Saturday Splash Page #18

 

"Terrigen's a Helluva Drug," in X-Factor: The Quick and the Dead, by Peter David (writer), Pablo Raimondi (artist), Jeromy Cox (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer)

Near the tail end of my time buying X-Factor, Marvel released a couple of one-shots focused on specific characters. There was Layla Miller, charting her life in the dystopian future she was stranded in as a result of Messiah CompleX, and this one, where Peter David started to drag Quicksilver out of the toxic waste dump writers had shoved him into since House of M.

Quicksilver spends most of the issue in a jail cell, hallucinating. It is the after effect of having the Terrigen crystals (he somehow internalized after stealing them from the Inhumans) pulled out of him? Or is he just concussed after he took a shot to the skull chasing Layla Miller through a merry-go-round? Probably a little from Column A, and a little from Column B.

I did a whole long-winded post about all the conversations Pietro has with Crystal, Magneto, Wanda and Layla in his head, which you can read here. The point seems to be that Pietro needs to stop trying to excuse or justify the shit he's done, but that he also needs to stop beating himself up or it and wallowing. That if he wants to be better, be the person the people who care about him think he can be, he needs to get off his ass and actually be better. Which does not include using the Terrigen mists to jumpstart depowered mutants and cast it off as God's will it they die horribly from it.

Endgame is, Pietro has somehow gotten his mutant powers back. He leaves jail, saving a woman from an abusive boyfriend in the process, then takes a nice little run around the world. Not long after this, he joins the roster of Dan Slott's Mighty Avengers run and within a couple of years of that, was one of the instructors in Christos Gage's Avengers Academy. Unlike Wanda, I think Pietro's mostly avoided backsliding into Crazy Town, or being forced to constantly re-litigate his past fuck-ups. Must be nice!

Random Back Issues #83 - ROM #45

It's been a while since we looked at an issue of ROM. A lot of things have changed, as the issue opens on Rom burying his own corpse!

He and Brandy Clark (now occupying the Galadorian armor of Rom's old ally Starshine) wound up in Russia, where Rom got duped by Quasimodo into giving up the armor in exchange for a clone body. Which broke down, and forced him back into the cold cyborg armor. He takes it well.

Or maybe not. The two of them are joined by the sometimes pilot of the Titanium Man armor, the Gremlin, who wants to know more about these Wraiths Rom keeps talking about. After a few panels of exposition, Gremlin explains he'd been seeing signs of odd behavior among others in Moscow. He thought it was Soviets jumping at shadows, disabling security out of fear it was going to be exploited by an enemy. Now he figures it was Wraiths impersonating humans, trying to weaken the USSR against an attack.

Agreeing to work together, Brandy uses the "Living Light" to transport them to a secret base Gremlin discovered evidence of before he fled Moscow. Rom gets to blasting, only to have his Neutralizer beam reflected back at him. A Wraith impersonating the Commissar of State Security has duped the Soviet Super-Soldiers - Vanguard, Major Ursus and Darkstar - into defending the facility from invaders set on destroying the Soviet Union. Those three got no love for the State (as explained through another page of exposition), but they do want to protect the people. Darkstar used her power to transport them there, and its Misunderstanding Battle Time!

Brandy and Darkstar square off in a battle of light and dark that begins to escalate beyond either of them. Rom manages to toss Ursus aside, but has more trouble with Vanguard. Random odd thing: Ursus can understand Rom's English perfectly well, but Vanguard admits to knowing only a smattering of the language.

Gremlin, minus any weapons, heads for the facility, with Ursus tracking him. Brandy starts to overwhelm Darkstar and is moments away from banishing the Darkforce from her entirely (which would kill her), but Vanguard throws his hammer and sends Brandy plummeting into the snow. Oh Vanguard, you done fucked up now. Rom snaps, although he always seems about two seconds from a berserker rage that would impress Wolverine. 

He turns the Neutralizer on Vanguard and when Darkstar uses her power to shield her brother, Rom just keeps firing at killing intensity. Brandy snaps him out of it, asking if he intends to kill them or force a surrender, and Rom figures out they're fighting mutants, not Wraiths. Good thing, because Ursus comes staggering back, wounded, with a bunch of Wraith Hellhounds on his heels.

We're still almost two years from the end of the Wraith War to conquer Earth at this stage (by which point Steve Ditko will have taken over as artist), but Rom's globe-trotting adventures will end up paying off in making sure various forces are aware of the danger.

[9th longbox, 14th comic. ROM #45, by Bill Mantlo (writer), Sal Buscema (penciler), Ian Akin and Brian Garvey (inkers), Ben Sean (colorist), Janice Chiang (letterer)]

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

This is Hitchcock's first time making this, not the Fifties' remake with Jimmy Stewart. Leslie Banks and Edna Best are on a family vacation in Switzerland when their friend is killed. Before he very calmly dies of a gunshot to the chest, he passes them a message they need to deliver to the British consulate. 

Complicating matters is that someone has abducted their extremely irritating daughter, so they can't pass on the message, and a foreign diplomat may be killed. Some guy from the Home Office tries to shame them with warnings of guilt if this causes a war, but imagine the guilt if they get their daughter killed.

The Home Office guy does trace a threatening call the family receives, which is enough for the husband and his brother (who is the comic relief as all sorts of bad luck befalls him) to go snoop around the area. There's a long stretch where Banks is a prisoner and Best tries to find the assassin at a concert. The concert part is at least somewhat tense, since it isn't clear whether Best has any chance of spotting the killer, or if she can do anything if she does. Banks as a prisoner, is not so tense, because everyone's just sitting around, waiting to hear what happened. The movie ends with a lengthy armed standoff, which is mostly shots of people ducking at the sound of gunshots or glass breaking. It's not great, but it's not bad. 

There's a few interesting shots in the film, Hitchcock trying to stretch himself, maybe. When they get the note their daughter's been kidnapped, Best staggers away and he switches to this blurred, spinning view for a second or two before cutting back to her fainting. In the concert, Best spies a curtain moving and then the camera shifts to a close-up of the gun barrel slowing emerging. A first-person shot when the brother is being hypnotized where the woman doing it is shot with a hazy filter, but the coin she makes him focus on still glints brightly.

The other thing of note is this was apparently Peter Lorre's first English language film role. He's among the bad guys - surprising none of you, I'm sure - sporting an off-center skunk-stripe in his hair worthy of a moody anime protagonist. His character seems mostly either bored or mildly amused, but there are a few moments where you see him casually order someone around and there's just a hint of authority in there to hint at something dangerous.

Summer Slowdown Commences

July's solicits did not bring much good news. Certainly not much new business.There are two collections solicited I'll mention. I already bought them both as single issues, but if somebody was waiting for the trade on either Black Jack Demon (from Literati Press), or The Rush (from Vault Comics), they're solicited for July. Although The Rush apparently isn't out until August. Seven Seas Entertainment has volume 1 of Box of Light, which seems to be a manga about a convenience store somewhere on the edge between life and death.

The only new thing from Marvel was an issue of X-Men Legends about Longshot, written by Ann Nocenti. On top of that, there was no listed issue of She-Hulk (I assume because the book's been a month behind since February), and that Steve Skroce Clobberin' Time mini-series is apparently not happening for a while longer. Which leaves Moon Knight, Iron Cat, and the final issue of Wolverine: Patch, in the extremely unlikely event I'm still buying it.

DC, there's just Batgirls, if I'm still buying that. Image has the fifth issue of Slumber and maybe I will buy the first issue of Above Snakes, by Sean Lewis and Hayden Sherman. On the plus side, a Western, and I am a sucker for Westerns. On the negative, the solicit describes it as, 'an explosion of Western tropes and American vengeance that explores where our rage can take us.' So it's probably yet another story about the futility of revenge. So, maybe not.

