Pretty Colors And a Powerful Stink: Tom Morello’s Orchid #1 Review

Can’t… make an F-chord on the guitar that sounds like anything but shit.
– Stephen King, Misery

When it comes to Dark Horse Comics’ Orchid #1, I want to give writer Tom Morello the benefit of the doubt, the way I did a few years back when Scott Ian from Anthrax wrote a couple of issues of Lobo for DC Comics. I really do.

After all, based on Morello’s interview with Rolling Stone last week, he grew up a comic geek just like Ian and the rest of us. And what with me being a former FM rock radio DJ, I will gladly admit that Morello gets sounds out of a guitar that neither I nor Scott Ian could get out of a woman with a million dollars in blood diamonds, a vibrator and a non-Irish dick.

And Morello’s even coughing up an original song you can download with every issue, which Dark Horse is calling “a free piece of musical score by Morello,” which although harder to type, sounds a hell of a lot nicer than “multimedia bribery”… which WILL be the name of my Rage Against The Machine tribute band. But I digress.

But the unfortunate fact of the matter is that if Alan Moore showed up at Epic Records waving a copy of Watchmen and demanding a record deal, he’d be laughed out of the lobby just before and extensively after security mildly tased him for being an insane person. Dark Horse should’ve done the same when Morello knocked.

George Romero Only Likes Some Of The Zombies, Some Of The Time

According to recent tweets by CNN GeekOut! and Newsarama, last night’s season two premiere of The Walking Dead was watched by over 7 million viewers. Huge numbers! Wow, who didn’t see it last night? Well, me – but I had an excuse. I was catching up on Red while the DVR was recording The Walking Dead. Insert your “geriatric killers are kind of like zombies” joke here.

But, you know who also didn’t watch The Walking Dead last night?

George Romero.

Yup, the father of modern zombie horror as we know it is not a fan of The Walking Dead.

The Dame Said Ph’nglui Mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh Wgah’nagl Fhtagn: Brubaker and Phillips Announce Fatale

At Friday’s Creator-Owned Comics panel at the New York Comic Con, hosted by Robert Kirkman, who is arguably the poster boy for creator-owned books what with his walking away from Marvel at the height of his popularity and his 427 bazillion dollars of Walking Dead TV money, announced that Image Comics will be producing Fatale, a supernatural crime book by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, the creative team behind Criminal, Sleeper and Incognito.

Tell us about the book, Ed!

“I’ve been wanting for a while to do something with a more supernatural element to it… ‘Fatale’ mixes what [Sean and I] do and all the ways we’ve poked fun at the noir genre. If ‘Incognito’ was us doing ‘What if Doc Savage, Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler had all existed in the same universe?’ then this is a weird combo of James M. Cain and Lovecraft…

The story involves all these characters that spin around a woman who may or may not be the living incarnation of the femme fatale. Parts of the story are told from her point of view.

I’m gonna let you insert your own Cthuhlu / tentacle porn joke here. Because I am one classy motherfucker.