Reviews Butcher Baker Righteous Maker #1

Butcher Baker Righteous Maker is a rip-roaring adult adventure no one should enjoy. It is base in premise, vile in presentation, and offensive to at least three of the five known senses. Butcher Baker Righteous Maker is the product of a 12-year-old boy's imagination, replete with overblown stereotypes instead of characters and a plot straight out of your average video game. Explosions follow car chases in a never-ending loop broken only by scenes of gratuitous sex and violence.

In short, Butcher Baker Righteous Maker is, quite possibly, the greatest comic book ever made.

Joe Casey and Mike Huddleston communicate volumes through caricatures of political figures, overblown tropes of the superhero genre, and ironic use of stock characters, eliminating any need for backstory or exposition. The reader is on a need-to-know basis and is given glimpses into Butcher Baker, his history, and the dystopian world in which he lives through organically-occurring flashbacks. What would probably be a jarring distraction in less capable hands works perfectly in Casey and Huddleston's.

Butcher Baker Righteous Maker's gratuitous, tongue-in-cheek sex and violence also comes from the story itself. While intentionally excessive for comedic and shock value, these elements exist within the story, as opposed to being included simply for their own sake. It's an obvious rebuke to the politically-correct depictions of superheroes in mainstream comic books today - I don't think the Kingpin even smokes anymore! - but not at the sake of the story. The whole thing is a satirical, though loving, jab at comic books and the comic book industry, superheroes, their place in and effect on pop culture, and so forth - but it's not just a series of digs. Butcher Baker may be a joke, but he's one the reader will enthusiastically laugh with, not at.

Huddleston's art is purposefully crude and (probably intentionally) reminiscent of Bisley's work on various Lobo projects, and is a perfect fit for Casey's story. The first issue looks, in places, like some kid drew it in a notebook during class. Huddleston's blend of caricature, cartooning, and photorealism vividly renders Casey's subversive blend of political satire, comic book lampooning, and straightforward, overblown, hyperfueled, superhero excess.

While a pointed swipe at the current state of comic books and the comic book industry, Butcher Baker Righteous Maker is also a filthy, over-the-top, if somewhat nostalgic, celebration of the superhero, proper.

Highly recommended, Adults Only.

© C Harris Lynn, 2011