Down at the End of Lonely Street - Goon Intro :: Blog

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Down at the End of Lonely Street - Goon Intro

07/19/2012 1:52pm

The Goon is about to start dropping monthly at a Local Comic Shop near you and we can't be more stoked. The humor and action are about to amp up and we don't want you to miss any of it. Over the next few months we will be posting more of these intros from The Goon Trade Volumes and more entertaining items to keep this Eisner winning series at the forefront of your mind. This week we have the Intro to The Goon miniseries Nothing But Misery by William Stout. If you're looking for a free issue of The Goon to get you started click here. If you are ready to dive into the whole series, you can get 44 digital issues of The Goon for only $50 in our digital store.

I gotta admit it—I’ve got a thing for zombies. And hillbillies. That makes Eric Powell’s comic, The Goon, just my cup of inbred tea.

I did some unsavory digging and uncovered how it all started. After a long day of guesting at Deliverance Con, Jack Kirby got all liquored up on some white lightnin’ with Wally Wood and Graham Ingels late one full-moon night in a local fan’s darkened Tennessee shack. One thing led to something unspeakable, which led to a very particular form of popular backwoods perversity, and before ya knew it, little Eric Powell was “born.”

The feisty little runt needed shaving at birth and in many other ways was pretty much unstoppable. As an unwashed, cowlicked, pesky whelp he’d grab a meat fork and a chunk of hot charcoal from the smoke pit at the monthly Long Pig Barbecue celebration, and before anyone could stop him he’d have drawn close to thirty cut-and-smudge Laughing Demon tattoos on the rumps of both the conscious and unconscious lady folk attending the event.

Powell didn’t improve with age; he only got more ambitious. His teen years were spent performing “experiments” that, if related here, would result in a permanent federal-government shutdown of Dark Horse Comics coupled with lengthy (and well-deserved) prison terms for publishers Richardson and Stradley.

Eventually, with the begrudging help of rehab at gunpoint, Eric saw the light. Or, more importantly (and more accurately), Eric convinced his parole officer that he’d seen the light. Working within Dark Horse’s charitable Art for Dollars program, Eric began to release his demons in a much more positive form: comic books.

Promised his own book and mere house arrest instead of the chain gang if he produced a regular comic-book series, Eric went to work. The Goon is the result. A mini masterpiece of urban debris, Powell’s nihilistic noir drops thirties and forties pop-cultural references (like dialogue from Frank Capra’s nightmarish It’s a Wonderful Life) amongst Texas chainsaw hillbilly hilarity (and old Monty Python reruns to boot) to devastating effect. Confused? Just think Murder, He Says (1945) with flesh-eating zombies.

Most of the Goon books were originally published in black and white, an appropriate choice considering the influence B and Z drive-in films have had on Powell’s twisted psyche. Now that he’s ventured into color, Powell’s world is painted in somber umbers and grayed-down pigments that effectively convey both the psychological and tangible rubble of the Goon and his squalid environment. These ashen palettes are occasionally ruptured with a burst of red (usually—surprise!—blood) or potently spiced with a fetidly sweet, bilious green.

So, pour yourself a Mason jar full of yer grampa’s best corn liquor, grab a pig-ear sandwich and a plateful of rib tips, kick up your feet in your La-Z-Boy, and strap yourself in for a series of lively thug-and-zombie stories where anything can happen.

’Cause it will.

William Stout

Pasadena, California

William Stout was the production designer for The Return of the Living Dead and worked with Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) on Invaders from Mars, so he knows what the hell he’s talking about.

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Down at the End of Lonely Street - Goon Intro

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