Review: Blood, Sweat and Tears -- and Tacos!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 4, 2014
I look forward to every issue of Blood & Tacos and sometimes start snickering and chortling before I even get through the table of contents. Johnny Shaw (Plaster City, Big Maria, Dove Season) is one of the funniest guys in the country and he has assembled a rogues gallery of other wits as contributors to this mag, which specializes in satirizing such 1970s and 1980s era potboilers as Don Pendleton's "Executioner" novels, Murphy and Sapir's "Destroyer" series and numerous other over-the-top adventure stories featuring "explosioners, pistolists and fistmen," an alarming number of which have moussed hair and stylish mustaches!The gimmick here is that Shaw and his friends come up with "discovered" classics of the genre in each issue, treasures from "a bygone era filled with wide-eyed innocence and mustaches." Most of these tales they invented themselves based on their own extensive reading of these books. Each has a convincing back story about how the particular yarn was discovered and biographical notes about the "authors," most of which are even funnier than the parodies themselves. Plus mustaches! (I did mention the mustaches, right?)This particular issue features terrific stories by some of the best hardboiled writers in the racket today, including Ray Banks, Josh Stallings and Andrew Nette. But every issue -- and I own them all -- is equally hilarious..If you love cornball adventure yarns and like to laugh, what better way to blend the two guilty pleasures than by reading clever parodies of those stories? I can't think of a single one -- of course my brain doesn't work as well as it did before I got pitched out the window during a knock-down, drag-out with my own personal favorite, The Defenstrator!As Shaw says on his website, "The stories might not always be politically correct, but whether satire or homage, they will deliver on every page. Fast and fun, action and adventure, Blood & Tacos."