Recently, I was at my little cousin's house babysitting him, when I stumbled across a comic which had been strewn apon the floor. Right on the front it read in large and garish letters: DooM. I, being the iD games freak that I am immeadiatly picked it up. That fact that my cousin owned it should have tipped me off about the quality of the comic.


The Doom guy, who appeared to have had a face lift from the front cover (see above), was shoving his fist through the spinal cord of an imp with an obvious constipation problem. In the background lie the corpses of about 100 or so monsters that were apparently killed in the preface (obviously edited out for length, or maybe because the writers of this book smoke crack by the metric ton). After reading what the Doom marine was shouting ("DYNAMITE!"), I knew this book could not have been written by only one person. The workload for dialogue alone would've killed them. I looked at the credits and sure enough, it took TWO writers to pen this work of art. In case you pass the local 7-11, you may want to see if any of these guys are working there:

"Writer" (guys that got drunk and wrote random words into the empty speech bubbles)

- Steve "Body Bag" Behling and Michael "Splatter" Stewart. Look, they're cool because they have gory nicknames! And the Doom comic book is gory too! Wow!

Art and Color design - Tom "Gallows" Grindberg. He was the genius that had to make the tough decisions such as "should the blood be pink or green on this page?" and "what color is hair?"

Lettering - Edd "Dead" Fear. This was the poor sap that had to rewrite the dribble

"Body Bag" and "Splatter" scrawled on the original sketches. I bet he's in an institution now or he has taken his own life.

Editing - The Slaughterhouse 3. I don't know who the "Slaughterhouse 3" is, but I'm assuming it's a group of people that were smart enough to not associate their name with this piece of rubbish.

Written below that -
"Justin 'Massacre' McCormack, Jeremy 'Kidney' Kove, Lisa 'Instant Lobotomy' Leatherman, Dana 'Machete' Moreshed and Bob 'Intern' Prodor all had something to do with the creation of this bloodfest."

I assume those were the people that brought in wheelbarrows full of horse tranquilizers for the writers.

Below the credits (word "credit" used as loosely as possible) is the phrase "BASED ON ID'S DOOM AND DOOM II". This was very helpful, because the first time I read through this book I didn't understand the deep and complex storyline, as I assumed it was based off the hit 80's cartoon, "Jem and the Holograms", and not the popular PC game "Doom". I didn't pick up on the fact that the comic book was named "Doom", every ad in the book was for Doom or Doom 2, and "id" was stamped all over the cover. The "Based on id's Doom and Doom II" notice cleared that all up however, and I was able to sleep better that following night. The enigma of the ages had finally been solved.


What's the plot?

Who knows. As mentioned before, the comic book starts out with a bang as the first splash page features the grunt ramming his fist out of the ass of an imp. The sound effect "SPLOOOORTCH!" really makes you feel like you're there, standing on top of the pile of carcasses in the background. I think they stole the whole "SPLOOOORTCH!" thing from Hemingway.


With writing and action like this, how could the Doom comic book fail?

Anyway, the grunt gets sick of standing on top of a pile of bodies, holding a spinal cord in his hand and posturing, so he sees an "important looking door", which, in Doom terms, means "any door that opens". He kicks open the door, and wooden pieces of the entryway fly everywhere. This is kind of disturbing since I didn't know the space stations of the future will be constructed of plywood. You'd think in these advanced military complexes, they could afford better stuff that the junk they sell at Builder's Square. Maybe they spend all their money on making sure there is an abundant supply of advanced weaponry laying on the ground around every corner. You got me. So "KRAAAAK!", the grunt jumps through the door and comes face to face with a menacing looking cyberdemon, who kind of looks more like Shania Twain or Britney Spears without makeup. The Doom guy wants to "rip and tear" his guts out, but his breserker pack runs out. Don't you just hate it when that happens? The grunt comes to the conclusion he needs a gun, so he begins to run away (all of this while the Cyberdeamon just kind of stands there modeling, motionless the whole time. I guess id Software only sent the artists one picture of the cyberdemon to trace and the artists couldn't manage draw it in any other positions)
After cowardly running away, the marine finds himself in a hallway, confronted by three armed, grey zombies. They appear to be drugged or fairly drunk, as they can't hit their target that is easily three feet in front of them. As luck would have it, there is a chainsaw laying in the middle of the floor. The people that designed the space station must've put it in the floor plans in case the station is overrun by evil, mutant trees, which is a possibility if you've ever seen that one episode of Captain Planet. Or maybe the chainsaw is used for opening the locked, wooden doors. The grunt quickly snatches it up while nimbly avoiding the zombie's shots that land as close as 100 hundred yards away from him. It is indeed a moment of great tension as he swings the chainsaw across the panel, decapitating all three zombies. I was on the edge of my seat.


