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.

The Nightwatchman Moonlights

The first big Comic-Con announcement, on preview night, was that Dark Horse Comics was planning to publish Orchid, a comic written by Tom Morello, the lead guitarist for Audioslave and Rage Against The Machine, which led most if us there at the time to take in a sharp breath and remark: “I hung around the Dark Horse booth for an hour to hear an announcement that didn’t include the words ‘Buffy’, ‘Sin’ or ‘City’?”

Dial ahead two months and Dark Horse has released a six-page preview of the first issue of a book they’re hyping as “the tale of a teenage prostitute who learns that she is more than the role society has imposed upon her.” Oh, Dark Horse… you had me at “teenage prostitute.” And so did the Internet. Be right back…