4 out of 5

Ah, The Goon.  The first few bundles of issues by Powell combined with the first few trades worth of Hellboy material probably account for the influences of the majority of Dark Horse’s current publications.  Or they do what they do better than any have before or since.  In HB’s case, its the silly / serious mash-up of occult and 80s-movie cheekiness with a literary undercurrent.  For The Goon, it’s all things ridiculous – the kind of offensive humor that’s dotted with enough of a wink to indicate intelligence that Jhonen Vasquez can sometimes commit in his more directly humorous work, only Powell has no need to throw off any genre chains, so he can go all out with the B-Movie stylizing.  And before things got a bit too melodramatic with Chinatown (Powell has a great sense of timing but isn’t, in truth, the best scripter if the story leans more on dialogue and story – at least when he’s handling art chores as well.), The Goon was a freaking blast of ridiculousness, just the right splash of uber-violence and crassness to make ya’ love Franky and Goon, our two enforcers working for Labrazio on Lonely Street.

Volume 0 collects an initial independent run by Powell, along with some fascinating pre-Goon sketches that show the character’s evolution.  Something that’s incredibly rewarding is that, while the style / humor here is still finding its pace, Powell maintained all the story elements he’s established here, making it an absolute need to read.  He’s always had a spot of over-indulgence with trailing a joke out for a panel or two too long and it’s a bit more apparent here, but the expressive creeps and ghoulies more than make up for it – Fishy Pete’s bit a good encapsulation of this: his joke is sorta’ run into the ground but the visuals are so hilarious you still are smiling.  ‘Rough Stuff’ also captures the three general shades of Goon – issue one a jokey, blood-soaked adventure, issue two a random smattering of beat-ups, and issue three a more plot-driven tale that elevates this above a gag book by sliding in some last minute tragedy, made all the more poignant by how silly the rest of the content is.  The third issue comes closest to gold, the second closest to a more disposable format that started to crop up more recently in the run (as of 2014), but overall the collection is well-balanced and entertaining.  Dave Stewart helped with the coloring (this was originally B&W, I believe), and when you compare to the more poppy, flat colors of the next volume – not a bad job, just different – you can appreciate Stewart’s mastery of the genre, fully letting Powell’s able skills in both pencil and paint shine – hefty shadows, gloriously garrulous muscles on the Goon – while giving the book a wonderfully varied palette that makes Lonely Street drip with delectable muck.

The back matter is, as mentioned, really interesting, but there’s a sudden jump from pre-Goon to Goon and a couple more pages of that growth would have been interesting.  Still, its great going back to re-read this as I’d been a little disheartened by recent Goon, and this volume reminded me of the reasons I started collecting it in the first place.