This is the final week of
Friday Night Fights—Classic Edition!!! presented, as always, by the Inimitable Bahlactus. The past eleven rounds of FNF have been all in black-and-white, and in the spirit of stepping into the monochrome ring with the fightin'est, black-and-whiten'est,
righten'est comic there is, I've pulled out the 1986 Scott McCloud classic aptly titled
DESTROY!!
PARENTS BEWARE!
(it says on the front)
This comic book is exactly what you think it is: 32 pages of meaningless, overblown violence, mayhem and destruction! (Plus one Naughty Word)
And, up below the bombastically immense title on the cover:
THE LOUDEST COMIC-BOOK IN THE UNIVERSE!!
It only cost $4.95 in 1986, but this comic book is
huge. How huge is it? It's fourteen inches tall and eleven inches wide...twenty-two inches across when you open it up.
It is so huge I can sit entirely inside it.
It is so large I couldn't fit it into my scanner. So yes, you are looking at
photographs of the comic book here, not scans. Don't sue me, Mister Understanding Comics McCloud!
The plot? Well, such as it is:
The Red Basher has gone berserk in Manhattan,
destroying everything in sight, and only
Captain Maximum can stop him. So, you're likely to get several pages of angsty discussion and conversation over what's eating the Red Basher, huh?
Not in a comic book called DESTROY!!, baby!:
The mega-sized pages and McCloud's crisp distinct inkwork are perfect for displaying the most intense and violent fistfight in the history of comics. Well, at least the most
destructive:
Remember that
Justice League issue where Batman laid out Guy Gardner with the famous "one punch"? That's
child's play. With
one punch, the Basher sends Captain Maximum flying from the Wall Street district on Manhattan's south end straight uptown to Rockefeller Center: as a character screams, "a total of more than
four miles!" And, right into the Time-Warner Building, too!
Say goodbye ("Bye bye!") to most of New York's most famous architectural wonders, as the Flatiron Building, the Empire State Building, Grand Central Terminal, and Chrysler Building get smashed into rubble during the mighty brawl!
Because once big superpowered guys start hitting each other with buildings, it's sorta like potato chips...
it's hard to stop!
From there on the fussin', the feudin', and the fightin' (not to mention the SHOUTIN') start to get a
little outta control:
My goodness. It's getting mighty violent in here.
All good things must of course come to an end:
(Granted, that's a pretty macabre panel, but hey, it was published in 1986, when we still could think blowing up New York was fun to look at.)
Anyway, the
punchline, in the final two panels?
So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. The ultimate black-and-white Friday Night Fightin' comic book. Graphic novel literature at its finest, and a masterwork of visual narrative fiction that simply must be experienced in the original big-ass format to be appreciated. That, my dear friends, is the magic of...
DESTROY!!
(Buy your own:
...and
read about DESTROY!! on Scott McCloud's website.)
Bahlactus is big, yeah yeah yeah. He's not small, no no no.
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