Background: Pseudo_Intellectual sees Kiss your pants goodbye, Evil One!, /msg's me asking if it's for real, I admit it's all made up, and P_I sends me a true Horror Beyond Imagining...Ladies and gentlemen, I give you 1995's "
Sisters of Mercy #1"...
The Worst Comic Book of All Time.
First, we have the
cover, which is poorly laid-out and drawn by
Image Comics co-founder,
prettyboy, and
hack Rob Liefeld. Three figures are depicted: on the right is a hastily drawn and somewhat
lopsided tiger,
snarling at us; on the left is a
close-up of a
pissed-off redhead with an
eyepatch and
cleavage up to her neck; in the center (well, a bit
off-center) is an even more
pissed-off woman with
purple-and-black hair, purple facial
tattoos, and a purple
bikini. One arm is apparently
cybernetic; she's holding a
sword in the other. By all appearances, she is smuggling
cantaloupes under her bikini top and has what
poor taste demands I call "
good birthin' hips." The
grimace on her face seems to be an indication either of the effort needed to move that 25-pound
rack or of a
desire to
shishkebab the artist.
We open the comic to the
inside cover, where the
credits for this issue are printed. Credited to the late
Mark Williams are "
Plot/
Art/
Words" while the "
Plot/
Computer Color/
Lettering" is credited to
Rikki Rocket. That's right -- the
drummer from
Poison. Just in case there's any doubt, the issue is dedicated to the cheesy '80s
glam metal band.
Okay, now let's get into the story. On the first page, we find three
cyborged
thugs carrying oversized
hand cannons and
gloating over a small
wolf they've just killed. "Ha, Ha!" says one. "Nice shot Ox!" Ox replies, "Yeah, kinda
scrawny though. Maybe it'll make a good
lamp shade! Ha Ha!" The
caption on this page reads: "A
stench fills the morning air.
Blood and
acrid smoke mingle with an even more
repulsive odor... the
foul reek of evil and
senseless violence!"
Now really, the first thing we notice on Page 1 is that, as
bad as Liefeld's cover was, the actual story art is much, much worse. The pencil work is
crude,
disproportionate, and
sloppy, like the work of, perhaps, a moderately talented
junior high kid. The "wolf" looks more like a
malnourished and
deformed
terrier. The only things that look like they were depicted accurately are the
guns. God, I'm tired of looking at Page 1. Let's move on.
Offended by the wolf's
death and the men's
stilted dialogue, a woman in a
black leather catsuit leaps out, claws two of the men to death and tears half of Ox's face off. Incredibly, she is even more poorly drawn than the wolf is. When Ox threatens to
shoot her, another woman, a
misshapen,
horrific freakshow -- oh, wait. It's actually the chick with the
sword from the cover. She's just drawn
incompetently. Anyway, she jumps out and cuts Ox's arm off. After screaming some threats while the girls make
unfunny remarks, Ox obligingly passes out.
Now the scene shifts to the
Mercy Island Correctional Facility, where the
prisoners have taken over the place and been heavily cyborged. We follow some
scrawny,
mentally deficient loser named Buster as he gets threatened by more of the thuggish prisoners and reports to the
Doctor, a
robotlike
butcher who's currently carving a bunch of prisoners up and adding various cybernetic parts. The Doctor doesn't look that bad. He's a fairly
stereotypical robot-loving
mad scientist, but I've seen
dumber looking characters, even outside of this book.
Next the scene shifts back to Ox, who awakens tied up in a boat on a beach covered with
crabs.
Malina and Mariah (I had to look their names up on the credits page) have inexplicably
stripped their clothes off, making it very clear that the artist learned
anatomy by taking the clothes off his sister's
Grow-Up Skipper doll. The girls demand to know more about Ox's cybernetics, but he refuses to tell them anything, so they push his boat out to sea. Ox's boat sails for the
horizon while he alternately bellows
threats and
whimpers for
mercy.
Unfortunately, this was all fairly
typical, thematically, of a lot of Image's books in the early- to mid-1990s -- drenched with
moronic violence, bad anatomy, and
heroes who are just as
psychotic and
murderous as the
villains. I don't know if comic book fans were just
dumber back then, or if all the
creators were just
blithering idiots. "Sisters of Mercy" had at least three issues
published, probably more. It was probably considered a great
success -- just one more piece of
evidence that there is no
God. It is my very sincere
wish that I never see any further issues of this
abomination.
I can't say I really mind comics with psychotic and murderous heroes. I'd just prefer that Evan Dorkin write them...