Writer: Fred Van Lente
Art: Clayton Henry
Publisher: Valiant Comics
Didn’t really know a lot about this property other than Barry Windsor-Smith used to draw it. I guess I was pleasantly surprised by its liberal politics or at last: A comic geared for the Occupy Movement, which they might use to fuel a wood or charcoal fire because it gets cold at night in those camps. Or it used to before their movement was quashed by The Man.
I’m not entirely certain if this has a relationship to older “Archer and Armstrong” — which I had to read up on — but it features Archer who is a religious sort and is trained in, seemingly, all of the martial arts but that’s not the funny part. He’s raised in one of those completely fake Creationist Amusement Parks where people rode on dinosaurs because the Bible tells you it was so, or at least your reading of the Bible tells you its so. I have a feeling that even though the religious parents of Archer were bad people even in the first books they probably weren’t that bad. But let’s face it: fundamentalist religion has become the enemy of logic and reason. (And sometimes far right Christians, college educated though they may be, will let the sacrificial cat out of the bag.)
Here’s a sample of this fundamentalist nightmare, with a morbidly obese American thrown in:
By the way, and I’m not kidding, there are creationist museums out there that teach people things that kind of aren’t true. There’s one in Kentucky in fact (You can read all about PZ Myers visit there here. Very depressing although it did yield a funny picture of him riding a dinosaur.).
There’s also this bit of dialogue and you can see that Archer has gotten his home schooling training directly from Rick Santorum. Here he is writing in his diary about his journey to that modern Sodom and Gomorrah New York City:
“Dear Mary-Maria, See? I’m already putting your journal to good use! If I fail in my quest, and you–or any of our older brothers and sisters must step up to replace me–you will have the benefits of my experience, and will know beforehand the strange sights and sounds and smells of the outside world. Particularly the smells. For they are nasty. Mom and Pop always taught us Manhattan is a rat’s nest of Liberal Marxist Atheist Nazis who want to rob us of our freedom by making us dependent on government handouts. And that is 100% true. But many ways it’s also a lot like home. Afterall, we did grow up in an amusement park.”
But the last page is where our one percent villains are revealed. Our hero Archer has been sent to New York to kill somebody by his fundie parents (One of which serves in congress which would not be a shock…Michelle Bachmann…?), which should tip him off about his parents convictions about him. Like in the original stories that appeared many years ago Archer is betrayed by his parents.
And yeah there must be a bunch of austerity dudes in masks of bulls who want to blow up Greece in order to stabilize the Euro. It all makes sense now. Not bad but certainly not on the level of the True Sacred Text, written by the One True bearded and self proclaimed Snake God. 4.2 out of 5 stars.
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