The Summer of Big Hauls End with Fall

The September solicits were a real letdown. Just not much out there from almost anyone. I think my eyes had crossed by the time I waded through all the Batman-related stuff in DC's offerings. Boom, IDW, Image, Dark Horse, nothing really caught the eye.

Marvel's not doing so great, either. I didn't see Runaways for the second time in four months. I don't think it ends in August, but maybe I'm wrong. Way of X has segued into some overpriced one-shot called X-Men Onslaught - Revelation, which Spurrier apparently described as a 'season finale.' It really just makes me think about bailing on Way of X even sooner. Which would leave Black Cat (still on its Infinity Heist storyarc), Moon Knight (if the first two issues impressed me), and that Defenders mini-series by Ewing and Javier Rodriguez.

Ms. Marvel's getting a five-issue mini-series, but it's written by Saladin Ahmed, whose Magnificent Ms. Marvel did nothing for me. Ka-Zar's getting a mini-series that brings him back from the dead. I didn't even know he died, but I ignored Empyre, so that's no surprise. Even Kang's got himself a mini-series.

Outside the larger publishers, Scout's doing pretty well. Midnight Western Theatre will be wrapping up, and Locust will be on issue 4. And Karl Kesel and David Hahn have a mini-series about a thief who gets mistaken for a superhero called Impossible Jones. Figure that's at least worth looking at.

There's a second issue of Black Jack Demon out. Hopefully I'll have the first issue by then. And Mark Russell and Ben Tiesma have their second issue of Deadbox out as well. Which brings me up to 8 single issues for the month. Oof.

It's not all bad news. Yen Press has volume 15 of Kiyohiko Azuma's Yotsuba! The first new volume in three years. It doesn't come out until the very end of the month, but that just makes it something to look forward to, right?

In Evil Hour - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Set in an unnamed town along a river, where every morning people wake up and may find a lampoon posted on their door, detailing the gossip of the town about themselves or someone else. The story starts with one man going and killing a young singer the lampoons claim is sleeping with his wife, but it isn't really about who's behind it, or why. It's about how people respond to the whole thing.

The country itself has undergone a shift in government, with likewise shifts in what's considered moral, acceptable, or legal. The mayor, who is just as often referred to as the lieutenant, was sent there to instill order by the current regime, and the town is still considered to be in siege, which grants him certain leeway. And that circumstance gradually emerges over the course of the book. Starting as a background detail and becoming more and more prominent with every comment the mayor makes about wanting to do things legally, while lining his own pockets.

The book doesn't have quite the languid sense of pace I get reading Marquez' other works. Possibly because he jumps between characters often, rather than staying focused on just one or two. It gives a feeling of rushing back and forth across town to make sure we don't miss something important. Which lends a certain suspense, since I wasn't sure at all how this story was going to go.

The mayor and the village priest are the two most prominent characters. Each of them is restless in certain ways. Each of them dismisses the lampoons at first, and later each takes steps to address them that are entirely inadequate and useless. The priest is uselessly focused on trying to make the town appear moral, so that the next priest can get a nice church built, but it would be a surface gleam at best. He's concerned about appearances, rather than what people actually are. The mayor drifts a lot, like he's waiting to be pointed in the right direction. Enjoys casually flexing his power while pretending he's not doing that at all.

By the end, the things people were told they could rely on are of course exposed as useless. The government has not changed - how can it when the man who shot up people's homes is mayor? - and the church is doing nothing other than telling people they shouldn't go to certain movies, or that women shouldn't wear short sleeves. What good does any of that do anyone?

'"That's gossip," the priest said. "you have to legitimize your situations and put yourself out of the range of gossiping tongues."

"Me?" she said. "I don't have to put myself out of the range of anything because I do everything in broad daylight. The proof of it is nobody has wasted his time putting any lampoon on my door, and on the other hand, all the decent people on the square have theirs all papered up."'

The Seeds of Destruction

Feels like the kid summed up the human condition rather neatly.

The Seeds was originally going to be a 4-issue mini-series published through Dark Horse's Berger Books line. Ann Nocenti and David Aja got two issues out, and then it just dropped off the radar. Finally, they released a collection of what would have been all 4 issues last winter.

So, the Earth's on the verge of total collapse. Some people still live in crowded cities, others have gone beyond the wall, abandoning phones and internet and whatnot to scratch out whatever existence they can. Probably the main character is Astra, your typical reporter in fiction who wants to do hard-hitting journalism, but has to give her editor the cheap sensationalist crap that gets views, or clicks, or whatever. And what Astra finds that might do both is Lola and Race. 

Lola's a young woman in a wheelchair. Race is a guy she finds herself growing fond of. Race is also part of a quartet of aliens living out beyond the wall. They're here because someone - it's never revealed who - is pretty sure Earth is about to go belly up. Their job is to gather as many seeds as possible for the Celestial Seed Bank. They aren't conquerors, or grand beings with plans of creating some Eden, so much as they're contractors, hired and sent to do a job. Race and one of the others, Sandy, both note at different times most planets they're sent to haven't gotten past single-celled life, so this was actually sort of a nice assignment.

 

A lot of the book is about choices, what people are going to decide is important. Is Race important enough to Lola to go beyond the wall? Is she important enough to him to go against his team's leader, who is clearly enjoying Earth a little too much. Is the opportunity to write the stories she wants worth Astra outing Lola as the one sleeping with an alien? Her boss argues yes, the public has a right to know there might be alien babies running around, but her boss also admitted that when she was going to write an article about a vampire cult, she created it herself. Basically, tell the lie hard enough it becomes truth.

There are a couple of other bits Nocenti adds in to round it out. A farmer wondering why his bees abandoned their hives, and feeling really bad about having to kill his prize sow. There are also two scientists somewhere, each of them with different ideas about what's going to save the planet, technology or nature. Which feels like a false dichotomy, since you can presumably use technology to help nature along. Technology might help you clear a field of invasive species so you could restore a native prairie full of wildflowers for the bees, for example.

I think Aja handles all the art and color work himself. The book sticks to a black/green-gray scheme. Which allows for high-contrast at times, but also can give things a sickly look. You probably wouldn't think a plant that shade of green was doing very well if you saw it. But it works. Even just the absence of the shadows works. Like when Astra's able to enlarge a photo of some idiot billionaire whose spaceship crashed on Enceladus, and she can somehow make out there's a plant sprouting in his eye socket inside his helmet. Cue Jeff Goldbloom "life finds a way."

 

He uses a pretty 9-panel grid most of the time. In some cases it's only one or two rows of 3 panels, and then a larger panel takes up the other third or two-thirds of the page. It makes things feel very restricted, I guess. Everything is caught in their own little boxes. Disconnected from larger things, maybe. There's a recurring motif of hexagonal grids. Beehives, insect wings, chain link fences, people's tattoos. I don't know what that means. Life falls into particular ordered patterns, and attempts to circumvent that are futile? Even if everyone is trying to isolate themselves, they still are connected? Trying to pretend nothing we do has an impact, and nothing else can impact us is a ludicrous notion? The things some people put stock in are incredibly fragile, while things considered archaic are more resilient than we expect?

I'm just spitballing, I don't really know. But I enjoy trying to figure it out.

Sunday Splash Page #172

 

"Welcome to Earth, Dipshit," in Dragon Ball Z vol. 4, chapter 36, by Akira Toriyama

Yeah, I know, in Japan the Dragon Ball Z manga isn't a separate thing from the Dragon Ball manga, but it is in the collected volumes they released here in the States. Besides, like hell I was going to pass up an opportunity to post a picture of Vegeta getting punched in his stupid face.

Toriyama does the old Five Years Later maneuver between Goku beating Piccolo and marrying Chi-Chi and the start of this. At which point he reveals that Goku's not just a weird kid who had a monkey tail, he's a weird alien kid who had a monkey tail. Oh, and he was sent here as a baby to subjugate this world so it could be sold to someone else, killing all the present inhabitants if necessary.

