3 out of 5

This – the 90s – was a weird time for comic books.  Malibu wasn’t the first – nor will it be the last – to try the unified universe shtick, but it was an interesting flash-in-the-pan that combined some of the best qualities of indies – creator’s tights – with the worst qualities of 90s trends – the crossover, requiring a full-line commitment to get the full story.  Steve Gerber was a “founder” of the Ultraverse, but unlike a lot of the other dudes who were kicking around he stables, his name wasn’t plastered across a lot of Malibu books – instead, he focused on one title, ‘Sludge,’ and typical of G, it was a total oddball in the line.  Malibu was big and bright and superhero-y; Sludge even managed to skip an origin issue and just shows up with cop Frank Hoag having been turned into the titular heap of muck, whose mind is a shambles – his dialogue often swapping words – and whose touch causes ‘rapid cellular growth,’ – ugly cancerous splotches of skin.  Distancing the title even further from the ‘Ultra’ line, Sludge isn’t exactly a badguy, but he’s not a hero.  He wants revenge, but he also hates his new existence, searching moreso for a way to die than for a cure.  This marks it as one of the darker titles in Steve’s career – not as daring as ‘Foolkiller,’ but it has that element of wallowing in humanity’s mires in which that title reveled,  Unfortunately, the art and Malibu ‘style’ are incredibly at odds with the dialogue – Lopresti has an appealing Kelly Jones-ish stylization, but it’s too cartoony to work the vibe, causing a reader (me) to expect something snarky and Howard-like… which can ruin the read, as you’re searching for jokes where they don’t exist.  Adding to this effect was Malibu’s love for bright, poppy color schemes, so Sludge is a pleasant deep blue and the world in which he wallows is never dark thanks to all the bold colors poppin’ up everywhere.

Lopresti steps in to script issue #5 (I think) and 12, and his pacing and humor pale next to Steve; Sludge may have been written at a more “accessible” level for a Malibu audience, but there was still the skill of its author to make it stand out, as it tried to slowly put things into motion, Steve seeding his Sludge world with Gerber characters the way he used to with his Marvel books.  The book was canceled before he could really develop the character too much, and there’s an apparent switch to a lighter style in Gerber’s last issues, #s 10 and 11 (featuring an odd Nevada proxy), but as is the case with a surprising amount of stuff from the writer’s career, there’s enough of the Gerber spark in these pages to definitely make it worth a read.