After reading Wolverine And The X-Men #17, I want nothing more out of the rest of my life than to go drinking with Jason Aaron. And for the first time, when I imagine drinking with a comic creator, I question whether or not I would survive the experience. Because based on this issue, clearly Aaron can put  ’em away.

Wolverine And The X-Men #17 costs $3.99, but it is easily worth several thousand dollars. Wolverine And The X-Men #17 features neither Wolverine, nor The X-Men, and that is okay, because none of them are bad enough motherfuckers to pick up the real hero of this book’s jockstrap. Wolverine And The X-Men #17 instead features a secret warrior with two brains, who craps fire, makes sex with anything that walks, moves or crawls, makes James Bond look like a whimpering mongoloid with a bum knee, and looks like a giant booger.

Wolverine And The X-Men #17 is the most balls-out fun that four bucks will buy you all this week.

There are good and bad things to say about Talon #0, written by Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV and drawn by Guillem March, but in the final analysis, there’s only one thing about the issue that really, truly matters. And that is that there’s a panel of a child being chained up and straitjacketed by a clown that, no matter March’s intentions in drawing it, will make you wake up screaming like a woman.

But for now, let’s put that horrific image aside and focus on the comic itself, which gives itself an uphill battle to fight right out of the gate. Talon #0 not only has to introduce a character we’ve never seen before, but it has to do it within the DC issue 0 conceit of telling us backstory about the character… about whom we know nothing about to start with. So on one level, the book has kind of a strange feel to it, like meeting a stranger at a party and having him tell you about some childhood trauma. Perhaps the time he was savaged by a clown.

However, the book generally overcomes the obstacles that it sets itself, introducing a pretty entertaining character who gets a couple of good, funny lines, with a dark past I wouldn’t mind learning a bit more about, some hints about his upcoming supporting cast… even while it ties itself inexorably to an escape artist’s conceit that might be difficult to maintain over the long term, and tries like hell to get us to feel positively about a character not only trained as a killer, but who has at least one dead fella under his belt.

Plus, there’s a creepy menacing clown chaining up a child.