Happy Friday... It's Tequila Time!

You know what might surprise me most about working in a sleazy gay dive bar in a scummy part of San Francisco one day a week?

It's not the hustlers, the druggies, the perverts, the cell-phone naked photos, the crazy homeless people taking a swing at me, the police ignoring my 911 calls, the secretly-rich-guys (it's not hard to guess how some of these people spend all day, every day in the bars), the drag queens, the trannies, the bewildered European tourists, the management asking about my cock size, the straight-but-then-they-get-drunk-and-let-some-dude-blow-'em crack fiend bartenders (and other, similar victims), my co-workers going nuts and stealing bottles of liquor and tazering the clientele, the deaf guy singing karaoke, or the fact that I seem to somehow fit in...

...it's the amazing frequency with which someone will go to the jukebox and put on "What If God Was One Of Us".

I mean, who knew?

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That's the cutest thing I've ever seen, Mark.

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So, Zilla asked if I picked up Last Planet Standing #1, and in a week where I was really only getting two other floppies (She-Hulk and Fables), I didn't really have an excuse not to. What was I looking for? Well, I knew it was about Galactus and some kind of universe-threatening peril and is written by Tom DeFalco. So, basically, I was hoping to get some jam-packed insane super-heroes-in-space adventure with everything and the kitchen sink thrown into the plot, a la all my favorite old Fantastic Four stories from the 80's.

What did I get?



Exactly what I wanted.

You remember when Marvel's big event comics weren't about changing the entire landscape of their publishing plan as much as they were about having a bunch of REALLY BIG SHIT happen?

In 22 short pages here, we get an entire universe destroyed (possibly killing Reed and Sue Richards, who were "on vacation" there), a new herald of Galactus (Dominas, who whups ass on Gladiator), a re-imagined Fantastic Five (though there are seven of them, including a grown-up Franklin Richards, Lyja the Skrull, and Kristoff von Doom), a humiliated third-string line-up of the Avengers with a rough luck past ("We lost Captain America... allowed the Hulk to demolish half the city...), the complete annihilation of the Shi'ar homeworld, Spider-Girl's re-recruitment into the Avengers just as she's beginning to doubt herself and grow tired of the ennui of fighting a bunch of hoodlums and losers, and Galactus apparently having discovered a way to "finally evolve to the next level" that involves Thor's homeworld of Asgard!

There's obviously a bit of a What If? / Elseworlds thing going on here, but it's not expressly acknowledged anywhere on the book, which makes me wonder if this is the kind of thing that, like 1601, will turn out to have existed in the same comic book universe as the "real" Marvel. The possibility certainly exists within the frame of this storyline, and that just opens the door to more fun.

It's not gonna be everybody's cup of tea, 'cause it is by definition a little hokey, but I had a lot of fun reading this. A lot more fun than I had reading Infinite Crisis or any of Marvel's recent event comics. So I'm throwing the big thumbs up, and the hell with the consequences to my reputation.

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The Dark Horse solicits are up, and I just wanna give the shout-out one more time to my boys Arvid Nelson and especially Juan Ferreyra for landing Rex Mundi in such a sweet spot. I mean, damn - they even got J.H. Williams III to do their first cover!



That's some hot shit. First, the series gets a blood transfusion in the form of rapidly-becoming-one-of-the-very-best artist Juan "Small Gods" Ferrayra, and now they can just sit back, let Dark Horse handle everything, and just write and draw the shit out of their comic. Let the good times roll.