Comic review: The Superannuated Man #6- And you thought there were no consequences?

Created, written and illustrated by: Ted McKeever
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 25th February 2015


So what was it all about?

Mankind not caring, eating whatever came along. Oh, so it doesn’t really matter because I can do it, so I will do it. There are no consequences, yum, yum.

Oh, the animals can talk now. They have hunger in their eyes, and I am on the menu. That’s not fair, but it is, isn’t it?

And the world we build on selfishness on doing what we can because we are bigger, because there are no consequences is built on wobbly moral foundations. A house built on a tar pit, and eventually it will sink.

Look in the mirror, do you see your past?

I see it, and it has become today.

Consequences are real. We get what we deserve.

It may take some time, but eventually.

Eventually, there is a slippage.

Wasn’t there a flood in the Bible?

Wiped away, and you think that we are better now?

Do you think that we have progressed?

Do you think that it doesn’t matter because there are no consequences in this Darwinian jungle of screw or be screwed?

I think that it matters.

I think that consequences are real, and that the past is never far behind the future. You store up the deliberate ignorance, the pretending that moral truth does not exist, that you can do whatever you like, but all of a sudden…….

Bang.

It’s time to pay the price.

That is what this book was all about.

Well, to me anyway. I went to work, sweated, made money, and exchanged it for this book, so I get to write my own meaning, my own response to the text. Whether I’m right or wrong it doesn’t really matter. I loved the book, it resonated with truth, it made me think, it made me write daft reviews here on my blog.

That’s it for the Superannuated Man. I’ll miss him, but Ted moves on, and his next book is something called POODWADDLE. We’ll have to wait until the fall of 2015 for that one, so something to look forward to, and now back to the predictable world of me moaning about statism and neo liberal PC moral crusading in left leaning Marxist/Feminist comic books. Oh Ted, I’m missing you already.

Rating: 10/10

Comic review: The Superannuated Man #5- A warning from the future

Created, written and illustrated by Ted McKeever
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 14th January 2015

A man making his living working off of ‘Blackwater’ Pier sees horrible animal mutations. A disease is coming, spreading rapidly, and he attempts to warn people. The people don’t want to hear him. He is told that, ‘No one gives a s**t,’ and is forcibly removed from institutions that could help. His warnings ignored, he resigns himself to a life of solitude where he witnesses the collapse of human civilisation.

What could this comic book possibly be saying?

Blackwater Security Company (they change their name frequently to confuse people, but this is the name they started with) are a private security firm that works in Iraq, and other countries that have been invaded/liberated/destroyed by western governments.

Blackwater (their current name is ‘Acadami’ but it will change again) has a simple job. They protect western interests as countries are looted on the pre-text of neo-liberal human rights and democracy. Here’s how the Guardian newspaper describes its operations:

‘The mercenary firm Blackwater has become a symbol of the utter lawlessness and criminality that permeates the privatised wing of the US war machine. The company's operatives have shot dead scores of Iraqi and Afghan civilians, while former employees allege in sworn statements that Blackwater's owner Erik Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe", and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life". (Jeremy Scahill)

This is not a ‘conspiracy theory.’ It’s a conspiracy reality, and the world has been warned. So what has been the reaction to the warning?

A shrug of the collective shoulders, and a very clear, ‘No one gives a s**t.’ And what happens to a species when it no longer cares? What happens when morality disappears, when whistleblowers to state sanctioned evil are either imprisoned or ignored? What happens to a civilisation when it chooses to ignore morality, when it chooses to ignore reality itself?

Look around you.

Civilisation collapses. People act selfishly, and do what is best for them only, sod everybody else. The world burns and people warm themselves by the fire.

‘I suddenly found the sheer absurdity of it all to be completely and utterly…. hilarious.’ (Ted McKeever in ‘The Superannuated Man’ #5).

So what to do? Ted is laughing, and I don’t blame him. I’m going to keep on knocking out these reviews, keep on learning, keep on making mistakes, and keep on trying to improve myself as the world teeters on the edge of total collapse.

We haven’t gone over the cliff just yet. There’s still time to avert it, and the warnings are everywhere now. Will we heed them? Can we stop the end of everything? Yes, we can. But, as always, it’s up to us to do it. Nobody is coming to help us, it’s up to us, as it always is.

