I tackled an unusual Marvel title in February, 'The Luckless, the Abandoned and the Forsaked', so it seems fair that I follow up a couple of months later with a DC title. In fact, I'll tackle a pair of them, both of them released under the 'DC Graphic Novel' series in 1986. As with the Marvel, neither of them are superhero books, because that was my only real rule with this project. 'Me & Joe Priest', #5 in that series, and 'Metalzoic', which was #6, are post-apocalyptic sci-fi romps, but otherwise they're very different indeed.

This one feels very much like a wish fulfilment comic from the seventies and it's worth about as much as that that suggests; but there's a lot of fun to be had from a cult B-movie perspective. I can't say that the post-apocalypse is a particularly new idea but it started to get serious in the late fifties with films like 'On the Beach' and 'The World, the Flesh and the Devil'; made it into the mainstream in the sixties with 'Dr. Strangelove', 'Night of the Living Dead' and 'Planet of the Apes'; then took over in the seventies with films that ran the gamut from deep and serious through cheap and ridiculous to wild and original.

This tries to be the latter but fails through lack of originality, merging 'A Boy and His Dog' with 'Mad Max' and maybe a little 'Zardoz'. Of course, in April 2025, it's hard to look beyond the first page, which features a very different sort of wish fulfilment, given that it depicts the results of the last President of the United States, in the year 2193, shooting himself in the head. But hey, let's not project! The reason he takes such a drastic step is the Great Drying Up, a sudden lack of fertility in human beings. With nobody able to knock anybody up any more, the population is in serious decline with no way to stop it reaching zero within our lifetimes.

Enter Joe Priest, whose name is really Fr. Joseph St. Simone. He's a young and handsome priest who encountered the divine and left the experience fertile. Now he follows a star which guides him towards fertile women and jumps into bed with them, guaranteeing that they'll all become pregnant in the process. As we saw with 'A Boy and His Dog' and 'Hell Comes to Frogtown', it's a hard job but someone's gotta do it, right?

Now, what's shocking about this is that he's actually not kidding. He really is a priest, who grew up with his mother in a seminary simply called 'The Church', and he really did experience a light that spoke to him with the voice of the divine. Now, as he borrowed from 'The Blues Brothers', he's "on a mission from God" and it surely can't hurt that all the fertile women the star guides him to happen to be young and beautiful. And clean, given that we're past the apocalypse. But hey, like I said, wish fulfilment.

All this takes place in the deserts of Arizona, where the population is mostly divided between a bunch of Homebodies, folk who cluster into little communities as if nothing had happened, and Bully Boys, who are ex-military and ride around on their futuristic motorbikes in search of new Experience. One band of Bully Boys, U.S. Army Desert Rangers led by a gentleman who goes by Bunker, bump into Fr. Joseph in a Homebody community, where he's… erm, ministering in private to a blissfully unaware man's young and beautiful wife, and one of the Bully Boys is so tickled by the Experience that he joins up with him in the next scene.

And so they go with Fr. Joseph spreading the seed of God and Lummox serving as his bodyguard as he does so. That's needed, I should add, because the fanatical priests of Cardinal Baylin are dead set on killing him. It's completely obvious to anyone with a brain that the cardinal is also Fr. Joseph’s dad and, if you ever read this and believe I just spoiled the big reveal, then you missed the most overt telegraphing in the history of literature. However, Baylin also goes batshit crazy and, after seven months of isolation, forms an elite squad of ninja priests in corpse paint called the Order of Darkness. Like you do.

And so we go. There is a twist at the end that isn't telegraphed, so I'll leave that for you to find out for yourselves. Really though, there isn't a heck of a lot else here. The art by Ron Randall is capable enough and it's really colourful, as if it was a seventies colouring book and he coloured it in with bright felt tip pens. Now, he coloured it in really well but that's the feel nonetheless. Of course, he also drew it all and I don't want to diminish his work because it's a heck of a sight better than the writing, by Greg Potter.

What it all feels like is that someone in the seventies wanted to take the infertility angle from 'A Boy and His Dog' and the bikers and gasoline angle from 'Mad Max' and create something a little more religious in focus that mixed humour and action and spiritual sci-fi. However, they didn't have the budget to do that, so they saved up for ten years, eventually hiring a B-movie director looking for a gig to knock out a straight-to-video release for unwary punters to rent on a Friday night. And they enjoyed the crap out of it, but mostly because the beer flowed freely and the pizza ran out.

Fast forward forty years and one of those unwary punters finally figures out with Google's help just what that fertile priest movie was that they saw one drunken night with their buddies and downloaded a copy to watch afresh. To their horror, they discovered that it was never any good to begin with and this fresh viewing spoiled the nostalgia that had kept it alive all these years. Oh, and I know it's a comic book not a movie but that would mess up my analogy and it worked so well otherwise. Let's just say there's fun to be had here but it's cheap and ephemeral fun. It doesn't bode well for 'Metalzoic'. ~~ Hal C F Astell