"The
Ultimately Insane Warrior!"
5/30/07
by:
Protoclown
...CONTINUED
The third issue begins
with Warrior being released from the hospital before a throng of
screaming fans. He's confined to a wheelchair and he doesn't look too
happy about it. The doctor beside him thinks to himself "Man, I've got
some preposterous flatulence", which is an exact thought I think we've
all had from time to time, am I right?
"Don't worry Warrior,
you've been left in the best care available with Dr. Fartypants!"
A particularly
enthusiastic young fan approaches Warrior for an autograph, but Warrior
only responds with a face full of rage while fire shoots out of his
eyes. The narration box says that the Warrior has made an impression on
this kid for a lifetime, basically saying that he's just scarred this
poor kid for life. Warrior's girlfriend tells the kid it's okay, that
Warrior isn't himself right now, and to just forget about it.
Warrior truly knows how to
keep his fingers on the pulse of his fanbase.
Inside his limo, Warrior
then yells at his girlfriend, telling her never to make excuses for who
he is. He'll be an asshole to as many children as he likes, dammit! Oh
man, he's becoming totally unhinged for no reason at all! This is
some serious drama here, folks!
"Wait, that was supposed
to be my middle finger.
Pretend you didn't see that and we'll start over."
Upon arriving back at his
mansion, his chauffeur brings his wheelchair around and offers to help
him, at which point Warrior yells "Are you... fucking... kidding me!?"
and throws the chair higher than anyone could possibly throw it,
presumably launching the chair into orbit.
Warrior throws all objects
that offend him into the sun.
Too bad this comic book didn't make the list.
Warrior takes a shower
while his woman cries in the hallway, and then he takes off on his
motorcycle, leaving her sobbing and crying "I love you" as she eats his
dust. They never really bother to explain why Warrior is acting like
such a jackass, but his eyes are glowing orange as if he's possessed by
some dark force. Warrior probably thought we should have "picked up on
that" since it was all so clear in his own head.
This is quite possibly the
most unbelievable scene in the entire series.
Meanwhile, back on the
Terrain of Testament, Warrior continues to run around aimlessly facing
trials that apparently consist of running around aimlessly. Suddenly a
plane flies overhead, catching on fire inexplicably and crashing down in
front of him. (And someone in the plane thinks to themselves "Man, I
just shit my pants!" to the delight of 12-year old readers everywhere).
I think a train wreck
might have been more in the spirit of the series...
Warrior (who apparently is
not a total asshole in the galaxy of Destrucity, only in the real world)
runs up to the flaming wreckage in an attempt to help the people inside.
The burning pilot reaches out to him but his Belief Banners tell him he
mustn't help them, for they have reached "the end of their evolution"
and it's time for them to die. They also point out that there's "no room
for altruism" in the Warrior's evolution, so apparently he's now going
to become an asshole in this make-believe world too. The banners also
refer to adrenaline as "jetjack", which is just silly.
Apparently this pilot
did make the "thrown into the sun" list.
Warrior then runs around a
bit more, stumbles across two snakes and kills them, declaring that they
are "sacrifices in the name of Destrucity". Yes, I'm sure Destrucity
will be proud that you killed two itty bitty little snakes in its name.
"Swaziznap?" Now why
didn't that one catch on with all the kids?
Warrior runs around some
more before stumbling across a manufacturing plant called "Parts
Unknown" in the middle of nowhere. We then cut back to the "real-world"
Warrior, who is drowning his anger in a bottle down at Slippery's Pool &
Suds. Some guy in an NWO shirt tries to pick a fight with him to prove
that he's the toughest guy in the bar, and an all-out brawl
ensues.
Here we see that the
Warrior is not only a master
of combat, but a master of insults as well!
Warrior takes down the
final combatant by pulling some green energy out of his ass and using
his "mindscope meltdown" to, I don't know, do something to the
guy, fry his brain or whatever. Who the hell knows. He screams and then
falls down unconscious like all the others, and thus ends our third
issue.
What the hell? Now Warrior
is pulling random superpowers out of his ass?
What is this, an old Superman comic?
As the fourth and final
issue begins, you can't help but notice that the artwork is completely
different and they evidently couldn't afford coloring this time around.
More on that later. Everything that came before is brushed aside,
apparently, as this time the Warrior seems to be in some crazy
futuristic sci-fi setting, populated by crazy mutants and robots.
Here's a sneak peak at the
upcoming "X-Men 4" by Joel Schumacher.
We are introduced to a
band of mutants with stupid names like Stoker, Cease, Stitch, Britch,
Jeeth, and Catch, who after having an entire page devoted to introducing
them, you might think will have some kind of impact on the story, but
they don't. Warrior stands around striking poses in this
city/manufacturing plant for a while before he decides he doesn't like
it here, and he starts killing people, declaring "get a life, or have it
taken!"
I'm still trying to figure
out why there are quotation marks in the middle of the word "fuckin"?
Clearly, where the Warrior is concerned, normal rules of grammar do not
apply.
Also, in the future, there
is a newscaster who looks just like Joey Ramone.
So maybe you think
he looks more like Howard Stern,
but Joey Ramone was cooler, so fuck you.
We are then treated to
several pages of newspapers and newscasts revealing that Warrior has
apparently gone on a killing spree around the world, killing no less
than 42 world leaders in the same cities he has wrestled in. Warrior
stops off at a truck stop kind of restaurant and some guy starts talking
shit to him in the bathroom, so Warrior strikes back with a barrage of
bathroom-oriented alliteration before kicking his ass.
I can totally imagine
Warrior giggling like a schoolgirl to himself as he hunted
and pecked his way across the keyboard to these fine lines of dialogue.
