From an unexplained corner of the galaxy they came! Zan! Jayna! And their space monkey Gleek! Did they come from a planet where all brothers and sisters could form animals or water anythings when they touched? How much training did they receive before they were put in charge of rescuing Earth children? Because, and I’ve made this case before, things only got more insane and worse any time they tried to help. The following is a real adventure from a real 1977 episode of the Super Friends. Please enjoy Everyone the Wonder Twins Rescued Should Be Dead Episode 2.
… This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Haught Phart: the other Wonder Twin, whose power is Not Associating With the Wonder Twins. Oh, and nuclear farts.
There is nothing more Indoor Kid than what we’re looking at today. Someone recreated the Bible, the Holy Bible, in its entirety, using Minecraft. The idea sounds like a homeschooled child’s desperate gambit to play more video games. It’s something you’d come up with if you were a nerd your entire life then suddenly tried to rebrand yourself as “cool” after becoming a youth pastor. And it’s fucking garbage. From concept to finished product, it sucks beyond the scope of God’s forgiveness.
Besides being a clear mockery of the authors’ creator, THE UNOFFICIAL HOLY BIBLE FOR MINECRAFTERS: OLD TESTAMENT: STORIES FROM THE BIBLE TOLD BLOCK BY BLOCK is completely unauthorized. It’s just baaaaarely not in violation of the game’s commercial use guidelines, and should serve as a lesson to all future media companies: include the line “not for use in weird fucking Bibles” in your terms of service. In fact, by continuing on to the Minecraft story of Creation, you consent to these terms.
The Christian universe doesn’t have a complicated origin story, but when it got adapted into Minecraft it got shortened to exactly 16 panels (and 4 of them are blank). And if you’re wondering if this book was the work of inspired artists expressing their passion for Christ using the limitless potential of digital sculpture, look at that weak shit. That gray cube on nothing is how they represented the majesty of the time God made the entire moon. It’s not necessarily terrible, but it’s clearly saying, “If there was a way to do less, I would have, God.” The artist obviously hated doing this and more obviously couldn’t have done a good job if they cared. Let me put it like this: if you were recently fired for being bad at teaching gorillas how to play Minecraft, this would be a D- project by one of your below average students.
This was the moment when God created Woman? This mental patient burying a sex doll? Can you imagine looking at this and thinking, “This is going great. I’m going to stick with it and do the ENTIRE BIBLE.” Even with stakes this low — a book sold exclusively to bad grandparents which will never be opened — this is an embarrassing effort. If this is what I had made and Jesus Christ Himself asked to see how my Minecraft Bible was going, I’d tell him I lost all my files in a masturbation accident.
The dialog isn’t much better than the set design. After Adam and Eve eat from the forbidden tree, they tear their own legs off and whine, “We are going to be in such big trouble!” Why are these naked, grown people talking like babies? I know this is intended for kids, but in what world does that mean every character has the mind of a child? Even Starscream had enough respect for his audience to shriek things like, “You are a coward, Megatron! I should lead the Decepticons!” He didn’t look into the camera and say, “My poo poo is more big boy than his! Clap, clap if I am right!” Wait, sorry, I accidentally undermined my point by making Transformers better.
There really is no better way to tell the story of man’s original sin than the skin of a nude guy stretched across three cubes and telling God, “She did it!” Do you hear that sound? It’s every oil painter in the world whispering a reverent “MINECRAFT” into the barrel of a shotgun. And if you were curious how this book’s crafty artist represented the serpent, they put a Creeper behind a bush and counted on the imagination of Minecraft players to replace the unseen parts of one of history’s most well-known video game enemies with “snake.” It genuinely wouldn’t have been any lazier if the caption said, “Sorry the game didn’t have snakes, and if you’re reading this, God, that’s in many ways on You!”
We all get this is a dumb thing made by untalented assholes who bet three weeks of their life on the idea of how Christians will buy anything. But with Cain and Abel, I think there is a danger in telling the story of the invention of murder using characters in a game where death is cute and meaningless. It’s, I don’t know… it’s like explaining the dangers of misogyny using sound clips from Big Natural Milk-Squirting Sluts. It gets the message across, but does it? Anyway, let’s skip ahead to the end of the Cain and Abel story.
