SAVANT:: Essential

ESSENTIAL:
THOSE ANNOYING POST BROTHERS:
DISTURB THE NEIGHBORS
BY PAUL T. RIDDELL

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Those Annoying Post Brothers:
Disturb the Neighbors
by Matt Howarth
Aeon Press, 1995
$9.99
ISBN 1-883847-15-X

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When people talk about their neighbor's kids being "trouble children", I just have to chuckle. Most of the time, this "trouble" consists of jumping over fences and TPing every house on the block. I just like to point out that my brother Eric and I were true trouble children, considering the horrendous things that we initiated or at least instigated in our youth. Many of our exploits are not for public consumption due to the murkiness of statutes of limitations in Texas, but let's just say that Eric was the first five-year-old most people ever met who knew how to make black powder. Eric went for brute-force trauma; I went for psychological horrors, and our father lost most of his grey hair when we moved out after high school. Eric is currently in Special Forces: what better way to get a paycheck and commendations for doing things that would get him thirty-to-life in the civilian world, and that he'd do anyway?

(We may have grown older, but we certainly haven't grown out of our disturbing tendencies. My mother has a picture from my sister's wedding, taken June 1995. The wedding itself was a true nightmare for everyone involved, but Eric and I were the only ones willing to express it. There I am, ready to baptize my sister in Lake Winnebago and keep her down until she stops twitching, and Eric follows behind, ceremonial sword on hand just in case she slipped from my grasp.)

Many comics instill in me the urge to live life differently: I still can't thank David Lee Ingersoll enough for Misspent Youths and the decisions that this comic inadvertently catalyzed that led me to the dark path I now follow. However, only Matt Howarth's Those Annoying Post Brothers sets off dj vu every time I read it. I swear, at times I suspect that Howarth was taping Eric's and my activities during our teen years.

For the uninitiated, the Post Brothers first received popular acclaim as characters in a featurette called "Changes" in Heavy Metal back in the late Seventies, and rapidly mutated into any number of one-shots and continuing series, but everything centered around the multidimensional Bugtown. People and things from all over reality ended up in Bugtown, but only the natives could shift to an infinite number of alternate realities at will. Equally naturally, nothing that died in Bugtown stayed dead: even buildings regenerated after a while from the harsh ambient radiation. Because of this, Bugtown attracted equally intriguing residents, which included the insect rock band the Bulldaggers (which featured, at one point, both C'thulu the Elder God and Hiroshima the nuclear goddess), an infinitude of Caroline clones (none of whom resembled another Caroline clone, of course), Savage Death (a skeevy shyster "whose names are legion, like the boogers in my nose"), and the Post Brothers.

Ron and Russ Post had been living by the motto "Bad boys do bad things" for a very long time: in fact, Russ was two weeks older because he simply couldn't stand Ron's acidic presence in the womb. Russ lived for random violence and the opportunity for quick and easy wealth; Ron didn't mind the wealth so long as violence was part of the equation. Anything they made from a job, and they were constantly being offered cash or other items to kill someone or blow up someone's planet, was usually burned up on armaments and music (since Bugtown had the best record shops anywhere), which just gave them that much more incentive to get paid for doing stuff they were going to do anyway. And they were going to do it: one of the more notorious story arcs came from a minor bet between Ron and C'thulu over more random murders occurring at 98 degrees Fahrenheit than at any other temperature, no matter the reality level, and Ron and Russ ended up going to truly obscene lengths to hedge the bet.

Because of the scope that Bugtown embraced, as well as Howarth's natural workaholic tendencies, one comic wasn't enough to hold all of the possible tales, and Bugtown's residents found homes at a plethora of publishers over the years. Savage Henry, lead guitarist for the Bulldaggers and good friend of the Posts, had his own title for years, which combined usual Bugtown savagery with musical cameos from such notables (and real people) as Michael Chocholak and Hawkwind. Unfortunately, only two collections of this simply incredible output exist, and these are the two Post Bros. collections Das Loot and Disturb the Neighbors.

Now, any Post Brothers story is a good Post Brothers story, but the title tale in Disturb the Neighbors helps explain how Matt Howarth helped inspire about half of the comics "Savant" readers currently worship. Ron and Russ live in a huge Bugtown warehouse along Steadman Bay (so named because of the amount of crude oil floating on the surface), and they're settling down to a night of snuff videos and nitrous oxide when someone comes knocking on the door. The interloper turns out to be the head of the neighbor relations office for a large fraternity, and so after Ron finishes him off quickly and messily, the two realize that they have neighbors, which is a violation of their lease. Given free reign to take out said neighbors by the landlord, Ron and Russ get together with a resident Caroline clone and plot strategy; first by petty snipings such as the use of an electric chainsaw to disrupt TV reception during the last quarter of the Superbowl, and then by a massive attack of ambient sound from an impromptu music jam with Savage Henry that literally causes the frat house to crumble. (And since the landlord doesn't charge rent on properties but instead on the forces necessary to protect properties from the stress of Bugtown, that inadvertent demolition sets off a whole series of bad decisions and worse recriminations that ultimately lead to the moon falling on the warehouse, but that's a story for a later time.)

In his way, Matt Howarth was as much responsible for the current boom in adult titles (that is, adult content, not crappy porn) as anyone else one would care to name, and yet he receives little to no credit. Howarth was retaining the rights to his characters when everyone else produced work-for-hire because they didn't know any alternatives existed (c'mon: can you picture what would have happened to Ron and Russ Post if Marvel had gotten its claws into them?), and he was pushing stories that buckled the limits of "antisocial" and still remained funny. Look at some of the most popular non-superhero titles out today, and wonder how many of them would have stood a chance if not for one guy writing little stories about two brothers from Bugtown. No matter whether Lobo or Spider Jerusalem, they're all following the lead of the Post Brothers.

With this in mind, go out and hunt down a copy of Disturb the Neighbors. To save the grief of walking into a comic shop ignorant of Howarth's joys, order it directly from Howarth at www.matthowarth.com. This way, the next time the neighbor kid starts lobbing golf balls through your bedroom windows, just follow the lead of the Post Brothers: repeatedly pop the little bastard with a tranquilizer gun and leave him there so the fire ants can scoop out his eyes. Or you can just use your imagination and your wasp collection.