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".

The Vertigo Vault # 2: The Minx # 4-8

The seemingly unconnected Sex Death storyline is followed by The Monkey Quarter (issues 4-7), of the Monkey finally coming down to Earth.

The story concerns Anna trying to find out how she was conceived, along with having to deal with religious nutts, her crazy alter ego and a monkey who'se oral report to God may doom mankind. She fares quite well, given the circumstances, which include her mother still being a horrible, horrible person.  Just recently done having sex with an old Monkey Cult priest, she finds that after being gone without a word for like over a week her husband is having sex with another woman, who is actually Anna's roommate. This upsets her for some reasons as I suppose fucking an old man because you were told to is somehow not cheating, apparently.

Anna manages to seemingly patch things up in her life as much as she can, and the Monkey's report seems favourable....until we get to issue 8.

Here, we find reality is suddenly unravelling and people and whole countries are being erased from history. Including Canada. And Anna's boyfriend Tom. Who is incidentally the saddest character I've seen in years. Dude nearly gets castrated while being abducted by a crazy psychopath, slandered in the media by his mental cousin Shannon who wants him to date her so badly she takes everyone in the store she works at hostage, and Anna (or The Minx) promising him an ideal date only to stand him up and fly to London. All to finally be able to do it with Anna. And almost as soon as he does, the man is erased from history. Tom Jones (not the other one), you are the new Yamcha.

Anna then realises that not only is Bob, the senator Tom worked for her father and McAnguish is her grandfather but....apparently her father was born from a giant alien vagina McAnguish found in a desert once and then in the midst of researching it decided to stick his dick into case why not.

Naturally this throws Anna quite hard so they fly to try and find the Monkey, who'se went to live with the Bonobos in the jungle, hoping he might have some answers. However, Anna only finds his dead body. So, as she was retroactively revirgined by having her only sexual partner wiped from history, she decides to jump the bones of her big, muscular black guide.

Afterwards, things look, well....

Not good. So McAnguish takes Bob, Anna, her parents (well her mother and non biological father as well as Ben so.....yeah, kinda needed to elaborate there) and Ngongo, the black guide Anna screwed in the jungle, to the institute and has them jump into the giant Monster Vag Bob was born from, hoping it will allow them to survive in some way now the world's being erased.

The end.

I did like The Monkey Quarter, and the final issue has a really nice surreal atmoshpere to it, but you sort of expect there to be more to the story, and the ending does feel like a bit of a copout. In fact the final issue comes way too soon after the end of the Monkey God storyline and sort of nullifies the ending of that story, and of course there's the fact I just feel really, really bad for what Milligan did to Tom, who couldn't even get the decency of being dead and having had existed by the end of the story. Of course I can guess why issue 8 happened, and why it ended as it did. It seems the Minx failed spectacularily and so they ended it before even reaching issue 12. It's apparent in how the Minx does not even have any part in the series finale, despite being the "mysterious entity" the series was named after.

It's a pitty since it was really well written and it could have been a good, psychedelic little series about the Supernatural. It still holds up but the ending will leave you wanting more.

The Vertigo Vault # 1 The Minx # 1-3

The idea of this little side project is to write down thoughts and observations on obscure Vertigo titles that hardly anyone remembers.

Truly a great use of one's time. First off we have The Minx, written by Peter Milligan. I remember seeing a sample of the first issue in an issue of Preacher and I was intrigued by the idea of a serial killer surgically remodeling his victims into an assexual featurless mass of tentacles. It is a really disturbing idea of surgically transforming someone to the point of no longer being a member of one's species.

The larger story revolves around a Monkey God, a monkey they sent in a rocket into space, returning to earth and sending telepathic messages to people on Earth.

Meanwhile the main character, Anna Schwarz, is caught in the middle of this while having to deal with preparing to lose her virginity to her boyfriend. This first post will cover the first Story Arc of this series, The Chosen.

The first Story Arc

Taking up the first three issues, it deals with Anna's woes, with her mother being snared by a monkey worshipping cult, her grandmother's death and the fact that her boyfriend got kidnapped by the surgicall serial killer Sexdeath, the self proclaimed messiah. Meanwhile the President pukes into a toilet and hopes his man McAnguish won't stop the guy who'se going around castrating and mutilating people into brainless, skinless, boneless, asexual tentacle monsters cause it would hurt his popularity as compared to the Monkey god.

The main problem of the story is it is over in 3 issues. Two issues are spent on setup and then Anna gets kidnapped by Sexdeath, only for McAnguish, the guy who set her up as bait for the serial killer, to prance into the room in a hot pink bikini (may I add the guy is like sixty five ?), to then start begging to be able to work with Sexdeath instead of capturing him/her cause McAnguish is afraid of death. Anna lets her other personality, the titular Minx which has supernatural powers, take over and resolve the situation by forcing the two to have sex which givent hat Sexdeath is a hermaphrodite is all kinds of disturbing. The end shows McAnguish has Sexdeath locked up in his Monkey Research Institute while he talks about how much potential Anna has.

During this story Anna had to deal with her second personality, being nervous about having sex for the first time, McAnguish stuffing her in a car to look at Sexdeaths demented creations and to top it all off she has to deal with her mother being just about the worst human being who is not Sexdeath. Seriously, she tells Anna her father is not her actual father and that she's a product of her getting high as a kite and getting fucked at a punk rock concert. Which she springs on her husband, daughter and father-in-law right after the funeral of Anna's Grandmother. And not only that, she goes on about how it was the best sex she's ever had. Trust me folks, you will want this woman to get hit by a bus.

Tom's boyfriend didn't have much of a good time either. Blueballed and then nearly had his balls cut off by Sexdeath, he spends time in the hospital with a whole list of ailments, including having something that Sexdeth poured down his ass which the doctors couldn't get out yet. Plus he gets captured and nearly gets turned into a giant leech by accident, as Sexdeath realises he's not a psychic, which is why s/he captured him to begin with. S/he sees her/himself as the Messiah and the Monkey God as the False Prophet and s/he wants the telepaths who have been receiving the Monkeys messages for some reason that's never made all too clear

At least the story ends with Anna finally changing her mind about being too nervous and the two finally go at it as the story ends so I guess there's something a bit positive to come out of this whole thing.

I've spent years wondering about how this would all turn out. I never picked up Minx at the time when it came out, hearing about it a long time after it was over in fact, and living in another country didn't help with that either. But after so many years of wondering where this story would go, it's a bit underwhelming. Not sure if that's just me being biased, but I can't help the story fell short of what it could become.

Plus the sight of the old bugger up there in pink lingerie was not something I was hoping to see. He spends two issues going on about how serious he is about the whole affair, but then we find out he's just a pathetic and demented nutter who'd have the procedure he describes in the picture above happen to him and countless other people because he's "scared of death".

Let me put it this way: if you're somehow handling a situation like this worse then Morgan Freeman's Commander Abraham "Heihachi" Curtis from Dreamcatcher, you've seriously fucked up somewhere along the way. And old Banana Brow only did two things in that movie. Yell and shoot at his own men.

* As an addendum, I hope no one will pull  the racism card because I used the word "banana" in conjunction with a black actor. The fact is his eyebrows in the movie really do look like two bananas got glued to his forehead. I hope we can get to the point where people mentioned alongside fruit can no longer be offensive.