Welcome to Ghostliness & Nerfherders Presents: East of West, Issue #24 – “The Legion Brings Word”! In the previous installment, Archibald is quite unhappy with the efforts of a hired Japanese crime syndicate tasked with assassinating Xiaolian Mao. This causes Japanese crime syndicate crime boss to die of a crime. A murder crime courtesy of the Conferacy’s chief Crime Man: Andrew Archibald “Crime” Chamberlain.

We see the backstory of John Freeman 8 and Wolf rasslin’ in the good old days. In the present, Freeman allows Lux to take a pyramid full of money back to the Union. Then he tells a rather shaken Vizier that he intends to usurp the throne of the Kingdom (i.e. kill Daddy), take over the world, and make her Queen of the Shitty Dying Earth.

Things are heating up in Apocalypse Year Two and we’ve barely even seen any apocalyptic shit! And that’s fine with me. The politics are way more interesting.

East of West, Issue #24 [January, 2016]
Written by: Jonathan Hickman
“The Legion Brings Word”

Gross, what an unappealing cover. Ezra Orion’s lumpy, fucked up physical presence. He was supposed to die after cramming his throat full of paper and getting dragged into a demon’s mouth, but no. This smelly, veiny mound is still here. It’s really a crying shame.

Orion is ferociously dragging a tattoo machine over someone’s skin. I don’t know whose. “There’s an art to persuasion,” he grits his teeth, eyes bugging out, “especially when persuading those who are blind to a right and proper path…”

He mumbles about choosing words carefully. He is Prophet Orion now. Or always has been? This guy has a lot of nerve, throwing his dick around like King Shit of Fuck Mountain.

His giant, toothy demon buddy, and yes they are friends now, interrupts his ravings. “Rrrrarrrr. Apologiesss, Orion… But trying too hard isss never a good look,” he hisses like one of those talking poet eyeballs, kindly suggesting that he chooses his words even more carefully. Some of these words are little too, shall we say, aggressive? “Sssubtlety, I sssay. Alwaysss and ally in the doomsssaying.

Orion snaps at him, tells him to keep his opinions to himself. ORION’s the prophet, not YOU, you weird Hell thing. Then he tells his screaming tattoo victim, who is splayed out face down and hanging from his limbs in shackles and chains, to cork it. He looks like a sideburns kinda guy from the Confederacy. He’s not having a very cool time while Orion is using his back as parchment paper for his scrawlings.

I’m gonna stick this sword where the sun don’t shine. You’re gonna be a true hero!

This Daniel guy is begging for his life, sweating profusely while Orion freaks him out with emotionless and detached religious nut buffoonery. “After today, you get to walk through life with the luxury of knowing that you are not like all the others.”

Then he flays his back with the sword. If I didn’t know any better, and I don’t, I’d say that was quite painful. But what do I know?

“You are a man of achievement. A fulfiller of destiny. You have done what you were born to do. Take pride in that,” Orion says while rolling up his back skin like a scroll.

Daniel tells this bald fuck to stop, but he will not stop. He will never stop. It is not in his nature to stop. He will keep going. And maybe you will learn to like it when Orion keeps going! “That pain is an honor you have earned.” He just keeps saying stuff like that! Over and over! What a card!

No. Daniel wants it to stop! STOP IT. What the hell dude? Not cool.

Fine. “Do you see? I offered a gift, but all these people really want is convenience. No wonder God has forsaken this soft land. Go on, Buer…”

Nice to meet ya, I’m Mork from Ork. Nanu nanu.

Buer is the name of the demon! How cute. Buer chomps Daniel in one bite from neck to thighs, raining blood all over the dang room.

Ezra Orion, he has earned the pain! He says so himself, AND he wrote his words and Buer can’t tell him to change any of them and they are part of the Message and there are seven words and you can’t say them on television per George Carlin! These words are different, though. These words are for the Chosen! Oh boy!

So round them up, Buer my good chum. Think you can do that? Fetch, Boy, fetch!

“Within me there are many fallen… Hunters, seekers… All of which, my minions.”

Looks like Buer forgot to hiss a few of his S’s there. While he speaks, he doubles over like he’s going to blow a giant shit behind him. Something struggles to rip itself from within Buer out of his back, kinda like a reverse Alien situation. BURSTING FORTH AND OUT, we see a group of bloody, screeching, demon pterodactyl creatures. There are six of them. Each one grabs a scroll made out of human back flesh, each one containing words inked in by Ezra Orion the Smelly Prophet himself!

He instructs them to fly away to deliver the scrolls to each of Chosen. There will be one last gathering of “the faithful”.

So,n’lo, the creepy demon carrier pigeons find their way to the insufferable Chosen ones. A veritable montage is displayed over a few pages of each of them – LeVay, Freeman, Archibald, Mao, and… the Horsemen? – receiving a scroll. LeVay feeds hers a scrap of food. Mao shoots hers down with a bow and arrow.

Awww, how cute. Like a puppy dog ready to claw my face off.