Moving to other publishers, there's the third issue of Jenny Zero II, the fourth and final issue of Kaiju Score: Steal from the Gods, and the second issue of A Calculated Man. Which reminds us that knowing the math on committing murders doesn't mean someone can pull it off cleanly. The only other publisher with any comics I figure to buy is Scout. Distorted will be up to issue 5 (if I'm still buying it by then), and Broken Eye at issue 4, but there's also a new series called She Bites about a vampire in a child's body who hires a teenager to buy her smokes and whatnot. It's by Hedwig Hale and Alberto Hernandez, and I'll give it a look.

The other book from Scout is Locust: Ballad of Man. Locust was originally solicited as an 8-issue mini-series, but the last issue that came out was #4 last fall. Looks like they split it into two 4-issue mini-series. It's still by Massimo Rosi and Alex Nieto, so it should look the same, at least.

Edge of Eternity (1959)

The movie starts with an attempted murder at the Grand Canyon. Someone dies, but not the intended victim. He turns up dead not long after, though, and now a local deputy (Cornell Wilde) has a mystery to solve. The situation is complicated by the fact he could have met the victim before he died, but chased after a speeder (Victoria Shaw) instead.

The movie plays that, plus some past mistake the deputy made in a previous job, into a subplot about the county attorney trying to use this case to make the sheriff lose the next election. It doesn't really go much of any place, it's more there for Wilde to struggle with self-doubt for a bit as two more bodies pop up and he can't find the connection between them.

It's only an 80 minute film, but it doesn't feel rushed. I mean that in a good way. Wilde has time to interact with Shaw, have some conversations that slowly reveal useful information while building a relationship, as well as meeting her father, who owns a gold mine that's closed down until prices go up, and her lush of a brother. It's a decent mystery, as the clues are slowly unearthed, and not always how the audience might expect. Asking around about the victim to determine his identity at a guano mine inadvertently reveals the identity of his would-be killer.

The movie's just nicely put-together in that way. It also takes advantage of its location, with lots of aerial shots of the Grand Canyon and showcasing different terrain and walks of life. There's a big difference between the mine owner's nice ranch house (with a pool!) out in the desert and the corrugated metal structures people live and work in around the remains of the mines. The aerial shots even work with the plot, because it's such a huge area, so much of it that can't be traversed by cars, using a helicopter or floatplane to search.

The movie ends on a decent chase sequence that leads into a fight on top of a bucket lift as it descends into the canyon. My dad and I were trying to figure out where the stuntmen's safety harnesses were, but I never could see anything in the long distance shots (the up-close shots are clearly being done in front of a screen in a studio). I also don't know what the helicopter was hoping to accomplish. It's one of those flying eggbeaters like on MASH, nobody was going to try and jump to it.

What I Bought 4/20/2022 - Part 2

There were several Marvel comics I was expecting out this month that don't appear to be showing up. Weird. At least two of them were mini-series I was considering dropping, so maybe I should take it as a sign. The universe is trying to save me from bad decisions. On the other hand, why would it start doing that now?

Grrl Scouts #6, by Jim Mahfood - A girl, her squid buddy, an eel thing, and a bunch of bones.

Dio, Gordi and Turtleneck Jones reach the place where Billy's ashes are stored. After Dio answers a riddle about death and life from two weird yellow things, they still have to blow up the gate to get in. Kettlehead shows up to ruin the plan with some fancy new powers and save dozens of longboxes of '90s comics, but Natas, or at least his head, pulls a suicide bomber routine to make sure those comics get the fate they deserve.

Once inside, Dio has one last legal pad flashback to when she designed the ceramic urn the ashes are stored in. It also shows how she tried to deny he was dying, but Billy had long since accepted how things were going to end. We see conversations they have, as well as some with other people, where Billy just casually discusses how he's gonna be dead soon and Dio tries to act like he's joking.

Back outside, Turtleneck Jones has killed most of Kettlehead's Multi-Form clones, but the real deal's got him on the ropes. It looks like we're about to see what happens when Natas and Jones are dead at the same time, when Dio rushes in and clocks Kettlehead upside the kettle with the urn. Shattering it and thereby scattering his ashes. Jones handles the rest, and Dio has a brief breakdown. 

It's sad, and a little sweet. Right after the panel I selected, Mahfood switches to this almost watercolor style, where Dio's cheeks have this rosy color like he dropped one dilute bit of red paint and let it spread on the paper. It's another of those touches I haven't seen Mahfood use prior to this. It gives the sequence, which is around six panels, a unique look.

Dio's spent the whole series remembering Billy, and their last times together, but this whole bit where she uses him to save Jones' life is the first time where it seems like she acts in a way Billy might have. To charge in without thinking and do something crazy, and then revel in how cool it was. Given the butterfly symbolism, it's like she came out of a cocoon of grief and now she's able to move forward. Not only is she wanting to go find the Grrl Scouts and get trained by them, she wants to help Gordi rescue his family, too. She's embraced taking chances and acting, even if there's a big risk.

I don't know when Mahfood will get back to another of these series, but when he does, I'm curious if he'll focus on the rescue or the visit to Freak City. Or maybe both.

Sunday Splash Page #215

 

"This Neighborhood's Going to Hell," in GrimJack: Demon Knight, by John Ostrander (writer), Flint Henry (artist), Martin Thomas (colorist), Gary Fields (letterer)

Demon Knight was an original graphic novel, published the same month as GrimJack #64, which I reviewed for Random Back Issues #72. The machine which controls any and all time travel in Cynosure is glitching out spectacularly and GrimJack takes the job to go in and pull the plug. Except he gets distracted by a memory and falls back through time to his first life. Specifically his peaceful, happy times in Pdwyr, after he left the Arena, but before he went to fight in the Demon Wars.

GrimJack at least avoids meeting his younger, original body self, who is already off to war, but can't stay away from Rhian, the love of his life. He's determined to fix his past mistake, or so he says. He takes his sweet time getting to it, and by the time he decides to hunt down Major Lash and kill him, well, see the splash page. Never put off a manhunt until tomorrow when you should already be killing him today.

Ostrander presents GrimJack as the only one who knows what's coming but refuses to accept it. Rhian doesn't know exactly what's going on, but if her love has returned from the future in a different body it can't be good. But she doesn't fear death, because it's just the body not the soul. Likewise, her father Maethe knows exactly what's coming, but feels what would be required to avert it would be worse than letting events go as they do.

GrimJack, meanwhile, is so caught up in trying to break out of this cycle he's in he grasps at straws. Pdwyr is the place where he was happy, where he had peace. He left, it burned, so that must have been his mistake. If he just prevents that, he can escape everything else! Which ignores the fact part of the reason Maethe couldn't teach him to be a wizard was because of all the anger in his soul, that same anger that drove him to go fight in the Demon Wars. And even once he's failed, he can't let go. Has to take revenge on both the demons and Major Lash. Both decisions end up causing him trouble once he gets back to his proper time. 

There's a strong current, especially in things Maethe says, that make me think GrimJack's doomed to this cycle because he can't ever simply accept his past failures and move on. He's always torturing himself over them.

Henry's version of GrimJack here is able to exhibit a wider range of emotions because there's a brief stretch where he's actually feeling good. But when things go wrong, he takes on a nearly rabid expression. Wild-eyed and grinning in a way that looks like his teeth are going to shatter. When he really starts to let loose and tap into the energy inside him, Thomas has it green and purple energy practically bubbling out of and off GrimJack. Like he's a bomb about to explode and just so gleeful about it.

Demon Knight isn't referenced in the ongoing series until issue #70, by which time the Steve Pugh-drawn "Demon Wars" story arc, detailing John's leaving Pdwyr to join the fight to drive the demons out of Cynosure, had concluded. And the decisions he made in this story accelerate his decline in the last dozen or so issues of the series.

