Fun Sh*t

A Review of Shitshow #1

Shitshow is yet another dystopian superhero story, but I ended up smiling when I read this comic. I may have even chuckled. I hope the creators intended that.

Since my recent look at Dark Knights Death Metal #7, I started to think about how the last ten-plus years have given us — like it or not — a nineties revival, with work that harks back to the glory days of Rob Liefeld, Todd McFarlane and their extreme ilk. I blame this on DC’s New 52 and Bob Harras, who was one of the top brass employed at Marvel in the wake of the original creators of Image finally leaving the soon to be bankrupt company. Marvel tried to recapture that extreme magic, from having creators copy the Image style to even bringing back Rob Liefeld, all with various degrees of failure. DC Comics didn’t learn from that and did pretty much the same thing years later.

Paying homage to the Image style is hard. At its rare best, you get longtime McFarlane collaborator Greg Capullo actually showing tremendous growth or great satire like Doom Force. At its frequent worst, we get Herb Trimpe going back on years of drawing knowledge to imitate Rob Liefeld’s style. The secret pleasure in reading Shitshow #1 was…