2. The Goon #44 by Eric Powell (Dark Horse)
Ladies and gentlemen - Eric Powell is back! It's been a year since The Goon #43 but this week saw the release of the long awaited The Goon #44. Powell's been off doing regular people stuff (moving house, living his life and so on) and as he's the sole creator of The Goon - writing, drawing, inking, colouring, lettering - 2013 has been a distinctly un-Goonish year in comics but thankfully the wait is over. For those not in the know, The Goon is a tough guy who fights zombies, monsters and other gangsters that hone in on his racketeering, as he pretends to be the enforcer of a fictional mob boss no-one ever sees while secretly being both the brains and muscle of the operation. Powell's Goon stories tend to be either noirish and maudlin comics or out and out nutso comics - and #44 is definitely the latter! A drunk giant lizard called Lagarto upsets the Goon and Franky's (Goon's partner in crime - literally) operation of smuggling booze into Mexico in cuckoo clocks and... you know what, it's going to be impossible to try to summarise the plot of this issue so I'm not going to try! Lagarto does some crazy stuff and Goon stops him. There's a Tom Waits cameo and a fictional movie poster I don't want to say anything more about because it's too funny to spoil and a musical number from Lagarto in the moonlit desert. Oh and most of the comic is written in Spanish with no English subtitles. Powell's art - good god, it's bueno! It's been awesome for a long time but I'd forgotten how beautifully painted the pages were and the colouring is tremendous. Besides the artistic merit, this comic is utterly hilarious, really. I was laughing throughout this insane chaotic journey that only Powell seems able to pull off so successfully with his series. I couldn't even read over half the comic but I still loved it, the fact that half of it was incomprehensible being one more thing to love about it. Interestingly, Powell says this will be the last numbered issue of The Goon so there won't be #45 - instead he'll adopt the mini-series approach like other Dark Horse comics, so we'll get more Goon comics but collected into story arcs with a few one shots. So long as we continue to get more Goon comics, I don't care. Here's to Occasion of Revenge and many more Goon comics in 2014! Hombres, check out this issue for something unforgettably weird and terrific!