Saturday Splash Page #17

 

"Rictor's Dropping Out," in X-Factor (vol. 3) #1, by Peter David (writer), Ryan Sook (penciler), Wade von Grawbadger (inker), Jose Villarrubia (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer)

Apparently there was a 4-issue X-Factor mini-series in the early 2000s, written by some Entertainment Weekly writer, mostly just involving regular X-Men characters. That's why this post-House of M run is volume 3.

During Grant Morrison's stint writing New X-Men, it was established there was an entire mutant neighborhood, borough, something in New York. Bishop acted as sort of a cop there in District X, I think that was where X-23 got introduced in NYX. In 2004, Peter David and Pablo Raimondi established Jamie Madrox set up a detective agency there with Strong Guy and Wolfsbane. In late 2005, David got an ongoing series to play with the premise, complete with a ready made mystery for them to investigate: What happened to all the mutants?

He expanded the cast, adding Siryn and Monet, the latter in particular serving as team asshole to spark conflict, plus Rictor as a mutant who lost his abilities and struggled with that. Then David brought in Layla Miller, who actually knows what happened to all the mutants, but is trying to keep X-Factor from finding out, while giving the appearance of helping by 'knowing stuff.' David did his level best to run that bit into the ground, but it at least felt appropriate for a kid to annoy the hell out of adults.

Ryan Sook was the initial artist, but a monthly schedule is not something he can keep. He was already sharing artist credit by issue 2, and before long the book was being drawn mostly by Dennis Calero and Renato Arlem. Those two had a photorealist style that matched certain aspects, like the emphasis on people talking and doing detective work. They weren't so great at fight scenes or drawing more unusual stuff like the cast member who is a werewolf.

The first issue of X-Factor came out the month prior to this blog's creation, and I reviewed it and the second issue the first week of the blog's existence. It was the one X-book that held on through the first two years of the blog. The first year was the strongest, with X-Factor trying to learn what we already knew, but dealing with the company Singularity not only trying to stop X-Factor from learning the truth, but keep them from undoing the Scarlet Witch's actions. They should have been more concerned with stopping Cable from protecting Hope, obviously. Madrox struggled to actually pick a course of action, Rictor struggled with his change in circumstances, Siryn struggled to accept her father actually died in Brubaker's X-Men: Deadly Genesis, Quicksilver showed up acting messianic/insane.

The second year started out well. Pablo Raimondi came on as the mostly-regular artist. David had established that Madrox sent duplicates around the world to learn and experience new things, and decided Jamie decided if he brought them back, it would make him whole and maybe make things a little clearer. That got waylaid by a story involving some guy called the Isolationist, who Raimondi sometimes drew to resemble John Cena. It at least led to a change in Rictor's status, and David played with the notion that with so few mutants left in the entire world, the mutant neighborhood was falling apart.

Then Messiah CompleX happened. While David had been able to integrate the two-issue Civil War tie-in into what he was already doing, it was a little harder with 4 issues of "everyone hunts the mutant baby." The fallout didn't do the book any favors, either. Layla was lost in the future, Wolfsbane left to join Cyclops' Stabbity Kill Team (the Clayton Crain-drawn X-Force book), Jamie became grim and angry. David tried to roll with it, integrate the feeling of disintegration and uncertainty into the book, but it didn't work so great. He did a storyline with Arcade and I hardly cared. Never a good sign.

The final straw was when I picked up an issue with the triple whammy of being a Secret Invasion tie-in, a She-Hulk (which David was also writing) crossover, and Larry Stroman as the new artist and in dire need of a stronger inker. That was enough and I pulled the ripcord. Same time I finally gave up on Ultimate Spider-Man, actually.

Volume 3 ran 113 issues all told (not counting annuals and special one-shots, one of the latter we'll look at next week), David writing it the whole way, albeit with a long string of different artists. By the end the team was getting involved in wars over control of Hell of all things, and Pip the Troll was part of the cast. Yeah, I don't know if that means I should have given it another chance, or that I did the right thing staying clear.

What I Bought 4/20/2022 - Part 1

It almost completely slipped my mind Wednesday was 4/20. I don't smoke weed, but I know a lot of people that do. Guess I figured one of them would mention it. Oh well. Anyway, here's one book from this week, and one book from last week.

Batgirls #5, by Becky Cloonan and Michael Conrad (writers), Jorge Corona (artist), Sarah Stern (colorist), Becca Carey (letterer) - That is a really dumb helmet Spellbinder's got. How does he see through it?

The Batgirls - all three of them - draw out the Saints and defeat them in less than 7 pages. That's barely over a quarter of the comic. Usually takes most teams at least a half to defeat the Saints, but I guess times are tough since Drew Brees retired. I think we're meant to take it that this is how it goes when the Batgirls are ready and fighting on their terms, but it comes off as pretty underwhelming for a threat they were trying so hard to avoid for the first 4 issues. The pacing of the fight is weird, too. Cass decides to play chicken with the Saints (who are driving an A-Team van, basically). One panel of the Saints recognizing this, one panel of the big guy insisting he's happy to oblige, next panel they're panicking and swerving. Feels like it could have been presented in a more interesting way, but Cloonan and Conrad wanted more pages to spend talking about Tutor's backstory.

Anyway, the Saints are off the board for now (July's solicit says they'll be back by then), so the trio splits up. Cass and Steph head to what's left of Arkham to confront the Tutor, while Barbara (in civilian garb), goes to visit her old psychiatrist chum. Too late, the girls figure out Charles Dante was the Tutor's shrink in Arkham and Barbara's out cold. In the meantime, Tutor's assembled an army of people, which Cass intends to fight alone, while Stephanie squares off with the Tutor.

There's a sequencing foul-up, where Barbara is telling the others where they're going and you're supposed to turn the page and get a full-page splash reveal of Arkham Asylum. Except they screwed up and put the page that would follow that first, so we see the girls jumping the fence and snooping through offices, then back outside the gates staring up at the asylum. Great hustle, DC. Maximum effort there.

I can't keep up with the redesigns to Barbara's Batgirl outfit. There was the "Burnside" outfit, then they did one that I thought ditched the cowl and just went with a mask, and now she's back to the pointy cowl like the Burnside look, but they ditched most of the yellow except the chest emblem and the cape lining, and added a lot more black, including the cowl. Just looks weird against the blue of the costume.

I feel like the creative team is trying to set a quick pace here, but I'm not sure it's working. The narration boxes that are from someone who isn't any of the Batgirls definitely aren't working. I think it's a narrator, but I don't know why they think we needed that. Spend more time on the characters's thoughts! Maybe I was always supposed to recognize the Saints as little more than an annoyance. At the end of the day, they're just three fanatics who think they serve a higher purpose, while Tutor and Spellbinder are controlling an army. Although at the end of the day, Tutor's just a deluded pawn like the Saints. Something's not working right for me with this, and it isn't the character interactions, I enjoy those. The pieces are there for me to dig this more than I do, I'm just less sure it'll happen before I give up.

Slumber #2, by Tyler Burton Smith (writer), Vanessa Cardinali (artist), Simon Robins (colorist), Steve Wands (letterer) - It looks refreshing, bursting out of your old body in a brand-new body. The next big health craze.

So, Detective Finch killed a man, chopped him up, and stuffed him in his fridge. Or more accurately, the dream demon Stetson is hunting took control of his body and did that. So, his need to find and question Stetson just got more urgent. Stetson, meanwhile, is talking with a different dream demon about her target, who tells her this creature wants to become human, somehow. Finch shows up, the conversation goes south very quickly, so her guys drug Finch and they jump inside his mind.

Inside, they find a version of Finch on the floor, weird things growing from his chest, and the same marks as the creature from the previous issue. Stetson frees a very of Finch from that form, but he's not much help. May not matter, because Valkira left a message for Stetson.

