Comic review: Big Man Plans #1- It’s about a Dwarf stabbing people in the neck and face

Writers: Eric Powell and Tim Wiesch
Artist: Eric Powell
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 4th March 2015


Is it particularly clever or worthwhile to either read or write a comic book about a bullied Dwarf who spends his life stabbing people in the neck and/or face?

Umm, if you are the writer and people buy the book, and if you make ‘F**k you money’ out of it (this apparently is the only thing that drives writers Tim Wiesch and Eric Powell) then I guess it was worthwhile.

But what if you are the reader? I’m the reader, and I feel like I’ve just given my money to a couple of sociopaths. I feel like I’ve given money to people who want to get dirty, filthy rich not because they feel like the money can help anyone, but no, because they want to use the money to abuse people instead.

How did I get this impression?  I got it from writer Tim Wiesch in a page titled, ‘What the f**k just happened?’ The page describes the motivations (in his own words) behind the writing of Big Man Plans. Here’s a section of that article:

‘I really hope that a lot of people buy this thing because f**k-you money ain’t easy to come by…..and Eric and I have some big f*****g plans.’ (Tim Wiesch)

These plans involve replicating scenes from a serial killer movie and other stupid things that only a hipster douchebag or immature teenage boy from 1991 would find funny.

Well, that’s made me feel great guys. Thanks for that Tim. Now I know that your life goals are to get rich, and to use and abuse people. What can I say? Have you ever thought about getting involved in politics?  I’m not very impressed with that mindset at all. It’s not clever, it’s not funny, it’s just depressing, deeply, deeply depressing.

Rant over, so what is this book all about then? It’s about a little man, a Dwarf. We follow his life as a young little man. His Dad is nice. His Mother isn’t. She leaves him, and the family. Dad drinks heavily, then dies in a barn fire. Young little man and his sister are taken away by social services. Sister goes to a nice home because she is pretty. Young little man gets beaten up and abused in care homes because he is a Dwarf. From there he tries to join the army, fails, and is taken into a special unit where he is broken down and stripped of his humanity, and then sent down Vietnamese tunnels (and why are comic books in 2015 still talking about Vietnam when they should be talking about Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria?) where his job is to stab people in the face, murdering people for the banks and corporations that operate under the corporate fiction known as the USA.

After his legalised murder unit is disbanded, an older little man comes home to the US where he gets into bar-fights and stabs people in the neck, but it’s okay because the guy he stabs in the neck has a swastica on his forehead. The book concludes with the Dwarf wielding a hammer and looking to hurt more people because his childhood sucked and because the army turned him into a secondary psychopath.

Okay, so what am I supposed to say about all of this? Am I supposed to go…………Cooooooooooool maaaaaaaaaan????????????? Come on. Come off it. What the Hell????

I can’t even be bothered to properly finish off this review. I feel gross even writing about this book. Okay, so it has some truth in it. It shows that abused people become abusers, and that the US army is the perfect place for psychopaths, that they deliberately manufacture psychopaths in order to carry out legalised butchery. Okay, that’s real, that exists, but we already know about that, and I’m going to repeat myself here…WHY THE HELL IS IT STILL SET IN VIETNAM??????

That’s it, end of review.

Unpleasant book. Yuck, yuck, yuck. If you want to do yuck in 2015 please set it in Iraq, at least then we can get something new and contemporary out of it.


Rating: 3/10 (Although I hate the book I do admire Eric Powell’s artistic abilities)