I picked up Shaky Kane’s “Monster Truck” a few weeks ago for no other reason than I liked the name Shaky, and because a comic with a monster truck is going to be fun no matter what else is in it. I’m glad I did because, besides being a visual feast, it gave me a new artist to look for when browsing the stacks at my local comic shop. That’s why when I saw the name “Shaky” on Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred I decided to buy it immediately. I was not familiar with the former “Bulletproof Coffin” series, nor had I ever read anything by the writer, David Hine. When buying comics, I tend to do more research than that so that I know what I’m spending my three dollars on. I am glad I took a chance on this one though because what I came home with was a thoroughly entertaining phantasmagoria of pulp. It opens up with a shot of some full frontal zombie dong, so right away I knew this comic was going to be crude (read: my cup of tea). What follows is a mash up of golden age super heroics and crime capers. Kane's heavy line work makes the already bright color pallet seem even more exaggerated. Exaggeration is a reoccurring motif throughout. The characters all have personalities that are pushed to the extreme end of who they are supposed to represent. Ginger Palmer, the female sidekick and “love interest”, is violent, sexually voracious, and drawn with the bust dimensions of a 1990’s Barbie doll. Johnny P. Sartre is about as hardboiled a detective as they come. Apparently he used to fight communists (or “Pinkos” as Ginger calls them), which is ironic considering he seems to be named after noted French Marxist and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. The story revolves around Sartre trying to figure out who is behind a series of murders, who he finally deduces is Ginger by realizing that her last name is Palmer, a term also used for someone who is adept at a particular type of sleight-of-hand. It is a hilarious parody of noir films and detective stories wherein the main character seems to be running through all of these different connections in his head. What normally seems brilliant and deductive in serious literature is disassembled here to the point where Sartre just seems more of a paranoid schizophrenic than anything else. The story closes out with an old “Crime Does Not Pay” throwback, a hyperbolic conclusion that can’t seem to figure out that there are punctuation marks other than the exclamation point. There’s also an added bonus at the end of the book in the form of an essay by a mysterious author named “Destroyovski”, who details a completely fake history of Kane and Hine’s carriers and subsequent fake falling out. The author of this essay claims that even though each of the creators hates the other, “the friction is causing the sparks to fly”. Funny, smart, beautiful, and chock full of referential material, this is a comic you should rush to buy if you already haven’t. The second issue was released today, so if your local comic shop didn’t run out of copies like mine did, I would strongly suggest picking up that one as well (a zombie says “daddio” in the preview, so there’s that). I’m sure there are refrences in there that I missed, and some of the jokes probably fell flat because I haven’t read the first book, but it was still thoroughly enjoyable and well worth the money.