Review: Weekly World News #1
OK, I confess, I bought the first issue of Weekly World News in comics form. Yes, alright, I even reserved it in advance at my local shop. This stuff - the weekly rag version - was comedy gold when I was in junior high, a time so overwrought with fears of nuclear war and questionable fashion that absurdity seemed the only rational response or escape. Compared to news reports about Reagan's doddering obsession with jelly beans, the Weekly World News was no less ridiculous than anything else and twice as funny.
These days I look back on the now-dead print version and think that it must surely be the direct ancestor of The Onion. WWN reached into the same cultural junk drawer of fears, hopes and momentary obsessions and turned out Frankenstein's monsters by the dozen every week: a half-boy/half-bat whose misadventures tickled both a bumpkinish fear of government and an elderly suspicion of youth in general; PhD Ape, the world's smartest primate; UFO Alien, who apparently was everywhere at once; and Ed Anger, whose far-right-wing column was a scathing satire of the mindless kneejerk kill-'em-all conservatism that has since manifested in real life. It was hilarious to a certain youthful and perhaps highly unrefined mindset. The Weekly World News in its supermarket tabloid incarnation was The Colbert Report with the safety off and ink on its fingers.
This comic, though? Don't waste your time, because IDW have already wasted theirs for you. They've taken this property and tried to morph it to produce a continuous narrative rather than a series of short comedic bursts. The humor of things like WWN was in part based on getting in front of the reader, making the joke, embellishing it a little and then getting out. It wasn't a novel, it was a few column inches. Rolling all these characters out and then keeping them in front of us for page after page doesn't work.
Add in the weak characterization and it only gets worse. In the tabloid, Ed Anger was a chest-heaving crazy who at least had enough energy to stay plugged in to what's happening in our culture even though he hated it all. In the comic, he's a broken down old man wallowing in self-pity. I get that plenty of people make that same tragic transition in their own lives, yes, but characters need to have agency. I also get that a lot of the characters were never intended to be sympathetic, but in order to stay with them I've got to be able to work up a little sympathy. They've turned Ed Anger from a raving lunatic to an annoying whiner. It's like spending 32 pages reading about your depressed, alcoholic Uncle Marv, the one who can't belly-laugh without breaking down into a coughing fit.
Ugh. Just... ugh. That's actually what I said to my comics shop in email: "Did I add WWN to my bag? If so, please remove it. Ugh."
Of course, there's probably a bigger difference between me now and me then than there is between Weekly World News now and WWN then. I will grant that. That said, my personal opinion is that the dice roll of converting these characters from short-form humor to long-form narrative came up snake-eyes. As I say this, however, there's probably a teenager in a country town somewhere who thinks that Weekly World News is the funniest comic book he's ever read. At least, I hope so. I just hope he doesn't try to find me and tell me anything at all about issue #2.
Klarion
Posted to Review on 28 January 2010
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