In 1997, Chaos! Comics published a four issue series entitled the 'Cryptic Writings of Megadeth'. Remember Megadeth? Remember 1997, for that matter? The last thing I remember about Megadeth was a certain Metallica documentary film which featured a scene in which Megadeth front man Dave Mustaine was sitting in a psychologist's chair and, well... he was weeping.

So yeah, I can only imagine that in 1997, Megadeth was still AWESOME and CRUSHING. AWESOME and CRUSHING enough to have their own comic book, at least. The immediate problem one might assume of this series is bias with regards to its branding, especially from a comic book out of the late 1990's. I explain how you can produce horrible comic books and still makes lots of money off of them as long as you have decent branding below.

As we all should know, comic book tie-ins with other media/branding iconography are generally atrocious. There are exceptions, of course. Dark Horse and IDW all seem to publish decent comics despite their penchant for branding (Aliens, Predator, Scarface, etc.) Stuff like Rob Zombie's Bigfoot or that comic from Gene Simmons with the wrestling ladies in it, may or may not count too, depending. Although that particular classification of title branding seems to be better suited to stuff that actually features Rob Zombie or Gene Simmons in the book, fighting Spider-Man or what not, as a general rule of thumb.
But I'm not talking about the present... I'm discussing 1997. This was a year when comic books were very different, and many comic books were done very, very wrong. Why? Well, we tie back into branding here. Comic book publishers buy or borrow the rights to various movie film characters and musicians and television series and anything else you can think of. The reason is these outside mediums tend to have a higher public awareness than the comic book medium. They certainly did in the late 1990s, at least, in terms of corporate awareness.

So once you have your rights to publish Backstreet Boys comic books, for example, you can then crank out product using the cheapest artists you can find and then distribute them to the places like the bargain bins at Wal-Mart. These abominations then compete with higher quality products because of a lower price association with a brand name that a casual buyer might be attracted to. These are buyers who have no interest in comic books whatsoever, but little Billy's tenth birthday is coming up, and, disturbingly, he loves the Backstreet Boys.

So voila, you have sold a poorly crafted comic book.

It's probably not as simple as my explanation, but we can explore the most boring subjects in the world at a later point in time. Right now, I'm here to talk about the awesomeness that is the Cryptic Writings of Megadeth, and how it defied my expectations. You're welcome to explore the corporate agenda and how, despite the millions of dollars behind it, still manages to wreck everything in pursuit of better numbers, on your own.

The concept of the series is easy enough to grasp: each issue contains three vignettes based on the lyrics of Megadeth songs. I used the words 'based on' instead of 'inspired by', because, yeah, the narration provided for each story are the actual lyrics of the actual song. The title of each story is the title of the actual song, too. Without examining the music itself too carefully, I would like to point out that conspicuously absent are Hanger 18 and Holy Wars - but we've got Peace Sells in issue #3, at least.

And, well, despite this massive potential for grand scale failure and my general misgivings regarding branding titles - it's an excellent comic series.
The comic is presented in that 1990's "horror-style" art - which is sort of a cross between van art and surf board/skateboard/Volkswagen/guitar decal art. Despite this dated style though, the writing holds up remarkably well - and a lot of the thematic ideas presented here have become staples in the genre. Perhaps this series was ahead of its time in that regard.

Most importantly, The Cryptic Writings of Megadeth is remarkably satanic, and this in itself is always worth a few points. It's largely impossible to hate devil comics, and in the first issue alone, two out of the three vignettes deal with inversions/perversions of Catholicism. The first is a fairly blasphemous reinterpretation of the crucifixion featuring that skeleton on all those black band t-shirts, while the other is an accurate portrayal of the crucifixion, except that it is set to the lyrics of 'Looking Down the Cross' instead of, you know, the bible.

Other features in this series include the prerequisite "guy murders his girlfriend and goes to Hell", a Viking rape/pillage montage complete with Norse monsters and set to the lyrics of 'Chosen Ones', werewolf sex, and at least two zombie apocalypse stories.

The series is violent and has an ample supply of naked girl drawings, too.
What's most interesting about the books to me, are that all of these things (except for maybe Vikings), have become staples of horror comic books these days, and perhaps the series was too far ahead of the curve to gain any serious recognition at the time, or maybe the gimmicky nature of the series, what with Megadeth and all, meant that it was overlooked when it initially came out.

It's difficult to gauge the popularity of a limited run comic book, especially from a year you can barely remember, but I'd go out on a limb to say that while this comic may not have garnered any critical acclaim, somebody from the industry was definitely looking at it.

All that aside, there's nothing particularly clever about the series. You're certainly not going to gain any new insight into yourself or the universe from reading the series, no matter how badly Megadeth might want you to. But we're talking about comics, and you either enjoy the format or you don't. Surprisingly, in terms of horror comics, this one does it better than most of its contemporaries.

I certainly recommend the series if you, um, still listen to Megadeth, and I'll recommend it to the general reader as well. While you won't find anything innovative here, it does somehow read like a template for more contemporary commercial horror comics.

An interesting and entertaining footnote in the canon, if nothing else.