a unit of measurement anyway by the author instead of Willows, so what are we doing here, fucking Bokee?
This man is just pulling from the building instructions for the resort as he half pays attention to his Hobbit rip-off book. I’m surprised he didn’t throw in that the home decor was from a mystical Homegoods by TJ Maxx. The endless buffet in the Gremlins Village was an unbelievable $14.99 gremlin dollars on the weekends.
The moral of Bokee’s Trek is supposed to be about all races coming together peacefully. Something we need more eighty-year-old white men to write about, in my opinion. According to the Ancient Lore Village website, the author was inspired to write Bokee’s Trek after joining his son on the campaign trail and finding, “There was so much hatred, intolerance, and misunderstanding of others.” His son was a Republican candidate for governor who spent 19 million dollars on his own campaign and lost because he ran so many negative ads against his opponents that it just convinced everyone he was dick. Tennessee Republicans thought this guy was too cruel to be the governor. That’s like being told to calm down by Kanye West.
I hate to analyze this truly terrible book from a literary perspective because it doesn’t deserve it, but the moral of the story is not that all races should just get along and love each other. Bokee lives in a world where all the different creatures are separated by a magical mist they can travel through, but their God OOoomah has told them not to. Bokee defies God, and travels through the mist to meet the other creatures, but they are mostly all scary, weird, and terrible to him.
The other fairytale creatures know they aren’t supposed to communicate with each other, so they treat Bokee as a curiosity. They creep him out and play terrible tricks on him. The Leprechauns turn him into a foot, and the Gremlins hang him upside down from the ceiling and laugh at him. These creatures can’t help it. It’s in their nature. The moral I’m getting from the story is: look, we all know minorities are scary, but we gotta rise above and try to get along with these creeps, I guess?
Leprechaun nationalists, please stop disfiguring and torturing me and let me go home. Thanks!
Although it may be true there wasn’t enough thought put into this book to have any real moral at all. This man named an elf Brigadoon. He named an elf after a famous play that’s been adapted to both film and television multiple times? He gave the fairies Asian features and then named one of them Ube, a purple yam used in Filipino cooking. He named a yeti Blowdon and didn’t write LOL after it.
Lots of the creatures have animals in their village, and the animals are always dogs with wings. He had one idea for a mythical animal, and he stole it from pegasuses, and he couldn’t even steal a second thing for another mythical creature? Here I’ll do it in three seconds: fire breathing dog, very tall dog named Clifford, dog that is smart enough to use a toilet. Simple, elegant, cool ideas that took me thirty seconds. Here’s a description of the Dwarves’ dog and a picture of the Fairies’ dog so you know I’m not exaggerating.
“Why am I typing all this? It’s just a goddamn bulldog, reader.” – Bokee’s Trek
The Gremlins also have a dog that’s described as being so beautiful because the gremlins are so ugly, and OOoomah wanted them to have something beautiful to look at. Then the writer threw in a photograph of what is clearly his own dog. So, it’s just a regular pretty dog. The mystical creatures created for this book include an elf with long ears, a dog with wings, another dog with wings, and a regular dog.
I guess if you’re writing a book designed to rip off Lord Of The Rings and teach people to be nicer to your angry son, you might as well throw in a humble brag about your hot dog while you’re at it. This Hank Hill ass author grows more Hank Hill by the second as he rounds out his story.
Bokee’s Trek ends with him returning home and getting exiled from his village into a fiery unknown. However, on the path to the fiery unknown, they run into all of the families Bokee met on his journey who were also exiled for talking to Bokee, and they all end up in a new valley where a directive from their God OOoomah tells them to start a new world together. Then this fellowship, you might call it, of generic fairytale creatures and one long-armed freak make a ring of homes near a waterfall in Tennessee, the famous land of equality. That way, people can “see that different people can live in harmony together and possibly change their paths to the acceptance of all as one race.”
Just think, if people had been nicer to Randy Boyd on the campaign trail we might not have this wonderful book, and the resort that came from it. It just goes to show you that sometimes people really do deserve to be bullied, and good things can come from bullying them.
The Monster Mash is a work of genius. Christmas songs are a genre, but the “Monster Mash” stands alone. It’s the only Halloween song. Don’t come at me with your other vaguely spooky songs. Don’t say “Season Of The Witch” to me. Don’t be the “Ghostbusters” guy. Those are songs you can trot out at Halloween, but we all know they’re pretenders to the throne. If you ask someone to name a Halloween song, they’ll say “Monster Mash” first one hundred percent of the time.
