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Bars, Booze and Bad Guys

Published Mon, 09 Mar 2020 12:00:26 -0500

Richard Carrington writes,

Imagine there's a bar where all your favourite Super-Heroes hang out together after a long day of solving crime and saving the world.

Now imagine just how colossally boring that bar would be.

But I digress. Let me just paint you a picture first. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with He-Man figures. Obsessed. Now if you're too young to remember or you're one of those millennial types and you don't know what He-Man figures are – they're like the toys you played with when you were a kid but better. Much better.

Like most children of the 80s, I'd play for hours with these not-at-all-oddly-inappropriate toys (Fisto, anyone?!) but unlike most shell suit wearing kids of the time, I'd never have the good guys win. Instead, I'd have Skeletor drag He-Man around by that stupid blonde bob of his and have Trap-Jaw snap the arms off Man-at-Arms so that he'd just be 'Man'. Maybe I was just a freaky little kid but I've always found the bad guys much more interesting than the good guys.

Fast forward thirty-something years and that's still very much the case. For example, going back to that idea of a bar for good guys and Superman would be drinking a tall glass of lemonade, making sure Batman keeps to the legal limit so he can drive the batmobile home safely. Captain America would be sitting alone by the fireplace, making his non-alcoholic cocktail last all night. Tony Stark wouldn't come within a hundred feet of the place (demons and bottles, you know?) and Peter Parker would be asked for ID all the time. Boring, right?

But now imagine there's a place for the bad guys just down the road. A low down, no good saloon where Lex Luthor's buying rounds of Dom Perignon, Mr Freeze is making sure the beer's ice cold and Bullseye's on his fifth hour straight of 'winner stays on' at the pool table. Wouldn't you rather hang out there instead? Of course you would.

So that's where Mahoney's comes from. It's a comic set in the titular bar, run by retired Super Villain Mike 'The Brawler' Mahoney. A bar where there's only three rules. No fighting. No real names. And no credit ("You're all Super-Villains so by definition, you're not 'good for it'"). Part action, part comedy, Mahoney's is populated by such regulars as Snowstorm, Vileofax, Psi-Kick, The Blender, Flamer and Bloodgeon. Think The Legion of Doom hanging out with Cliff and Norm at Cheers.

Issues 1 and 2 were released last year and we've just launched a kickstarter to help get this latest issue to print so if you like the idea of bad guys being front and centre and you're a fan of comics that put the 'comic' into comics, why not head for the bar at Mahoney's.

HAPPY HOUR BONUS: If you back the project and quote 'Bleeding Cool's Bar Bill' when you do, we'll even send you the first two issues on the house!

Mahoney's may be a hive of scum and villainy – but they serve the best craft beers in town!