The Goon vol. 13: For Want of Whiskey and Blood

Well, it turns out that I was wrong and we did get a new volume of this series this year.  It’s also a pleasant surprise to see that the stories collected here skew more towards comedy than drama.  After all, where else are you going to see a zombie with dynamite stuffed inside, living department store mannequins, and a quick-growing bug warn the Goon about things to come.  These things are all present in the first story, which is ostensibly about a scrawny boxer making a deal with a shady promoter to win his next fight yet simply serves as a hanger on which the hilarity — which further consists of the title character shopping for new clothes in garments owned by his friend Frankie — is hung.  Also featured in this volume is a team-up of sorts with Billy the Kid (from the “Old Timey Oddities” stories) as they face off against the Ossified Baby of Nuremberg, a lizard man lusting after latina breasts and chicken, a musical interlude with Tom Waits and Lil’ Jon, a tribute to Jack Davis involving a man-eating Nazi gorilla, and a Mark Buckingham-illustrated serial where the Goon faces off against a bog lurk, a killer robot, and a crazy kid who lives in the sewer.  It’s bizarrely funny stuff that you won’t see anywhere or from anyone else.

The only downside to this is that while most of what we get here is funny, there’s also the sense that creator Eric Powell is starting to lose interest with his signature creation.  While the first issue is the most successful of the bunch, the Billy the Kid team-up ultimately felt phoned-in as the characters don’t interact with each other all that much and the story wraps up in a fairly arbitrary way.  The lizard man’s issue is almost entirely in Spanish which made it really hard for me to care about what was going on, even if it was a good showcase for Powell’s artistic skills.  You also get the feeling that the writer/artist was struggling to get through this issue itself as it features not one, but two random one-page digressions which happen to be the most memorable parts of the issue.  As for the Jack Davis tribute, I’m happy for Powell that he was able to devote an entire issue to one of his artistic heroes.  I would’ve been ecstatic had he been able to tell a story that didn’t feel like it was screaming about how great this guy was at the top of its lungs.  In the end, I’m still looking forward to the next major storyline in this series, “An Occasion of Revenge.”  What I got in this volume ultimately leaves me hoping that it’ll be the finale of “The Goon” and send his story out on a high note.