EDITOR'S NOTE: Sometime just before 2020 ended, the Captain Blue Hen-sponsored RUN THE COMICS 5K on Facebook crossed the finish line, ending the year with 5, 211 comics reviewed. It was a great experience, and we are glad to have been part of it, contributing 752 to that number. Here's the last of my entries posted to their Facebook page in December 2020 . . . . .
HISTORY: I’ve been numbering my entries, picking up where I left off with the I LOVE COMICS 3000 CHALLENGE as one of the participants on the Captain Blue Hen Facebook page. This started as a challenge from friendly comic shops in Ohio and Texas, originally as the 1,000 Comics Challenge, then the 2021 Comic Book Quarantine Odyssey, and then I Love Comics 3000 - - all goals met by the group of Captain Blue Hen customer participants. I’m curious to see how long it takes me to read that many comics. My journey began with the 1,000 Comics Challenge on approximately March 15, 2020.
#746-748 CROSSED: BADLANDS #1-3 (Avatar, 2012) Garth Ennis & Jacen Burrows. Graphic, gory, bloody and brutal. Ennis put a different spin on the zombie mythos with The Crossed, a plague that drives the infected into a bloody berserk rage. He replaced cannibalism with savagery, mutilation and the worst cruelty. Crossed refers to the telltale marks of the virus, a blood red rash that manifests across the face in the shape of a cross. These stories are not for the sensitive. The majority of them don’t end on an upbeat note of optimism.
The Badlands series opened the door for other creators to play around in this wicked world, with short story arcs in different settings and Ennis writing the first of them. This three-issue story focused on a diminishing band of survivors. They are fleeing a band of the Crossed who are tracking them across the Scottish highlands. The story centers around the changing principles of a formerly loving husband. He escapes but not his wife, in sacrificial bloody fashion. He gradually loses all compassion as one challenge after another forces him into blunt survival mode. THREE AND ONE-HALF STARS.
#749-752 CROSSED: BADLANDS #25-28 (Avatar, 2013) “The Fatal Englishman” by Garth Ennis and Raulo Caceres. To mark the occasion of the 25th issue, Garth Ennis returned to pen the most cynical and pessimistic Crossed tale of the ones that I have read.
A quartet of British soldiers travel the English countryside on their way to a secretive former chemical-biological research center, hoping to find a weapon to exterminate all Crossed from Great Britain (with much collateral damage, of course). They manage to save a small group of school children protected by a Catholic priest and guide them to Bridgeport, where they repair a motor boat so that the children can leave for a small island and survive.
The scenes depicting what the formerly seaside resort has turned into at the hands of the Crossed are extremely graphic and horrific. In the only positive turn of the story, the priest and children do manage to leave for a better future. The soldiers then find their way to the research center, where hard decisions need to be made.
The most interesting parts of this story were the frequent discussions between the cynical leader and the priest, where organized religion, faith, survival instincts, responsibility, war and the ravages of the British empire all come under the introspective microscope. FOUR STARS.
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