By Frank Miller
If you're looking at this strange little one-shot from 1997 with 2024 eyes, the first thing you are going to to notice is how fucking tame it is. With a title like that, and Frank Miller at his peak show-off stage, you'd expect a bit more spice, instead of ongoing gags about smoking cigarettes and eating meat.
It would, of course, be a fucking awful idea for a comic book these days, because everybody has been perpetually offended by everything since social media let us talk to each other, and because truly offensive shit like blatant racism and transphobia is frequently leading the news. There's enough of that nonsense in real life, we don't need more in our comic books.
But in the post-ironic 90s, when Miller still had a decent sense of humour about the grim and gritty world he had help popularize, Tales To Offend can still be a lot of fun. It was an age where sexism was okay because you didn't really mean it - and that really doesn't matter any more because who can tell who means what? - but Lance Blastoff is just a fucking jerk, and easy to digest in all his simplicity.
It's also a lot of fun because, with the exception of a black and white and pink Sin City story in the middle, there are some lovely eye-popping coloring work by the great Marie Severin, capturing a silver-age gloss that still shines in the issue, more than a quarter of a century after it was published by Dark Horse. Miller's usual coloring collaborator Lynn Varley does work on a pin-up that has wonderfully muted colors in this issue, but Severin's work on the main strips is garish and alive.
Unsurprisingly, there haven't been a lot of Lance Blastoff stories since then, and that's no great loss, the world is offensive enough. But his technocolor nonsense is enough for one issue, and one issue only.
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