The Ludocrats

What happens when Kieron Gillen teams up with fellow former games journalist and “Rock, Paper, Shotgun” co-founder Jim Rossignol?  Something that is easily the most Gillen-esque thing I have ever read.  Whatever Rossignol’s contributions were, they’ve either enabled the writer’s most ridiculous notions, or just harmonized with them to produce a work of singularly unmitigated nonsense.

It starts with a magnificently huge naked, bearded, and balded man covered in blood.  Why is he covered in blood?  Because it is his blood gown and he is on his way to a wedding.  Not his own wedding, but that of a crusty old Ludocrat who is incapable of being ludicrous anymore and is being married off to put his title and lands to better use, post-beheading.  Said balded man is Otto Von Suberan and he’s attending this gathering with his best friend Professor Hades Zero-K as they try to find some entertainment from this gathering.  Instead, Otto finds the urge to couple with Grattinia Gavelstein, the High Steam-Judge of New Prussia and her steel-plated labia.  Just before he can make her acquaintance, agents of the Hyper-Pope show up to arrest her on the grounds of being boring!  Otto is shocked, stunned, and aroused enough to not let these agents get away with seizing someone he has just met!  Hades, meanwhile, is willing to help him out, if for no other reason than the lulz.

That is all in the first issue, and I didn’t even mention the crossover with another Image title.  Subsequent issues have a gigantipedic spermatazoic epidopterapede, desirable torture, the Obscenitarium, a voodoo universe, how slaughtering exposition can make oneself two-dimensional, and what the most ludicrous thing in this universe actually is.  Surprisingly, Gillen and Rossignol didn’t break artist Jeff Stokely in the process of making this.  Stokely proves amazingly willing to go along with the writers’ rampant madness and actually does proper justice to this world of the ludicrous.  All of this results in a work that’s relentlessly entertaining as well as just plain relentless.  It’s certainly not the series I’d recommend to people new to Gillen’s works, but if you’re like me and are in the tank for him, then you are very much the target audience for this comic.