The Vertigo Vault # 4: Muktuk Wolfsbreath - Hard-Boiled Shaman

Most avid readers of supernatural comics coming from the west will probably have seen enough of Hell for about five lifetimes. Even the dearly departed, classic that is Hellblazer, despite it being kind of in the name, used it as a safety net a bit too often. Of course it's understandable why, given the extra research necessary to be able to do something entirely different without screwing it up too badly, however once in a while it would be good for someone to at least try.

This is where today's series comes in. Muktuk Wolfsbreath - Hard-Boiled Shaman. First appearing in Terry Laban's Cud comic, which was an anthology comic which ran between 1992 and 1994, created by Laban in order to do something "wilder and crazier" according to his own words.

In 1998 the series got picked up to run as a three issue mini series published by Vertigo.

We begin with Muktuk sleeping in his tent when the he gets a dream vision of his former-lover/student/enemy Nusqua. Sniffing around they find Nusqua's familiar, a thing that looks like if  Sonic was designed by Heinz Edelmann and let it loose to lead it to her in the only way Muktuk knows how: swallowing magic mushrooms.

Arriving in thea village and almost getting shot by an arrow in the process, Muktuk finds Nusqua as the local Shaman and quite a lot more when concerning Rooka, the local hunter. There's been something supernatural killing things around the village, so he sets up a decoy boy and gets his drink-loving weasel spirit animal to make the empty sack get up and go for a calm afternoon walk in the forest.

And what does he find but a cannibal ghost - basically a zombie with nothing you can shoot at, with the body of a young boy. Ol' Muktuk has to make like an Avenger and levitate out of there to make sure he's not on the menu and goes about trying to find out more. It has something to do with the death of Rooka's kid and as he explains it, there being just a cannibal ghost around is apparently too good to be true, because the Great Mother has a habbit of piling up an additional side of famine and sickness ontop of the revenge hauntings whenever a crime happens, just to spice things up a bit ya know ? The reason being well, humanity kinda sorta shits all over her face whenever they screw up.

Kind of understandable I guess. Muktuk is pressured into leaving my Nusqua, but he's attacked by the ghost again and this time he has to spend a whole night up in a tree to avoid being munched on. Worse yet, after he's basically said "screw this" and leaves, he finds a tiger and uses his shaman voodoo to talk to it and find out what really happened. Rooka found his dead son's body, mauled by a tiger, and after he managed to shoot the pussy bastard he was then jumped by another tiger (some guys have all the luck eh ?) and then he had to hide in a cave with the only thing to eat being his son's corpse.

Ouch. There's not really a way to get past this sort of thing, no matter how expensive your shrink is.

Just when things start falling into place Nusqua possesses the body of Rooka to try and and kill Muktuk. Our heroic shroom muncher manages to prevail, barely, and Rooka dies. Of course he doesn't have any answers so he follows the poor devil into the netherworld, using a boat he made out of the first Shaman who picked a fight with him.

Oh you thought I was exaggerating ? Nope, Muktuk made a living boat out of the first Shaman he killed, cause that's how he rolls.

He finds Rooka's spirit and folds him up ino his backpack to take home with him, literally, but he's stopped by Nusqua stealing his boat and giving him a very good shaq until he realises she's somehow feeding off the power of the Great Mother and well, as she starts to turn into her he gets second thoughts, given that the Great Mother kinda sorta sits at the bottom of the spiritual toilet bowl of the entire planet.

When Muktuk comes back to his body he actually manages to resurrect Rooka, thereby showing that yes, you can do it, John Constantine was just being a lazy sod everytime he tried to do it and fucked up.

So he and Rooka have a manly slumber party while Muktuk tries to think of a way to ritually screw over Nusqua, but Rooka heard him and snuck off to get the stuff Muktuk needed for the ritual. Nusqua has her hands full with the village chief being possessed by every demon this side of the Don so she didn't notice but the problem is one of those ingredients is the bone of Rooka's son and well, he kinda sorta runs into it, what with holding the dead boy's severed arm and all.

Yeah I don't think it will surprise anyone when I say the poor bastard ends up dead, again. Wonder if he'll get some sort of frequent visitor bonus down in the underworld.

Anyways Muktuk gets what he needs and decides to go pay the Great Mother a visit in her stone hut, dressed in Nusqua's necklaces to fool the old hag that it's really her. He succeeds but when he comes to Nusqua has been setting him on fire and then uses her supernatural strength to punch the ever lovign shit out of him. Luckily, a demon from down under followed. So the day is saved and Muktuk can go back to his tent to drink fermented mare milk with his weasel friend. Only sticking point here is the original prophetic dream was caused by Nusqua's spirit animal thing who betrayed her cause of what she was doing. It feels like a last minute ending to try and resolve all loose ends with a boatload of exposition but given all that happened before I can take it.

However, despite how over the top this series was, according to Laban sales weren't that great and so Muktuk would go under for more then a decade this time, only to surface as a webcomic-turned-graphic-novel in 2011-2012 with Muktuk Wolfsbreath, Hard Boiled Shaman: The Spirit of Boo. One hopes this isn't the last we see of Laban's shroom chompign Shaman. The Vertigo three parter is basically like a Siberian Hellblazer and there's nothing wrong with that.

