Return of the Funny Comic: X-Farce Reloaded

The 1990s were a boom market for independent creators, riding the rising tide of comics sales bolstered by a flood of new talent entering the comics industry. The boys who would later go on to build Image Comics were pulling in a lot of eyeballs -- and a lot of dollar bills -- for Marvel and DC Comics, emboldening a lot of imitation and a fair amount of parody.

One of these titles took to skewering the popular Marvel title X-Force, new to the stands and the spawn (no pun intended) of fan-favorite Rob Liefeld. X-Force was yet another spin-off of Marvel's X-Men franchise, which was already starting to over-expand on comics shelves, and became an overnight success, thus ripe for parody. And that's what Parody Press looked for: the perfect target.

Enter X-Farce. Replacing Cable we had Cable TV, armed with his massive channel changer that can swap your reality. Domino became Dominoze, a pizza delivery girl with a punch. Boom-Boom was Shboom-Shboom, who mesmerized with the powers of Motown. Shatterstar turned to Fallenstar, and made to look like actor PeeWee Herman. You get the idea. It was the kind of thing that Mad Magazine was probably kicking themselves over for not getting there first.

Now Don Chin and Bill Maus's original X-Farce is back, with a lot of extras. First, the saga of X-Farce versus the evil Mpuppets has been colorized to make it really pop off the quality paper pages. You also get to mee The Unfunny X-Cons, done in the original sixties style of the first X-Men comics. The team has even treated the pages to give them an aged look, as well as the older style of four-color printing.

This book has also mutated from its original form -- gotten bigger, stronger, and more fully packed with parodies. Mike Baron and Ted Helard give us a glimpse behind the scenes of how to become an X-Con by allowing us to watch mutants audition for the team. Then Thad Rhodes gets into the mix with some gorgeously painted panels introducing The Newt Mutants. Hey, who says parody comic pages always have to look like caricatures?

Wrapping things up is The Mighty Mascots' Keith Gleason, who writes 'The Overcomplicated and Completely Unnecessary Power-House of X," with art by Ian Waryanto. If you toiled through both Power and House of X last year, these five pages actually make sense of it all. I mean, it's the only way the whole thing could make sense, so consider this a quintessential hidden chapter to that whole event.

The book is still fulfilling on Indiegogo, and the creative team is busily putting together their next project -- unsurprisingly, a parody called Beardzzerker, which takes shots at the Boom Studios BRZRKR title, modeled after and sponsored by Keanu Reeves.