Random Back Issues #108 - Birds of Prey #37

This could be labeled "Joker: Last Laugh - Aftermath", assuming anyone was stupid enough to advertise it was connected to that event. I know it's hardly ironclad, and more likely an example of recency bias, but I remember an issue of Wizard where Last Laugh ranked as the worst event in a reader poll they ran. I hadn't read it, so the idea it could be worse than the Clone Saga (which ranked 2nd) was stunning and terrifying.

Anyway, Black Canary, Blue Beetle and Robin are trying to track down some of the last few Jokerized escaped super-criminals loose in Gotham. First up is, G-Nome who accumulates DNA of different things to copy their traits. Robin warns he's been to the zoo and aquarium since escaping The Slab, but the spiked tail thing reminds me more of a dinosaur.

I guess DC has that one island with dinosaurs, the one in the War that Time Forgot comics?

Beetle tries to tranq him, but it can't get through his tough outer shell. The Canary Cry stuns G-Nome long enough for Robin to stab him between some of the plates and that's that, although G-Nome doesn't revert to normal.

Oracle confirms most of the escapees are rounded up, and the only one left in the Gotham/Bludhaven area is, well, you see the panel directly above, right? Cue sepia-toned flashback of Barbara-Batgirl and Grayson-Robin taking him out in his only previous attempt at crime, where he was dressed as a fast-food employee with a name tag reading, "Hi! I'm Crazy How May I Serve You?" I'm wondering if that was from the Batgirl: Year One mini-series that I think Dixon and Martin did. Barbara's confident the guy will be more incompetent since being Jokerized, as the toxin 'amplifies your personality.'

Hovering in the Bug above a shopping mall, Ted's thermal scope reads someone standing over a trash barrel in the food court, people huddled on the ground around them. Smash through the skylight and find the person standing a "Weiner World" employee chained to a oil drum full of mustard gas.

Condiment King then gets all three of them with various condiments, spiced up to a 100,000 on the Scoville scale, which Wikipedia says is equal to a low-end habanero chili or Scotch bell pepper. The Carolina Reaper is at 2,000,000 units, but maybe it hadn't been created when Dixon wrote this in '02.

While Robin and Canary go into anaphylactic shock and Ted crawls to the ice cream store, Condiment King goes into his own sepia-toned flashback. He was assigned to the Arkham kitchen, where the food was 'bland, soulless, and drugged.' But then he had a conversation with Poison Ivy, and she told him all about spices and plants.

In some versions of her character, Ivy would be against people eating plants, wouldn't she? But I guess if you're using nature's gifts to kill humans, she'd give the thumbs up to that.

Ted overcomes the heat with a healthy dose of milk. Turns out all that book learning didn't fix Condiment King's glass jaw as one punch sends him to la-la land. His mustard gas bomb is set to go off, and with no time to defuse it, Ted uses the Bug to haul it out of the mall. Where it blows up over the city? I'm assuming the idea is the gas will dilute on the wind but that seems like a good way to broaden the effect over several city blocks. Maybe its overwhelmed by the smog normally hanging over Bludhaven.

C.K. gets hauled to jail and Canary heads home to wash her hair, while Tim wonders how to get BBQ sauce off Kevlar and Ted complains the Bug's gonna smell like a hotdog cart. There's a subplot about Barbara trying to get in touch with Nightwing, who is shutting people out after he beat Joker to death at the end of Last Laugh (Batman resuscitated him, because of course he did.) Bold of Dixon to assume we'll care that Nightwing is angry with himself for killing the Joker.

{2nd longbox, 105th comic. Birds of Prey #37, by Chuck Dixon (writer), Marcos Martin (penciler), Alvaro Lopez (inker), Wildstorm (colorist), Albert T. De Guzman (letterer)}

How Far the Light Reaches - Sabrina Imbler

The subtitle of the book is, "A Life in Ten Sea Creatures," and in each chapter Imbler discusses a different aquatic animal. Goldfish in one, sturgeon another, cuttlefish later on. In each chapter Imbler likewise discusses some aspect of their own life, of their effort to come to some sort of understanding with themselves.

So Chapter 3 switches between paragraphs about the Chinese sturgeon, still trying to reach breeding grounds on the Yangtze River that have long since been blocked by dams, and discussing Imbler's maternal grandmother, who grew up in China in the first half of the 20th Century, and fled their home to escape the Japanese Army. Their grandmother is in cognitive decline, and to some extent seems to be returning to those earlier days, speaking only Chinese, recalling mostly how things once were.

Chapter 5 parallels how life clings to the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the sea, with the places queer people find or make for themselves. Those places can be precarious - eliminated by the cessation of magma flow or gentrification - but somehow the life persists and takes root in a new location that supports it.

It's not always a pleasant read - in one chapter, Imbler discusses a stretch of their life where they would frequently get drunk at parties and wake up the next morning with no recollection of what happened between them and the men beside them - but it's also a hopeful book in some ways. It took time, there were apparently many failed relationships, Imbler struggles to understand themselves independent of whoever they were dating, struggles to get comfortable with who they are.

