Curse Words vol. 2: Explosiontown

You know, I thought that Wizord’s arc for this series was going to be a standard redemption one but now I’m not so sure.  There’s a lot here in “Explosiontown” which suggests that while he’s come to like our world and enjoy being a part of it, he’s still the same bastard he was back in the Hole World.  From his attempts to get Ruby Stitch to be on his side, torments of walking French joke Jacque Zaque, bullying of the president (whose familiarity I finally realized here is not a coincidence), and casual indifference to the fact that the way he regains power in this world involves actually taking people’s beliefs, I’m not seeing a lot in the way of redemption here.  Sure, Wizord realizes at one point that he’s acting exactly the same as he would back in the Hole World where he was constantly trying to curry his master Sizzajee’s favor.  He immediately changes his approach because he recognizes that Sizzajee is THE BAD GUY and Wizord doesn’t want to be that here.  So while our protagonist isn’t actually working towards redemption, writer Charles Soule may be onto something more interesting here.  Namely, what happens when an utter bastard with magical powers tries to play nice with his adopted world?

In addition to this, Soule also manages a lot of fun worldbuilding throughout the course of the volume.  We get to see a lot more of the group of wizards working under Sizzajee in the Hole World and they’re an enjoyably self-centered group of bastards with their own agendas at play.  There’s also a very deranged take on baseball which they use to settle disputes, and in the holiday special we get to see how they curry Sizzajee’s favor and how Wizord and Ruby Stitch became a couple.  It was also nice to see some effort being made to turn the above-mentioned French joke into a proper character, with some actual Wizord-fueled tragedy in his background and some setup to turn him into a key player in the story for the next volume.  While this isn’t going to match the insanity of Soule or artist Ryan Browne’s — who again turns in work which is as inspired as it is deranged — other creator-owned work, it’s working really well on its own terms and is also a clear step up from the first volume too.