Highway 62 Revisited

WHAT IF WOLVERINE BATTLED CONAN. (1990)

Script by Glenn Herdling. Gary Kwapisz on pencils. Ian Akin and Brian Garvey on inks.

Sadly, Conan never uses an axe on Logan. And really, this comic is much more “What if Wolverine beat Red Sonja in single combat and she fell for him with some Conan dude for a couple pages.” Well, there’s more Conan on Logan action than that, but it seems pretty perfunctory. Which was often the problem with WHAT IF.

So anyways, yeah, on the first page, Logan beats Red Sonja one-on-one and she at last has to give in to her infamous oath. Note that I’m not in on the lore of Red Sonja one way or another, so you can argue ho’od win somewhere else. Of course Logan don’t swing like that, so he gives her a pass.

Conan catches up with Logan, thinking that he needs to take Red Sonja so that her body can be used to ressurect Conan’s lost love. Yeah, I didn’t buy that either, but you gotta get ‘em to fight somehow. Conan kills Logan, but of course Logan pops back up all berserker like. Then he chops off Conan’s hand.

Conan ends up fighting a big ‘ol demon anyways. Then he gets pushed into a magic portal that pushes him into the pages of X-MEN 137 where the X-MEN are trying to fight for their lives and make sure that Phoenix can commit suicide (okay, maybe they didn’t plan that.) Did I mention that yeah, Logan gets pushed into Conan’s time in the middle of X-MEN 137? Oh, sorry. There you are.

So Conan is off the page, Red Sonja and Logan live on happily ever after. And Conan arrives just in time to prevent Scott Summers from talking Jean Grey into killing herself, so then the Phoenix eats this alternate reality.

CROM!

No, really, that’s the last word on the last page. I love it.

Good? Bad? Who cares.

From THE BABY (1973). This movie is crazier than a bag of snake’s armpits. Above you’ll see just a handful of the fine and upstanding citizens you’ll meet in this psyhothriller about a 21-year-old man developmentally stuck in infancy, which may or may not have come at the hands of his sinister family. The twist at the end threw me, and I can’t say that happens real often anymore.

There’s so many great characters in this and they all look they could have been drawn by the Hernandez Brothers. Highest recommendation.

It’s on Watch Instantly. You have no excuse.  Just keep the brain-scrub nearby.

SLASH MARAUD - DC Comics, 1987.

This is a deeply weird comic book by Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy with some awesome coloring by Adrienne Roy. Spoilers follow.

Humanity is doomed. The alien Shapers moved into town and have been reconfiguring planet Earth to be a little bit more to their liking, with a toxic atmosphere and dinosaurs on the hoof and overgrown jungles taking the place of comfortable civilization. We’ve got five years before the process is too far gone for us to live on the planet any more.

Needless to say, the vast majority of humanity takes the news well and loses their collective marbles while the aliens sit back and watch the native population go crackers while they inject alien and recombined human DNA into the planet.

SLASH MARAUD is equal parts ROAD WARRIOR, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, THE WARRIORS, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, HEAVY METAL, BLUES BROTHERS and PLANET OF THE APES without being any of those things by itself. Is it unhinged? Yes. Off the rails? You bet.

How crazy? Well if you’re good, I might show you a bit in the future. But if I just told you, you wouldn’t believe me.