On my spinner rack, I have a couple issues of his original 1992 series and his 2017; but I haven't made a lot of progress completing either. Ghost Rider appears on the cover of 1993's
#4, which might be tougher to find; and the 2017 is probably like his Mercs for Money teammate
Solo, in that the latter issues of this one are going to be more scarce. Still, this one's here now, so...from 2017,
Slapstick #2, "Saturday Morning Massacre!" Written by Reilly Brown and Fred Van Lente, storyboards by Reilly Brown, art by Diego Olortegui.
I think I've seen him guest a few times--like maybe a really bad
Marvel Comics Presents serial--and then with the Mercs for Money, but this might be the first
Slapstick I've read? Huh. Short origin, he entered a portal to another dimension, while dressed as a clown? Now he's made of "electroplasm" and is basically an indestructible cartoon character. Still, he'd like to be human again, and has started working with the computer Quasimodo; who also had body issues. This issue, Slapstick gets dragged to a football with his niece, nephew, and best friend; which is interrupted by the arrival of Bro-Man! Slappy doesn't exactly leap into action, since he learned to hold out for a cash offer from Deadpool; and the cartoon barbarian hacks the cops up, since he appeared to be indestructible like Slapstick.
The fight doesn't go great for Slapstick, when he finally gets in there, and there's also a Spider-Man pinned-by-something-heavy riff. Eventually, he halves Bro-Man, and takes half the body back to Quasimodo; but the remaining half manages to get a message to S.H.I--no, a division of that, A.R.M.O.R. Who follow him home, to his parents' basement, and Slapstick and Quasimodo are taken into custody. Slapstick puts up a brave front, then caves hard; and the government probably would throw the book at him for trying to open a portal to another dimension. Except, another threat has appeared in Westfield, the Smurf/My Little Pony hybrid Taurs. Will A.R.M.O.R. be forced to work with Slapstick? You can tell, they really don't want to, but...
I remember him & seeing a random issue of his first series on spinner racks back in the day, hell even his official Marvel trading card, but he never interested younger me enough to buy any of his books. Back then I tended to stick to the traditional comic book fare with very rare exceptions, unlike today, where I’d be more inclined to explore stranger, non-traditional comic characters. Anyhoo…
ReplyDeleteLove the art here, as that classic Saturday morning animation is excellently replicated by the artist. Hope he got more work after this series ended.
Slappy’s definitely got a point about the avengers, and I think the road to him becoming this way is due to when he maybe “accidentally “ killed his trainer during the Avenger Initiative program period where he & a bunch of other young, unregistered heroes were forced to join the initiative to learn how to use their powers better or else go to jail. He got pissed off & killed the drill Sargent/head trainer…or something to that effect. He may not have died, but it became very clear that he had the potential to break bad.
The funny thing is, his original miniseries was more in the older style of comics art and storytelling than most of what was being published at the time.
DeleteI actually didn’t have much trouble finding his first series- got the whole thing out of the dollar bin and saw random issues here and there for a while. I guess different areas have different distributions for back issues.
The origin’s more like ‘the Creeper, but with clown Groucho Marx’- the portal’s right on though. A surprisingly fun character (at least at first). They’ve been playing it too seriously (I know, hard to believe but I think it’s true) since Mercs for Money.
I’ll have to track down interviews from his creator to understand what his mindset & reasoning for Slapstick’s creation was, especially at that specific time period at Marvel.
DeleteI think I only knew Slapstick originally from his Marvel Series 3 trading card, but I probably saw an issue of his first mini-series on the spinner racks and ignored it.
ReplyDeleteI bought the tpb of this back in 2018, and oof, did not enjoy. The art is very nice, especially when Brown and Diego Orletegui contrast the cartoon world characters with the "regular" world characters of Slapstick's friends and family, but the story and especially the humor, yeesh.
If you took a shot for everytime someone uses the word "dingus", typically in reference to Slapstick no longer having a dick because he's a cartoon character (which seems to be the main thing he's concerned with), you'd die. The subtitle of the tpb was "That's Not Funny." Little too on the nose.
I liked the contrast with the Saturday morning cartoon style art too. Wish more comics would employ that style but in more less kid-friendly comics.
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