After the first issue, I thought Stetson had been used as a child by Valkira and killed her own mother. Now it sounds like Valkira may have controlled Stetson's daughter and the child wound up dead. I don't know how much of a difference that will make. I guess Stetson would be driven by feeling like she failed as a parent, rather than anger at something that terrorized and used her as a child. Does one make her more reckless than the other? 

There's indications Stetson's mind isn't entirely secure. During the conversation with Finch, Robins shifts to this almost psychedelic color scheme from one page to the next, while it seems like Stetson is just doing exposition for Finch. But she's actually fallen asleep or nodded off mid-conversation. So who is telling her to ignore the ostrich? Is it just a response to stress and trauma, or part of Valkira's plan?

Cardinali draws Stetson looking like ten miles of bad road at all times. Either slouched or with her shoulders drawn up to her ears, frequently scowling and deep shadows under the eyes. Not bothering to disguise the bruises from her work. So I could believe the character just rarely sleeps and is showing every bit of that. If she wants to make sure to meet Valkira on her terms, she might try to avoid sleep so the demon can't get in that way.

I'm also curious how much Finch will remember of what's going on in his dreams when he wakes up. The guy in the first issue didn't seem to recall Stetson shotgunning the clown. That could be a complication. So could the body in his fridge, for that matter. Gonna have to do something about that eventually.

Choose or Die

I had some other stuff saved on Netflix, but it was all going to require reading subtitles and I wasn't up for that on Sunday, so here we are.

There's a game, old and looking like it plays off a cassette tape. It's called Cursor, or Curser maybe. The second vowel is actually a symbol. The game is far too aware of what the player is doing, and it presents them with choices. Some are simple, like, would you like another beer? That doesn't last, and soon the player is asked whether their wife should lose her ears, or their son his tongue. If you don't choose, well, you know. If you do, the choice happens, as the game can override people's bodies, somehow. Also, it's sadistic, as even innocuous choices turn out horribly. And, the game forces you to play at the same time each day that you first started it. No giving it back, no throwing it away.

A copy of the game ends up in Kayla's possession, and now she's got to either find a way out, or survive long enough to win. She has the help of her friend Isaac, who is kind of an expert on '80s stuff, but that's not as much help as they'd hope. The movie spends a fair amount of time on Kayla's lousy life. Dropped out of college, working a shitty cleaning job to support her mother, who retreated into drugs to escape the grief of Kayla's baby brother dying. The guy who sells her mom drugs hangs around all the time, taunting Kayla about her situation and eating their groceries.

This would be pretty effective at putting the audience on Kayla's side, if that was necessary. So I think the point is to show how she's suffering, even before the game starts in on her. The way she's let guilt over one slip-up tie her into an awful situation, one she can't win. It's not the game's intent, but at points, it feels like it's almost helping set her free. The things it tries to put her through, she's already done to herself for years. At least with Curser, there's theoretically a way to make it through, a prize at the end.

The "boss battle" at the end is kind of strange because it flips the way the game operated. It's not about suffering for someone else's gain. I won't say more because it's probably something best seen yourself. The problem is, it's kind of a tough thing to pull off without seeming cartoonish, and I'm not sure they pulled it off. There were some parts that were kind of goofy. Still, as far as Netflix films I've watched go, it's on the higher end for enjoyment.

It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Won't Die

I've been trying to figure out why Death was so infatuated with Ben Grimm in the recent Thing mini-series. The point that kept coming up was that Ben will never stop fighting, but Death seems intent on making him her consort or concubine, her words. It would seem like that's something he will fight, and Death must recognize it, because she tries to use Alicia as a lever to make him submit. But even if it works and Ben does give in, doesn't that mean he's not what she wanted after all?

So the conclusion I came to is, Death wants someone who plays hard to get, but only to a point. Look at her two most common suitors. Thanos throws himself at Death all the time. Proclaims his devotion to her and anyone else in earshot at the drop of a hat. Showers her with gifts like killing half the universe or making temples that float in space. Completely shameless, and look at how she treats him. She eggs him into doing things for him while he's alive, but as soon as he succeeds too well she stonewalls him. When he's dead, which would seem to be the truest submission, she can't wait to bring him back to life and send him off to pick up her laundry or whatever.

In contrast, Deadpool. Wade is, on the surface, a bit like Thanos, if less eloquent. He kills a lot of people, in a more personal way, but sometimes not terribly discerning. Wade also talks sweetly to Death, although mostly when he's in a vulnerable state. Meaning, while in severe physical and probably mental or emotional pain. There's also that lack of pride Thanos shows, but it doesn't feel like an act, Deadpool trying to show he can be vulnerable. In those moments, he just is vulnerable. Hurting and eager to die. 

The trick is, Wade doesn't stay dead. Death can welcome him with open arms, but Deadpool will always leave, whether he wants to or not. On the plus side, he never overstays his welcome. Death never grows sick of him the way she does Thanos, but at a certain point, it has to get tiring. No commitment. Wade isn't playing hard to get, he just is hard to get.

So now here's the Thing. He's not singing any hosannas to Death, but he's open about what he feels. He's looked death in the eye in a hundred different forms and punched it in the face. He will not quit. Will fight until he collapses. Fight until he dies. But that's the key. Unlike Deadpool, Ben Grimm can die and (setting aside meta-textual intellectual property concerns) stay dead. There's no ridiculous healing factor that will pull Ben back from the brink. So she gets to enjoy his fighting, but there is will be an end to it eventually. 

And during this mini-series, we watch Ben fight and fight and fight. More than once, he collapses from either his injuries or exhaustion, or both. In a couple of cases, Death (as Amaryllis) helps him recover, which seems contradictory. But it offers another chance to watch him fight later, to watch the struggle of the mortal against inevitability. She can afford to indulge, because she's confident that sooner or later, he's going to succumb. 

But she has her limits, so when Ben refuses to kill Dr. Doom, when his stubborn will refuses to remove a possible threat to her domain, it stops being a fun exercise. That's when it becomes a matter of trying to force the issue via Alicia's safety. Which doesn't work because Death underestimates Alicia, because a woman who made herself a great sculptor, who befriended a strange man who crashed through her skylight and turned out to be a gofer for a hungry giant alien, who has dated Ben through all his insecurity, is not the sort to give up easily, either.

One Wild Bird at a Time - Bernd Heinrich

I've reviewed a couple of Heinrich's other books, which were focused more on biological studies he performed, mostly with birds. This book, on the other hand, is focused on his interactions and observations of specific individual birds over his years living in New England. Unless he's done a dive into the literature to see if what he's observed has been studied elsewhere, he's not necessarily drawing any larger conclusions about a species based on what he writes about.

For example, the first chapter is about a breeding pair of northern flickers that hammered a hole in his outer cabin wall and built themselves a nest there. The chapter consists of his observations on who did most of the work constructing the nest and how the pair behaved. Once there are hatchlings, Heinrich notes how often and when each parent brings food. That the male tends to just pick the loudest or pushiest babies to feed, while the female feeds each one repeatedly. He notes the behaviors of the young in the nest, the fighting for position to get food, and ultimately, how the parents try to coax their young to finally leave the nest.

Not all the chapters are about birds' nesting attempts, although most of them are. It's easier to observe a bird if you know it's going to come back to a particular location several times a day. Plus, the harshness of winter where he lives means birds can be scarce that time of year. 

That said, there are chapters about bird behavior he observed in winter, such a redpolls diving headfirst into snow for no immediately apparent reason. There's a chapter devoted to the dens ruffed grouse make under the snow, where he tries to determine how long and when they stay in them based on the amount of crap in the dens, and how grouse decide where to make a den. He tries making the opening of a few tunnels in the snow himself, to see if other grouse keep an eye out for things like that as a sign to den in that area. At the least, the tunnels he made with his boots were unconvincing, so he can't draw any conclusions on that. But it does give the book a casual air, of listening to someone describe interesting things they saw during a hike through the woods.

