Like Bonfire of the Vanities with the bodycount of Hamlet
If I couldn’t be sheriff, I wouldn’t play.
— Miguelito Loveless
In 1996, John Arcudi and Doug Mahnke, the creative team behind The Mask, having turned the main series over to other creative teams following the success of the Jim Carrey movie, made one final foray into their bizarrely violent world.
Sometime after the events of The Mask Strikes Back, series antagonist and mafia bruiser Walter has been arrested and put on trial for 28 counts of first degree murder. He is big, he never speaks, and he is Obviously Evil - a slam-dunk case and the perfect recipe for Mayor Sims to beat the Tough On Crime drum before his upcoming election. Fortunately for our hero, local billionaire Bruce Corpful wishes to undermine the mayor and his meddling D.A., and provides ruthless attorney Anna Hamel to defend Walter in court. When her rhetorical skills and a freak event see Walter not only declared innocent on all charges but praised as a hero, his benefactors see an opportunity to use him as a battering ram on their way to the top. But politics is perhaps the only game more dangerous than fighting The Mask, and Walter must navigate it using only his wits and his Nigh Invulnerability, all without uttering a single syllable.
Be warned: Spoilers are unmarked.
The comic provides the following tropes:
- Ambiguous Ending: Walter’s the only surviving candidate for mayor, and was more or less a shoe-in before that, but the story ends before the actual Election Day.
- Assassin Outclassin': Walter’s main physical threat is a spooky weasel of an assassin named Mahlon. Poor Mahlon never achieves much more than inconveniencing Walter. In his defense he's hardly bad at his job, there’s just only so much you can do against a man who simply does not die.
- Asshole Victim: Walter's landlord is such an asshole that killing him on camera actually sends Walter's ratings soaring.
- Badass in a Nice Suit: As in previous appearances (where he was generally a mafia hitman) Walter is always wearing a suit, though he's otherwise too brutish looking for the full effect. Mahlon also wears one and is no slouch himself.
- Batman Gambit: A spectacular example. When tensions are at their highest, Walter simply mails an ominous letter to Mayor Sims. Sims assumes that it's a blackmail threat from Corpful, who's funding Walter's campaign, and beats him to death at his mansion. When Hamel discovers this she realizes she no longer has the money to win conventionally and assassinates Sims and (unsuccessfully) Wozner. Hamel herself is killed by Sim's hired gun when he finds out. In one fell swoop Walter has eliminated all his competition and his bosses, guaranteeing his victory and leaving him the sole power behind the throne, without getting any of their blood on his hands. The only hitch is that Wozner miraculously survives, but in the end that issue works itself out anyways.
- Black Comedy Animal Cruelty: Walter stomps on a squirrel in the middle of a campaign event.
- Call-Back: Walter’s on trial for blowing up a bunch of cops in The Mask Strikes back.
- Chekhov's Gun: Walter is always carrying around a newspaper. The newspaper has a front page story on Big Head and it initially seems to merely suggest a continuing obsession with him - but at the end when Sims receives a threatening letter made of newspaper clippings, guess who sent it?
- The time bomb Mahlon tried to kill Walter with at the beginning of Issue 3 ends up being used to kill him at the end of Issue 4.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Lea, the psychopathic child, is seemingly unrelated to the plot until the very end when she intentionally murders Wozner by tripping him on her skateboard.
- Creepy Child: Lea is a young girl who really, really wants to kill somebody. She murders animals, assaults other children, and rolls her skateboard at approaching adults in the hopes they'll trip and break their necks.
- Dark Horse Candidate: A mute Giant Mook. It's somewhat subverted since he doesn't actually do much more than stand around while Anna Hamel does everything including debates and speeches, and she's part of the establishment.
- Decoy Leader: A bizarre example, crossing with Apparently Powerless Puppetmaster. It's immediately obvious to everybody that Walter is just the mascot for Hamel's run for mayor and has no actual involvement (Hamel is writing and reading "his" speeches, for example). However because he's the figurehead he is constantly bombarded with assassination attempts while Hamel is mostly ignored. In the end though she overplays her hand and gets assassinated anyways, and it turns out Walter isn't quite as disengaged as everyone assumes.
- Did Not Think This Through: After Corpful's death a distraught Hamel murders Sims, as she reasons it's the only way her campaign can still win. She accidentally leaves Wozner as a living witness though, and the next day Mahlon murders her and dumps her body in the river.
- Flat Character: Walter is a Generic Doomsday Villain in the main series whose only real trait is his unrelenting opposition to Big Head. He doesn't change much here - he never speaks or even communicates to anybody else, he barely seems interested in what's happening around him, and when he isn't killing things or standing around he's glowering at a newspaper featuring Big Head's exploits. In the end when everything suddenly goes to hell he’s last person anybody (likely including the reader) expect to be behind it.
