Yes, it's the obvious choice, but sometimes you have to take the easy ones when they're handed to you. It was either this or the one where the narrator gets really snippy with us about being so demanding halfway through the caption boxes.
The Heckler is, I guess a loving pastiche of superhero comics. It carries a lot of the trappings, with the overburdened, responsible protagonist and his colorful supporting cast. The unusual villains, the distinctive urban setting. But it's all turned to just absurd enough the reader isn't intended to really take it seriously. Stu owns/runs a diner, which has a running gag about its sign never being correct. One of the patrons is a Fat Elvis-looking guy that seemingly knows everything, and the cook appears to be a French chef slumming it.
So Heckler fights El Gusano, a man-sized, talking worm that works for the chief mob boss in the first issue. There's an air of Bugs Bunny to it (or maybe it's just the Heckler's penchant for calling his opponents maroons), as the issue has a brief gag where El Gusano suspects Heckler of hiding in one of 3 garbage cans. The Heckler pops up alongside him and suggests checking the one in the middle. Cue 3-panel sequence of the Heckler being punched high into the sky, then falling back to the city below.
After that there's a battle with John Doe, the Generic Man, which also involves a gun-toting bounty hunter who targets guys she went on lousy dates with. Then an assassin robot from outer space that looks like a clown, which also involves a sci-fi fan who can't distinguish fiction from reality. Considering the clown-bot is out to get its brethren and thinks they've already subjugated Earth, there must be a lot of that going around.
From there Giffen and the Bierbaums spend an issue joking about the Heckler going on patrol and finding no crime, all the while an inept big-game hunter type tries to kill him. Then a night at the theater is ruined by a frustrated, past-his-prime thespian (who seems to have gotten his look swiped by Christopher Nolan's version of Scarecrow). The sixth, and ultimately final issue, involved the Heckler getting dragged into stopping some hideous monster from another dimension that was summoned to usher in the Apocalypse.
Well, the book got canceled, so I guess either it succeeded or the Heckler failed, depending on how you want to look at it. The subplot of the guy who was waging a "purity" campaign to try and turn Delta City against the Heckler never did get resolved. Ah well.
Outside the splash pages, Giffen sticks almost exclusively to 9-panel grids. His Heckler is an expressive character, always with that mask with the enormous smile on it. He moves unconventionally in terms of how Giffen depicts him. Side-hurdling chimneys, and leaping across rooftops in an almost hunched over posture. He's not drawn as an acrobat like Spider-Man or Nightwing. Giffen's Heckler reminds me a lot of Ditko's Creeper, only with the "HAHAHAHA" on the Heckler's costume instead of filling panels and surrounding the Villains of the Week.
Lots of extreme close-ups on people's face, but also I think Giffen uses the small panels to try and offer a sense of Delta City. Not just all the panels showing joke names for different businesses - such as Delta Epsilon Pies, or Mr Fix-It and across the street Mr. Fix It's Ex-Wife Gloria - but it makes it feel like a very close urban area. Lots of people, homes and businesses all tucked in together. A neighborhood, you might say.
One which is, in the background of all the madness, being steadily destroyed or gentrified. I think that's also Mr. Rabid's doing, part of his so-called attempt to clean up America (meaning, homogenize it, which makes sense given his true identity.) Again, that subplot never comes to fruition.
Until Mark Russell's One-Star Squadron, the less said of which the better, I'm not sure anyone had used the Heckler since this early '90s debut. If Russell's work is the best one could manage, that's probably for the best.
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