'Unfortunately it is illegal to take a live crow, although it is perfectly all right to take dead ones, after shooting them on sight for target practice. But what is legality, if it is legal to torture a goose or a duck by putting it in a cage where it can't move, shoving a tube down its throat, and force-feeding it to make its liver fatty in order to make foie gras for people to spread on crackers?'

What I Bought 4/15/2022

I only found one of the three books from last week, but I also only tried one store. At the time I didn't think I had time to try a second one, but I underestimated Alex's capacity to run behind schedule. Being the punctual person with consistently late friends and family might be more annoying than being the one sober person surrounded by imbibers. Certainly less entertaining.

Kaiju Score: Steal from the Gods #1, by James Patrick (writer), Rem Broo (artist/colorist), Dave Sharpe (letterer) - I like incorporating the kaiju into her outfit more than the covers on the first mini-series, where all those details were in the background.

So this mini-series is focused on Michelle, the safe-cracker that was pretending to be a better, more famous safe-cracker the first go-round. She paid the debt to save her old crew, and has started up a new crew, sticking to mostly safer, low-end jobs. Which doesn't mean she's safe from people trying to rip her off, or that word of that previous art heist didn't get around.

A man named Javier wants her to break into a secure Russian facility where an immense kaiju is frozen underground and steal a bunch of original Aztec gold from galleon sitting in its digestive tract. Michelle, not being an idiot, declines. Unfortunately, the guy who tried to rip off her last heist (who looks like a complete fucking doofus. Like he stole some newscaster's hair) decided to kill her to make an example, and she doesn't have the financial resources to go to war with him.

Why does she need to go to war? One of the guys on her crew is apparently a top-notch sniper (among other skills), and when we see this Carlito, he's out on a golf course in broad daylight with only two goons, one of which is preoccupied holding Carlito's phone for him. Can't be that hard to find out where he hangs his shingle. Just find a nice grassy knoll and put one in his skull. Apparently that's not on the table, so Michelle and her crew are taking the job.

Patrick understands that Marco, who brainstormed the last heist, would be the guy to approach, so he addresses that by having Javier explain he tried Marco first, but he's lost interest. And there's some backmatter at the end that's supposed to be a journal Michelle keeps where she notes she tried to recruit Marco for this crew of hers originally, and he turned her down, too. So I think it's not a smokescreen, and Marco's not going to pop up at some crucial moment later on.

Patrick's also setting some things up with her crew. T.G., the sniper (who is also her gardener) seems like he's got something going on only he knows about, like he was waiting for her to hire him. The journal notes Sung tends to move between crews a lot, which Michelle says is a red flag. The other guy, Glover, is from her old crew and he seems to keep screwing up. Michelle leveled up whether she wanted to or not to pull off that first kaiju heist. Glover hasn't, and so when things go wrong, he's almost certainly going to be the problem. Or one of the others is going to kill him first, which will create its own problem.

Broo seems to have pulled back a bit on the exaggeration. Characters don't jut their lips or chins out as wildly as they did before, the angles are their joints aren't as ludicrously sharp. It's still recognizably his work, but now I'm not having moments where I'm pulled out of the story because he's trying too hard to sell an emotion.

Sunday Splash Page #214

 

"Back Where It Ended," in GrimJack #77, by John Ostrander (writer), Flint Henry (penciler), Hilary Barta (inker), Martin Thomas (colorist), Gary Fields (letterer)

In the last issue with Tom Mandrake as series artist, Gaunt learned a rather disturbing fact: Death was not going to be the end for him. His unwillingness to abandon a friend had far-reaching consequences, and the last third of the series starts to explore that.

Set 200 years later, GrimJack is a man named Jim Twilley, but he's also John Gaunt, whose fate is now tied to Cynosure's, condemning him to be reborn so long as the city exists. He takes it well. That's a lie, he takes it horribly, initially refusing to try and reconcile two sets of lived experiences. once he remembers his past, he goes out of his way to claim that Jim Twilley doesn't exist, his family and friends remember someone who doesn't exist. He eventually pulls his head from his ass, but as usual, his decisions had consequences.

This version of GrimJack is wilder, more vicious than his earlier incarnation. Which is saying something given what that guy got up to, but it's true. He has less control of his worst tendencies, or more likely he doesn't bother to control them. Learning that you're a long way from ever getting back to your loved ones in Heaven will do that to ya. In his previous life, he knew how to bargain with people, how to at least attempt to sweet-talk someone. Now he doesn't even try. Even when people agree to help him or extend a helping hand, he goes out of his way to push until he pisses them off. His best friend BlacJacMac made allowance for him if he did return, GrimJack burns that bridge down in one issue.

I think the first third of GrimJack (roughly the Truman and Tom Sutton issues) is about how Gaunt how Gaunt's stubbornness and loyalty lead to him standing by his friends and they, in turn, stand by him. The second third (Mandrake's run) highlighted how that, stubbornness and loyalty can go awry for his friends. The final third seems to highlight that GrimJack is his own worst enemy. He grows more reckless and desperate as it progresses, the faint hope of what he might get back to someday failing to keep him going. 

All his attempts to improve his lot, or even to help save a long-lost friend, end up failing because he can't put his own selfish desires aside. He can't let what Major Lash did pass, which would have let him stay dead. Instead, he takes revenge and ensures he'll have to deal with him again, and again. So that when he does finish it, he puts everything else he was trying to accomplish at risk. As he can't seem to find any pleasure in anything other than tormenting people or taking revenge, he just keeps pissing different people off until he's besieged from all sides. All the times he just had to have it his way coming back to haunt him. Not even in any coordinated, "super-villain team-up" manner, just all these people deciding, "fuck it, I'm sick of that asshole," at the same time.

(There's a series of back-up stories that run near the end that detail Gaunt's life growing up, and what happened between him and his brothers. The main thing is we learn that is was impressed on John very early in life that he should never allow anyone to disrespect or harm him. Every injury must be repaid in kind, or worse. He never unlearned that lesson.)

Flint Henry's GrimJack is different, and not just because it's an entirely different physical body. His version is more expressive, less guarded. Truman and Mandrake's GrimJack has a death's head grin that suggests a cold enjoyment of the fact they're about to kill an enemy. Henry's is wilder, like he's either not even aware of what he's about to do, or he's planning to go a lot further than just killing. And Henry is more graphic with the violence. When GrimJack cuts somebody apart, there's blood and guts following the arc the sword. 

The whole run looks more, I'd almost say lurid. The closest thing Twilley gets to a romantic relationship in this run (minus some time travel hijinks) is with a sorceress who draws off tantric energy. So, you know, a fair amount of implied fucking to charge her engine. The colors are brighter, the oppressive shadows of Mandrake's run largely banished. Henry's version of Cynosure is the most crowded, the most hi-tech. It feels like it owes more to Blade Runner or sci-fi of that sort, whereas Truman's ran more to noir and Mandrake's to horror or German Expressionism, maybe. It is 200 years into the future, so that makes some sense, though I'd also expect there to be dimensions coming into phase that time runs backwards, or it moves faster and civilizations have been destroyed.

Saturday Splash Page #16

 

"Death Down Below," in X-Factor (vol. 1) #10, by Louise Simonson (writer), Walter Simonson (penciler), Bob Wiacek (inker), Petra Scotese (colorist), Joe Rosen (letterer)

Does it make sense to go with a splash page that not only doesn't feature the title characters, but they aren't even mentioned? Probably not. But the other options were one of Freedom Force trying to arrest Rusty and Skids (with Mystique cosplaying as Uncle Sam), or Joe Quesada drawing Wolfsbane and Feral as Ren & Stimpy. So, go with Walt Simonson drawing the Mutant Massacre in the biggest sewer I have ever seen.

I've never owned many issues of X-Factor. Probably because it never seemed like a cool X-book. You either have the Original 5 X-Men, and the only one of them I'd define as cool is the Beast, and that's mostly when he hangs out with the Avengers. When it's not them, it's the bunch that worked for the government, and anyone who's read Marvel Comics knows working for the Man isn't cool.

