Shirtless Bear-Fighter

…With a title like that, what more do you need to know?

Maybe that he’s also “Pantsless Bear-Fighter” for a good portion of the first issue?

Or how about that this series does a decent enough job of delivering enough insanity to live up to that title.  You’ve got Shirtless himself, who lives in a bear house out in the woods and spends his days fighting the bears who cost him the life of his one true love.  Then the bears start coming to the city and he’s drawn into that conflict by his old friend Burke and the promise of a lifetime’s supply of top-quality flapjacks and maple syrup.  A bearplane, hillbilly warlock, and a mechanized fighting toilet are some of the more deliberately outlandish bits of insanity next to weirder ones like Shirtless’ greatest weakness or how he escapes from one fight by swimming upstream like a salmon.  Because why not.

Artist Nil Vendrell is utterly committed to all this and does a pretty great job of delivering on the craziness from Jody Lehup and Sebastian Girner’s script.  While I’d love to give an unabashed recommendation to this volume just for the title alone, I really can’t do that.  Though the script from Lehup and Girner definitely has its strong points, it’s also determined to follow the same basic arc of your average action movie.  Specifically, the kind where the hero is called back into action to do what he does best and is suddenly but inevitably betrayed before his inner strength allows him to overcome and triumph in the end.  It’s an especially ridiculous and crazy version of that kind of story, but it also means you’ll be able to see where all this is going right from the start.  A little insanity with regards to the plotting could’ve gone a long way here, which is something I wasn’t expecting to write regarding a series called “Shirtless Bear-Fighter.”