Minor Threats: Barfly

Meet Shiteater.  He’s the small-human-sized sentient fly who used to be a henchman for the bug-themed supervillain known as (wait for it) The Entomologist.  These days he works a degrading job at a burger joint, frequents The Lower Lair for drinks every night, and takes on the odd hench job here and there.  None of these things provide him with anything resembling fulfillment and only serve to remind him of the universal maxim that there are only two kinds of people in this world:  Those that shit, and those that eat shit.  So when The Entomologist breaks out of prison looking to enact a crime that will engrave his name onto Twilight City, Shiteater finds himself thrust back into the same toxic relationship that he thought he had escaped.

I was really looking forward to this latest spinoff of “Minor Threats” as it was coming from writer Kyle Starks and artist Ryan Browne.  They seemed like an ideal team, what with Starks’ demented sense of humor and Browne’s equally demented artistic sensibilities.  This wound up being a better showcase for the writer than the artist, as it’s easily the craziest thing I’ve seen from him since the glory days of “God Hates Astronauts.”  Not only are his designs for Shiteater and the rest of the cast appealingly and freakishly weird, but he knows how to exaggerate them and go for scale when the story demands it.  Better still are the whacked-out sound effects he creates for every situation, and the dozens of background jokes he throws into every issue.

If this sounds like I’m about to crap all over Starks’ work here, I’m not… really.  At the very least, the writer deserves credit for coming up with the weird cast and situations for Browne to draw, and he tells a perfectly serviceable story about doing the right thing.  It’s just that it’s an entirely predictable story that’s also hamstrung by a quasi-epilogue that kicks Shiteater from “hard luck hero” to “continues to eat lots of shit.”  That leaves “Barfly” feeling more like a downer than actually entertaining in the end, even with the top-class art it has throughout.