Money Shot Comes Again #2 // Review
Personal shopper robots are attacking. Progressive consumerism has evidently reached a colossally damaging point as the XXX-plorers are about to find out. One of them has taken on the identity of an anti-science kid’s TV show host, and it wants to destroy the team led by...a scientist in Money Shot Comes Again #2. Writer Tim Seeley continues his weird screwball satire with art by Gisèle Lagacé. Color comes to the page courtesy of Carlos Badilla Z. It’s a strange and oddly complicated journey that spoofs porn right along with everything else that it’s engaging in. It’s a light comedy, but it’s hard not to read Seeley’s story and not see something far deeper and savvier in the writing...somewhere.
Chrissy loved watching Dr. Urf as a kid. In spite of his abject hatred for science, she loved the idea of bringing light to the world. Shoot ahead a quarter century, and she and her crew are in deep space being attacked by an army of parody robots led by a construct modeled after...Dr. Urf. If Chrissy and her crew are going to make it through unscathed, they will have to work something out with the robots. The right solution might just lie in strategically...repurposing them.
Seeley works with concepts that are close to being something out of cheesy adult movies...and tweaks them in just the right way to make them kind of sophisticated parodies of pornography. He’s using characters modeled after Mickey Mouse, Sailor Moon, and indie adult comix character Cherry Poptart. It’s kind of a weird mash-up that comes really, really close to making some sort of a point about the nature of pop iconography in contemporary consciousness and the relative acceptability of violence over sensual passion in mainstream media...but it never quite makes it there. It’s fun, though.
Lagacé’s art manages a weird fusion between serious, straight-ahead space action fantasy and something altogether more silly. The color of Carlos Badilla Z gives the clean lines and swift sense of action a classy warmth, radiance, and depth that serves the comic quite well. Lagacé misses a bit of an opportunity to work with spoof images of classic pop cultural characters, but she really nails the look and feel of Larry Welz’s Cherry character in a new and fresh way that gives her a little more life. It’s fun to see her return in an alternate format.
Seeley walks a very fine line between tasteful silliness and something altogether more unsavory, but he’s doing so in a way that feels like it could really make a statement if he chose to point it in a more definitively satirical direction. There’s a lot that almost gets said in the course of this second issue of the series that could be provocative on a variety of different levels, but Seeley doesn’t seem all that interested in the depth that might be possible with the plot that he’s working with.
