Category: NERDING DAY
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Tired of amoral Superman parodies? The Batman ones are worse.
This cover’s untouched by Photoshop or editorial. Meet Nemesis, one of my favorite things ever printed. I need pain to feel alive, putting Nemesis among the worst crimes preserved in ink. Somewhere between Cheney’s Visual Guide to Nation Building and The Punisher Breaks Your Arm in Real Life.
It’s a neurotoxic miniseries drawn by Steve “Better Than This” McNiven and written by Mark “Perfect For This” Millar. Some writers are consistently good or bad, and Millar finds that shit boring. He has comics of every letter grade, generally concentrated around the Bs and Fs.
The first cover sets the tone:
I’ve never raised an eyebrow in real life, but that tagline’s tempting. I liked Kick-Ass. It tapped vigilante fiction’s appeal and pratfalls with a fresh voice. Hearing “I see you were into all that character stuff or whatever, but we’re done with that cuck shit” makes me nervous. I’ve lost kneecaps in the MillarWorld casino before.
That inconsistency grates more than outright incompetence. I know the author of Pick-Up Lines for Lost Souls couldn’t write Superman: Red Son. A Mark Millar fuck-up feels like a choice. When I read Nemesis, I know that less/more/better drugs could have elevated it to a B and spared America’s brain another polyp.
The festival of edge opens in Japan, one of the six countries that exist in action media. The mysterious Nemesis gloats, unlike his later scenes where he is bragging and boasting.
This might take a while. Since we’re in a future film, let’s fast-forward.
Give him a moment.
In the above mess, Nemesis executes a simple plan: commit Payday 2 heists across Tokyo, announce the police chief’s time of death, kidnap said chief, leak his location, blow up his fakeout location, hit the chief with a train, derail the train into an orphan factory, and explain every beat to awed minions and/or victims. That’s a migraine-inducing sentence, but you need it to understand the concept: combining the plot armor of Batman and The Joker into one mistake.
I tell students there’s no wrong way to write, because I’m a liar. It’s the easiest thing in the world to fuck up. For example, the second worst way to make a character cool is having them declare their radness. The worst is having someone else do it. Every page of Nemesis does both.
After blowing up Japan, BatJoker turns his eye on DC. His gimmick is hunting elite cops, presumably as research for the ultimate drill album. Leading to our star:
Blake Morrow, the middle point between an electable Bush and mid-franchise John McClane. He even has a diversity sidekick. A second draft’s title would be Batman vs. Die Hard. Hopefully DC gets to that idea before Discovery turns them into an NFT marketplace.
Only Blake’s not really our star. He’s a medium for BatJoker, who kidnaps the President from Air Force One.
Absorb this moment. Whether you’re in or out, the comic peaks here. It’s the purest power fantasy, with the least gloating or pointless gore. My inner child can’t reject a gunman surfing a plane. I’d even accept him kickflipping it.
Keep the 2010 publishing date in mind: the target is neither senile nor addicted to snow/Twitter/his daughter. For once, we don’t have to be told BatJoker is cool. He just does something interesting. It’s a hard beat to ruin.
There we go.
As the Cabinet’s current supercop, Blake searches for information. This hunt has dramatic potential, so BatJoker directly exposits his origin.
Remember, Batman has the most widely riffed-upon origin this side of Batman. Parodies, tributes, and shameless copies of the Dark Knight anchor their own blockbuster franchises. Hotep Batman made a billion dollars in theaters, Depressed Batman saved Netflix, and Depressed Hotep Batman is my next book. If you commit to a 21st century Batman parody, you have to come correct. Here’s what Nemesis delivers:
The takeaway: Batman would be a worse person if his parents were death row sex criminals. This is a special species of dumb, rarely seen in the wild. The logic chain and conclusion are fine. The base question is so stupid that thinking about it hurts your headsponge.
While we’re on Batman: did you consume anything between The Dark Knight and The Batman? It was a golden age. Not for any nation on our dying planet, but for plans where the villain intended to get caught.
The world held an openweight cop-out tournament, and Mark Millar won. While mortal creatives waited five or six minutes before revealing their villain’s genius, Nemesis gloats on the same page.
I want this page in a museum. It’s a scene too attached to one power fantasy to set up another. We’re at the end of issue two, the ancestral home of the cliffhanger page. For flow, Nemesis just needed one page without BatHogan resting a testicle on God’s forehead. Instead, he plants both.
Six pages later:
I can’t criticize a Dynasty Warriors rampage through Corrections. My rom-com pitch had two. But imagine the impact if BatJoker spent six pages on the ropes. Or two. Or a panel.
Then again, we’re not in the restraint game.
The magic of Nemesis (and the nearly identical Wanted) is that it’s exactly what my Mom thought comic books were like. Decades after proving three homophobes in one suit invented the Comics Code, the industry produced this. IP violations kidnapping presidents, decapitating riot cops, and rigging womb bombs.
Hold on, rigging what?
I’m getting ahead of myself. Narratives are about the journey to the womb bomb. The quiet moments between genital implosions. In this case, a costumed game of Truth or Dare. Sleepover games are a little mature for this reading level, but it’s good to challenge the audience.
After waltzing out of prison, BatJigsaw kidnaps Blake’s kids and demands the hero’s darkest secrets. Which, to his credit, Blake nails. Brass balls are the only heroic trait Nemesis respects, and Blake’s clang together when he walks.
The abyss is staring back into me here. It’s hard to confess to our more forward-thinking readers, but I’ll be honest. In my heart, I assume most marriages work out this way. No matter how much you love and trust someone, BatLecter will steal your kids and make you both podcast about cheating. It’s the simple human truth.
Years later, I still can’t read this panel without choke-laughing. I wish I knew why. It’s not as regressive in context: Millar pins Blake as old-fashioned from the jump. It’s much less outlandish than Batman kidnapping the president. It might be the simple brevity, the stilted wording, or the one-two punch of “I can’t fuck” and “My son can, but blasphemously.”
Okay? That’s not how escalation works. A bombless abortion can’t compete with the rest of this book. Pre-lunacy, the CDC reported 194 abortions per 1000 live births, and zero buildings gassed by Batman. You’ve set a higher standard for edge–three pages ago, someone’s teeth got punched out from the inside. This is like a Mortal Kombat sequel about couple’s therapy.
Now, let’s get back to what matters.
“But why?” Strap in.
When I cover a book, I have one scene in mind. Here’s the Nemesis edition. While spamming the words womb bomb, I’ve left out “incest.” Thank you, Lucifer Morningstar, for helping me type “incest womb bomb” before a once-trusting audience. I enact your will in this world, master. The genitalia of the Elohim shall burn in your light.
I’ll never say that Mark Millar isn’t an artist. Art makes you think and feel. And I’m full of searing emotions and searing-er questions. Why a womb bomb? Was that a last minute idea, or is this entire comic written around the womb bomb? Why didn’t I come up with the womb bomb? Is this commentary on abortion, or just thoughtless? Are there real womb bombs? Are there testicle bombs? What is the CIA hiding? Am I one Lee Harvey Oswald joke away from my junk exploding like Mount Vesuvius, and not in the fun Spring Break way?