But the final chapter, which discusses the immortal jellyfish, able to regress to the medusa stage in response to severe injury and produce clones of itself a thus-far endless number of times - suggests Imbler reached an internal equilibrium. Imbler can't return to childhood and start over with a better grasp of who they were from the start (the jellyfish sections alternate with accounts from other individuals about what point they'd like to go back to and speak with their younger selves), but they can keep trying to find what identity fits. They aren't immortal, but they are alive. The opportunity still exists.

'Thought the yeti crab's environment seems inhospitable to us, it is nothing to be pitied. The pressure does not crush the crab, and the darkness does not oppress it. It is exactly suited to the life it leads, however strange or repulsive we might find it.'

Upswing in September

Much like my attitude towards the weather, the solicitation outlook improved as we moved from August to September. Not to a wild degree, but there's certainly more to discuss.

What's new I might buy? DC had a bunch of new stuff, but, I mean, some of it is bringing Damian back into the fold as Robin, or a new Birds of Prey with Zealot and Harley Quinn on the roster. Yeesh. Oh, and they really are going to let Tom King write Wonder Woman. That won't be a disaster.

There is a Fire and Ice mini-series by Joanne Starer and Natacha Bustos, where the JLI duo are banished to Smallville by Superman after some mess-up and Ice takes to the small-town life better than Fire. First off, where does Superman get the authority to banish any other adult anywhere? I mean sure, Batman is always telling people to get out of "his" city, but Batman's a conceited asshole. Also, and this could be good or bad, Starer is definitely ditching the espionage agent aspect that got added to Fire post-Infinite Crisis in favor of the more publicity-oriented JLI version. I don't know if I'm down for this.

Speaking of things I'm probably not down for but caught my attention. Dynamite is, in addition to their Darkwing Duck book, doing a Negaduck book, written by Jeff Parker. All about the bad guy going on the road so the local villains stop stealing his plans. Like I said, probably not buying it, but I at least paused to read the solicit.

Marvel had a few things, the most likely of which is Si Spurrier and Lee Garbett's Uncanny Spider-Man, but there's also (in descending order of likelihood), a Werewolf by Night one-shot by Derek Landy and Fran Galan, co-starring Elsa Bloodstone, and Avengers Inc., by Al Ewing and Leonard Kirk. Not so sure about that one. I read those Ant-Man and Wasp min-series Ewing wrote recently. The former was clever, the latter was fine. Do I care enough about a detective story starring Janet van Dyne and some version of the Vision?

Outside those publishers, there's Lone by Angie Hewitt, published through Vault, about a girl who is the only one who notices things around town are disappearing. More critically, Si Spurrier and Matias Bergara are coming back with another Coda mini-series! Only five issues this time, but whatever, it's good news!

Two other things of note. A hardcover called Centralia, but Miel Vandepitte, published through Living the Line. I thought it would be about that Pennsylvania town that was abandoned decades ago because of the out of control coal fire underground (EDIT), and according to Greg Burgas' review at Atomic Junk Shop, that's at least the inspiration, but it's a more fantastic world otherwise.

The other is All Star, published through NBM. Which mostly seems to publish comics about musicians, which made me leery it's about Smashmouth, especially when the solicit firmly grounds the story in the summer of 1998. But it's about some high-school baseball phenom who makes a mistake and it's by Jesse Lonergan, who wrote and drew Hedra, so it merited a mention.

What's ending? Grit n Gears says it'll conclude with issue 6 in September, but unless it double-ships between now and then, it won't be until October.

What's left? Moon Knight is still chasing the mastermind behind these attacks on him, but Fantastic Four involves the Thing alone in a house falling towards the center of the Earth, which sounds interesting. I haven't loved North's run, but I can't fault the weird science single issue plots he's devising. Captain Marvel: Dark Tempest will be on issue 3, and Unstoppable Doom Patrol says it'll be on issue 6, but issue 4 didn't show up in June and I don't know when it will, so best not to bet on it.

As for collections or manga, volume 4 of The Boxer out of Ize Press is listed. Volume 3 comes out in July, so I'll have to get to that first, I suppose. Still trying to get a handle on that book.

So overall, best case scenario, 11 single issues, but more likely 8 or 9 (not counting late stuff finally arriving.) Not spectacular, but better than 6 books to be sure.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)

My friend wanted to watch it, and it was a good call. We get the backstory for how Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez' characters ended up in an arctic prison, disguised as Pine stalling for time until their escape plan can begin. It also neatly establishes the broad strokes of their two characters: Rodriguez doesn't talk much, but punches a lot (and likes potatoes), and Pine is a professional bullshitter.

Then it shifts into what looks as though it'll be a revenge heist movie, with Hugh Grant using that doofy charm thing of his to play a character the audience is supposed to want to see punched in the face. A heist requires a team, so they have to get a team and then their plan requires certain items, so they have to retrieve those items. The entire time it's obvious to the audience that there's more going on, and it's a question of whether our heroes will figure it out and act or just walk blindly into a big mess.

