Dark Horse Comics

The Goon has returned to a monthly release 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. If you're looking for a free issue of The Goon to get you started click here. 

Ever since I first laid eyes on The Goon, something had been tickling my brain . . . let’s be fair and call it a weird—though oddly pleasing—sense of déjà vu. 

Don’t get me wrong. The Goon is a wildly original work in comics, a unique and singular creation by Eric Powell, a hugely talented new voice making an important mark. Still, I do recall feeling that tingle of déjà vu the moment I saw the Nothin’ But Misery collection beckoning to me from a shelf at my local comic book shop. Something about that glorious cover painting (Goon knocking the head off a rather surprised-looking zombie), as well as the interior art, made that tingle happen. It happened again that night when I brought the book home and read the stories (and found myself delighted—indeed floored—by Powell’s off-kilter, hilarious world). The tingle I felt wasn’t familiarity, exactly . . . more like a vague sense that I’d known these guys all my life, that Goon and Franky were old friends I’d somehow lost track of and forgotten.

How could this be, considering that The Goon is, as I’ve said, fresh and original and all those other good things? How could something be entirely new, yet still give me that Rod Serling vibe that I’d stumbled into a place I’d visited before and re-encountered people I’d known, perhaps in a previous life? It was a puzzler, all right, and I’d been trying to put my finger on it ever since.

The answer finally came to me the other day when I was down in my basement working on my treadmill (nothing like exercise to get the mind wandering). The solution had been lurking there in my hind-brain like an air bubble at the bottom of a pond, and it finally broke loose and rose quietly to the surface where I could see it. 

Folks, I’ve developed a theory about The Goon, and though some of you may laugh in my face, I will take courage in hand and share that theory with you today.

It has to do with Eric winning the Eisner Award for Best Single Issue. Mind you, it’s no small cheese winning an Eisner—it’s the comic industry’s most coveted and meaningful honor. It’s given to people in comics who keep the bar raised high, and has been won by the likes of Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen scribe Alan Moore. That’s some rarified company to be in, and if you can make that kind of cut, you know you’re doing something right. More to the point, consider the legacy the Eisner Award suggests—well, to risk stating the obvious, it’s named after Will Eisner, isn’t it? In the pantheon of comics, Mr. Eisner sits atop Mount Olympus. This is the gentlemen who created The Spirit, after all, which has inspired generations of storytellers to take pen and brush in hand, and remains to this day a high-water mark to which all aspire (in the film world, this would be like having directed Battleship Potemkin or Citizen Kane.) And so I’m thinking, as I’m sweating away on my treadmill, that winning an award named after Will “I am Zeus” Eisner has got to be just about the most thrilling honor a young comic book creator like Eric Powell can receive.

And as I mused upon this, that air bubble in my brain-pond started to rise, and I began to perceive a deeper connection between Powell and Eisner than I had previously allowed for—and thus did my theory take shape.

I certainly had noted, even upon my first exposure to The Goon, that Eric Powell’s art, though very much his own, owes a debt of inspiration to Eisner. Check Eric’s line work, the shading, the compositions, the expressions on the characters’ faces—I guarantee you Eric spent at least a part of his childhood peering over every page and panel of The Spirit, the circuits in his young head going clickety-clack and lighting up with “gee, I wanna do that when I grow up” inspiration. This is no different than any of us who grow up to become storytellers for a living; those inspirations are there to be soaked in, cherished, and used as fuel someday. I have a whole list of inspirations myself, those keenly-felt treasures that give us a big kick in the pants when we’re kids and help propel us into following our dreams in our adult lives. In my case, Frank Capra had a lot to do with it. So did Stanley Kubrick. So did Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, and Harlan Ellison. So did seeing THX-1138—still George Lucas’s best and most personal work, in my opinion—when I was twelve. The list goes on, but I won’t bore you—this intro’s about Eric, not me. The point is, there I was the other day, sweating on my treadmill, thinking about Eric Powell’s The Goon and Will Eisner’s The Spirit, when I finally realized why Goon had given me that nice shiver of déjà vu:

I think Eric Powell’s The Goon takes place in a part of Central City that Will Eisner never quite showed us (though it was just around the corner, and he did take us down some of the same mean streets and alleys). And I’m convinced that Goon himself is a tough customer that Eisner’s intrepid criminologist, Denny Colt—who struck fear into the hearts of most criminals as “The Spirit”—probably butted heads with more than once in his crime-fighting career, but never managed to bring down. (Note that I said most criminals—Goon probably slapped the Spirit around pretty good and even threw him through a wall.) Perhaps Goon and the Spirit even developed a grudging admiration for each other over time, and left each other alone. Maybe they even found themselves fighting on the same side once or twice, much to their surprise. I’m guessing Mr. Eisner just never got around to telling us those particular tales, because he was understandably distracted by all those sultry femme-fatale hotties like P’Gell and Sand Saref that kept sashaying after our boy Denny.

