Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Alias (Vol. 1), Issue #13 – “Rebecca, Please Come Home (Part 3)”! In the previous installment, Jessica Jones hits up the local high school and gets… nowhere, really. The kids are dumb.

She and Sheriff Luke Wilson, as I like to call him, had a big ol’ bone session on top of his police car and he was look “whoa doggies, you’re too much for me to handle” and that was the end of that. Fuckin’ small-town cops.

A woman from the newspaper tells Jones to go to church over the weekend while she’s in town. Jones stops in the church on Saturday and catches the pastor practicing his “God Hates Mutants” sermon. That’s going to go over well.

In short, Jones is no closer to solving this “missing Rebecca” case than she was three weeks ago before Rebecca even went missing! That’s sad!

Maybe some other drunk asshole in Hicksville has some leads. We’ll see.

Alias (Vol. 1), Issue #13 [November, 2002]
Written by: Brian Michael Bendis
“Rebecca, Please Come Home (Part 3)”

We pick up exactly where we left off! Again! Just like last time! Let’s see Jessica Jones fight with a pastor.

First of all, she’s wondering why a church service would be talking about, of all things, mutants. Mutants. Second of all, this guy recognizes Jones as the woman investigating the missing girl case. He’s chuffed to see her in the flesh! A real superhero person!

Anywho, Jones asks the guy if the Crosses go to church. And the answer is, sadly, not often enough. Rebecca, as far as he’s aware, has never been to church.

Anywho again, the pastor hopes to see Jones tomorrow at the real service. She starts to walk away, but then stops herself. Because there’s something she needs to get off her chest…

“You’re actually going to get up in front of a group of people and say that ‘mutants are an abomination’?” She points and accusing finger at this fat sack of Christly shit. He doesn’t seem too shameful about the truth that, yeah, he will.

“People are going to listen to you and they are going to believe you.”

“I hope so…”

“But it’s not true.”

First of all, sir, your fly is unzipped and there are balls flopping everywhere.

Pastor Fat is inclined to disagree with that opinion. It’s not natural. It’s not God’s way. Yada yada fuckin’ yada. Arguing is a really big waste of time with these people, honestly. You might as well go FUCK a TREE STUMP. She rants about how he’s preaching hate like some uneducated hick from Hicksville, USA (which is every town in the Bible Belt). Teach love! Not hate! Etc.

“And I tell you…” she continues rantily. “If I find you and this dog and pony show has anything to do with what happened to Rebecca Cross–”

And then she admits to Pastor Crapface that she’s a mutant. And Pastor Crapface just stares.

Annnnnd scene! Whew, that was fun! Let’s go get some donuts…

…are you back? Great! Because Jessica Jones is now in the bathroom of a podunk diner repeating “fuck you” into a mirror! After this incredibly healthy dose of self-therapy, she notices a sentence scrawled on the side of a stall: “Jesus was a mutant.”

Upon exiting the bathroom, Jones spots Sheriff “Can’t Handle the Sex” approaching her, much to her chagrin. He wants to apologize. She wants to hear none of it.

“The thing is – is I have had some bad breakups and –”

“I swear I don’t care.”

“No, seriously, I – I like you. I just…”

Jones smiles. “You like me?”

“Well, yeah…”

“You don’t even know me, you fuck!”

“I know you a little…”

“All you know about me is that if you get a couple of drinks into me, I might fuck you. That’s all you know.”

Now we’re cooking with conversational gas! She starts to walk away in a huff (he did throw her in jail for the night instead of bringing her to his home, for the record), but he insists that he’s really, truly, very, very sorry and that nothing unseemly will ever happen again, cross his heart, hope to die, stick a needle in his eye. He gets salty when he ignores his apology by answering her ringing phone.

Hi, it’s Ant-Man’s Paul Rudd calling! Ageless as always! What are you doing tonight??

Jessica Jones is not happy that she’s getting an unsolicited call from fuckin’ Ant-Man right now. Carol Danvers is a bitch for giving her number out and she can rot in Bitch Hell for eternity. Jones tells him that now is a bad time; she’s in the middle of a case. Ant-Man is like “wow fascinating let’s get together some time”.

After some semi-pleasant, go-nowhere chit chat, Jones spots the woman from the newspaper – the one who told her to go to church – motioning Jones toward her from a window. Whether or not she’ll actually go out with Ant-Man is tantalizingly left up for debate!

The newspaper woman gets a lot of mail from angry 77-year-olds who compare mutants to “coloreds” and that they are “just like animals”. This is just a snippet of the kind of people who live in and around town.

Jones wants to apologize for the way she acted toward her the other day. Reporters, you know? Newspaper people? They’re like coloreds or animals, you know? Unseemly.

“So I take it you already went and visited our First Unity Church of Hypocrisy and Racism?” she asks Jones.

“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I almost – I swear to God I always popped him one on the nose.”

“He’s a fucking asshole.”

What kills this woman, this unnamed reported, is that the church will be packed to the gills with his followers ready to lap up his words. Like DOGS, they are. Jones asks her if the pastor possibly has something to do with Rebecca’s disappearance. The woman doesn’t think so, but indirectly, maybe? Once upon a time, a few years ago, a little kid fell out of a treehouse without a scratch on him. A week later he was found beaten almost to death in a schoolyard because of possible mutant reasons. The entire family left in the middle of the night, never to be seen by the town again. The kid died in the hospital. Alone.

“This shit with the girl, it was bound to happen…”

Simon Le Bon? Yuck. Give me Daryl Hall any day of the week.

The newsreporter lady doesn’t think Rebecca is actually a mutant. She’s been doing some digging herself because, you know, the police are completely useless. Especially Sheriff What’s-His-Nutz. Rebecca’s parents won’t cooperate. All her friends just have rumors. They made up the mutant stuff! Rebecca dressed differently, behaved differently. Come on, man! Fake news!

Jones still thinks Rebecca might be a mutant. A mutant on the lam, see? She pulls out one of Rebecca’s scrapbooks. See, there’s like, dark imagery and occult stuff in there! Real devil shit. Badass, actually. Anyway, mutant proof positive.

“I still have to talk to the father,” Jones says.

“Half the town thinks he did it.”

“I don’t.”

“I don’t either. But a lot of people think he did.”

“What do you think?”

The reporter thinks she was raped and murdered by a fellow student, that’s what she thinks. Because they thought she was a mutant. The reporter wonders if there might be a clue in the scrapbook…

Later, Jones visits Fat Daddy Cross’ humble trailer home. The TV is blaring a news report about Matt Murdock, handsome New York City lawyer, who has been recently outted as Daredevil! And he’s denying it! And maybe it’s true! But maybe it’s not! And it’s a big scandel! News of the century!

Oh yeah, and Mr. Cross is dead with a knife sticking out of his chest.

Final Thoughts

How the hell are they going to wrap this shit up in one more issue? Rebecca is probably skeletonizing in a broom closet somewhere as we speak. Case closed.