T-that’s the end? God gave them Emo Peter Pan as a replacement son, bye? Is this book even accurate? It’s been awhile since I’ve read the non-Minecraft Bible, but I don’t remember the story of Cain and Abel being two things long and one of them was Eve giving birth to a teenage Seth in front of a makeshift Arby’s. Oh, good. The next part is Noah’s Ark. I remember this one:
Honestly, when I first realized this book wasn’t kidding, the first thing I considered was how much effort it would take to do Noah’s Ark. I thought about the undertaking it would be to build every animal out of 3D blocks and the scale at which you’d have to do it. And then I turned to page 23 and saw Noah only rounded up the five farm animals that come included in Minecraft. This isn’t storytelling. This is a tedious expression of how you gave up on joy. If the Walls of Jericho stand for ten thousand more years, the children of God will never come up with a more stupid or slothful way to spread His word. If anyone reading this makes a bubble gum that tastes like the cry of the Israelites, you can put this quote on the packaging: “Absolutely not the worst Bible adaptation! – The Internet’s Seanbaby.”
When you read in an ordinary Bible how God tells Noah to put two of every animal on a boat so He can safely kill everything with a flood and restart the Earth with the incest set to max, it seems reasonable. To me, at least. But when you see that story play out in video game form, it doesn’t quite resonate the same. Watching this guy try to save all of Earth’s animals and seeing how all he does is lure a couple pigs into every five-year-old’s first Minecraft barn… it doesn’t look like he’s doing God’s will. Presented this way, it just looks like some old farmer lost his goddamn mind.
There are a few other stories that don’t translate well into Children’s Video Game…
Sodom and Gomorrah is no longer a city of hedonism, but a… what are we looking at? A summer camp for cranky baboons? A parade of peanuts marching at an anti-kindness rally? One of them is really letting Abraham have it with, “God shmod!” If a child made this, their loving parent might brag, “My oldest is so talented!” which is just the misdirect part of the joke before they add, “…his younger brother, on the other hand, is a do-nothing piece of shit who plays Christian Minecraft all da– no, don’t ask. You don’t want to know.”
These nude peanut monsters appear later in the book when they jealously tear off Joseph’s dream coat and throw him down an eighty foot hole. This is unrelated to the prison he gets thrown in for not sleeping with Potiphar’s wife. Stripped of all doctrine, context, narrative, and dignity, then illustrated with cubes, these stories really don’t make a lot of sense. For instance, the rest of this story is about Joseph taking a job as a prison dream interpreter.
I have no notes here. I love that the prison guards let the baker keep his costume. I love how dreaming about birds on your head means you’re going to die in jail. I love the baker’s sad body language when he hears and believes this terrible news. Pausing the Bible to let Chef Boyardee know he’s never getting out of prison is exactly the type of story meant to be told with Minecraft blocks. Ten out of ten.
Look, I don’t know if there’s a good way to illustrate the Angel of Death killing the firstborn of every Egyptian using only Minecraft. But I do know you can’t do worse than this. It’s the bare minimum of design required to say “this is a house” and a figure skating cookie trying its best. This book can’t be serious. If your school assignment was to draw a city and an Angel of Death, and you turned this in, the note from your teacher would read, “HEY, I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE EITHER, YOU SARCASTIC LITTLE FUCK.”
THE UNOFFICIAL HOLY BIBLE FOR MINECRAFTERS: OLD TESTAMENT: STORIES FROM THE BIBLE TOLD BLOCK BY BLOCK is at its best when the text describes the scope and glory of God’s might under a screenshot of a simple idiot’s half-finished diorama. Here, I’ll show you:
Whatever this is rules. To tell everyone to behold the power of the Lord and then show them this completely rules. It’s like 2000 years of sacred teachings were only put here to create the context for this perfect Moses comedy routine.
This “it’s a head on a box but please imagine it’s actually something else” art technique is used all through the book, like when Abraham’s wife gives birth to this moustached refrigerator. Look at this fucking 500 pound terror golem. Can even the most devoted Christians suspend their disbelief this much? It’s like the artist watched someone die in an iron lung and thought, “You know, if you squint your eyes, really squint, it kiiiiiind of looks like a newborn baby!”