The story still has a lot of Goku going to some new place to fight new people and learn new tricks, but the periodic tournaments are largely abandoned. So are a lot of the comedy elements, especially during the Androids and Cell Sagas. There are brief bouts of it here and there, though. The brief stretch on Namek with the Ginyu Force, basically a bad guy version of Power Rangers, complete with choreographed poses and what not. Captain Ginyu asking Frieza if he should perform the Dance of Joy (although that was probably anime filler). 

Then the Buu Saga brings some of the humor back. First with Gohan trying to fit in at a regular school, then his trying to be a masked superhero, complete with his own ridiculous poses. After that, there's the brief stretch where Goten and Trunks are the ones on the front lines, and since they're little kids, they come up with stupid attacks. Poor Piccolo gets reduced to playing the straight man for them. Even Buu himself, in his initial form alternates between terrifying and silly. The way he sort of dances around or puffs pink steam out of his skull when he gets annoyed, but then he turns people into cookies and eats them. Yikes.

But most of the series is still fighting, people getting punched in the face or shot with energy blasts. The antagonists are stronger, but at the end of the day I'm not sure that changes much really. Is there a functional difference between Vegeta coming to Earth and being able to destroy and entire planet, and Frieza or Cell showing up and being able to do the same, but even more easily? Motivations, I guess. Vegeta trying to find a way to reach the top of the heap, Frieza for revenge, Cell because he's been designed to be perfect, and he wants to know that he is. And the best way is to beat everyone else.

I admittedly prefer the earlier arcs, the Saiyan and Frieza Sagas. I read a post recently that said Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z could be divided into two halves, at the point where Vegeta first mentions the Legendary Super Saiyan. Before that, the series is all about Dragon Balls. After that, it's all about Super Saiyans, and I think that was part of my issue. Anyone that wasn't at least part Saiyan got sidelined more and more. Maybe if the character that benefited the most in terms of focus wasn't friggin' Vegeta I wouldn't have minded so much, but it was, so I did. Vegeta is the equivalent of the dumbshit police chief in Die Hard, always there to be wrong or make things worse.

Like a lot of people I got into Dragon Ball Z through the anime first, on Cartoon Network late in my high school years. I think a friend of mine mentioned it to me first, and Cartoon Network had finally been added to my family's basic cable package, so I watched it when I could after school. I don't think it was the first anime I'd seen - I know I watched Voltron as a kid, and I remember Sailor Moon being on another network before it was on Toonami, even if it wasn't really my jam - but it was the first one where I understood this was from a different country, and where the series really interested me and made me want to watch more. Granted, that's been more branching into other styles of anime and manga; none of the shonen series that owe something to DBZ have ever come close to interesting me as much as it does (One Piece comes closest, but I feel like that's still more in concept, or maybe the fictional setting in general, than the actual story Oda is telling.)

Random Back Issues #64 - Silver Surfer #13

Ah, just in time for the 3 p.m. Emo Monologue. If we missed it, we'd have to wait for the 3:15 p.m. Emo Monologue!

There was only comic out this week I wanted, and I wasn't driving 45 minutes to get Way of X #3. So, the first issue of Silver Surfer I ever read instead. Englehart's well into the Kree-Skrull war that would run the entirety of his span on the book. But this issue is really more about maneuvering and backstabbing within the respective sides.

We open with three Kree trying to assassinate Nenora, currently running the Empire because the Supreme Intelligence has gone mad from trying to combine blue and pink Kree minds into one within itself. The assassination runs smack into Ronan the Accuser, who promptly kills the three of them, and hurls a little racial invective at the last one before melting his face off at point blank range. A racist, lethally violent cop. Unheard of.

Nenora rebuffs Ronan's attempts to cozy up to her, telling him the Surfer has been attacking their border worlds recently, even after she agreed to let him and Zenn-La remain neutral in the war. Ronan's stoked to see how he stacks up and leaves Nenora to gloatingly monologue about how she's actually a Skrull now in charge of the Kree Empire. Only three people know this, and she already killed one of them, her own lover, and is making plans to deal with the other two.

The other two includes one of the five Skrulls claiming to be the true Emperor, and Nenora feeds him information on where he can score a great victory by ambushing a Kree armada. She assures him the Kree defense shields will be down.

Spoiler alert: They were not down. Word of Kylor's defeat reaches yet another of the five, S'Byill, who sends one of her agents to Earth as part of a big scheme that will play out later.

In other threads, the Surfer has currently teamed up with Nova to find the Contemplator, one of the Elders of the Universe, on behalf of Galactus. The Elders tried killing him as part of some big scheme to cause the end of the universe, so they could be big deals in the next universe like him. Brilliant plan. That's the best they could cobble together with literal billions of years? The Heralds find what's left of the Contemplator's head, the guy having been killed and partially eaten by space pirate Captain Reptyl. Except, Death decreed the Elders can't die after Grandmaster pulled that stunt where he stole her power and tried to end existence in those Avengers Annuals.

After the Surfer spends a few minutes moping over Mantis' recent apparent death, he and Nova set off and come to a world the Surfer recalls having visited before. A Kree border world, which doesn't respond well to his arrival since he was just there rampaging. Ronan shows up and when Nova protests the Surfer's been with her this whole time, he encases her in a bubble of absolute zero and declares 'accusation is punishment', whatever the fuck that means. He and the Surfer fight a bit, Ronan appears to have the upper hand, but gets caught with the old "mentally command my board to smack you in the head" trick. 

 

Surfer says Kree science is impressive, but he's the Silver Surfer, and he and Nova leave to find the imposter. The Surfer's able to track the energy signature to another world, even as Nova wonders how someone could impersonate the Surfer. His look sure, but his power is another matter. Well, they'll find out because the imposter is waiting for them. Meanwhile, Ronan's back on his feet and made some adjustments to prepare for a rematch.

[9th longbox, 240th comic. Silver Surfer (vol. 2) #13, by Steve Englehart (writer), Joe Staton (penciler), Dave Cockrum (inker), Tom Vincent (colorist), Ken Bruzenak (letterer)]

The Mummy (1999)

This is one of those movies I can watch pretty much whenever. It never slows down too much, the cast seems to be having fun with it. Watching Brendan Fraser try to intimidate undead warriors by screaming at them, only to have them scream back is pretty funny. 

Fraser plays O'Connell as this mixture of bravado and weary panic. He's like a louder Indiana Jones, in that he has that same, "Oh hell, I don't want to deal with this," attitude, but he's louder about it. Less able to appear unfazed. Sometimes he grasps how deep they are in this with Imhotep running around stealing people's organs, and other times he's overly confident bullets will solve everything (he is from the U.S. after all). Although even that you can tell is an act at times, either for himself or the others. I mean, what else is he going to do?

Fraser and Rachel Weisz seem to have good chemistry. The scenes where Evelyn is really excited about something, and O'Connell's just watching her in amusement are cute. There's a mutual respect that builds as they get a chance to know each other. She's a bit naive, but not oblivious to danger once she encounters it. He might have been to Hamunaptra before, but he respects her knowledge on the subject. When she tells him they don't need to fight with the Americans over a statue, he goes along with it, even if he doesn't know what she's figured out. She grasps soon enough that he knows about fighting, and tends to follow his lead.

Alex and I agreed that some times, the CGI is pretty good for 1999. I would say when it's not dealing with people (or revived corpses). The sandstorm effects, the masses of flesh-eating scarabs, that stuff looks pretty good. Other things, they were probably better off sticking with practical effects. Like when the one guy loses his eyes, the CGI of his empty sockets looks, as Alex put it, "like he's got a couple of buttholes on his face." The next time we see his face, his eye lids are shut are there's just a lot of red staining around there. The less CGI they have to use on Imhotep, the better. When he first starts moving around his reminds me of that skeleton knight from the MediEvil game on the Playstation 1, except he still has some flesh.

