Wicked Power

Lately I’ve been having a bit of trouble finding comics to review. Mostly this is because I find it more interesting to review bad webcomics, and to be honest I don’t really keep up with the mountain of bad comics that pour out of the infinite anus that is the internet. But I figured someone is bound to have an opinion on the matter, and I just looked up “Bad Webcomics” on google search… which just brought me back to Sore Thumbs. Well, that was a bust. It was then I remembered that, while reviewing Sore Thumbs, I would occasionally see ads for another comic drawn by Owen Gieni. After finding his website I recognized it as “Wicked Powered”, and I thought to myself, “Gee, I wonder what kind of story Owen creates on his own when he doesn’t have that hack Chris Crosby holding him back?” So I opened the link to find…

Well, shit. Sure, Owen gets credited first, but trust me, this thing reads exactly like pre-reboot Sore Thumbs. In fact, all of the comics that Gieni works on are co-created by Chris Crosby. One of them even ups the ante and includes Chris’ crazy brother Bobby. Maybe I put too much blame on Crosby for the comedic abortion that was Sore Thumbs; either Crosby and Gieni work much more collaboratively than I had originally thought, or Wicked Powered is written entirely by Crosby and Gieni just gets to have his name first because it was mostly his idea.

Actually, that might not entirely be true. You see, the comic was originally conceived as a promotional tie-in to go with the company Wicked Lasers; a company that produces expensive laser pointers. Yes, really. I couldn’t actually find any links on the Wicked Lasers site back to the Wicked Powered webcomic, which leads me to believe they’ve severed all ties to the product. Now why would they do that? Either way, someone at the company must have been a fan of Gieni’s work and likely commissioned him to create the series, with Crosby along for the ride. The comic itself is something of a parody of promotional tie-in comics and cartoons, and if you couldn’t pick that up right away it gets forced down your throat when a group of guys show up who are essentially just strained parodies of He-Man, Thundercats, and the Silverhawks. Do you get it? Because those cartoons were essentially just half-hour commercials for toys, just like this is a painfully long advertisement for fucking laser pointers? Isn’t that so goddamn original?

Okay, enough of that. On to the story… such as it is. The comic opens on our hero… er, protagonist lying in bed with three scantily clad women. This is what’s sometimes called a “hook”; an image or bit of action that should appeal to the reader in some way to make them curious enough to keep reading. Obviously this is meant to hook the hormonal urge most men have to be surrounded by what amounts to a girl blanket. The three women are there as some sort of elite fighting force from the far future, sent back in time to protect this one guy because he’s a charismatic leader from the future, and a powerful entity has travelled back in time to kill him before he gets the chance to grow into his future, badass self (as conveyed in trademark unnatural Crosby textwall). Oh wait, wasn’t that The Terminator? Yes, you’ll find that this series has quite a few plot elements or ideas that seem uncannily familiar, but not enough to really count as parodies. Sort of how like Avatar is essentially just Ferngully in space: it’s clearly not meant to evoke memories of that other movie, but the similarities are pretty staggering. Anyway, the women are sleeping with him because, and this is the funny bit, they convince him to let them stay by promising to sleep with him, and then they literally sleep with him! Oh my, that would be such a clever play on words if we hadn’t already seen the very first strip of this comic which pretty explicitly shows that no actual sex has occurred!

Let’s get back to the Powerpuff Girls. Oh, sorry, did I say Powerpuff Girls? I meant to say Wicked Powered 1, the elite fighting squad from the future. I don’t know why I thought they were the Powerpuff Girls there for a second. I must have just gotten confused on account of the green-themed angry one that enjoys fighting, the pig-tailed childish/stupid one, and the leader with the oversized pony tail and no discernable personality. So, yeah… they’re basically just sexy, adult versions of the Powerpuffs, which would be great except this is the internet where that kind of shit is actually pretty easy to find. Oh wait, they’re contractually obligated to use and talk about lasers so, yeah… nothing at all like the Powerpuff Girls.

