Word: scud
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Instead, the idiosyncratic universe of "Scud" is generated out of a bizarre fusion of selected elements of the popular culture of the last decade or so: action movies, popular music, noir films, video games, Dungeons & Dragons, Japanese robot cartoons. The 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...
...things don't work out the way they're supposed to: When our Scud robot takes a break from the first issue's cinematically staged chase-and-shoot sequence to wash monster blood off his hands in the men's john...well, he happens to catch a glimpse in the mirror of his own back--complete with a label warning that he'll blow up the moment his assigned target is destroyed. Our Scud has an epiphany, realizes that he doesn't want to die and settles for merely damaging Jeff and stowing her safely in the emergency facilities...
...connection of "Scud" to popular culture, and to genre film culture in particular, is one Schrab plays up heavily. He suggests that "Scud" readers imagine that they're watching a movie, complete with music appropriate to each page or each scene. Each issue lists on the inside cover a "suggested soundtrack," drawn from rock, alternative music and film soundtracks. Schrab even provides suggested "voice talent," so you know just what those voices in your head ought to sound like (Scud is supposed to be voiced by John Malkovich...
...which the action of animated films is laid out, more than they do conventional comics. The story itself, along with its universe of pop-culture causality, features characters who are archetypes straight out of genre films: mobsters, samurai, sexy female assassins. And each "episode" of "Scud" is dedicated to a director in whose style the issue is cast: from Quentin Tarantino to Jim Henson to "the memory of Orson Welles...