That’s a stupid idea, because I’m stupid now. This comic made me stupid, and I needed to pass it on to you. With my junk shredded by bat-shrapnel, it’s the only way I can reproduce.
Surviving Maury unlocks the last level. BatMengele holds the president hostage in the White House, which should be a commentary on something and isn’t. As the boss arena loads, Blake’s black sidekick emerges as a mole, gets shot, and falls back out of the story. Then the ensuing cutscene reveals the twisted, unimaginable, boring truth.
And more gloating. There’s always more gloating. Nemesis would thrive if it stole Batman’s “stoic silence” schtick.
That origin I dumped on earlier? Millar didn’t like it either. BatJoker’s real origin is no origin. Which is the Joker’s origin. He’s the Joker with triceps.
This is getting complicated. Let’s sketch this plan out.
Doable.
The president sacrifices himself to stop JokerJoker. That doesn’t sound dull, but life finds a way. Imagine gloating interrupted by a campaign ad and you’re there. I’m here to talk about the denouement.
After surviving a Saw and Air Force One crossover, Blake Morrow retires to raise his inbred grandchildren. Until he gets a note with the real, original origin of Nemesis. Picture a nesting doll made of smaller and smaller brains. Now put the smallest brain on Air Force One and tre flip it into a mountain.
Nemesis is a vacation package for billionaires. A clever commentary on Batman’s…nothing. This says nothing about Batman. Or society, beyond the fresh observation that “the rich are less than pleasant.” If Bezos tried ghost riding a plane, we’d still be laughing at gifs of him hitting tarmac. With one page left, I can’t imagine making this dumber.
Ten years? Amateur hour. I’ve plotted my revenge for twelve.
Parody’s fun. I know a website with some solid ones. Yet Nemesis doesn’t touch Batman’s bizarre ideology or platoon of child soldiers. It’s laser-focused on preptime, an element that doesn’t matter. Even a little. This is a four issue deconstruction of Aquaman’s haircut. Whether you love Bruce Wayne or think clowns have Miranda Rights, there’s more to work with.
As parody, Nemesis falls short of this:
That’s assuming there is a real parody here. Vegas odds say there’s nothing smarter going on than “what if Batman killed people?” An idea DC mined to death themselves:
We live in the best of all possible worlds, because a Nemesis screenplay is marching along. I believe in the project. I need that pain to not only feel alive, but transcend God’s failed creation altogether. The ritual begins. You nerds can enjoy dodging water thieves in The Wastes, I’m out.
Until then, I’m calling two shots. If in vitro incest makes it onscreen, it’ll be the last meme. Bane can’t compete: we’ll quote BatManiac until the sun and jokes are long dead. That said, if the rest of Nemesis makes it onscreen, it’ll be the last superhero movie. Not because of the deconstruction, but simple failure as a story. Cats killed musicals by non-Spielbergs, and Nemesis may divorce capes from the American imagination. This is the stumble that buries spandex next to disco, arena rap, and bipartisanship.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Max Baroi, who will forever be associated with the search terms “incest womb bomb.”
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Nerding Day: Barbie MAD LIBS đźŚ
MAD LIBS are already one of the saddest ways to VERB with human language. They are designed to let pedestrian minds manufacture NOUN by clumsily beating reason to death– like putting on a play about laughing at a badly translated FOREIGN FOOD menu. But with a little effort they can still be ADJECTIVE, right? MAD LIBS are like an AI generating CONCEPT INCLUDING PREGNANT HULK HOGAN PLAYING TENNIS. They won’t replace real art, but what’s the harm in letting chaos VERB your silly idea? I guess what I’m saying is you get out of them what you put into them. It’s not like the author of a MAD LIBS book could PERSONALLY FAIL, right? I guess we’ll VERB ENDING IN “ING” see.
A woman named Stacy Wasserman wrote this book decades later than you’d imagine, in 2021. Her only previous published work was Royal Family MAD LIBS, so Barbie MAD LIBS may have been her punishment for violating lèse-majestĂ© laws. It is as uninspired as an intentionally unfinished book of Barbie quotes can be. It’s one of the lowest forms of art made worse by indifference and stupidity. Still, let’s try to have a(n) ADJECTIVE time!
While navigating Barbie MAD LIBS, we’ll be using the three pillars of auto-generated comedy– silliness, unexpected horror, and wanton lewdness. I call this The Pizza Dismember Penis Gambit, and I’ve designed a tool that allows me to randomize even the randomness of this groundbreaking MAD LIBbing system:
The book includes a full page explaining how to fill in blanks and another defining adjectives and nouns, which is pretty revealing about its intended audience. If something markets itself as a “word game” and the first thing it does is explain words, you’re either too good for it or a below average ape. So with that in mind, this fucking thing is for FUCK ENDING IN “ING” idiots, let’s read “TRUE FRIENDS” by Stacy Wasserman.
This sucks. No matter what noun or adjective you pick, this “World’s Greatest Word Game” won’t mean anything. Barbie’s friends might mean the CHEESEBURGER to her. Or the INTRUDER’S ERECTION. Or the FAILED AIDS CHARITY. It doesn’t matter. Part of the MAD LIBS fun, maybe the only kind of MAD LIBS fun, is trying to ruin its intended fun. Which isn’t actually fun when the coherence is this poorly guarded. Unless you put in exactly the words WORLD and SPECIAL, it’s PROBABLY NOT FUNNY gibberish. So fun-wise, this is a hail mary– a desperate prayer that the reader puts in a hilarious sex act or gets tickled by gently wrong syntax. This is the comedy equivalent of looking around the room and saying words. Fuckin do better, Stacy.
What the shit is Stacy doing here? Barbie’s friend Teresa VERBs with excitement, but the thing she gets excited for is very specifically “mold?” What the fuck kind of tactic is this? Are you trying to do the silly part of the MAD LIBS for us, Stacy? It was a nice save there at the end to let me choose the animal and what they do at night. Because giraffes? Going antiquing at night? Get. Out.
The first blank in Renee Chao’s backstory seems suspicious. You don’t throw the word “motor” in front of a random body part unless you mean for that to get dirty. Even Stacy Wasserman should have had the foresight to know “motor-PART OF THE BODY” was going to end in either a turbo sex hole or mild confusion. Like what, is Renee going to be a motor-elbow? A motor-tooth? Fucking stupid. Stacy, you made Barbie’s other friend an amateur mold historian. The least you could do here is clearly establish Renee has an internal combustion vagina. But I guess I have to do everything, so here: “she’s UNHAPPY a lot. Renee JACKHAMMER-FUCKS up any room she’s in.”
Daisy is Greek, so she will VERB anywhere. This one is great! It has a high potential to be funny, and now you know if you have any problematic biases against Greek culture.
Barbie’s last friend is Nikki, who can VERB anything. This swings hard away from meaningless incoherence. Most verbs you put here will simply make sense in a mundane way. Unless you’re deliberately throwing penises in her path, Stacy Wasserman is laying the groundwork for a eulogy. She has the comedy instincts of a gas leak. She made Nikki a/an ADJECTIVE entrepreneur! That’s scientifically the least silly place you can put a blank in that sentence. That’s like saying “Nikki’s grandmother watched her sick cat finally die on HOLIDAY*.” You can’t hope for a miracle on every single blank, Stacy.