- Genius Bruiser: Everybody assumes he's Dumb Muscle, but Walter is no fool. He outwits a small mob of professional sycophants, liars, and thieves to become mayor while confounding assassination plots on the side.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Literally, in this case. Mahlon ends up getting blown up by his own bomb.
- It's Personal: Mahlon continues to try and kill Walter after his employer dies because Walter threw a beehive at him. But first he offs Hamel because she killed his employer the day before he was supposed to get paid.
- Kangaroo Court: It turns out that every election cycle Mayor Sims hauls up someone without the means to defend themselves and has them prosecuted in an extremely public trial to show how he's tough on crime. The last guy this happened to claims to have been innocent, and while Walter is certainly guilty of many things it's implied he might actually be innocent of the specific crime he's been charged with.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Sims apparently had a guy falsely prosecuted for a child abuse in a show trial during the last election cycle. This same guy shows up at Walter's trial and shoots the place up in revenge, kicking off the plot and leading to Sims' downfall.
- Mayor Pain: Mayor Sim is a short tempered psycho who abuses his assistant and attempts to have his rivals assassinated. His only redeeming trait is that he's the only politician willing to stand up to Corpful, so he does seem to have some values at least.
- The Man Behind the Man: Corpful is the one funding Walter's campaign, to the point that when he's offed it's considered the death blow for it.
- Money Is Not Power: Corpful is a very diminutive man with great wealth. He method of coping with the former is to simply not be afraid of anything and to tell himself that his money gives him power over things he probably should be afraid of. Unfortunately for him, owls and bees don’t care about how rich you are, nor do the more violent and animalistic men he doesn’t even try to protect himself from.
- Ms. Fanservice: Hamel wears a very skimpy minidress for the entirety of Issue 3. Skimpy enough that a professional woman probably wouldn’t be able to get away with it at a formal upper-class luncheon.
- The Napoleon: Bruce Corpful is a billionaire dwarf and is absolutely obsessed with height. He has a miniature scale model of the city in his home which he stomps around in like Godzilla, and all his speeches are about how size doesn't matter and he's a metaphorically big man.
- Nigh-Invulnerable: And how! Walter survives dozens of gunshots (including several from a high caliber sniper rifle), a piano falling on him, a swarm of bees, and a rocket launcher.
- Pinball Protagonist: Walter clearly does not care at all about running for mayor and pretty much just stands where other people tell him to stand and reacts to attempts on his life / people he doesn't like. He's more of a mascot to Hamel's campaign than a candidate himself, and everyone treats him as such. Or so it seems - unfortunately for everybody else, he's more attentive and clever than he lets on.
- Psychopathic Manchild: Corpful is one of the most literal examples in fiction. He’s an adult with the body of 12-year old boy, and mentally he isn’t much better.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: One of Walter's campaign aids tells Hamel that she's "bad news" and walks straight out of the plot - right before everyone else gets killed.
- Smarter Than You Look: Everybody assumes Walter is just an easily-manipulated gorilla in a suit. Their mistake.
- The Speechless: Walter, as always. It's revealed that his throat was shot out.
- The Starscream: Corpful's manservant Janos is the one behind the hitman subplot - he believes Mayor Sims is the only candidate willing to prosecute Corpful, whose imprisonment would leave Janos with all his material wealth, and so he connects the mayor to an assassin to literally cut out the competition. He achieves this in a roundabout way when Sims ends up simply bludgeoning Corpful to death, although he doesn't have long to enjoy it.
- Walter himself counts. Corpful and Hamel (herself also The Starscream to Corpful, the man does not inspire loyalty) both consider Walter to be a useful pawn. Walter's machinations lead to both their deaths.
- Too Dumb to Live: Walter's landlord rats him out to the cops and then, right in front of him, asks for his reward money. The first thing Walter does when getting out is throw him through a car.
- Corpful refuses to accept that he’s the size of a literal child and that agitating people much larger than him (which is everybody) is a bad idea, especially when those people are hot-tempered psychopaths. Sure enough he gets brained to death by the Mayor because he can’t stop himself from needling him into a homicidal rage.
- Jamos and Mahlon both head to Walter’s campaign headquarters at the end with the intent of putting him down once and for all. They don’t find him, but rather than worrying that they may have stumbled into a trap, they somehow conclude that Walter must have fled town. It is, of course, a trap.
- Wire Dilemma: A hitman mails Walter a time bomb. Walter defuses it in one second. With nail clippers.
- You Have Failed Me: When Walter gets declared innocent, Sims has the prosecutor killed.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Both Corpful and Hamel tell Walter that they won't need the other once they've become mayor and can have them eliminated. Unfortunately for them Walter doesn't find either of them particularly endearing.
