After jumping out of the Adult Swim cartoon Metalocalypse the members of Dethklok once had their own Dark Horse miniseries and The Goon crossover.
After ending years ago, the fan-favorite Adult Swim series Metalocalypse is getting a feature film that will take the heavy metal musicians Dethklok to their biggest stage yet. And while Dethklok has a long and bloody history on the small screen, they’ve also shredded their way through comics as well.
In 2010, Dethklok make their most high profile appearance in comics in Dark Horse’s Metalocalypse: Dethklok by Brendon Small, Jon Schnepp, Jeremy Barlow, Lucas Marangon and Thomas Mason. This three-part series, Metalocalypse: Dethklo, was successful in carrying over the majority of its ultra-violent and shockingly dry humor to the page. Much like the original series, each issue of the comics was its own self-contained story.
The comic begins with the band bickering amongst themselves over the minutia regarding their latest branded product while ignoring their dutiful manager, Charles Foster Offdensen. The band’s drummer, William Murderface, is as always finding any way he can to fight with the other members. Soon enough, Toki, Pickles, Skwisgaar and Nathan Explosion have all come up with their own brutal food concepts to enter into their upcoming line of frozen meals, and the results couldn’t possibly be worse.
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Dethklok, as successful as they might be, constantly make their dutiful fanbase suffer, and their frozen food proves no different when the band’s incompetence leads to mass poisoning and death. What follows is a trip back to Finland, specifically the village of Espoo, where their previous concert had unintentionally awakened a cannibalistic troll from the depths underneath the ice. Their return trip is turned into a bloodbath when an ancient, masochistic cult arrives to bring the trolls back. Once again, the Dethklok members are miraculously unharmed as the scenery around them devolves into unfettered chaos.
Their subsequent cross-country train ride concert fares even worse when it plunges into the ocean with all of its passengers aboard, save for the band, of course. All of this over-the-top death and destruction — one of the cornerstones of the series’ comedy — is encapsulated almost perfectly in the Dark Horse limited series. Though their own series was the last time Dethklok found life in the comics, their decidedly non-canon crossover with The Goon the year before at least gave fans another paper concert to enjoy.
In 2009, Dethklok versus The Goon by Eric Powell and Brendon Small saw yet another cult create serious problems for the band by using Murderface and his tragic bloodline to send Dethklok’s citadel, Mordhaus, crashing into The Goon’s world along with a brainwashed Doctor Rockso, the Rock n’ Roll Clown who had been programmed to kill the band. The ghoulish world of The Goon was close enough to home for the members of Dethklok to assume they were in Cleveland before throwing a raging concert. Unfortunately, the Goon’s pal Franky is gunned down by Rockso, sending the Goon into a violent frenzy of his own. It didn’t take long for the Goon to cut down Dethklok’s guards before turning his attention to the stage, and with an axe in Murderface’s head, all of Mordhaus was returned to its rightful universe.
The Goon and Metalocalypse, though not analogous to one another, have always shared a similar sense of humor regarding violence, drugs and sexuality. It comes as no surprise that their one-shot crossover would land as well as it did, even if there are moments that haven’t aged particularly well. While the likelihood of ever seeing these two cross paths anywhere else is almost zero, the fact that the comedy of Metalocalypse can be translated to comics means there is hope yet for more of Dethklok’s antics on store shelves eventually, and maybe even a rematch.
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