Hey everybody, welcome to another exciting episode of the number one comics podcast. I'm your host Jonah, with me is Bill. Bill, how's it going? Good, Jonah. How are you? I'm doing well. Good. Well, it feels so weird. In case anyone doesn't realize this yet, we record like four of these at a time. So I ask him that every episode, and I literally just ask him that like 30 minutes ago. That's fine. I don't expect a lot to change in those 30 minutes. One of these times, I'm just really going to throw you a curveball and be like, I'm horrible, Jonah. And I'd be like, but 30 minutes ago, you were fine. What changed? Was it because we talked about like a shitty book? So, but I figured it's also like, could be every, you know, anyone's first episode. Yeah, exactly. And they may want to know how you're doing. Exactly. They're not watching these consecutively. Well, yeah. You have to check in every week to find out how I'm doing. There you go.
Well, again, everybody, welcome. This is the only podcast that's dedicated to the review and discussion of first issues. We are part of the Field of Geeks Network, so special thanks to everyone at Field of Geeks for helping make this happen. Thanks to Raven X for the intro song and outro song, right? Yeah. I believe there's an outro song. They're the same thing, but you know. It's not that I don't watch these all the way through. It's all good. Yeah, but special thanks to everyone that helps make this happen. You can find us on YouTube or on Apple Podcasts under the Field of Geeks banner, so just search Field of Geeks. Be sure to like us, subscribe. New episode launches every week, and you can also find us on Facebook at The Number One Comics Podcast. Today, we are talking about...
quite possibly one of my favorite miniseries from back in the day, which is Violent Messiahs. So we're talking about Violent Messiahs number one. Had you read this at all back then? Had you heard of this before I gave it to you? I had no idea. Okay. So I'm excited to get your take on this when we get to that point. Like I said, I was really excited about this because when I first discovered this, I believe, I can't remember.
If it was the issue, you know, Wizard Magazine used to do those half issues. Yeah. I can't remember if I got that first. I'm sure we'll talk about it. But I was introduced to these guys and I was instantly hooked on this concept. So let's get into that. Image Comics is the publisher on this. It has a cover date of June of 2000. Cover price, $2.95. The concept of the story was created by William O'Neill and Joshua Dysart. The writer, Joshua Dysart, and the artist is Tone Rodriguez. Now, there is a note from...
Joshua, at the back of this book, which indicates that this story was actually a resurrection of sorts. The story originally existed as a single issue black and white indie book. And a fan of that issue was Tone Rodriguez. He asked how the story was supposed to end, because he only read that one black and white issue that was ever released. So he kind of asked how that story was supposed to end. So Joshua told him, and Tone just started drawing it out. It was then submitted to Image, and 25 years later, we're reviewing it for this show. The story takes place on the fictional Rancor Island, and it follows the police efforts to take down a couple of vigilantes. You've got the family man and Citizen Payne, which I absolutely love that name for a character. Yeah.
The cover itself does a really good job of setting the tone or setting the mood. As you can see on the cover, you've got sort of the brooding character. You've got kind of the TV, watching the TV sort of in the lower corner of it. The cover is definitely more reminiscent of like... a hand-drawn VHS cover than a comic book cover, in my opinion. So it looks very different from a lot of the other books that we've talked about and really a lot of the books that we probably will talk about because this thing really stands on its own. Let's dive inside. Our first page takes us into a large home sitting on the coast of the island. Inside this home, we're taken down a long corridor to a large set of double doors. The door at the end of it is open just a crack and our text following it or going along with it is...
Deep in the lungs of a great house, at the end of a disregarded hall, there is a rosewood door. If you listen closely, you will hear the shuffling of strange feet, the sound of breathing like an old dog sighing, something behind the door sniffing at this side of the world. It is fitting that we start with the door. Doors must be opened. Thresholds must be crossed. One must always travel into different rooms with different hauntings.