Somehow the grunt finds himself in a dark room following the immortal "chainsaw" scene. I don't know how, it isn't explained. Using the shotgun he took from the dead zombie soldiers, he so elegantly brightens up the room by firing round after round until he runs out of ammo. After flipping on the lightswitch, it is revealed he killed approximately ten monsters with just three shotgun shots. This displays how much of an "l33t k1ll3r" the marine is. He's one bad mutha', even badder than the guy from "Rise of the Triad". After making an intensely bizarre, cryptic remark ("At this particular moment in time, I don't believe I have a healthier or more deeply-felt respect for any object in the universe than this here shotgun..."), the marine snatches a chaingun from the corpse of some unidentifiable creature and comments "...packing 80 pounds of heavenly joy!" which is what the ladies say about me all the time. You know because... ah, nevermind.


Unfortunately this feeling of great euphoria had to end sooner or later, as an imp sneaks up behind our hero and scortches him with a facefull of flaming snot. This appears to just make the marine moderately angry and give him an awful complexion. After getting burned by the imp, the grunt shouts one of the best (and most memorable) lines in this entire book, "You're stupid! And you're gonna be stupid and dead!"
It turns out the marine was speaking the truth as a few seconds later he unloads a few hundred rounds into the imp, reducing him to a mess of various flying internal organs. Once the imp is dead, the marine kills some more imps, zombies, and demons for good measure. Unfortunately he is knocked into a vat of toxic waste which turns him radioactive. No really, it actually turns him radioactive. He actually says "Now I'm Radioactive! This can't be good" This is the kind of writing that wins major awards, folks.





After his brief stint with radioactivity, the grunt jumps through a teleporter and warps into a room infested by Cacodeamons that are attempting to stop him from grabbing the plasma rifle. Good thing our hero has the ability to jump and walk to the right as this appears to be the key to avoiding the fireballs the demons launch at him. He grabs the plasma rifle and rectorates both of those suckers because in the comic book, the plasma rifle shoots flames. I'm assuming this is just a form of artistic expression the artists chose to use, as opposed to simply saying "these guys are idiots and have never played Doom before." I like to give people the benefit of the doubt.
The marine kills a specter and heads into yet another room filled with bad guys that obviously got tired of waiting for his slow ass to get there because they're all killing each other for no reason. On a pedestal in the middle is the BFG, or as it's called in this book, the "BIG gun". At last, the crowning apex this entire work of art has led up to. Oh, what a joyous moment that was for me when the grunt saw the BFG, as I couldn't help but notice there was only one more page left. The guy grabs it and "scant seconds later", the cyberdemon from 15 pages ago is shooting at him (I don't know how he got there so quickly, maybe no clipping was turned on). Our hero powers up the BFG, tension begins to build as the readers desperately try to guess whether the marine will get off a shot before the comic book goes into the trash, and before you know it, the cyberdemon is filled full of holes. Yes, the BFG apparently shoots bullets in this book, one of which cuts through the monster's crotch. I guess they ran out of green ink or something. And speaking of running out of ink, the cyberdemon's legs in the final panel aren't even inked; they're just black lines. My best guess is that the authors had something better to do, like get back to downloading nude pictures of Gay men or drinking paint thinner.


So what the heck was the point of this monstrosity?

You got me folks. I've read this thing about six times, and I can't figure it out. Here are some of the possibilities:
It is a big advertisement for Doom. I don't know how this would be effective though, as the comic book makes Doom look to be about as appealing as banging your head against a heated radiator for three hours straight.
It is a big advertisement for guns. The only "theme" to speak of in this comic is the fact that the Doom guy likes guns and (consequently) enjoys shooting things. He shoots monsters. He shoots zombies. He shoots barrels. He shoots random inanimate objects. When the room is dark, instead of finding a lightswitch, he repeatedly fires his gun. Charlton Heston (who's he?) probably has some stake in id Software. Either that or the writers enjoy the "shooting" theme, as in "Yeah man, we were all shooting heroin when we made the Doom comic book."
The comic book authors lost a bet.

So, in summary, let me take a look at the ups and downs of this abominable comic book:
Downs - Poorly written (if written at all), terribly inked, has no plot, has no backstory, is completely pointless, is not at all consistent with Doom, makes you pray for death while reading it. Ups - Easily combustible, can be used to swat bugs, great conversation starter ("Hey, want to see a piece of shit?"). So was this comic book worth what I paid for it (nothing)? No. Was it entertaining? Maybe to people that like to watch car accidents. Would I recommend it? Yes, I would recommend it to other comic book companies, explaining "OK guys, this is what NOT to do". This comic book is directly responsible for everything that's wrong with the world. This piece of trash has made me question my faith in God (ok, maybe not that far, but definatly close). I have never wanted a mental enema more than right now. I would pay doctors all the money I have to erase all memories of this thing from my mind. If I had a choice between being castrated with a rusty screwdriver and reading this comic again, I would probably choose to read the comic, but I'd have to think about it for a while.


< Oh well, at least I'm not radioactive. That's good.


~Jade's Fire Click here to return to the main page