Axe Cop The American Choppers #1
Story by Malachai Nicolle
Pencils,Inks, and Lettering by Ethan Nicolle
Colors by Dirk Erik Schulz
Cover by Ethan Nicolle
Publisher Dark Horse Comics
Axe Cop is back and caught in a whirlwind of lunacy as per usual.
For those readers not familiar with Axe Cop, here’s a little back story. The artist Ethan Nicolle started Axe Cop as a web-comic based on his then five year old brother Malachai’s imaginative creations. Axe Cop’s popularity grew as it spawned toys, t-shirts, an expansion to the popular card game Munchkin, and even an animated show on FOX.
The American Choppers is the latest Axe Cop adventure, and though there is a very loose continuity in the Axe Cop universe one need not have read any previous adventures to enjoy American Choppers.
From the very first panel where Axe Cop tells his wife that she can be President Of The World because “I just like fighting. Everything else is boring.”, it’s clear that this is a very stream of conscious affair and it only get’s more random. A new character named Captain Axe (the self proclaimed Captain of all Axes) is introduced looking like a viking version of Captain America.
Captain Axe along with Super Axe and Axe Cop decide after cooperating to take down a group of food based villains known as the Food Force Five that they should form a team of Axe swinging heroes, the titular American Choppers.
From that point on the reader is treated to lot’s of ham eating, bad guy chopping, Demon Lumberjacks and even Satan himself. There isn’t much of a traditional plot. The book is mostly just a series of non sequiturs. One character describes his power as “The ability to shoot chickens out of my brain when I close my eyes” and it sums up the whole book pretty nicely.
Absurdest humor is an acquired taste for some. Many readers may be turned off by Axe Cop’s lack of a coherent narrative, non-existent character development or just plain weirdness. A large demographic however seems to crave this sort of surrealism in their media as of late. Show’s like Aqua Teen Hunger Force paved the way for show’s like Adventure Time and Axe Cop seems like a natural progression from there.
The art has an appropriately cartoony look to complement the ridiculous event’s that it is depicting. Ethan Nicolle’s drawing style on Axe Cop is reminiscent of The Tick which was itself a bastion of lunacy. It’s nothing flashy but it suit’s the story well.
If you’re a fan of the kind of stories that elementary aged children act out with their action figures than you should definitely pick up Axe Cop American Choppers #1. If you like your comics serious and with a logical plot progression you may want a book with less psychic chicken bullets.