Well, now, my children, we’ve come up on another weekend, a much-needed break from drudgery and toil, and that means it’s time for us to get our all-too-brief break started with… FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!

Tonight’s battle comes to us from 2000’s World’s Funnest by Evan Dorkin and a ton of artists, including David Mazzucchelli, doing a near-perfect pastiche of Jack Kirby. Mr. Mxyzptlk has chased Bat-Mite to the worst place in the Multiverse: Apokolips!

Is it my imagination, or does Mxy look an awful lot like Kirby himself in that one panel?

Hope y’all have a great weekend, with not too much cosmic destruction and madness…

Okay, it’s Friday, and we’re all tired of working, and good gravy train, do we ever need the weekend bad. Let’s get things rolling with a little comic book ultraviolence and… FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!

With Free Comic Book Day coming up tomorrow, I was hoping to find something for tonight’s battle with a comic shop theme. I was hoping to find something from Evan Dorkin’s Eltingville Club series, but I wasn’t able to find where that particular comic was hiding, but luckily, I found something even more violent. From 1994’s Milk and Cheese #666 by Evan Dorkin, here’s the Dairy Products Gone Bad vs. pretty much everyone!

Y’all don’t forget to stop by your local comic shop tomorrow and pick up your free comics — and please go ahead and buy a few comics, too. Let’s make it easier for our comic shops to keep operating in the future…

Hellboy in Hell #1

Here’s something we don’t see often enough anymore — a comic written and drawn by Mike Mignola. Hellboy is dead, and like all good demons, he’s ended up in Hell. While one demon tries to beat him to death (again) with a hammer, a warlock tries to defend him, and a puppet show performs Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” Hellboy tries to make some kind of sense of everything going on around him.

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’d be a thumbs-up just for Mignola’s wonderful artwork. But the writing and action and humor are all primo, so there’s another reason to go get it.

House of Fun

Evan Dorkin throws a whole lot of funny strips in here, including Milk and Cheese, The Murder Family, The Eltingville Club, and a huge number of short newspaper-style strips. No, I’m not telling you more than that — it’d spoil all the fun.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Ye gods, like I should have to tell you Evan Dorkin is funny? Go get it, you mooks.

Colder #2

Well, at least it doesn’t have another cover as gross as #1! Okay, that’s damning with faint praise, and this is actually a very nice comic. Declan is walking around and talking like a normal person, which freaks out Reece, the nurse who’s been his guardian for the past few years. And what really freaks her out is when Declan uses a crazy street person to give her a glimpse into what the world looks like for people who are insane — a mad Jenga game of skyscrapers and monsters — and he gives her a look at what his life used to be like in the asylum. Meanwhile, Nimble Jack drives a fairly normal agoraphobic completely ’round the bend so he can feed on her madness.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Incredibly disturbing horror — the vision Beth, the agoraphobic, has of an audience full of cyclops-monsters is just amazingly freaky, and everything else is just a shade off-kilter, leaving you feeling a bit unbalanced by the time it’s all over…

Worlds’ Finest #7

While Huntress and Robin fight off deadly wolves from Apokalips, Power Girl has to deal with a bunch of child soldiers armed with Apokalips technology. Not really a lot more than that going on in this one.

Verdict: Thumbs down. The art by Kevin Maguire and George Perez is still gorgeous, but this feels like a series that isn’t really going anywhere.

Today’s Not-So-Cool Links:

• Is DC Comics trying to run off all of their non-racist, non-sexist douchemook creators and readers? Are they, in fact, going to offer work to Tony Harris next? After getting rid of Gail Simone and Karen Berger, how close are they to turning their workplace into a complete sausage-fest?

Has it been a long week for anyone else? ‘Round about Monday, I was thinking it was almost the weekend, and dang it, I was wrong! It was nowhere near the weekend! NOWHERE NEAR! Can you imagine the shattering, towering agony of having to wait five whole horrible days after Sunday for the next weekend to start? Well, of course you can imagine it! But — how do we stand it?! Those endless, terrifying hours spent at work instead of maxxin’ and relaxxin’ back home, spinning some fine tunes, eating Cheetos on the toilet — um, I mean, sipping champagne in the hot tub. YOU SEE HOW THE STRESS GETS TO ME?!

