Classic Gone-and-Forgotten: Oh, Good Christ, It's The Power Pachyderms!

Raaaaargh, I am ICEBERG HEAD, and let me show you a little icebreaker I know of. Ho ho, ho ho.

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No, seriously folks, it's great to be here tonight ... shoving my ghastly and stretched out mug abruptly through the greenish ice of this frozen lake or whatever. Greenish ice? Don't the folks around here dispose of their antifreeze in the proper recycle facilities?

Anyway, my life's been pretty quiet since I last surfaced ... ha ha ... to force Mera and Aqualad to give me tasty Hostess snack cakes. And you know what? THEY DID! You can pretty much force Mera and Aqualad to do ANYthing, cause what're they gonna do to you, spit? Splash? Screw
'em, I wanted pastries and they didn't have a thing to say about it.

Tonight, I bring you a much-belated edition of Gone&Forgotten featuring big elephant superhero idiots! Here's a scientific fact, 'pachyderm' means 'thick-skinned.' Here's another one, "Iceberg Head' means 'has the head of an iceberg.' And 'hack comedy piece' means pretty
much what it sounds like ..."

Comic books, despite what the name implies, are just not funny.

My UNDENIABLE evidence of this is "POWER PACHYDERMS," a 1989 Marvel
one-shot, coming to us discourtesy of writer Roger Stern and artists Adam Blaustein and Jon D'Agostino (Gotta love that Dag!) ... oh, and Tom Defalco had a hand in creating the concept, so kill yourselves now if you'd like to be spared his venomous touch.

Each time Marvel attempts a humor comic, it becomes harder and harder to remember that this was the same company which produced "Not Brand Ecch." Since the days of Charlie America and Spidey-Man, sadly, Marvel's taken a downturn in the humor department. A handful of What Th-!? stories have managed to keep pace, but for the most part, Marvel's humor comics (and hell, most self-referential comic book parody in general) have been sad, sad, SAD amalgams of context-free pop culture references, poorly executed sight gags with origins at the turn of the century, and self-aware jokes which not only break the fourth wall, they stumble through it drunkenly and spill red wine on your carpet before scratching your car on the way out of the driveway. At least Mad Magazine could throw in some useful Yiddish when the formula started getting old, SCHMUCK! DRECK!

The story dribbles over the pages like so: We open on a circus train, wherein the car holding the troupe's elephants falls off the train and rolls down a neglected side-track. Their detour takes them straight through a gamma bomb test site and a completely unconvincing 'comedic' revamp of the Hulk's origins, and two panels later, the elephants on the train give birth to MUTANT
SUPER ELEPHANTS. This takes us up to the end of page three and the better part of the origin, and so far, NOTHING funny has happened ... which is a theme with this book.

The elephants grow into super hero parallels to Colossus, Cyclops, Elektra and Wolverine - and why these four? I have no idea. I'm already asking for a lot given that the name of the book APPEARS to be a spoof of "POWER PACK," but that there are no Power Pack elements anywhere in the comic ... I guess making it a stilted, unfunny parody of one of the most popular X-Men and two of the oft-neglected background characters AND ALSO of a Daredevil character cast through the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lens MUST MAKE SENSE! Mostly to Tom DeFalco, curse his soul.

Fast forwarding through a painful routine where the Pachyderms meet up with martial arts monk versions of the Three Stooges (well, four of them as Curly and Shemp co-exist. And as we all know, basic Physics tells us that if Shemp and Curly were to simultaneously co-exist in the same space, the resultant explosion would destroy all life on Joe Besser) where we’re treated to not one, not TWO, but THREE separate “We’re reading from the script” gags! Yes, not funny the first time, let’s give it two more shots and see what happens.

Past that, the team assembles, forms a crime-fighting organization with their headquarters well established in the middle of a harbor on a dilapidated boat, and go through a series of personal interactions that mock the ever-popular ‘angsty team dynamic’ of the day. Actually, parodying the angsty team dynamic was ALSO a common phenomenon of the day, but did we get parodies of that? No. Thank goodness.

At this point, I still haven’t found a joke in the entire book, despite the fact that the Wolverine character - Rumbo, by the way , L O L - keeps breaking kayfabe by telling the readers that the characters are fully aware of being in a comic, oh the high hilarity of it. We’ve also been through
a half-dozen swipes from ‘famous’ comic scenes at this point, mostly from Frank Miller’s Elektra and Wolverine stuff. Now, I’m actually admitting there MIGHT’VE been some jokes in there, but I have to confess that my taste for humor was absolutely murdered dead a few pages into the book … because they KEPT PUTTING THE LADY ELEPHANT INTO SEXY POSES!
Fucking AAAAH!

Seriously, a peach-colored anthropomorphic elephant WITH TITS strutting sexy over the joint or hopping around naked in the shower … I’m not going to go as far as to say it’s put me off sex forever, but at the very least it’s put me further off of sex with anthropomorphic elephants than I've ever been before. For the time being anyway, winky face, LOL, a/s/l. type ‘1’ if
you like Limp Bizkit.

Now here’s where the book goes wonky, and I sure as hell know what I just said, but I stand by it. The team gets on the case of Clarinetto, leader of the Brotherhood of Evil Musicians and a neo-Nazi, for some damn reason. Apparently feeling they’d drained every bit of life out of the already dead super-hero parody, your creative team turns to POP SINGERS for further so-called lampooning, as the Pachyderms fight weakly-represented clones of Prince, Cyndi Lauper, The Bruce, Willie Nelson and Madonna. And hey, goddamnit, Willie’s been through enough lately, let the man rest.

Even as I’m trying to figure out the POINT of the damn celebrity spoof - what are they trying to SAY here, why THESE singers - the book throws me another curveball as Electralux - did I mention that’s the terribly clever pseudonym for the lady Elektra Elephant? Cyclops’ analog is called Trunklops, so count your lucky stars Electralux - falls into a vat of radioactive MAKE-UP!

Yes, radioactive make-up, in the basement of a Musical Academy … OF EVIL!

So, at this point I kill myself, which is why I miss it when Elctralux becomes ROGUE ELEPHANT, a crap Dark Phoenix gag enhanced by singing snippets of ‘women power’ songs, and then the team decide to beat up the Three Stooges and take their places as all-wise Martial Arts masters, and Rumbo does another fucking self-aware gag about being in a comic. I miss all of that.

I’d love to wrap this one up in a quick summary of sheer derision, but I’m dead, remember? Power Pachyderms did what Kitty Pryde and Wolverine couldn’t. Congratulations, and MAKE MINE MARVEL!