Poor Mojo's Newswire

Speedy, perhaps you know, has recently been known as “Red Arrow”, and is/was a member of the Justice League of America. He’s had a weird and tortured past: his name used to be “Speedy”, after all. He was famously addicted to heroin. He slept with Chesire (who he calls “Jade”) — a genocidal mass murderer in the DC Universe who once blew up the country of “Qurac” with nuclear weapons. They had a daughter, named Lian, who was recently killed (along with tens of thousands of other people in “Star City”) by Prometheus. Prometheus also ripped off Roy’s arm, leading us to this series, where he’s meant to “rise” to become Arsenal. That’s the backstory, here is what happens in issue #3: Page 1: Chesire shows up to (theoretically) kill Roy, blaming him for Lian’s death. They fight, and Roy’s thought captions on this page are about how hot she was in bed. No shit: ” Next to Kendra (Hawkgirl), Jade was the best in bed.” Chesire has poisonous fingernails that will kill you fairly instantly. She is shown scratching him with those fingernails, though he isn’t poisoned (?), and the scratch marks completely disappear on page 2 (??). Page 2 -7: they fight, to such scintillating dialogue as “Bite me, Jade.” and “You’re a skilled assassin, but as a mother — YOU SUCKED!”. Roy uses various things sitting around (a tennis racket, a stapler, an extension cord) to battle Chesire — this is apparently Roy’s new superpower, fighting with whatever junk is sitting around, which is excitingly McGyver-esque! Using the extension cord like a whip (which is OK, “She likes it ROUGH anyway”), he ties Chesire up, porn-submission-style. Then they make out, and start to fuck…. Page 8: .. except it turns out that he’s impotent! Chesire then disappears from the comic without another word or mention of her. Page 9: Since he can’t fuck, he decides to go beat up guys. “I need a release.” and “For me, they serve their purpose” he thinks, as he sticks knives in faceless people’s arms. Page 10: full-page splash of Roy standing over a bunch of unconscious guys. “Much better” says the caption as Roy makes an O-face.

"'Stuffed' has to do with father issues, brother issues, and the history of anthropology," explained Eichler. But it really has to do with a dead body. His book (out in 2009 from First Second) is about a guy who inherits the contents of his late father's "Ripley's Believe It or Not"-type museum. Among the findings: a macaroni-noodle interpretation of "The Last Supper" and…a statue of loin-cloth-wearing, spear-wielding African man. "It's the corniest sort of ooga-booga native thing you could imagine," says Eichler of the politically incorrect curio. "Then it slowly dawns on him—it's not actually a statue, it's stuffed human skin." Upon this discovery, his pothead half-brother (a.k.a. the disheveled guy in Bertozzi's sneak peek) returns to town, and the siblings—who must contend with their father's involvement in such an unsavory practice—disagree about what do with the creepy statue. The protagonist wants to hand it over to a natural-history museum; the hippie brother…doesn't. If that sounds to you like the makings of probing racial commentary — you'd be right. Eichler read a story in The New York Times a while ago about a Spanish museum that nixed an African country's request to return a stuffed human skin to its motherland. "There are an amazing number of human remains that Eurocentric quote-unquote 'explorers' brought back to museums and have to be repatriated," he noted. "This also happened in America. There was some really disgusting souvenir taking during the slaughtering of the Native Americans." And this is funny, how? "It's sort of a comedy of manners in that it deals with people's assumptions," he said.