Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Red Hood and the Outlaws (Vol. 1), Issue #4 – “Come Fly With Me – Come Die, Just Die Away!”! And this is by far the worst title yet. I’m so pissed right now. In the previous installment, Red Hood, Arsenal, and Starfire enter the Chamber of All in the Himalayan mountains to search for an artifact (which turns out to be a snowglobe from a Colorado gift shop and that pisses Red Hood off).

The Chamber of All is guarded by a 4,000-year-old shirtless bald child, S’aru, who allows them through the chamber in exchange for their most precious of memories. Starfire’s precious memory was destroying one of her captors as a child. Arensal’s precious memory was being talked out of suicide by a crocodile. Red Hood’s precious memory was, as Robin, having to stay in from patrol due to being sick and Bruce Wayne stays back too to watch TV with him.

I suppose the meaning of Red Hood’s precious memory is that, deep down, that good guy is still in there. However, angry at the snowglobe, he tells S’aru to just keep the memory.

This series has been such a slog so far. I remain emotionally unconnected to the whole team, and the art is so cluttered and chaotic that I don’t find it to be as absorbing as, I imagine, it should be.

BUT, this storyline is my path to the Batman: Night of the Owls multi-series event, which I want to get to eventually. I’ve heard good things. So, press on I must.

Red Hood and the Outlaws (Vol. 1), Issue #4 [February, 2012]
Written by: Scott Lobdell
“Come Fly With Me – Come Die, Just Die Away!”

CRUX WANTS STARFIRE… DEAD!

Oh wow, I hope it happens. How am I supposed to give a shit that the alien woman wearing 4mm² of clothing might get killed by some pointy-toothed reptile creature? Not me! Show me more of that cool-as-ass Colorado snowglobe.

“My name is Roy Harper. I’m an alcoholic.”

Oh God. How many jerkoff motions is this one going to take? We’re in Middleton, Colorado, where redhead Roy is at a bar getting another drink filled by some Daisy Duke bartender.

“You sure I can’t get you anything harder?” she asks.
“Funny, I was just going to ask you the same–”

Yes, yes. Very classy. Roy has a sponsor named Waylon, just like Bubbles from the Wire without the greasy long hair. Maybe. He shouldn’t be in a bar, but he’s in a bar.

About to get his ass kicked, too. A very large man with a flannel lumberjack shirt and very VERY Ron Perlman face approaches Roy with his posse and tells him he’s “sittin’ on his stool, talkin’ to his lady.”

Jason Todd, sitting next to Roy, beats them up and makes them cry on the floor within three seconds.

“My apologies, sir,” he says, brushing off his sleeves. “You can have your stool back.”

Waylon has always told Roy to stay away from the types of trouble-makers, ne’er do wells, sportos, motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, and dickheads. The kind that are a bad influence! The kind that are Jason Todd. Roy, on the other hand, argues that Jason Todd isn’t a bad influence! He’s a good influence! So that’s settled once and for all, then.

What’s worse? The quotation marks around “downtown”, or the horrible misspelling of “officer”?

I’m starting to think that, to make up for the complete lack of substance, Red Hood and the Outlaws needs to pack in as many sexy women as they can muster to keep everyone’s attention. It’s not working for me! Ha ha ha ha ha! Heh. … … er….

Anyway, they get kicked out of the bar. Surprise, surprise.

Starfire is elsewhere. I can never remember her fucking name. “Subterfuge is the word,” she narrates. “An Earth concept. On Tamaran, if you want something – you kick down the door and take it.”

Sounds reasonable to me. Fooey on “Earth concept”. That neighbor’s Playstation 5 is rightfully mine!

Starfire conspicuously floats above the snowy houses of a small neighborhood. So conspicuous, in fact, that I bet people can see her from 40 miles away! “Subterfuge is why I’m up here, keeping an eye on these two,” she claims, but I think it’s so Earthlings can get a nice view of her cooch. This neighborhood, or hamlet, is where Jason is going to track down the Untitled. A quaint little area. Pies cooling on the window sill. Domestic abuse. It’s got it all.

Allow me to translate for you: “CUNT! Fucking hell cunt!”

Out of nowhere, while she muses about why she cares so much about these losers and why she is so willing to help, she gets slashed and bloodied and thrown around by some invisible entity that turns into a visible entity and that visible entity is CRUX, who will spend the rest of the issue in a fight with the Fire of Stars. Should be really boring.

“Strak es tru cor’str lekkre!” she exclaims, having a stroke. “M’ro bountre kel!”

Whatever, lady. Here comes Crux flying through the air, even LESS conspicuous then Starfire, ready to rumble! He’s all like “I’m going to kill you, please let me kill you,” and she’s all like “Thank you for the courteous discussion. I am Princess Blah of the Planet Blah Blah.

Even Crux gets some narration here. He’s been tracking her down for years, He knows every single little thing about Tamaran there is to know, such as how many glaciers are in the Thraxoalthan Ocean and how many bathrooms there are in C’gjas4jrp. For a while there he thought the trail had gone cold, but here she is at last! At last! Time to tear her a new one! Some kid on the internet posted a thing on a message board and led him to her. Seriously! I’m not making that part up, and I sure do make a lot of things up!

Which is good, honestly, because Ducra smells like old cottage cheese and a slaughterhouse full of farts.

“I took the name CRUX because I am the human being willing to draw a line in the sand between and the invading hordes of–”

He doesn’t finish that thought, because Starfire punches this so-called human being in the chest. I’m glad we don’t get to see more of this yet.

