Fewer Hold-Me-Backs Every Day
• Last weekend I broke down and bought the entire sixteen-issue run of Kid Eternity from Vertigo.
The deal with Kid Eternity is that, like, he was fishing or something when a U-Boat blew up his boat, but when he got to Heaven it was determined by, you know, The Powers That Be that the kid had died before he was supposed to so they sent him back to Earth with the power to resurrect any historical figure he felt like by shouting the word "eternity." There's also this monk/angel guy that hangs out with him called the Keeper.
Then, in the early 90's, The Kid got brought back for a delightfully unreadable three-part miniseries by Grant Morrison. A year or two later, Vertigo gave Kid Eternity his own monthly title, which seemed to have been designed to be a more-accessible comic book, but loosely within the parameters that Morrison established. Kid Eternity was canceled after sixteen issues because no one liked it but me, and it ain't hard to tell why. In the comic, the Kid is constantly surrounded by a rotating cast of flat characters whose only purpose appears to be to relentlessly spew the kind of pseudo-intellectual claptrap that I can only imagine I found to be entertaining fifteen years ago.
Now, though, I find Kid Eternity entertaining on an entirely different level. I like that the Kid is surrounded by these idiots and caricatures and their monologues because I have a powerful resistance to these things, and so, probably in spite of the intentions of the comic's writer, does the Kid. He just wants to be Plastic Man, but the people around him won't let him. That, and Sean Phillips occasionally wrecked shit. (Not to mention the kind of hilarious WWII propaganda aspect of Kid Eternity's origin story.)
• I figure that since it's Saturday you're probably not at work, so maybe today you can hear some audio, watch a video, and maybe look at a picture of a woman in a bathing suit.
Audio: a lesser-known Digital Underground joint I was listening to around the same time I was initially reading Kid Eternity.
Video: the single greatest interview with a rapper probably ever.
Women in bathing suits: Audrina in a bikini, posted here because Jush just got the internet.
