The Scumbag #8 // Review
Ernie's been through a lot. Now that it looks like he's about to enjoy a really trippy time with a group of hippies on the moon, things are going to take a turn for the worse. Everything seemed to be going so well, and now it's all gotten so much infinitely weirder for the title character of The Scumbag #8. Writer Rick Remender continues the satirical sci-fi spy-fi adventures of Ernie Ray Clementine in an issue drawn by artist Alex Riegel with the aid of colorist Moreno Dinisio. The backstory on Ernie and his colleague comes into focus over a joint before everything gets weird again.
Ernie's about to have sex with his dream girl when an alarm goes off. Evidently, his secret agent colleague Sister Mary is launching a full-scale assault on a hippie commune on the moon. Things are about to get ugly. Mary's about to get hit with something that's going to make everything infinitely more strange as mind-altering countermeasures find the most totally uptight death machine super spy...smokes a joint, and reveals a bit of her past. Everything seems perfectly lined up for a totally groovy future in a psychic blast to the earth from the moon. Things never seem to go right for Ernie, though, so they're bound to get messed up in some fashion.
Remender nails the landing on a totally weird trip to the moon. The satire is a bit soggy and uninteresting. Still, he's made Ernie and Mary such fascinating characters throughout the past seven issues that it's actually pretty cool getting into a bit of their backstories. Beyond the further developments of their professional relationship, the rest of the story is...well...less than interesting. Odd to know that something as significant as the central plot of the story isn't as interesting as the relations between the two central protagonists, but this issue actually kind of...works...
Riegel has a solid appreciation for comic action. The artist embraces cartoonishly amplified violence with a whimsical sense of rubbery action that seems to shoot through even the most stationary moments. Everything seems to be so totally squishy as Riegel bounces the characters across the page, whether they're engaging in affection, aggression, or anything in between. The cartoonish amplification of the weirdness serves the story well. It's too bad that there isn't more of a realistic grounding for the art. Just a bit more gravity on the page would keep it all together a bit better.
Ernie's been through so much that it's kind of strange to think that it's only been eight issues so far. Remender seems to have quite a serial mapped-out that involves a character arc that seems a hell of a lot more coherent than a guy like Ernie seems to be capable of. A story like this could keep going with further developments for a very, very long time. Ernie's got a lot of potential, and Remender clearly has a sharp understanding of the kind of pacing needed to go the distance with a reluctant hero.