Every year around Halloween, the Monster Mash discord begins. Is it a song about a dance, or is the song discussed within the song also called The Monster Mash? That’s a boring question, but I’ll answer it. The Monster Mash is a song and dance created by Boris, the mad scientist narrator of the song. How do I know this? Because I’ve Monster Mashed harder and longer than anyone.
I’ve listened to “The Monster Swim,” “The Monster Rap,” and the entire album The Original Monster Mash. They had to call the record The Original Monster Mash to distinguish it from a rival Monster Mash album released the same year. You see, nobody has a trademark on monsters mashing. That’s why there’s so much bigfoot erotica on amazon.
Bobby Pickett won the war of the Monster Mash’s not because his album was the most creative or the best produced. I think John Zacherle’s Monster Mash has much more to offer in terms of both musical composition and lyrical creativity as a whole, but he’s not the impressionist that Pickett is. Pickett also showed a commitment to the Monster Mash. He was still putting out Monster Mash content in 2004. That’s forty-two years of furiously Monster Mashing. In that amount of time most people would find a second, even a third passion.
The most interesting thing about “Monster Mash” is the lore Pickett created for his characters. He was the original slash fiction writer. Monster Mash has a large cast of musical monsters and discusses the effect entering into the music industry has on their lives. The most deeply affected monster is Dracula, who plays the role of Turtle in Entourage to Boris the mad scientist’s Adrian Grenier. We first hear in the original Monster Mash that Dracula is disappointed to have his hit song “The Transylvania Twist” replaced by the “Monster Mash.”
People have recently taken this line out of context and suggested that Boris stole “The Transylvania Twist” from Dracula to make the Monster Mash, but I’m familiar with both canonical versions of “The Transylvania Twist,” and neither sounds anything like “Monster Mash.” The Original Monster Mash has a version of “The Transylvania Twist” on it, and in 2004 a trio of musical melons sang a modernized take on the song in the film Spookley The Square Pumpkin. It’s…not great. It rhymes the word stomp with jomp. Jomp is not a word. If it was, it would be a Finnish Van Halen cover band or a sexually transmitted foot disease.
Coming in at the length of an average urinary catheter commercial, Dracula’s “Transylvania Twist” was never going to be the smash hit that “Monster Mash” was. Boris produced “Transylvania Twist” because he’s friends with Dracula and wanted to do him a favor. It might have been popular for a bit, and Dracula enjoyed his fame, but it was soon overshadowed by “Monster Mash.” The lyrics insinuate that people can’t resist doing the “Transylvania Twist,” but unfortunately for Dracula, it turns out they could! And did.
Boris then, out of the kindness of his heart, allows Dracula to join his now wildly successful band. I’m not sure what he’s bringing to the table there; I don’t think he plays any instruments. But by the end of “Monster Mash,” Boris and Dracula are on good terms again. Dracula is in a well paying job as a musician in a successful band. He should be thrilled. That should be the end of Boris and Dracula’s tension, but it’s only the beginning.
The first three songs on The Original Monster Mash are all about the deteriorating relationship between Boris and Dracula. After The Monster Mash opens the album, we go straight into “Rabian – The Fiendage Idol.”
In this song, Dracula has come to Boris as the manager of Van Helsing, who has been transformed into a werewolf that wants to be a teenage idol. Sexy Teen Pop Star Van Helsing Werewolf is definitely something a fan-fiction writer came up with. I’m surprised I could type out that entire sentence without getting an offer to write it into season seventeen of Riverdale.
Rabian is a terrible singer, that’s the song’s punchline, but Boris blows Dracula off gently with the classic “don’t call us, we’ll call you” and “bring him around next week, will you?” We never hear about Rabian again.
It’s Monster Mash canon that Dracula has a son. He attended the original Monster Mash when his father was the successful singer of “Transylvania Twist.” He never appears again, and it seems like it’s because Dracula lost custody. Otherwise, you would expect him to put forward his son as a potential teen idol before Van Helsing. The next time Dracula is mentioned in “Blood Bank Blues,” we see he’s in dire straits. His relationship with Boris has completely deteriorated, along with all of his money.
