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The Bears Deserve Better

Bodog Entertainment’s "Ayre Force” nosedives into four-color mediocrity.

I’m sure worse things have been done in the name of charity. Benefit screenings of Sin City for troubled children. Strippers for Multiple Sclerosis. "Ayre Force", A graphic novel from Bodog Entertainment, isn’t quite a disservice to the fight against harvesting Bear Bile.

But a wantonly violent, adolescent spy-story full of bullets and ‘splosions might not be the best way to raise the cash needed to halt the repugnance...

"Ayre Force" is the story of Calvin Ayre, the CEO of Bodog Entertainment, a burgeoning multimedia empire that houses singers, poker players and mixed-martial artists. For the purposes of the story, Ayre is not just a billionaire playboy like Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark, he’s an environmental crusader who recruited his entertainers on the basis of their civic-mindedness, their proclivity for “wet-work,” and their ability to kill lots of people with semi-automatic weapons in covert ops missions.

Granted, it’s a comic-book. Plausibility is meant to be stretched in four colors. But the marriage of real-life players to this outlandish Rainbow Six ripoff is as ill-considered as Michael Jackson’s engagement to Debbie Rowe. Writers Adam Slutsky (Maxim, Stuff, Razor, and Fight magazines) and Joseph Illedge (editor of Batman) slapped together a story that begins with Ayre leading his squad of poker players and singers into a Bear Bile harvesting facility, only to be trapped by Ayre’s longtime adversary, Janus Winter, a multimillionaire into gene splicing to create hybrid supervillains. Winter has genetically modified his children into manimal-esque warriors, bent on exacting revenge on Ayre and his uppity, peaceful ways.

It only gets sillier from there, as poker players Josh Arieh, Evelyn Ng and David Williams are captured and tortured, and the Ayre Force has to launch a rescue attempt into the heart of Winter’s compound. If this had been, as I suspect, a pre-existing story that just had it’s cardboard characters swapped out for real-life employees on the Bodog payroll, it might have just been corny and mildly amusing. But even as an ego-stroking bit of “what-if” that looks to coast solely on the novelty of seeing recording artist Bif Naked killing faceless goons with gunshots to the face, and kicking cat-people in the chin? This is mostly lazy, sloppy failure.

The only person seeming to put any real effort into this is artist Shawn Martinbrough, whose noir-ish style lends the whole mish-mash an air of stylistic integrity. Except for the panel or two where it feels like Martinbrough pushed back from his worktable, looked at the script, looked at his art, and went “Really? REALLY?” and went outside for a drink or ten.

I wouldn’t blame him, either. If this were filmed and released, it’d be an Asylum Films straight to DVD Release, except even those cash grabs (think Snakes on a Train, Transmorphers, Ratatoing,) at least put a little thought into the one-liners. Near the climax, when Winter’s Manimal Family is closing in on the Leather and Armor clad Ayre Force, this exchange occurs:

Trevor Prangley: Wow. You’re a big girl
Helena Winter: Too much for you?
Trevor Prangley: You know what they say. The bigger they are—
Helena Winter: The harder they hit!
SFX: WHAM!

But the coup-de-grace of bad dialog comes during the actual coup de grace of the narrative. It’s a minor miracle the word balloons could stay aloft in the panels, considering they’re weighted down by the turds contained therein:

“You want some science, Janus? Here’s your damn science! Right up your ass, you piece of garbage. Time to cash out.”

As a comic book, it’s a noble failure, and only noble in that the proceeds from buying it go to the Calvin Ayre foundation for the stopping of harvesting bear bile, a practice that is so painful to the animals that they end up chewing their own limbs off in response. Aside from the novelty enjoyment a poker fan or MMA enthusiast might get from seeing Josh Arieh or Jorge Masvidal unload clips into mercenaries while dressed like X-Men movie extras, you’d probably be better off just directly donating to Ayre’s foundation than you would purchasing the book. That way you get the warm glow of helping the less fortunate without having to own sub-par entertainment.