The Vertigo Vault # 3: Beware the Creeper (2003)

Not to be confused with the 1968 miniseries by Ditko and O'Neil, Beware the Creeper is a story founded on stereotypes.

It takes place in Paris in 1925, and has as it's focus the twin sisters Judith and Madeline Benoir, two artist types. Judith is very promiscuous while Madeline is very reticent, which stems from their parents having died in a Church bombing during the first World War. Judith has since abandoned religion while Madeline embraces it, while having to make a living as a seamstress to fund her and her sister's artistic lifestyle.

Mixed into this is Judith being the object of affection of two men. One is Inspector Ric Allain, who fell in love with Judith after receiving letters signed under her name during the war, only, well, those were writen by Madeline. And yet Judith knows this and doesn't really care for Allain except as another "good time" and knows Madeline is in love with him and still she decides to not tell Ric. Basically Judith is a bitch. The other person in love with her is Mathieu Arbogast, a member of the rich Arbogast family whom Judith despises.

Now the story begins with Judith finding a man with a devil's mask in her room who proceeds to rape and beat her up. She's found badly hurt when she's found by Madeline and then we cut to several months later.

The Surrealists are trying to be provocative and Judith is trying to swing with them because she likes to be the center of attention, going so far as to hit on Ernest Hemmingway while he's visiting Paris. At around the same time a "mysterious" figure in very, very silly getup starts running around Paris, writing huge slogans of "Beware the Creeper" on walls and monuments and defacing art and that sort of thing. She then proceeds to sneak into a family dinner at the Arbogast house, poisons the food so everyone vomits, then steals away Mathieu Arbogast's infant son to put ontop a statue of Joan of Arc, which could have easily ended with the kid falling down and getting hurt. The surrealists can't get enough of the Creeper and make her into their icon.

 

Now to sum up what's actually happening: the story lets you believe it was Judith who posed as the Creeper but it was actually Madeline. Judith died after Mathieu Arbogast raped her and Madeline apparently buried her in their garden in secret, to then assume her identity as well. The problem is the story has her doing these things to the "corrupt elite", portrayed in a way which is not only very typical and predictable, but not the least bit novel. All the policemen except for Ric are bastards, who are willing to force a prostitute that was just beat to hell by someone to have sex with them for free, the rich are all racist and bigoted, the police prefect is working for the Arbogast family etc. These really don't look like characters as much as props, set on the stage to make some sort of statement.

The thing is, the story seems to basically ignore everything wrong Madeline does as "The Creeper" until almost the very end. She defaces public property, ruins a stage magician's performance, and then proceeds to burn down art at an arth ehxibit because "your art has no future" because fuck people trying to express themselves artistically in a way that is not surrealism eh ? Mind you I actually do like surrealism quite a bit, so this isn't coming from any kind of bias.

Now, the worst part of it: at said art exhibit, she proceeds to hijack a small train, deliberately smashes it into a wall which injures the passengers, then she proceeds to spray a trail of gasoline from the train to a wooden statue and then lights the statue on fire. And the only reason she cracks and why anyone actually turns against her is that a little homeless girl gets killed in the subsequent train explosion. Now don't get me wrong the death of a child is a tragic thing but not only does she injure several people, she puts the train, with people trapped inside, on fire, the result of which is apparently seven people being dead. And yet the story really only focuses on the tragedy of Little Colette dying.

Add to that that when Ric finds her, she's abducted Mathieu Arbogast, forced him to write a confession to Judith's murder and then throws him off the Eiffel tower dressed as the Creeper, to then seemingly escape herself, while blowing up the lights of the Tower, just because Ric Allain didn't like them. And all Ric can think of is clearing her/Judith's name of any blame, so he has Mathieu Arbogast blamed for being the Creeper. Not only does this ending not make sense, as the Creeper was seen by many people unclose, especially that stage magician whom she kissed onstage, but he's basically denying the other people who got injured in that train fire/explosion and the families of those who died the right to know who the culprit was.

Mathieu Arbogast did routinely beat up prostitutes, killed Judith and the one prostitute who reported him to the authorities, but Madeline killed at least eight people including Mathieu Arbogast, and he's just acting like she did nothing wrong because she killed a murderer and "didn't really mean to hurt Colette", going so far as to ignore all mention of the wire harness on the side of the building which she could have used for her escape.

Now even if one assumes she went crazy after her sister died, which is highly likely given her plan, then  letting her go after causing the deaths of seven innocent people, to go do God knows what God knows where, without nothing being done to stop her is immensely foolish and I can't believe we're supposed to find this guy to be the one good, decent guy who actually "cares" in the whole of the Paris Police.

Overall the story, while it works, is nothing amazing. Basically we have a "heroic" hero whose defiance of the system amounts to commiting murder and a police officer who lets her get away with it cause he's in luv with her. So no real lesson to be found here either, aside from maybe "don't rape and murder people".