KILLER Comics

Comic books don't usually get a lot of attention from the mainstream media. But when Oliver Stone, high-grossing film-maker and conspiracy theorist extraordinary, decides to option the movie rights to a moderately popular black-and-white independent comic book, all eyes are suddenly drawn in its direction.

Thus it is that "Scud: The Disposable Assassin," an independent comic written and drawn by cartoonist Rob Schrab, is one of the latest comics to emerge from the comics underground into the glare of Hollywood's scrutiny. Creator Schrab attributes Scud's success to what he calls its multimedia appeal and its "surrealistically" funky style--both of which were probably factors in drawing Stone's attention in the first place.

The comic is set in a banal yet bizarre near-future world, in which voodoo dinosaur zombies can run amuck in a 24-hour convenience store, or the clerical error of some guy in shipping can cause you to wind up wearing the right arm of a lycanthropic astronaut. Schrab calls this aesthetic "surreal"--indeed, one of the book's slogans is "Surreality just got funky!"--but that doesn't seem quite the right way to describe it. The key to understanding the "logic" of Schrab's universe is to realize that it's not the same sort of causality that we expect from works of prose fiction--or, in fact, from most comic books.

Instead, the idiosyncratic universe of "Scud" is generated out of a bizarre fusion of selected elements of the popular culture of the last decade or so: action movies, popular music, noir films, video games, Dungeons & Dragons, Japanese robot cartoons. The resonances evoke the increasingly trendy ideas of a sort of "geek chic," based on the artifacts of mainstream male teenage culture of the 1980s and early 90s, overlaid with a technophilic edge: it's a world born out of John Woo movies, computer hacking and the fandom of comic books themselves. It's a universe in which attitude is everything.

The premise of the "Scud" series itself is typical of the comic: delightfully simple yet utterly absurd. In the hyper-violent, super-capitalistic universe of the future, a corporation called ScudCo manufactures "disposable assassins": three coins deposited in a vending machine will get you a robot designed to be the perfect killer, which will demolish your enemy and then self-destruct as soon as it's accomplished its mission (planned obsolescence, after all, is what makes consumer culture go). Our hero is a typical Scud robot assassin, bought by a middle manager who needs to get rid of a hideous mutant monster named Jeff--which, in the finest sci-fi/gross-out film tradition, is rampaging in the basement of his factory.

But things don't work out the way they're supposed to: When our Scud robot takes a break from the first issue's cinematically staged chase-and-shoot sequence to wash monster blood off his hands in the men's john...well, he happens to catch a glimpse in the mirror of his own back--complete with a label warning that he'll blow up the moment his assigned target is destroyed. Our Scud has an epiphany, realizes that he doesn't want to die and settles for merely damaging Jeff and stowing her safely in the emergency facilities of his local hospital. As long as she remains alive, he's got nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, the hospital fees will cost a bundle, and so Scud hits the streets to earn money the only way he knows how--by hiring himself out as an assassin.

And thus a series is born.

The connection of "Scud" to popular culture, and to genre film culture in particular, is one Schrab plays up heavily. He suggests that "Scud" readers imagine that they're watching a movie, complete with music appropriate to each page or each scene. Each issue lists on the inside cover a "suggested soundtrack," drawn from rock, alternative music and film soundtracks. Schrab even provides suggested "voice talent," so you know just what those voices in your head ought to sound like (Scud is supposed to be voiced by John Malkovich).

Moreover, the design of the comic is very film-like--the panel designs often resemble "storyboards," or the way in which the action of animated films is laid out, more than they do conventional comics. The story itself, along with its universe of pop-culture causality, features characters who are archetypes straight out of genre films: mobsters, samurai, sexy female assassins. And each "episode" of "Scud" is dedicated to a director in whose style the issue is cast: from Quentin Tarantino to Jim Henson to "the memory of Orson Welles."

Schrab is a highly gifted visual artist, and his fluid, hyper-kinetic black-and-white illustrations give the comic a definitely "cartoony" feel which contrasts quite effectively with the startling violence which periodically erupts in it. Ben Edlund's popular humor comic "The Tick" is a visible influence in the early adventures of Scud (for example, in the characters like the nefarious "Voodoo Ben" Franklin, a villain suspiciously resembling a founding father who animates his zombie armies using his electrified kite).

But the comic moves away from those influences as it progresses; in fact, the "Scud" universe is now large enough to have generated two spin-offs. Almost as violent and twice as profane as "Scud" is "La Cosa Nostroid." Illustrated by one Edvis (whose goofy, facile style is as reminiscent of Phil Foglio as it is of Schrab), the book somehow manages to make immature, violent, half-cyborg mafiosi extraordinarily lovable. And Scud's silent sidekick Drywall--a little creature whose zippered skin leads into a infinitely large inner warehouse where he can store anything he needs--has for some reason become extremely popular among the readers of "Scud", and recently merited his own book (called, of course, "Drywall: Unzipped").

With a spin-off series, a video game and now a movie looming in the future, "Scud" is obviously one of the success stories of the competitive world of independent comics. And, unusually, it's succeeded not through literary depth or through the invention of strange new worlds, but through sheer attitude and its own idiosyncratic method of drawing together the disparate threads of popular culture. There's a prevailing opinion that genius consists less in originality than in the ability to bring together what's already in the air, giving it a new life of its own. According to that point of view, Schrab must be doing something brilliant.

Because when it's taken on its own terms, of course, Schrab's ridiculous fusion of machismo, humor and popular culture works. And it certainly does generate a lot of attitude. Scud himself realizes this in one of his profounder moments. Meditating that he's one robot protagonist who's never wanted to be a human being, he comes to the conclusion that he should enjoy being what he is. Summing up the central aesthetic of the comic, Scud proclaims, "It's cool to be a robot."