It's a funnier movie than I expected. The dragon, the difficulties the party has raising and questioning the dead, the bard distracting the guard. But the movie knows when genuine emotion is needed and to keep the humor at bay for a minute. Rodriguez stops off to see her ex-husband, and there's a bit of a gag that this buff warrior lady married a hobbit, but the film also lets us see how awkward and uncomfortable the whole thing is for her, especially seeing that he's moved on in her absence.

I appreciated the fact that while Rodriguez and Pine both care for his daughter, there's absolutely nothing romantic between him. She outright declares his lips too big for his face, and Pine never shows the slightest interest in romance beyond trying to resurrect his murdered wife. They play off each other well. Rodriguez' character is fairly stoic, so she grounds Pine's fast talk, and she's very good at looking exasperated, which felt essential here.

She contrasts nicely with Sophia Lillis' changeling character, or Justice Smith's sorcerer, especially in how each relates to Pine, who is the one ultimately driving all this. Smith tends to doubt Pine's plans, but ultimately is overwhelmed and goes along with them (and probably likes having someone who believes in him). Lillis is the one who pokes at Pine's bullshit and is the most skeptical, while Rodriguez just rolls with it because she trusts he'll get them through.

The one romantic subplot, which isn't highlighted much is between Smith and Lillis, where she broke things off some time previously. But she did so because he lacked self-confidence, and over the course of the movie, we see Smith gain some confidence. So at the end, when he asks if she's willing to give it another chance, it doesn't come off as him prodding at her in different ways like a puzzle box to unlock. More that he had a character issue that frustrated her (and him), and he's at least partially addressed it..

The CGI is fine, at least I didn't have any issues with it. The fights are entertaining, the problem-solving is fairly clever given the limitations of the characters' abilities. It doesn't drag too much for being just over two hours long, the supporting characters don't overstay their welcome and the focus remains tight on the party. It's a well-done, enjoyable movie to watch.

What I Bought 6/21/2023 - Part 2

Based on the temperatures and humidity, summer's arrived. Great. Now when is it going away? I don't enjoy sweating when I take my mid-morning break walk at work. I'm not setting that brisk a pace.

Clobberin' Time #4, by Steve Skroce (writer/artist), Bryan Valenza (color artist), Joe Sabino (letterer) - Dr. Doom, angry robots, and interdimensional carnivorous worms as the options for Ben's version of Fuck, Marry, Kill.

Ben finds he's not the only one in the 'repaired multiversal-incursion point', as Ogdu ambushed and dumped some future version of Doom in there as well, in some giant ship that looks a bit like a castle. While Doom figures out how to get them clear, Ben has to fend off the worm things using what looks a lot like Orion's Astro-Chair. Which, obviously the New Gods plagiarized from DOOM!

Skroce has some fun with Ben and Doom working together as Doom keeps up a steady stream of ten-dollar word insults and feeds Ben horrible Latverian dishes to fuel his anger (but probably just to fuck with him). Ben continues to be unimpressed by Doom, making cracks about this one being older (as he received a glass of prune juice from a HERBIE with a Doom mask), and calling Doom a little thief hisself for having some Pym Particles that probably just "fell off a truck" somewhere.

That's what was missing from the previous two issues. Skroce didn't spend enough time on Ben interacting with Wolverine or Dr. Strange to show anything about their relationships. They were right into the fighting, or else too tied up in plot stuff for characterization to shine through like it did in the first issue.

Doom finds Ogdu's big ship and his captured Watcher, who got tricked and experimented on by Ogdu. He might be an "Un-Watcher" and have stolen some of Cable's armory, but he still knows how to exposit like a Watcher, telling the other two that Ogdu's been taking powerful items from across realities to create something new that will erase all this superhero jazz and start fresh. And then Ogdu shows up to do just that.

Moon Knight #24, by Jed MacKay (writer), Federico Sabbatini (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - Moon Knight against Eclipso does seem like a natural cross-company throwdown.

MK's trying to bring in an old foe/friend/something named Morpheus, but keeps finding himself in the dreams of his different aspects. A happy family life in the suburbs with Marlene and Diatrice for Marc. A big party for all Jake's pals. A quiet dinner in a big mansion with Marlene and some other old supporting cast members I don't know for Steven.

I feel like Sabbatini could have tried to distinguish Steven and Marc visually a little more. Granted Steven's in a tie and Marc's grilling in an apron, but shift up the hair, or give them different smiles. They're different people who share the same body, correct? They can probably smile differently.

Gaining no traction there, Morpheus shifts to a vision of a world where the Avengers welcome Moon Knight back, and finally, one where MK can just punch people forever. Marc rejects it all, claiming his happiness is earned, not given.

Would love to see the conversation with Jake and Steven about that unilateral decision later. I imagine they'd agree it wasn't real and they couldn't let Morpheus keep it up, but maybe a bit of consideration for them. No expectation of that, as MacKay has once again largely relegated them to the background. I don't think Steven's gotten an actual line of dialogue so far this year.