I feel like it's not a great depiction of Egyptians, or maybe Middle Eastern folk in general. The buffoonish warden of the prison, for example, especially with all Jonathan's remarks about his smell. (Although in that book about the British gunboat on the Tigris in World War the captain also complained in his journal about the locals lack of bathing. So maybe that's just a typical ignorant Westerner response? It's a desert, they have more critical needs for water.)

On the other hand, the Ardeth and Dr. Terrence Bey characters are both competent and calm under the fire. They do their best to adapt to the increasingly dire circumstances. Neither one of them is exactly pleased with O'Connell or Evelyn, but they recognize they'll need help to stop this, so set aside being pissed at these idiots to save the world.

Plus, the entire problem is caused by British and Americans deciding they just have to go busting into another culture's history to take it for themselves. Despite repeated warnings, and even some violence, they just kept going ahead until they unleash a mummy. And once things do go wrong, their responses are largely a) run, or b) get drunk.

In the Running for Dumbest Thing I've Posted About

I have no idea how it got started, but I guess there was some brief debate online last week about whether Batman would perform oral sex on his girlfriend. I'd be surprised this became a topic of discussion, but I know too well the sort of madness one's brain can cook up when left to its own devices. If you've read this blog for any length of time, you know it, too. You poor unfortunate souls.

And I'm typing this very late Sunday night while I wait to see if the thunderstorm passing through does dump golf-ball sized hail like Alex decided to text a warning to me about. Like I needed that thought when I was trying to get some sleep before work tomorrow. Anyway, it can be a convenient distraction. 

So, Batman's sex life.

I can't really see him getting away with being so ungenerous in bed. Maybe with women he dates under his "dull-witted playboy billionaire Bruce Wayne" persona. They probably wouldn't be surprised he wasn't anything special in the sack (and might not care if they're interested in his money.) I don't know how many of those ladies he was actually sleeping with, though. Be difficult to explain his disappearing in the middle of the night and returning at sun-up beat to hell. But with the women who know he's Batman? I can't see either Catwoman or Talia letting him slide. I mean, Selina's got claws and a whip and I'm betting Talia keeps daggers or firearms handy as a matter of course.

On the other hand, it's funny to imagine him coming up with excuses not to. Like, 'The Bat-Signal, I have to go!' and he runs off. Or explaining the Joker had him chained up in a deathtrap earlier, and he had to manipulate the lockpick with his mouth, so his tongue's kind of worn out, and could he just take a rain check on that? Next time for sure.

Oh, and there was no hail. Huzzah!

Six Black Horses

Audie Murphy finds himself a horse, only to have six guys find him and accuse him of rustling. One of those guys (Dan Duryea) objects to Murphy getting lynched and helps him escape. While traveling together trying to figure out their next moves, they're approached by a woman (Joan O'Brien) who offers them $1,000 each to escort her to another town. So they accept, even though it's through hostile country, but it's very clear she had other motives behind the offer.

The movie spends a fair amount of time with Murphy and Duryea discussing what each of them might do with the money, what they've done for money in the past, what that does. Murphy's pretty much always worked as a cow puncher, and while Duryea's done the same, he's also worked as a killer for hire, a line Murphy refuses to cross. The nice bit is Duryea's not proud of it, he knows it's ugly work, but it was going to be done by someone, and he had to make a living. He's actually happy they're doing a good thing for this money, protecting someone. 

He's not entirely a good man. There are certainly times, even before we find out he and O'Brien have some past history, where he makes me nervous with how close he gets to her. But he's not all bad, either. Murphy gets the less-interesting role, since there's never any doubt that he's going to do the right thing. There is the question of what he might decide that is, but it's a matter of whether he'll agree to get O'Brien where she says she wants to go, or take her someplace less perilous.

The romance subplot is kinda half-baked. There because I guess they figured it had to be. Murphy's pretty quick to forgive considering he was going to be a pawn in O'Brien's plan at best, collateral damage at worst.

A Leisurely Stroll Into the Heart of Spiders

Is that not a normal outfit for a 15-year-old?

After picking the first 12-issue series for Arana two years back, I thought I'd track down her origin story, which appeared in the same early 2000s relaunch of Amazing Fantasy that gave us a new Scorpion and I think Amadeus Cho.

As far as origin stories go, writer Fiona Avery seems to take the decompressed, Ultimate Spider-Man approach, as Arana doesn't put together her full costume until the sixth and final issue of the story (after the disastrous attempts shown above), though we do see a version that's halfway there in issue five. Not that the pages until then are wasted. Since this is a whole new character, with a power and history not really established previously, there's a fair amount of world-building to do. We have to learn who Anya is as a character (headstrong and protective, impulsive and inquisitive, a little awkward around guys), and what she's found herself tied up in. 

Who is this mysterious group that she's working with now, and what are they after, and what are some of the people like she's working with? Even if it's just that Miguel uses magic, saved her life, and is the dark, brooding mysterious type, and Ted's your typically spastic hacker type, there's at least a little fleshing out of the supporting cast.

 

Since her powers appear to come about as a result of a precise magic ritual that's part of a centuries-old struggle between two shadowy groups, rather than a seemingly fandom spider-bite, it's not just her sort of fumbling about trying to learn about her powers on her own. Instead, she gets to fumble about trying to understand her powers in highly dangerous tests initiated by the gent who's supposed to be her partner.

Mark Brooks draws the first two and last two issues, and Roger Cruz handles the 2 in the middle. Not sure what the reason was behind that division of labor. Brooks' versions are a little more squared off. Broader shoulders, sharper jaws and noses. The shading is a little heavier, more detailed than in Cruz' issues. Brooks' version of Miguel has some dissolute grunge stubble going, while Cruz' looks older and more weary. There's less manga influence in Cruz' work, so the eyes are smaller, which makes them look pinched in comparison. Larry Mollinar and Jeannie Lee handle the color work, which feels a little muddy at times, but does maintain a consistent feel through the shifts in artists.

Still, I can't help comparing this story to Fred van Lente's Scorpion origin story in the next six issues, where the main character is running around in costume by halfway through the second issue. It feels like preamble mostly. Dropping hints towards future mysteries. It's at least presented in such a way that Anya doesn't know much more about what's going on than we do, so she's just as confused. Maybe they already knew there was going to be an ongoing series, so there was less need to hit the ground running.

Sunday Splash Page #171

 

Blink and You'll Miss It," in Dragon Ball vol. 11, chapter 122, by Akira Toriyama

I don't know, what do you say about Dragon Ball? That Akria Toriyama came up with a story, based on Journey to the West, that became the template for a a huge chunk of shonen manga? The cheerful protagonist who loves to eat and fight, who loves a challenge and makes friends wherever he goes has been duplicated or riffed on in so many other series or video games or whatever. The repeated tournament structure, the steady escalation of threats. I mean, Goku starts out having trouble rescuing Bulma from a single pterosaur, and by the end of this stretch of the manga, he's fighting the offspring of a demon who forced the entire world to surrender to him and vowed to destroy a country every year on that day, just for a celebration.

I don't think Toriyama was the first to use those elements, although perhaps using them altogether was a novel idea. But it was the way he did it that seems to have resonated with an entire generation of artists, in Japan and the States.

The series has its issues. Master Roshi is a warning all his own, the archetypical perverted old master, groping girls and trying to get them to flash him. Oolong the shapeshifting pig is the same, although he's at least sort of an antagonist at the start (a pathetic one, but still.) The Mr. Popo character looks like a Sambo caricature or something. So there's things that aren't great, and it's things that could be eliminated at no real cost. The series has plenty of humor without peeping tom shit gone awry, and it wouldn't be that hard to come up with a less offensive design for Mr. Popo.

I've read somewhere the initial World Martial Arts Tournament arc sort of saved the series from being canceled. Which is odd to think of, because up to that point, it had been about hunting the Dragon Balls and running into various semi-comic threats. An evil rabbit that turns people into carrots. A desert bandit who gets social anxiety around pretty girls. Emperor Pilaf and his two beleaguered henchmen. Goku's complete ignorance of almost anything. 