It isn't like the book has a great start. Far as I can tell, Marvel wanted more X-Books than just Uncanny X-Men and New Mutants, and someone got the bright idea to reunite the original team. Sure, Angel, Beast and Iceman were on the Defenders, but they can cancel that easily enough. More difficult were Cyclops and Jean Grey. Cyclops for being a husband and father, Jean for being dead after committing genocide. 

Jim Shooter apparently decreed no bringing Jean back as a hero unless they could wipe the murder of the broccoli people off her ledger. So that's how we get the notion of Phoenix creating a facsimile of Jean, while Jean's slumbering in an energy cocoon at the bottom of a bay. As for Cyclops, Uncanny X-Men #201 made it pretty clear to everyone, including Maddy Pryor, that he wanted to keep being an X-Man, and his responsibilities as husband and father were of, probably not even secondary importance. He loses the fight against Storm for leadership of the X-Men one month, and the first issue of X-Factor came out the next month. It was 13 issues before he even bothered to go back and try and check on Maddy or little Nate.

How anyone on the X-Men listens to that deadbeat, I will never know. I mean, Gambit's an inveterate scumbag, but he's also not typically trying to give orders.

The actual initial idea for the book isn't terrible. Xavier's first students, feeling the X-Men are no longer following Xavier's ideals, what with letting Magneto hang around, decide it's up to them. I mean, it's presumptuous as hell, as I can picture Cyclops making some big speech that would make me roll my eyes right out of my head, but at least, "find and protect young mutants while helping them learn to control their powers", is a decent enough storytelling engine.

Of course, the way they go about it is fairly idiotic. They pose as a group of ordinary humans called the X-Terminators, who hunt down mutants. People hire them for this purpose, but they are constantly thwarted by those dastardly X-Factor mutants, always helping the targets escape. Granted that Angel's money is funding the whole thing (looked over by future pain-in-the ass Cameron Hodge), but you'd think their failure to actually capture or kill any of their targets would tend to make business dry up. But hell, people keep hiring Arcade to kill superheroes.

People in the Marvel Universe are stupid, is what I'm getting at.

But it also doesn't seem like a way to gain the trust of the people you're trying to help, showing up like you're going to kill them, only to then go, "Just kidding! We're here to help, but play along like my two friends in the blue jumpsuits are really trying to kill you!"

I think the whole thing got dropped shortly after Mutant Massacre, and once Louise Simonson started writing the book (with Walt Simonson drawing it some of them time), the team spent more time just fighting Apocalypse and his plans. Angel lost his wings, got the metal ones. Beast went back to being blue and furry. Future X-Forcer and NextWave alum Boom-Boom showed up. Jean and Scott took advantage of the Assassination of Maddy Pryor by the Coward X-Office to get custody of the baby. Probably some other shit I don't care about.

After a series of events like X-Tinction Agenda and *sigh* the Muir Island Saga, the series shifted to the government team, written by Peter David, with Joe Quesada and Larry Stroman as pencilers for the early stages. David wrote a team that was basically a mess psychologically, between Havok's paranoia, Polaris' self-confidence issues, Quicksilver's abrasive nature, etc,. It didn't seem like working for the government was helping any, what with the moral compromises you have to navigate when stuck following official policy.

I think this is the best regarded stretch for this volume, which is remarkable because David only wrote the book for about 20 issues, and a few of those were wasted on X-Cutioner's Song crossovers. But he established characterizations that stuck for a few members of the cast. "Pietro Maximoff Syndrome" gets a lot of play, but the notion that Strong Guy's party dude attitude is just an act is another. Though some writers handle them better than others. Matthew Rosenberg probably read some of PAD's stories with Jamie Madrox, but the conclusions he took from them are, I'll be kind and say "curious."

After that, the book went on for another 50 or so issues. Lobdell, Dematteis, DeZago, John Francis Moore, lots of writers over a 20 issue span before Howard Mackie takes over for the last 35 issues. The roster shifted as characters started dropping like flies. This is the stretch when Forge and Mystique were on the team. Not sure Forge being a headliner ever bodes well. Outside of Forge and Mystique's relationship being referenced in her ongoing series, I don't remember seeing anyone talk about this stretch of the book, not even in a "holy crap this was terrible," sense, which doesn't bode well.

What I Bought 4/9/2022 - Part 3

Saved the one comic that was wrapping up for last, so it could get its own post. Do I have enough to say to justify that? Let's find out.

The Thing #6, by Walter Mosley (writer), Tom Reilly (artist), Jordie Bellaire (color artist), Joe Sabino (letterer) - The only copy the store had was with the Mahmud Asrar variant cover, which is Ben glaring at us while holding a big sandwich. Like I'm gonna try to steal the Thing's sandwich. Be like stealing beer from Wolverine.

So Amaryllis is Death. She takes Doom, and she already has Alicia. If Ben wants Alicia to be free, he's got to give himself to Death. Conversely, he and Bobby could take Doom's deathless robot army and storm Death's realm themselves. They opt for "B", which is good, because it's much more fun to read. They fight some dead warriors, Ben takes care of Mot (who was Death's lackey I guess, rather than just Death in another disguise) and they rescue Doom, who has experienced the time as centuries of torture. 

Death has been kind enough to give Doom a new mask after Ben smashed the previous one, although it looks like it was made from a potato sack, so it's probably not an act of kindness. Makes Doom look like a scarecrow. His mother shows up, basically telling him to suck it up. She was kinder than that when he rescued her from Mephisto, but I guess she's learned what he got up to since her death in the interim.

Alicia, meanwhile, is handling being in the realm of the dead rather well. Turns out being a living person has certain advantages, as Alicia trounces some dead warrior bent on chopping a child up with an axe. Bellaire colors Alicia as brighter than everyone and everything around her. Sometimes with an actual glow, but mostly minus the grimy filter that everyone has. Then she confronts Death herself and they have a bit of a throwdown, which Alicia wins long enough for them to leave. I guess because, by fighting her, none of them are willing to accept Death, so she can't hold them. Everyone gets home, though Doom's mama stays behind, 'cause she's dead. Ben and Alicia get back together, and Bobby takes the Champion's teleporter belt and goes, somewhere.

Right before Alicia shows up, Ben has to fight another monster, who doesn't offer a name and looks like he might be out of Hindu mythology, based on the headgear Reilly draws, mostly. Ben can't beat him by fighting, but once he admits he just wants to find Alicia, the monster seems stymied. I think it's a misplay by Mosley, because Ben doesn't figure this out on his own, the weird orb/helmet thing he's wearing tells him that's the key. 

All through this story, Ben has met every challenge by punching first. Just two pages earlier, he wants to fight his way through the next wave of Death's forces rather than take off to find Alicia because he doesn't want to be a coward. Maybe it would have been unrealistic for Ben to just suddenly realize that refusing to fight is sometimes the smart move. That not every person that bars your way need to be met with violence. But he has shown intelligence and insight at points. Enough to recognize there was something unusual about Bobby and Amaryllis. Enough to get in touch with the Silver Surfer to take the Champion someplace else.

Maybe the point was he needed it pointed out to, in a way he couldn't dismiss. He and Alicia have a brief exchange near the end that suggests she's brought up his temper before, and Ben hasn't taken the conversation to heart. I do like that, at the very end, when he promises to try to be better, to get anger management, and rescue Alicia from Hell, Ben says the last one is the easy part. The grand gestures and declarations, the one-off things, those are easy to do. It's the everyday stuff that's hard, because you have to stick at it. But Ben doesn't give up, so maybe he can pull it off.

Men at Work

Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez are garbagemen who get tangled up in the murder of a political candidate, and, I don't want to say they solve the mystery of who killed the man and why. More like they happen to be in the vicinity when those mysteries are solved. 

