Maybe YOU Can Hire... The A-Team!

If you ever need proof that there's no justice in this crazy world of ours, look no further: Marvel has allowed Spider-Girl to be published for a hundred issues.

And yet they cancelled The A-Team after three.



It's a tragedy from which comics may never recover.

Admittedly, DC's forthcoming adaptation of Snakes on a Plane excepted, comic book media tie-ins are rarely a good idea. But honestly, The A-Team is the story of over-the-top caricatures engaging in surprisingly non-lethal explosions, and that makes it almost a Marvel comic already. Plus, it's almost exactly like the Fantastic Four.

Seriously. Only instead of Mr. Fantastic, you've got Hannibal, Murdock's the Human Torch, Face is Sue (assuming that every reasonably attractive woman in the series is an analog for the Sub-Mariner anyway), and instead of this guy...



...You get this guy:



Amy, I guess, is HERBIE or something. Maybe She-Hulk, if I want to stretch this analogy any more dangerously thin than it already is. But the fact remains: It's genius.

Take, for example, The A-Team #2, the Jim Salicrup/Jim Mooney classic that ranks as one of the finest examples of sequential art ever published by man.

It kicks off with Hannibal gluing a Fu Manchu moustache to his face and slicking back his hair--in order to disguise himself as a Japanese man for some unfathomable reason--and getting hired by a pair of video-game publishing millionaires to find their kidnapped father, and it doesn't reach its crashing end until the A-Team has to face down a deadly cult of Ninjas from Arizona, a process involving a nunchuck duel and B.A. Baracus throwing a sumo wrestler out of the ring by his hair.

By that point, of course, some new shit has come to light and it's been revealed that Old Mr. Kuramoto actually kidnapped himself, retiring to a compound based around a life free of soulless and impersonal technology patterned after the world of feudal Japan rather than living out his life as a burden on his sons. Unfortunately, he doesn't bother to explain why his peaceful existence necesitates a battle arena where intruders are challenged to death-matches, but when you roll with the A-Team, I imagine that sort of thing is to be expected.

Like I said: Pure. Genius.