He couldn’t pay his bills, so he doesn’t have access to his usual blood bank. Toward the end of the song, which is mostly about how much fun drinking blood is, he completely switches gears and is like, “You know whose fault this is, BORIS!” Dracula accuses Boris of putting a stake in his girl’s heart. You might think this refers to Dracula’s wife, Vampyra Alucard, who is named in a later song because the Monster Mash lore is so endless.
I think Dracula was cheating and had both a wife and girlfriend at this time because my wife and my girl are the same amount of syllables. If Boris had staked his wife, that would be a much more upsetting statement for listeners here, but “girl’s” was an intentional lyrical choice to let us know how bad off Dracula is doing at this point. He’s broke, he’s cheating, he’s not making great music, and he’s blaming Boris for all of this. I feel bad for Dracula.
We then hear three songs with very little to no Dracula lore until we come to “Monster Minuet,” track seven of The Original Monster Mash, which is the craziest song in existence. It’s not even a song. It’s a spoken word poem where Dracula and Boris have a knockdown, drag-out fight at a party Boris is throwing. We learn Dracula’s full name is Count Dracula Alucard, and his wife is Countess Vampyra Alucard. They enter the party together, and Dracula immediately starts complimenting all of the beautiful ladies in waiting at the party, which pisses Boris right off. Things devolve into full wrestling kayfabe from there.
Bobby Pickett got so into his story he went full soap opera and forgot to write a song. It doesn’t rhyme. There’s no beat. You can’t go around your house singing, “Don’t leave that snaggletooth bag of bones you call your wife behind.” It isn’t even an attempt at a jam. It is nonsense. It is something you’d say to your husband if he came back from the bathroom during Riverdale and asked what he missed.
Then Boris meets and falls in love with a Mummy in “Me and My Mummy.” He’s ready to leave the record industry behind and settle down together in her ancient tomb. The relationship doesn’t last long, though and the song after that, “Monster Motion,” features Dracula doing a mental health check on his toxic friend Boris.
Dracula uses Boris’ depression to try and get a new dance craze going called the Monster Motion. It’s a blatant rip off of The Monster Mash, utilizing all of the same monsters in Boris’s Monster Mash now doing an unspecified motion that certainly isn’t mashing for copyright reasons.
There are a few other interesting pieces of Monster Mash lore scattered throughout the album. Igor is fucking Frankenstein’s wife. There’s a whole song devoted to what a sad loser Wolfman is, but the story of Dracula and Boris’ on-again, off-again friendship is by far the most compelling thing on the record. Dracula and Boris end the album on fairly good terms, celebrating Christmas together with all of their other friends by plotting to kidnap Santa Claus.
In 1984, when Bobby Pickett released “The Monster Rap,” he again included Dracula as the same sad, needy, failed musician character. This time Dracula hopes Boris can make him relevant again by teaching him how to rap. And it worked! Everyone remembers “The Monster Rap!”
So, if anyone ever asks you, “what’s the deal with Monster Mash” now you can tell them. It’s the beginning of a fascinating VH1’s Behind the Music episode about a failed musician named Count Dracula Alucard, and his producer friend, Boris. Discussing “Monster Mash” in any other context divests it from the full value of the total work.
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This article was brought to you in remembrance of our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme:Thomas Cavazos, who died of inverted feet. Fuck Jomp.
Categories
Nerding Day: Incarnate đźŚ
If you love your kids, consider failing. Superstars’ children put out comics like Incarnate.
Incarnate is the literary premiere of Nick Simmons, son of Hollywood’s longest tongue. If you don’t know Gene Simmons, he was the frontman for Kiss and patient zero for treatment-resistant gonorrhea. As for Kiss, they made the Spotify suggestions your dad skips after Van Halen II. Presentation-wise, they walked so that Violent J could run.
I’m not saying that glam rock, pop metal, or other rock for people that smile sucks. I’m saying that Kiss, specifically, sucks. When “Strutter” makes your Top 3, you’re in deep shit. Kurt Cobain was a Terminator sent back to destroy the Resistance’s worst music. To survive, Kiss turned the enemy’s own weapon against them:
It didn’t work out. Grunge was like the ring: you could try to wield it, but it only obeyed the depressed.
Incarnate emerged in 2009, two VH1 humiliations later. Nick Simmons took on script and pencil duties, debuting as a double threat. He seized a chance to sprint out of his father’s short creative shadow and spread his own breed of crabs. Challenging commercially, less so critically.
