Keith Giffen & Alan Grant Lobo: Infanticide (1993)
I vaguely recall this having been the third four-issue series to star Lobo, who is more or less Vyvyan from the Young Ones in space. The first two were decent as I recall, but this was the point at which the law of diminishing returns had patently kicked in. Where it was once thought that puerile humour of the gratuitously violent and wilfully offensive kind should, logically speaking, become funnier with repetition, research undertaken by the Insane Clown Posse has since demonstrated this to be a falsehood. The problem with this one was the abrupt absence of the distraction of Simon Bisley's gorgeous yet ridiculous artwork on the first two series. Giffen drew Infanticide himself, but did so in a style varying wildly from his usual thing, presumably imagining it would better fit the subject in the absence of Bisley's spacehopper muscularity and guns bigger than the people firing them. It's not a bad style but it's a bit of a mess, and without colour to give definition would probably resemble Jackson Pollock; which is probably why I noticed that the enterprise wasn't actually very good, and that there's something a bit pitiful about the hyperbole of brace yourselves because it's gonna get real fuckin' offensive up in this bitch any moment now in a DC comic which won't allow naughty words. There are a few smirks, I guess, but once you get to the Schulz pastiche doodled in the margin - Lobo as Charlie Brown shooting his Lucy equivalent when she pulls the football away, or blowing up the kite-eating tree - it all starts to look a bit familiar and a bit bleeding obvious. The problem is that Giffen himself is well aware of this:
I vaguely recall this having been the third four-issue series to star Lobo, who is more or less Vyvyan from the Young Ones in space. The first two were decent as I recall, but this was the point at which the law of diminishing returns had patently kicked in. Where it was once thought that puerile humour of the gratuitously violent and wilfully offensive kind should, logically speaking, become funnier with repetition, research undertaken by the Insane Clown Posse has since demonstrated this to be a falsehood. The problem with this one was the abrupt absence of the distraction of Simon Bisley's gorgeous yet ridiculous artwork on the first two series. Giffen drew Infanticide himself, but did so in a style varying wildly from his usual thing, presumably imagining it would better fit the subject in the absence of Bisley's spacehopper muscularity and guns bigger than the people firing them. It's not a bad style but it's a bit of a mess, and without colour to give definition would probably resemble Jackson Pollock; which is probably why I noticed that the enterprise wasn't actually very good, and that there's something a bit pitiful about the hyperbole of brace yourselves because it's gonna get real fuckin' offensive up in this bitch any moment now in a DC comic which won't allow naughty words. There are a few smirks, I guess, but once you get to the Schulz pastiche doodled in the margin - Lobo as Charlie Brown shooting his Lucy equivalent when she pulls the football away, or blowing up the kite-eating tree - it all starts to look a bit familiar and a bit bleeding obvious. The problem is that Giffen himself is well aware of this:
I have no idea why Lobo took off... I came up with him as an indictment of the Punisher, Wolverine hero prototype, and somehow he caught on as the high violence poster boy. Go figure.
So Lobo was never a labour of love, which should probably come as something of a relief, and Infanticide feels like something churned out to a very limited formula because that's what it is - good for one joke, which is admittedly a great joke, but not something you want to hear told over and over again.
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