‘The Goon: For Want of Whiskey and Blood’ – Eric Powell (Dark Horse)


You already know that I love ‘The Goon’; the only surprise left is that I managed to hold off binging on the whole series for as long as I did. All good things come to an end though. Posts for Volumes 14 and 15 have been on the blog for a good couple of years (Here and Here, in case you were wondering) so ‘For Want of Whiskey and Blood’ is the final piece of the puzzle, so to speak ;o)

I didn’t get a lot of reading done over the weekend (okay, hardly any reading in fact) but I did make a little time to polish this last volume off. Let me tell you about it…

The return of the Zombie Priest, a latin-tongued Godzilla, drunk sailors and a Halloween visit from Billy the Kid are just a few of the special tricks and treats for the Goon and Franky. Nothing too arduous then but, why has the Zombie Priest returned? And why are all his messages trying to kill the Goon…?

Lets get the slightly awkward bit out of the way first… 99% of ‘The Return of the Lizard Man’ is in Spanish and while I was just about able to translate the title, I was stumped by the rest. It’s looking like I’ll have to wait for my daughter to finish her GCSE Spanish before I find out what everyone was actually saying. Whatever is happening though, it looks gorgeous on the page.

Moving on to the rest of the book (which luckily for me, is all in English) what we’re looking at here is essentially a repeat of ‘Them That Raised Us Lament’, at least in terms of structure. There’s a threat brewing on the horizon but the Goon and Franky must negotiate a few tricky situations first before they can start worrying about what’s coming. Not that the Goon is worried but, you know what I mean ;o)

The good news is that while the stories in ‘Them That Raised Us Lament’ weren’t bad, the ones we get here are a lot more fun to read. I’ll be honest, there was still a part of me that wanted the main event to just hurry up and get here but what we get instead of that is just great fun to spend a little time with.

I loved how the Goon and the Zombie Priest come together again and the resulting conversation… Even though it’s only a page long, you can still tell how much these two hate each other and that has got to bode well for the final two books (spoiler alert, it really does). The rest of the stories are really just ‘monster of the day’ lining up to take a beating, from the Goon and Franky, but there’s a hell of a lot of weird energy to accompany them; that strange mixture of horror, tragedy and toilet humour where you least expect it. It all makes for a wholly unique reading experience and that’s all I’m after really. ‘For Want of Whiskey and Blood’ more than delivers on that score.

I’ve got a hell of a day ahead of me so I’m going to stop here. Thanks for sticking around while I took this journey one more time (and it won’t be the last). If you haven’t read these books already, well… You know what to do about that ;o)

(All of my 'Goon' posts can be found Here)

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