The Goon, Volume 10: Death’s Greedy Comeuppance by Eric Powell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
There’s not a bad volume of this comic. There just isn’t.
This particular one had what amounted to a kind of touching story. It reminds me of what happened with Atomic Robo. I’m loving it, laughing my ass off, and then there’s this point, kinda deep in the series, where things get poignant and great.
This feels like a newer method of storytelling, to me.
It’s like this.
Think about Kevin Smith movies. He started funny, did a second comedy, and then did his serious movie. His serious movie had some jokes, but overall, it wasn’t a comedy, really.
The classic mode of telling these stories is to decide. Am I telling a funny story or serious story. And then there are moments, jokes, lines that go on a different track. But the overall narrative kinda goes one way.
I feel like that comes from the desire in every funny person’s heart to tell a serious story for once. Or to prove that, yes, I’m funny and lighthearted, but I have a brain too. I FEEL stuff!
And then what happens is, that person expresses the serious side, but in a very separate way. I did my fun project here, and my silly projects over here, and I like to keep them a little separate.
Which can work, but seems to be ineffective oftentimes.
In The Goon, instead of doing this big announcement about “This is my serious-er project”, Eric Powell just does the work. And it works for me. I think it’s great to see that a series can turn like that, and part of what’s cool about the Goon is that I always know SOME of what I’m gonna get, but not everything.