Word: comical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Comic books don't usually get a lot of attention from the mainstream media. But when Oliver Stone, high-grossing film-maker and conspiracy theorist extraordinary, decides to option the movie rights to a moderately popular black-and-white independent comic book, all eyes are suddenly drawn in its direction...
Thus it is that "Scud: The Disposable Assassin," an independent comic written and drawn by cartoonist Rob Schrab, is one of the latest comics to emerge from the comics underground into the glare of Hollywood's scrutiny. Creator Schrab attributes Scud's success to what he calls its multimedia appeal and its "surrealistically" funky style--both of which were probably factors in drawing Stone's attention in the first place...
...comic is set in a banal yet bizarre near-future world, in which voodoo dinosaur zombies can run amuck in a 24-hour convenience store, or the clerical error of some guy in shipping can cause you to wind up wearing the right arm of a lycanthropic astronaut. Schrab calls this aesthetic "surreal"--indeed, one of the book's slogans is "Surreality just got funky!"--but that doesn't seem quite the right way to describe it. The key to understanding the "logic" of Schrab's universe is to realize that it's not the same sort of causality that...
...resonances evoke the increasingly trendy ideas of a sort of "geek chic," based on the artifacts of mainstream male teenage culture of the 1980s and early 90s, overlaid with a technophilic edge: it's a world born out of John Woo movies, computer hacking and the fandom of comic books themselves. It's a universe in which attitude is everything...
...premise of the "Scud" series itself is typical of the comic: delightfully simple yet utterly absurd. In the hyper-violent, super-capitalistic universe of the future, a corporation called ScudCo manufactures "disposable assassins": three coins deposited in a vending machine will get you a robot designed to be the perfect killer, which will demolish your enemy and then self-destruct as soon as it's accomplished its mission (planned obsolescence, after all, is what makes consumer culture go). Our hero is a typical Scud robot assassin, bought by a middle manager who needs to get rid of a hideous mutant...