Dang, you know what we need? We need some FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!

Our kicktastic smackdown tonight comes to us from 2002’s Dork #10 by Evan Dorkin, in which teenaged Evan comes face-to-face — or at least face-to-foot — with the prettiest girl on the bus:

Ahh, the happy memories of junior high and the compadres of our youth… Ack, spit, howl, now I need three more weekends to erase those memories!

Also, a very merry birthday to our Friday Night Fights host, Spacebooger! He’s almost old enough to legally buy cigarettes and porn now!

Okay, fact is, I love, love, love Evan Dorkin‘s “Milk and Cheese” comics. Not just because of the horrific violence, not just for the gin-swilling, not just because of the crude and unsubtle commentary on everything irritating about pop culture and modern life. No, I love those little guys’ eyebrows. They’re hilarious.

But the eyebrows aren’t important right now! Because it’s Friday Night Fights! And that means the only thing important right now is nicely overblown butt-whompin’!

But dangit, I just used “Milk and Cheese” last week. Is there any way I could disguise this, so Bahlactus doesn’t think I’m repeating myself? Maybe if we disguise them with some sort of mask…?

Wow, that’s awesome. Only thing that’d make that better would be if Darth Milk and Cheese were beating up on Ewoks. Hey, wait a minute…

Seems like most comics these days are just smothered under a ton of drama and angst. So let’s check out a couple of recent comics that are just plain awesome, well-written fun.

 

Biff Bam Pow! #1

Yay! Comics by Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer! If you’re familiar with Dorkin’s outstanding “Dork” comics, you know you’ll get great artwork and outlandishly imaginative stuff, but with this, you get some more kid-friendly stories, too. Like One-Punch Goldberg, space-boxer and crime-fighter, and Nutsy Monkey, a very bad monkey with a scheme to get mango sherbet, and Kid Blastoff, a not-very-competent crimefighter and his team of monkey helpers, and Billy and Super-Rad, a superhero and his pesky kid brother! Have I already said this is fun? Because it is fun, and that’s the best recommendation I can come up with.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Go get it, and keep your fingers crossed that Dorkin and Dyer produce some more of these.

 

Doctor 13: Architecture and Mortality

It’s weird that this, one of the very best stories of the past year, made its debut as the backup story of one of the worst comic books around. “Tales of the Unexpected” was supposed to be a spotlight series for the Spectre, but the Spectre story was meandering, dull, irritating and, for a story about God’s Avenging Angel, morally unhinged. I mean, the Spectre was killing people for merely witnessing murders they had no power to stop, and standing by idly while maniacs killed children. And the writers really seemed to think he was awesome for behaving this way. Gaaah. It’s criminal that a story as incredible, funny, and imaginative as “Architecture and Mortality” was stuck as the backup feature instead of the lead.

Anyway, this is the trade paperback collecting the entire Doctor 13 story. The doctor is a detective and extreme skeptic who doesn’t believe in any sort of magic. He and his daughter Traci, who has secret spellcasting abilities, run into a bunch of obscure and unfashionably cheesy DC Comics characters, including Andrew Bennett, the main character from the ’70s series “I… Vampire,” Anthro, the first caveboy, Captain Fear, Genius Jones, J.E.B. Stuart and the Haunted Tank, and Infectious Lass, from the Legion of Super-Heroes. All of them have been marked for elimination by shadowy overseers called The Architects, who want to remake the universe and get rid of unfashionably cheesy comic-book characters.

A lot of the audience for this one is going to be comic book geeks who remember and love these old comic book characters, but if you don’t know these characters, you should go pick up the paperback anyway. Brian Azzarello clearly had a blast writing this, and Cliff Chiang draws some awfully purty pictures to go with it. A huge part of the joy of this comic is the dialogue, which is playful, fun, and funny. From the outrageous accents of Julius, the talking Nazi gorilla, Captain Fear, the Spanish ghost pirate, and that one bald-headed Scottish Architect, to Traci’s pop-culture spells, to the many puns that get tossed around, this is a comic where reading the dialogue is a real pleasure.

Verdict: Big thumbs up. This was one of the best stories DC has produced in years, and it’s great that they collected the whole thing into one book. Go pick it up.