Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Red Hood and the Outlaws (Vol. 1), Issue #6 – “Take Me Down To the Paradise City Where the Sea Runs Red & the Girls Are Pretty!”

I’m going to take the opportunity to express my complete, volatile hatred of Scott Lobdell and everything he is subjecting me to here. His horrible titles. His horrible storytelling. *googles Scott Lobdell* ..his horrible nerd-bro face.

Let the record show that this is worst comic book I’ve read so far by a long shot. I trust something else will earn the top spot some day, but it’s going to be hard to beat. I can tell you that much.

In the previous installment, who gives a fucking shit? Let’s just move on.

Red Hood and the Outlaws (Vol. 1), Issue #6 [April, 2012]
Written by: Scott Lobdell
“Take Me Down To the Paradise City Where the Sea Runs Red & the Girls Are Pretty!”

OK, maybe this won’t be too terrible. The cover promises a story about Red Hood and Starfire’s first encounter, and I tend to be a sucker for flashback stories. They are usually a good vehicle for character building, and I’m wondering if Red Hood is responsible for busting Starfire out of her torturous slavery, er, lifestyle. But I may already be giving this issue too much credit. Best temper my expectations…

“It’s always been hard to say goodbye. So I never do.” Then how do you know if you never do it? Red Hood, you are a silly goose as always. An editor’s not tells me that the events of this issue take place one month before the events of Issue #1. If there was any trust in the audience, this note would be unnecessary. It goes to show what kind of readership we may have for Red Hood and his Two Merry Outlaws.

Red Hood is fighting some dude in a submarine. “Here’s a little clue for you – me – killing all your men. Should have thought twice about trying to smuggle nuclear weapons into Miami. Why could you just be trying to sneak in drugs like everyone else? At least then you only have to worry about sniffing dogs and not guys like me.” Red Hood busts through the steel exterior of the vessel with, I don’t know, his fucking face? He swims away just far enough before the submarine explodes and propels Red Hood through the water.

Dumb.

Later, Jason Todd – that’s Red Hood when he’s not wearing the red hood! – is on some faraway island lying half-conscious in a makeshift bed of rocks and sticks and other pointy, uncomfortable artifacts of nature. He’s hooked up to an elaborate alien gadget that I wouldn’t want near me even if I was dying of Elaborate Alien Gadget Withdrawal Syndrome.

A few days later, he’s off the machine getting some rest. A VERY scantily clad orange woman with the green eyes and the purple lips approaches. The poor unconscious boy seems familiar, as if they hung out together in another life somewhere. Maybe they met at a Red Robin and got a hamburger? Wouldn’t that be something? Get it?! Red Robin. It’s like because you see…

Pants? Where we’re going, we won’t need pants!

Jason puts a gun to Kori’s neck, but then eases up when he realizes that the assailant six inches away is a very sultry orange lady. He’s all “where am I?” and she’s all “I’ll tell you in a minute”. Her neck has melted the tip of Jason’s gun. He’s not too alarmed. He’s detached, you might say. He asks Kori how the hell she did that and she’s all “I’ll tell you in a minute”. She tells him to just rest. REST, DAMNIT! RELAX!

That evening, Jason has a vivid dream about his old Robin days. He’s getting some training from Dick Grayson, another former Robin who is now Nightwing and still shitty. “Patience isn’t just a virtue, Jason. It can save your life.” Wait for the right moment but don’t hesitate to make a move. Wait, but don’t wait too much! Stay still and don’t move, but then move fast! Are you getting all this? Write it down. And then don’t write it down.

“Enough already!” hollers the ever-petulant Jason. “I don’t need to be told how to do my job by the guy who left me to fill in his cape. And besides, Batman picked me… not you.

Dick looks visibly hurt by this, and I’m sitting here positively LMAOing. “…Dude, relax,” Dick stares at the fucker coldly, “this isn’t a competition.”

Yeah. NOW it isn’t, sure. Jason Robin disagrees, calls him an ass, and leaps down impatiently. He didn’t wait for the right moment and, clearly, he moved too soon. He head gets smashed to paste by a cement truck! Or, barring that, something else happens that would have been avoided with a little more patience. Maybe we’ll see that later, I guess, who cares.

Back on the Island of Misfit Heroes, Jason wakes up from his stupor and wanders through the jungle looking for Miss Orange and discovers a huge spacecraft that Koriand’r had turned into a home.

Nice to meet you Coriander-Like-the-Spice from Tamarind-Like-the-Fruit. Your home looks like total garbage.

