Heavy Liquid TPB
Every week I compose this wonderful column by running through the list of weekly releases on Midtown Comics‘ site. Some weeks, like this week, I just stare at the list in horror. There’s absolutely nothing I want to buy – nothing I can recommend in good faith to the fantastic followers of Mishka Bloglin.

Thankfully for me I have a younger brother, who likes to do younger brother things. Despite being my intellectual superior, and a more analytic comic book reader, he gets a kick out of torturing me. Coming down into my room, I told him to get the fuck out, I had to write this shit. He didn’t budge. So I said okay, fine, you tell me what to write about. So we scrolled and scrolled through the list. And then like a Paul Pope fanboy, he said, oh, go back! Heavy Liquid!

Coming out this week is the softcover TPB of Paul Pope’s comic. Pope is one of the more inspiring dudes I follow in comic books these days. He generally marches to his own beat, and even his superhero work is inventive and a bit left or normal. Check out Pope’s Batman Year 100 or his Stranger Adventures tales in DC’s Wednesdays Comics for further proof.

Heavy Liquid came out in 1999 and for a cyberpunk geek like me, it seems like a warm, welcoming handjob. Asked by me to explain what Heavy Liquid was about since he had read it, and I hadn’t, my brother responded between disgusting bites of Caramel Apple:

It’s about a guy, named S who is addicted to the drug Heavy Liquid which happens to be but he’s asked by some art dealer to find what happens to be S’s ex lover to commission a painting using the liquid as some sort of alloy…and he hallucinates and sees cool things and blah blah…

I sort of tuned him out after a while. I was more concerned with him throwing gobs of caramel apple and spit everywhere all over my floor. Joking aside, Heavy Liquid seems to be a trippy dystopian journey, which is exactly what I’d expect from Pope. For those of you who missed out on either the single issues, or the hardcover, you’ll probably think this shit is dope.

Punisher #75 (Steve Dillon Variant)
A dope recommendation later I told him that I needed more than one comic to cover for the week. So we kept scrolling. Punisher #75, Steve Dillon Variant, he said to me. I know that he doesn’t like Punisher or Steve Dillon and was just busting my balls. That said, it’s been a long time since I checked out the Punisher. I rocked it back in the day when Ennis and Dillon were first on it. It was vulgar, funny, over the top. But eventually it just sort of became that…every month. Nothing too spectacular. I have a few friends who still subscribe to it religiously. Meh. It isn’t bad, it just seems sort of monotonous.

The Punisher stabs someone in the eye with a hooker’s shoe or something and then someone says something snappy to him, and then he shoots them and hangs them by their intestines. It was shocking and amazing the first three-thousand times.

Uncle Scrooge #384
Uncle Scrooge #384?, he said. Anything that has had 383 issues before it must be on to something. I think he has a point there. Doing some rough math on my Mac’s calculator, that means that this comic book has been running for thirty-two years. Holy fucking shit! This title has been on the Earth for six years longer than I have! Pretty amazing. I think my brother may be right, just what the fuck is going on in Uncle Scrooge? Is he pulling some truly villanous shit? He is Scrooge after all.

Scrooge needs his own Vertigo title. I wouldn’t mind seeing him dealing with his old age and loneliness buried under a mound of tapped ass and cheap drugs. Dude’s been on the shelf for thirty-two years, it’s time to shake things up. Right? I can’t imagine anything other than emptiness filling his life. As the cover clearly shows, his desire for wealth has left him with a bunch of nephews that hate him and some bastard children in various states.

Uncle Scrooge. It had come down to recommending that I write about Uncle Scrooge.

My brother turned to me, and said “I don’t know how to tell you man, but you may be shit out of luck.”

Check out Heavy Liquid, and pray to the Gods that next week’s release list isn’t so sparse.