I’ve been flailing about the comic book solicitations like a thirsty dater who just paid for a premium membership in a second rate dating app; I’m just wanting something, anything to be worth my time. I’m looking at you OkCupid. Yeesh, what a disaster that site is. You’re just scrolling through trolls and old maids until you find a couple of cuties that match but never respond. Just like any other app you either delete or decide that you’re going to take your dating life by the horns and upgrade your membership, woo hoo! You convince yourself, hey you gotta spend money to make money which means you gotta spend money to date honeys! That, my friends, is a maxim that one should neverrrr believe in.
See, once you upgrade now you’ve got skin in the game so you have to find dates to justify your investment. It doesn’t matter if it’s only 20 or 30 bux, who in their right mind would pay for something and not get anything??? Even a sociopathic degenerate gambler gets the thrill of that moment when they could win all their losses back. You don’t even get that on a derelict dating app, you get an hourglass where the sand is sifting through to the bottom at ten times the speed of normal. Eventually you will match and you will chat with someone who seems cool enough and after oodles and noodles of your time plying and prying this ‘ehhh, she’s okay, she seems cute’ kinda girl you’ll meet up with her only to wonder ‘Wait, when the hell were these pictures of her taken that she’s got on her profile ,1992???’. At that point you’ll look at the menu and pray to the Dating Gods that she does not choose the 36oz Egyptian tomb aged steak with duck confit and roe from a salmon that could play chess.
You know, single men and women ten to twenty years from now are going to look back on all those who did the dating app thing and they’re going to think of the dating app trend in the same way that we look at doctors who thought putting leeches on a sick person to suck out the bad blood was a good idea.
So, as my pull list dwindles and dwindles due to the considerable plop plop of drivel that the comic book industry seems to be mired in, I’m just sending likes to new offerings that I may not necessarily have sent in previous years as a means to and end of hopefully finding a hidden gem. I’m not a big fan of Cullen Bunn. His name sounds like a name that the French were going to give to a pastry until they decided not to:
‘Let’s call this thees Le Cullen Bunn’
‘Mais non, c’est ordinaire. We shall call eet, Le Croissant!’
‘Ahhh, Le Croissant, oui! C’est magnifique!
And the Cullen Bunn was never to be heard of again until a descendant of this aborted pastry starting dropping middling horror series for brain addled comic book fans. Bad Bunny Bunn also had a run on Marvel’s recent ‘Conan the Barbarian’ catastrophe that rankles me to no end. I don’t get the fascination with this guy but hey, lots of people are fascinated by ordinary these days. SI saw that he was tasked to write this Indie Russian Spy type tale and I was intrigued. I’m always down for a good spy thingamajig and since I’m flailing for adds to my pulls I gave this a shot. Well, oy vey. Oy to the emm oh eff oh vey.
I’m going to take apart this story right now so if you want to read this comic don’t keep reading. In other words, spoiler alert although I would say these pages have already been spoiled. First, the art by Mike Deodato Jr. was fantastic, let’s just get that out of the way. Mike, you’re amazing, per usual. Okay, so some old Russian Teacher Dude at a College is approached by some young blonde Army Dude who swiftly convinces him to join their ‘extraction team’ to get his former Russian flame babe out of Russia on an extraction mission. He meets the team and they’re all straight out of a Call of Duty game. They go to Russia, all the special op bad ass dudes post up all around this restaurant where Teacher Dude’s Russian Babe is waiting at a table. They meet and she goes ‘Oh, you’re not just taking me you’re taking my hot daughter as well’. Hot daughter in a skimpy dress and six inch heels walks up like she’s meeting her new sugar daddy, there’s zero tension or stakes for what supposedly is a dangerous mission.
All of a sudden all hell breaks loose! The Russians! The Evil Russians! They blow everything up! Oh those dastardly Russians! Rat a Tat Tat Tat! Oh no! They killed the Call of Doody Dudes! All of them! In like one fell swoop, well, that was easy. Old Momma Russia Flame pulls out a Gat (I wish people would keep using this slang term that was popularized by Old School Hip Hoppers back in the day, it’s my fave) she pulls out the Jammy (I love that one too, c’mon, a Jammy??? Wuttttt!) pulls out the Jammy and lets it fly. Now scruffy old Rusky Teach and his Hot Babe in Heels are on the run.
Yeesh, ya think Cruller Bunns watched Indiana Jones before writing this. Should we change the title of this to Indiana Jonesanovich and the Babushka? Are you frikkin kidding me with this Honey Buns??? So let me get this straight. You got a special ops bad ass group of Army dudes who have to extract some old Russian chick. Rather than contacting her themselves and meeting her in a, oh I dunno, a garage, an apartment, a Dunkin Donutsky, they drag some old dude with them ‘cause she requests it and they meet in a nice restaurant. They couldn’t meet in a garage, apartment or at a Dunkin Donutsky and get a Cruller Bunn together??? Not only that, her hot daughter wants out too, so she dresses like she’s auditioning for Moscow’s Housewives or The Bachelorusky for her extraction. Let me guess, while she was deciding which outfit showed her tits off better she was on TikTok telling the CCP and her millions of fans about her Hawt X-Tract.
Look here Pullen Ho Doughnuts, if you wanted a half naked chick running around Russia with an old Lolita Express Teacher and gun just cut to the chase and have them running from the restaurant; lose all the exposition. Clearly that was your pitch: Russian Club Chick from the 90s and Indiana Jonesanovich. Gee, lemme guess, Indianov is great with guns and has a few tricks up his sleeves and down his pants and he makes it out alive while killing all the evil Russians, eff you dude and your lame plot.
Lemme guess, you and Axel Axelrod Foley the EIC of AWA have the Ukrainian Flag in your profile pic and jerk off to Zelensky like he’s a Farrah Fawcett poster from 1977. Axel Foley in his little spiel at the end of the comic even goes so far to compare Putin to Drago from the Rocky IV movie. Oh fer goodness sake. Is that it, you watch the lametsream news and believe all the BS that spews from the pathological liars that call themselves newscasters and now you’re all ‘Russia is Evil and Sucks?’ I know that the war over there is waaaay more complicated and more nuanced than the pathetically reductive lens of good vs evil. Anyone with a brain who understands history and who objectively considers the myriad of implications and levers that have caused this conflict understands how complex this situation is. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that Culler Bunn and Ahmed Foley don’t know jack about jack. So you can keep your canned plot and myopic simplistic world view off my golden pull list that only allows intelligent beautiful geniuses on it.
This comic is not in the Red Zone. It’s sitting on a tee at the 35 yard line and it should just be kicked off into the stands rather than into the endzone. Blecchh. What a waste. Man, all this talk of pastries has me hungry. I’m gonna go grab a Russian Bear Claw from the KGB-odega up the street.
Rating: 4.4
Verdict: Drop
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