And the series still revolves around that for a time. Goku or someone else seeking the Dragon Balls for one reason or another, and Goku getting stronger in the process. The tournaments are really just a way to showcase the improvements in a series of well-illustrated fights. Toriyama knows how to draw for comedy, exaggerated looks when someone arrogant gets shown up. But he also knows how to draw someone taking a punch and make it look like it hurt.

Random Back Issues #63 - Daredevil #5

Oh, Matt Murdock, I bet you say that to all the girls. Wait, you do? Part of a court-ordered settlement? Yikes.

Last time we looked at Mark Waid and Chris Samnee's Daredevil, Foggy found he he had cancer. In this issue, he dies. But not of cancer!

At this point, Matt and Kirsten McDuffie are operating a law firm in San Francisco, since Matt got disbarred for committing perjury that time he insisted he wasn't Daredevil under oath. And the world at large believes Foggy Nelson is dead, but we know he isn't. This issue explains that.

Sometime before the move out west, Hank Pym's running around inside Foggy blasting any circulating tumor cells he comes across, to try and keep the cancer from spreading. Meanwhile, Matt and Foggy are walking in the park, discussing Matt's decision to admit he's Daredevil, and how this puts Foggy in danger. So Matt wants Foggy to pretend to die of cancer, and continue his treatments in secret.

Matt admits Foggy's family will hate him, and there'll be some explaining to do, but he's sure it'll be fine. Iron Man and Spider-Man are presumed dead all the time. Foggy notes they die big, while he's just going to die.

 

At which point the All-New, Fantastic Frog-Man attacks. Or is it the All-New, Leviathan Leapfrog. Either way, it's a big frog-mech now - expect the Runaways to show up and steal that thing - with mini-guns and chainsaws. And it's after Foggy. Daredevil pursues it into a crowded city street, at which point the pilot tries to bail, fighting desperately to get away. Because there's a bomb in the mech. 

Matt's already freed Foggy, and tells him he's the only one close enough to pilot the suit away and save everyone. So Foggy leaps it into the sky, and gets blown up. Or not, because Hank Pym was listening in and shrank Foggy to subatomic size, then they hitched a ride on some falling debris and drifted more or less gently onto a roof. Ta-da, instant fake heroic death!

 

The truth comes out eventually as part of a big thing with the Owl and the Shroud near the tail end of this run. Charles Soule somehow puts the secret identity genie back in the bottle, I don't know how. I was more annoyed Matt was not only back in New York, in a costume that was depressingly familiar to his '90s, Jack Batlin period costume, but also working for the District Attorney's office. Helping the city imprison people instead of helping keep them out. Delightful.

[3rd longbox, 133rd comic. Daredevil (vol. 4) #5, by Mark Waid and Chris Samnee (storytellers), Javier Rodriguez (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer)]

Monkey Business

Cary Grant's a chemist work on a formula for a revitalizing tonic. His boss (Charles Coburn) is eagerly awaiting a successful formula so he can make a play on his airheaded secretary (Marilyn Monroe). He thinks he's figured it out, but really one of the test chimps mixed a bunch of stuff together while left unattended and dumped it in the water cooler. That concoction does make people feel young, and the more he or his wife (Ginger Rogers) unwittingly drink, the younger they behave. It does have the unfortunate side effect of almost throwing a monkey wrench in their marriage, as things they say or do while under the influence have effects that carry forward, mostly in regards to a lawyer friend of Rogers, who clearly wants to break up the marriage.

It's a good comedy, I think because most of the main characters behave with a certain amount of dignity most of the time, so watching them behave foolishly, and really commit to it, works. Even when Grant's playing an absent-minded professor, he still carries himself such that watching him do cartwheels, or take a pratfall while rollerskating with Monroe is just funny. The same with Rogers, who is a mature, loving, helpful lady, but once she drinks the water she starts slipping goldfish down Coburn's pants or jitterbugging up a storm.

Although the funniest bit to me might have been Grant enlisting the neighborhood children to help him capture and scalp the lawyer. Watching Grant hop around with the kids whooping, then shouting, "Jeepers, it's the cops!" and fleeing into the woods is pretty funny. Well, Grant and Rogers' brief paint fight is in the running.

Monroe doesn't get much of a role, the stereotypical bubblehead, who shows up before 9 am because her boss told her to work on her "punctuation". Watching Rogers get wound up about her when she's on the potion is amusing, but Monroe doesn't get to really do anything in response.

Reflections of a Teenage Bat - Spellbinder

I've been kicking around the notion of looking at what Terry McGinnis' most common villains reflect about him since I bought the box sets of Batman Beyond from a coworker of Alex during his years in the Town He Tries to Forget. That was a decade ago, and I just kept putting it off. 

There's three villains that show up three times in the 52 episodes. Maybe four, because I don't remember Shriek showing up a third time, but the episode summaries insist there's one where he buried Batman alive and Bruce and Max have to find him. So maybe I'll get to him, but let's talk about Spellbinder.

Spellbinder's shtick in Batman Beyond is basically he's a disgruntled civil servant. More specifically, a school psychiatrist who gets fed up with listening to teenagers talk about the problems their rich parents will fix while he works for relative peanuts. So instead of using hypnosis to help them reach the root of their problems, he uses it to let them experience their fantasies, while they're actually committing crimes for him. When that first scheme fails, he tries a VR interactive experience thing that is highly addictive, so they'll willingly steal to pay for another turn. His third appearance, he gives up on getting people to steal for him, and instead tricks the police into thinking Batman killed Mad Stan (we'll probably get to Mad Stan the next time I do one of these).

Terry's thing is that he had a lot of anger about a lot of stuff. Probably the failure of his parents' marriage, certainly about his father Warren's willingness to be the good corporate drone and eat shit with a smile. Then Warren's murdered, because he was going to stand up and do the right thing, and there's even more anger. And Terry ultimately, once he's gotten his hands on Batman's suit, uses it and his anger to fight crime. Protect people from people with power who try to abuse it.

Spellbinder obviously took his grudge and his power and used it for himself, which is Villainy 101. He's also a twisted reflection of both Terry's father figures. Warren McGinnis in the sense that both of them are ultimately workers beholden to higher authorities. Spellbinder worked at a school. He's got rules and regulations he's gotta follow. Every few months, he's probably gotta bring something to put out in the break room. Chip in for community coffee even if he doesn't drink it. Be there for school dances and shit.

Terry's dad is a researcher, and a good one. But at the end of the day, he works for Wayne-Powers, and so he answers to a shitbag like Derek Powers. He doesn't have much control over his life. He's forced to do ethically questionable things or risk his job (or his family's well-being.) Warren decided to stand up against his boss, while Spellbinder decided to punch down at his patients. Differing responses to the pressure of being a cog in the machine.

Bruce Wayne is no cog. He's either the one controlling the machine, or by the time the series begins, a person with enough money to remove himself from the mess entirely. But Spellbinder mirrors Wayne in that he manipulates teenagers to do shit for him. His first two appearances are both about Spellbinder getting high school kids to steal for him, so he doesn't have to be at risk. Bruce isn't Batman anymore because he couldn't hack it. Because he didn't think he could actually protect people without becoming something he despised (a killer), not because he wasn't willing to risk himself. And Terry approached him, which makes a difference. 

But Bruce definitely understands what makes Terry tick, and he certainly uses that to his advantage. Terry wanted the chance to bring his father's killer to justice, and he got that chance because Bruce Wayne let him use the suit. Just as Spellbinder can use what he knows about his students to make illusions or hypnotic suggestions that are most effective on them. Terry works better when he has something to push back against, so Bruce is in his ear all the time, giving him that something if nothing else is available. Maybe Terry would have gone off the rails badly without that opportunity, and so Wayne is ultimately looking out for him, while Spellbinder doesn't give a damn about people who are supposed to be able to trust him to help.

