So, you want to be a Metabaron huh?

Hey people?

Anyone catch last night's awesome episode of Arrow? Other than Randomnerd:)

Well it was just that; completely awesome and-, oh yeah, hey Random, spoiler alert, so feel free to skip this part of the post unless you want to know what happened;)

At the beginning of the show, we're recapped as to why Ollie's been arrested. And a very cool Easter egg just happens to show up while the cops are taking Ollie's mugshot.

Did you catch what it was?

 Take a serious look at those numbers. Did you catch the significance?

If you're a true comic book fan/nerd, then you know that the Green Arrow made his debut in More Fun Comics#73 in 1941.

Of course looking at the cover you wouldn't know that since Dr. Fate was front and center on it, but he did.

So when I saw that, I was like nice. Hey I'm glad at least someone working for DC still respects their older history. So rare these days you know;)

Now on the main topic at hand, The Metabaron.

I guess in order to explain why I'm so fond of this series, I need to go back to when I first saw this series, back in ye old late-1990's.

It was one of my more frequent trips to my not-so-local comic book store, that I just happened to catch this particular title on the rack. The beautifully painted and illustrated cover by series artist Juan Gimenez caught my eye and never let it go, as I poured through pages of pages of this now classic epic story.

I can't stress enough the pure awesomeness of the art.

As for the series itself, it was created by writer Alejandro Jodorowsky and Juan Gimenez for their comic series Incal in 1981. At the time, the Metabaron concept was just a supporting character that grew into it's own series, published by Humanoides Associes, a french publishing company.

I had to go back and do some research online a bit, since I only a little bit about the concept and the story based on the few issues of this series I do have. I keep forgetting to get the rest, so there's always that.

But basically the main story is about a character/characters named the Metabaron. His loyal robotic servant Tonto tell the other robotic servant Lothar the whole background and story of how the whole Metabaron thing came into existence  And trust me folks, it's a very wild and crazy journey through many generations of Metabarons.

This whole series reeks of classic Greek drama, and with the factor in the main drive/conflict being the father vs. son(and sometimes daughter) aspect of the Oedipus Complex, you quickly understand this is nothing at all like the classic plot set-ups of most mainstream superhero stories. Not by a damn sight!

I read the wiki write-up and it says the Jodorowsky was heavily influenced by the classic Sci-Fi series Dune. Well yeah, I can see that as well, since again, the family aspect of the story is so crucial to the development of the Metabaron(s).











The main premise is that every generation, the father willingly tortures and injures his son, so that the son can learn to deal with pain, and rise above all that, making him a true warrior. Yeah, these guys don't exactly win the best parent of the year or century award, but they could care less.



The cycle ultimately continues on this way generation after generation, with the son being forced to kill his father and take his place. Then when the times comes for that son to have his own son, the cycle repeats itself and so on and so forth until we get to the current(and final) Metabaron.

So yeah, again, not your father's comic, and certainly not a kid-friendly one either, but it's still damn good and very worth checking out.














The series wrapped up for good in 2003, but you should still be able to find the individual issues and/or collected trades either at your local comic book store, or by shopping online @ either Amazon.com or any other online bookstore.

Again, I can't stress just how cool and refreshing this series is, compared to the usual mainstream spandex-clad stories. This one is pure gritty Sci-Fi drama, that you should have no problem sinking your teeth into once you start at the beginning, or hell just start at the beginning of any Metabaron's story. You don't need to read them all to enjoy this series, but it does help, since they're all in chronological order from first to last.

You can go straight to this link to learn more about this series and the entire Metabaron history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabarons

Hope you do, 'cause this series is all sorts of awesome:)

Have a good weekend folks!