We kinda suspect that the debauchery seen in "Hard to Swallow" -- orgies of muscular men, fluid-spurting phalluses, sexual grave desecrations, gay hookers fondly remembering tricks of yore -- are represetative of how middle-America sees San Francisco, if not Nancy Pelosi's office. Compiled by local artists Justin Hall and Dave Davenport, "HtS" pretty much defines NSFW -- the cover promises "HOT ape-on-pirate action," and when we opened it, the first line of dialogue our eye caught on was "Now that's a f**king load! A little salty, maybe, but you have been floating at sea." We flipped a few pages and read, "muscled armpit! my favorite flavor!" ... then flipped again and landed on "now let's get down to some serious f**king." And that's when we quietly closed the book, our hands shaky and sweating, shifted uncomfortably in our pew, and decided to read the rest AFTER Mass had concluded.
After the jump: sexxxy girls, and underwear pervs at war.
If we could've bough a Cliff's Notes version of Sam Kieth's "My Inner Bimbo," we might've -- it's an awful lot of reading, and an awful lot of symbols that sorta slipped past us. The idea's pretty cool: a meek, lonely married old guy discovers a sort of second personality -- a bimbo -- manifesting herself by appearing in visions and influencing his behavior. It certainly shakes things up in his hitherto unremarkable life to have his inner monologue suddenly being delivered by a squeaky pink nymphette ... but does it shake things up enough? Even with what's-her-name fulfilling his sex needs in very real fantasties, and driving him to flirt with a woman in some kind of bizarre lesbo-Sybil menage-a-deux ... he's still a nebbish. The only difference is, now he's a neurotic nebbish.
The first seven pages of "Civil War" (by Mark Millar, Steve McNiven, Dexter Vines, and Morry Hollowell) are real dynamite stuff -- a reality show, based around a pack of marginally competent heros, launches a raid on a house of villains. Oh man that's good TV -- or at least, it is until the fun and games kill a bunch of bystanders. The solution? A seven-part navel-gazing. Oh, what are we to do about the mutants, blah blah blah, we've read it all before. The twist here is that the Marvel heros are evenly split on a proposal for government regulation of superheros, so they start bickering and infighting.
And you know what? It's just not all that interesting. It's like the galactic senate business in Episode I; you're like, "can we skip over this administrative stuff and actually have an adventure?" Er, no, apparantly not. Despite posessing awesome superpowers, the Marvel crew seems to be content just to stand around, debate, and, at most, run away very excitedly. There's six more issues left to go in the series -- at some point in there, would somebody please DO SOMETHING? Okthxbye.
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