The Goon: Rough Stuff (Goon (Unnumbered))

Dark Horse Comics brings you the origin of Eric Powell's The Goon, the earliest stories published for the first time. The Zombie Priest has just set up shop on Lonely Street and intends to build an undead army, and the Goon's the only man who can stop him. His early battles with the undead are mixed with stories of the Goon's youth, as we meet his circus-freak family and learn how he came to be the head of a notorious crime family. Also included in this volume is a look at the creation of the Goon and his world with a special "Evolution of The Goon" sketchbook section.

If at first Powell's square-jawed and square-headed, hypermuscular hero, the Goon, looks like some kind of Hellboy rip-off, look again. The Goon and his milieu are retro in appearance and allusions, and making a movie of them wouldn't need as big an FX budget as Mike Mignola's demon-gone-good required. Oh, sure, the Goon tangles with the supernatural, but supernatural isn't paranormal, like Hellboy's antagonists. The Goon just has to stomp zombies now and then. His other foes include regular, or at least real, humans, such as cops, and a mad scientist who's turned his flesh into gold, and those plug-uglies with tails, the Mud brothers, and a redneck werewolf. Just regular guys. The Goon is an old-style enforcer for reclusive mobster Labrazio in a seemingly Depression-era seaside burg, where the talk's like the scripts for the Dead End Kids, and the Goon must have a sidekick like Franky, a pint-size palooka with pupil-less peepers right out of Little Orphan Annie. Franky's eyes aren't Powell's only tip of the hat to comics tradition. He draws one extended flashback in a style reminiscent of graphic-novel elder statesman Will Eisner and another to resemble early Mad stalwart Bill Elder's work, and he frames one of the flashbacks with fumetti starring his nine-ish-looking son. Another Mad ace, Wally Wood, exerts a more pervasive influence on Powell, yet he is always very much his own man, a fearless parodist of even the most shopworn tough-guy cliches. Ray Olson
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