Anyway, on to more of the plot summary: After Blossom textwalls enough to literally shove Bubbles out of the panel, they finally get Wiley to agree to let them stay with him, before promptly disappearing the next morning in a completely pointless “maybe it was all a dream” moment, even though the audience knows Gieni/Crosby aren’t good enough writers to do anything even remotely interesting with that idea. Instead we get a mountain of enema jokes, because enemas involve butts and poop, and those are automatically funny at all times. This is where we get into awkward territory: you see, Wiley attends “High School University”, which is essentially just a parody of whatever High School clichés the writers could think of. Wiley is desperately in love with the bitchy cheerleader for no reason, the head of the football team is a complete moron who picks on Wiley because he’s a nerd, and his schoolmates start to treat him differently after his “magic girlfriends” from the future show up. If this reminds you of the “Epic Movie” style of writing where the writers just reference existing properties with no attempt to create an actual joke outside of “this is similar to another thing”, then congratulations, you can read!

Actually, this brings me to an interesting point. The page where they first show up contains one of the few jokes I actually found kind of funny: Buttercup’s line about school shootings. The problem is this comes in a single panel that contains at least 5 other potential “jokes” all of which fall flat. Imagine, if you will, going to a buffet, and you see they’ve got crab legs there (or whatever food you think is cool to find at a buffet). Okay, now, in your mind’s eye, picture sitting next to those Crab Legs, a sample of human feces. I don’t care what kind… just any kind. Picture it. They’re not touching or anything, but it’s there… tainting your meal with its very presence. That’s the Gieni/Crosby school of writing humor: just a buffet of human feces with the occasional bit of food in between. And trust me, the tolerable stuff isn’t usually crab. It’s that greasy, awkwardly shaped slice of pizza that has practically no sauce and has been sitting under a heat lamp since breakfast. Sure, it’s better than the turds, but does that really make it worth it?

Somehow in the middle of this a monster shows up, the girls fight it, but their lasers do nothing! Oh no, how will we ever sell overpriced lasers when they don’t even kill the monsters? Luckily Wiley has a costume and lasers as well for no reason whatsoever, and promptly defeats the monster by somehow forcing it to shit itself to death. Because poop is funny. With the threat defeated they can all breathe a sigh of relief and travel through time in their ersatz Zords. If you’re interested at all in those things, tough luck, because aside from a few strips where they’re basically just used as spaceships they’re completely forgotten. It’s not often that you can say “it’s just used as a spaceship”, yet here we are. Because time travel doesn’t make a lick of sense in this series, the Powerpuffs get called back to the future to take care of a problem that’s happening in the future while they’re still in the middle of their “make sure this idiot doesn’t get killed” mission. Instead of, y’know… waiting until that mission is finished, since it’s time travel and all. I just want to focus on this because it gives me an excuse not to focus on JEM, the extremely annoying robot that apparently acts as the Zordon of this crew of rip-offs. God I hate her. Nothing she says in the entire comic is funny or entertaining. She’s so aggressively “wacky” that I just feel insulted that they expect me to laugh at this crap.

At this point they use painfully forced writing to turn Wiley into a girl. As anyone who keeps an eye on bad webcomics will tell you: transgender fetishists will tolerate any level of awful writing. I have no idea why, but it’s just one of these weird subcultures that seem to have no quality control filter on what they read. Either way, this story arc really only stands out in my mind for the fact that it contains one of the pages filled with the absolute worst non-humor the series has managed so far, followed by a page of sweet, blissful silence. Oh, and Wiley accidentally blows up the Earth, but even the characters recognize that they have access to time travel so it’s really no big deal. Unfortunately, JEM doesn’t die and she manages to send them back in time to the 90’s, which is a completely incidental fact because the actual time period that they arrive in has no impact on the plot. There they meet a wacky inventor in order to convince him to invent time travel so they can get home. This, again, is entirely incidental and has no impact on the plot because some future version of Wiley just sends his car back in time anyway, which has been retrofitted with equipment to allow it to fly and travel through time. Thus the inventor has absolutely no reason to exist other than to facilitate another mildly entertaining gag served amongst the buffet of shit. That and to make this feel like even more of a roundabout ripoff of the Back to the Future trilogy.

