So here's a brief list of things that are amazing about DC's latest promotional comic for Kentucky Fried Chicken:

  1. It's a sequel to last year's "The Colonel of Two Worlds," in which Colonel Sanders teamed up with the Flash to fight Colonel Sunder, his evil counterpart from Earth-3.
  2. It involves an attack from Sunder that causes eleven of the Colonels Sanders of the Multiverse to each forget all but one of the Eleven Secret Herbs and Spices, meaning that they have to all team up to remember how to make fried chicken, including the Colonel Sanders of the Kingdom Come universe or the far-off future of the Legion of Superheroes.
  3. It posits that Colonel Sanders and Kentucky Fried Chicken are multiversal constants within the construct posited by Multiversity and Convergence, on par with Superman and Batman.
  4. It is the single best DC comic of the year.

 

Kentucky Friend Chicken Presents: The Colonel Corps
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You might think that I'm being ironic about this, but I can assure you that my feelings about Kentucky Fried Chicken Presents: The Colonel Corps --- currently available for free over at Comixology --- are 100% genuine. It is delightful. And for a comic that's designed to sell chicken --- and spends a lot of time talking about how great KFC is --- the real meat here is less about KFC itself and more about how it fits Colonel Sanders into the DC Multiverse.

Over the course of a single issue from Tony Bedard and Tom Derenick, the Colonel, aided by his gender-swapped counterpart Arla Sanders and the Flash of her world, takes a whirlwind tour of the Multiverse. It'd be easy to just get a bunch of weird Colonels --- and look, that's basically what happens --- but what's amazing is how hard they go into making it fit into the DC Universe. Like, when I said that this comic has the Colonel Sanders of Kingdom Come, I wasn't kidding:

 

Kentucky Friend Chicken Presents: The Colonel Corps
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His name is Koln-El. He is from Krypton.

But my deep and abiding love of promo comics notwithstanding, it actually is a really fun superhero story on top of all the goofy weirdness of seeing a chicken-slinging advertising icon palling around with the Teen Titans. And considering it's free --- and that the worst that can happen is that you get a craving for chicken and encourage companies to go completely bonkers with the way they're trying to sell you things --- it's definitely worth a read.

Especially the letters page, which features a missive from Dr. Sivana among other truly bizarre touches.

 

Kentucky Friend Chicken Presents: The Colonel Corps
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"I am a real man." "This is all really happening."

I love this comic so much.

 

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