Horror Comic Haul #3: Soul Plumber
October has come and gone, Halloween has passed so it’s time to put away all of our spooky stuff and get ready to blast Mariah Carey music 24x7 for the foreseeable future
Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!
Just because October is over doesn’t mean we have to stop being in a spooky mood but to be honest, the amount of horror comics does tend to drop after October which is why this week I was caught walking out with not much except for My Little Pony. While it may be true that major publishers have shifted back to “normal” comic content, this is the time for indie comics to shine. A recent weird horror release from After Shock has me absolutely hooked, and I will cover it thoroughly in an upcoming entry of this series but until then…
Welcome back to Horror Bound’s Horror Comic Haul where we dive deep on the best and brightest horror comics available at your local comic shop. In this entry, we will be covering issue #1 and #2 of DC Horror’s absolutely insane Soul Plumber.
Soul Plumber hits a very specific set of criteria that I just absolutely love in horror. A list:
Absolutely terrible main protagonists - Honestly, what’s the point of a squeaky clean, square jawed, “Truth Justice and the American Way” type of main character? These characters are BORING. We know exactly what they are going to do and why. There’s no nuance, there’s no subtlety and that’s because they are unnatural. It’s like a sort of uncanny valley situation where we look at the character and say “Yeah that looks human, but something ain’t right” and that’s because we know that real human beings are more troubled and flawed like Batman more than they are perfect and pure like Superman. The main characters in Soul Plumber are absolutely atrocious. First there is the main character, Edgar, a failed seminary student turned gas station attendant who is insane about his faith to the extent that he ignores the real world. He’s bat shit crazy and the comic is narrated by him which makes everything more turbulent as the insane art is enhanced by the ravings of a madman. Then there is his foul mouth partner Elk, a war vet whose nose was blown off in the war and says more curse words per minute than anyone could imagine. These are the characters are love. Pure scumbaggery!
2. Non Standard Interpretation of Religion - I said these were super specific, but hear me out. It’s really easy to do The Exorcist or an Exorcist-like film with generic ass priests in their robes and collars speaking in Latin and consulting with the Vatican. It’s much more difficult to do a film like The Last Exorcism which features a phony faith healer doing a phony exorcism or Constantine which has its own mythos about angels and demons. To me, it always seems like these type of stories are, like the terrible protagonists, much closer to what reality is. Sure the real world has stiff priests in their vestments speaking in Latin, but it also has scumbag trickster televangelists like Harvey who shows up to Edgar’s gas station in his God mobile and invites him to come to an event where he can learn how to be a Soul Plumber.
3. Techno Occultism - Again, super specific but to think that the only way to expel a demon or to track a ghost is to read from a 2,000 year old book is just pure madness. Humanity evolves and so should our demon hunting skills. I love when a story involves unique occult technology like the creepy ghost camera in Paranormal Activity: Ghost Dimension or the whole entire film Nekrotronic and famously, Ghostbusters. So when Edgar goes to Harvey’s event where he is performing an exorcism on stage with the use of a machine called the Soul Plunger that allows the user to reach into the soul of the possessed and literally rip the demon out, I was pretty excited.
4. Inter-dimensional Shape Shifters - Yeah, I know, it’s bat shit crazy and internet maniacs like David Icke and Alex Jones but isn’t any different than HP Lovecraft’s old gods like Cthulhu or Nyalarthotep? After watching Harvey’s exorcism Edgar tries to purchase a Soul Plunger but being a broke gas station clerk he can’t afford it so he ends up stealing the plans and building his own out of junk that he collected with Elk. It is revealed that Harvey’s exorcism is staged but when Edgar and Elk kidnap a local drug addict named Scuzz and pull a purple glowing demon out of his chest, the soul plunger is very real and very powerful.
The best part about all of this utter insanity, the terrible shit characters, the unique take on religion, the techno occultism and the inter-dimensional shapeshifters is that it is all in issue #1 of this comic. Needless to say, I was excited to pick up issue #2. It was sheer luck that I was able to get a hold of this comic, at first I was looking for issue #1 of a DC Horror comic based off of The Conjuring but when they were all out and the helpful employee at my local comic shop directed me to their last issue of this amazing comic, I was hooked.
Issue #2 reveals that Scuzz was killed when Edgar ripped the purple ball of light demon out of his chest, a fact that he barely noticed as he was too excited about the soul plunger working to notice Scuzz was exploded all over his tiny apartment. However he again finds himself distracted from reality as the purple glowing ball is staring at him and making weird noises. He lunges at it with a spatula but the glowing thing jumps into his head and we get some weird back story. There is some gross imagery of Edgar’s birth to uncaring, drug addicted parents. His fascination with a TV character known as the Judo Priest who kicks ass for the lord, an homage to Dead Alive no doubt and Edgar’s time at seminary school where he pukes on a priest and confused diarrhea from dripping toilet as tears on a statue of the Virgin Mary. It’s all very Troma-esque and I absolutely love it!
Edgar once again tries to attack the purple glowing ball of light but this time it fights back, shocking Edgar and bringing him into a different dimension. As Edgar floats in space, the purple ball of light reveals itself as a giant purple woman with nine breasts floating in infinite space. It shifts all space and time, turning Edgar’s brain inside out, learning everything about human kind before rocketing his mind and spirit back into his body. It’s all fairly insane with tons of cosmic horror vibes. Typically this is the point in a review where I say some thing like “And that’s when shit goes sideways” but this story is already sideways, it started sideways and went inside out backwards and back again so when the purple glowing ball of light, now known as Blorp, heads out into the world to create a human body for itself the insanity is just par for the course.
First Blorp rips the arms off of a naked drug addict while he is in the middle of having sex with a fire hydrant. It then takes a random woman’s legs, the torso from a tourist and head from a hot dog vendor. All these gory, bloody, shredded body parts assemble in a weird orbit around the glowing ball that is Blorp as it takes a stroll through New York City. This limited series has only five issues and I have no idea how how much more crazy this series is going to get but the last page has me very excited for the future as it hit another check box for me.
5. Random Knights Templar - Honestly, I can’t think of any other horror films or stories that just randomly insert a knights templar, but one appears at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and it was absolutely amazing. It’s equally amazing when Father Rivera appears, in Edgar’s apartment promising to capture Blorp and kill Edgar all while dressed up as a crusader. It put a huge smile on my face and then I saw that issue #3 has Father Rivera on the cover getting a Slurpee which has me absolutely geeked.
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