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. Don't forget to pledge your support to The Goon Movie Kickstarter.

 

Somewhere between Where Monsters Dwell and the dark, dirty streets populated by Marlowe and Hammer, folded between the thick, green scales of Fin Fang Foom and the luscious, heaving breasts of Rita Hayworth, lies the bubbling land of The Goon.

I first encountered The Goon while I was in the middle of directing the second season of Metalocalypse. I heard that Dethklok was going to be doing a crossover with the Goon. I had seen pictures of this character in various comic mags, and heard about the comic, but I’d never actually checked it out. So I went to Meltdown Comics in LA and bought The Goon: Fancy Pants Edition Volume 1. I instantly went from casual outsider to riveted fan, because this man knows how to tell fun, gripping stories and can draw the hell out of them. Then I read his script for the Dethklok/Goon crossover. He knew exactly how to write Dethklok, and how to stick them perfectly into the world of The Goon. Over the few brief hangs we’ve had at Comic Cons coast to coast, I have found him to be a kind and funny guy.

I was deep into comics before I could even read them. My dad would buy me a bunch of different monster comics, and I would pore over each and every panel and meticulously cut out the monsters with child safety scissors. So began my lifelong obsession with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Few artists have ever reached the raw originality for me that these two titans could blast out month after month. As I grew older, so did my list of artists that echoed the individual qualities of these two men. Wood. Colan. Wrightson. Gulacy. Windsor-Smith. Romita. Andru. Chaykin. Kane. Steranko. Perez. Byrne. Gibbons. Simonson. Miller. Golden. Bolland. Mignola. Rude. Sienkiewicz. Hernandez. Totleben. Mazzucchelli. A slew of even newer artists followed, building on a compositional legacy that will always be very personal to me. Allred. Ross. Pope. Hitch. Lee. Dillon. Cassaday. Luna. Cooke. Quitely. Risso. This brings me back to the man called Eric Powell. 

Powell’s craft and style and references burst off the page, and at once call forth a feeling of deep nostalgia and startling originality. His pencils and compositions evoke Jack Kirby by route of Frank Frazetta, and his inks channel the great Bernie Wrightson, with Kelley Jones and Wally Wood floating just around the edges.

If you are reading this tenth volume, you are either a rabid follower or a brand-new fan— or, like me, a mixture of both. In this collection, we are treated to Eric’s facility to play both the clown and the king, both comedy and tragedy. 

A scarred, giant beast of a man with a broken soul, running a tiny shit hole of a town.

An old, broken man who has had everything taken from him except the ability to die. 

In The Goon #32, what could be someone else’s fill-in issue becomes an exercise in astoundingly stupid absurdity, with Eric injecting himself into the story, following the time-honored traditions of Stan and Jack. In issue #33, the story is told with drawings inside the thought balloons instead of words, and Eric lets us fill in these words with his characters’ emotional faces and physical reactions.

In Buzzard, we are treated to an epic journey with the starting goal of mutually assured suicide, but which arrives at something quite different. This is a story that is poetically scripted and visually stunning, dealing with the eventuality that we all face, that of death. The Buzzard does not want to live any longer—he’s way past it all—he just wants the sweet release of nonexistence. This character has always merited a series for himself, and I’m glad Eric has finally done it.

This tale caught me by surprise, for I was not prepared to be so emotionally moved, and as the ending slowly crept up on me, I found it difficult to swallow, and my eyes filled with tears. I shook off this feeling of mortality that was shared in such grim yet beautiful prose . . . an emptiness took hold of me . . . GODDAMN IT, POWELL MADE ME CRY LIKE A BABY!

Jon Schnepp

September 2010

 

“My sweat smells like frosting.” —The Goon #32