The Goon has returned to a monthly release at a Local Comic Shop near you and we can't be more stoked. The humor and action are about to amp up and we don't want you to miss any of it. Over the next few months we will be posting more of these intros from The Goon Trade Volumes and more entertaining items to keep this Eisner winning series at the forefront of your mind. If you're looking for a free issue of The Goon to get you started click here. 


The Goon really helps me move my bowels.

Now that’s the kind of blurb that will probably come back to haunt me, but it’s true. And it’s not just because the book is filled with irreverent scatological humor (though it often is). You see, while I’m proud to read my funny books in public, I save my absolute favorite reads for the uninterrupted peace and tranquility of my beloved bathroom.

And I’m proud/mortified to say that the Goon has been keeping me company in my private shame for several years and through countless rolls of s--- tickets (as the creep at my local drugstore once referred to toilet paper).    

As I may have already mentioned in my introduction to the Powell-illustrated Superman: Escape from Bizarro World (how many intros do I have to write before this deranged, hobo-slaying hillbilly LEAVES ME ALONE?), I once worked on a miniseries for Marvel Comics (sorry, Dark Horse, I’m plugging the hell out of the competition here) called The Hood, cocreated and pencilled by the great Kyle Hotz, a name that’s surely familiar to all of you Goon enthusiasts (Goon-thusiasts?).

Anyway, our inker on The Hood was a then-obscure kid named Eric Powell. And though his work was always stellar, it wasn’t until I finally discovered The Goon that I realized with sadness that even the goddamn tracer on my book was a way better writer than I.

That’s right, I know every Goon introduction has to drone on and on about Powell’s artwork; how he’s one of the greatest storytellers ever to grace the medium, how his painted covers would make Michelangelo weep, how he’s the demon love child of Frank Frazetta and Wally Wood and Will Eisner and blah, blah, effin’ blah. And while all of that is (mostly) true, the thing that really annoys me is how beautifully he writes.

Look, I don’t want to get too highfalutin’ here (to quote lovable sidekick Franky, re: fancy pants like yours truly looking for symbolism in this multiple Eisner Award winning series, “Sometimes a simpleton-playin’-in-his-own-filth-and-gettin’-shot-in-the-face joke is just a simpleton-playin’-in-his-own-filth-and-gettin’-shot-in-the-face joke”), but The Goon isn’t all exquisitely rendered poo gags and zombie decapitations.

That’s only eighty percent of it.

The other twenty percent is what elevates this story to the realm of the sublime. At its heart, the book is about a dark man with a broken heart who realizes that all we have in this wretched world are our friends . . . and we’re probably gonna take them down with us. That right there is the kind of horror that’s way scarier than zombie priests or mad scientists or even bog lurks. Because it’s The Truth.

Lucky for you, the issues that make up this collection represent some of the truthiest Goon stuff to date, darker and more challenging than ever. Like an evil computer from a bad 1980s sci-fi movie, Eric Powell continues to learn and evolve, even when God and Science dictate that such a thing should not be possible.

Clearly unwilling to let the Goon become a two-dimensional pulp hero, Powell writes our protagonist into one of the bleakest, meanest scenes I’ve read in a long, long time (you’ll know it when you see it), a scene that did a bang-up job of reminding me exactly who and what the Goon has always been (hint: not a “good guy”).

Anyway, it’s been a thrill watching Eric and his pug-ugly baby grow over the last decade or so, and I can’t wait to see what comes next for both of . . .

Christmas Christ, I’m only at 579 words?!

Ugh, Dark Horse editor/assassinatrix Sierra Hahn said these intros usually run 1,200 words, but I’m a two-bit comic guy who only “writes” cheap splash-page cliffhangers. I haven’t written 1200 words in my career, much less in one sitting. If you editorial types seriously need something to fill up space, kindly insert a picture of someone getting knifed in the eye HERE: 

Cool?  Cool. Well, what are the rest of you waiting for?  THE WAR STARTS NOW!!!  Quit reading my rambling parentheticals and get to the good stuff!

As for me? 

I’m gonna go take a dump.

 

Brian K. Vaughan

Selloutsville, USA

February 2009

A writer/producer on the television series Lost, Vaughan is also the co-creator of a bunch of comics, including Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, and The Escapists. He is very sorry about the images conjured by this introduction.