Sometimes these hacks don’t even bother trying. Like when God punished Pharaoh with a plague of frogs, they didn’t build a bunch of frogs out of blocks and zoom out. Instead, they showed a picture of Pharaoh looking out the window and explaining to the reader he sees frogs. Like in the movie Jurassic Park where they hold on Sam Neill’s face for 40 minutes and the voiceover says, “Sam Niell is surprised to see dinosaurs. He’s looking right at dinosaurs right now. What has Man done, he probably thinks.” Wait, hold on, is the edge of that tree supposed to be the frog plague? Never mind, I stand corrected.
Most of the books of the Bible are cut down to three or four pages of unrelated screenshots and nonsensical, half-remembered plot points, but sometimes they indulge in a long action scene, like when Samson beats the shit out of a cheetah for two pages. He carries it around, breaks it over his leg, climbs on top of it to taunt it, and piledrives it ass-erect into the ground. Then it… turns into a beehive and he pulls honey out of its butthole? Whoa, I don’t remember any of this from Sunday school.
There’s probably some kind of symbolism in this. Slamming a monster so hard until it stands erect and then eating something sweet out of its ass? I’m starting to see the appeal of Christian theology. Anyway, look at the intrigue that happens later in the same story:
This Samson scene demonstrates the kind of adorable minimalist storytelling they could have been doing this entire time. Look at their little conspiratorial lean! The thoughtfulness in the camera angle and architecture! Something about watching a super ripped guy suck honey out of an asshole really inspired these creators. And to be fair, this also isn’t a bad whale:
Unfortunately, most of the Jonah whale story takes place inside the whale and these authors weren’t about to try to draw this giant damn thing a second time but inside out. So instead of getting swallowed, in the Minecraft version of the story, Jonah sits patiently inside the whale’s gaping mouth for three days.
Look, drawing the interior of a whale’s digestive system must be hard. Whenever I ask someone to do it they say no because their NSFW commissions aren’t open, whatever that means. But Jonah is just sitting there. What are you doing!? Move fifteen feet in any direction, Jonah! What’s the goal here? Are you hoping you’ll die and St. Peter will say, “Hey, there he is! Guys, look who’s here! Earth’s most cooperative leviathan hostage! Ha ha, how’d you figure out we were using Pointless Whale Mouth Patience as a standard to measure morality?” Oh no, this is crazy. All this shit I’m typing is crazy. I don’t think THE UNOFFICIAL HOLY BIBLE FOR MINECRAFTERS: OLD TESTAMENT: STORIES FROM THE BIBLE TOLD BLOCK BY BLOCK is good for my mental health. Maybe let’s turn to one last random page and see if it gets less ins–
aiiieEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!
… This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Eric Spaulding: who has cast out that vile ender dragon, Satan, and rejects the vile temptations of The Nether!
It’s Golden Age Comics week, just like every other week of my life, so I came ready to crush two things: this article, and the tsunami of poon-vag that follows comic book criticism’s lunar pull. Here are two other things that will be crushed in this article: evil and children’s skulls. But is there really a difference? Let’s ask today’s superhero, Captain Ghost!
Alias “The Chattanooga Ghost,” he was a murderous vigilante with extremely poor judgment at best, and borderline personality disorder at yes, that one, that’s it. He embodied the exterminator archetype in a universe of gentleman tigers and guns that shot laughing rays. Obviously he kicks the most ass since the state of Tennessee outlawed mule-fighting rings.
Our narrator is Billy Batson, the boy who turns into Captain Marvel, A.K.A. Hoagiemouth Superman, but whom you probably know as Shazam. DC recently quit trying to claw the name Captain Marvel back from Marvel, but it’s what he’s called throughout this story, so it’s what I’ll use for consistency. Officially, I choose to do this because his disappointing movie was better than the other Captain Marvel’s disappointing movie. But unofficially, I distrust anyone who vanishes shortly after telling you his real name, and you should too.
Speaking of bodies disappearing:
Every year, MAD magazine founder Bill Gaines used to take his entire company on an all-expenses-paid trip. It’s history’s only instance of your boss inviting you on vacation that doesn’t smell like a crime in progress. Sterling’s anxious to flee town, and take his pet waif with him. Billy is a 13-year-old orphan with his own office at a radio station. What’s he even report on? Which baseball card packs have the most digestible gum?
This child can’t tell his boss no. His 9-to-5 life is the worst parts of being a kid and an adult conjoined. And the tragedy is at any point he could fly away and punch monsters for a living. If Captain Marvel and Billy Batson ever decided one of them had to go, they would unanimously vote Billy out of his own body.