Although there's also that episode of Justice League Unlimited where Terry has been Batman for years and is clearly chafing under Bruce forcing him to keep secrets from Dana and do everything Bruce's ways. A universe where Bruce Wayne is a bitter, lonely old man estranged from every former love and protege, with a Gotham even shittier than his was. Basically defeated on every conceivable level. So maybe Bruce isn't looking out for Terry, and is using him as much as Spellbinder does. 

But that episode also said Terry was genetically Bruce's son due to some bullshit Amanda Waller set up to try and make sure there was always a Batman, and that's honestly better left shoved into a dustbin and forgotten.

The third episode is really more about Barbara Gordon as Commissioner, and her doubts about both Bruce and Terry. She knows Terry's Batman, knows why he's Batman. Knows about his anger issues in the past. Knows from experience how Bruce Wayne can twist people around and drive them until they burn out. So it's not hard for her to think Terry could go too far and kill a bad guy. Still, Spellbinder's shifted his style a bit. Still manipulating others, but instead of targeting the relatively powerless, who inevitably lead the authorities (or Batman) right to him, he targets the authorities to send them to Batman. Plays off the fear of vigilantes. Sure, it's fun to see someone in a costume saving lives and punching bad guys, but that's only as long as you agree with who they're punching, and how much damage they're doing. It doesn't take far to tip the perception from "costumed do-gooder" to "loose cannon."

Spellbinder's ultimately the guy with no power for years, feeling put upon and powerless, who then abuses his power as soon as he gets some. (Pretty sure Darkseid made a demonstration like that once on Apokolips by turning his slaves into overseers.) The kind of person teenagers suspect most adults are; ostensibly there to help, but really there to control and condescend to them.

In the Electric Mist

Tommy Lee Jones as a recovering alcoholic cop in Louisiana, investigating the brutal murder of a young woman. Which also ends up tying in to the murder of a black man decades ago, when his body is discovered by an actor during the shooting of a no doubt highly inaccurate Civil War movie. John Goodman's in there as, a former criminal of some sort, who now is getting movies made in Louisiana and figures he's hot stuff now.

It's mostly a typical murder mystery. Detective flails about trying to put pieces together. John Goodman tries to use his influence (money talks) to derail the investigation, and when that fails, people start dying. Potential witnesses, helpful detectives, innocent bystanders. I think it mostly pulls the different plot threads together well. The decades old death never falls out of the story entirely, as Jones will periodically speak to someone about it that leads him a little further on his way.

The unusual bit is partway through, Jones gets a soda dosed with LSD and starts seeing a Confederate general who basically tells him not to lose heart. It continues long after the drugs are likely out of his system. This is apparently a sort of development common to the series of books this is based on. I don't know how much it works here. It is sort of funny the Confederate keeps trying to be supportive, and Jones mostly just thinks he must be nuts to be seeing this guy.

There's sort of a subplot with the actor that found the murdered black man being an active alcoholic trying to be pals and just making an ass of himself all the time. That subplot peters out partway until the very end when the movie does one of those, "so-and-so went on to blahblahblah" bits. Frances McDormand plays Jones' wife, but she seems stuck playing the concerned spouse of a cop we get in most movies of this sort. Not a role with much meat on it.

What I Bought 6/12/2021

Well, it's been summer weather here for over a week now and I completely hate it. But what else is new? I knew I was going to hate the heat and humidity once it arrived, and I do. In other news, this month is all over the map on comics. Four I wanted the first week, one last week, nothing this week. Which should mean 7 the last two weeks of the month, hopefully. So here's the one from last week, and one from two weeks ago.

Freak Snow #1, by Kevin Roditeli (writer) and Robin Cannon (writer/artist/letterer) - That definitely looks like someone I want carrying a firearm. Unfrozen Slack-Jawed Yokel.

Set in some iceworld apocalypse, the story focuses on Berny, who has somehow survived, drinks a cocktail of beer and the blood of something called a Smarg, and talks to a beer can and an old cartoon robot toy. He claims he fought three guys, but they were actually women, and one of them was the daughter he thought got eaten by a Smarg 8 years ago, and she shot him, but she's alive, so that's good.

The beer can raises the possibility that Berny's memories of his wife and child's deaths my be inaccurate, and they can't very well have a woman-killer as part of the woman-protecting defense force. He's got to prove he's innocent. The robot's cartoon apparently had an episode with a "hole of truth", and Berny's sure he knows where one of those is, so they go there and he jumps into it.

This wasn't quite what I was expecting. Not in a bad sense, just more focused on the disintegration of a single person than I thought it would be. It might be funny, if Berny wasn't so pathetic, a wild-eyed, wobbly-looking shell of a person. Cannon's art style is very loose, like a much more exaggerated Kyle Baker, maybe. At times, I think he's using continuous contour line drawing, where the person draws without ever lifting the pencil. (I remembered that was a thing, but I had to look the term up). Huge, uneven eyes and skin folds that run into jawlines. It's like a scribble that managed to pull itself into a coherent drawing through gravity. 

It certainly works for making Berny look unhinged, but sometimes I can't entirely tell what's going on. When Cannon whites out an area to show the flight of a bullet, or smoke drifting from a gun. I guess you could argue that Berny's perceptions of things is pretty sketchy, so it should be a mess.

Iron Fist: Heart of the Dragon #6, by Larry Hama (writer), David Wachter (artist), Neeraj Menon (color artist), Travis Lanham (letterer) - Ah, I see the Wakandans have perfected their boob armor. State of the art, no doubt.

The heroes' attempt to stop the undead dragon's not going well. Okoye needs a little more power, which means, yep, the baby dragon has to die, too. Then Danny goes ahead and gives her the Iron Fist chi while he's at it. Cripes, he passes that stuff around like it's a common cold. Okoye kills the dragon, but here's the Heirophant, but she kills him as well, after making a comment about how her hubris may kill her. But then she just stabs him with the spear and punches him the chest with the Iron Fist, so I'm not sure what that realization did for her. Get her to wait for him to attack, rather than charge in?

Day is saved, dragon hearts return to their cities, Gork is reborn as an egg. The Brenda lady is left blinded and still swearing vengeance, but Danny won't let her be killed. OK, not sure what Hama's point was using her at all. She didn't really do anything of significance, since Taskmaster could clearly have killed the dragons just as easily. She never got any sort of a showdown with Danny.

Danny tells Okoye she can't give him the Iron Fist back which, bullshit. Danny's taken it back from people in the past, so clearly if he gave it to her, she can give it to him. But, sure fine, whatever. She gives the chi to the egg that'll hatch as Gork one of these days, and Danny's apparently done being Iron Fist now. Right, pull the other one. There's been at least three other mini-series where Danny either loses the Iron Fist, or has lost it, or lost his purpose in the last 20 years. 

 

Man, I was so excited about this mini-series after the first issue, and it let me down so, so badly. I've mentioned multiple times the way there seems to be a lot of pointless running around, but I do not see what Hama's going for at all here. Take the Fist off Danny? I thought Kaare Andrews' Iron Fist series already did that 7 years ago, or at least Pei was the one training to be Iron Fist and Danny was her teacher. That was definitely the impression I got when they showed up in Black Cat, with Pei socking Beetle all over the place and calling Danny "Thunderer".

Sunday Splash Page #170

 

"Never Tell Him the Odds," in Down, Set, Fight!, by Chad Bowers and Chris Sims (writers), Scott Kowalchuk (artist/colorist), Josh Krach (letterer)

Released early in 2014, Down, Set, Fight! is the story of former football player Chuck Fairlane, who was banned from the game for punching out a mascot who chose to taunt him at the wrong moment. Settled into life as a high school football coach, Chuck gets attacked by a mascot one day. It turns out there's been a string of these attacks on famous athletes, and that there's a lot of betting on them going on. Which means someone's orchestrating it, and Chuck has a good idea who.

