An Ode to Comics and to Chaos

One Christmas, when I was a kid, I got a grab-bag longbox of superhero comics as a gift. I’d already been a voracious reader for as long as I could remember, but something about the perfect fusion of art and words left a mark on me. I even aspired to be a comic book writer, before I realized that winning the lottery would probably be easier. That said, I’m still proud of that script I sent to Bill Jemas of Marvel Comics back in the day. In it, Kitty Pryde has an awkward date with a mutant whose power is spitting acid on his food to dissolve it and absorbing the nutrients he needs from the resulting goo through his fingers (and if anyone working for the comics industry likes that pitch, drop me an email).

Inevitably, I became drawn to “mature readers” comics. I wish I could say my gateway into that world was the Hernandez Brothers’ Love and Rockets or Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. Instead, it was the gloriously gory horror publisher Chaos! Comics (yes, the “!” is part of the name). The seed for Chaos! grew out of its founder Brian Pulido’s concept for a movie about an undead teenage serial killer who starts a zombie apocalypse, Evil Ernie, which he turned into a comic. After two series about Evil Ernie’s origins and murderous adventures, Chaos! became a bona fide comic book universe full of tormented anti-heroes and murderous villain protagonists.

The breakout star of Chaos!’s stable of characters was Lady Death. She could boast of literally spitting in the face of the Devil, taking over Hell, causing an apocalypse, and having an unnaturally thin yet busty body even Chesty Morgan would envy. I don’t think anyone can plausibly deny that she was Brian Pulido’s fantasies unleashed on the page, not least considering that her lover and acolyte Evil Ernie bore an uncanny resemblance to Pulido himself at the time. Still, as I noted in a piece I wrote for my blog Trash Culture, Lady Death had a pretty sizable following among female readers. I suspect it was because she was, quite simply, a badass warrior/sorceress/goddess who didn’t really have much of either a heart of gold or a sentimental side, unlike many other fictional female badasses of the time. Pulido himself had an edict when other writers wrote stories for her that Lady Death never be put in a submissive position, at least not for long and not without her coming out on top.

As for Chaos! in general, I’m sure there are people wondering what the appeal is, especially if they’re not impressed by a taste:

But honestly, how could you not have at least some appreciation for this? It’s like the movies of Jim Wynorski and Charles Band mixed with ‘70s and ‘80s dark fantasy pulp novel covers with a dollop of old-school heavy metal. To put it another way, it’s like if the people in your high school Magic the Gathering group had their own comic book company. I mean this not as a condemnation, but a commendation.

Lady Death and the other violent non-heroes of Chaos! offered at its core the same typical outsider power fantasy that drew kids to classic Marvel Comics, especially the adventures of the X-Men and Spider-Man, but cranked up so far the dial broke off. An exploited queer woman from an ancient, patriarchal society makes herself the renegade queen of Hell, an abused teenager failed by a callous and money-corrupted society gets his apocalyptic revenge on society and all authority figures, and a medieval peasant woman unjustly condemned by her own community and Christian faith becomes a wrathful yet occasionally benevolent pagan goddess. I think perhaps that explains why I, an embittered little gay kid growing up in rural Virginia, found an appeal that still sticks with me. Also, the origin story of bisexual vampire Purgatori, where she marries an Egyptian queen, was honestly my first exposure to the idea of same-sex marriage in any work of fiction, so there’s that.

At its peak, Chaos! had licensing agreements with the Halloween franchise and the World Wrestling Federation. Further, it arguably had the earliest fan community that really made use of an Internet presence, the “Chaos Fiends.” Sadly, in the end, Chaos! was a casualty of the crash of the comic book industry of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. Pulido kept Lady Death and shepherded her through a variety of publishers, and to date she is now being published through his own press, Coffin Comics. The rest of Chaos!’s characters eventually ended up with Dynamite Comics. There were several attempts to revive the Chaos! brand, the best in my opinion being Tim Seeley’s Chaos mini-series and his incorporation of Evil Ernie into his own Hack/Slash series, but none have matched Chaos!’s heyday in the ‘90s when it was sold in comic book stores right alongside DC and Marvel. In fact, it’s fairly safe to say it doesn’t have that much of a cult following nowadays, at least compared to some other ‘90s revivals.

Despite that, if anything, my nostalgia for Chaos! has only gotten stronger. Even I won’t argue that, say, Lady Death vs. Purgatori is more of a must read than Watchmen (although it is tempting to try to spawn such a hot take). But I will say Chaos! perfectly represents something that’s become endangered. We live in a time when culture is shaped around the marketing strategies of a few media monopolies and the vagaries of social media and is carefully presented to either completely avoid offense or provoke the right amount of controversy. That’s not to say Chaos! had an exceptional amount of violence and male gaze candy; indeed, I’d go so far as to say it really wasn’t that more extreme than what you’d find in the mainstream superhero epics of the era. It’s just Chaos! had a special rawness, a grimy authenticity that’s harder to find out in the open on mainstream platforms in our present era of media hyper-monopolization and cultural consumption habits curated by algorithms.

Or maybe I’m just trying to rationalize my fondness for stories about queer vampire women and undead teenage serial killers. Either way, cheers to Chaos!. Thank you for what you taught me about the potential of the medium I still love today. And thank you for the image that I've posted many times as a meme in our past few awful years.

And finally, happy Halloween!