Orion’s words are as follows:

“I devoured the three-fold Message at the fall of Armistice and became the Living Word. Apocrypha made flesh. And with my rebirth, the true believers of the end times were no longer beholden to the static and undecipherable Old Word, but liberated by the New… By me, for I am true providence. My every utterance, constructed – composed – for the ears that hear them. Each Message I sent…unique…to be witnessed by their eyes only. We have all cast off our old skins and put on our new ones. The true Chosen have revealed themselves… Both who have long believed… And those who have not. Now… I call them home.”

Throw that shit in the garbage. This windbag can keep his awful Word. I, for one, am tired of hearing about it.

The Horsemen receive a scroll as well, as I pointed out above with a nicely placed question mark! Their version invites them, as avatars of the end times, to come visit the Chosen to see what fun they’re planning! And Orion loves and forgives them! All is well and namaste.

War calls him a piece of shit as he tears the scroll in half. I’m sorry, a total piece of shit. The whole enchilada of shit. They’re at the Stonehenge-type location where they were reborn as filthy urchin children in Issue #1, and with them is a pea-brained companion named Jed.

Every 10,000 years it’s the same thing. Humanity is useless and stupid so they must be wiped out. It’s actually the fun part about being a Horseman. This time, though, they raise this annoying pup as their own, “teach him to believe and now look… the ape thinks he’s running things”.

Your little boy is a pain in the ass, Conquest. Why didn’t you let me smother him with a pillow when I had the chance?

The thing that Conquest finds most disappointing is that he/she raised Orion to be less of a wimp. He seems like a big, janky wimp. Oh well. You live 900 trillion years, you learn a thing or two once in a while.

“It’s ready,” says Famine, who is stirring a big cauldron of orange goo like a god-danged stereotypical witch. “I’ve cooked down all the meat we brought with us.”

Jed the pea-brain is instructed to lift the cauldron and dump it in the holes. And so he does.

Each of the three holes from whence the three Horsemen were reborn as little imps are filled up with Famine’s pot of boiling hot, rotten goo. “Damn the high cost of transubstantiation…” War mutters as he/she begins to lower him/herself into the hot hole. Yeah baby.

Jed stands in the middle of the platform as all three Horsemen HUURK and GUURK into their next transformed selves. It looks like the event is particularly hard on War, who seems to be enveloped by fiery, eye socket-tugging tendrils.

In the desert, a couple of crows intercept one of the demon pterodactyls after it drops off a scroll. They tear both its wings off mid-flight and it plummets bloodily to the ground.

“You made me a promise, Wolf…” our favorite sneering monochrome gangster mumbles to his companion, “That you’d be with me ‘til this thing of ours is done. Well… it ain’t done. And you never struck me as a man who went back on his word.”

Wolf glances at his scroll. “I’m not,” he says vaguely, “We are… with you. We just won’t be by your side for a bit.”

Sounds an awful lot like going back on his word, to me! Pretty flimsy stuff. I’ve disowned my whole family for much less.

Death resigns to this, giving Wolf the stink-eye. “How long?”

Wolf doesn’t know.

Oh no, is widdle Deathy Weathy going to miss his fwwwiennnds?

Death goes as far as his charm and warmth can, but it’s no use. Imagine that! So he kind of begs them to stay quite pitifully, but it’s too late. They’re going. Death feels betrayed. Even hurt. Maybe he wants to kill himself so that, and I quote Oppenheimer, “he am become him”!

“And what about you?” he snaps at Crow, “You got somethin’ you wanna say before you run off too?”

Yes she does. It’s a bunch of spiritual hippie shit. BUT she also tells him that she knows he will find his son, just as she knows that he’ll really fuck up whoever took him in the first place! “When you do, remember these words and the smile on my face as you kill them all.”

Wolf turns into a giant wolf and Crow stays Crow. She rides him off into the sunrise or sunset or even possibly north or south as well. It really doesn’t matter. They left all the same.

Next, and it’s been a while since we’ve seen Bel Solomon and his Hunter buddy, we’re in another part of the desert where the two of them are roasting a scrawny demon pterodactyl on a spit. Ol’ Bel, ever the skeptic. Ol’ Bel who is actually the designated skeptic of the Chosen. He’s skeptical of the scroll. “Do you think it’s a trap? ‘Cause it sure feels like a trap.”

Show me someone who is triply Chosen and you have yourself a deal.

He pores over the scroll and equivocates. It does seem very sound. Even Cheveyo, Bel’s eternal over-the-shoulder ethereal companion, sees the authenticity of the document. I mean, it’s written with tattoo ink and ripped from some loser’s back. It has to be kinda real.

Bel doesn’t want to, but Cheveyo goads him into doing what he must. He is Chosen, after all. He can’t back out.

His Hunter friend, Thomas, he smells something fishy here. Something’s going on. It sounds like a trap! Did you already say trap? Well, it’s a trap.

“So we shouldn’t go?” Bel asks with this strange look of horror on his face.
“Not sayin’ that at all,” Thomas drawls, “Hell, I’d bet my last dollar everyone we’re lookin’ for will be there.”

“And I just don’t think I could forgive myself if I passed up that kind of opportunity,” he adds, loading up his shotgun.

Final Thoughts

Mass shooting at the old Chosen watering hole. Get out while you still can.