Mon 5 Oct 2009
Halloween Countdown: October 5 – Sticky business
Posted by bitterandrew under Comics, Culture, Halloween Countdown, Music, Nobody's Favorites
[12] Comments
I’ve gotten a few inquiries over the past week wondering how the Halloween Countdown was going to effect Nobody’s Favorites. Luckily, the urine-stained historic tapestry of comics crapulence includes more than enough travesties of a horrific bent. This happy concordance has allowed me to stay on seasonal topic even as I regale you with my unvarnished contempt for the worst of the worst…
…and they don’t come much worse than Dexter Mungo, Ectokid.
“Dex” made his debut in September 1993 as part of Marvel’s “Razorline” imprint, a shared superhero universe differentiated from the eleventy-billion other shared superhero universes unleashed during that era by the involvement of Clive Barker. I have mixed feelings regarding Barker’s creative output. The various stories contained within his early Books of Blood anthologies offer a groundbreaking fusion of the mythic and visceral that represented as important a paradigm shift as Lovecraft’s “cosmic,” (reluctantly) modernist take on the horror genre. His films, which flattened the highs and lows of his written style into boilerplate gorefests with intellectual pretensions, and his later novels, which tended to wallow in indecipherable cosmology, left me rather cold.
With Razorline, Barker served the role of creative overseer, setting up various superheroic properties to be handled by other (lesser) talents. Ectokid was first written by James Robinson and then by Wachowski brothers, making the title something of a feeding station for future one-trick ponies. Acting as the imprint’s Spider-Man analogue, young master Mungo was the fifteen year old product of a coupling between a male ghost and female human psychic.
Dex’s human-spirit heritage granted him certain supernatural powers, the foremost being the ability to produce and shape white sticky globs of ectoplasm from his hands….
…making him kind of a cross between Spidey, Green Lantern, and certain “adult” films produced in Japan (which, to be fair, is very true to Barkerian themes).
Dex also possessed the power to see and to travel into the Ectoverse…
…essentially the mundane world run through an 80′s metal album filter and populated by the spirits of the departed and other assorted supernatural beasties normally encountered in a middle schooler’s English notebook.
“Wait, Andrew,” I can hear you saying, “this all sounds pretty pedestrian. How does that make Ectokid qualify as Nobody’s Favorite?”
Well, how about the eight-issue (out of a total of nine before the imprint — and the comics industry — mercifully collapsed) establishing arc in which the rude and ‘tudey Dex discovers that he’s a special being with access to magical powers and a magical world lurking just beyond our own and there’s an absent father figure and a ill mother and pair of fiendishly cruel assassins with “clever” names who seek to kill Dex before he can fulfill his special destiny and a villainous cabal modeled on the Catholic church and team-ups with Edgar Allan Poe, Cyrano, Janis Joplin, and Sacco and Vanzetti (portrayed as explosive experts who talk like the Mario brothers) and a magical road trip and a painful lesson about the true meaning of love and…..
…y’know what? I’m done.
Not only does Ectokid combine the most insufferable cliches associated with Vertigo titles with the all-thumbs aesthetic approach of the Chromium Age, but it is far and away the lousiest comic book series I have ever had the misfortune of reading. If anything, “nobody’s favorite” is a vast understatement in Dexter Mungo’s case.
Recommended listening: His Name Is Alive – How Ghosts Affect Relationships (from Livonia
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TRUE FACT: Finding out that your partner owns a complete run of Ectokid is grounds for a summary divorce in thirty-four states.
Related posts:
- Halloween Countdown: October 19 – An American werewolf in slacks
- Halloween Countdown: October 12 – Rock and schlock
- Halloween Countdown: October 29 – Sympathy for a demon
October 5th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
I never read this, and I’m awfully glad now. But I do have to say, that “urine-stained historic tapestry of comics crapulence” is sheer poetry.
October 5th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Huh? “Well, how about the eight-issue (out of a total of nine before the imprint — and the comics industry — mercifully collapsed) establishing arc in which the rude and ‘tudey Dex discovers that he’s a special being with access to magical powers and a magical world lurking just beyond our own and there’s an absent father figure and a ill mother and pair of fiendishly cruel assassins with “clever” names who seek to kill Dex before he can fulfill his special destiny and a villainous cabal modeled on the Catholic church and team-ups with Edgar Allan Poe, Cyrano, Janis Joplin, and Sacco and Vanzetti (portrayed as explosive experts who talk like the Mario brothers) and a magical road trip and a painful lesson about the true meaning of love and…..”
this sounds awesome! i mean, i’m 24 years old, but this still sounds awesome
October 5th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
I would suggest reading it in the original Gaimanese, then, if not the Moorcockian ur-text.
October 6th, 2009 at 6:03 am
I’ve always been curious about Ectokid. Sounds like I’ve had a lucky escape…
October 6th, 2009 at 8:43 am
I was working for a comic dealer at the time who got hyped up about this line at the big marketing meeting they had at the Capital City Comics distribution. Needless to say he got burned.
October 6th, 2009 at 9:28 am
Because somebody has to, “Mungo like candy.”
October 6th, 2009 at 11:16 am
OK, I give up. What were the “clever” names of the assassins? Mr. Vandemar and Mr. Croup? Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff? Mr. Pin and Mr. Tulip? Mr. Wint and Mr Kidd? Mr T. Rope and Mr C. Liche?
October 6th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Man, I remember reading about this when I was younger and thinking the idea of a guy who could see different worlds out of each of his eyes was pretty cool. Actually I still think it’s not bad in and of itself, but everything else sounds pretty terrible.
Barker’s a great idea man, which is why he works well in short story format, but his longer-form stories are often pretty unfocused and pointless. That said, I’ll defend the first Hellraiser as a good, solid horror movie. I love how it starts out as an EC comics riff and then moves in another direction.
And I guess I’m literally the only person left on the internet who’ll defend the Wachowski brothers…
October 6th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Crapulent actually refers to drunkenness.
I was amazed that it’s actually a word.
ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: from late Latin crapulentus ‘very drunk,’ from Latin crapula ‘inebriation,’ from Greek kraipalē ‘drunken headache
(Of course, a dictionary that is descriptive of usage, rather than prescriptive, ought nowadays to include a definition that suits your usage as well, as that’s how it’s used these days.)
October 6th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Indeed. It offers that patina of class that ‘craptacular’ lacks.
And given the contexts I’ve used the word in, “shoe-pukingly blotto” also tends to apply in most cases.
October 7th, 2009 at 1:06 am
This is kind of a drop in the ocean compared to everything else that’s wrong with Ectokid, but Balzac never wrote about Cyrano de Bergerac. That was Edmond Rostand.
December 2nd, 2009 at 3:52 am
This book was filled with sheer insanity and was all the more fun for it. Taken seriously, it is beyond a mess, but I think if you’re taking it that seriously, you’re missing the point. A fun, somewhat psychedelic romp, with great Steve Skroce art.