Jason Todd wants to interrogate the sexy occifer and he tells a bitter Roy to wait outside while he sticks organs into her.

Jason has a gun to her head, and she’s still being all coy. He needs some files that might point him to the whereabouts of the Untitled! By any means necessary! Even if he has to stick organs into her, by god.

I don’t think I ever really got this explanation, but the Untitled are a “very ancient and evil mystical race – maybe a dozen left on the planet – who have been hiding among humans for centuries.” And Occifer Halle Berry wonders why he even thinks they even exist on Even Earth!

It’s just one that exists on Earth, and it’s because Jason can FEEL IT in his dick. Which isn’t inside the occifer, but at least that’s still on the table. “They usually hide in positions of authority in order to make it easier to cover their tracks,” he says, laying it all out there for really stupid readers like me understand what’s going on! Can we all guess what’s going to happen next? Huh? Can we?

Cover blown. She sticks her hand right through his back and makes him all tingly. “The few remaining members of our race–” YADA YADA YADA! The few remaining members of her race want to stay in hiding. Even on Earth. It’s fun, and the All-Caste have a truce with them. So it’s a good arrangement. “No need to struggle, pup. Once I’ve eaten your liver, I’ll know everything you know.”

Occifer Hannibal Lecter barely moves before Roy enters the room and THUPTS eight arrows through the back of her head. Eight. I counted them. She turns around, calls him an idiot, and tells him, for no discernable reason whatsoever, that steel can’t hurt her. Only copper. So get some copper arrows and come back. Or maybe a pot or a pan.

Jason already knew this. So Roy knows this. And he throws some spiky copper through her head.

THAT’S GOTTA HURT! *horn honk*

Back to the fighting between Orange Julie and Lizard Man. They do a lot of talking at each other while fighting, which is a waste of breath and energy to be sure. “Before you die, I want you to know exactly why you’re being dispatched… and by whom,” Crux says. And why? Fucking why? What does that matter? What is her brain death corpse going to do with that information? And if she stays alive, then it’s information she now has that might work against him. Dumb. Dumb dumb dumb.

“It was less than five years ago– my mum, my dad, and I were–”

JESUS CHRIST! AGGGHHHH!! WHO CARES?!

Long story short, Crux was a human and his parents were scientists at the University of Edinburgh. A Tamaran ship crashed the fuck into their car while they were driving home with Crux in it. His parents died. The Tamaran individual walked away unscathed. It’s like Bruce Wayne if, on that fateful day, a UFO landed on his parents’ faces instead of a bullet!

So Crux took it upon himself to continue alien research, which is what his parents did I guess. He “dedicated his life to tracking down every alien he could”. He also studied corpses. Whether or not he fornicated with the corpses is between him and the corpses!

Then he injected himself with alien DNA to get an upper hand! Now he looks like shit.

Get ‘im, gurl.

Understandably, Starfire isn’t sympathetic to this sad-sack’s life story and uses some of that recuperated energy to start throwing Crux around. There’s a “SPLACKT” onomatopoeia involved! Then Crux swims away, pissing off Starfire. What a wuss move.

The fake cop Untitled lady is still not dead. Her head is split in two down to the bottom of her ears. “You are toying with dangerous forces here,” she says as brown smoke and maggots seep out of her skull. “…in short, I was the last Untitled you should have bothered.”

Jason only tracked her because she started pushing around the All-Caste. She doesn’t care. Something fucked up is about to happen and the Roy/Jason Dream Team need to get out of there. Stat! Roy thinks this is a wuss move, the biggest wuss move since the other wuss move, but Jason doesn’t care. Bye.

Starfire is still chasing Crux, who is spending more time underwater than would seem to be possible. Then she realizes that he doesn’t have to defeat her, especially due to his subpar strength. He can, apparently, travel his way through some Stargate that Starfire calls a “Tamaran Transubstantiator”, using her own race’s technology against her, which is such a huge plot hole right now that I’m having a heart attack.

Crux knew, too, that he couldn’t beat her. BUT, “to use technology from her home planet? A device I found buried in the base of a Mayan temple? There’s a beautiful symmetry to it all. That I could employ the alien’s own devices against them.”

*clutches chest, dies very painfully forever*

Congratulations! Welcome aboard! We really like watching reality TV shows about people eating bugs. We also enjoy accidentally running people over with our cars and driving away quickly.

Meanwhile, Roy wants to go kill things but Jason, now donned with a Red Hood, needs to stay. So Roy goes and Jason stays, mostly because Starfire aka Kori aka Korfire has been abducted by something that may or may not be an Untitled. Oh no!

The not-Untitled Crux dipshit “erased the line between he and Starfire”, and now she’s stuck on a glacier in the middle of nowhere? It’s very hard to understand.

“I prepared for this night years ago,” Red Hood says to himself as he sits in waiting with a couple of guns in his hands. “A year of training under the All-Caste. A night none of us believed would ever happen. Why am I so happy? Because I know I’m ready. Who knows? Maybe I was born ready.”

He throws his guns to the ground and whips out some pointy rapiers out of his boots. He strikes quite a beautiful pose as he waits for Untitled Cop to come get’im. She is going to kill him, then everyone else in the town, because “he wouldn’t leave her alone”.

Yeah right, lady. Just try it.

*pose*

Final Thoughts

This is the worst fucking comic series yet. Just an irredeemable pile of ugly, misshapen turds. There’s nothing I like about this. I hate the characters, the story is completely stupid, and nothing makes sense whatsoever. This Scott Lobdell guy can suck a muffler.

See you next issue!