WTF Wednesday: The Beard Hunter - on the razor's edge!

Welcome back, fans of the weird, to the clean-shaven oddity that is ...

WTF Wednesday Presents:
The Beard Hunter!

"Beard Hunter?" you might ask — "What the hell's a Beard Hunter?"

"THE Beard Hunter" (thank you very much) is the sort of satire only Grant Morrison could've cooked up during his warped run on Doom Patrol, and it's one of the crazier characters he came up with — which, if you've read his Doom Patrol stories, is saying something.

In this stand-alone story, vigilante Ernest Franklin is an urban hunter, a misunderstood soldier waging a lonely war — against facial hair. Why? Why target the bearded, the mustachioed, even (or maybe especially) the goateed? Because those guys are obviously assholes, that's why.

After shooting a comic shop patron from a nearby rooftop for saying, "Ron McMurray, award-winning writer/artist on 'The Glo Worm' didn't understand the elementary rules of grammar," our anti-hero shaves off his victim's Van Dyke and leaves him silky smooth on the hood of a car. Unfortunately for him, he's also dead.

You'd think that would earn this gritty punisher of evil some respect, but you'd be oh-so-wrong. After getting hassled on the street by some cross-dressing hookers ("They were lucky. No beards.") he goes back to headquarters. Which happens to be his mother's house. Can't a guy just go home to spend time with his stuffed dog and body-building magazines?

Moooom!!! Jeez!!

Next week: Who is the man with the blue beard, and what does he want with The Beard Hunter?!?

Panel from Doom Patrol #45
Grant Morrison, writer; Vince Giarrano, penciller; Malcolm Jones III, inker