With their time car the Powerpuffs can now explore the time stream, which is basically a purple background with arbitrary floating rocks. Then, in a fit of some of the laziest writing I’ve ever seen, Wiley gets knocked into the timestream where it’s revealed that travelling through the time stream… causes amnesia! Yes, the go-to condition for any hack writer who wants to have their character do something but can’t actually come up with a good excuse for them to do it. Anyway, it turns out that Wiley, still in his female body, has travelled back in time and somehow become his own mother! In fact, it is because of his bizarre, quasi-incestual heritage that Wiley happens to have the vaguely defined super powers that will eventually lead to him becoming the most important person in the entire universe! That… that sounds awfully familiar. Say Fry, didn’t you travel back in time and become your own grandfather, thereby granting yourself vaguely defined super powers that eventually led to you becoming the most important person in the entire universe?

Thanks Fry, that clears up a lot. Anyway, after that past nastification, that Fucking Robot comes back and turns Wiley back into a man, and conveniently erases his memory of ever being a woman in the first place. Then he falls in the time void again and becomes his own father as well. Because ripping off something once is plagiarism, but doing it twice is original, right? God, I hate this comic…

After this point they return to modern times like nothing happened (seriously, nothing of any significance has changed because of the events of the previous story arc), and Wiley is invited to a party being held by that bitchy cheerleader he was in love with as part of the comics’ misguided attempt at a teen movie parody. While there, he confesses his love to Blossom of all people. Now, the comic has been running for more than a year now, but when it comes to actual plot the characters have interacted for only a couple of days, and even then they’ve barely talked to each other. Their conversations may seem abnormally long because of the writers’ love of horrible, ungodly walls of text, but ultimately their relationship so far has been Blossom telling him mission briefings, and Wiley whining about something. That’s it. He knows absolutely nothing about this girl (though in all fairness if she’s anything like the characters in Gieni and Crosby’s other series, there’s probably not much to know), and she knows nothing about him. It’s a completely empty romance that only exists because comics like this usually have some kind of romantic element, so Gieni/Crosby feel the need to cram one in here as well.

That’s not important, though. Like, at all. What seems important, though, is that an agent of that thing that travelled back in time to kill Wiley (you know, the supposed motivator behind this entire fucking comic?) sends an agent to defeat the Powerpuffs by stealing their lasers. I haven’t really touched on it, but the Powerpuffs haven’t succeeded at a single thing in the comic since it started. Their first fight was against the He-Man parody and his friends, and that didn’t go anywhere. Later they fought another agent of the evil-for-no-real-reason monster, and their lasers were completely useless against it. Then we had them fight the villainous “So Bad” and his cronies, where they were soundly beaten and tied up before he just got tired of dealing with them and let them go. They couldn’t even get back from the 90’s on their own! Some future Wiley just sends his car back in time to rescue them. I mean… is that the joke? The fact that they never actually accomplish anything? The comic certainly acts like you’re supposed to be impressed with them at times, or like the other characters are relieved when they show up. Throughout the entire comic they don’t win a single fight, and this attack is no exception: the Powerpuffs plus Wiley all get trapped in some kind of bizarre goo cage with bars clearly far enough apart for them to just walk out if they felt like it. Either way, the monster finally shows up, offers absolutely no backstory on where it comes from, what it has against Wiley, or why any of the readers should give a rat’s ass, then promptly gets killed. Great, so we can finally end this comic, right? I mean, sure, the monster had absolutely no motivation or purpose to the story other than as a flimsy excuse to justify these women travelling back in time, but with it dead that means they’re going back to the future and ending this nonsense.

