In which I bitch like an old man.

I’m a grown man.

I’ve visited Rotten.com.

I’ve read American Psycho and a few Chuck Palahniuk novels.

I’ve seen a lot of horror films that take violence to its extremes, including the work of Takeshi Miike and more than one entire episode of Full House.

I’ve seen blood literally gush out of a gunshot wound as someone is wheeled through an emergency room on their way to the trauma center.

But, you know, I would have enjoyed the Sub-Mariner: Revolution trade paperback a hell of a lot more if it didn’t feature the these scenes of over-the-top violence:

• Venom ripping off two of Namor’s cute little feet-wings.
• Namor, in retaliation, ripping out Venom’s tongue.
• Namor ripping off a power-siphoning character’s “borrowed” version of his cute little feet-wings.
• Namor then skewering said character on the spire of the Space Needle in Seattle.

I mean, I get it. Namor’s dark and brooding and shit, but at some point, it all becomes too gratuitous. The plot in Revolution is dead good, actually, but the amount of sadism on display by writers Cherniss and Johnson is pretty galling for a mainline Marvel title and takes a what could be a potentially great story and transmogrifies it into ghoulish fanboy torture porn. Thumbs down.

(Nice art, though, and the last four pages set up a potentially interesting plot for the future. Still, I didn’t need to see Venom’s slime encrusted tongue hurled at his own face by Namor.)