Monday, April 12, 2010

My Axe to Grind with Axe Cop

First off, I enjoy Axe Cop. Honestly I do. The first few pages were awesome and I was part of that group that crashed the site. I still enjoy the comic but there is a serious problem with the ultimate power that is apparently going on in the comic. Yes, I am aware it is written by a kid but the adult in me is having problems with it which was bound to eventually happen and I am free to complain. I mean, there is little forethought put into the comic which is fine for a kid writing it. I made comics like he did. The problem though is the issues that will likely never be covered at all.
1. The Wishes
As we've seen in a bunch of Ask Axe Cops, he'd has plans to kill every bad guy in the universe and if he'd do that, then he'd be without a job. He has the tools to do this as well and a team of people available to do it, all without using any wishes. Wishes seem to just complicate things, and not in the generic badly phrased wish trope. "If wishes were horses, poor men would ride" is the old saying though this comes off to me more as if wishes were horses, there'd be a lot of shit going on, which there is. The unlimited powers make Axe Cop and everyone else have an extreme lack of forethought in a lot of ways and the main reason Axe Cop has for not removing all villains seems to be he is greedy. He wants to have something to do. If they wanted to, the Axe Cop Crew could all enemies from the universe and then wish for something else to do that they would enjoy. Problem solved simply. No more killing people which brings me to point two.
2. Lack of Law
Axe Cop is a gigantic antihero. He kills with no regard for the law. He kills other law enforcers. I remember my obsession with violence at that age, sort of. I never really killed people in games, video or real, though. Bad guys vanished or they fell off the screen in video games or they just came back in another episode in tv shows. It is a bit disturbing how Axe Cop and his party simply kill everyone they come across and see as being evil. Malachi even had them accidentially kill innocent people. Not to mention there is the fact that Axe Cop became a law enforcer simply by signing up to be one. Nobody keeps him in check. God is apparently fine with this as well even though the golden rule is "love thy neighbor as thyself." There is also that whole though shalt not kill commandment. I don't see Axe Cop following any law other than his own which is to kill the bad guys.
In the future I have no idea how the comic will grow. Personally I'd like to see it be remade in a decade or so after Malachi has grown up. I think a look back with maturity might make the comic really interesting with him viewing the black and white morality of childhood with more adult eyes. As it is now though, it is rather Frank Miller-esqe except it lacks whores.
I'm going to keep reading the comic for now and I highly suggest taking a look at it but these ideas were just on my mind partially from the other negative critique that was posted and partially because I need to update my own blog more. I still liked the early pages the most because it was fresher. The world was more natural in a lot of ways because we could see it a bit more as our own, there were no wishes and the weirdness wasn't as omnipresent. Now it just seems like attempts to pile ideas on ideas with no format and that feels sloppy like it should in a lot of ways because a kid is writing it. This though is an adult reviewing it and I have issues.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Unlike other reviews that have bashed Axe Cop, I think this one is very level headed and fair. I kept imagining Kill Bill when reading your review. Haha.

Will said...

This is certainly less flamer-riffic than other Axe Cop criticism I have read, but why try to apply logic to this strip? Isn't that part of its charm?

PD said...

True enough (especially about the early bits being the best), though yes I am reading it for the complete abandonment of reason. The most fun can be had out of this because you don't have to take anything seriously.