Hitting the stands on Wednesday, January 21, 2015, Nick Marino and Daniel Arruda Massa’s Holy F*ck #1 (Action Lab: Danger Zone) seemed to confirm what it says in Ecclesiastes; there is nothing new under the sun. A heaven-hell team-up? Garth Ennis’ Chronicles of Wormwood gave us that. A hedonistic bad-ass champion of God? Robert Kirkman’s Battle Pope. A heavily armed – Rambo-style – Jesus? Warren Ellis’ Bad World. The one thing that seems novel in Holy F*ck is its alliance of forgotten deities bent on destruction in order to once again get people to believe in them. But this, too, has some precedents, even if not as directly comparable – Marvel Comic’s Council of Godheads immediately comes to mind for the gathering, and the worship-hungry old gods are reminiscent in some ways of the old gods in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods or the alien Goa’uld of Stargate SG-1, for example. And Jesus long ago came off the cross to duke it out with Zeus in Godyssey, because the Greek god was fed up with having lost worshippers to the new monotheism.

Holy F*ck #1 is the first of four issues of what the advance material calls “an edgy satire sprinkled with action and adventure.” The plot so far is pretty straight-forward: a nun, as yet unnamed, seeks out – literally finds – Jesus so he can help her save the world from Polydynamis, Inc., a multinational company bent on worldwide destruction. Led by Zeus and Isis, and with a board consisting of a handful of other old, no longer worshipped gods, the group wants to plunge the world into chaos so that people will pray for help; by responding to those prayers, the thinking goes, the Polydynamis board will once again be worshipped by humanity. The issue ends with Jesus and the nun traveling to New Jersey (complete with parodied Jersey Shore beach bums) to enlist some backup from hell.

Marino writes in his introduction to the issue that he and Massa “worked our asses off to pack this comic book full of fun and unexpected moments.” One has to assume that this refers to moments like the issue’s first shot of Jesus, where we see him getting high with two naked women in a Tokyo hotel, while Japanese “tentacle porn” plays in the background. Something can be said about the nun’s disappointment with finding Jesus and seeing that he is nothing like what she has believed him to be all her life, but the moment is a throwaway and its potential wasted. The rest of the issue continues in this vein and, for the most part, it is neither all that fun, nor its moments all that unexpected. (The fact that the room number is 666 did elicit a small chuckle in this reviewer, though.)

That is not to say that old wine in new skin has to taste bitter. But Holy F*ck does not reach any creative heights. The cartoony artwork is reminiscent of Ryan Dunlavey’s work in series like Action Philosophers and The Comic Book History of Comics, with the addition of some simple coloring. It is good enough, but nothing special. And the writing is rather on the nose and the gags predictable. When Jesus, in the in medias res opening scene, attacks Zeus and Isis and empties two handguns in their general direction (curiously,  these weapons have turned into a single machine gun in the next panel – a variation of his old water into wine trick, perhaps?), their response is no more imaginative than to simply exclaim “Jesus fucking Christ!”

It is difficult to say what is supposed to be satirized in all of this. It is an action comic book that burlesques Jesus; most of the twists seem designed to play with expectations and to reverse common notions about who and what he is, or what he would do. This falls flat, however, not least thanks to the disclaimer on the cover: “WARNING: JESUS DON’T TAKE NO MESS. HE LIKES GUNS, NUDITY, SWEARING, AND EXPLOSIONS. DO YOU WANT FRIES WITH THAT?” We know what is coming before the first page. Holy F*ck’s mix of the expected with the already-done does not make for complex commentary or biting satire. The majority of gags neither require nor inspire much thought beyond what is on the page, although I am certain that it will offend if it falls into the right hands. But until the very last pages, I was hard-pressed to find an example where Holy F*ck seemed likely to really strike a nerve. This, of course, might be because I do not hold Jesus (or Zeus, or Satan) in particularly high esteem. Still, for most of the issue, it feels like the creators are pulling their punches (as they do in the censored title).

The thing that seems most likely to ruffle some feathers, and which I regard as Holy F*ck’s saving grace, comes at the very end of the book. [I think a spoiler alert is in order here.] After Jesus, who is portrayed in the butch action-hero style that some Evangelical preachers and cultural producers seem to prefer (“Jesus wasn’t a sissy!”), and the nun arrive in New Jersey, they head to a closed restaurant called Satan’s Bait. In the basement, they meet up with a devilish-looking little man with tiny wings, glasses, a mustache, cut-offs, and a fanny pack – in short, a homosexual stereotype through and through. Jesus addresses him as Belial, to which the devil replies, with pink hearts in his eyes: “Bunny?” “By the scrotum of Moses,” says Jesus, also looking through heart-shaped eyes, “it is you!” They run towards each other and the story then ends with a splash page, depicting the two men in each other’s arms, smooching. Here, behind the juvenilia, comes the issue’s first touch of satire.

Thanks to this final scene there is something about Holy F*ck #1 that makes me not want to write it off just yet, all other criticisms aside. For what it’s worth, I will be reading the second issue to see if things shape up and continue along these lines.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Sacred & Sequential was provided with an advance copy of the issue for review.]