Shame that the result’s stitched together from Hellsing, Bleach, and everything else on Zumiez tank tops. Allegedly. You can’t believe everything you read. For example, the media claims water is a human right, but Nestle says to kneel. Nick might be another victim of U.N. misinformation.
Let’s give Incarnate a fair shake. It starts in an unnamed city haunted by shadowy predators– presumably Jersey City and developers, respectively. One slumlord laments his ways:
That’s Mot. He likes blood and talking about blood. Mot’s named after/is the Canaanite god of death, which doesn’t count towards today’s plagiarism charge. Tolkein reinvented a genre by swiping Beowulf’s wallet. This could be the next Return of the King! Or one of those bleak novellas edited by his son, where broken heroes overdose in elven alleyways.
The weebiest among you may feel an itch of familiarity. Ignore it, and focus on the horrorcore slam poetry above. “Sopping scarlet treats” is a sentence you get to read once in life (twice counting brilliant recaps). Soak that in, and bury any memories of better sequential art. Nick deserves a chance to be the least shameful Simmons.
“Wait,” say the other attendees of the anime event hidden behind Comic-Con like a malformed/predatory/black royal. “Isn’t that Hellsing’s Alucard, the character I dressed like until the second amendment ruined trench coats?”
No. That’s a serious accusation. Alucard’s much harder to draw:
See? Incarnate’s design is simply Dracula backwards. I should know the name for that, but Columbia’s been demoted to a preppy kindergarten. Now I teach finger painting, and keep rainbow stickers away from clichés like smiley-face suns. It sounds harsh, but they usually stop crying by naptime. When you nurture hackwork, you end up with a Simmons.
I’ll grant that Nick took a few design cues. But he put his own spin on it.
Narrative spin. Mot’s not a vampire forced to hunt other vampires. More specifically, he’s not trapped in a vampire-hunting organization, alongside a louder and less experienced vampire, under the bondage-y control of a blonde heiress with attitude. New character, new IP, new profit margins. Nick can still get this shit into theaters before executives remember that they hate nerds.
I cave. We’re in a place beyond plagiarism. Most of these panels look like webcomic drafts, and those are the forgivable ones. The rest are photocopied from the Little Free Library outside a GameStop.
For example, the dominatrix above:
That’s a direct lift from Bleach, which was a hit among conscientious prom objectors. I’ve broken the Great Anime Week Detente for good reason: Incarnate cribbed from the era’s most visible train wreck and hoped obsessives wouldn’t notice. That’s like saying you came up with trafficking migrants for votes. Someone in Texas with endless ammunition and impotent rage now knows you by name.
Perhaps I seem paranoid.
As you can see, Incarnate also has shades of a troubled relationship. While my demon brain does spawn jokes about domestic violence, I’m not publishing them. Otherwise, I’d be writing about Mötley Crüe instead.
Alright, so our faces come from the “Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V” school of art. Maybe Nick has more passion for his heels. After all, he’s drawn to darkness. Let’s check in on the ancient vampire cult that runs the world or some shit.
“There is no room on Olympus for a reluctant god.” That’s a dungeon master’s first draft, and I love it. I don’t think a meaningless line has ever meant so much to me. If Incarnate had two original panels, I’d call it mandatory reading.
This dialogue gives me a mile-wide nostalgia grin. Certain strains of garbage are contained to an era, like Kiss. It’s not just trash: it’s trash that can only exist at a specific cocaine-to-edge ratio. Incarnate is a perfect fossil, preserved in another fossil’s stolen amber. This cutscene just needs a final boss describing the main character’s girth to make me forget I’m on a melting planet.
Thank you, Nick. I couldn’t ask for a better birthday gift. “The language of battle” is everything pop culture lost when nothing happened over six perfect years.
I see my best years in every poorly-colored panel. The first time I flirted with alcohol poisoning, writing like this was acceptable. The first time someone accepted an IHOP date with an unpublished satirist, only half of these lines were clichés. I could even say “vampire urban fantasy” without an editor groaning or an IHOP date leaving me with the check. If Nick didn’t have creative kleptomania, we’d be friends.
Anyway, all these designs are traced. Check it:
Yes, even antelope-head. I’m at least a third as disappointed as Gene. Maybe half. My tongue hangs at half-length in mourning.
