"I DON'T IMAGINE you're going to see this book optioned by a Hollywood production company or turned into a major motion picture any time soon (not if I can help it... and I fucking can)." So writes Joe Casey in the backmatter of the Butcher Baker the Righteous Maker hardcover, which collects all eight issues of the series, illustrated with gorgeous, hallucinogenic energy by Mike Huddleston. Truer words have rarely been spoken, at least in comics: Butcher Baker begins with Jay Leno and Dick Cheney heading into a sex club to recruit the super-powered Butcher Baker, who's bringing no fewer than three women to orgasm while remembering "the good ol' days"—when, driving around in a star-spangled semi, he threw supervillains into a prison called the Crazy Keep. Agents of an evil empire, Leno and Cheney ask Butcher to blow up the Crazy Keep—a task that kicks off Butcher Baker's splattered-with-various-fluids chaos.

Butcher Baker is, as Casey notes, "a motherfucking comic book where shit blows up and a bunch of freaks try to beat the shit out of each other!"—but in its feverish attempts to titillate, it veers close to pulp profundity. "As a superhero, I had a pretty simple code," Butcher says at one point. "Self-awareness is for pussies." But both Butcher and Butcher Baker are well aware of how to best exploit their lurid charms, and in the process, there's plenty of stuff to say—about the sad state of superhero comics, about growing old, about failing. Butcher speeds and fucks and jokes and punches his way through these pages, a man who the world has left behind—and a man who's happy to drag the world, kicking and screaming, right back to where he wants it.