Smiley the Psychotic Button #1
Written by Mike Raicht
Art by Juanan Ramirez, Rod Rodolfo
Published by Dynamite Comics
If you’re going to walk the by now well-tread path of Faustian bargains (or any other narrative relying on the same old Judeo-Christian concepts of good and evil generally), you’d better bring something new to it.
Dynamite’s Smiley the Psychotic Button one-shot trafficks in that stuff and, while writer Mike Raicht hits a few welcome grace notes, he ultimately fails to create anything terribly original.
It’s mainly an origin story for Evil Ernie’s comic relief sidekick, who we’re told was once Richard Smiley, architect of a fast food empire that, as he says, became “Bigger than the clown or the king” with the helpful hand of Lucifer.
The price of Smiley’s success was, of course, an obligation to deliver souls, and this is where Raicht scores a satirical bull’s eye at the expense of fast food. Smiley not only exploits the modern tendency toward gluttony, but compounds it by offering a special (and ghoulish) secret ingredient you can probably guess at. As the diabolical burger mogul narrates: “They knew the food was bad for them but they kept coming. A thousand little sins can be as deadly as one big one.”
There’s also a satisfying complexity in the character of Smiley. He eventually falls out of hell’s favour in part by becoming too powerful. When the underlord moves to check the monster he created, Smiley resists but is undone by a vision of his pious son, who he resents for staying on God’s side but still loves.
Unfortunately, none of the other characters have such depth. This is particularly true of Smiley’s daughter, who is shown to not share her brother’s unshakable faith in God. That sets her up to be a significant part of the action but she’s otherwise absent from the story and, in the end, simply disappears from it. Similarly, Smiley’s wife is a key figure in his turn to Hell, but is introduced and dismissed with the same indifference.
A female character is front and centre in a second story, however. That’s Debbie Divine, who narrowly survived an encounter with Evil Ernie and now hunts him with divine assistance. It’s diverting enough but too brief to do more than introduce Debbie and clearly signal (by closing with the rather hackneyed phrase “Just the beginning”) that she’ll be an ongoing challenge to the central duo.
The art (Juanan Ramirez handles the main story and Rod Rodolfo the second) lacks nothing technically, and both artists have created several impressive splash pages to be admired, even if our preview copy looked rough and incomplete in a few spots. Still, the world of Evil Ernie is a limited one thematically speaking, leaving little room for mood or nuance so one can’t fault Ramirez and Rodolfo for giving it anything more than it deserves.