Strangely The Bearded Gentleman Club is from a Jimmy Olsen tale and they did plan to put a formula in the reservoir.

God bless GM love of 60′s quirkiness

This is especially hilarious to me because I’m currently working on growing a beard.

You’re a bad, bad man sandwich eater.

“Handman has a familiar logo on that first page…and how about “Our Founder” in the final panel of that last posted page? Ha!

Whoops! I see the All-Knowing, All-Seeing Cronin already mentioned the Moore!

At the risk of sounding like a stick in the mud, is every spoof, parody, or joke character now a “meta-message”? If so, I’d like to nominate every comic book that has ever featured Lobo, Ambush Bug, or G’nort.

Yeah, I agree with Kyle that this probably isn’t a “meta-message” — but it’s cool stuff, certainly worth seeing!

I think there is a meta-message, not so much about the Punisher but about certain types of comics fans who take things like “mint condition” and their favorite writers being insulted Very Seriously. T

he Beard Hunter is motivated by his literal and figurative puerility: he can’t grow facial hair, lives at home with his mother, and is obsessed with superheroes and guns and bodybuilding. He’s a preadolescent in an adult’s body — well, except his still-childlike follicles — stuck on weird feelings and power fantasies, a bundle of impotent rage…until he gets his gun out, that is.

If that was a meta-message, you may as well have featured Grant’s Doom Force one-shot. It skewered mid-90s comics quite successfully.

I just noticed that he wears beards around his belt as trophies. That is just too awesome.

I can see this working in a short 2000AD story featuring Judge Dredd – it’s been done plenty of times before. It’s weird seeing it in a 22 page DC comic. I haven’t read it, but I’d be curious to know if it held up well over 22 pages or just got old and embarrassing. Did this type of storyline happen a lot in Doom Patrol?

It was a good issue.

And yeah, stuff like that happened in Doom Patrol frequently. Flex Mentallo, for instance, was a parody of Charles Atlas. And as someone else noted, Doom Force was a sharp commentary on books like X-Force.

Shouldn’t the Beard Hunter have referred to a third big mistake rather than a second second big mistake?

OK guys. Yes, you’re right, there are a lot of meta-messages. And we get that you know what they are already. If all you’re going to do is show up in the comments section and bitch about how if this is a meta-message then everything’s a meta-message, maybe this isn’t the feature for you.

Forgot about this one. It does work well over 22 pages.
Love the 1st panel ‘Clockwork Orange Juice’ getting in a reference to Kubrick and Morrison’s Scottish pop contemporaries (Edwyn Collins’ band)! Love the pre-emptive strikes against internet fanboys plus Punisher & ‘best at what I do’ Wolvie satire!
Is this Morrison’s 1st dig at Moore? I understand they’ve had a feud going on, more from Morrison’s side from what I know.

This would indeed have been more typical in 2000AD but worked here too (and some issues later DP had a full issue homage to “This man…this monster” and Lee-Kirby FF in general…)

And yeah, there is a wide variety of meta-messages, from blink-and-you-missed it nods to plot points to extended parodies. It is true that within this feature it would be a bit too easy just to pick the most obvious parodies (e.g. Lobo, Marshal Law, Cerebus and She-Hulk have not yet been featured) but doesn’t mean one should leave them out completely.

Huh, I always interpreted this meta-message as a dig at Frank Miller’s writing style and his generic, over-the-top characters.

He did this again in The Invisibles when he had Jill Thompson draw a King Mob action sequence in the style of Rob Liefeld.

The comic writing references in The Filth are about as hyper-meta as you can get.

I hope that you do have an opportunity to do an entry on the Doom Force special, Brian. That was one long series of meta-messages. I’ve sometimes felt that Grant Morrison was often too keen to do weird-for-the-sake-of-being-weird in Doom Patrol. But Doom Force totally nailed things on the head concerning a lot of the trends in early 1990s superhero comics. And it was actually very funny.

This is one of the best stories Morrison ever wrote.

i love when the head of the bearded gentlemen’s club notes how when the professor was confined to a wheelchair, “he… he.. lost the use of his beard…”
*GASP!*