Review by Frank Plowright
Promoting Lobo from popular supporting character to headliner in 1990 wasn’t without risks, but the result succeeded beyond any predictions, in no small part due to Simon Bisley’s wild art, albeit from Keith Giffen’s layouts. Giffen also supplied the plot which was blessed with Alan Grant’s funny dialogue quickly defining the loose cannon personality. The Last Czarnian was a runaway success when serialised and in paperback, while what in trade form was Lobo’s Back’s Back wasn’t as creatively successful. After being out of print for a while they were combined as Portrait of a Bastich in 1998, and for almost twenty years and several editions the Giffen/Grant/Bisley repository was incomplete for missing their one-shot Christmas special.
Lobo is a one note joke, but in comedy that’s hardly a restriction. He’s the last of his race, having slaughtered the remainder, and has strength enough to go head to head with Superman. That doesn’t happen here, where the victims are more likely to be tough guys in bars who underestimate him. Violence is his first resort, although will occasionally be prefaced by a comment about how much he’s going to relish the next few minutes. How do you mortify Lobo? Well, Giffen’s solution is to have his old teacher having escaped his planetary massacre to write his biography. As drawn by Bisley she’s magnificently purse-lipped and wrinkly, and in her presence Lobo is reduced to a schoolboy muttering under his breath. He’s promised to deliver her alive, and one of the few things Lobo values is his word.
As he travels Lobo picks up more and more pursuers, and it all eventually converges explosively. The joy is in anticipating the inevitable, and it’s duly delivered with cartoon excess.
While the sequel begins well enough, it’s rapidly sidetracked into Lobo visiting the afterlife, where he causes as much mayhem as he would alive. While the opening story hardly had the complexity of even a piece of mindless cinema, it succeeded on those terms spectacularly well. The sequel lacks ideas and grinds what it has into the ground. DC have realised Bisley thrives on excess, so there’s an adult rating enabling Bisley to show the gruesome effects of Lobo’s deeds. However, Bisley bails before the final chapter, leaving it to Christian Alamy who can approximate the style, but not the inspiration.
The Paramilitary Christmas Special is packaged alongside this content in the first volume of Lobo by Keith Giffen and Alan Grant and in the Big Fraggin’ Compendium.
The same content was previously issued as the Lobo Slipcase Collection, consisting of a boxed version of the two individual graphic novels, eight postcards and a new paperback titled The Wisdom of Lobo. The sixty pages were blank, a joke that annoyed a lot of people.