The first place Mr. Morris takes Billy is Lover’s Leap. Holy moley, 1940s comics move fast. We’re still on page 1, and as promised, my hair is standing on end. Billy makes up an excuse to get away, and we meet The Chattanooga Ghost, out hunting perverts and revenuers.
Morris chooses death over exposure, but Captain Marvel saves him, and they agree to pretend he merely lost his footing. Meanwhile, a shaken Ghost flees the truth of what he has uncovered. His panicked flight alarms a nearby couple making love in the old-timey sense of reciting poems but never getting sticky.
Being The Chattanooga Ghost takes a certain kind of insight, and the person under the mask is still young, naive, and soft. But he’s being hunted at the speed of Mercury, and life on the edge is hardening him faster than Mr. Morris watching an orphanage go bankrupt:
This morning he was just a regular crimebuster. Now he’s dangling by his fingertips under a rope bridge while the sum of six demigods hunts him. The Chattanooga Ghost wears white to show he has no shits left to give.
As this story begins to resemble the plot of First Blood, some very important real-life Chattanoogans deliberate pragmatically. One of them is Bill McAllester, President of The Knothole Gang—which I assume to be a loose fraternity of bootleggers threatened by a local crime fighter.
His co-conspirator in Knotholery, Joe Engel, swallows his pride and asks a rival radio station’s reporter for help. Oh sure, that’s how media executives act when nothing suspicious is going on.
This is where it seems like the entire strip is an ad, paid for by the Chattanooga Tourism Board; I recognize the type. So why does it depict The Noog as a place where delusional murderers prowl the state parks and the Scenic City’s most capable men require a child’s help? Maybe investigating The Knothole Gang will explain it…
Okay, The Chattanooga Times Free Press wants you to believe the Gang was merely a wholesome boys’ club devoted to baseball. But does the photo they ran with it look wholesome to you?
The press knows, and they’re scared to say it directly. The deeper I get into this story, the more I think the Chattanooga Ghost was an escapee from some kind of insidious True Detective cult.
And look, it’s easy to find evidence of lunatic conspiracies to hurt children among innocuous material; QAnon’s got 15% of America doing that in a time when fact-checking is the easiest it’s ever been. But if this is just a comic from a more innocent time trying to raise sales in the local newsstands, then on a scale of 1 to crazy, The Chattanooga Ghost is the only Tennessee. But if he is crazy, then why do some pizzerias in Chattanooga have basements? Cui bono? (That’s Latin for “Who likes to bone?”)
Keeping his god-face holstered, Billy free solos Lookout Mountain’s steepest face, desperate to feel alive when he can transform into an invulnerable titan with a breath. Cap’s nickname is actually “Earth’s Mightiest” and it’s only when everyone remembers Billy’s death wish that they sigh “…Mortal.”
Atop this climb, a man promises to show Billy a ghost if he accompanies him to a second location. This kid’s entire life is just blindly following strangers to isolated areas, and he didn’t stop once it got him the best set of superpowers out there. Or, as his therapist put it, “Not once in my professional career have I said the victim deserved it. Nevertheless…”
Twenty minutes later, the guy is still laughing at how naive the orphans who quit grade school are. It will be the last laugh his heart ever musters. He meets The Chattanooga Ghost’s stare, and sees his own capacity for evil gazing back at him.
No longer is The Ghost shocked by the depth of man’s depravity. He stands at its bottom, where God Himself recoils from the twisted sinews of his heart.
Did you think the crushing was metaphorical? Evildoers—and thereby evil—will be literally crushed! Captain Ghost’s identity is ethereal; his methods are rock-solid. His weapon of choice is the boulder, and that makes him king of Rock City:
Now 90% of Captain Marvel’s battles are with Dr. Sivana or Mr. Mind, so it’s a pardonable assumption that anyone under a certain height is evil in the Fawcett Comics universe. But if achondroplasia didn’t exist, The Ghost would devise it anyway to continue heroically killing children.
Soon, even this fiction will fall away. True annihilators know that to make an evil omelette, you have to break a few baby Hitlers.
I get it, TCG. I, too, worked in branded content, and nothing will make you want to crush a child’s skull faster than post-deadline feedback from the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce, saying your comic book story lacks robust detail about the tachymeter factory (now-closed). But you can’t blame one stupid boy reporter for your time in the Knothole.
