Sometimes I think of starting a blog on Tumblr. Mostly as a fallback for when Blogger goes belly up. Each time I look over there, I see people complaining about pornbots, and how people won't reblog their posts (you want me to post your stuff on my blog?), and it all just seems like an insane hassle.
Belasco wants Felicia and MJ to recover his Soulsword, taken from him long ago by whoever put him in charge of Limbo originally. It's locked in a place called the Screaming Tower, which looks like a bunch of monochrome L-shaped Tetris blocks with eyeballs on them. There are a lot of people after the sword, but Belasco figures since Earth girls always upend things in Limbo, he's got the inside track.
Our stars go in, MacKay foreshadows something about MJ's jackpot dial, they run from a bunch of screaming loonies, and are saved from a nasty fall to their death by S'ym. That's it as far as plot progress. A third of the issue was Belasco doing exposition. Felicia is still stressing over needing to confess she's dating Peter, which I still don't see the issue over. Mary Jane is still being vague about the bracelet thing and how it works, which seems like a much bigger issue to me, since it could directly endanger Felicia's life.
I wonder if the reason Mary Jane is getting skulls in her "pulls" is because of Felicia's bad luck abilities. MacKay seriously dialed back the use of those after his first volume of Black Cat, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't still be available. And now certainly seems like a dangerous enough time to need every edge she can get.
There are two threads in this issue. In one, Moon Knight and Hunter's Moon head below the city - that's right, another weird place beneath New York City! - where a guy called "Commodore Donny Planet" is acting as overseer of a Moloid slave labor camp. Khonshu's fists hand down a beating, but Planet doesn't know who hired him. What's more, Hunter's Moon explains a couple of things. While Khonshu can traditionally resurrect his fists (as he did for Dr. Badr when the vamps broke his neck), the person loses a little of themselves each time, until they're a, 'feral psychotic.'
Except now, with Khonshu trapped, he claims Badr's comeback was the last time. No more resurrections. Which sounds like bullshit designed to corner Marc into freeing him, but could simply be Mackay wanting Marc to deal with his reckless tendency.
Or the source of them, because the other thread is an old merc buddy of his, now a psychiatrist, interviewing Zodiac. Zodiac is, as I figured an edgelord putz, who claims super-villainy and psychopathy are true American cultural imports, and that Carnage is a better super-villain than Dr. Doom. Granted that Doom doesn't think of himself as a super-villain, but Carnage is as much one as a rabid bear, give me a break.
The more critical point is that Zodiac doesn't believe in guilt, and he doesn't think the doctor does, either. Zodiac watched Moon Knight, and the things he's done weigh him down in a way they don't weigh Dr. Plesko down. Which would seem to imply Marc's lack of self-preservation is a martyr complex, or that he should suffer to pay for that stuff. But that's not going to get him anywhere, except maybe dead. Although I'm not sure Marc would actually care if he could be killed once and for all.
One thing I'm curious about in the look is the sort of glow/blur effect Rosenberg uses around Hunter's Moon and Moon Knight. At times it's as though the Moon is still shining on them even underground, but other times it seems to emanate from them. And there's this smear of white that surrounds their eyes as well, but it also showed up around Zodiac's eyes a few times. Mostly when he's going on about villainy and how Doom is overrated, not when he's discussing how he killed his own guilt.
Is the glow/shine/whatever representing the characters' devotion to their respective causes? A light that shines out from within when the Fists of Khonshu do his work in protecting night travelers, or when Zodiac espouses his belief in super-villainy as an art form?
4 comments:
How many subterranean worlds are there below Marvel New York now? I feel like someone should do one of those Official Handbook schematic maps to clarify whether the Morlocks live above that homeless city Morbius was the king of for a bit.
As I was reading this issue, I remembered we had a similar conversation about this when I reviewed the second issue of that Walter Moseley/Tom Reilly Thing mini-series around the beginning of last year, since that involved another underground city. I thought, "oh no, wait until Kelvin reads about this!"
I don't know where they find the room for all these cities and lakes and everything else.
The ground under Marvel New York must be quite unstable by now!
At this point, there's one lonely, narrow pillar of rock that hasn't been excavated to make room for another underground civilization holding the entire island up.
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