The Spice Girl lets him in and shows him around. It makes me wonder if her bed is the final sight on the tour, wink wink cough puke. Jason continues to be nude, covering his penis and balls with what I hope is poison oak. He apologizes in advance for being presumptuous, but he asks if this is a repurposed spacecraft more of a hideaway than a home. Then he asks about a hundred other prying questions before Kori slaps the leaf off his dick and tells him to calm down. “I’ve just never seen an alien before – orange or otherwise.” Classy. More like Rude Hood.

“And after so long in solitude, I’ve forgotten how obnoxious humans can be?” she says with an extremely icy glare. Jason apologizes for being, you know, a man. “Let me start over – thank you, Princess Koriand’r, for saving my life.”

Think nothing of it, Opie. There’s some clothes over here *points* if you want to hide your grotesque nudity *points*. The clothes, Jason notices, are Nightwing’s various costumes. Flashing back to a time when Red Hood was holding Batman down on the ground with his boot, he tells the caped crusader that he had failed him. He left Red Hood with the Joker. The Joker! He’s mean and weird and you left Red Hood with him! “It’d be so easy to kill you,” Red Hood says with a dead look in his eyes before Nightwing swings down to intercept. He kicks him right in the mouth.

As it turns out, Kori knows Nightwing well, explaining why she found Jason Todd so familiar. Jason is crazed with fury over why the hell this lady has Nightwing’s clothes, but she admits that she and Nightwing had a bit of a fling. She did lewd acts, he came on her face, it was all very special. She smells the clothes with a sigh. Good times. Happy memories. Here, put these on so she can relive the magic!

Oh, Nightwing! Tee hee! My hero…

Jason gets used to the hunk of shrapnel that Kori calls her home. For one thing, there’s a kick-ass arsenal stockpiled there. For another thing, why should he feel threatened anyway. “She obviously loved Dick Grayson – almost as intently as I hated him.”

He picks up a really clunky-looking hunk of metal that looks like three weapons fused together into one big mess. He smiles as he looks through the scope. “My war on crime is never going to be the same again,” he says, hefting the 400-pound pile of shit. However, the war on crime is far from how he really feels. “All I can think about is how to use it to hurt people. How far have I fallen from Ducra’s teachings?”

Right, yeah, Ducra. The muppet who taught him everything he knows about jacking off, basically.

Speaking of jacking off, Kori stands ankle-deep in the water staring up at the moon, wearing a two-piece. Finally wearing pants, Jason approaches her with the intention to, heh, “talk”. There is something you need to know about me–” he starts as he gazes into her creepy green eyeballs. She kisses him before he can say another word. Now, I know what you’re thinking: hey, she’s just treating him as a replacement for Nightwing! She doesn’t really care about him! And to that I say… *clears throat* …yes.

“What the hell?” Jason exclaims, entirely into it despite what his question suggests. Kori is like I’M AN ALIEN LOL SORRY. So they actually sit down and talk this time.

“So I told her about me and Batman. How, like Dick Grayson, I was also the ward of Batman – a partner. I was a superhero named Robin. I told her everything.”

I’m sure Kori was thrilled to hear all about it. I can see her yawning with excitement, believe you me. She literally doesn’t care; the past is the past, and the present is the present, and that’s all she wrote, man.

Behold, the Furnace Lady. She needs maintenance every six months. Change her filter once a month. Clean her sensor as needed.

Kori is chock full of heat. Heat that’s supposed to be there. Jason, however, is full of heat that shouldn’t be there. Hot air, you might say. Keep it pent up and you’ll explode in a torrent of guts and feces!

They kiss again. He appreciates her. Batman never kissed him like this. Wait… maybe he has…

We end the issue with Jason and Kori hanging out in her abandoned hideaway spaceship wreckage. It gets WiFi, apparently, which is pretty kicking rad. He’s browsing the Internet on his laptop. After hitting all those classic porn sites we all know and love, he stumbles upon a news article full of fake Middle East country names.

Some redheaded dude flashes a peace sign in the photo.

“AMERICAN PUT TO DEATH IN QURAC. ROY HARPER TO BE EXECUTED BY INTERIM QURAC GOVERNMENT. STUDENT PROTESTERS IN RAQISTAN HAVE TAKEN TO THE STREETS IN A DEMONSTRATION OF PEACE.”

We’re at the end of that one month before the events of the beginning of Issue #1. Now there’s a clunky sentence!

“Kori,” Jason smiles, “are you up for a road trip?”

Final Thoughts

Qurac! Raqistan? Look, we all know which two countries they’re supposed to be and I’m appalled at the stereotyping! I hope the governments of Snyan, Graphganistan, and Papa’s New Guinea are spared this kind of flagrant racism!