* FORD MOTOR DAYS SALE.
Let’s try a different one. “BARBIE AND KEN’S FAVORITE RECIPE.”
This is more nonsense. Barbie and Ken VERB each other’s recipes? Aside from squirt and strangle, what verbs would work here? And look at the last two blanks. Does that say “SILLY WORD?” And EXCLAMATION!?” Are you telling me the other words weren’t supposed to be silly? What the goddamn fuck are we even doing here, Stacy? And then, after that, you want me to give you an exclamation to be placed all by itself and used as an exclamation!? That’s not MAD LIBS, Stacy. That’s not goddamn anything, Stacy. “DuRr, reADER, tHiNk of an eXPreSsioN yOUrseLF and ThEN sAy iT!” Get back to Hell, Stacy.
Oh, this will kill. “One and a half cups of COLOR sugar?” Holy shit, what if they pick green? Or mauve!? And oh my god, “NUMBER teaspoons cinnamon?” Any number!? Can you imagine if they picked the funny one! If the military developed a PSYOP to destroy an individual’s sense of humor, it would look identical to the Barbie MAD LIBS manuscript. There’s a good chance they’d give it that code name too, and wait, hold on, I may have solved the mystery of Barbie MAD LIBS.
So Stacy finishes her SARCASTIC WORD comedy recipe by telling you to bake the cookies for NUMBER minutes. Really, Stacy? NUMBER again? In your wildest dumbshit dreams, is there a funny number of minutes to bake cookies, Stacy? Are you hoping someone cheats and puts in BONER SEVEN? Because that’s what I did. And I still hate it. Serve that with whipped INNOCENCE and enjoy!
Let’s do another! “SELF-CARE DAY!”
Stacy might have completely lost her mind. She’s having us insert a random LETTER OF THE ALPHABET into acronyms. Stacy, where you’re from, are there alphabet letters that are hilarious on their own? Ha ha, W, maybe? Are you hoping some random letter will be so evocative of a word that the reader’s brain inserts it into D-I-BLANK to create a joke? Are they going to see an S, somehow think “sex with stepfather,” and continue on this long train of thought to decode the acronym “do-it-sex-with-stepfather” in their head? That’s bad therapy, not bad comedy. Stop giving us your weird shit to unpack, Stacy.
But seriously, ADJECTIVE work with the last sentence here, Stacy. “Take NOUN!” No matter what you plug in, how could that be anything other than a limp drive off a cliff? What noun were you imagining your readers would take? Soup? Abortion? Anal, for example? The best -the best- case scenario here is that you have beloved pop culture icon, Barbie, screaming “Take titty!” Honestly, it isn’t a bad catchphrase.
I made a butthole mask out of ritually murdered yogurt and edible panties juice, which means Stacy has finally constructed a proper MAD LIBS sentence. Unfortunately, she simply cannot resist letting her readers fill in a hilarious blank NUMBER. Oh, do I rub tragic wet yogurt on my asshole for 11 minutes, Stacy? Terrific. That really puts a button on the gag. And good luck finding a punchline where you “VERB with cold water.” Juggle? Ejaculate? Interrogate? Never mind, those are all very silly. Nearly competent job, Stacy.
Combine half a cup of sea Nazi with four tablespoons of vomiting olive oil and two teaspoons of breast milk zest? Stacy seems to be getting better, because this is easy-to-steer madness. She can never quite land it, though. She ends this chain of potentially fun nonsense with “scrub ADVERB?” In what magical universe of possibilities are there silly ways to scrub, you stupid CAREFULLY NON-GENDERED INSULT?
Let’s do one more. “BARBIE’S GUIDE TO VLOGGING!”
Barbie is an internet PIZZA! A MISSING vlogger with over BONER SEVEN subscribers! This one is off to a good start. Even Stacy’s deranged need to include a blank NUMBER on every page sort of works here, because it’d be sort of strange if Barbie only had, for instance, BONER SEVEN subscribers. And I like how the final blank has the potential to disrupt the entire narrative. Barbie could give her personal tips for successful KIDNAPPING, or ABRUPTLY STOPPING.
There aren’t a huge number of verbs that can sensibly BLANK an audience. But all the big ones are there. Fuck. Mutate. Waterboard. A skilled MAD LIBber could make this work.
Jesus Christ, this went off the rails. SOMETHING ALIVE (PLURAL)? What the fuck, Stacy? Why do they need to be alive? Are you worried if Barbie interviewed UNIDENTIFIED REMAINS or OLD DIAPERS it would disrupt the tight fiction you’ve put together? Let her talk to a stapler or a ghost; it’s MAD LIBS. And nice job on “PART OF THE BODY (PLURAL)-up.” The purest soul in the world would instantly and confidently write “balls” for this, and only find out later an interview with their uncle is going to get “lots of balls-up.” Gross, Stacy.
And for the record, Stacy, adding the word “furry” to the front of yet another random NUMBER probably isn’t the secret code to unlocking its hilarity. Here, I’ll show you: furry 9/11.
By this point of the book I had lost my temper and I was filling in “fuck” for every blank. I knew it was going to cheer me up, but I could have never expected the magic of “Consider FUCK-off like ‘FUCK YOU!’” That’s a world-class catchphrase for any occasion. Imagine a newscaster signing off by saying, “FUCK-off like ‘FUCK YOU!’ ZOINKS! Keep FUCKING!” You would VERB ENDING IN “ING” shit. So on behalf of everyone here at 1-900-đźŚ, we thank you for your continued support, and FUCK-off like “FUCK YOU!”
…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Chance McDermott, who is the USURPING-est example of BRATWURST we have ever BUTT.
Listen – the first thing you need to understand about paperback science fiction and horror novels of the 1990s is that they were all desperately horny. Depressingly horny. Horny in a way that made me ashamed to be a boy going through puberty. And I wasn’t going through it gracefully – I was shambling into my teenage years like a sex werewolf. Indeed, I suspect most of us make the transition into adulthood in a similar fashion.
But even then, I was more than a little uncomfortable every time I ran boner-first into a clumsily graphic sex scene in my latest Aliens adventure, or was whisked away to a dystopian future in which the men were abstract shapes and the women had enormous breasts that were described in painstaking detail. I quickly learned that genre fiction’s three favorite words to assign to female characters – ample, heaving, and spilling – could also be used to describe WWE Superstar Tugboat at a wine tasting.
I’d be lying if I said the DOOM novel was no different. First of all, merely attempting to turn the experience of DOOM into a novel is the act of a psychopath. Any halfway faithful adaptation would just be a rambling scroll of intense violence, like a list of every sitcom catchphrase written in angel’s blood. It would be the internal monologue of a shark. So the fact that someone managed to wring 250 pages out of that should be cause for alarm – either it will be the worst book ever written, or it will actually open a gate to Hell.
But 1995’s DOOM: Knee-Deep in the Dead by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver is toweringly unique among creep fiction, a bold piece of art that dares to ask, “What if the hit computer game about a nameless freight train murdering his way through Hell was both upsettingly horny and weirdly Christian?” Like Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Also, I think those phrases are redundant.