We then cut to a helicopter flying low over the water towards the large cityscape. Rancor Island is a few miles off the coast of the eastern seaboard. We catch glimpses of newscasts reporting on a recent outbreak of vigilante activity, including a man called Citizen Payne. The Citizen Payne began a crusade three months ago. There's another killer dubbed the Family Man. And we're also introduced to a police officer named Sherry Major. She's brought in to lead an anti-vigilante task force. So this is all given to us in these news kind of talking head blips.
Inside a rundown building, two men are discussing the recent vigilante killings. These men, they feel they're being hunted, and probably with good reason. As they talk, a large, black-clad figure has entered the building. They hear him approaching, but it's too late. The mystery assailant opens up with two dual 1911s. One man can't escape the hail of gunfire. The other one does manage to flee as he escapes out a window. He sticks a couple of attack dogs on the shooting assailant.
The mystery man fends off the attack dogs and a countdown is seen kind of ticking its way down to zero. We then see a large explosion that blasts through the windows. The fleeing man leaps from the fire escape into a dumpster. He's looking up at the burning building and he sees the black clad attacker still standing and he's on fire. Leaping from the building, the burning man in black pursues his frantic prey. The fleeing man finds himself trapped at a dead end. His pursuer has gained on him and has wrapped his large flaming hands around his victim's neck until he snaps it.
We then cut to the Rinker Island police precinct where Lieutenant Sherry Major has arrived. She is a quote-unquote renowned super cop, but she's not exactly a welcome face around there. Sherry finds herself alone in the bathroom fighting back her true emotions, which is her fear. People are always wanting for her to show weakness, but she refuses to give in. Even she knows that after months of...
investigation, you know, she's going to meet this man called Sis Payne. She kind of knows it in her gut. We cut to an evening in another part of the city where an unassuming white gentleman finds himself in a bar a little far from home. He catches the attention of a young patron and soon finds himself with her at the low-income housing complex nearby. The man's name is Jeremiah, and his new friend has taken him on this trip to buy some weed in an apartment.
Jeremiah takes a seat on the couch while a woman who looks like my brother-in-law, if he was dressed as a woman, is multitasking with an infant on her dining table and a pile of grass that she's kind of putting into baggies. The reason I say she looks like my brother-in-law is because when we made our Blackjack comic, there's a woman featured in it who was based on my brother-in-law. Nice. It reminds me of that. There's a young boy seated on the floor watching television.
beast of a mother is yelling at him to turn down the volume. Aside from the weed the dealer is trying to push her customers, she's also trying to get him to buy some cocaine. But they decline. The boy slowly turns his attention from the TV to the stranger sitting on his couch. Little does he know, the man named Jeremiah is about to change the course of that kid's life forever.
Moments later, we cut to Jeremiah emerging from the apartment and back out onto the street, and he is covered in blood. A local street dealer is waxing biblically. Our masked man in black is actually listening from the dark shadows of the alleyway until he's heard enough. Nearby, Sherry Major is in the middle of a stakeout. And this is an effort to flush out or to find the vigilante. She's supported by a helicopter above, and there's other cover officers on the street. After a few hours of no sign of the vigilante, she decides to go with a decoy carjacking. Again, this effort to draw him out. And it works. The vigilante appears behind a would-be faux carjacker, but he's not duped by the facade. The other undercover officers move in to apprehend him. Sherry also runs towards the scene.
The vigilante tosses a grenade under the car, exploding it, and then he uses the blinding fireball to escape the cops. As he's escaping, more explosions go off around them. Now, they believe that they've got the vigilante trapped in an alleyway. There's an officer in tactical gear. He goes in just like guns blazing, but Sherry calls for him to hold his fire. The overzealous tactical officer disappears down the alleyway, leaving Sherry all alone.
