The Goon #29

Unless you have more money than you know what to do with, it's pretty much impossible to buy every comic every week.

What that means is: sooner or later, a comic you would enjoy reading flies under the radar. As a result, many comic fans find themselves scrambling to catch up on the ones that got away. (For example, I didn't start reading Sandman until issue #8. Thank goodness for collections!)

Several of my comic book reading friends have been raving about the comic book starring The Goon, so I finally decided to give it a try.

I told my friend James that I had picked up issue #28, and he told me I had made a mistake. "It's a fill-in issue," he said. "It's the worst issue of The Goon I've seen. Be sure to buy the next issue."

So I decided to reserve judgment until the next issue. And now that I've read it - I still don't get it. Oh, the art by Eric Powell (who also wrote the comic) is a lot of fun, and his enthusiasm leaps off the page. I also enjoyed his recent run as artist on Action Comics.

And my problems with the story may very well be tied to the fact that I'm not familiar with the characters. The title character is a brute of a guy who hangs out in a bar, dishing out punishment or abuse to just about everyone who shows up.

For obscure reasons, a supernatural creature shows up at the bar, looking for a character called The Priest, and a big fight ensues.

I'll grant that I need to read a few more issues, or perhaps a collection or two before I can get a handle on The Goon, but my first impression is that it's just a knockoff of the excellentHellboy comic.

But I'll reserve judgment until I have more information to go on.

Some years back, someone pointed out that every comic is potentially someone's first issue - so it's a good idea to give that new reader the basic information they need to follow along. In that, The Goon fails miserably. But I'll give the comic a few more tries to show me what it is that made my friends such big fans.

Grade: C-