Pushing through all this, MK finally reaches his target. Morpheus just wanted to give people what they dreamed of, because he's dying. Because he refused to help the person messing with Moon Knight. He wanted to help people with his powers for once, instead of being selfish or hurting others. It didn't work with Moon Knight, but he can reveal the mastermind, so that's nice.

Sunday Splash Page #276

 

"Mascot Rodeo," in Jenny Zero II #2, by Dave Dwonch (writer/letterer), Brockton McKinney (writer), Magenta King (artist), Arnaldo Robles (color artist)

Following directly from the first mini-series, Jenny Zero II has the title character embrace her role as the first line of defense against the kaiju, while retaining her, unique charm. Meaning she still curses a lot and gets shit-faced at public appearances, and sleeps with her extremely obnoxious alpha male stereotype coworker.

The creative team use a diary of her father's Jenny received at the end of the previous mini to delve a little into how Jennys father gained his powers, though it doesn't get much beyond when they manifest. We also get to see what exactly was the screw-up Jenny made that sent her into such a tailspin before her father even died. Robles does some lovely color work for the parts of that where Jenny's using some sort of kaiju-derived narcotic.

Magenta King smooths out her linework considerably from the first mini-series. Which has the effect of making Jenny look more stable, more in-control. And she mostly is, so that's fine. Even if she's joking around, she doesn't dismiss facing the threats that arise, she fights them. The figures aren't any busier, King still being restrained and keeping things straightforward with the shading. Not a lot of hatching or extra little lines allover. Everybody's in the bloom of youth and having fun, no such thing as stress lines!

The mini-series wraps up with the Director of the agency revealing herself as a worshipper of some kaiju death cult that revived the worst kaiju as a mixture of biology and science. The metal face under its flesh face looks a lot like Ultron, but maybe that's unavoidable if you want a silver-grey machine with an ominous glowing grin. Jenny manages to handle that, but may have lost every other member of her supporting cast she actually liked in the span of about ten pages.

That the (at present unconfirmed) deaths of her best friend and uncle would hurt makes sense; that she would seem be distraught enough over alpha dork seemed unlikely. She'd been giving him shit since he appeared in the first mini-series. They get drunk and fuck once, and now she really likes him? Plus, the comic goes to pains to highlight the Director has three assistants who are mentally linked, all with different telepathic specialties. Like removing memories or inserting them, or producing illusions. After the first issue, it doesn't really come up, which felt like a missed opportunity. Unless it's going to pay off in Jenny Zero III: The Search for the Good Tequila.

I'm joking. No such thing as good tequila.

The third mini-series has not been solicited at the time of this post going up, but I assume there'll be one since the Director's on the loose and Jenny's mother has apparently decided now is the time to get involved in her daughter's life. As opposed to, you know, those years Jenny was an alcoholic, pill-popping tabloid disaster.

Saturday Splash Page #78

 

"Got the Grip," in Thor #156, by Stan Lee (writer), Jack Kirby (penciler), Vince Colletta (inker), Sam Rosen (letterer), colorist uncredited

While my dad's comic collection, or what survived of it to the point when I could find it in my grandmother's basement, leaned more towards DC, there are the scattered Marvel comics among it, including three issues of Thor. Two from the Lee/Kirby era, and one by Lee and John Buscema.

Of the two by Lee and Kirby, you have the penultimate chapter of Thor's first run-in with Mangog, who somehow possesses the strength of his entire race - a billion billion beings - and is hellbent on taking revenge on Odin for wiping them out. Odin's asleep as usual, so it falls to Thor to take his best swing at things.

The other one, sadly is not the next issue, but is probably more important to the lore of Marvel's version of Thor. It's the issue where he brings Jane Foster to Asgard and she freaks out at the weird shit she sees, to the point Odin erases it from her mind and sends her back to Earth. Jane would, of course, get those memories back at some point, and then become Thor herself, and then a Valkyrie, which I think remains her current status.

It's also significant for the fact that when a heartbroken Thor is sent to defeat some multi-limbed monster Odin originally unleashed to test Jane Foster, he gets bailed out by a mysterious warrior. Who turns out to be Sif. When your All-Father chucks one girlfriend out the door, he opens the window for another.

The comics are what I figure most people thought of as "Thor" for a long time. He makes big speeches about never surrendering and fighting on, and shoots lightning at Mangog until the ground beneath his feet heats up enough to become an active volcano (???) Then Mangog just grabs some lava and throws it at Thor and the Warriors Three (with Volstagg in full Cowardly Lion mode and Fandral jumping headlong into things.)

Kirby's going big, and there are some good full-page splashes in the Mangog issue (the colors seem messier on the early Jane Foster issue), but I assume Colletta's erasing backgrounds in a lot of the smaller panels, where it's just a solid block of color behind the characters.

