Panel Vision - Foolkiller (2017)

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Happy April Fools everyone, if there can really be such a thing.  I’ve elected to celebrate this most ignominious holiday by delving deep into the “fool” part of the name with a look at one of my favorite superhero G-listers: Foolkiller.  Created in 1974 in the pages of Man-Thing by the incomparable Steve Gerber, Foolkiller is one of the many bizarre no-name characters that tend to pepper the lower tiers of the Marvel echelon.  He’s best described as a more comedic version of the Punisher, largely because Steve Gerber was one of the premiere funnymen of ‘70s Marvel comics (he invented Howard the Duck, after all.) 

From those humble beginnings Foolkiller’s actually been re-imagined about 4 different times, once as a hardcore murder vigilante with a weird bondage gimp costume, once in the Marvel mature readers line MAX Comics, and once as part of Deadpool’s expansive entourage.  I’m going to focus today on the last of those three, the Greg Salinger Foolkiller, and his short-lived five-issue comic from 2016 written by Max Bemis, drawn by Dalibor Talajic, and colored by Miroslav Mrva. 

Panel Vision - Giant-Sized Man-Thing #4

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So, as I write this one of the big cultural deals of the moment is a new Netflix series called 13 Reasons Why.  It’s a teenage melodrama revolving around the suicide of a young woman and the collection of cassette tapes she left behind explaining her 13 reasons why.  It’s gotten quite a bit of controversy, mostly from groups of actual experts on suicide prevention who are mad that the show misrepresents the actual circumstances that can lead to suicide as well as prevents a graphic depiction of the act itself.  

However, being a massive geek, this format of gritty high school realism, post-mortem messages to the living, and deconstructing the performance grief mandated in the wake of a tragedy reminded me of one of the best forgotten comic stories of all time.  Coming to us from way back in 1975, it’s an extra-long comic story under the name of The Kid’s Night Out, courtesy of one of the greatest comic book authors of all time alongside his most underrated creation- Steve Gerber’s Man-Thing.