Yes, It’s True; This Man Has No Dick: The Adventures of Apocalypse Al #1 Review

Hey, didja know that one of J. Michael Straczynski’s first professional writing gigs was on the cartoon The Real Ghostbusters? Sure, it might seem odd that the guy who came up with Babylon 5, Crusade and the first draft of the World War Z movie cut his teeth on irony-based horror comedy, but it’s true: one of JMS’s earliest gigs was putting words in the mouth of Peter Venkman. That puts him in the rarefied company of Dan Ackroyd, Harold Ramis, and every slashfic author who ever wanted to see Bill Murray take a PKE Meter in the Ghost Trap from Patrick Swayze, if you get my drift.

Without that knowledge, it would seem really counterintuitive for the guy who wrote Changeling to write a horror comedy with an oracle who can foretell the futures price of cucumbers, a lawyer with a sense for the dramatic who happens to represent the Prince of Darkness, and a private detective protagonist who specializes in stopping the end of the world despite her crippling fear of sensible shoes. It might sound silly for the guy who wrote The Shadow War to write a book where someone warns the hero that the end of the world is preferable to undercooked bacon, but again: Straczynski made his bones writing for the animated avatar of Bill Fucking Murray.

Which means that Straczynski is actually a pretty damn good person to write a book like this. Which is why it’s actually a lot of fun.

Meet Alison Carter – Apocalypse Al – a private investigator from a long line of adventurers who have specialized in preventing the end of the world. After we witness her do just that, she returns to her office to get shitfaced when she bumps into Mike Rose: an ex-LAPD detective who has a line on the supernatural due to his investigative skills and the fact that he’s been dead for two years. Rose tells Al that someone’s trying to open the door to Hell, which sends Al to her source Max: a prophet who lives under a bridge and enjoys the sartorial simplicity of a Reynolds Wrap chapeau. Max sends Al to Hollywood and Vine, where the power of the door opening sends her into her worst nightmare for long enough to allow the perpetrator to escape. Upon returning home, she is picked up by a hired goon for a CEO of a company who likes to talk like a movie trailer voice over guy, and who happens to represent the only being who likes to call himself Ultimate Darkness who isn’t the bass player for a Norwegian Death Metal Band.

So yeah: this is very much a story in the vein of Ghostbusters, where the end of the world is, in fact, at stake, but where the players are a little bit absurd and loaded with sarcasm. Is that a formula that is now 30 years old? Sure it is. But the reason people are still screeching for Ghostbusters 3 in a world where Ghostbusters 2 has existed for 25 of those 30 years and sucked every second of it is that that formula can work, and so far, it’s working here.

This first issue is very much a pilot episode issue. The cold open of Al taking on the end of the world with a sarcastic wisecrack, a well-placed gunshot and a ride back to her office for an after-work drink not only provides simple characterization and establishment of the book’s tone, but it calls back to the Ghostbusters feel of taking on the supernatural as a blue collar, work-a-day gig that somebody has to do. Setting up the Gateway to Hell interlude not only allows JMS to introduce us to some of the supporting characters in a fairly organic way, but he sets it up in a way that literally puts us into the protagonist’s head, which is one of the niftier gimmicks to fully introduce us to a new character that I’ve seen in recent memory. Further, it sets up a potentially decent secondary antagonist that teases some decent future storylines.

So the issue does everything that you’d want an introductory tale to an ongoing story to do – it shows us the players, sets up the world, and teases bigger tales to come – but it does the most important thing well in introducing the protagonist… with one exception, which I’ll get to in a second. I’ve already mentioned the conceit of the dream sequence, which shows us what Al fears, which is not only funny, but which goes a long way toward telling us what she’s actually lie, but it also shows us a professional. We see Al face the end of the world twice, and with a sense of irony and sarcasm, which gives us the sense that the character has see all of this before, and has dealt with it because that’s the gig and that’s her family history. It makes saving the world feel like a job, and while I don’t want to keep namechecking Ghostbusters, it’s that same feeling that helped turn that movie into a classic.

But that exception was a fairly serious one to me, and I don’t know if it’s Straczynski’s fault, or artist Sid Kotian’s: when Abernathy’s goon comes to escort her to see him, we know that this is serious based on Al’s reaction. By the time this happens, we’ve seen Al face the literal end of the world twice, and being summoned by Abernathy is the first time we’ve seen Al flustered. Seeing Abernathy is a big deal, and a professional challenge… so she goes to meet him in the half-shirt and panties she was gonna wear to bed? We’ve seen Al afraid to face the world in sensible shoes, sure, but she’ll face the first person that we’ve seen intimidates her without fucking pants? The choice rang utterly false to me, and again: I don’t know whose fault it is. There’s nothing in the text to indicate that it was a conscious choice for Al (“I decided to attack the one person who frightens me with camel toe…”), so it’s possible that Kotian made the decision on his own and nobody called him on it. But either way: it was one of the few bad choices in an otherwise solid and entertaining book.

Unfortunately, if there is a consistent weak point in the book, it’s Kotian’s art. Not because the art is bad; the guy works in a fine line, with a lot of detail, and he does a good cheesecake pose, so Al is one hot number through the entire book, but because of some of the choices he makes. There’s a caption where Al mentions that she’s reaching for a liquor flask that used to belong to her father, and Kotian shows us a glass bottle labelled, “Rot Gut.” From some angles, Al’s car looks like a late model VW Beetle, and from others it’s a PT cruiser. Straczynski makes a point of telling us, in a caption, that the street signs are melting, and yet Kotian only gives us half a panel of the visual, with a single letter on the sign slightly off-kilter. And on the second-to-last page, he clearly reuses the same two panels three different times. This stuff looks good, but there are some serious storytelling problems that just didn’t work for me.

But none of those art issues made the issue unreadable, which is good because there’s a hell of a lot to like in The Adventures of Apocalypse Al #1. We have established that I am a Ghostbusters fan, and there is a very similar feeling to this book. I like the idea of a private cop who’s not only seen it all but grew up around what she hasn’t seen, and treats it all like a common workplace pain in the ass worth cracking wise over. It’s a story about a blue-collar entrepreneur dealing with the supernatural with sarcasm and some pretty decent jokes. If that’s something that interests you, this is a pretty solid example of it, and is worth giving a day in court.