Saturday, July 28, 2007

Blogathon 04: Mr. Majestic #3

More Mr. Majestic and don't forget, you can sponsor me by clicking the sheep. All money goes to the Alzheimer's Society of Canada.

Well, since we've passed ten am, I figure it's late enough in the morning to put some music on, so we're going to be listening to Led Zeppelin all day. Nothing says marathon blogging for charity like Zep. I was torn between this and Neil Young. Who knows, since I'm here all day, there's a good chance I'll blow through the entire Zeppelin catalogue.

Anyway . . .

Issue three of Mr. Majestic is a fun issue. Our fearless hero goes to the movies with Maxine "Ladytron" Manchester, his former WildC.A.T.S. teammate. Now, Maxine is a cyborg and, um, a little high-spirited? Okay, she swears like a trucker and has that pissed off "you fucking with me?" attitude, which plays perfectly with Majestic's reserved, stoic persona. Oh, and Maxine is also a nun in a robot religion, which leads to her mantra: "I'M A #@#@ING NUN!" Also, Majestic has the perfect outfit with a stripped sweater, coat and his usual headgear. The dude is a dork.

Maxine insists they see a "Man with No Name" type marathon at a local theatre, which Majestic disapproves of, because the films are violent with no social value. The whole evening gets disrupted when robot zealots show up to kill Maxine, because she still has human parts, an abomination to their faith or something.

This issue has my favourite Majestic moment where, during the movie, he finds an unpopped kernel of popcorn and looks at it. His eyes glow red for a couple of panels with a SSSS sound-effect and then in the last panel of the sequence, we get POP as the kernel pops in his fingers while Maxine says "JUST HOW ANAL ARE YOU, MAN?!" Everything you need to know about Majestic's personality is there: using heat vision to pop a kernel of popcorn while at the movies.

I really can't do the humour in this book justice, because it's packed full of it. Maxine is a fantastic character that Casey went on to use in Wildcats and he just gets this character (who was created by Alan Moore, by the way).

The sad thing about this issue is that it's the sort we'd get now as a buffer between storyarcs--and it wouldn't have nearly as much of the funny. Goddamn, I miss this book. Seriously, how was it not selling a million copies?

(And, seriously, Led Zeppelin? Fucking awesome. Probably the best debut album from a band I can think of. Maybe The Velvet Underground and Nico would come close. Some would probably say Please Please Me by the Beatles, but, while good, isn't an AMAZING debut the way Zep and the VU's debuts were.)