SCUD: The Rick And Morty Comic Books You’ve Never Heard Of

While cooking dinner yesterday, a hot saute pan spat garlicky oil at me. I knew it was going to happen. I had opened the lid of another pot, and the condensed water inside the lid fell into the pan. I remember thinking, Oh, that’s surely going to sp-

“HOT SUCK!” I yelled as the pan, indeed, spat.

Thankfully, my catlike reflexes allowed me to dodge directly into the path of the arcing and flavorful oil. My wife walked into the kitchen at the same time, chortling at the unusual but strangely obvious combination of the word “hot” with “suck”. I had to explain to her that this phrase was not my own coinage, and was in fact from a comic book called Scud: The Disposable Assassin, and, yes, I was fine, thanks for asking.

Later, I realized that I had brought the incomplete collections of both SCUD and its’ spin-off, La Cosa Nostroid with me when I moved to London. I dug them out for a nostalgic flip-through.

Scud is a one-time-use robotic assassin, purchased from a vending machine for the affordable sum of 3 Franks, whose programming sets him on a course to eliminate his target, then self-destruct. The premise of the series involves Scud’s realisation that he does not want to self-destruct, so instead critically wounds his target, Jeff, and has to pursue episodic side-quests to pay the medical bills to keep him alive. I see now that this is a particularly American premise.

Scud has all the audacity of a 90’s indie comic as soon as you open it. The panels look more like postcards on a cluttered blackboard, with bold black inks that are highly gestural, even lazy. Action sequences are frenetic, where every line implies movement and the point seems to be less an unfolding narrative than a pastiche of violence--if you can imagine a film like Spring Breakers adapted to a comic book. The characters sling suspicious eyebrows and serve maximum face whenever possible; the art generally seems more concerned with attitude than function. There are the usual thuds and pops floating around the gunfights, but in one scene where Scud removes a magical ring that gave him super size, he shrinks back to normal, and the onomatopoeic word that narrates is just “SMALL!”. It has a 90’s “zaniness” to it.

It was a very refreshing trip down memory lane. I wondered who I had to thank for it. The inside cover of every SCUD issue reads more like it was meant to scroll at the end of a film: a director (artist/creator) in Rob Schrab, suggested voice talent (John Malkovich for Scud, Gwyneth Paltrow for his not-quite-girlfriend Ssussudio), and a writer, Dan Harmon.

Wait, that Dan Harmon? Creator of Rick and Morty and Community and, my personal favorite, Harmonquest?

Indeed, ten issues of the twenty-issue run of SCUD were written or co-written by that Dan Harmon, and all nine issues of La Cosa Nostroid--which follows an Italian-Cyborgian Mafia family and their Gundams--were written solely by him.

And you can see it.

When you see Benjamin Franklin--a main villain--burst into a panel screaming “I AM BEN FRANKLIN, MASTER OF SEX AND VOODOO!”, it’s pretty hard to deny that some similar comedic sensibilities exist in Rick and Morty. When you notice that Tony Tastey’s mafia family can communicate silently via a cerebral intranet when discretion is important, you can pretty easily see some of the genre sensibilities as well. Even the recommended voice actors suggest that Schrab and Harmon were probably thinking in ‘toons.

That said, there are certainly some other aspects of these books which are undeniably of-their-time, and have not aged as gracefully. There are instances of very 90’s casual homophobia and chew-the-scenery-type racism. The books are often ultra-violent in a teenage-Tarantino wouldn’t-it-be-fucking-awesome-if way. Female nudity for the titillation of a young male readership (me) and implied sexual threat appear with similarly 90’s regularity. In no way do I intend to apologise for these aspects, but they exist, and I remember that at the time, no one was telling creative people that that wasn’t okay. Dan Harmon came forward about being part of the problem of an explicitly sexist system of power in the entertainment industry in 2018, giving an apparently honest recollection of the timeline and his culpability within it. Regardless of how this may affect your opinion on his projects, at the very least it implies that Dan Harmon is a man on a journey through understanding, and at one end--the beginning end--there might be some quite distinctly puerile ideas and jokes.

You can see some of that in these comics as well.

So, if you think you understand Rick and Morty, if you’ve seen every episode, if you own anything made to resemble a sentient pickle, if you believe that your knowledge of that show is part of who you are, and you haven’t read La Cosa Nostroid and Scud: The Disposable Assassin, you are wrong. You are sadly incomplete. Also, the publisher, Fireman Press, has been defunct since 1998. Try not to worry, though. The journey to read these strange little books might be long, but it will take you through experience, and by the time you find them and read them, maybe you’ll realise that it had a lot more personality than the phrase “Summer, where are my testicles?”