Yes, the more I’ve thought about it, the more certain I am that if we could visit Lonely Street, we’d find it just a stone’s throw from Wildwood Cemetery. (I mean, take another look at the boneyard where the G-men find Labrazio’s headstone right after the Goon lops off Fishy Pete’s limbs with a chainsaw—just try and tell me that’s not Wildwood . . . come on, you know it is.) If we exited the road to where the docks are, we’d find ourselves in Goon’s neighborhood . . . ducking zombies and car-hugging giant squids, I have no doubt.

I think what Eric Powell has done in creating The Goon is given us the flip-side of The Spirit: shown us how the other, less-fortunate half lives—you know, the guys who aren’t James Gardner-handsome and don’t get the chance to flirt endlessly with Ellen, Commissioner Dolan’s sexy and pampered daughter. I’m talking about those other guys, the pug-uglies we often glimpsed in the Spirit’s adventures but never really got to know, the disposable guys who dwelt on the murkier side of the law, did all the dirty work and heavy lifting, and spent the off-hours in those sleazy dives along the waterfront. (Those are the very same dives the Spirit would often poke his head into, but—lightweight that he is—never stick around and do whiskey shooters until he passed out and went flumpf facedown on the floor.)

So there’s my theory—that The Goon amounts to a perfect companion piece to Will Eisner’s The Spirit—submitted, as Serling would say, for your approval. I think Eric has created the yang to Eisner’s yin, made those disposable pug-uglies indispensable, and brilliantly filled in for us the other half of the Spirit’s world. Go ahead and laugh if you must, but I think I’m onto something here. I think it explains that tingle of déjà vu, and the reason Goon and Franky seemed like old, forgotten friends to me—because in a sense, they are. I swear I caught glimpses of them years ago when I was a kid reading those excellent Warren reprints of The Spirit, the pair of them darting around the corners of dark alleys lugging a safe on their shoulders or bags of loot under their arms while Denny Colt went zipping by in hot pursuit of bigger fish like the Octopus, or a sexy dame like Silk Satin, or . . . hell, maybe even on the trail of Labrazio. All of which makes Eric winning this year’s Eisner Award not only deserved, but—to my mind—oddly and sweetly appropriate. 

Part of my thrill in writing the intro to this volume is that it contains the most talked-about and fun crossover of the year—of course I’m talking about Goon meeting Hellboy. (And if you’ve read my intro to the new Hellboy anthology, Odder Jobs, you’re certainly aware what a rabid Hellboy fan I am, and what I genius I think Mignola is.) But, hey, as much as I loved Goon hooking up with Hellboy, you know what I’d give anything to see? I mean anything? (Even my naked pictures of Ingrid Bergman?) That’s right, bub . . . I’d love to see the Spirit stumble into Nort’s sleazy bar with a herd of Eric Powell zombies snapping at his heels, trying to chew his ass off. 

How about it, Eric? I think it’s the least you could do for us, having taken home the Eisner.

Okay, so maybe I’m dreaming. And maybe I’m projecting big-time about The Goon being the flip-side of The Spirit; perhaps I’m just conflating the two because I love them dearly, and both have a uniquely Damon Runyon period flavor. But, dammit, I don’t think I’m wrong. And even if I am, what the hell . . . if you can’t make a geeky fanboy of yourself writing an intro, then what’s the point of doing one? Tell you what, when you get to write the intro, you can subject the rest of us to whatever crackpot theory you want to float. Right now I’ve got the floor, so siddown and shaddup, ’cause I ain’t done talkin’ yet. (Sorry, all this talk of Goon is bringing out my Damon Runyon.)

Before I hand over the reins to the estimable Mr. Powell, let me just say again how much I adore what he’s created here. For starters, he’s got a thing for flesh-eating zombies (which I share), and he draws them funnier than anybody I’ve ever seen. The Goon is a true American original—a delirious medley of strange characters, stranger creatures, wild-ass (and often truly creepy) storytelling, art so excellent and perfectly matched to the tone of his stories as to be flabbergasting, and writing so hilarious that it sometimes comes close to making me pee my pants. (¡Lagarto Hombre!, which we are fortunate to have in this collection, is one of the funniest things I’ve read this year, a hilarious tip of the hat to every “giant monsters beating the crap out of each other like drunken WWF wrestlers” movie ever made.) And make no mistake, Eric’s just getting better as he goes—The Vampire Dame Had to Die, also in this collection, starts out being fall-down funny (I love the way he skewers the overwrought Anne Rice goth-types), then surprises us with the fascinating and extremely delicate trick of becoming unexpectedly and genuinely moving in its last few pages.

Yeah, boys and girls, this Powell guy’s good. He’s the real deal, doing pitch-perfect work, and I’m making a safe bet he’ll be taking home a few more Eisners before he’s through.

Frank Darabont

Los Angeles, CA