Nextwave: Agents Of H.A.T.E. Complete Collection s/c back

"You think Cap's dead?"
"He's a guy. How would you be able to tell?"

The second NEXTWAVE book was called 'I Kick Your Face', officially the finest title to any book in the world. This contains both.

Highly recommended to readers of Fraction and Aja's HAWKEYE, this is cartoon comedy violence in which Ellis gets to indulge his love of fine timing without having to bother with anything like a serious attempt at characterisation. You couldn't get more two-dimensional character traits, yet once Ellis sets up those two dimensions they're all he needs to wring line after line from them, whilst Stuart Immonen - one of comics' finest chameleons - pulls off the visual gags with relish and apolmb. The result is a monkey house of anarchic, pugilistic pageantry, as a bunch of C-list superheroes make things 'splode.

It hardly matters why.

Here they take on the giant, green, purple-panted dragon called Fin Fang Foom:

"FIN FANG FOOM! Mommy was a slut-lizard that did the bad thing with suggestively-shaped piles of nuclear waste, and nine months later --
"FIN FANG FOOM! Has been burning with the need to mate since 1956!
"FIN FANG FOOM! Has absolutely no genitals whatsoever!
"FIN FANG FOOM! Oh, you cannot imagine how annoyed he is."

It's basically Warren Ellis cackling to himself and it reaches its apogee of insanity in six outrageous double-page spreads as the team silently smack their way across the page and down the corridor through waves of ludicrous foes from gladiatorial wheelchairs, through apes dressed as Wolverine, to spitfire-flying serpents, each accompanied by single-sentence proclamations like:

"NEXT WAVE are in your room and touching your stuff."
"NEXT WAVE should only be taken in 100 mg doses and never through your urethra."
"NEXT WAVE blatantly wasting your money since 2006."

Blatantly. And all in blazing Kaleidoscopicolour.