Review: Groo the Wanderer: The Kids who would be Kings- Chapter 2, by Sergio Aragones

You will find 'Groo the Wanderer' in: Dark Horse Presents Issue #8

Contributors: Sergio Aragones, and others

Publisher: Dark Horse Comics

Release Date: 18th March 2015



Let me know if anything that I’m about to describe sounds familiar to you:

Groo (a man who likes to eat and fight) has made a young boy the king of a country called ‘Larchmout.’ Not liking what he has seen Groo has decided that the old King needs to be replaced by a new King. Groo (a very good fighter) puts his new King on the throne of Larchmout. This new King sets about changing the country he now controls, whilst Groo busies himself filling his belly. The new King collectivises industry, raises taxes and lowers wages, making everybody equally poor and lowering the quality of goods and services, since nobody cares any more as incentives for excellence no longer exist.

Because everything in the country has been collectivised the King now finds himself with incredible wealth, and he’s scared of losing it, so he builds a big army, forcing his subjects to sign up as soldiers and making it illegal for them to leave his kingdom. Larchmout is now a collectivised country of poor indentured servants with an insanely wealthy centralised control system that tells them what they can and cannot do.

Groo (the man who started it all) has a full belly, and he wants to engage in his other favourite past time- fighting. However, when he starts to fight the King’s army they tell him that they are ‘Still in training,’ and not yet ready to give him a good, satisfying fight. So he tells them he’ll be back later to fight (and defeat) them all when they are better trained.

Having failed to find a good fight Groo decides to eat again, but there’s nothing decent to eat anymore in a collectivised country where the incentive to excel has gone and all wealth is going to the King. The people are understandably upset that all they have to eat is ‘left-over garbage,’ and Groo slowly begins to realise that his new King is just as bad as his old King.

What is he going to do? He’s already tried a new King, and all it did was make things worse. A young girl then walks up to Groo with the obvious solution. ‘We do not need another King! What this lands needs is a Queen.’ The narrative thus concludes, and will likely continue with a new Queen put on the throne by Groo.

I’ll ask the question again. Does any of that sound familiar to you? To me it sounds like the history of the modern world, portrayed in a ridiculous comic book strip that is nowhere near as ridiculous as the actual reality that it is satirising. This is the history of US imperialism, of faux-democracy, of Communism, of China, Russia, Britain, Iraq, Afghanistan and America today.

Here’s another question- Who is the figure of ‘Groo’ supposed to be? Who is this man who goes wandering around the world putting Kings on thrones, whilst interested only in eating and fighting? Here’s my take on what he is supposed to represent:

The obvious conclusion to be drawn would be that Groo is America, but I don’t see it that way. Groo is not America, or the UK, or China, or Russia. No, Groo is the power behind the power. The power that controls temporary Kings and Queens, putting little boys and girls in positions of power, only to see them destroy that country, time after time after time. Groo is an idiot, a dolt, a fool, but he’s the worst kind of fool. He’s a fool who places people in positions of power and naively expects them to do something different than the last person he put into a position of power. So who is he?

Is he the globalists, the new world order, the banksters? I don’t think so. Remember that Groo is not a devious manipulator. He’s not interested in world domination, all he’s interested in is fighting and stuffing his belly. He puts Kings on thrones, but he doesn’t try to manipulate them like a puppet on a string. He places them on the throne because he’s an idiot who doesn’t know what he is doing.
Bearing this in mind you cannot really conclude that Groo is a satire of the ‘illuminati’ or any other occulted group of world controllers.

Groo is the collective mentality of humanity encapsulated as it is today. He’s a great lumbering, bumbling moron who thinks only of short-term physical pleasures. He’s a fool who gives power to petty individual tyrants, thinking that they won’t act in exactly the same way that all petty individual tyrants act. He’s a man who keeps making the same mistakes over and over again, but always hoping for a different result. If only he can find the right leader to put on the throne, that would make everything different this time, right?

Groo believes in leaders. He believes that people should have Kings, or Queens. He believes in top down power, he believes in the legitimacy of the state. So what is Groo other than a reflection of the statist mind-set that has contaminated the world and made it what it is today?

Groo is us. He is the voter at the ballot box. He is the follower of the cult leader, the loyal subject of the latest King or Queen tyrant, dictator, president or Prime Minister. Groo is the face in the crowd at the election rally. Groo is the human race, thinking only of their bellies and the next good fight, giving away their power and allowing themselves to be slaves to their leaders.

That’s my take on Groo, that’s how I see him, but this is the first time that I’ve ever read the work of Sergio Aragones, so I’m 100% sure that my (late to the party) analysis has been said a thousand times before. All I can do is to react to his work as a new reader and declare that I’m very impressed with what I am reading. Scrub that. I’m more than impressed. What he has done here is excellent, and it’s in a category of excellence far removed from the usual nonsense that I read and review here on my comic book blog. I might be late to the party, but that doesn’t mean that I cannot catch up with the work of Sergio Aragones, and as I finish off this review, that’s exactly what I intend to do. I need to find out a lot more about this guy. I have a lot of reading to do.


Dark Horse Presents (overall rating) 8/10

Best story: Groo the Wanderer: ‘The Kids who would be Kings’ Chapter 2, by Sergio Aragones (Excellent cutting edge satire)- 10/10

Worst story: Murder Book: Night Fare, by Ed Brisson- (Empty, bleak, distressing and depressing) 2/10