The copy I’d purchased way back during the Clinton years had long ago been lost to whatever Bookmobile donation pile I’d abandoned it to, so in order to revisit it for this column, I had to purchase a new copy. And by “new,” I mean “obviously illegal.”
This new version (available on Amazon Dot Com!) has the kind of offset type and blurry cover art that can only be achieved by sending low-resolution PDFs to a print-on-demand service. Indeed, according to the sole line of publication data on the back page, my copy was literally printed the day I ordered it, in Las Vegas. Also, it cost $16, roughly three times as much as the copy I bought 27 years ago. Paperback fiction abides by strict codes, one of which reads, “If a book is taller than normal, it is 300% more expensive.” I can only hope the habit I funded with this purchase is a cool one, like cocaine. Or motocross.
I bring all that up to try and set the worst possible stage for you that I can before we embark on this journey. It’s only fair, because the book itself does the exact same thing when you crack open its throbbing cover and are assaulted by this probable felony:
Now, when I read this back in 1995, I didn’t have a smartphone or the internet, so the only way I was going to crack this nut was if I heaved my ass onto my bicycle and pedaled to the library, and guess what the fuck I wasn’t about to do for the dedication page in the DOOM novel. Consequently, I had no idea what this meant, and just assumed these were two people the authors knew personally. This is not the case.
Camille Paglia is a professor at the University of Arts in Philadelphia, but all you really need to know about her is that in 1993, she voiced her support for NAMBLA, and has written extensively about her belief that “male pedophilia is intricately intertwined with the cardinal moments of Western civilization.” And for some reason, the DOOM novel is dedicated to her with lust. Turgid, anxious lust.
Fred Olen Ray is a film director who, when this novel was published in 1995, had mostly made softcore erotic thrillers. After this book was published, he mostly continued to make softcore erotic thrillers. Dozens of them, in fact.
This is the first fucking page of this book. The first fifteen words are a pledge of allegiance to a sex crime apologist and a Skinemax all-star. Buying it has almost certainly earned me a federal wiretap. Let’s continue wading knee-deep into the dead and see what else lies in wait for us.
We’re introduced to Marine Corporal Flynn “Fly” Taggart, a name invented by an adult in G.I. Joe pajamas. Fly is the main character – the “Doomguy” from the video game. He opens the story by telling us about a recent mission in a fictional Middle Eastern country, which means there’s no excuse for this passage:
The “torn hymen” is not a real place. These two daring authors just decided they wanted to open their book with that image, right after lustily dedicating the story to their favorite NAMBLA booster.
Fly is a classic character – a proud Marine who doesn’t do drugs and practically seethes with friend-zoned boneration at his fellow soldier Arlene Sanders. Fly is such a proud Marine, in fact, that he devotes three paragraphs to a deranged rant about his devotion to the Corps like a kid trying to argue Santa Claus into existence:
He continues…
… and continues more…
See, now we’re getting close to what a DOOM novel should be, which is “incoherent lip-wiggling.” And there are exactly two moments in this DOOM novel that shine so brilliantly they nearly bathe the sun itself in gold:
Yes! Yes!
That’s some top-shelf gibberhooting. If DOOM: Knee-Deep in the Dead had been 250 pages of this, it would’ve won the Pulitzer Prize and been elected president, and all other books would have been destroyed for their inferiority.
But sadly, it was not to be. Instead, Fly spends most of the book talking about his female squadmates like the goddamn Zodiac killer:
It’s strange that the authors want me to know Arlene is hot, but not too hot. Like they’re trying to convince me that they, personally, have a shot with this make-believe person they’ve created. But don’t worry – although most of Fly’s lurking horniness is focused on Arlene, he does find time to spread it out to the only other woman we meet. Incidentally, she is a corpse, though “still cute,” when we meet her:
With “Dude” Dardier out of the way, Fly can spend the rest of the book leering at Arlene exclusively. He’s a one-woman guy, just like the authors, who were only able to include a second female character if she were stone fucking dead.
The book nearly collapses under its own freewheeling horniness at one point, when Fly briefly pauses in the middle of a medical emergency to drool over Arlene’s tits:
Her amble breasts. The authors have become so horny they have forgotten one of the most important words in the pantheon of horny fiction.
It all leads up to an extremely chaste kiss that was meant to be steamy but comes across as deranged because Fly can’t wrap his mind around having a platonic female friend:
But just in case you thought Fly was some kind of hatchet-faced dweeb, think again, buster. He’s such a glistening fuck horse that Arlene can’t take her eyes off him. And, ok, yes, he is also a dweeb. Such a dweeb that he cannot bear to be seen naked:
You would be forgiven for expecting Fly – the Doomguy himself – to be cool and badass, and not a weirdly repressed ghoul who eye-bangs every woman he encounters while hiding his own shame like a kid who just got pantsed at the bowling alley.
Not only is he a weird, repressed ghoul, but he is technically the most repressed ghoul in the entire galaxy, because this story takes place in space. For instance, the authors thread a subtle anti-drug message throughout the book by casting Fly as a passive aggressive version of McGruff the Crime Dog:
After bragging about getting grease-butter deep in an old-movie orgy, Fly confesses to the time he got hopped up on the magic of Halloween:
He’s so straight edge he even has a problem with demon massacre-enhancing drugs:
Synthetic adrenaline, not even once:
Now, the Doomguy from the video game has eaten so much bath salts that he qualifies as a controlled substance. He doesn’t do drugs because they stopped working on him. Fly, on the other hand, is a nerd who is scared of needles and burns cocaine fields for the CIA. Cool. That’s much better. Having two guys write this book really paid off.
There’s two important reveals in this passage. One, that Fly – and, by extension, the authors – thinks shitty jokes are funny. “Take my name to heart and become a Human Fly”? How dare you. If a child told that joke at a talent show, you would boo that child. You’d have to.
Two, Fly – and, by extension, the authors – hates sicko nightclubs. The tunnel in question in that passage is a normal tunnel, with flickering lights. So the word “sicko” is just describing how Fly feels about nightclubs. Which makes sense, because he – and, by extension, the authors – is a huge nerd.
“The big silly got itself stuck,” says the Hell marine about his 19,721st kill.
Oh, thank fuck. For a second I thought he was serious about the pear tree. What a joke! What a perfectly timed explanation for that joke!
This isn’t really a joke, unless you count the authors’ genuine belief that the word “Indian” is what is problematic about that phrase.
When you’re MADLibbing an alien planet name, you can pick anything. Xorblop, Zantagg IV, whatever. To let your mind wander and have it land directly on the planet “Pornos” is as psychologically revealing as the phrase “Native American giver.”
And just in case you thought jarheads were muscle-bound jocks who think books are a thing you knock out of a dweeb’s hands – which is an experience the authors definitely had, along with several kids who bought this terrible DOOM novel – Fly and Arlene make book jokes. Because they’re strong and cool and they read:
Fly is a genius, instantly and perfectly adopting new vocabulary. “This situation has got eldritch… am I saying that right? Elll-der-itch? Right, all that elstridge is coming out my ass.”
