The Goon is a self-published book by Eric Powell, who's also the inker on The Hood.  Apparently the character has already appeared in Dark Horse Presents #175, but I missed that one.  This one-shot is a trailer for an ongoing series starting in October.

Given that, it's a little odd that this issue never really gets around to explaining the concept.  There's a banner on the inside front cover that says "The nameless man, the zombie priest, had come to town to build a gang from the dead.  But even the undead fear... The Goon."

What that has got to do with the actual story, I have no clue.  There's this guy, the Goon, and he has a flat cap... and there's some zombies wandering around... and somebody does mention a priest in passing.

The general tone is clear enough, though - it's a comedy horror book.  As near as I can make out, the premise has antihero fighting zombies of the traditional "green skin and bad suit" variety.  Except the actual story is about him and his comedy sidekick trying to retrieve a valuable coin collection from a haunted house.  Possibly not the best story to do for the first issue, given that it seems to have next to nothing to do with the series concept.

The art is excellent - just sufficiently cartoony to get away with shoving hatchets in people's faces, without losing its solidity.  The writing is going for a kind of freewheeling stream of consciousness absurdity (random cutaways to completely unrelated scenes and so forth), which kind of works, but leaves the story a bit shapeless.

There's some promise here.  It looks great, and many of the gags are very funny - although some of the non sequiturs fall flat.  But the story doesn't really hold together.  I want to like it, but it needs a bit of tightening up. 

Rating: B-

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