Wicked Inclinations

The tide has turned in Goon's war against the undead hordes of the Zombie Priest - or has it? With Buzzard now preventing the harvest of any fresh corpses from the cemetery, the Priest grows desperate. So desperate, that he unleashes incantations of previously unseen power to create a whole new breed of minion - one that may be beyond even the strength of the Goon to contain. But one pays a price for conjuring such evil into the world, and the Zombie Priest quickly discovers that the cost of such power may be far more than he bargained for.

There's a certain joy knowing that a cartoonist of great skill is filling his or her own comic with the elements they love. Powell clearly loves drawing big tough guys, zombies, ghouls, men in fedoras and various combinations of the above. The fifth Goon trade paperback has all that and a Hitchcock reference to boot, a treat for fans but still accessible to new readers. The appeal is how Powell conveys that enthusiasm by drawing every creature and monster so darned well. His style continues to evolve as the book now has a lush painted look to it. This only adds to the well-rounded depth that all of Powell's figures possess and to the spooky atmosphere that the stories demand. The main story relates how the Goon's nemesis the Zombie Priest is coming up with a new kind of menace for our hero and his town. That plot often takes second place to the humor, which is so cheerfully rude and crude that it's positively endearing. At this point all the characters of Norton's Pub gel so well that their interactions are chummy enough to be entertaining no matter what chaotic destruction might be headed their way. (Dec.)
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Powell likes to start each new arc of his horror-gangster parody with a bit of backstory. Here we learn the Goon's shrouded-in-the-mists-of-time origins and why he is shepherded by an undying ghoul called the Buzzard. This is all rendered like a sequence from a selectively tinted black-and-white movie, vintage 1931, much grayer than but similar to the movie Sin City. There are more and brighter colors when the "contemporary" story resumes, but god forbid that the sun should ever flat-out shine on The Goon. Goon and Franky are still fighting the Priest and his horde of zombies. The latter minions having been pretty much overcome, the Priest conjures a legion of baby ghouls that can amalgamate into giant carnivorous insects, and for a rousing conclusion, the giant lizard unleashed by currently arrested Dr. Alloy joins the fray. The book fairly bursts with fisticuffs, gore, bad attitude, and running character gags, and the appended five short stories by other hands add more of same. Prime ghastly fun. Ray Olson
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