They sort of try to solve it. Sheen goes to try and question the woman whose apartment the guy died in, but they end up on almost a date. Estevez and Keith David, who was assigned to supervise them for a couple of weeks because they've been doing a shitty job of collecting garbage, are supposed to tail Sheen, but that falls apart in minutes. They also bring along the corpse of the dead guy, plus a pizza delivery guy Keith David decides saw too much. What was it about movies in the late '80s - early '90s and people lugging around corpses while pretending they're still alive?

This is definitely a movie that feels stretched at 98 minutes. There's a whole running gag about two of Sheen and Estevez' coworkers trying to prank them in various ways. It just starts off as the pranks backfiring, but then you get to the point where they're accidentally blowing up the lady's car and purposefully tampering with the garbage truck's brakes. Isn't that attempted murder?

There's another running subplot with these two cops who like to hassle Sheen and Estevez. Keith David's character apparently went through some shit in 'Nam, so he ends up handcuffing the cops to a children's merry-go-round thing in doggy style. That takes those morons out of the plot, but the movie comes back a couple of times to make jokes about it looking like they're fucking.

At least the pair of idiot henchmen are relevant to the plot, as they lose the body of the guy they killed and have to locate both it and an incriminating tape they were supposed to recover. So there's a reason for us to listen to Biff give Mario grief about bringing a taser instead of a gun, or Mario to smack Biff for talking about Mario's mother.

I'm still not sure they actually won at the end. They dumped the bad guy into a pool of the toxic waste he was dumping in a landfill, but I'm not sure they have any evidence to connect him to the murder. The two morons that did it might have escaped where they were buried in trash, and he had taken the incriminating tape prior to that. If he had any sense, it's long destroyed. I guess humiliation (and maybe he can be charged with attempted murder for trying to crush them with a bulldozer) is punishment enough. Well, humiliation and cancer from landing in toxic waste. That's basically the death penalty in 1990.

This almost feels like it should have been a pilot for a syndicated TV show. Like Psych, but with two intelligent but immature garbagemen who find new mysteries to solve in the garbage each week!

What I Bought 4/9/2022 - Part 2

That urge to jump into the comments of someone's else blog and call someone an idiot never goes away entirely, at least not for me. It is nice to know I've developed enough to control to resist the urge.

Distorted #2, by Salvatore Vivenzio (writer), Gabriele Falzone (artist), Francesco Canneva (color assistant) - Didn't I kill that guy in a meat locker in Silent Hill 2?

James' attempt to have sex is interrupted by his kickboxing friend, who we learn is named Dem, getting in a fight in the club. They go hang out with some guy who buys weed off Dem and talk about stuff before the other guy shows he has some sort of power, too. James gives a little speech about how these powers affect their lives and they have to deal with it. I don't know, it's kind of dull.

In other, more interesting developments, there's two pages on a guy with the last name "Collins" who is investigating people with these powers, including the girl with the acid barf from last issue, who has disappeared. More pages are devoted to the guy on the cover, named Mason. He's a hatchet-wielding cannibal serial killer, and his favorite food is the kids with powers, who he can sense somehow. Here, he gets a young boy with a kind of frog tongue.

Falzone does the page where the kid tries to use his tongue to get to the ceiling, so the boy's leg is outside the panel, in a white space. Mason grabs it there, and then there's one more panel to the right, an extreme close-up on the boy's tearful face, pleading to be let go. But the way Mason is drawn, it leads to the bottom of the page, where Mason swings the kid's head into the floor. It's a pretty solid composition.

There is one strange thing. The last page, at least in my copy, is the same one as last issue. Where the teleporter is standing over the acid barf girl. The one who is missing now. Not sure what happened there.

If Vivenzio is going to continue to focus on James and Dem, then they need to start doing something other than moping around and complaining about not getting laid. Because at this point, every other plotline we've seen so far is much more interesting than they are. I'm guessing one of these three forces - Mason, Brunner or Tom - are going to cross paths with James, and that's how he gets drawn into this. Force himself to decide if he's content to just 'live with it.'

West of Sundown #1, by Tim Seeley and Aaron Campbell (writers), Jim Terry (artist), Triona Farrell (colorist), Crank! (letterer) - Nice job on capturing the movie poster feel. That's not the cover I was able to get at the store, but oh well.

Dooley's an Irishman caught up in the Civil War who digs up a live woman from a grave. The woman is Constance der Abend, and for a decade, they travel the U.S. Dooley helps Constance who, surprise!, is a vampire, find people to feed on who are evil, while Constance acts as a lady of society and possibly a professional opera singer. But there are people who know she's a vampire, and they burn her house to the ground, along with the dirt from where she was born. So Dooley's got to get her back to that place. They reach a town called Sangre de Moro, but the hunters are waiting.

The issue is written from Dooley's perspective, and he's presented as a man who is loyal to his mistress, but he's starting to feel the toll. Serving Constance saved him from the war, but as he notes while peering into a beer Farrell colors like blood, it's still him deciding it's OK to take these lives because they're immoral. He alternates between this downtrodden weariness, Terry giving him exhaustion lines and deep shadows swallowing his eyes, or else a wide-eyed horror at the things he's a party to.

Which makes me wonder if he's going to reconsider his allegiance at some point. It probably didn't help that Constance, badly burned from her failed attempt to save her coffin, comments that if she doesn't get fed, she might even eat him. Get the feeling Dooley hadn't entirely considered that outcome. That, push comes to shove, he could also be nothing more than food to her.

Seeley and Campbell also highlight one possible supporting cast member in the town. The sheriff, who also writes stories about the West. So dime novels, like Beauchamp in Unforgiven? Either way, we'll see if Sheriff Abilene (and that name sounds fake as all hell) does play some sort of role. If he's the type to maintain law and order, or only sheriff because someone has to pin the badge to their shirt.

The Trip

Lisa (Noomi Rapace) and Lars (Aksel Hennie) head to Lars' father's cabin for the weekend. Both are dissatisfied with their marriage, and both plan to kill the other, while being unaware of the other's scheme.

The first 20 minutes is devoted to show the state their marriage is in. Lisa will say something which may or may not be meant as a dig, but Lars absolutely takes it as criticism and fires back. They're petty and ugly, there's no cooperation between the two. Of the two, I think the film lays more of the fault at Lars' feet, as he always seems to be the one spoiling for a fight and Lisa decides there's no reason to hold herself back.

This is followed by a 15-25 minute stretch where the actual murder attempts kick in. This involves a couple of reversals of fortune and a few flashbacks to show the preparations each of them made. The pettiness and sniping continues, but at least each of them lays out their grudges. It's early for Festivus, but the airing of grievances is always important.

It's about that point they find out there were three escaped convicts, Petter, Dave, and Roy, hiding in the attic. Now Lars and Lisa are hostages, and the remainder of the movie is the two of them (with one surprise assist) against the three convicts.

The violence is extreme, but in a way seemingly meant more for comedy than graphic violence. One character gets pushed chest first into lawnmower blades, while another gets shot in the ass with a load of buckshot. During the couple's fight against Roy in the kitchen, Lisa gets picked up and dropped on a Formica dining table, and when Lars tries to get involved again, Roy punches him out without even bothering to turn around.

There's also an extended sequence where it looks like one of the two is going to be raped by Dave. I think the point of that was to disabuse the audience of any idea this might be one of those movies where the crook is not really such a bad guy, and he will help the couple solve their marital problems, ala Denis Leary in The Ref. No, these are bad guys who enjoy the power they have over Lars and Lisa, and will abuse it in whatever manner they choose. Petter keeps the other two under control, but only because Lisa offers him something he wants more.

There's a point near the end that makes me wonder if there are two endings to this out there. Like in The Descent, the version the put in theaters here in the U.S. has the lady escape the cave and make it home, but I think the original ending is she remains in the cave and basically loses her mind. Because there's a moment where it looks like one of them is about to drown and you can see the other debating whether to keep struggling to pull them up. They do, and the ending progresses from there, but part of me wonders if there's a version where they let go.

