Pretty Colors And a Powerful Stink: Tom Morello’s Orchid #1 Review

Can’t… make an F-chord on the guitar that sounds like anything but shit.
– Stephen King, Misery

When it comes to Dark Horse Comics’ Orchid #1, I want to give writer Tom Morello the benefit of the doubt, the way I did a few years back when Scott Ian from Anthrax wrote a couple of issues of Lobo for DC Comics. I really do.

After all, based on Morello’s interview with Rolling Stone last week, he grew up a comic geek just like Ian and the rest of us. And what with me being a former FM rock radio DJ, I will gladly admit that Morello gets sounds out of a guitar that neither I nor Scott Ian could get out of a woman with a million dollars in blood diamonds, a vibrator and a non-Irish dick.

And Morello’s even coughing up an original song you can download with every issue, which Dark Horse is calling “a free piece of musical score by Morello,” which although harder to type, sounds a hell of a lot nicer than “multimedia bribery”… which WILL be the name of my Rage Against The Machine tribute band. But I digress.

But the unfortunate fact of the matter is that if Alan Moore showed up at Epic Records waving a copy of Watchmen and demanding a record deal, he’d be laughed out of the lobby just before and extensively after security mildly tased him for being an insane person. Dark Horse should’ve done the same when Morello knocked.

Which is a bummer, because I can see what Morello’s trying to do with this book. There are parts to like here. But the problem is that the parts are all chopped from other, earlier, BETTER stories. He’s grabbing from good stuff and stitching it together, but there’s only one Dr. Frankenstein… which purely by coincidence is the name of my Blue Oyster Cult cover band, but again, I digress.

Most of the world is underwater (Waterworld) after a catastrophic climate event (The Day After Tomorrow). Man’s pollution of the environment has caused a plague of giant monsters (Godzilla). The rich have built cities and promised protection to the poor in exchange for slavery (Land of the Dead). The leader of the poor rebels (Robin Hood) has an object of power (King Arthur) in the form of a mask with a star on its face (Captain America). And the last great hope of a wide swath of the disenfranchised is a charismatic whore who ‘s bought and paid for (Michelle Bachmann).

I could forgive the “borrowing” – after all, without I Am Legend, there is no Night of the Living Dead – but the execution is hamfisted, first-time-writer bullshit… which makes sense, because that’s what Morello is.

Let’s start with the fact we pointed out when Dark Horse released the preview of this issue: there’s four pages of raw exposition that make the Phantom Menace opening crawl look like a fucking Shakespeare sonnet:

When the seas rose, genetic codes were smashed. In the days when humans could read… in the days when slavery was outlawed… in the days when animals could be tamed and domesticated…

That’s one page. That shit goes on forever. And that’s not even the worst of the ripped-off exposition. That Captain America mask? It came from a guy named General China. Which could be worse; if this four pages of exposition was written by George Lucas, the guy would’ve been named Colonel Pastiche.

And let’s not forget that page one line: “In the days when humans could read…” Let’s remember the one, the only good thing about exposition: it tells you what’s going on. It explains the story. So we should expect from this story, at the very least, that humans cannot read. It says so on the first. Fucking. Page.

So explain this:

That character is a poor prostitute, whom one can presume, like in modern America, was probably not classically educated. And yet she can read the brand on her arm. As, presumably, could the person who branded her. And as, again presumably, could the blacksmith who forged the brand. Unless we find out in issue 2 that this whorecamp was build on the ashes of the Know Your Role Ranch. Which will be the name of my Audioslave-themed whorehouse. But again I digress.

Let’s step away from the story and talk for a moment about the art, which I actually liked a hell of a lot. I’m not previously familiar with Scott Hepburn’s work, but this guy does yeoman’s work on everything from disaster scenes to weird monsters to a variety of people and actions and facial expressions, all in a style that reminds me a little of Georges Jeanty from the last arc or so of the Buffy comics. It’s solid stuff, and I can’t to see it in a good comic book.

Look, I wish I liked this book. I’d like to believe that some dude who’s a comic fan could walk off the street and write a good book after years of completely unrelated experience like being a guitar player, or maybe an FM rock radio DJ.

But that shit ain’t the truth. Tom Morello is second to none. As a guitarist. He should stick with it.