Obviously, I’m setting up a gag there, because we’ve got some more ridiculousness to get through. No, the comic thrusts in another story arc and uses it as an excuse to turn all the girls into furries. I don’t know if Gieni or Crosby or furries, but I can’t escape this sneaking suspicion that this whole thing only came up because they knew it was a lucrative market and wanted to get their attention, if only briefly. It’s just like how Sore Thumbs was marketed as a gaming comic, though really it was just an excuse for Crosby to make fun of Republicans in the absolute stupidest way possible. Anyway, the excuse for the whole thing is that there’s this evil guy (and you know he’s evil because he describes himself as evil) who can, for no real reason, live forever based on how many people he kills. He’s not a vampire or anything: just somehow people dying keeps him alive. Presumably he has to be at least marginally responsible for their deaths, but that’s just my assumption. The main point is, though, by turning people into furries he drastically reduces their lifespan… apparently. See, since rabbits don’t generally live as long as humans? Like I said, that’s not the reason or the explanation for why everyone’s a furry now: it’s the excuse. There’s a reason the sun rises in the East, a reason for the Doctor to prescribe penicillin, etc. You need an excuse for when you, well… serve shit on a buffet. Also, this features yet another fight that ends with the Powerpuffs failing miserably to serve any function in the story and getting tied up. Whatever: Wiley acts briefly like a completely different person for the sake of completing the story, the power of love turns everyone human again, the end.

Finally, with all that nonsense out of the way, the villainous “So Bad” shows up again, and reveals that he’s actually Wiley from an alternate reality. Also, his name is a reference to the Power Glove, which I’m sure counts for something. Also getting shot in the face by a faulty laser will apparently turn your skin blue and give you a freaky alien head: who knew? I’m not sure whether or not that explains why he’s evil. I guess being freakishly deformed does tend to put a damper on one’s spirits, but still, what’s his goal? Does he have a motivation for travelling to alternate realities and being an asshole to alternate versions of himself? Of course he does! He’s the bad guy! And… and he’s the bad guy! See, he’s doing bad things… because he’s the bad guy! I have to admit, though, his methods of torture are extremely cruel in a way I could have never conceived. Once the Powerpuffs fail yet again to contribute in any significant way to the plot, he zaps them with a “Loop-Laser”. This horrendous device smacks them with the worst fate that could ever befall a person: being forced to relive this shitty comic for eternity!

It’s at this point that they literally repost almost the entire comic as a means of padding. If that had simply been the end of the comic, with the “next” button just linking back to the first page it would have been a pretty clever and fairly meta-fictional ending for the whole thing. But no, they just continue posting comics like they’re actually producing something. They manage to get all the way back to the last story arc before they finally pulled the plug on the whole thing and just let this abomination die.

The art on this is much better than what was going out for Sore Thumbs at the same time. Gieni still got pretty lazy on backgrounds, but the coloring was solid and the figures tended to have a bit more personality. I’m still baffled, though, on Gieni’s stubborn insistence on not giving women whites to their eyes. I mean… is it really that difficult of a concept? He starts putting a lighter area around their eyes, but that just makes it stand out even more! Still, even if you don’t like the art you have to admit that there’s a strong level of skill involved. What really kills this thing is the writing. It is awful. I don’t use the term “awful” very much. Mostly I prefer shitty, or dumb, or crap, or whatever. But this is beyond that: it’s awful, it’s dreadful, it’s horrendous. It is some of the worst, most forced humor I have ever read. Every joke reads like a desperate plea for you to recognize this series as a comedy. It’s not. This is anti-comedy. This is comedy’s vestigial twin brother that got chopped off an hour after birth but somehow manages to stay alive seemingly for the sole purpose of pissing me off. Like some kind of bizarre version of the twin from Basket Case, except instead of murdering me in my sleep it just makes bad jokes that make me want to drive my fist into my computer monitor.

The series is just awful, which funnily enough, is its greatest redeeming factor. It’s sort of like “Troll 2” in that regard: it’s just so blatantly terrible that it becomes fascinating. If some evidence came up that Gieni/Crosby had deliberately made this series as terrible as possible because they knew there would be no reason for anyone to read it otherwise, well… I wouldn’t question it.

My question now is… should I move on, or see if the other Gieni/Crosby comics are as horrible as this?