Trencher #2
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeTrencher #2 is a sharp piece of mid-run satirical provocation from Keith Giffen, arriving at the precise moment in 1993 when Image Comics' house aesthetic of hypermuscled anti-heroes and gratuitous carnage was at its commercial peak. The issue carries the first appearances of two new antagonists — the Hurler and the desert-dwelling Saguaro — while deepening Giffen's parody of the very publisher he was working for, deploying deadpan ultraviolence to critique the genre's excesses from inside the machine. As one of the rare Image titles conceived as deliberate satire rather than earnest power-fantasy, it documents the earliest internal skepticism about the style that defined the era, making it a meaningful artifact of that creative moment even if the series never reached a wide mainstream audience.
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Giffen conceived Trencher after watching his earlier DC co-creation Lobo — itself originally a satire of violent anti-heroes — get embraced unironically as exactly the kind of character it was meant to mock. With full creative control at Image, he wrote, penciled, and inked every issue himself, coloring and lettering handled by Lovern Kindzierski. Issue #2, cover-dated June 1993, was edited by Bill 'Bud' Shakespeare and carried a cover price of $1.95. The series was intended as an ongoing but folded after four issues, with Giffen continuing Gideon Trencher's story almost immediately in the three-issue Images of ShadowHawk crossover series later that same year.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Written, penciled, and inked entirely by Keith Giffen; colored and lettered by Lovern Kindzierski; edited by Bill 'Bud' Shakespeare — published June 1993 by Image Comics.
- First appearance of The Hurler, a new villain who meets his end within the same issue.
- First appearance of The Mighty Saguaro, a desert-themed character introduced in this issue.
- Supreme (Ethan Crane), Rob Liefeld's Superman analog, appears in this issue — a harbinger of the extended, brutal encounter between Trencher and Supreme that takes center stage in issue #3.
- Bloodstrike is referenced (mentioned) in the issue, tying Trencher into the broader Image Universe continuity of 1993.
- The issue continues Giffen's deliberate parody of the 'Image Comics style' — ultraviolent set pieces rendered in his distinctive ligne claire-influenced art, informed by the hyper-detailed work of Geoff Darrow.
- The entire four-issue Trencher series, including this issue, was later collected in a trade paperback released by Boom! Studios.
- The series was conceived by Giffen as a corrective to the unironic reception of his earlier DC character Lobo, giving him full creative control to satirize violent anti-hero tropes from within Image itself.
Cast · 29 characters
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Full plot ⚠ may contain spoilers
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Trencher fights Cher Noble.
Plot details indexed by the Grand Comics Database (CC BY-SA).
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