Billy is the only boy in the world who gets more naive the more it tries to kill him. He’s deteriorated to where he can’t even tell what’s real. Look at this:
This guy trips over a statue of an innocent stalked through nature by a murderous lone wolf and doesn’t blink at the symbolism. Read the signs, you young fool! Go back to the city proper!
YES! The Chattanooga Ghost crushes Billy under one ton of rock for every year he’s been alive, and laughs about it. An hour ago he was terrified he’d contributed to a pedarast’s death. Did he kill a dog or something in between scenes?
Did he just log his first murder? I have no idea what the rules are for hunting orphans in Tennessee. I just know this rocks so hard. He killed a Kryptonian-class magic user his first day on the job, and he already has a war journal.
Ha ha ha! Look how proud he is! “And what have you done today, you big, red cheese? Beaten up a Venusian inchworm?”
His day could not be going better! The guy he has a crush on just witnessed his greatest triumph! They’re going to team up!
What? No, no it can’t go this way! A failure in his own hero’s eyes! Buddy is…crushed.
He vows to amend his ways: Never again will he belittle anyone for having a developmental condition! And he will only murder people he can strongly suspect have committed crimes. Alas, his life is a warning, not an example. Billy returns home to mock him on mass media.
But was Captain Ghost so wrong? Or was the Rockgate conspiracy real? Remember, Billy is our only source for this story! Let me show you how this trip began—and remember, this entire story is told over the radio from Billy’s perspective. Let me just give it a light edit, because nobody needs racism in their staturism:
That’s how Billy Batson: Racist thinks his unprovoked aggression in the train station unfolded; an impossible caricature of a human being was delighted to be treated as a subaltern by a child too stupid to realize he’s being trafficked across state lines.
Even Mr. Sterling Morris, currently in the middle of several federal crimes, is aghast. In a time before Xbox Live, people didn’t know a junior-high boy is the most atomically racist form of a human being. Billy is an unreliable narrator who rewrites history in his favor.
Now here’s how that meeting of crime fighters actually went:
It’s not Captain Ghost’s fault that he was created for violence in a world of wonder.Initially a gentle soul, enraged by crimes against children, obsessed with killing criminals to the point where he sees them among normal people just living life. His arch-enemy has dwarfism and he uncovers a conspi—
Wait a second.
Hey, Google: how approximate are the Charlton and Fawcett earths in DC’s multiverse?
Oh my God.
Picture the ultimate vigilante stalking a world in freefall, born for this. Now transplant him to a childproof Earth. What would that look like?
Now look. Look:
Loooooook!
I understand now. Buddy isn’t trapped in the Golden Age with Captain Marvel. Captain Marvel is trapped in the Fawcett Universe with Rorschach.
Brendan wrote a comic book about a Golden-Age mad scientist turning men into babies long before researching this article. He’s also working on a Golden Age podcast, so prepare whatever anti-crushing measures you deem appropriate.
Last month of this very year, Archie Comics published The Mighty Crusaders #1: The Shield. It was a lifeless reboot of a 60-year-old knockoff superhero team, which isn’t as mean-spirited as it sounds since that describes most comics, but the reason we’re talking about it is because it was written and illustrated by Rob Liefeld. And it may very well be the most Liefeldian thing ever made, which is absolutely as mean-spirited as it sounds.
If you’re not familiar, Rob Liefeld was a comics illustrator from the ’90s who could sort of draw a few human parts and nothing else. Everyone noticed this, talked about it, and hated it, but they just kept letting him do it and here we are. The Shield’s second page shows a group of superheroes who look like they were mocked up this morning under the words “The Pinebrook Nazarene Youth Camp Super Duper Squad (Option Four).”
It’s okay if you don’t know the classic Archie heroes Flygirl, Captain Commando, Jaguar, Black Hood, Comet, Fox, and Lancelot Strong. They don’t do anything in this issue other than stand here hiding their difficult-to-draw feet behind their (maybe) office’s only furniture– a rectangle drawn by a 4th grader learning how to draw shapes. One hallmark of Rob Liefeld’s writing is that every character gets one small text box explaining which superhero archetype they are, no second part to this list, and then the comic gets cancelled.
