This is where today's series comes in. Muktuk Wolfsbreath - Hard-Boiled Shaman. First appearing in Terry Laban's Cud comic, which was an anthology comic which ran between 1992 and 1994, created by Laban in order to do something "wilder and crazier" according to his own words.
In 1998 the series got picked up to run as a three issue mini series published by Vertigo.
We begin with Muktuk sleeping in his tent when the he gets a dream vision of his former-lover/student/enemy Nusqua. Sniffing around they find Nusqua's familiar, a thing that looks like if Sonic was designed by Heinz Edelmann and let it loose to lead it to her in the only way Muktuk knows how: swallowing magic mushrooms.
Arriving in thea village and almost getting shot by an arrow in the process, Muktuk finds Nusqua as the local Shaman and quite a lot more when concerning Rooka, the local hunter. There's been something supernatural killing things around the village, so he sets up a decoy boy and gets his drink-loving weasel spirit animal to make the empty sack get up and go for a calm afternoon walk in the forest.
And what does he find but a cannibal ghost - basically a zombie with nothing you can shoot at, with the body of a young boy. Ol' Muktuk has to make like an Avenger and levitate out of there to make sure he's not on the menu and goes about trying to find out more. It has something to do with the death of Rooka's kid and as he explains it, there being just a cannibal ghost around is apparently too good to be true, because the Great Mother has a habbit of piling up an additional side of famine and sickness ontop of the revenge hauntings whenever a crime happens, just to spice things up a bit ya know ? The reason being well, humanity kinda sorta shits all over her face whenever they screw up.
Kind of understandable I guess. Muktuk is pressured into leaving my Nusqua, but he's attacked by the ghost again and this time he has to spend a whole night up in a tree to avoid being munched on. Worse yet, after he's basically said "screw this" and leaves, he finds a tiger and uses his shaman voodoo to talk to it and find out what really happened. Rooka found his dead son's body, mauled by a tiger, and after he managed to shoot the pussy bastard he was then jumped by another tiger (some guys have all the luck eh ?) and then he had to hide in a cave with the only thing to eat being his son's corpse.
Ouch. There's not really a way to get past this sort of thing, no matter how expensive your shrink is.
Just when things start falling into place Nusqua possesses the body of Rooka to try and and kill Muktuk. Our heroic shroom muncher manages to prevail, barely, and Rooka dies. Of course he doesn't have any answers so he follows the poor devil into the netherworld, using a boat he made out of the first Shaman who picked a fight with him.
Oh you thought I was exaggerating ? Nope, Muktuk made a living boat out of the first Shaman he killed, cause that's how he rolls.
He finds Rooka's spirit and folds him up ino his backpack to take home with him, literally, but he's stopped by Nusqua stealing his boat and giving him a very good shaq until he realises she's somehow feeding off the power of the Great Mother and well, as she starts to turn into her he gets second thoughts, given that the Great Mother kinda sorta sits at the bottom of the spiritual toilet bowl of the entire planet.
When Muktuk comes back to his body he actually manages to resurrect Rooka, thereby showing that yes, you can do it, John Constantine was just being a lazy sod everytime he tried to do it and fucked up.
So he and Rooka have a manly slumber party while Muktuk tries to think of a way to ritually screw over Nusqua, but Rooka heard him and snuck off to get the stuff Muktuk needed for the ritual. Nusqua has her hands full with the village chief being possessed by every demon this side of the Don so she didn't notice but the problem is one of those ingredients is the bone of Rooka's son and well, he kinda sorta runs into it, what with holding the dead boy's severed arm and all.
Yeah I don't think it will surprise anyone when I say the poor bastard ends up dead, again. Wonder if he'll get some sort of frequent visitor bonus down in the underworld.
Anyways Muktuk gets what he needs and decides to go pay the Great Mother a visit in her stone hut, dressed in Nusqua's necklaces to fool the old hag that it's really her. He succeeds but when he comes to Nusqua has been setting him on fire and then uses her supernatural strength to punch the ever lovign shit out of him. Luckily, a demon from down under followed. So the day is saved and Muktuk can go back to his tent to drink fermented mare milk with his weasel friend. Only sticking point here is the original prophetic dream was caused by Nusqua's spirit animal thing who betrayed her cause of what she was doing. It feels like a last minute ending to try and resolve all loose ends with a boatload of exposition but given all that happened before I can take it.
However, despite how over the top this series was, according to Laban sales weren't that great and so Muktuk would go under for more then a decade this time, only to surface as a webcomic-turned-graphic-novel in 2011-2012 with Muktuk Wolfsbreath, Hard Boiled Shaman: The Spirit of Boo. One hopes this isn't the last we see of Laban's shroom chompign Shaman. The Vertigo three parter is basically like a Siberian Hellblazer and there's nothing wrong with that.
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