 Evil Ernie: Youth Gone Wild #3
Everyone aboard the magical comic book time machine train, as we travel back to the 1991, and the start of what I call the Comicapocalypse of the 1990's. The 90's (As I'm sure you've heard me say a billion times before) was possibly the worst era of comic books ever. I can't think of a single era where so much awful garbage was published.
It was an awful time where the industry exploded with horrid tales, of anatomically incorrect people and fucking stupid shit-head artists with big egos starting up their own companies and publishing fucking garbage. It was also an era of stupid pointless gimmicks. The 90's gave birth to all of the gimmicks you could think of: variant covers (Hey, I'm going to buy the same fucking comic four time over because the cover is different!), cardstock cover, holofoil covers, glow in the dark covers, gate-fold covers. If they could glue it to a cover they did it man, and charge you an arm and a leg to buy it new, and then you would get raped in the ass by shops selling the rare ones at a marked up price. But I'll get into that rant some other day, because we're going to focus on a more specific subject of the 90's that added to the fucking abomination the industry was at that time.
In 1991, an independant comic book company known as Eternity Comics (an imprint of Malibu comics before it was bought and -- mercifully -- tromped to death by Marvel Comics due to the horrid shit they pumped out) gave a young Brain Pulido the chance of running his own series, titled Evil Ernie.
Shortly after, Pulido founded his own independent comic book company Choas! Comics. Chaos!, was where he published his horribly rendered horror comics. Due to the state of the comic industry at the time (about 98% of comics being published by anybody outside of the realm of Marvel and DC featured scantally clad women huge breasts and perpetually hard nipples) he turned his little comic book company into a 30 billion dollar money maker and printed his title characters on just about everything, including your mom's ass.
If there was a company more low-ball in terms of quality of writining and bilking readers out of as much money as possible on stupid gimmicks and anatomically incorrect women than Image Comics, it was Chaos! Comics.
 So popular was Chaos! they even commissioned music, had a band that had it's records released under the Chaos! Comics banner, and was licensed to print comic books based on WWE characters and the Halloween franchise, until the company went bankrupt in 2002.
All his characters were sold to other companies (Except for Lady Death, who he sold to Crossgen Comics, in 2002, which laughably thought they could make an impact on the industry by publishing nothing but mystical and magic based comics -- guess what happened to them? They wen't bankrupt as well. Lady Death is now published by Avatar Press, whom I've aired my criticisms of the quality of their work over at our sister site Micro-Shock.com) and mercifully the last attempt of reviving the Chaos! franchise (through Devil's Due publishing) was quickly shit canned due to lack of interest (maybe because people realized they were buying shit in the first place.)
Anyway, I got completly off track, the comic book that started it all for Pulido and the creative-abortion of the comic book industry that Chaos! Comics was, was Evil Ernie. Which in retrospect reads like an agnst filled, self fullfillment hand-job by somebody who could draw marginally well and only had a rudementary understanding of how story telling works.
The original run lasted five issues, and Pulido later reprinted them when he created Chaos! Comics. I'm reviewing the third issue of the reprint, not that it matters really. Get read for a shit load of garbage in 20 pages or less!
|