At least, that is until the large, black-clad Citizen Payne steps forward. Citizen Payne wants to talk, but Sherry doesn't necessarily want to hear it. Air support approaches as Citizen Payne tells her to forget about him and go to the Caracole Low-Income Housing Complex, apartment 14. This is the same apartment that we saw Jeremiah leaving previously, so Citizen Payne's kind of directing her that way. He uses a smoke grenade and vanishes into the night. Sherry is adamant not to let the vigilante get away from her, so she pursues him. Another explosion blows her backwards, and he approaches her again with a warning. He says, you must understand tonight, and from now on, this city belongs to me, is what he says. He then finishes it by saying, I'm sorry, you can't win this. With that, he walks away. Now, she's not ready to admit defeat. Sherry grabs her pistol, but Citizen Payne's already gone.
Sherry tells her backup once they get on site that they're heading for the Caracol apartment building, as Citizen Payne had instructed. And then our last shot of this issue is a single panel back on that double door of the old house. And that's kind of where we fade out or cut to black. What are your thoughts on this? Man, this was a ride. Man, I love this comic. Oh, right? It's so good. Now, I didn't get big into the, you know...
Into a lot of the image stories and a lot of the darker stories when I was younger. This is one that I would definitely pick up now I have to say that the suit is fantastic. I would love like a like a McFarlane toy of it or something, like a bust of him or something. I want to buy a cheap black suit and have my mom, who I'm sure, I think everyone assumes her mother can be a seamstress, have my mom add the white stitching randomly all over it. He looks badass. He does. He looks fantastic. And with his speech bubbles being very different from everybody else's, you just know that this guy talks differently. I don't quite know what it sounds like yet. I kind of envision that sounding...
For some reason, I heard Keith David's spawn. Yeah, I can see that. Or... Like, just that really gruff, like, deep voice. Or Candyman. Yeah.
Tony Todd. Tony Todd is kind of who I give a voice to this. Yeah, it's fantastic. It's atmospheric. It's poetic. It does a fantastic job of blending superhero-ish stuff with horror genre because it kind of feels like Punisher meets Seven almost. The atmosphere is really, really strong in this one. It's really good. The scene with Jeremiah in the apartment was so creepy. Oh, my God. So unsettling. We're introduced to the two mysterious vigilantes, both...
you know, kind of both doing things their own way. You know, Citizen Payne is a large brooding figure in the black suit with the white stitching and Jeremiah, aka the family man, which I find him more scary than Citizen Payne because he's, to me, he's more scary and more compelling because he's average, he's unassuming, you know, he's picked up. Just a random guy there to buy some weed. I'm assuming she's maybe a prostitute, I don't know, but meets this gal, they go to buy some weed and it's one of the things where it's like, you just gotta be careful who you trust, you know, who you get in a car with, essentially, so. We're also introduced to Sherry Major. She's as tough as nails cop, but she's a little in over her head with these guys. She's definitely got some secrets of her own. I don't know if there's maybe a little premonition that she's got the ability to do, but she's a very cool character as well. I really like female characters like this who have that ability to be strong but vulnerable. They have the ability to...
They have the ability to they're realistic to me. They're real and they're not presented in you know, you get so many of these Other characters where it seems so forced. I don't like to use the term Mary Sue's but that is a lot of times I think it's just very easy for people to fall into that trap when it comes on designing a good female character And I get the sense from this character to that like everything she's experienced in the city dresser like one you know, one more notch towards the edge. Yes. And eventually she's going to come across something that's just going to make her mind snap. Yes. Yeah. A hundred percent. Um, yeah. So, uh, the other thing too, that, you know, I use like seven as a, as the example, um,
If they were to make a violent messiah's movie, David Fincher would direct it in a perfect world. Because even the city itself, which is this fictional city, it's as much of a character as the actual characters. And that, I think, is hugely important for really any setting, especially when it's kind of like an isolated setting. And it reminds me of what David Fincher is able to do with even going back to Alien 3. But Panic Room is a good example of that. But Seven, where the fictional city that Seven is set in, because they never disclose where it's located, but it's as much of a character as Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt's characters are.
