The Return of Pood
From "Ultra-Lad" by Joe Infurnari
The last time I had used the word “Pood” prior to the emergence of the new comic rag by that name, it was as a past tense verb, and I was about four years old. A quick Google search also reveals that it is an archaic Russian unit of measurement. But I think I will take this broadsheet on its own terms and link it with neither of those previous associations. Having enjoyed the inaugural edition, I was more than grateful to receive Pood #2, the subject of this post.
A testament to its delightful strangeness: I awoke in my sick-bed the other night from a fitful, cough-syrup-tainted sleep. It was about two in the morning, and unable to shut my eyes, I reached for the copy of Pood. The trippy, surreal comics therein took me to faraway places…the same sorts of trippy, surreal, faraway places I thought had just left behind in slumberland. In fact, the transition was so seamless, I wasn’t sure if I was awake or asleep. Did I dream these comics? No, but it’s a near certainty someone else who was high on cough syrup did. My favorite was perhaps “Cochlea and Eustachia” by Hans Rickheit, in which a mini-skirted girl in a Lone Ranger mask follows a mile long spoon, which turns out to be the sexual organ of a creature whose head is a sort of diving helmet with deer antlers. He pulls a string on her back as though she were a doll, and she begins to spew forth a very lysurgic-inspired ectoplasm, which gradually forms an Amazonian canopy over their heads. I also loved “Gaboon’s Giant Journey” by Tobias Tak, and “Exquisite Corpe” a lovely bit of beat poetry by Adam McGovern set to Jack Kirby-like visuals by Paolo Leandri. And there’s a dozen more; no turkeys in the bunch. Truly, Pood is the only blotter acid you will ever need, and best of all, the hallucinations stop when you put the newspaper down (which is more than you can say of The New York Times). To learn how you can get your hands on one, go here.