The third one, issue 192, maybe showing the wear in the formula. Thor's stuck fighting "Durok the Demolisher", who is your typical mindless, unstoppable force. A more human-looking Destroyer armor, but less visually interesting than the Juggernaut, and without any capacity for speech. Loki is somehow running Asgard because he's got the "Odin-ring", and Sif is reduced to offering her hand in marriage to keep Loki from killing the Warriors Three when Hogun tries to smash the ring with his mace? Knock it off Loki's finger somehow? I dunno. The issue ends with Balder having Karnilla bring him to Earth so he can summon the Silver Surfer to give Thor a hand. Yeah, it's not great.

What I Bought 6/21/2023 - Part 1

I had a nice visit with my friend in Florida, but the drive down there and back was hell. 14 hours one way. New record for the longest drive I've done solo in one go. I definitely ran out of patience on the drive back with about three hours to go. Also, I've never seen as much lightning as I did in Florida, as though the universe itself was telling me to stay away.

Hellcat #4, by Christopher Cantwell (writer), Alex Lins (artist), KJ Diaz (color artist), Ariana Maher (letterer) - Looks like Tigra with the stripes filed off. Yet another case of Patsy stealing Greer's style.

Spalding was building a gate for Blackheart, but Hellstrom tricked/convinced him to build a different kind of gate, one that would restore a person to their true form if they passed through it. So if, a half-demon trapped in a stuffed rabbit went through, he'd be restored to his pentagram-tattooed chest self.

Blackheart attacked Spalding for double-dealing, but Patsy kicked his ass by tapping into. . .something. What Daimon considers to be her true self, aka the lady on the cover. Who emerges after he chucks her through the gate while she's in a trance Sleepwalker put in her to try and figure out what the crap was going on. Also, Sleepwalker seemingly being able to stand toe-to-toe with Blackheart but getting one-shotted by Hellstrom reeks of bullshit. Or perhaps that's just sulfur.

And, in the flashbacks to Patsy's high school years, we see Chet dealt with being expelled by yelling at Patsy for being overruled by her mother, getting drunk, killing one of Buzz' friends with a broken beer bottle, and crashing his car into a tree. Also, Cantwell's still playing coy about who killed Spalding, other than it doesn't seem to be Blackheart.

So what's the point of all this? Patsy has always been trapped by the whims of people who thought they knew what was best for her, or who she really was? Her mother, Hellstrom, even this Spalding (god what a stupid name), who cast a spell to muddle Patsy's telepathy because he didn't want her to know what he was. Or is it that she's actually always been a monster under the skin and it's a convenient excuse to blame it on others, as characters in this mini-series have suggested?

It isn't just Hellstrom, who is still parroting that line about Patsy walking out of Hell, which, no, is still not accurate. Hellstrom tricked Hawkeye into doing it once, and the second time, Mephisto couldn't spare the energy to fight her, but she knew she'd be back there some day. Now, it could be this is just Hellstrom gaslighting her, but Cantwell also writes Hellstrom saying, 'To me, my Hellcat,' so it's entirely possible he's just a lousy writer.

The demon-Cat design is underwhelming to say the least, but Lins manages to make a stuffed rabbit look ominous, so credit for that. The flashback pages and the ones where people are just calmly chatting are all done with nice, straight rectangular panels. Once we start delving into Patsy's memories or anything with Sleepwalker, they start to tilt or grow irregular. A couple of panels in her memory wave and flutter like a sail as she falls into or out of the dream.

The Red House Mystery - A.A. Milne

Can the man who created Winnie the Pooh write a murder mystery? Raymond Chandler said no, but what does he know, am I right?

A long-estranged brother is coming to visit Mr. Ablett at his manor, the Red House. According to all his guests and his cousin/assistant, Mr. Ablett was not pleased about this. So he must be quite pleased when his brother is shot in the head not long after arriving, although he might not enjoy it happening in his office. Pity he seems to have disappeared so no one can ask him.

Milne uses a wealthy dilettante as his detective. The guy, Antony Gillingham, just happens to show up wanting to visit a friend who is staying at Red House and walks into a murder mystery. He drafts his friend as his Watson - as in he specifically asks the friend to play Watson and ask obvious questions so he can look brilliant - and they set to work. Milne does include a cop, but does not have him or Antony interact much beyond the inspector taking Antony's statement. So, no adversarial relationship between the professional and the amateur, if that's something you feel strongly about one way or the other.

Chandler's specific complaint was the solution felt contrived and that what was presented as a problem of logic and deduction is that the solution isn't possible. I'm not clear on exactly what aspect isn't possible, but the ending does feel contrived. The whole thing has been about the brother being dead, and who did it, and where's Mr. Ablett. Then at the very end it's shifted entirely and the innocuous comment that tips off Antony seems terribly random.

That aside, Milne's writing is light and breezy. Antony and especially his friend seem to be having a lot of fun. There's no tension or danger to either, beyond someone figuring out what they're doing. The people they question mostly find the whole thing fascinating to gossip about. It's almost a lark, which is an odd way to describe a murder mystery, but there it is.

