Brat Pack: A Hardcore Review

So, finally I bought a copy of Rick Veitch's Brat Pack. Man, what a mind fuck. When you grew up on shit like The Cosby Show and Family Matters, and read Spider-Man and Superman, to read something that tells the truth of how "heroes" would actually be it kind of sits weird in your stomach. Not bad really, but kind of like when you first heard about Santa Claus. The truth can be tough to take sometimes. And everything isn't just black and white, there's a ton of gray in there too. Just like in Brat Pack, Veitch hit hard with the gray scale. The world we live in today supplies a lot of moral ambiguity. And so does Brat Pack. The Mink is a raging psychotic, repressed homosexual with longings for his sidekick, Chippy. Moon Goddess is a tweaked out, toothless old whore with a serious hatred of all men, except for True Man. Judge Jury is a sociopathic racist, complete with pointy hood and giant gavel. And King Rad, which has to be the worst hero name of the group is a drunk and a pill popper who is also an enabler to his protege. And please don't get me wrong. I loved this book. Reprinted through King Hell in 1992 with reworked art and some script changes by Veitch, Brat Pack really sat about 10 years ahead of its time, much like Watchmen and the Dark Knight Returns were ahead of the curve in 1986.
Things start off pretty bad for the sidekicks in Slumberg. What you perceive as a villainous threat by Doctor Blasphemy in a Mink Mobile car bombing, takes out the four young would be heroes. It is revealed after much maligned ideals, that the sidekicks, affectionately referred to as the Brat Pack, are merely a marketing tool for their adult counterparts. They rarely go out on patrol or fight crime in any capacity, other than helping to instigate a gang rape of Moon Goddess' sidekick, Luna at a football game.
The book wouldn't be complete unless there was a tie in to the original Brat Pack, and that's the original Chippy who somehow survives the bomb blast and in a seriously fucked up form haunts the new Brat Pack and eats pigeons.
Probably my favorite part of the book is when the heroes are getting the sidekicks ready and in a series of quasi double page spreads with each quarter devoted to one hero/sidekick set. It continuously told a story, while telling each hero's warped version. Not unlike the Gospels according to those four guys who all told the same story, just in their own words. You know what I'm talking about. That really famous book that had all those great stories in it. Like, incest, rape, murder, betrayal, war, famine, magic and all sorts of cool stuff. I think they omitted the dragons and dinosaurs though. There's nothing quite like the truth ringing in your ears. And then finally, being able to hear it.
Now, for the grade. The true world of what heroes would be like cannot be graded with just any moment in wrestling history. It has to be a true moment. One that rang in with as much truth as someone in a costume and mask could possibly muster. And the moment I choose is one that rings truer to me than almost any other moment in wrestling history. And the true voice of wrestling, in my very not humble opinion, came when Joey Styles walked off the set of the live taping of Raw in late May 2006, after being pie faced by Jerry Lawler. After the commercial break Lawler called Styles back and apologized. And out came Styles, who ripped Lawler and the WWE a new one. Saying he was hired as an announcer not a Sports Entertainment storyteller. A role he was bumped off of Wrestlemania for. Bumped off Wrestlemania for JR. Who they fired only six months before, and then hired Styles to do his job. He then said he was bumped from Backlash. To which he had some hard feelings. "I'm not good enough to call Backlash?" He said he does what he does for every guy in the back who never wanted to be a "superstar" and wanted to be a wrestler.He called wrestling by himself for five years. No tv sidekicks, no story telling. Calling the matches move for move for half a decade.
Styles would later reveal in an interview with Bill Apter for www.1wrestling.com that he was approached by Vince to do the promo, and he was given full creative license for the wording he used.