Axe Cop Volume 5: Axe Cop Gets Married and Other Stories

If you like the webcomic or have read the previous issues then this one is for you - it's an absurd story of how AxeCop gets married with some of minor other inclusions.Fun stuff.

I got to a part in this book that made me stop reading because I started laughing uncontrollably. For about five minutes, Ethan Nicolle's subtle, affecting, portrait of a powerless superhero, about to be mercilessly cut down, had me in fits of barely stifled laughter. This is a comedy goldmine. Please read it. Give these guys more money so they can show us more hilarity.

The best current comic out there. The only current comic I enjoy, really. I like seeing The Dogs get their own story, and Axe Cop's search for a wife is hilarious.

Malachai Nicolle's imagination is off the charts and his big brother Ethan continues to do an amazing job bringing the world of AXE COP to life! If they ever make a full-length, animated AXE COP movie I think AXE COP GETS MARRIED would be a great story to base it on. In addition to the epic AXE COP GETS MARRIED story this collection includes around 40 pages of "Ask Axe Cop" comics, another complete story THE DOGS and a bunch of behind the scenes sketches, a pinup gallery and more! This book is a great value with a $14.99 retail price, the content is quite dense and took me a couple days to get through all of it. If you haven't stepped into the world of AXE COP.....why not?!?!?!?

You might think that the novelty would be wearing off or that your adult brain would shut down and begin to reject such silliness. Even worse, with the comic’s creator now nine years old the absurdity quota might drop. But it doesn’t. Axe Cop – who is basically Judge Dredd for surrealists – continues to delight and surprise.This book is one of the best yet with a double dose of “Ask Axe Cop” and two big stories. With Malachai growing up he gets exposed to more of the adult world such as dating, marriage and children and with “Axe Cop Gets Married” shows us his perception of relationships. Still at the stage of girls and kissing are dumb this apparently necessary evil is integrated into his world.Whilst his spin on the opposite sex is certainly unusual and definitely un-PC it is a lot less derogatory than the way many grown up writers treat female characters. Sure he has characters whose name end in queen and princess but that is probably what TV is foisting on him. He also has women who fight evil and chop of heads perfectly well without male backup and aren’t afraid to say they don’t want to get married but would rather fight crime.Ethan, providing the drawings, also gets to mature with a really cool fight scene and a black and white wedding album at the end. With a new colourist on board everything gets a makeover and we see Axe Cop looking in his most polished and slick incarnation yet.There is no sign of a plateau yet and for so many reasons this deserves to be a Double Thumbs Up!!

Well, kinda. Or more accurately, a spate of weddings in the Nicolle family means that matrimony is foremost on nine-year-old Malachai Nicolle’s mind – and as such, his creation Axe Cop also ties the knot! But what sort of woman would want to marry a balding workaholic sociopath with no time for love? Every woman alive, as it turns out – and Abraham Lincoln too!This volume of Axe Cop’s misadventures contains two major stories. The first, ‘The Dogs’, focuses on Axe Cop’s canine chums and their struggles with a pair of Siberian witch-doctor mummy cats. Ethan Nicolle readily admits that he likes drawing animals more than people, and as such, this story features his strongest art to date. Be it evil cats, heroic hounds, monstrous mummified fusions of both (or just incontinent Hell-Chickens), ‘The Dogs’ marks a clear progression in Nicolle’s work, and showcases some confident and gloriously over-the-top designs. Check out the page where a confused Axe Cop awakes to a world of giant birds and flying, bat-winged sea-creatures – a surreal delight indeed.The other key story is the titular one, and features Axe Cop’s quest for a bride, to act as mother to his two recently adopted mutated sons. Whereas ‘The Dogs’ is an artistic tour de force, ‘Axe Cop Gets Married’ is a funnier strip. Given Axe Cop’s fundamentally unromantic nature, there’s a lot of humour to be mined from his typically blunt dealings with the opposite sex – the Rainbow Princess, for instance, gets a particularly rough deal. That said, Axe Cop does learn something important about women during the story. He learns that you can’t always knock them out with the blunt side of an axe - sometimes you have to lure them into a pit using decoys instead. Whilst the tale arguably goes on a little long, it’s still great fun, and again, Nicolle’s art shines when able to draw more monstrous creations, such as a rather terrifying fusion of Axe Cop of his monkey and bat-hybrid sons. The one area where Nicolle’s work falters a little concerns, ironically enough, his portrayal of the Water Queen, modelled on Nicolle’s own real-life wife. Understandably, he’s tried to draw her realistically and non-comedically, but given the over-the-top and stylised nature of all the other characters in the strip, she sometimes looks as though she’s wandered in from another story entirely.As much fun as the longer stories are, the highlight of the collection remains, as ever, ‘Ask Axe Cop’, which here reaches its one hundredth instalment – and what appears to be its conclusion. ‘Ask Axe Cop’ has always been the funniest element of the Axe Cop universe, but here, it becomes the most surreal – time is routinely rewritten, major events happen in the space of a page, and the utterly bizarre secret of moustache growth is revealed, in a story which has to rank as the weirdest and most unsettling in the Axe Cop canon. And that’s saying something.So there you have it. Another smashing collection of alien-decapitation, rowdy beard-leaders, and the most implausible martial arts moves in the history of fighting. Business as usual for the man who works the always shift - but he no longer works it alone.