‘The Devastator’ #8 Crosses Over With EVERYONE!

We've talked about The Devastator a few times around here before, but this month, our favorite quarterly comedy mag is back in action with a new issue themed around crossovers. It makes sense, too: If Internet t-shirt sales have taught us anything, it's that people love it when two things they recognize are mashed up together to produce something new, like, say, Buffy in a TARDIS, or Finn and Jake in a TARDIS, or that lady from Game of Thrones in a TARDIS.

Nothing we've seen yet, however, has managed to top The Devastator's Imperial Walker: Texas Ranger.

Asterios and Kokkinos and Nate Pride's Star Wars/Chuck Norris mashup about an AT-AT that upholds law and order in Texas, which may in fact be the most Internet thing that has ever appeared in print, only lasts two pages, but that's just enough to make the most of its so-dumb-it's-hilarious premise without wearing out its welcome. It's definitely a high point of the mag thus far, but it's also just the tip of the iceberg of what the new issue has to offer. There's a cover by CA favorite Jim Rugg and a contribution from Box Brown, and some great pieces that skewer our cultural obsession with mashups and crossovers -- of which we're just as much a part as anyone else -- in a way that's, well, downright devastating.

By its nature, this issue includes a few jokes that are a little more on the side of "mashups are dumb, look how stupid it is when two unrelated things are together" than actually using that premise to make comedy, but the bits that hit are among the best the mag has ever produced. There's a really sharp bit that parodies that bizarre old Cartoon All-Stars anti-drug special from the '90s -- you know, the one where the Ninja Turtles and the Smurfs team up to tell you that crack is wack? -- and one piece in particular, a self-insertion crossover fanfic written by the fictitious president of a high-school sci-fi club, that has some amazing gags. Here's how it starts:

"This is an amazing short story," said Dumbledore, Andy Forsyth's English teacher at Enloe High School. "I've never seen a sci-fi noir done so totally great, Andy! You're the best at studying magic... the magic of storytelling!!!!!!!!"

"Thanks," said Andy Forsyth. "I felt a cybersteampunk noir genre-mash was the best way to make people interested in a satire about the Men's Rights Movement. The world needs to know."

Sadly, there's a website referenced in the story that doesn't exist, no matter how bad I want it to. Either way, it's definitely worth grabbing.

Check out DevastatorQuarterly.com for more.