I don’t know Gene Simmons, or what he’s like as a father. Maybe horny sobriety helped him raise a kid right, and this is all Nick. But it’s fun to cast this desperate plagiarism as the result of eighteen years of rockin’ neglect. Gene’s take on file sharing was, and I quote: “Sue everybody. Take their homes, their cars.” Making open theft the perfect rebellion.
Consider this nonsense:
That’s history’s least metal filing. Metal has a spotty court record after all the Napster hunting, attempted spousal murders, and crispy churches. Gene topped it all by hunting for quarters under Ronnie James Dio’s casket. Incarnate may be a biblical curse for patent trolling.
Either way, the Xerox Illuminati battle the not-Hellsing Foundation, while Mot and his domme/victim battle puberty. But that doesn’t matter. Delete that data from your mind. What matters is my favorite trace. I’ve been holding out on you: Mot’s stock rival is a direct lift of Bleach’s only good idea. Kenpachi, the face that launched a thousand t-shirts.
Context matters. Follow me into the mind of an anime club survivor.
Pretend, for a moment, that you don’t know who Dave Bautista is. The HOTDOG defense system would detonate your device if that were true, but let’s make-believe. You live through hollow, Batista Bomb-less days, searching for something to fill the Animal-shaped hole in your heart. As if anything could.
Then, CSI introduces a man in a rubber Bautista mask named Bave Dautista. Bave dominates criminals with the Dautista Dunk, argues with his sergeant Double H, and ditches the show to star in a James Gunn flick. And you clap along like a seal with cable.
That’s what it would take for the audience to miss this trace. In simpler terms, it’s like making a comedy sketch about a blind black klansman: we all know Clarence Thomas.
Anime fans are a meticulous bunch. I mispronounced a ninja clan on one podcast, and my inbox still gets slurs in kanji. They didn’t take long to unearth Bave Dautista.
Embarrassing. More importantly to a Simmons, financially abortive. The publisher, Radical Comics, specialized in stealth movie pitches. Oblivion became a film without ever even making it to print. Nick didn’t have to make great art to win, or even art that sold well. It just had to exist, and he cocked it up.
Nick Simmons apologized, once the lawyers and pitchforks got intense enough. Sort of.
This was 2010, making Nick an early innovator in non-apologies. We hadn’t quite mastered the “I’m sorry you’re a mitch-bade pussy, and hope you suck less in the future” press release. In fact, this tone may be his best original thought. It’s quite the legacy. Creators as diffuse as Ted Nugent and Roseanne Barr have paid homage to Nick Simmons.
Bleach’s author had a more surprising reaction. After learning a sentient being willingly plagiarized Bleach, Tite Kubo tweeted the following:
That’s a professional. He looked past the low-hanging fruit of anger, right into the absurd vortex of Gene Simmons’s son publishing comic books. After mocking him twice, I can confirm that Kubo has more Hotdog spirit in his sunglasses than I do in my soul. I’d cover his glorious spiral into madness, but the Great Anime Week Detente says I’d have to smother myself with a body pillow.
Incarnate lasted three issues, two longer than any breathing lawyer should’ve allowed. Gene’s personal Saul Goodman slipped up. When your client claims to have fucked six Civil War regiments, you spend the rest of your career on high alert.
Two genres of people burn polaroids: future defendants and current defendants. Legitimate perverts dump them in the recycling, to rest comfortably in a local landfill or become 1/25th of a handbag. This is legal malpractice.
Recall Rambo in First Blood: a desperate man hiding in the frozen wild, knife in hand, waiting for the first unlucky cop to inherit his trauma. One false move, and they’ll kill him faster than a Jamaican teenager minding his business. Every day as a Simmons family lawyer should be that tense.
Don’t confuse that for an accusation, defense, or even hyperbole. It’s the simple reality of working for someone the rest of a glam rock band called a sex addict. That’s insane. That’s like getting kicked out of early Metallica for drinking.
Nick deserves a break. Armchair generals can criticize, but he’s the man in the arena. In fact, Nick should take that speech from Roosevelt. He has an inspiring ability to take inspiration, and it’s the spark I’ve been missing. I’m excited to take my next book in a new direction. Here’s a preview:
One Cray-zy Summer is a young adult romcom with a killer ending. It features a new writing style I call “ten-steppin’,” and should be a movie by 2024. Keep an eye out for it.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Jeff Orasky, who was shamelessly traced from Boris Vallejo art.