Everyone told me to draw a comic making fun of the new Lobo design floating around but I already made a 30 page story about that exact kind of bizarre rebranding

Coelasquid August 28, 2013 2:11 pm

Eugh, I’ll finish colouring this later, this computer is chugging like crazy right now for some reason.

ANYWAY so yeah, I’m sure by now anyone who follows me on tha social medias has heard about DC’s recent plan to turn the last Bastion of comedy at their company into every grimdark bounty hunter ever forever, because DC apparently hates fun and joy and dreams of a world full of characters who look like bland soap opera heroes gritting their teeth and staring pensively into the middle distance.

For those unfamiliar with the character, Lobo is sort of like Deadpool before Deadpool was Deadpool, but also a big hairy raucous biker. His stories usually revolved around lampooning the hypermasculine invincible badass archetype that ruled the 90’s and completely ludicrous over-the-top ridiculous fight scenes. His accomplishments included annihilating his entire race with a middle school science project, punching everyone in heaven and hell into submission until they agreed to grant him immortality so they wouldn’t have to deal with him anymore, and eating a city.

So word got out that Lobo was about to get his own titular story in DC’s new 52 Universe, but not only that, it would focus around a BRAND NEW serious and not at all comical Lobo, who we’re supposed to accept is the real Lobo, on a mission to kill the fun Lobo that I actually want to read comics about for stealing his name and reputation. I assume once Boba Fett new!Lobo meets classic Lobo, the reasonable course of action would just be a shot for shot copy of the Simpsons episode with “real Skinner” that ends with all the heroes of the DC universe tying up Nu!bo and sticking him on a rocket sailing off to nowhere in particular.

I feel like this is some sort of evil genie wish, where DC has said “Yes we’re committed to making female creators more prominent in our company but ha ha we will task them with burning your favourite comic character ever forever to the ground”

A design DC reported was the New And Improved Lobo that basically amounted to Nightwing with fish barbels painted at the corners of his mouth made the rounds a few days ago to extreme internet backlash resulting in a great deal of backpedalling on DC’s part and the author claiming that the design DC posted was not in fact her Lobo, assuring people he would be much bigger and uglier in the comic.

Of course she’s also said; “My goal for him was to make him less comically hyper-masculine and more focused. He’s still vicious, still savage and still entirely immoral, but I wanted a gravity out of the character. When he showed up, I didn’t want him walking away from explosions and smoking a cigar. When he shows up, I want people to feel like, ‘This is it. This is the end.’” Which kind of says to me she doesn’t really understand what people are taking issue with. The redesign isn’t the issue, Lobo’s been redesigned a million times. He’s been a skinny kid, he’s been a woman, he’s been a squirrel, he’s been a duck, he’s been an android (he was a poorly received serious character when he started out), the problem is the idea that they’re promising to take the hypermasculine comedy out of a hypermasculine satire character. That’s like saying you like the Venture Brothers but wish it didn’t have all those pesky jokes and parodies in it. Or you like reading the handsome comics down at  internet website  ThePunchlineIsMachismo.com but wish it didn’t have all the pesky punchlines and machismo. Or like saying you’re going to give someone toast and then serving them a piece of soggy waterlogged bread because hey it’s still bread right? God forbid we just make a new name and backstory for this soggy bread character we just came up with so people who want soggy bread comics can still have their soggy bread without stepping on all the people who would rather have toast.

I think the real issue is, you can get away with making a character a ridiculously overpowered badass if they’re a joke, but when you make a serious character who can supposedly out-overpower a character that was specifically manicured to be absurdly over the top you’re saying right out of the gate that this serious character is even more broken than everything the parody character was making fun of.

Or maybe this is all a publicity fakeout and Nu!bo will die four pages into the the comic.

So hey, if you read all that, I guess this comic is just here to reassure all my fellow Lobo fans that all those years of upping the ante with his absurd set of powers has made him the most retcon-friendly character ever, and they could swap him back to the classic model we know and love at the drop of a hat.

I guess what I’m saying is someone petition DC to let me fix Lobo when the dust settles from all this because I’m pretty sure if you get 100,000 people on board Obama has to force them to.