But don’t worry – Fly’s bizarre repression still manages to shine through all these zingers thanks to disturbing acts of borderline sexual violence!
“My eldritch was rock hard, but from excitement, not for his still cute buttless corpse, which making love to would be a cosmic sin. ‘Just say no to sex with this demon, Arlene.’ I told my amble-chested pal. In Jesus Christ’s name, Amen.”
The authors seem to be doing their best to get me to stop reading this book, which is why they thoughtfully throw in a few easter eggs for fans of the game, AKA the only people who would ever purchase a DOOM novel in 1995.
Haha, what a gorm! What a useless, fleshy gorm!
That line is a reference to a cheat code in the game. But you’d probably never be able to tell, because it’s so badass.
There aren’t actually any dick levers in the game. But there should be. And hey! Another opportunity for barely restrained horniness to burst back into the story like a loose circus bear.
At one point, the authors slap the pause button on the action to do some quick swastika rehabilitation:
The marines continue their desperate speculation…
The only people who would include this in a DOOM novel are people trying to convince you it’s okay to own shit with swastikas on it.
This passage also contains the most unexpected reveal of the entire novel – Fly is extremely Christian, and is essentially trying to convert Arlene. In other words, the authors are extremely Christian. Or, at least, they’re pushing an extremely Christian worldview. Also, they notably change the monsters from literal Hell demons to aliens pretending to be Hell demons. Why would aliens pretend to be demons? To scare Earthlings. It’s genius. Also, writing a book about aliens won’t upset Jesus.
Fly constantly mentions going to Catholic school as a kid, and as the novel progresses he begins to slip more and more into it until he is all but quoting scripture. In this novel, Doomguy is a cool youth pastor who is really good at sports and doesn’t do drugs and reads awesome books, and is desperately, ragingly horny inside his mind at all times:
“We might as well play Adam and Eve and… name all the beasts,” is the hardest you can possibly bail on a pickup line. It’s like saying, “We should get out of these wet clothes and… then meet back here from the separate rooms we went to, in Jesus Christ’s name, Amen.”
This is what world-class world-building looks like.
Reminder – this “not huge fan” of morbid jokes fired a machine gun into a monster’s anus and called it a rectal suppository. I suppose if he’d called it a Christ Blast or The Last Suppository, it would’ve been in poor taste.
In the end, Fly’s god-bothering horniness turns Arlene into a believer:
I cannot believe this is the DOOM novel. Two dudes got together and turned DOOM into a bizarre Christian action movie telling kids not to do drugs. It’s like a Left Behind novel dictated by Mr. T, except it sucks.
And it’s weirdly horny, did I mention that? Like, weirdly horny. Kids probably shouldn’t read this. I definitely shouldn’t have.
Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he is busy turning Quake into an erotic VeggieTales novella.
Categories
Nerding Day: Going Bananas! đźŚ
Sometimes you run across a piece of art that’s a great reminder of how the quality of the work doesn’t matter. If it hits at the wrong time, or the wrong place, or if there’s a problem with the cast, like, maybe you shouldn’t have cast an orangutan as the main character, then even a masterpiece of a TV show like 1984’s Going Bananas isn’t going to thrive.
The show description for Going Bananas will render you completely unable to guess what the next sentence holds. It begins “Roxana Banana is an orangutan that escaped from the zoo and was adopted by the Cole family.” Ok, sounds like a pretty typical family sitcom, right? Then the second sentence is, “One night, a mysterious spaceship comes down from the sky and endows Roxanna with superpowers via a lightning bolt.” I was good with a show about a monkey being adopted into a human family, but the makers of Going Bananas went above and beyond to deliver a superior product.
I love how they don’t even cover why the aliens would give a monkey superpowers. There’s no motive explained because we already know why they did it. Because it’s hilarious. Aliens have a sense of humor too; that’s why they made Prince Charles look like that! Anyway, the description continues; “Roxanna is pursued by two crooks who want to use her superpowers for their own ill will, but Roxanna’s outdoing them by means of her powers, as well as the predicaments she created for the Coles, provide much of the comedy for the series.” The super powered monkey has a nemesis? This may be the perfect description of a show, and it definitely has a perfect origin story intro:
Yet with all of this surrounding perfection, Going Bananas only lasted for one season and twelve episodes, almost all of which are impossible to find. The two episodes uploaded to Youtube have only five thousand views between them. The show was apparently more popular in Mexico, where it was called Miss Banana. You can find a few bits and pieces of Miss Banana online with English subtitles, but I could only locate two complete episodes.
Now you might be asking yourself if this show faded from history because of bad acting, to which I will reply, I don’t know. Do you think Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is a bad actor? That’s right, this show stars Shredder himself, James Avery, as Hank, who along with his friend Hubert tries to kidnap the superpowered monkey on a weekly basis. It works because I believe James Avery is full of enough fury to go after a superpowered monkey.
In every scene he’s in, it kind of seems like he’s begging the other actors to attempt to act, and they are all refusing. Everyone else on this TV show has gotten their lines five seconds before the camera rolled, and they can’t read. James Avery has been preparing his craft with an intensive seven month character study at the Oxford school of sitcom villains.
I’ve been trying to figure out what could make a monkey with alien superpowers better, and so far, the only thing I’ve landed on is if the monkey rode a motorcycle and wore a little leather jacket, which of course, it does! The people who made this show understood good television. We don’t need this prestige TV bullshit. We don’t need to know who the best singer on The Sopranos was or if whatever they broke bad got fixed. We need more monkeys on motorcycles that shoot psychic lightning bolts out of their skulls!
Roxana Banana doesn’t always ride a motorcycle, but in the episode this still is from, she fights a biker gang that’s terrorizing the small town her family is passing through. The whole family wears matching leather jackets with a patch that says Roxanna’s Bananas on the back. They’re somehow mistaken for a biker gang instead of a regular family with a motorcycle driving pet monkey. After they realize the town is scared of the bikers, the family encourages everyone to fight back, which is easy to suggest when you’re being backed by a monkey with alien superpowers.
The biker gang is headed by James Avery, who is playing the cousin of his usual thief character. We know this because his sidekick says to him, “Big Daddy,” sorry, his character’s name is Big Daddy and everyone in the episode loves saying it, “ain’t that the dumb, ugly ape that cousin Hank and cousin Hubie wrote us about?” Which means their destitute cousins wrote to them and said, “we keep trying to kidnap a monkey with alien superpowers, but it’s not working out,” and they just accepted it.
When they run into a monkey in a completely different town, they immediately know that it’s the monkey, and they’re also not at all intimidated. Which is a mistake because Roxana Banana immediately starts using her mind ray to mess with the bikers.
The mind ray seems to be Roxana’s only prominent power in the episodes that have survived, but since the synopsis doesn’t mention a single specific power the aliens gave her, I imagine they had her do whatever cool thing the episode called for that week which was technically legal to depict a monkey doing. For instance, in this same episode, she seems to have super strength and arm wrestles five bikers into oblivion.
Also, during the biker episode, she fires two bananas at the bikers as if they are guns? Both the strength and the banana gun strike me as powers that could come from just being a monkey? Or maybe it was the aliens riffing on things that they knew about monkeys. Can Roxanna make anything into a gun or just bananas? God, what I wouldn’t give to see those other ten episodes.