'"I say, what fun! I love secret passages. Good Lord, and this afternoon I was playing golf just like an ordinary merchant! What a life! Secret passages!"'

Let's Kill Ward's Wife (2014)

The movie is not quite what it says on the tin. Ward's (Donald Fason) friends all agree his wife is a horrible person. She berates him if he doesn't explicitly say her orders requires extra salsa, on the side. When she loses her train of thought on her speech for their son's christening, she blames Ward. When the baby starts crying because Ward's phone rang in another room while he's on the toilet, she tells him he'll be going to get her a foot-long sub with double meat and cheese, because he obviously doesn't care about his family. Then she mocks him for the fact his shits smell bad. She's a complete asshole.

So his buddies idly toss around the idea of killing her during a day on the golf course. The killing happens more spontaneously than that, however. Heat of the moment sort of thing where she's being a jerk towards one of the guys. The movie had done a good enough job I had no qualms about her being killed, though I wonder if they wanted me to.

Most of the movie is all Ward's friends working together to try and dispose of the body. One of the guys (played by Patrick Wilson) got interested in the idea enough to research how to get away with murder. But his character is an actor, so I suppose he could explain away his internet search history with "researching for a role".

It's also about waiting for someone to either make a mistake, or crack under the pressure. Ward, who Fason plays with his shoulders constantly up around his ears and a hunted look from fear of enraging his wife, seems the likely culprit. Also, his neighbor is a cop who really wants to be pals.

It's a dark comedy, and I did laugh at several parts. Especially immediately after the murder, when everyone's freaking out and getting drunk discussing their next move. Wilson's character is really into the whole plan, but a couple of the ladies are making movie references the entire time he's discussing ways to get rid of the body. Ward and Ronnie (James Caprinello) are freaking out, Tom (Scott Foley) is all for the plan, but has some trouble when he's elected to bleed the corpse.

The odd touch is that two of Ward's pals are married, but Wilson's in a trial separation, and Foley (who wrote and directed it) is distracted by his work and no longer interested sexually in his wife (played by Amy Acker and what the hell, I thought she was cute when she was playing Fred on Angel and was hiding in her hotel room because of trauma for entire seasons, what's wrong with this moron). The whole incident ends up impacting both relationships in ways that seem a little odd. More on Wilson's side, but maybe it's just a matter of people reacting to stress in different ways.

Easily the movie I laughed at the most so far this year, although the only real competition has been Used Cars and Lost CIty.

From Little Bugs, Big Things Come

Ant-Man: World Hive was a 5-issue mini-series that came out in 2020, focused on Scott Lang and his daughter Cassie, formerly the Young Avenger Stature, now going by her MC2 Universe codename of Stinger.

Dylan Burnett (artist) and Mike Spicer (colorist), stick close to the MC2 version of the outfit, although Spicer varies the colors a bit. Yellow for the eyes and the bio-electric stingers, darker purple on the chest and arms, more black than lavender everywhere else. She gets an upgrade to her helmet halfway through that enhances the strength of the communication with insects, conveyed by making the words fill the panel, and by having her helmet sprout also sorts of Jack Kirby Hat-style accessories.

Zeb Wells' version of Lang follows Nick Spencer's version from his two Ant-Man ongoings (and probably the movie to an extent). Scott lives in Florida (in an ant hill) to be close to his daughter, he has had a security company, and all the other heroes treat him as a joke or embarrassment. He doesn't keep his cool at basically any point, and is constantly sporting stubble and bags under his eyes. Not quite "Demon in a Bottle" Tony Stark, but halfway there.

Scott is asked to locate a lot of missing bees by the Florida Beekeepers Association, which disappoints Cassie, but depopulation of bees is a big deal! That leads him to The Swarm, who is himself running from more creatures made entirely of types of arthropods, who are controlled by a creature called Macrothrax, who is tired of these damn apes running things. It's a bug's world!

Recognizing this may be a big deal (and wanting to impress Cassie so she doesn't move to Cali to join Kate Bishop's shitty West Coast Avengers squad) Scott takes her to New York, where the Avengers basically treat him like a waste of their time.

I mean, I expect Blade to be a dick, not to mention Stark, and Lang did put his foot in his mouth saying everyone liked Tony better before he stopped drinking. But T'Challa literally laughs at the notion Scott could help improve his helmet in front of Cassie. No wonder you aren't king of your stupid, cancer-cure hoarding country any longer, if that's your level of diplomatic skill. At least when Spider-Man spends most of issue 3 bagging on Lang and Florida - justified on the grounds Florida's a shithole, says the guy visiting his friend in Florida as this post goes up - it's because he's jealous the Black Cat seems to like Ant-Man.

Wells justifies what feels like an otherwise gratuitous guest appearance by tying this story into some of his plots from Volume 2 of Heroes for Hire. The one where Black Cat was on the team. Had that one hentai cover with the ladies being menaced by dripping tentacles? Anyway, someone had to explain what happened to Humbug and I guess Paladin and Colleen Wing are too busy. Yeah, I don't buy that either.

