Groin Injury Saturday: Desolation Jones

No, Warren Ellis' semi-hero Desolation Jones doesn't get a groin injury, he causes one. A bad one. Not as bad still as Batman making a thug shoot himself in the crotch, but still pretty serious. Jones even does it using the hat-trick of blunt force, electricity and heat!

In issue #3 of Desolation Jones, the protagonist/antagonist Jones beats up a pornographer in a sleazy hotel for some reason. Sensing the pornographers' reluctance to cooperate, Jones takes one of the floor lamps used during filming and hammers it into the guy's crotch.



The lamp is super-heated from hours of filming dirty movies and as you see in the next scene, Mr. Porn-monger has a smoking ruin where his reproductive organs used to be.



This scene is pretty much a play on the old joke; "Why did the farmer hit the mule with a two-by-four? To get the mule's attention."

In the real world this guy would have his buddies wack Jones for $200 dollars and a bag of apples. But on Comic Book Planet this guy is probably sufficiently terrorized to leave town and become a member of the Salvation Army.

I'm a cautious fan of Warren Ellis. My main hesitation about his work is that his characters are variations of a theme. Some time ago someone in a comic forum I frequent described a similar style of character by Howard Chaykin as "Chaykin-Man", an archetype that gets recycled, showing up again and again.

It may be that the author has a specific idea of what a hero is like, is enamored with the idea and believes there is plenty of characterization to explore. That is not always the case. I think "Chaykin-Man" as a character peaked with Dominic Fortune and The Shadow. Heck, maybe even with The Scorpion.

If some common thread linking the characters would drop hints that he is a facet of some kind of eternal warrior that would be fine, and would even give a writer something to write in about ten years for a comeback, but "Ellis-Man" seems to me to be a retread of John Constantine and I'm getting kind of tired of the idea. Also, his "edgy techno-bastard" site is getting on my nerves, as it has many posts that have no explanation or seem to mean anything...that might be the point of it though. If I'm not hip enough to understand his posts without deeper references then I guess I'm not cool enough to be visiting it. It's probably part of his plan to keep out the old and busted type of riff-raff.

Well...For a good show of an awful groin injury my hat is off to Ellis & Williams for this issue but only to use it to sympathy-protect my own package.

Tags: Groin Injury Saturday