The coolest contemporary movie star, Keanu Reeves, added to his portfolio in 2021 by creating a comic book series called BRZRKR, co-written by Reeves with Matt Kindt and illustrated by Ron Garney. The title, a vowelless “berserker”, references those Viking warriors who fought with trance-like fury. In the comic, this is “B”, also known as Unute, an immortal who looks very much like Keanu Reeves (Reeves has signed up to play the role in the forthcoming Netflix adaptation). B goes from prehistory to the present day via a series of extremely violent fights, dismemberments and killings. He can be injured, but not killed: his wounds heal, missing body parts grow back, and on such occasions as his body is entirely annihilated a giant magic egg appears out of which he later emerges.
BRZRKR, as title, suggests a word too muscular for piddling little lower-case letters, and frankly too macho for vowels. Grunt, shoot, stab, kill, rip bodies apart with bare hands, is the whole game here. And if “BRZRKR” also looks somewhat like a typographical representation of somebody blowing a raspberry, there is something ridiculous about the whole thing, too. There is little by way of actual story. The fundamental samey-ness of the conceit, with diminishing returns of ripped-out intestines and gore, knives, arrows, bullets and blood spray, flattens and banalises the telling. Still, it has Keanu as main character, and Keanu is cool.