Let’s talk about superhero archetypes for a second. Comic writers have been using them as shorthand for decades, and we’re fine with it. A character in a third party superhero world might run into a “clearly Batman guy” or “whatever their Fantastic Four is.” We don’t need to know everything about them; they’re just there to establish the setting so the author can show us his unique take on the genre. Rob Liefeld doesn’t do it like that. He thinks his idea of an 85th Captain America guy with no interesting twist totally rules. The Shield isn’t even his first “exactly like Captain America guy.” He was so good at drawing Captain America he produced a comic called Fighting American, who was a guy in a Captain America costume who carried a round shield.
The Fighting American had a team just barely not called The Avengers with a guy named Smash who turned into a giant monster when he got angry and a viking god of thunder who doth verily spaketh like this. You probably believe me, but I feel like I should make it clear I’m not kidding:
If you’re wondering how they got away with this, they mostly didn’t. They were sued and Fighting American was legally prohibited from throwing his shield which didn’t matter because the company went bankrupt and Rob created another Captain America called Agent America which also didn’t matter because lawyers told him to stop fucking making Captain Americas. Every entertainment industry blindly regurgitates the same idea over and over hoping it will work again, but it’s rare to see this pathology in one specific person. Which brings us back to The Shield, the (at least) fourth Captain America Rob Liefeld illustrated.
The Shield is in his (maybe) apartment, sitting alone on his rectangle. A hot dog menu levitates? Rob Liefeld, without exaggeration, one of the biggest successes in modern art and he has remained incurious about how to draw any single thing in 30 years. This chair’s existence is very much like if Richard Donner asked a makeup artist which side the camera things film from.
Because art is life, this world-famous illustrator drew The Shield watching a panel of himself from later in the comic on his TV. He lives in a cement box decorated with only a shape and a lamp, and yet even this was too much clutter for Rob to remember to draw the levitating hot dog menu.
Agents wearing the kind of shoulder pads Rob knows how to draw burst in through The Shield’s open window and knobless door! Chunks from unrelated objects follow them in! They’re here for his invincible armor and, wait did they say invincible armor, oh no, that explains why none of their weapons are going to work.
In stakes Rob Liefeld seems to think are high, these faceless agents from an organization we don’t know harmlessly shoot the superhero for reasons not made clear. He barely has to move to beat them, which is good because Rob thinks he knows how a human arm connects to a torso at this one angle. He’s wrong, but my main point is this isn’t storytelling. It’s something a bored nerd would look down at during Algebra class and not really remember drawing.
Rob seems to have lost track of shit himself. The Shield brags about how he is super duper like his suit, explains to the reader how no he’s not, then headbutts and punches through everyone’s helmets with what is clearly super duper strength. Maybe? We’re not told what their hats are made of. They’re not quite motorcycle or SWAT helmets– they’re more like what you’d draw if you were an untalented artist falling off a bridge and almost had time to draw one last human head. Anyway, over the course of five pages of low effort storyboards for a Ugandan kung fu movie, we are told and shown several contradictory things about our main character while learning nothing about anything. It’s magnificent. If you showed this to the kindest comics editor in the world, they would say, “Tell the kid who drew this they should maybe be a fucking dentist.”
This goddamn fight is still going. He punches one guy so hard they leave the confinement of his 3000 square foot cement box apartment and land on a Frank Miller spatter paint background. If you were to interpret this as real art, you’d say it was revealing something about a dark brutality within this hero. But it’s not that. This art says nothing more than “I didn’t know how to draw The Shield’s love seat from the side.”
Jesus Christ, he is still handing out this one-sided beating while he thinks the Wikipedia entry for The Shield to himself.
After maiming whoever these men were, he rides one of them out the window. It’s not clear what floor he’s on, but his building is a mid-century cement rectangle in the city’s Gray Nothing District. There’s something more amazing happening here, though. Rob Liefeld is known for his reluctance to draw feet, and it’s almost genius how he managed to hide The Shield’s feet three different times on a single page. He had to savagely murder one cop(?) to do it, but there it is– a master at work.
It’s not over! The Shield gets shot a few times by a Pictionary drawing that was going to be a helicopter, so he leaps up onto it. Which means, wait, mounted aircraft guns don’t even jostle him? And they sent in eight(?) dudes in egg carton helmets to take him down with small arms? Holy shit, do I know more about helicopters than Rob Liefeld?