I think this whole thing was based around the idea of athletes fighting mascots, which is not entirely unheard of here in the States. I think Brook and Robin Lopez in the NBA have (mock)terrorized mascots for years. Chuck's also dealing with a manipulative, abusive creep of a father. He hates the guy, but his father consistently finds ways to make sure that Chuck winning helps him win, too. Which is why he originally punched out the mascot. His dad just had to let him know that he'd goaded Chuck into winning a game he was ready to give up on. That's an ugly feeling, when you can't even enjoy your successes because the worst person possible also benefited.

There's a high school football player Chuck tries to encourage in good ways, and an FBI agent who seems to be there for exposition and when the plot requires a way for Chuck to avoid legal repercussions for the stuff he does. But really, this is Chuck and his dad's story.

Kowalchuk's art has a heavy line, and he soften it with his color work, or make it heavier when necessary. Sometimes I see a bit of Keith Giffen in his characters' faces (though this is definitely not a comic that goes in for 9-panel grids), other times a bit of Rich Burchett. The fights have an old-school superhero style to them. Heavy impacts, big feats of strength (I almost went with the page of Chuck suplexing one of those Chinese New Year dragons full of people) but the violence isn't graphic or anything. A bear mascot slashes Chuck across the chest, but there's no blood. That kind of thing.

Random Back Issues #62 - The Mighty Thor #379

I know, just six weeks after the last time we looked at Simonson's Thor run we're back again. We're almost to the end of it now. Thor's just narrowly avoided getting thrashed by some frost giants Loki was collaborating with. Not killed, because Hela's cursed him to be easily injured, never heal, and never die. Meaning no death in battle for Thor. He'd almost given in to despair, but seeing his brother fight an entire horde of frost giants got him moving and he finished his new armor and saved the day.

So Loki wakes up to trashed citadel, no frost giants, no Iceman (who he abducted as part of his scheme) and no Thor. His magic gets the walls to tell him what happened and he predictably throws a hissy fit over Thor saving his life. I mean, it was a terrible idea on Thor's part, but Loki could try bearing it with grace. Instead, he searches for Grundroth and his frost giants, who have traveled to Earth to awaken the Midgard Serpent. It's supposed to die in a final battle with Thor, but with the thunder god being weakened, they figure it can be convinced to take a run at him and break its fate.

 

Loki actually thinks that's not a bad plan, and leaves them to it, focusing on his own plan to get revenge on them instead. Which involves going to some mountain peak on Earth and retrieving a pile of melted metal. The purpose of that becomes clear in two issues.

In Asgard, everyone has fallen prey to a mysterious plague except for the dark elf Kurse, who's fought Thor a couple of times in this run, but is just sort of hanging around right now, and Mick and Kevin. They're two mortal kids Thor brought here after they were orphaned thanks to Justice Peace of the Time Variance Authority (in one of the weakest stories of Simonson's run), who were adopted by Volstaag. Kurse won't speak, but he helps the children reach "President Balder", who's also sick, but has a vial on him Odin's ravens give to the boys. Who have no idea what to do, because they don't speak bird. What are they teaching kids in Midgardian schools these days, when they no longer understand ravenspeak?

Grundroth uses one of his own as the worm on the line for the Midgard Serpent, but instead pull up an all-orange Fin Fang Foom. Neither party is impressed by the other, but after Grundroth declares Mjolnir, 'would make fishbait out of YOU!!', Foom decides to see if this Thor is an actual challenge. Thor's in a park after returning Iceman to X-Factor headquarters, considering how his only chance of getting the curse undone is to go confront Hela. Which he barely managed the last time at full strength, with a whole legion of Asgardian warriors at his back, and it still took Skurge's sacrifice to pull it off. The odds this doesn't end with him a shattered wreck, tormented by Hela and all the foes he's slain for an eternity are not great.

FFF nearly stomps him, then apologizes for a case of mistaken identity. He thought he recognized the cape, you see. This leads to an extended conversation where Thor pretends to be someone else, claiming to be 'familiar with most of the other wearers of such capes.' He eventually refers to himself as 'an extremely local version of a tactical nuclear weapon,' aka a super-hero. He shows he's strong enough to lift Foom's foot, something only managed one other time according to FFF, and the dragon agrees to fly them somewhere else for their battle. 

 

There's a page of debate about what aphorisms are, the value of symbols and what one believes in. It's kind of odd how casual the whole thing is. I'd suspect Thor recognizes his opponent's true identity,  but I guess the dragon is just cocky. They reach a secluded spot, and "Fin Fang Foom" reveals himself as the Midgard Serpent. He proclaims he exists in the deeps of time beyond the reach of clocks, and that's where they are now. On cue, time stops for everyone except the two of them, and the giants, who hurry to see the battle. The Serpent apologizes for having not asked the poor warrior's name, but assures him that once he's dead, Jormungand will assume another illusion and gather all his loved ones to hear their lamentations. What a nice dragon.

Thor's response is he has plenty of names, too, but the one that matters is 'THOR ODINSON the Thunderer, Jormungand's Fear!' The weigh-ins, ring promos, and entrance music complete, it's time for the championship bout. But that's saved for the next issue, which is the all-splash page throwdown, the final issue of the run Walt Simonson draws himself. I think he was drawing X-Factor concurrent with this, so Sal Buscema had been drawing more and more of the issues for a while.

[11th longbox, 126th comic. The Mighty Thor #379, by Walter Simonson (writer), Sal Buscema (artist), EVelyn Stein (colorist), John Workman (letterer)]

Stand-Up Guys

Val (Al Pacino) gets out of prison after 28 years, his old friend Doc (Christopher Walken) waiting for him. Doc takes Val around to enjoy his first taste of freedom in years, but it's a condemned man's last meal. Eventually they pick up the wheelman from their crew (Alan Arkin) out of a rest home to include in the fun.

Val could have shortened his sentence if he rolled on the other two, but he didn't. It wasn't his fault that job went wrong in the first place, but again, he took the rap for it. Even when the father of the one who is responsible wants Val to pay even more, he's willing to go along with it, because it'll help Doc.

Movies about how criminals were different in the old days, and they had a code and rules can get kind of tedious. Because it's obvious that it's bullcrap most of the time. Thankfully, this movie isn't about that so much as it just these three guys do have rules, and try to follow them best they can. Even when they're having fun, they're mostly respectful. There is one poor convenience store clerk who gets punched out, but for the most part, it's relegated to people who are already being jerks.

It's a funny movie, plays up the idea of these guys being older and the issues that come with that. Val and Doc robbing a pharmacy to help Val get some blue pills, and Doc helping himself to stuff he needs for hypertension and ulcers. Then Val crushing those up and snorting them later. Val complaining that Doc's apartment is worse than his cell was. He got Showtime and HBO in prison! Walken has to play the straight man for Pacino, and to a lesser extent Arkin. Mostly looking on in exasperation or confusion at his friend, but he gets some good lines.

And it's also touching at times, because they are older, so they know time is short. They have regrets, friends and family either dead or just no longer in touch. Fewer and fewer people know or care they exist, which is not a great feeling to have.

A Copy's Not a Copy All the Time

So Krakoa apparently has a rule against resurrecting clones of people. Or, more precisely, having more than one of the same person. Setting aside this only seems to apply mostly to Maddy Pryor, and not the Stepford Cuckoos, it's a little strange.* The argument seems to be something to the effect the clone is just a copy of the original, and it would be a mess to have two of the same person running around (setting aside Madrox and his mutant-power generated duplicates, I guess.)

But they aren't really that sort of clones. As far as I know, Maddy Pryor doesn't have Jean Grey's memories, other than perhaps an unfortunate attraction to Scott Summers. What a horrible thing to inherit. And Jean doesn't have Pryor's memories of being left to raise a child alone, then getting hunted by the Marauders while Scott goes and hangs out with his old school chums and back from the dead ex-girlfriend. Maddy doesn't have Jean's memories of that time Scott telepathically cheated on her with Emma Frost.

Just a reminder Scott Summers is the fucking worst and no one should ever lend that character any moral authority. Ever.

