Lobo/The Authority: Holiday Hell
This thoroughly ridiculous collection unites a one-shot comic and its 13- and 14-years later sequels. Christmas 1991 was sullied byThe Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special, in which, on a contract from the Easter Bunny, Lobo, a red-eyed albino version of Conan the Barbarian wielding Sly Stallone superweapons, rubs out Santa and his slave-labor toy--factory enclave. Way later, the youngest in the satiric superhero crew the Authority (another member is a pothead, while two others are gay male lovers) reads that comic and, believing it, ropes her adult comrades into punishing the "mean clown"--Lobo, that would be. It takes one further installment to accomplish not Lobo's but the perfidious Easter Bunny's destruction (he never paid Lobo). The initial Lobo adventure excels the sequels in cleverness, but all three stories are rewarding as long as one enjoys the humor of wretched excess, of mayhem so overblown that, in the hands of ace artist Simon Bisley, anyway, it becomes psychedelically unintelligible. Two much shorter, soberer Authority stories by other hands wrap things up.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved