3 out of 5

And here, to me, is where ‘Goon’ started to get somewhat unsatisfyingly uneven… though in some ways, it got more consistent.  Leading up to this point, Powell would let his level of random crass flirt with extremes at well, then occasionally shock us (in a wonderful way) by dropping a suddenly sincere and serious flash of the Goon’s past into the book, meanwhile slowly building this interestingly evolving storyline.  His art style bounced around between more detailed cartoonishness and a somewhat classic “painted” look.  From this point on, though, Powell mostly sticks to what I would consider a defining style: all painted, with his foreground characters done up without the dramatic shadows of the background, excepting portions of the tale that are meant to be steeped in atmosphere.  The issues would also become rather clearly divided between silly and sad, as Eric finally began to build up to dropping his ‘this ain’t funny’ Chinatown GN.  This made the Goon experience a little less dynamic.  You wouldn’t enter into an issue not knowing what to expect, you’d be able to pick up on the vibe generally from the cover.  But for the first four stories in here, it’s all pretty dire stuff, with Goon facing thugs trying to take over his territory and the Zombie Priest, in mad desperation, ripping out his eye to impregnate “mother corpse,” which births some munchkin monsters which are zombie replacements.  The setting is still certainly outlandish, but its played more for horror thrills than gags at this point.  The last ish in the collection (excepting some guest short stories, which were maybe included with the original issues?) is a Lagarto bit, a character we by now know is loved, but because there’s no middle ground tone-wise in any of the proceeding issues, the gag falls a bit flat.

The trade is, of course, printed with the same high quality as the previous collections (bright colors, thick paper stock, solid binding) and with a surprisingly low price tag of $14.95, there’s just very little ‘joy’ in this particular collection, which was a reliable trait of Goon from the start.