Likewise, Gabby (or Scout/Honey Badger) doesn't have Laura's memories of having her mother around in that facility, or of being exposed to a trigger scent to send her into a murderous fury. And Laura doesn't have Gabby's memories of being raised in a different facility with a bunch of other clones of Laura of varying appearances and ages. They're clones in the way a pair of 10-year old identical twins are clones. The genetics match, but the life experiences don't.

A clone I could see the argument holding water for, up to a point, would be Ben Reilly, the Spider-Clone. Because he really did have all Peter Parker's memories up to the moment the DNA that he was created from was taken. Which was always one of the things I found interesting about him. He had all of Parker's memories, his likes and dislikes, his morality, but none of it was really his. He couldn't be Peter Parker, go to college, get yelled at by Jonah, kiss Mary Jane, because there already was a Peter Parker doing all those things.

Given Miles Warren initiated the whole original Clone Saga out of some twisted love for Gwen Stacy and anger at Parker, it's pretty cruel to create a clone who never actually met Gwen Stacy, but vividly remembers dating and being in love with her, remembers the grief of her death like it happened to him. Reilly's actually kind of a reverse of Carol Danvers. Where Danvers eventually got back all the memories Rogue took, she had no connection to them. They may as well happened to someone else. Reilly has all the emotional connection to people and events, but never actually did any of that stuff.

And even then, Ben Reilly isn't merely a copy of Peter Parker. From the moment he stepped out of the tube or whatever Warren created him in, he started forming his own, separate existence. Peter Parker never spent years traveling the globe, teaching at different colleges under a false name and faked credentials. Parker never got hunted relentlessly by Kaine. And Ben Reilly never got killed by Kraven and stuffed in a grave for two weeks.

The closest comparison to that in the X-verse would seem to be Sinister's old Marauders. Where, other than I guess Sabretooth, Sinister just had a bunch of copies of Scalphunter and Arclight and those other losers sitting around in case one of them got killed or pissed him off. I never got the impression the Marauders knew that about themselves, so presumably each one had the exact same memories as all the other copies.

I don't know if there's some point about how often clones in X-related stuff don't have the original's memories, versus other parts of the Marvel Universe. Cloning is X-books is more of a long-term, wide ranging scheme, and takes a more impersonal touch? It really just seems like an odd, arbitrary limitation on Krakoa. Maybe if the issue was exceeding carrying capacity of the island. I assume even with Krakoa being sentient and the mutants all being such superior geniuses to those dumb old humans that there must be limits to how many people the island can support. But I haven't heard anything about scarcity issues yet. It can't be a concern about duplicate codenames/mutant names. They aren't stopping Laura from also calling herself "Wolverine", after all.

* And yeah, it's obvious that Maddy not being resurrected is a cronyism thing. Scott and Jean would be uncomfortable seeing Scott's first wife, who he abandoned, walking around all the time, so Havok's request got denied. Same as Mystique's request for Destiny to be resurrected. It would inconvenience people in power, so it doesn't happen. The whole spiel that she committed crimes against humans and mutants is also bullshit considering the presence of, well where do you start? Magneto? Apocalypse, Mystique, Wolverine, Mr. Sinister, Daken, Exodus, Rogue? Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw were both in the Hellfire Club. No way their hands are clean. Quentin Quire's almost certainly gotten up to some shit.

When Life Nearly Died - Michael J. Benton

The extinction event at the end of the Permian period is considered the largest mass extinction of all time. While the one that ended the dinosaurs, among other creatures, killed roughly half the species at that time, the Permian extinction is estimated to have wiped out 90% of the total living species at the time. While there's some agreement that a meteorite impact helped end the dinosaurs, the question of what caused the Permian event is less well-known. By me, anyway, which is why I bought this.

Benton doesn't get to his actual theory of what caused it until the second-to-last chapter. Because first he wants to talk about fossils, about paleontologists trying to figure out the relative ages of rocks in different parts of the world, about the argument over whether "mass extinctions" were even a thing that happened. That delves into catastrophism versus uniformitariansim, and Charles Lyell again, who we discussed in Raup's The Nemesis Affair. Benton also gets into the iridium layer and the Cretaceous extinction, since that whole thing was what helped get catastrophism back on its feet as a more widely accepted possibility.

If the popular concept of the change in life over time is that it is gradual, that species die out one or two at a time because "better" species come along and shove them into oblivion (and Lyell didn't even believe that, he thought nothing truly went extinct, they just went away somewhere for awhile and would reemerge later), then the idea of mass extinctions, some huge disaster that wipes out dozens or hundreds of species at once is absurd. So, if it looks like a bunch of species just vanish abruptly from the rocks, well, that's actually probably the equivalent of dozens of millions of years you're looking at, not a few thousand. Or you just have an incomplete fossil record (not unlikely, since lots of organisms don't die in places that lend to their remains being fossilized.)

Which does raise an interesting point Benton touches on at times: How quickly does it have to happen to be considered a single mass extinction? The notion in the book seems to be that the Permo-Triassic mass extinction took place in maybe 800,000 years, maybe a bit less. From a human perspective, that's a long time, but from the perspective of the length of time all life has been on earth, it's an eyeblink. Even relative to the average length of time a single species might persist (which I think is ~2 million years), it's not that long. There are certainly species that went extinct due to slow changes in climate or the introduction of new competitors or predators. But maybe uniformitarianism versus catastrophism is a matter of how large the time scale you're looking at is.

For the most part, Benton's an engaging writer. Some of the discussion of rock layers or mapping differences in oxygen isotopes is dry, but he's able to bring it around to explain why that's important. If you can't decide where the Permian ends and the Triassic begins, how can you decide whether a mass extinction happened then?

'The point is that good fortune is a characteristic of mass extinctions. The survivors are more lucky than specially adapted. The most advanced, intelligent, fast-breeding animal species may be wiped out by the chance calamity of an extinction event when it is obliged to face challenges that have never been encountered before.'

What I Bought 6/4/2021

I went to my dad's over the weekend for his birthday, so expect reviews of older movies over the next couple of weeks. For now, here's two comics from last week. One I was expecting to find, the other I wasn't. It's really a toss-up between the two stores in the nearest town what I'll find at either one, and their schedules don't lend themselves to visiting both in one trip. So I pick the one I can get to that time, and take what I can get.

Jenny Zero #2, by Dave Dwonch and Brockton McKinney (writers), Magenta King (artist), Dam (color artist), Dave Dwonch (letterer) - Hopefully all those people were already dead when she started stomping around.

The issue switches between the time of Jenny's father's death and the present. In the past, he dies, and Jenny struggles to cope. Avoids his funeral, and comments he'd probably rather have his dog there than her. Gets introduced to all the neat weapons the A.S.P. make from the bodies of the monsters by her uncle. Which takes on a different light when we and Jenny know that he's always known she could do the size-changing thing like her dad, and kept it from her. All of those scenes have a soft lavender coloring to the surroundings. Not sure the specific significance of that color choice. I would say it's a matter of viewing things through rose-colored glasses, but most of the memories are not that great.

In the present, Jenny defeats the monsters, and confronts her uncle about lying to her. Then she and her friend Dana go hang out in a hotel until Jenny decides to seek out someone who can help her. I suspect we're going to find out Dana was assigned to her as sort of a handler when they first met. Given one flashback is with Jenny's uncle, who lied to her and guided her to fight, and the other is Jenny meeting Dana and basically sticking by her side ever since. Plus, not sure how a hotel heiress is able to get access to a secret monster-fighting agency, even if she is the big hero's friend. I'm sure Jenny won't see that as yet another shocking betrayal.

 

Jenny's personality seems to be the brash person who actually just runs from difficult stuff. Or she prefers to process in solitude. You could read it either way. The flashbacks show she really didn't want to be at the funeral services for her dad, and after the battle, she goes and hides out in a hotel with Dana. She says she hates hiding out, but it seems to be a default response. But if everyone always has a camera aimed at her, maybe that's the only response. Nobody does that to me, and I can still barely think on important stuff around others.

