I saw Joe Mad announced the 10th issue of Battle Chasers will be out in June.
Yes, June of this year. Whoever had midway through 2023 wins the bet! I mean, believe it when you see it (if you care), but certainly not news I was expecting to stumble across.
The theme of this issue seems to be how comprehensively Sargent has fucked up his son Michael, as most of what we sees is Michael's life. He designs games, but he never finishes any of them. He's disorganized, incapable of dealing with his daughter's cut finger, incapable of standing up for his wife when his father insults her over speakerphone. From the bits we see in flashback, the fact his dad would not ever listen to what Michael thought or wanted seems to be part of it.
When they meet up, Kelly and Niimura present it as a double-page splash where Sargent dominates the left page, while Michael is consigned to less than a fifth of the right page. his dad's hand extends onto his "half", and his father insults his clothes by asking if the t-shirt comes in men's.
Describing this guy as Eastwood's character from Gran Torino was giving him too much credit. Eastwood was mostly grouchy and silent with his family. This prick actively insults his daughter-in-law (who is also a defense lawyer, so lawyer + cop who thinks Miranda rights are stupid = real fire + gasoline combo there), his son, his ex-wife, his ex-wife's new wife. Michael makes a couple of attempts to keep his father from describing crime scenes of murders to the kids, but Sarge makes him look like the asshole for it.
It's probably meant to be something about how the cop deals with the things he's seen, but as they put it in an episode of M*A*S*H, he's such a remarkable example of walking fertilizer, it's hard for me to care. Niimura's very good at giving Sarge an especially irritating, shit-eating grin. He looks so gleeful as he fake-apologizes to his ex-wife's wife for his multiple homophobic slurs. Having the time of his life being a dick.
The guy with the flamethrower (still don't know how he's alive) and the guy with the katana carve up most of the guys in the hazmat suits. Jay escapes into the desert, which immediately turns back into the labyrinth. Nasir and the girls run into a trap, which mangles one girl's arm and dumps Nasir to his apparent death. But whatever's in that bread the girls ate has made them both a little weird and possibly impervious to pain. So when Jay tries to take them on she gets her ass kicked. Ladies busted out some Street Fighter moves, until they started bickering and got blown up by some cat doll the weird hunter guy left behind.
It also looked like Sofia cut Jay's arm with the combat knife, but there's no wound or bleeding, so who knows. Injuries are extremely inconsistent in this book, between this and Jay slicing open Flamethrower Boy's neck a couple of issues ago. I'm not sure it's by design so much as a lack of communication between the creative team.
End result, as far as the folks running this know, it's down to Jay, Flamethrower Boy and Katana Dude. Look, Thompson has given me no reason to care about them enough to bother to remember their names or the stupid titles they got, so I'm not gonna bother checking an earlier issue. Guess we could call them Mayhem Bros. Jay's got to go the whole way back through the maze, which is probably going to lead to a run-in with the Mayhem Bros. But Nasir survived falling, 'several hundred feet' largely unharmed, so he's a wildcard. Assuming the feral kid doesn't get him.
4 comments:
I also chuckled at that Battlechasers news. To celebrate 25 years since #1 it's coming back with a brand new story arc. Just please try to forget the arc that was abandoned 22 years ago.
It's an entirely new arc? I hadn't read that far, so I just assumed he was gonna, you know, finish the story he abandoned. Suppose it's likely he doesn't remember what he had planned, though, or it no longer interests him.
I believe it is a new arc, yes, so what that means for the original unfinished #10 I don't know.
As it turns out, it's not a new arc, or if it is, they do a decent job of transitioning into it from the previous arc.
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