Welcome, ladies and gents, to Acronym Week. That's right! Because comics are known for those silly words in which each letter stands for another word. Word? Word. Dig it.

1/14/07

14. W.A.S.T.E.

Click to enlarge!

You should be reading Casanova. You really should. Written by Matt Fraction and drawn by Gabriel Bá, this Image series is my favorite new comic of last year. It's the best supersexy super-espionage book on the stands, and it's only two bucks an issue. It's also selling a twentieth of Fraction's Punisher sales. That just ain't right, kids. Buy it. You can trust me.

As for W.A.S.T.E-- well, it's the super-evil terror spy organization in the Casanovaverse, and it's headed by Newman Xeno, the mummified madman and hedonist you see above. He's got our "hero" Casanova Quinn working as a double-agent against his own father, head of E.M.P.I.R.E., which is like S.H.I.E.L.D. Cass has got plans of his own, of course...

WASTE (I'm tired of periods) also employs Cass' evil sister Zephyr. Evil in this timeline, anyway. Yeah, this Cass was plucked from another timeline by Xeno to replace his dead counterpart. It's zany.

But yes, as stated in the picture above, WASTE seems to stand for "We're All So Terribly Excited." The organization is also, sayeth Wikipedia, a reference to an organization with the same acronym from Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. So there you go, Pynchon fans! Buy Casanova!

Xeno is a cool baddie. And we all know he's Joe Casey under those bandages.

Casanova #7 should be out any week now, with a trade of the first seven to follow soon after. You know you want it.