Pigeons From Hell is a delightful little graphic novel by Joe R. Lansdale, Nathan Fox and Dave Stewart. Take the Louisiana bayou, abandoned derelict houses, old slave-era folklore and combine them into a compact horror story, you might end up with something like Pigeons from Hell. The trio of authors take on this classic by Conan-creator Robert E Howard and redo it in a modern vein. The descendents of slaves inherit a house deep in the swamp, a house one of their ancestors inherited when the masters died, bequeathing it all to their only surviving slave. However, something is alive in the old house, something that regularly kills pigeons and leaves their corpses in a huge mound on the rotting floorboards of the first floor. In certain parts of the house, the air is always cold, even in the sweltering summer of the Louisiana swamp. The inheritors, all city-slickers, dismiss it all and settle down for the night. Thinking nothing of the pigeon mound and taking it for an elephant-graveyard type phenomenon, their illusions are soon dispelled in brutal fashion during the night.

As they are dispatched, one by one, by the lurking horror in the swamp, the reality they’re in takes hold. Escaping the miasmic entity in the house, they flee to their perceived saviour, an old man who has been alive for over a century, or maybe three. His wizened features make it hard to tell. The story may not have the power to entirely surprise, if you’re a horror-story aficionado, but it certainly has the power to please over its short length. I won’t give away the ending here, pick this one up if you’re in the mood for a delightful romp through a horror-filled night, replete with Southern references. The inking and colouring is superb, conveying a feeling of claustrophobia and darkness that no sun can dispel. The monster itself is depicted well, always staying out of obvious visibility, just enough to make the senses tingle with anticipation.

ISBN: 978-1-59582-237-6

Don’t these whatchamacallits look like cuter versions of The Corinthian from Gaiman’s masterpiece ‘The Sandman’? Below is Tom Cruise as the legendary character.

You decide.

I should come here and talk to you people about the meaning of sports in our society. Most of us tend to think of sports as a pleasant diversion…fun and games…a way for Junior to “build character” and learn “fair play”… This is Wrong. The sporting green is a Freudian battleground on which primitive psychosexual conflicts are played out using a sadistic lexicon, both physical and verbal, of sublimated homosexual rape and Oedipal hostility!

I have always thought this, no really!

Let’s see if we can shed some light on why so many people (men mostly) care so much about something so stupid. Even the most non-analytical amongst us would be hard-pressed to deny the presence of a sexual undercurrent in sports, one that is predominantly misogynistic. To be the male figure, the fucker, is to win; to assume the “submissive” female role, the fuckee, is to lose.

This is obvious. If the gladiatorial origins of sports are lost on you, there is no hope for you, my friend. Kill yourself now.

The language of American football, for example, makes this very clear, the object of the game is to enter your opponent’s ‘end-zone’ as often as possible, employing a variety of ‘backs‘ and ‘ends‘ (including those that are ‘split’ and ‘tight’) who attempt to ‘find the hole’ so as to ‘penetrate‘ as ‘deeply’ as possible into their opponent’s ‘territory’!

Football is nothing more than a homosexual ritual (look no further than the relationship between center and quarterback)…not unlike other rituals of male dominance such as prison rape and what is known in the animal kingdom as presenting…

Deferring backsides as some of the larger primates indeed. Here, if nowhere else is where Darrow should have looked for his evidence.

Baseball is more subtle but no less interesting. The batter emerges from the ‘dugout’ (a modern slang word for ‘vagina’) holding erect his mighty phallus. The field and especially the enclosed ‘diamond’ have a decidedly feminine quality…Baseball is overrun with sexually implicit phrases: To ‘hit the ball in the hole’, or ‘The bases are loaded’…

In basketball, the goal is adorned with a maternal ‘skirt’…Golf, on the other hand is extremely masturbatory…the ‘pole’ (or flag) symbolizes the father’s penis which must be replaced in the hole by the son’s ball (seed) in the fewest number of ‘strokes’

Thus, these penis-oriented sports are popular with (predominantly male) adults while equally meaningless games, like say ring toss or horseshoes are laughed off as silly…not because of the intrinsic value of the games, but because the player is symbolically feminized

This is your typical fan. His whole life is based around the actions of people he’ll never meet. He memorizes useless statistics, dreams about trades that will never happen..all that crap…and this is not some isolated fanatic…this is an average guy! This is You!

Sadly, the number of people I know like this has only increased in the last decade. Make of that what you will.

How does it happen? How do we become fanatics? It’s basically the same as Catholicism: We are indctrinated at an early age and only in rare cases do we ever regain our reason

Best analogy ever.

Looking at it logically, even on the most superficial level, being a sports fan makes very little sense. First of all, the players on your team aren’t even from the town they represent. They are free-agent mercenaries with no allegiance to your city or even the team itself.

Judging by the number of people on my MSN list whose names mention ‘The Swedish twins’, the logical inference is that Vancouver’s hockey team has a pair of Swedes on it who are playing for Vancouver because they love the air, the culture and the people here. No, really! How could you even insinuate that an athlete might be doing it for the money. How crass!

And do you think these guys give two shits about the fans? Of course not!…It stopped being fun for them in high school. It’s a business, and the fans are nothing more than interchangeable suckers!

And why shouldn’t they hate the fans? How would you feel if you were a trained athlete who had worked and sacrificed to get where you were and some fat slob who could barely move told you you sucked!

Think of the pressure on these people…No wonder everybody in professional athletics is either a coke addict, a drunk or a hardcore christian.

Liberally taken from Twentieth Century Eightball (20th Century Eightball), by the great Daniel Clowes. Humourous and true, I say!