Roxanna doesn’t only use her powers for good, though. There’s an episode where she uses her mind ray to frame a black man for stealing. James Avery just wants to adopt a lost dog, and Roxanna tries to send him to Rikers Island.
In that episode, the Coles find a lost dog, and Roxanna becomes jealous of it, so she allows Hank and Hubert to kidnap the dog and then later feels guilty about it when they force the dog to perform for an audience because Rozanna Banana is very familiar with how much animals hate being forced to wear silly costumes for humans.
Because Going Bananas seems to have based most of its plot around whatever monkey-sized hat they found that day, they could only fill up fifteen to twenty minutes of airtime with an actual show. So, the last five to ten minutes was filled with a segment called Jungle Broadcast System, where Roxanna Banana watched her favorite TV shows– animal parodies of other popular TV shows. Each skit was just an animal pun with a TV show name played over stock footage of animals quickly cut to almost, not quite, make it look like they’re talking. Some of the titles were respectable, like:
Some of them were downright amazing, like the parody of Little House On The Prairie starring ants that made the house even smaller:
And some of them were kind of a stretch. If you didn’t know that buffalo poop was called chips, this wouldn’t work at all, and also, that cow looks nothing like Erik Estrada. They could have at least put a police hat on it. I’ve become accustomed to a certain quality of silly animals at this point.
Apparently they also did Magnum P.U. with a skunk starring Tom Smelleck. So, it was a real mixed bag of puns but as you can see, fully worth remembering and archiving for future generations. This is what happens when we lose physical media: so many perfect shows are going to be lost to time. What will our generation’s Going Bananas be? Riverdale? The Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina? Katy Keene? Only time will tell.
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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Greg Cunningham, who vows not to rest until he catches the one-armed great ape that framed him for dognapping.
I have a friend Mark who shares my taste in cinema, so he invited me over to watch knife fighting instructional videos in his basement. We studied the shadowy virgins pretending to murder each other before moving on to increasingly unexplainable tapes. But I’m not here to talk about the time a gasoline company produced a VHS tape about a family’s road trip into Native American ghost country to sell no actual product or service. I’m here to talk about the far more cursed collection I found in a back room:
Mark’s partner Karly owns 19 vacation homes worth of puzzles, and there is not a sane one among them. Sexualized cheese sculptures, societies of taxidermied mice, ancient platters of sweaty meat, and so, so many distressed kittens. I started taking pictures of them and told him, “I’m doing an article about your wife’s puzzles, and I’m going to call it…”
I learned a lot about puzzles as I gasped my way through this haunted stack of mistakes. I learned art for puzzles is more about violent disharmony than composition. I also learned there never was a God; it has been mirthless chaos all along. So with what I’ve learned, I was able to come up with the perfect Jigsaw Puzzle Rating System. Each of my friend’s wife’s shattered nightmares will be rated 1 through 10 on two criteria: Ocular Shrieking and Creeping Darkness.
Okay, let me Google one quick thing and we’ll get started.
“WAX IMPRESSIONS” is 500 pieces of human parts. It’s the carefully stored hands and faces of… celebrities? Royalty? I don’t recognize any of these remains. This means they’re either not good wax sculptures or someone has replaced the wax museum’s storage room with the wax museum’s guests, again. Wait, hold on, I recognize one. Computer, enhance:
There. I’d know the front four inches of 1963 Ellizabeth Taylor’s feet anywhere.
Ocular Shrieking: 9/10
This seems like it should be a perfect score, but listen: it’s a closet full of nothing but human heads except for a single pair of feet named E. Taylor. It’s a little too perfect. It feels like a mostly sane jigsaw puzzle photographer said, “Ha ha, let’s make one of them just a labeled foot. Take away the Elizabeth Taylor head to make it look like they only sculpted her fee– no, chopped-in-half feet.” My point is, it’s a real non-maniac’s idea of what a maniac’s murder closet would look like. It *clap* is *clap* not *clap* hard, puzzle photographers: if you’re looking at a serial killer trophy case with no penises, that’s a decoy trophy case. You’re standing on a trap door.
Creeping Darkness: 10/10
If I put together this puzzle I would absolutely expect to be missing a single piece and find it later in the mouth of a dead body. This is fucked. A stain on our world. I mean, why did they even bother labeling the hands when they clearly crawl around to whatever spot they want?
BATHROOM, SWEET BATHROOM! is a passive aggressive argument between set designers. It’s like six refugee families moved into a 14 bed, 1 bath apartment and each of them has a different skin condition. What the shit am I looking at, BATHROOM, SWEET BATHROOM!?
Ocular Shrieking: 7/10
This is a vomit of unidentifiable shapes. If you were putting this puzzle together, you’d be saying things like, “I think this piece is part of the… Croatian sex driver? Maybe the klaarb lotion?” I have no goddamn idea. There are abandoned muffins and egg timers among the clutter of torsh scrubbers and chlorg tubes. This is something an idiot mermaid would build out of shipwreck debris after having surface toilets described to her by a lobster.
Creeping Darkness: 2/10
Maybe it’s the plastic flowers mashed into the moist landfill of discontinued Amway creams, but I almost get a pleasant feeling from this puzzle. At the risk of walking into a trap, I’d say the jigsaw puzzle photographer responsible for this has a reasonable explanation for all the cat parts hidden among it. See if you can find all 8 pounds!
A thing I’m learning about puzzles is there is more world building than you’d expect. For instance, look at how much you suddenly know about these teddy bears. They were posed and photographed by a pervert, and no second thing.
Ocular Shrieking: 10/10
I can’t even look directly at it. If I told the FBI about “BARE BEAR BEACH!,” I’m pretty sure they would shoot my friend’s wife. I legally became a bear sex criminal the second I published this.
Creeping Darkness: 9/10
If I heard a strange noise in my kitchen, I would rather find a hatching cluster of spider eggs than someone putting together “BARE BEAR BEACH!”. Let’s say you thought sexualizing children’s toys was cute, and are you hearing yourself, look at the bear with the binoculars. Why include him? Let’s say you thought sex crimes were cute, and oh my god are you hearing yourself, he is massacring this photo’s layout. And for what? “I’m very, very looking at buttholes,” he might tell you, but what his presence really says is there is nowhere you can hide from the dark perversions of a jigsaw puzzler, even in this land of magical toys.
Stuffed With Memories? More like stuffed with the souls of a lost Amish colony. “Putting together the puzzle won’t free us,” the box whispered. “Quite the opposite,” it explained.
“I know,” I replied. “You probably started as a puzzle of two ponies on a tablecloth, and these are all the bored souls who assembled you.”
Ocular Shrieking: 8/10
“Did you say something in there?” shouted Mark.
“Tell him. Tell them all, No one will believe you,” giggled the box.
Creeping Darkness: 7/10
“Your wife’s fucking puzzles won’t shut up!” I shouted from the vacant face of a chicken on a puzzle box.
“It is the year 2387 and I’m a different guy!” replied a new voice. “I think I hear sounds coming from this strange and dusty tomb!” said the doomed explorer.