Black Cat #7, by Jed MacKay (writer), Michael Dowling (artist), Brian Reber (color artist), Ferran Delgado (letterer) - Aw, Larraz even made sure her sack of loot has a big old dollar sign on it. That's a nice touch.

Felicia tracks down the Black Fox and tells him how she's undone his plan for immortality. So we see in flashback how she was sent into the Vault, requested her immortality be removed, and warned the Saint that Fox intends to renege on the deal. Which he doesn't, but the little explosive Felicia attached to the deed to Manhattan says differently. Rights to the city lost, the Saint emerges and drags the Fox back into the Vaults, just slowly enough for a tearful farewell.

It works. MacKay uses the tracking chip he established was on the deed in issue 4 to explain how Felicia can find it again in such an enormous space. Dowling makes the Vaults resemble Arizona, or maybe some early 20th Century artists' version of the surface of Venus or Titan. Some mountains, vast plains, red skies with no visible sun. Felicia reminds us that she has limits to what she's comfortable doing, and the Fox remains someone willing to do anything to survive. Just as he would betray others, or play on Spider-Man's sympathy for an old man, he'd sacrifice an entire city of people for immortality. But he can still respect the student outwitting the teacher.

Oh, and at the very end, Felicia and Odessa make out. Congratulations to those two crazy kids. I'm curious if MacKay will actually do something with it. I'm not talking about a date issue - although I'm not saying I'm opposed to that, we got one for Felicia and Batroc - but at least the occasional acknowledgement. One of them stopping by to see the other, or scenes of one of them waking up at the other's home. So it's more than just a one-time, "Yes, Felicia's bisexual. Diversity!" thing. Felicia says straight up she doesn't think this is something with a future, and Odessa says it can't possibly work, but that doesn't mean it ends immediately. Let them have some fun with each other.

 

Anyway, the next arc is Felicia getting tangled up in acquiring Infinity Stones, which are now people, apparently? Not promising, but MacKay and Villa made the King in Black tie-ins better than I had any hope of them being. They can make something out of this.

Sunday Splash Page #169

 

"Casting James Franco in a Movie About the Wizard Oughta Do It", in Dorothy of Oz vol. 1, chapter 4, by Son Hee-Joon.

I bought this, I think 7 or 8 years ago, for reasons that are no longer clear. I'm not sure I've ever read Baum's Oz work, or been a big fan of the Judy Garland movie or anything like that. Didn't read those comic adaptations Skottie Young did for Marvel in the 2000s. But here we are.

But Tolkein or Arthurian-style medieval fantasy, with the knights and bearded wizards and whatnot usually doesn't interest me either, but most of the JRPGs I've played are in that sort of setting. So maybe I was just curious to see Oz stuff through a Korean aesthetic.

In this version, Dorothy is some fabled person who could see the Yellow Brick Road, but the lead is a schoolgirl name Mara who somehow wandered from our world into Oz while chasing her dog. Because she seems to come from somewhere else, and can also see the road, people call her Dorothy, to her annoyance. When the story begins, she already has her crew with the Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman, and the Cowardly Lion. 

Except they're actually subjects of military experiments. Well that's certainly a different take. The Scarecrow is a telekinetic who confuses words. The Woodsman a cyborg with no emotions. The Lion a moderately androgynous lion chimera. Or maybe I just figured Son Hee-Jon would make the Lion a catgirl given his complaints about how he didn't include any hot girls in this to draw in the bonus outtake comics at the back. And how Mara undergoes a "magical girl transformation" complete with disintegrating and rematerializing clothes.

I only ever bought the first volume. I didn't love the series, but I think the reason I never bought any further volumes was either it seemed unlikely the series would be released in full in the U.S., or it wasn't going to be finished period. I forget which exactly, but it boiled down to the same thing: Not letting myself get sucked into something that was going to remain unresolved. I've had enough American comics where the creative team gets abruptly changed and storylines are dropped, or they just lose interest and things. . .just. . .stop.

What I Bought 6/1/2021 - Part 2

Did you know there are Skittles freezer pops now? I found that out this week, when the coworker without respect for peoples' personal space brought some in. Not sure the world was crying out for that product, but it probably wasn't crying out for the Starburst jelly beans either, and I do love those. Anyway, the other two books from last month. A second issue and a first issue.

The Marvels #2, by Kurt Busiek (writer), Yildray Cinar (artist), Richard Isanove (color artist), Simon Bowland (letterer) - Alex Ross makes this Kevin Schumer guy look a lot older than Cinar does. Not a new thing for Alex Ross, obviously, but it's like Steven Wright got dumped in the Marvel Universe.

There's a brief bit at the beginning with Frank Castle interrogating drug dealers, then doing what he usually does with drug dealers, but most of this issue is focused on getting to know Kevin a little better. His uncle is apparently super-villain gear supplier the Tinkerer, and Kevin sometimes sneaks into places with suspected super-science activities and steals things for him, for money. When he isn't leading tour groups, or listening in on the Thing and the Human torch discuss the merits of scary books versus scary movies. But he has some larger role to play in whatever's coming, although the people watching him don't seem terribly impressed.

That's pretty much the issue, bar a brief fight between a hero and a villain in the capital city of Siancong, where a bunch of weird shadowy tendrils erupt from a building. So there's a bit of plot advancement in this issue, but mostly it's about getting to know Kevin Schumer. Which makes sense. If he's going to be important, we need to care about him. I don't know if him helping the Tinkerer is the way to do that, but it's an approach to take.

I feel like Cinar's Frank Castle looks too young. I know, he's not a Vietnam vet any longer, but he could still look grizzled. Castle should probably look old before his time, or that kind of old where he could anywhere from 40 to 70, you know? But the Tinkerer also look a bit younger than I'm used to. I was trying to think who he reminded me of, and I finally decided it's Stan Pines from Gravity Falls. Which, there are worse fictional characters to resemble than one that successfully rocks a fez.

 

One of these days I really do have to start writing these things before I decide on panels to scan, so they actually line up a little.

I do think my initial impression after issue 1 was correct. This is going to read better as whole once it's done. When you can see how all the different pieces fit and built. Like I said then, I have pretty high confidence in Kurt Busiek to be able to do that successfully.

Yuki vs. Panda #1, by Graham Misiurak (writer), A.L. Jones (artist/letterer) - I guess the panda doesn't understand the concept of reflections.

So a stereotypical pervy old master brings his granddaughter to the zoo. While he's distracted hitting on a lady, Yuki goes to stare at pandas, but refuses to share her ice cream with one of the babies. What's more, she taunts the panda. When the panda gets some ice cream while she's distracted, she reaches through the bars, grabs its skull and bites part of its ear off. The granddad pulls her off and does the vanish in a smoke cloud trick, and the baby panda shortly thereafter escapes from the zoo. Flash forward ten years, Yuki's getting put through ninja training before school, or training for School Olympics, and that's as far as it gets.

So, we all know who I'm rooting for here. I mean, biting a panda's ear partially off? Shouldn't you throw her in jail for harming an endangered species?

The story has the potential to be a lot of things. It feels like it might turn into almost a Road Runner/Wil E. Coyote thing, with the panda constantly trying to take revenge and failing at every turn. Yuki could be either oblivious and simply avoid danger on instinct from her training, or actually know there's a panda after her. Or it could become a violent revenge fantasy story where the panda brutally slaughters all her acquaintances until Yuki is the Last Girl, Final Girl, whatever that term is.

 

I doubt it's going to be the second one, but I'm not sure how satisfying it's going to be to watch the panda repeatedly fail to get some payback.

Jones' art definitely has manga influence to it. Linework on the characters is thick, makes them stand out against what are mostly soft focus backgrounds. The surroundings don't get a lot of emphasis. His shading is more varied or graded when he's trying to convey some momentous thing. The first page, when the narrator is intoning about rivalry and showing all these different people fighting each other, and later when Yuki and the Panda have a staredown and a wind appears from seemingly nowhere.