Last week, we started a conversation about Curse Words 1. The issue hadn’t been released at the time and there’s an awesome twist at the end that we knew we had to discuss somewhere. If you haven’t read the issue yet, maybe check out that spoiler-free discussion, and then come back here for our conversation about That Big Twist. You’ll know it when you see it. Obviously, SPOILERS follow.

Patrick: So, okay, like 95% of this story is pretty well-examined territory in fantasy and science fiction right? An outsider from another world visits our own and falls in love with the places and the people and decides to make a home of Earth. Or protects it or whatever. Where Charles Soule and Ryan Browne’s first issue delightfully subverts that narrative by demonstrating that, while New York city has charmed Wizord, it hasn’t exactly made him a better person. For real, spoilers ahead.

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(p)reviews are a bit different from our usual coverage, as they discuss comics that haven’t come out yet. As such, we’ll avoid our usual spoilers — think of it as part preview, part review. Today, Drew and Patrick are discussing Curse Words 1, which will be released Wednesday, January 18th, 2017. If you’re looking for a Spoiler-y discussion, click here.

I’m outta balloons. Is a baggie all right?

-Lance, Pulp Fiction

Drew: Rules are fundamental to our understanding of any narrative. For most, the only “rules” we need to understand are those of the world we live in — physics, social norms, human nature — but other narratives take us out of this comfort zone. Pulp Fiction may seem like an odd choice to illustrate this point, but when I first saw the movie in high school, the world of recreational opiates was foreign enough to me that someone had to contextualize the line I included above, which explains why Mia Wallace later confuses heroin for cocaine. That heroin was normally packaged in balloons was an important rule, but not in the moment the concept is introduced — a kind of Chekhov’s baggie of heroin, if you will. As a story featuring magic, Curse Words promises to take us even further from the rules we know, but just like that line from Pulp Fiction, its first issue seems to lay some key groundwork for the rules that will govern the series. Continue reading →