If a clown or magician walks up to you and exposes their button dewlaps like this, get out of there. They have marked you for mating.
Ocular Shrieking: 9/10
I hate every square inch of “OH, DO YOU KNOW THE BUTTON MAN?”. What has The Button Man done? These are catch phrases from characters who don’t exist and he’s made them his entire personality. Five hundred pins is already how you tell strangers you’re weird about sex, and The Button Man still has too many cheeky buttons about touching his buttons. This man put pinback buttons on his bowtie, which is already a good enough reason to spray him with bear mace, but the three he chose were Erotic Lips, Piano Keys, and Playboy Logo. I honestly think those would place you in the top five of a nationwide Creepiest Bowtie Pin Choice contest. Fuck you, Button Man. Fuck what future generations of archaeologists will think about us when they discover your metal remains.
Creeping Darkness: 6/10
I gave this a six because there’s a six out of ten chance The Button Man is not an over-accessorized man, but a being of pure button and this is him peeling off the outer layer of his flesh. There is a six out of ten chance the answer to the question “Oh, do you know The Button Man?” is “Shhh! The Button Man hunts after he molts!”
This BUTTON TALK puzzle is promising because it shows The Button Man can bleed. And if he can bleed, we can kill him.
Ocular Shrieking: 8/10
Maybe I’ll never be able to get inside the head of a button collector, but you can just not keep certain buttons, right? Like, if a pin says “Try banana juice,” what happens inside you that prevents you from throwing it in the trash? To be fair, not all of the pins on BUTTON TALK are meaningless bullshit. I think we can all agree THINK FISH. My hair hurts. ESKIMO POWER. The word BITCH three times.
Creeping Darkness: 8/10
I do like how the badges of BUTTON TALK aren’t forming the skin of a horny juggler like they were in the “OH, DO YOU KNOW THE BUTTON MAN?” puzzle. Still, there are some unsettling things being said by these buttons. A lot of them are little jokes you tell when you also sometimes choke your wife. I have a theory that the button-making creative process is going fugue and pressing every last fleeting thought into a pin. So you might only find out later you’re a lonely, aging misogynist longing for the mouth of anyone– kids, family members, anyone. Oh, and you might be a militant Inuit nationalist? The point is, jigsaw puzzles have taught us nothing good has ever been expressed through button.
I don’t care what anyone says. “Deli Fare” is the perfect amount of old wet.
Ocular Shrieking: 6/10
A lot of jigsaw puzzles are abandoned slime farms stolen from “What Not To Do” chapters of food photography textbooks. This is an AI art generator trying to create a picture of “Moist Rusty.” If someone posted this picture on social media, you’d assume they were getting through a Resident Evil castle level, not getting lunch. Did they mean for this to be a sad tube graveyard, or was there a mixup at a colonoscopy screening? Because this implies there’s a proctologist somewhere studying a mound of deli meat for polyps. Fucking roasted, puzzle.
Creeping Darkness: 4/10
This isn’t an especially scary pile of sweaty food. If I saw this outside of a jigsaw puzzle, I’d tell the lead investigator the caterers had been slaughtered within the last 12 to 14 hours. So there is some menace to it, just not an impending menace.
I don’t care what anyone says. ORIENTAL CHOW is the perfect amount of mummified wets.
Ocular Shrieking: 4/10
ORIENTAL CHOW is what you name your Chinese food puzzle when you have no one in your life to bounce ideas off of. To make matters worse, this looks like the GrubHub thumbnail for a restaurant called Old Chang’s Diarrhea. There are 2300 items on the menu, yet everything comes out looking exactly like this (cup $1.76 bowl $5.93).
Creeping Darkness: 3/10
If a restaurant is serving food like this and it’s still in business, it’s definitely some kind of criminal peanut laundering operation. A litany of international crimes led to this dry smear of future leftovers.
I guarantee you the owner of “THE DOLL SHOP” is a seven foot cricket with human teeth.
Ocular Shrieking: 10/10
If you see a retail display that looks like this, don’t bother turning around. The exit door is gone, and everything behind you is dolls. I don’t even know why they make dolls like this. There’s got to be a more efficient way to store six gallons of innocent blood.
Creeping Darkness: 10/10
Come the fuck on, “THE DOLL SHOP.” What could this be other than a prison for child souls? It’s like the first slide in a lazy presentation on avoiding ghost kidnappers. More troubling than its creepiness is how there’s no attempt at being a second thing. You can’t relocate a bunch of baby graves to your sitting room and expect people to think, “Ah, ordinary dolls to be appreciated.” An 80-year-old Barbie collector would show this to her quilting club and go, “Ha ha look at this skin crawling shit. GIVE US YOUR FORESKINS ha ha ha. Cheryl, this puzzle is more haunted than your guest toilet after you make Oriental chow.”
I feel like Ahhh! would have been a better title for the last puzzle.
Ocular Shrieking: 3/10
This is about as non-refreshing as you can make a drink look. Ahhh!, just how I like my beer– 40% foam, placed next to its raw materials to help remind you this comes from a bunch of grains left to rot in a dystopian Missouri warehouse. I am less thirsty now, Ahhh!.
Creeping Darkness: 4/10
This obviously isn’t very creepy, but I wouldn’t underestimate the crushing sadness of finishing a puzzle of beer by yourself. It has to be at least as sad as finishing a warm crystal bowling ball of beer next to a wooden spoon of rice by yourself.
“OH! YOU BEAUTIFUL DOLL!” is what a serial killer makes when they’re self-aware enough to know they can’t outwit the FBI. No rational person has ever said, “For this room I’m picturing several thousand babies avoiding eye contact dressed in indistinct variations of nude, shape, and clown.”
Ocular Shrieking: 10/10
This is a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle, but there were 1729 people aboard the eighteen planes that crashed simultaneously the day it was manufactured. So you do the math.
Creeping Darkness: 8/10
Anyone encountering “OH! YOU BEAUTIFUL DOLL!” has plainly entered a world of terror, but it’s not the paralyzing unease of a normal doll collection. These aren’t the kinds of dolls who giggle from the shadows or pick up the phone to invite your wife into a trap with your voice. This is a marching army of baby soldiers– an immediate danger you either deal with or die. Do you have hand grenades? A firehose manned by exorcists? Then get the fucking fuck out of there!
When Karly learned what I was doing, she said the inclusion of MIDNIGHT’S DELIGHTS was non-negotiable. “Why?” I thought. “It’s only a cluttered fridge and I already have 211 food ones. What would the owner of the world’s most deranged puzzle collection know about weird puzzles?” Then I looked closer.
Ocular Shrieking: 7/10
My dear god. Some poor artist went in and designed “funny” food labels for all these products. All this work for a jigsaw puzzle and what did it get them? DULL PICKLES? DULL PICKLES!? Die nailed to your worst fear, you unspeakable monster. I hope your shitty puzzle gags impressed some 9-year-old who forgot to bring an iPad to Grandpa’s house.
