Ludocrats #5
Writers: Kieron Gillen and Jim Rossignol; Artist: Jeff Stokely; Colors: Tamra Bonvillain with Fernando Arguello; Letterer: Clayton Cowles; Publisher: Image
Like a person chaotically flipping through cable channels (Or maybe toggling through the “Because You Watched The Great British Bake Off” section of the Netflix menu), I could flit through the many tickling facets that made “The Ludocrats” such a fun read.
- An art style that mixes Manga, cartoon-violence logic and both-brow British humor
- Its addition to the pantheon of great comic moments involving the moon, somewhere just below the Phoenix’s sacrifice and its defacement by Chairface Chippendale.
- The design of protagonist Otto Von Subteran as this giant ginger bear of a man with the attention span of a child, often yelling, more often naked. A character I’d like to return to.
But like so many brilliant indie series of the past few years, “The Ludocrats” is five issues and out, the gone-too-soon climax of 17 years of ideas, scripts, sketches, false starts and pandemic delays.
One wonders, as we ponder the increasingly necessary evolution of the comics industry, whether these quickie series aren’t better served as graphic novels, given they’ve a predetermined beginning, middle and end. Then again, if you’re hand-selling a book on the strength of Kieron Gillen, you probably want it to occupy shelf space next to issues of “Once & Future,” “Die” and “Warhammer 40,000: Marneus Calgar.”
But I’m digressing into inside baseball. “Ludocrats” #5 goes hard meta in its finale, channeling the spirit of the 1953 Looney Tunes classic “Duck Amuck,” in which Daffy Duck is tormented by the animator’s pencil. After being put on mock trial for crimes against the Hyper-Pope, Otto’s battle against his brother culminates in a homogenization of reality, which apparently looks like a very boring black-and-white comic in which a 30-something straight white man pines for a more exciting life as he sits in a coffee shop, a situation quickly undone with the ax-chop of a panel-border-smashing Otto.
This leads into Otto and his companion, Professor Hades Zero-K, running through the backmatter, attempting to escape the end of the book, one last dash of silly as the credits roll. It’s a great bit that actually forces the reader to read and appreciate the post-story material, which is good because there are some damn good pinups back there by Jamie McKelvie, Kris Anka, Ro Stein and Ted Brandt, Mirka Andolfo and Skottie Young.
If the Gillen of “Wicked + the Divine” and “O&F” is a critically adored Eisner nomination machine, the Gillen of “The Ludocrats,” aided and abetted by his co-creators, is the one who used to spend an outsize amount of time making puns on Twitter to replies of “Kieron.” There isn’t a serious bone in this comic, yet it’s a buffet of wordplay, sight gags and structural demolition that proves Stokely’s pen every bit as important as Gillen’s humor.
Take, for example, Page 6, where, as Otto testifies poorly in his defense on the right side of the page, his former lover the Steamjudge Gratty grows larger and more enraged on the left, till the white gutter between them disappears and she is suddenly staring a dwarfed Otto right in his tiny, monocled face.
This leads into two pages of nine-panel grids in which bit characters testify against Otto and remind readers that, when done well, nine-panel grids aren’t a chore, we just shouldn’t have read “Heroes in Crisis.”
And again, the complete transition by Stokely to a hatchy, boring, black-and-white comic should be lauded as the most ludicrous thing of all.
The original solicit for “The Ludocrats” reads, “Baron Otto Von Hades and Professor Hades Zero-K are here, and they’re going to save us all and have a nice time.”
This book didn’t save anything, nor should the reader have gone in expecting it to. Y’all know how Kieron likes to fool around writing solicit copy. But we definitely had a nice time.
(Although seriously, let’s give some thought to what we publish as miniseries vs. graphic novels. To be continued on that.)
Dan Grote is the editor-in-chief of ComicsXF, having won the site by ritual combat. By day, he’s a newspaper editor, and by night, he’s … also an editor. He co-hosts The ComicsXF Interview Podcast with Matt Lazorwitz. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, two kids and two miniature dachshunds, and his third, fictional son, Peter Winston Wisdom.