I’m being silly. Rob Liefeld knows parts of the helicopter I couldn’t even conceive of. Like how The Shield is clinging to the helicopter’s… I guess you’d call it its dorsal fin? Then he reaches into the windshield, pulls out its important wires, and raises them up above his head. I have no notes about raising your hands while you’re on a moving helicopter’s windshield and can’t think of a single very specific thing Rob Liefeld is forgetting about helicopters.
You know what? This all seems weirdly familiar like I’ve seen it before. And not in the usual Rob Liefeld way. I mean a Captain America guy spending entire pages beating the fuck out of a room full of government(?) agents… that’s from Civil War, the extremely popular Marvel comics event they based a billion dollar film on. Here, I’ll show them side-by-side:
The similarities end there, though. It’s not like in Civil War, Captain America jumped out the window and punched through the windshield of a helicopter. It was a jet.
Obviously I’m not accusing internationally known haver-of-original-ideas, Rob Liefeld, of plagiarism. There are still some major differences between these two sequences. For instance, The Shield was attacked in his apartment and Captain America wasn’t. But wait, oh no, I just remembered Luke Cage’s scene in Civil War.
Oh fuck, I think that rectangle graveyard might have even been Rob trying to draw Luke Cage’s couch from a less interesting angle. So look, maybe it wasn’t on purpose that Rob Liefeld did a shot-for-shot ripoff of one of the most well-known comic events of the last fifteen years. But whether he knew it or not, something inside him said, “Let’s do exactly the thing everyone saw, only again, and worse in every way. Again.”
Oh, this must have saved him a few minutes. The page after the helicopter crash is just a The Shield pin-up.
Since it’s just a quick sketch of The Shield standing near the color orange, Rob has to explain in the text box that he is searching through the wreckage of his tenth(?) recent murder “for survivors.” If you’re wondering if it’s normal for a comic to do this -describe all the action because it’s faster than drawing it- no, it’s not.
Another hallmark of Rob Liefeld’s art is frantic nonsense instead of anatomy or design. It’s why the plain concrete walls of The Shield’s building have random cracks and bricks(?) every few feet, or why his indestructible costume suddenly has a bunch of super cool battle damage. Wait, oh yeah, fuck, indestructible costume. Well, no worries, they can add a text box explaining it has, I don’t know, “limits” and “self-repairing nanites” now. What I’m getting at is that Rob Liefeld will rewrite an entire character and his origin story if it gets him out of forty seconds of work.
The comic ends with all the superheroes voting to kill The Shield including this lady version of a Captain America guy. Like many Rob Liefeld drawings, it’s hard to tell if Dusty Simmons, “former boy detective current Crusaders liaison,” is three feet tall or if Rob’s brain made some kind of mistake during its understanding of perspective. It probably doesn’t help that they are standing on nothing in a dimension made only of primordial America.
There’s one more thing to talk about. Obviously, I’d never claim a comic was Maximum Liefeldian without another important aspect of Rob Liefeld’s work: petty, stupid behind-the-scenes drama that leads to him leaving the project.
Apparently, Rob was furious when an alternate cover by Tone Rodriguez was “leaked.” It revealed the surprise that would have shocked The Shield’s longtime fans*! A version of The Shield from the future, a big gun-carrying one, was going to come back to the current The Shield’s time! That’s right, the guy known for creating Cable and also the same things over and over, created Cable again!
* ha ha
What’s great is that an image of Old Gun The Shield was already being circulated in promotions for the comic for months. And the first page of this issue I’m talking about, the very first page, has a picture of him, battle-damaged indestructible suit and all:
It’s not a sudden twist at the end! Even assuming you had any expectations for whatever the fuck a The Shield story might be, knowing an old time-traveling version of him was going to show up only spoils the brief moment between picking up the comic and opening it. And Rob Liefeld quit over it! That’s like walking off the set of Transmorphers 2 because the first one’s DVD box told everyone it was 86 minutes long. There is nothing more Rob Liefeld than abandoning a knockoff Captain America comic after drawing eight lazy splash pages, one foot, and even fewer backgrounds. Even trying to imagine something more Liefeldian would risk shattering our reality and L-Liefeld Liefeld Rob Liefeld Liefeld. Liefeld. Rob Liefeld.
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