Creeping Darkness: 10/10
The labels are sad on their own, sure. It can hurt to watch people struggle and fail. However, it’s when the labels all come together when they tell a story of grief. DULL PICKLES and EEL Helper are the dry heaves of a mediocre mind, but they have the energy of an unfunny person trying. But the others? No. Something happened early in this process that caused this puzzle designer to lose all hope. This is going to sound dark, but you don’t go from “GEE WHIZ” to “I don’t care… GOAT MILK” unless the police call you during the design process to tell you your family died. “Hello, Reliable Puzzle Shop, Silly Gary spea– oh. Oh. I understand. That’s sad news, but… but they would want me to finish this puzzle. Sniff. I guess… ReD StUfF? Here’s one: Green Things. And these refried beans are now… Re-Refried BEA— what? I can’t believe it’s LARD? That’s terrific, officer. I’ll use that one for sure. Okay, I’ll come down to identify them after I finish naming the frozen foods. BLUE EYED PEAS? Ha ha that one is going in too, officer.”
Let’s do a nice one. It’s I ❤ Hearts!
Ocular Shrieking: 0/10
Pleasant hearts placed perfectly in rows? Fine! Nothing here makes me worry for the safety of the artist, which is the bar I now use to appreciate jigsaw puzzles.
Creeping Darkness: 1/10
This is really unappealing and I’m not sure what you use the hearts for, but there’s only a tiny bit of sadness here. If I had to guess I’d say 63 years ago, an aunt with no hobbies or personality accidentally said she liked hearts near one of her birthdays. It’s almost sweet! She probably smiles at these and thinks, “Am I supposed to freeze them and put them in drinks? Swallow and pass them? Who started this stupid fucking tradition? Anyway, the puzzle maker who came by to photograph them sure seemed sad.”
I think jigsaw puzzles might be a fallback career when you can’t paint for shit. “Still Life #24” is clumsy ass garbage. It looks like the production background for an unreleased Christian cartoon about food cops. If you put this trash image on a birthday cake, rats wouldn’t eat it.
Ocular Shrieking: 5/10
“Still Life #24” looks like an unfinished photo collage done by a coal miner who dropped out of 7th grade because the photo collages were too hard.
Creeping Darkness: 5/10
“Still Life #24” looks like something a coal miner imagines ever since they quit their job as an art teacher because one of their students painted “Still Life #24.”
“Okay, Springbok creative team. You’re the best jigsaw namers in the business. We’ve got a picture of 210 ceramic figu– extremely random ceramic figures on a black void. What do we call it?”
“CUTTING A FIGURE?“
“What about simply… GO FIGURE!“
“Gentlemen, I’m only a mysterious intruder with a knife, but GRANDMA’S KITCHEN.”
“That’s the one. Great job, new guy. GRANDMA’S KITCHEN.”
“GRANDMA’S KITCHEN IS WHERE IT ALL BEGAN! GRANDMA’S KITCHEN IS WHERE THE BLADE FIRST SPOKE TO ME!” The End.
Ocular Shrieking: 7/10
What the f– computer, isolate sector A3, enhance:
What the shit is this? Am I looking at a dismembered middle-aged centaur with milking tits? What is wrong with Grandma?
Creeping Darkness: 6/10
There’s nothing like a couple hundred tiny ceramic things lined up in delicate rows to remind you how short our time here on Earth is. These will be the last faces Grandma sees when Oriental chow clogs her final blood vessel. These will be the miniature porcelain ears to hear her last words. “I… I should have… spent more time… asking the… hhhh… gift shop owner… hhhh… what you were, milking centau–“
“CHILI TODAY – HOT TAMALE” proves that old saying in the art world– when you take a picture of food too disgusting to print in a magazine, split it into 500 pieces and sell it to Mark’s wife.
Ocular Shrieking: 3/10
I love how at some point in the production process, someone thought it was necessary to give this picture a little sash that says “MEXICAN FOOD.” Why? For whom is it for? Assuming a jigsaw consumer couldn’t recognize Mexican food, in what way would this information change things? Was it a trick to get some pedantic nerd to say, “Actually, m’lady, a lot of these dishes are more associated with Spain or Argentina.” Who does this “MEXICAN FOOD” sash help? Maybe it was a writing prompt so no jigsaw puzzle designer named it PIZZA MY HEART or IF LOOKS COULD KALE? They could have written them a private note that says, “This wet scrap is Mexican food, so name it something like GRANDMA’S TACO or AVOCADO WHAT SHE’S HAVING! thanks.”
Creeping Darkness: 7/10
That seven score doesn’t really have anything to do with “CHILI TODAY – HOT TAMALE” itself. But I read over the paragraph I just wrote and I’m 7/10 unsettled by the effect these puzzles are having on me. I don’t remember typing GRANDMA’S TACO and I can’t make the case for it being a coherent punchline.
I’m not sure why I took a picture of this one. What a pedestrian level of madness. Oh, look out for TROLL-MANIA!, everyone. Fucking eighty dollars worth of ordinary toys dumped in a corner. The guy who made “OH! YOU BEAUTIFUL DOLL!” collected enough human toes to feed 900 doll soldiers! Either dedicate yourself to the craft or cry in the coal mine with the “Still Life #24” artist. It’s not a great sign I’m only making references to jigsaw puzzles.
Ocular Shrieking: 0/10
Oh, is one of you Trolls a silly pirate? Fuck you. Come back when you’re a ceramic miniature made of unclear smears and one of your arms was chewed off during a centaur milking accident.
Creeping Darkness: 0/10
Yes, if you look closely, a Wizard Troll and a Taliban Troll are watching a circle of naked Troll children. And yes, Cop Troll is about to arrest Dashiki Troll for talking to Kimono Troll. And okay, fine, each of these creatures has the face of Mary-Kate and Ashley. If the category was Problematic Decisions, this would be a 10/10, but it’s not. It’s Creeping Darkness, and who would be afraid of multicultural best friends? Besides Cop Troll, of course.
Look, everyone! It’s Yellow! Wait, no, that’s the whole thing? No. No.
Ocular Shrieking: Yellow/10
From concept to name to execution, “Presenting Yellow!” is a desperate grab for nothing. It’s a yellow way to tell everyone at the jigsaw puzzle factory you’re not handling your divorce well; you need help. It’s an idea you would tell a mad scientist to assure him his soul erasing ray was a success.
Creeping Darkness: Yellow/10
This puzzle is like a solid brick of void misplaced in our dimension. And more haunting than its existence is how it implies these monsters made a puzzle for all the colors. “Step Back… It’s Lavender!” or “It Gives Us Great Pleasure To Welcome Taupe!” but most likely, “My Wife Left Me For Blue And I Can’t Do This Anymore.”
I grew up during an era of history where finding adult material involved treasure maps and interpreting nipples from scrambled TV signals, but still, if you showed 13-year-old me the PLAYBOY Playmate Puzzle, I would have found it almost ghoulishly cruel to ask anyone to assemble a naked photo from a tube of puzzle pieces.
Ocular Shrieking: 1/10
I didn’t take this out of the tube to test this theory, but you have to imagine a used PLAYBOY Playmate Puzzle never comes complete. You don’t buy something like this and then NOT throw out all the pieces except the feet ones.
Creeping Darkness: 8/10
“Three words: Pornography Jigsaw Puzzle,” I say smugly to the wordy idiot going on and on about the stupid baby shoes that were never worn.
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