What Were They Thinking?!: Monster Mash-Up #1

Written by Keith Giffen, Joe Casey, Johanna Stokes & Kevin Church

Art by Steve Ditko & others

 

Keith Giffen and Boom! Studios revisit the "Classic Comics Re-Mixed" format of the previous ‘What Were They Thinking?!’, this time choosing all monster stories instead of war stories to mess around with. It is, after all, October, so what better time for a monster-themed gag book?

 

For those new to WWTT comics, it's the same basic idea behind Woody Allen's 1966 What's Up, Tiger Lily?, only instead of re-dubbing the dialogue for comedic effect, Giffen and company are re-writing the narration and dialogue bubbles for comedic effect.

 

Where exactly the stories are coming from isn't disclosed, but they appear to be from various anthologies, of the sorts that used to be abundant in comics' Silver Age, right up until the seventies or so. The first story is drawn by none other than Steve "Co-creator of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange" Ditko, though the artists responsible for the other stories are unknown. They're cheekily credited as "Dint Leaveaname" and "Kudnot Tellya."

 

Nothing tickles the funny bones of the quartet of writers quite like gay sex it would seem, as most of the book is devoted to making homoerotic undertones in the art explicit in the new words.

 

The Ditko-drawn, Casey-rewritten "Barry's Secret Shame" tells of a deep sea-diver who alludes to a Troy McClure-like fetish that recounts his time with the Sea People. (I'm pretty sure that originally he was being captured by them, but here that wrestling is explained as something else entirely).

 

Later, in "Manlust," re-written by Chuch, the butch-named space heroes Dirk Rocket and Rick Beardley fight aliens, giant purple lizards and they're feelings for one another.

 

More successful in their attempts at humor are Johanna Stokes' "Hats Off," which was originally about two jungle adventurers fighting a giant lizard man, but has become a tense story of one man's jealousy at another stealing his hat-wearing, pipe-smoking, white-dude-in-the-jungle look (with a Lizard Man blundering in at the end), and Giffen and Church's re-imagining of a weird Sasquatch-from-space story as a romance comic entitled "Hairy Girls."

 

Using the words to comment on/make fun of the art, the writers behind WWTT offer a reading experience like no other. In the Giffen/Church story, for example, the narrator can hardly even narrate the story, it gets so silly. When the Bigfoot creature heads for a weird capsule/vehicle-type thing, for example, the narrator breaks down: "What's that thing she's crawling into? Some kind of space onion? Does this make sense to anyone?" And when the same page breaks the left-to-right, up-to-down standard layout of Western comics, the narrator shouts over the fourth wall: "Who laid this page out, Escher?"

 

Well, it sure wasn't Keith Giffen.  If there's one thing that guy knows how to do, it's lay out a comic book page. And if there's two things that guy knows how to do, it's lay out a comic book page and put out a funny comic book. WWTH:MMU should fit nicely into your Bwa-Ha-Ha collection.

 

Rating - 8