That said, one thing Wells does with Lang that I like is use the idea Lang actually cares about the insects he works with. When the Swarm orders bees to attack Scott, most of the bees shield him and he points out he didn't even have to ask that hard. The use of the word "ask" feels important. Scott mourns the deaths of the ants whose colony he was living in, even if Wells frames most of Scott's interactions with the queen ant, "Pam", as being like an old married couple where she's always on his case about something. But when he's looking for bees, one of the bees is happy to help lead him to the others, or help him escape. And that compassion plays in the climax, helping Scott save the world.

I like Burnett's designs for the various bug monsters. They're mostly humanoid shapes made up of a lot of a particular type of insect, but there are enough different types of insects your can go different ways with that. Thread is made of silkworms and has a loose, almost decaying look, while Vespa is hornets and so more sharply defined. Sharp projections, angular body, sleek.

Sunday Splash Page #275

 

"Big Reveal" in Jenny Zero #2, by Dave Dwonch (writer/letterer), Brockton McKinney (writer), Magenta King (artist), Dam (color artist)

I was hoping volume 3 would be finished by now, so I could have hopefully the entire series to do in succession, but oh well. The first Jenny Zero mini-series finds the title character wallowing in unexamined grief and self-pity. She couldn't live up to the legacy of her father, legendary kaiju fighter Mega Commander Zero, and decided to stop trying. But some people can't leave well-enough alone, so she has to step up whether she wants to or not.

This mini-series is basically Jenny learning she has more in common with her father than she thought, and having to deal with it. There are a lot of flashbacks to her childhood, many of which highlight her friendship with Dana, who is the heir to a hotel chain and alternates between enabling Jenny and protecting her.

Jenny doesn't make peace with her father's memory, nor does she suddenly stop being a foul-mouthed impulsive party girl. If anything, learning she has superpowers makes her even more inclined to throw her weight around. It's only the word of an old friend of her father's that convinces her to actually go along with the government agency that came knocking (with thanks and giant robots).

King uses a thin, wobbly line most of the time, that makes Jenny look all the less composed. Jenny's usually drawn as slumped, awkwardly dressed, off-color or sickly. In contrast, the line work on Dana is steadier, and she's much more calm throughout this whole thing, even though it's outside her wheelhouse. Jenny looks better at giant-size, but she's also usually hammered drunk at giant-size, so maybe that's why.

Saturday Splash Page #77

 

"Clint Barton's Big Mouth of Madness," in Thunderbolts 2000, by Fabian Nicieza (writer), Norm Breyfolge (artist), Joe Rosas (colorist), Comicraft's Jason L. (letterer)

Set during the first few months of Nicieza's run as writer of Thunderbolts, Clint Barton's approached by an associate of Daimon Hellstrom's with a message: Mockingbird's soul is trying to contact Hawkeye from where she's trapped in Mephisto's realm. Hawkeye recognizes Hell is probably not a place for his morally compromised team to go, and tries to handle it alone. His team, naturally, choose to follow anyway. Atlas gets himself in debt to the Enchantress to get an audience with Pluto so he'll open a doorway, and Moonstone brings a pair of Clint's underwear so Pluto can create a "sympathetic alignment" to help them find Hawkeye faster.

They naturally end up in the standard scenario of confronting their inner fears instead. The reactions are varied. Mach-IV acknowledges his guilt for murder and vows to do better. Atlas accepts he's never going to "get it right", but intends to keep trying. Songbird and Charcoal both deny any guilt whatsoever over what's used against them. Moonstone says she's prepared to handle whatever she's becoming.

The dialogue emphasizes how real everything feels to the team, but I feel like it missed a chance to let Breyfogle really go wild with the nightmare imagery. The man absolutely had that gear in him, as evidence by any number of Batman stories he drew, but this comic does not take advantage of that. Missed opportunity.

Hawkeye puts a temporary hurting on Mephisto with an arrow juiced up by a chaos magic and a battle stave loaded with the purer intentions of the trapped souls, and the team bails with a body wrapped up behind Mephisto's throne. A body which turns out to be Patsy Walker (Mockingbird would have to wait another 8 years to return in Secret Invasion.) This leads into the Avengers Annual of the same year, and eventually the Steve Englehart/Norm Breyfogle Hellcat mini-series we looked at in Sunday Splash Page #236.

This comic gives Hellstrom the air of a man pretending to be cold and heartless, but saddened by the distance between he and his ex-wife. Englehart paints a less-tragic picture, and Christopher Cantwell's seemingly trying to rewrite history to suggests Patsy's always just blamed Daimon (and everyone else) for her own shortcomings. Which smells a lot like bullshit, but he's using Daimon to shovel a good 40% of it, so it may very well turn out be bullshit.

Random Back Issues #107 - Giant Days: As Time Goes By #1

Well, it's only been two months since we last looked at Giant Days, but that's fine. Always time for that series, even if this was the conclusion of the book.