What I Bought 4/9/2022 - Part 1

Well, I almost got every comic I was looking for from last week. I knew the first issue of Lead City was going to be a longshot. I'll try again at the end of the month. In the meantime, here's the only two ongoing series I'm buying from Marvel right now.

Moon Knight #10, by Jed MacKay (writer), Alessandro Cappuccio (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - There's got to be a better place to grip the gun than around the trigger. That's just not safe if you're trying to pull someone out.

Moon Knight's confrontation with the escaped mental patient, Rutherford Winner, is related in flashback as Moonie talks with Dr. Sterman, who is also Winner's doctor. The doctor seems rather unconcerned with Winner, dismissing him as a hopelessly damaged individual who can only be contained. Unlike Marc, she says, who contains himself, but perhaps, shouldn't?

At first I thought this was her trying to do what Zodiac wanted, possibly in the most ham-fisted, obvious way possible. I guess I should have paid more attention to the disinterested posture and expressions Cappuccio gives her. She looks bored, talking about Winner, only leaning towards Marc when she encourages him to stop holding back.

As it turns out, this Dr. Sterman is actually Waxman, a Clayface-looking shapeshifting killer. Moon Knight busts out some liquid nitrogen canisters (where's he getting this stuff if he's broke and on the outs with the Avengers?) to freeze him, then seals Waxman inside a steel ball. Cappuccio does all those panels of Waxman as these tight, narrow boxes, where Rosenberg has colored almost everything black and Waxman's just outlined in the green glow of the walkie-talkie.

Moon Knight says he will bury the ball in the foundations of a condo ('execution by gentrification') unless Waxman tells him where to find the doctor. Waxman does, and Marc buries him anyway. OK, then. Glad to see therapy is helping. That would seem like an indication Marc is doing exactly what Zodiac wanted. Trapping a potentially immortal serial killer in a box and letting him go insane certainly seems like not holding back. Is MacKay going to have Moon Knight show Zodiac exactly why it's a bad idea to encourage him to cut loose, and if so, is that going to be one last trap Zodiac has for him? It's hard to see Moon Knight taking prisoners or showing restraint at this point.

She-Hulk #3, by Rainbow Rowell (writer), Roge Antonio (artist), Rico Renzi (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Last month I ended up with an X-Gwen variant, this month it's a Carnage variant. This is what happens when you wait until the weekend. You get stuck with whatever's left.

Jen gets to work trying to get some non-super-type clients. We don't see any progress on that front. She returns home with pizza for Jack and the two of them try to figure out what happened to him, and what about his origin can actually be proven. Which is apparently very little, since Jack has mostly relied on what other people told him. Hmm, I feel an "origin retcon" migraine coming on.

Jack still can't figure out where he was, what was happening, how he escaped or why he came to She-Hulk, though he thinks the last might be out of some guilt over that time he drained all her radiation. Everybody in the comic keeps saying that happened in Indiana, but I thought it was inside a secret biological weapons facility hidden in Mount Rushmore? It was Geoff Johns' Avengers run, the story where they figure out Red Skull made it to Secretary of Defense, right? I know, not critical, and I'm probably misremembering, but it keeps nagging at me.

They do figure out that Jack has barely any access to his powers. The way he describes it, the power is there, he just can get to it, but you have to wonder if it got drained out of him. The other thing I notice is Jack doesn't say what happened to his mother, only that she was an alien. So maybe Rowell is bringing her into the picture, trying to address her son's condition somehow. That wouldn't necessarily explain sending him to She-Hulk, though.

Rowell is still moving slowly, but she's taking pains to highlight different parts of Jennifer's past continuity that's been brought into play. For example, Mallory has apparently rebooted Andy, the Mad Thinker's Awesome Android as her assistant, the role he played in Slott's She-Hulk. Jennifer also calls Patsy Walker to see if she knows anything about Jack's history, so Rowell's also continuing that friendship, which I think Charles Soule established in his She-Hulk run. That could indicate Rowell's going for something more upbeat, or that She-Hulk's really going to need the support network. Or just that this is a version of She-Hulk willing to actually let other people help her.

I'm mostly just grateful Rowell writes She-Hulk as skeptical of Patsy dating Tony Stark as I am. Patsy Walker: Exhibiting terrible taste in men since, I dunno, 1952 or something!

Still, there probably needs to be more forward movement at some point. If only to give Roge Antonio something to draw other than people sitting and talking. Antonio is trying to keep it visually interesting by changing perspective or the characters' posture to reflect their emotional state. Jen spends most of her conversation with Jack resting comfortably back into the couch, leaning forward only when he's getting despondent, while Jack tends to hunch on himself.

Sunday Splash Page #213

 

"Return to Maker," in GrimJack #39, by John Ostrander (writer), Tom Mandrake (artist), Ken Feduniewicz (colorist), Ken Holewczynski (letterer)

After Tim Truman departed, Tom Sutton took over as artist for 9 issues (minus the anniversary 24th issue, where Truman returned for a short story). Then there's two guests artists, including Shaun McManus, and in issue #31, Tom Mandrake steps in as the regular artist, a role he would maintain for the 25 issues, the most anyone drew of the ongoing series.

Mandrake brings the deep, creeping shadows and faces that look fluid to the work. Most of the time. There are issues in the middle where someone else is doing the inking (Jim McDermott takes a turn or two) and the shadows become a more solid, flat presence. There's none of that sense of them being alive and trying to swallow everything on the page. Mandrake's Cynosure is a bit cleaner, and the streets aren't nearly as crowded. Gaunt seems to be spending more time in places with high walls all around, hemming him in.

I think the big internal conflict up through Truman's run was whether what Gaunt believes about himself is true. Is he really true to his friends? Is his stubborn pushing for the truth, his refusal to let certain people have their way, get away with shit, actually for the best? Is there really any point to anything he's tried to do?

The Trade Wars seemed to answer solidly that he is a person that stands by his friends, because they did the same for him when he needed it. Whether his stopping Dancer and Mayfair from taking over the city was the right move probably depends on what one thinks is best for Cynosure, and how many people it's acceptable to sacrifice to get it.

The time where Mandrake is the artist would seem to reaffirm this, but it also presents more of the downside to his personality. GrimJack being exceedingly stubborn and refusing to give up is great when he's fighting on your behalf and things are bad. Less so when it makes him put you in danger because he's determined to have things a certain way.

The main plot is that Mayfair and Dancer are no longer allies. Instead, each of them are trying to assume power in their own way. Mayfair ropes in BlacJacMac at a time when he's lonely and frustrated, while Dancer finds allies in a lower quarter. Meaning demons. Ostrander knows to give Mandrake the opportunity to draw creepy, crawly monstrous looking things with slime and too many eyes and teeth.

GrimJack finds himself in the middle, trying to piece everything together and get enough people on his side to actually win. But, he wants the win on his terms. Specifically, he wants to be the one who kills Dancer, for a specific reason I will try not to spoil here, and that leads to him making bad decisions. Bad decisions that result in additional casualties on his side.

Ostrander puts Gaunt through some heavy trauma as soon as Mandrake's on-board, and then, gives him a chance at some peace and resolution. It seems to work. A few characters remark he seems less haunted. But what we see over time is that he hasn't abandoned his old ways and gradually, the same flaws resurface. What looked like an unwillingness to abandon a friend, might have just been Gaunt being pissed someone was trying to use him. 

He lost a couple of friends during the Trade Wars when he got outmaneuvered. He loses a few more here, but they're more self-inflicted wounds. In the first go-round, those losses sent him into a dark place. He doesn't fall as far this time, but he gets a glimpse of the consequences of his actions, and it's a whole lot worse from his perspective. But we'll get to that next week.