Dice arts plotting and dialogue it's really good You know there is that always there is the and it always makes me cringe a little bit But there's the two people walking in and you catch the tail end of a joke where you just catch the punchline But you know it's not funny like there's no way that this joke was ever funny, but someone's laughing at it You do get a little bit of that And as someone who doesn't tell a bad joke I have to wonder how often that really happens There is, as I mentioned, a certain poetry to this, to the narration, especially. There's a cadence of several of the characters in terms of their speech patterns. And that's without it sounding flowery. It still really flows really naturally, even though they're maybe saying unnatural things, which is really cool. There's just very something unpretentious about it that I like. Like I said, Tone's art is a work of beauty in this throughout. The coloring complements it so well, but he does a really good job of giving the characters a sense of motion. The explosions look really good, so the action's awesome.
Like you mentioned, when I think back to 90s Image Comics that I was reading, it was a lot of Extreme Studios nonsense, a lot of Wildstorm stuff, Stormwatch, Wildcats, things like that. So this was really my first introduction to a different side of Image Comics that I think that they've really, really embraced well over the last several decades and kind of getting away from the more... generic superheroics you still have a little of that but yeah this is uh my my first foray into what image almost like a very um you know you think of the uh the dc imprint uh vertigo this is very much more of a vertigo style story right um that came out of image and i really like that so definitely different from a lot of the other superhero books that we've even covered on this show um but it's really good and i definitely recommend the issue in the series overall to anybody especially if you've got somebody who is like i don't like comic books read this one if you don't like comic books read this one because you're not Yes, you've got a guy in a costume, but it's not Batman punching somebody in the face. It's not Spider-Man. It's not your typical superhero. Or even if it's...
Even if you yourself are sick of the maybe not sick of but are kind of burnt out on like the usual comic tropes like You know good guy in bright colors bad guy in dark colors, you know this this subverts all of that There's not a lot of there's not a lot of color in this book I mean it's really I can see where like the black and white origins came from it Yep, because very much of a very muted desaturated that's what makes the explosions pop so well Yeah is by muting everything else around it. Yeah. Yeah for sure Well, this particular series, it ran for 12 issues, and it contained two stories within the 12 issues. The first story arc ran for about eight issues. That was collected into a trade paperback called Book of Job, which I have. Job is Citizen Payne's real name.
Oh, okay. Spoiler for anybody. Spoiler for you, I suppose. So Job is Citizen Payne's real name. There was a prologue story published as the wizard half issue that touched on Job, Jeremiah, and Sherry a little bit. And again, I think I read that first. I think I got that first before I had read this. There's also another detective that we'll be introduced to, which is Detective Ernest Houston. He plays a prominent role in kind of later on in that first story arc. And he's really the main, he's the man assigned to the family man side of the investigation. So Sherry's on Citizen Payne. This other detective's on the family man. And then they kind of like cross over. Right.
And I think actually he does appear, Houston does appear in this issue, like in one scene, he's kind of like just in passing. Oh, okay. I think they were like, hey, you know, the guy calls him out, he's like a bitch to Sherry, but then he's like nice to the other detective. Right. The second story arc is called Lamenting Pain, and that ran for four issues, and that's what ran out that 12-issue run. I would love to see Rancor Island and its inhabitants revisited at some part in the future. Yeah. I think there's really a lot of different stories that you could tell within this setting and with these types of characters. Yeah. Final thoughts? I loved it. I loved it.
Check it out. Like I said, you can get the graphic novel of those stories. There is actually another graphic novel I have, which I believe is called Genesis. I think it actually has that black and white issue included with it, if I'm not mistaken. Because I love this. I've got...
any of this that I could get I had to go and get my hands on at some point so yeah so yeah be sure to check it out that's gonna do it for us for this episode again this is the number one comics podcast find us on Facebook if you like the video you can like subscribe YouTube Apple podcast we're part of the field of geeks family so just look up field of geeks and you'll find us again special thanks to everyone at the field of geeks network special thanks to Raven X for the music and we will see you next time for Bill I'm Jonah thanks guys