Toby Finch reads far too many comics and justifies this with the belief that you will in some way care about what hethinks of them. Please humour him.

27th May 2008.

THE GOON

Time for a confession. I’ve been holding out on you. There’s a little something I really should have told you about last time with all the other zombie stuff, yet didn’t. And I’m not sorry. At all. Because this is just so darn good I wanted it to have an article all to itself.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you ‘THE GOON’.

To tell the truth, zombies don’t figure very largely in it., not that I care and neither should you. It’s all about the tribulations inflicted both on and by a self-employed hoodlum known only and to all as the Goon.

It’s one great big ongoing crime/horror/comedy caper that takes place in a knowingly and emphatically fictionalized version of a Depression-haunted thirties town that seems to consist entirely of slum (except for the bits that are shanty) in a world that still manages to retain its dull colours and grimy exterior despite all the blood and rain that unceasingly wash it, and that for some reason uses pork chops for black market currency. But it’s a bleak-but-bolstering, whatever-doesn’t-kill-you-only-makes-you-madder world where the terrors of Lovecraftian cosmic evil are there to be met, challenged, and even exploited just as are those of the Great Depression itself, by a cast of characters too dumb and/or determined to know when they’re beaten.

And they’re probably the most memorable cast in comics today. Firstly there is of course the Goon himself - mallet-fisted and anvil-jawed, with deep facial scars and still deeper emotional ones, the toughest of all the tough guys in comics – even the ones that can toss mountains around and have unbreakable metal bonded to their bones - due to the ability to absorb enormous amounts of physical punishment and the brutality to pay it back with compound interest (not to mention compound fractures).

Then there’s his sidekick Franky, who appears to have walked straight out of one the era’s cutesy-pie newspaper strips (probably because he was kicked out for mugging Little Orphan Annie or something) and rather movingly doesn’t allow his considerable physical shortcomings to impede his energetically psychotic behaviour at all.

And once we pass over such luminaries as Willie Nagel (a zombie who doesn’t let being undead get in the way of making a fast buck or occasionally a tasty coconut cake) and Spider (a personage more roundly vilified for being a no-good two-bit scam-artist than a giant talking spider) we come to the actual villain of the piece and purveyor of the aforementioned Lovecraftian cosmic evil, the Zombie Priest. Simultaneously terrifying and ridiculous, he commands an army of zombies (apparently supplied by Jethro and Earl Zombie Wranglerin’ Inc and The Adopt-A-Zombie Foundation, and referred to throughout as ‘Slack Jaws’) which could well deliver him world supremacy if it wasn’t for their susceptibility to being beaten with lead pipes and half bricks, pistol-whipped or exposed to Frankie’s trademark ‘Knife to the Eye’ move. Which just goes to show that despite all this talk about ‘destroying the brain’ a zombie’s real weakness is just the same as everybody else’s: getting hit extremely hard and often.

It’s prosaic ideas like this that provide an involving real-world feel to the Goon and his environment which serve to make the surreality, broad humour and over-the-top melodrama of the work believable - when in the hands of any creator less capable than writer-artist Eric Powell’s they would of course simply detract from it. In fact, the sheer number of balls that Powell manages to keep in the air with this seemingly stream-of-consciousness juggling act are boggling, even if you don’t take into account the vast amount of references to everything from ‘The Little Rascals’ to ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ he manages to sneak into his stories.

The Goon is one of those surpassingly rare works of fiction where the lead character climbs off the page and follows you around – which isn’t necessarily a good thing in this case, so you’d better buy a copy sharpish. Just to keep him happy.

TOBY.

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