Garbage Man

There’s a bit at the beginning of Aaron Lopresti’s Garbage Man comic (which is not the sequel to Derf Backderf’s Trashed) where the hero, now an animated pile of toxic sludge complete with bits of rebar sticking out of him, has flashbacks as to how he got that way. As things turn out, he was a corporate lawyer named Richard Morse investigating the goings-on at Titan Chemicals. Titan had been given a government contract to create super-soldiers by injecting test subjects with an HGH (Human Growth Hormone) derivative, combined with a bit of creative gene splicing. The mad doctor in charge at Titan, figuring Morse knew too much, had made him into one of the project’s guinea pigs, and in a lab explosion Morse was propelled into a nearby swamp, from which he then arose as Garbage Man.

When the mad doctor is letting Morse know what he’s going to do to him he says “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.” Which is Lopresti’s way of letting you know that, yeah, we’ve all heard this one before. Basically Garbage Man is a cross between Swamp Thing and the Toxic Avenger, with Hellboy’s granite hand thrown in for good measure. He actually looks a lot like Swamp Thing too, so much so that when another experiment gone bad appears that looks even more like Swampy it seems redundant (this latter figure is called Mossy Man).

I liked the art and colours here, but the story really is pretty basic stuff, and the not-so-basic stuff (like the guy who dreams dinosaurs into life) is a mess. Garbage Man slowly remembers, in fits and starts, what happened to him and so he goes after the people responsible. Along the way he’s helped by a preacher who lives among the homeless in the city’s sewers, and an old flame who, remarkably, isn’t too freaked out by his appearance. There’s also a trio of superhero types called the Night Club that play an ambiguous role. Maybe if the series continues we’ll find out more about them. But as far as I know this is all the Garbage Man we’ve got.

The individual comics/chapters are only ten pages long so things move really quickly. And it’s fun. But at the same time it didn’t really strike me as anything special and the story itself is very worn. Good as a diversion then, but not a comic I’m likely to remember very long or want to bother re-reading anytime soon.

Graphicalex