Before tossing him in the
toilet, he asks "Those who know me say it's better to be pissed on, then
have me pissed off...now what do you think?" Then he steals the guy's
jacket and leaves. A short while later, he's driving in his jeep and for
no discernible reason decides to play chicken with two oncoming semis.
As his jeep passes between them, Warrior jumps out, clings to the front
of one of the semis, climbs beneath the engine, and erupts from
underneath and through the driver's cab, tossing both passengers out
onto the asphalt below. It just doesn't get more
X-TREME than this.
No, the woman chasing
after him screaming "I love you, Warrior"
is still less believable than this.
Immediately following
this, some guy runs up to Warrior hoping to attack him with a wrench,
but Warrior spins around and rips his heart out of his chest... with his
BARE HANDS!
Warrior employs a little
trick he learned from watching Temple of Doom.
Warrior then climbs up a
cliff to survey the wreckage of his victory, and one of his Belief
Banners shouts out "Strack him down!" which of course means nothing,
because that's a silly made-up word. But I'm sure in Warrior's own mind,
it makes perfect sense.
Warrior looks over the
edge of oblivion and considers jumping in.
Sadly, this is a much easier decision for the reader.
Just then those crazy
mutants show up, and one of them (I think Britch, which sounds like
"Bitch"—isn't that hilarious?) shouts out some random shit that
doesn't make any sense, again using terminology that only has meaning in
the Warrior's own head.
Yes, "Britch" sure loves
her lace. Everything she owns is just covered in doilies and shit.
On the very next panel, a
giant version of Warrior floating in the clouds with no legs says "one
more stop for love" while the trucks get sucked into the sky (to
heaven?), and if you think this makes any kind of sense at all, you've
got problems. I didn't skip over any kind of explanation for this in my
description here, this is just how completely batshit crazy this comic
is.
Everything about this
moment just screams
"opening theme song" for the Warrior anime series.
After announcing that
there's one more stop for love, another personality apparently takes
over, Warrior shouts out "NEVER!" in response to himself, and then
starts running toward the reader spouting off random angry threats to no
one in particular. I honestly have no idea who he's talking to, and it's
not clear whether the mutants are even in the same place as the Warrior
or not. Of course, I guess it'd be silly to expect things to start
making sense now. And thus ends the Warrior comic. There's an ad in the
back of the issue that threatens that number 5 "ships in May", but that
dark May never came, as the book was canceled due to nobody wanting to
purchase the insane ramblings of a costumed lunatic any longer.
Wouldn't this make a great
Valentine card?
And now in the back of
issue 4 comes my favorite part of the whole series, a wonderful bit of
drama fit for any soap opera. But first I must preface this a bit. At
the end of issue 1, Warrior writes a brief note to his artist, Callahan,
and... well, here, I'll just let you read it for yourself:
With statements like this,
Warrior proves once and for all that he is a master of comedy.
Now that you're done
laughing at the assertion that these comics represent anything vaguely
relating to "perfection", I would like to point out an awesome
example of Warrior's impeccable sense of design:
Legend has it that if you
can actually read all of this from start to finish, you will become
immortal.
There are four pages of
this, only one of which is remotely legible (the black text on
ugly orange background). The first page however starts with a sentence
that piqued my curiosity more than a bit: "Callahan is a piece of shit."
Well, isn't that interesting! That's a far cry from the brotherly note
at the end of issue 1, and you know, now that I think about it, the art
in the fourth issue was completely different...
While I wouldn't recommend
that anyone else attempt this ever, I spent upwards of half an
hour trying to painstakingly decipher this illegible text to determine
what went down to create this rift between Warrior and Callahan. Turns
out that Callahan got sick, and then he got lazy, and he failed to turn
in pages that were promised after already accepting an advance of half
the money on them. So it turns out Warrior has a legitimate complaint
here.
But what really gets me is
that Warrior then writes a five page (only four of which were printed;
he even refers to it as a five-page rant on the last page, but page 4
picks up in mid-sentence where page three concluded with the end of a
totally unrelated sentence) manifesto about what a turd Callahan is, and
that Callahan owes him, and he's gonna get what's he's due, and he's
coming for Callahan, and other things that sound like somewhat serious
threats. It's one of the most insane things I've ever read in my life,
horrible design issues notwithstanding. This is the kind of insane rant
they would have found in Kevin Spacey's house in the movie Se7en.
Not to mention it's completely unprofessional to rant about a personal
grievance with this man in the public forum of a comic book. So even
though Callahan sounds like he's clearly the guilty party here, Warrior
is the one who comes across sounding like a total boob.
I'd like to end this by
saying that I've read lots of shitty comics in my day;
it's part of what I do here on I-Mockery: read shitty comics,
then write about them so you can experience the joys of laughing at them
without having to slog through the painful bits. I mention this so you
have a clear perspective when I tell you that this is BY FAR the
worst comic I have ever read. The jumbled, incoherent script for this
book makes
All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder
look like fucking Shakespeare in comparison. The artwork manages to
capture all the bad qualities of Rob Liefeld while displaying no merits
whatsoever. I'd rather read an entire series about
Marvel heroes using Office Max supplies
to battle supervillains than read one more page of this Warrior shit.
There are entire pages of meaningless bullshit narrative text that I
didn't even subject you to. If I had the money to do so I would buy up
every copy in existence so that I could ensure they'd all be properly
destroyed. If you ever run across these books in the nickel bin and
convince yourself that they look hilarious, I urge you not to
pick them up. Believe me, it's just not worth it.
Found any weird, bizarre, stupid or funny comics that
should appear in a future "Tales From the Longbox" column?
Email Protoclown and let him know!
If you enjoyed this
article be sure to check out
the special Warrior "Christmas" comic book:
