Goon: Rough Stuff - Softcover

If at first Powell's square-jawed and square-headed, hypermuscular hero, the Goon, looks like some kind of Hellboy rip-off, look again. The Goon and his milieu are retro in appearance and allusions, and making a movie of them wouldn't need as big an FX budget as Mike Mignola's demon-gone-good required. Oh, sure, the Goon tangles with the supernatural, but supernatural isn't paranormal, like Hellboy's antagonists. The Goon just has to stomp zombies now and then. His other foes include regular, or at least real, humans, such as cops, and a mad scientist who's turned his flesh into gold, and those plug-uglies with tails, the Mud brothers, and a redneck werewolf. Just regular guys. The Goon is an old-style enforcer for reclusive mobster Labrazio in a seemingly Depression-era seaside burg, where the talk's like the scripts for the Dead End Kids, and the Goon must have a sidekick like Franky, a pint-size palooka with pupil-less peepers right out of Little Orphan Annie. Franky's eyes aren't Powell's only tip of the hat to comics tradition. He draws one extended flashback in a style reminiscent of graphic-novel elder statesman Will Eisner and another to resemble early Mad stalwart Bill Elder's work, and he frames one of the flashbacks with fumetti starring his nine-ish-looking son. Another Mad ace, Wally Wood, exerts a more pervasive influence on Powell, yet he is always very much his own man, a fearless parodist of even the most shopworn tough-guy cliches. Ray Olson
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