Rating: 10/10


Click link below for Guardian newspaper article quoted in this review:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/nov/11/blackwater-mercenary-scandal-legal-sanction

Click link below for Wiki page on Blackwater/Academi:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi

Comic review-The Superannuated Man #4: Deviation from the norm

Written by: Ted McKeever
Art by: Ted McKeever
Published by: Image Comics
Release Date: November 5th 2014



I stopped reading many of my long-time favourite Marvel and DC superhero books out of apathy, out of the growing realisation that they were beginning to flow over me. Week by week I was reading my Avengers and Batman books, but they were having less and less impact, culminating in a point where I could read the book, put it down, and forget about it entirely.

Was the art any good? Was the story any good? Were the themes topical? Did I enjoy it? Did it say anything about the world? When the answer wasn’t a clear no, it was a middling, indifferent empty (as the kids say) ‘whatever.’

So I stopped reading them.

Today the only mainstream superhero book that I am still reading on a regular basis is Green Lantern, specifically the ‘Godhead’ arc. I do it to keep in touch with that old feeling. The feeling I had when I didn’t think about what I was reading, I just read it, enjoying the feel of it.

Those days are long gone. I think about what I’m reading these days, and what I get from mainstream comic books is production line apathy. I get compliance, a lack of questioning, a going with the flow for selfish careerism. There is regurgitation of old ideas, a lack of connectivity to a changed world, no imagination, and no deviation from the norms of what is expected from a good little neo-liberal consumer slave in 2014.

I can’t read books like that anymore, but I try to stay in touch.

The Green Lantern Godhead arc has been okay so far. It’s average, sometimes horrible (as it is this week in Green Lantern #36) but I know what I’ll get. So when I read a comic book that is in a completely different league, an excellent book like ‘The Superannuated Man’ I’m immediately reminded of why I stopped reading so many average comic books in the first place.

Why read average when excellent is available at the same price? Why read about government agents saving the planet from stale villains that have been around for so long that they have lost all relevance in this post 9/11 world? To keep in touch with happy old memories I guess. That’s why I buy the occasional Marvel and DC book. I know it’s going to be average, not worth my time, but it contains a childhood memory, and if I consume an extremely small dose of their ignorant statism, corporate compliance, apathy and unit shifter product it's not so bad.

Plus, it makes me appreciate quality books like this one so much more. The Superannuated Man #4 is not just better than your average Batman or Green Lantern book. To even compare the two would be like comparing a CIA produced Hollywood movie to the greatest works of Italian neo-realist cinema. Zero Dark Thirty compared to Bicycle Thieves would be an apt comparison. It’s ridiculous to even go there at all, so I won’t.

Sometimes you don’t appreciate just how delicious the freshly made cheesy mushroom, pepper and onion encrusted pizza is until you have spent a month eating bland tinned soup, and so the wheels of the comic book industry continue to turn. Average tinned blandness dominates, but delicious cheesy excellence is there, if you want it.

Rating: 9/10

Comic review: Ted McKeever’s The Superannuated Man #3- HE

Creator, writer and artist: Ted McKeever
Publisher: Image Comics
Released: 10th September 2014

It’s very easy to empathise with the character known as ‘HE’ in ‘The Superannuated Man.’ HE is surrounded by the inevitable endgame of Darwinian evolutionary theory. A wasteland where talking rats drink out of urinals, and humans are denigrated as evolutionary leftovers, anachronistic mounds of useless flesh that are to be looked at with suspicion and barely disguised disgust.

It’s a world of apathy, suspicion, overflowing trash, of seedy opportunism, triviality marketed as entertainment and a freak show circus for the degenerate baying mobs.

HE can try to stay away from the squalor, the filth, the godless, polluted mutants, but it always drags him back, out of his solitary hidden cave, back onto the litter strewn streets, where HE waits for the inevitable smack over the back of the head, a mugging, torture, pain. Well, it has to be better than nothing? Right?

HE is living in a world where human connectivity is dead. The animals have taken over. Charles Darwin is God now. HE feels old, lost, tired and disgusted with it all. HE has no direction. HE has no purpose. HE has no friends. HE has no family. HE has no soul mate. HE has no blood lust. HE has no desire to dominate. HE has no desire to use and abuse. HE is strange. HE is weird. HE just wants to be left alone.

‘You assholes couldn’t just leave things alone, could you? Just gone about your lives and left me the Hell alone.’

Of course they couldn’t. That is how the world of sick mutant animals works. A man who does no harm, who wants to be left alone, well that’s suspicious, right? He must be up to something. Best lump him over the head, just to be on the safe side.

I love this book. The artwork is beyond my descriptive abilities. Just take a look at the sample alongside this review. Is that not gorgeous? It goes without saying, though I'll bloody say it anyway, this is quite obviously a must buy book. You need to get it, now. Thank you Ted McKeever. You are a talented, talented man.

Rating: 10/10