A year after graduation, Esther's working as an editorial assistant at a publishing house, and generally being taken advantage of by two completely awful women, both named Cressida. The constant dumping of their work on her desk has caused Esther to experience burnout on a severe scale. Worse, as she explains to equally depressed cog in the financial machine Ed Gemmel, she's missed ten weekend get-togethers with Daisy and Susan in a row.

As for those two, things are going much better. Daisy enjoys her work as, well, I'd be inclined to think she's working as a civic engineer, trying to prevent a famous footballers weird mausoleum from falling in on itself, but maybe that's standard archaeology work. She's also still dating Saffron, the girl with too much hair she met her last year in school.

Susan's working at the hospital, not getting to use a bone saw nearly as much as she'd like, while McGraw works at the key store and hopes for an engineering job offer to come in. Or does he?

Susan, in an attempt to update McGraw's desktop wallpaper to a sexy image of her, finds out he's been getting job offers in other towns and turning them down. She confronts him in her usually tactful manner, by which I mean she calls him, 'phenomenally stupid' while projecting an aura of flames. Only orange-yellow flames though, nothing too hot.

That's what Esther walks in on, so the weekend is off to a roaring start. Their evening of fun is on the upswing, until the Cressidas show up, having tracked Esther by her phone. Esther demonstrates her typical inability to brush off people she perceives as popular even if they're dicks, to Susan's complete disgust. She storms out, Daisy caught in her wake, and Esther ends up alone at some horrible jazz show after the Cressidas abandon her there.

Which makes for an awkward breakfast the next morning. Susan's her typical acerbic self, Daisy is polite, but to the point that the Cressidas suck, and Esther runs into the rain before tearfully admitting she's lonely, but didn't want to drag her friends down with her. What are friends for, if not to be torn apart in the maelstrom of your personal issues? Anyway, Susan demands a showdown and the Cressidas turn out to be. . .

I don't know what the fuck that is. Some hideous, energy-sucking, body-snatching wraith thing. Whatever it is, it's no weak against British public transportation. Susan ducks in the key store long enough to affirm she loves McGraw and wants him to pursue job opportunities, even if they take him elsewhere. In return, she gets a key. A big skeleton key. Cool. Random quest rewards are the best!

Esther and Daisy are hiding in line at the post office, counting on the Cressidas inability to cut the line. or maybe they're repelled by old people. Whichever. This time, combined with the ready availability of Post-It notes, has given Daisy the beginnings of a plan, missing just one key ingredient.

Yes, the key opens the footballer's mausoleum, and his ghost sucks the wraiths into some other dimension. The day is saved! Now all Esther has to do is explain to her boss what happened to the top executive assistants. I smell promotion! Or I smell smoke because she took Susan's advice to commit arson.

{4th longbox, 192nd comic. Giant Days: As Time Goes By #1, by John Allison (writer), Max Sarin (artist), Whitney Cogar (colorist), Jim Campbell (letterer)}

The Catcher was a Spy - Nicholas Dawidoff

I first heard of Moe Berg, the only known person to play major league baseball and work for the OSS, through Mightygodking's "Reasons I Should Write Dr. Strange" series. So finding a biography of the man, even years later, was an immediate buy. 

Dawidoff starts with Berg's father, who left the Ukraine to come to the United States, partially in search of prosperity, but also apparently to escape a place that was entirely governed by Judaism. Then Berg's childhood, where Moe demanded to attend school like his sister and brother when he was only three, and college. Which is where some of the peculiarities emerge, as Berg attended New York University for a year before getting into Princeton, but from then on, never mentioned that year. Much as he never mentioned it took him an extra year to complete his law degree at Columbia University in the late '20s (albeit, a course of study conducted around his playing baseball.)

Berg didn't actually play much, despite being in the majors for 15 seasons, so much of those years are devoted to what he did the rest of the time. Reading newspapers, reading books about languages, traveling in the off-season to Paris or Japan. From there, it's into Berg's wartime service, including meeting and speaking with Italian physicists to try and get a line on how far along the Nazis might be in building an atomic bomb. That culminates in Berg attending a physics lecture in Zurich by Heisenberg, where Berg was to kill the scientist if it sounded like Germany was close to a breakthrough.

Maybe the most interesting part is what comes after the war, which is to say, largely nothing. Berg continues to travel and read, but without any sort of central pillar for any of it to revolve around. There's no baseball season taking him around the country, no spy missions taking him to Europe or other countries (minus a couple of exceptions in the '50s). It's a life a drift, and Dawidoff takes a different approach. Rather than going chronologically, he breaks the 100-page chapter into sections by cities, then details what Berg got up to there. Or more accurately, who he temporarily moved in with as Berg travels almost constantly, moving in with one person or the other for sometimes weeks.

Dawidoff apparently had access to a lot of Berg's personal papers, in addition to many interviews with other people (because sportswriters loved to talk to and write about Berg, so no shortage of copy there). The picture he paints is of a guy who liked to be the center of attention, but on his terms, so he played mysterious. He would see an old acquaintance on the street, and if they asked what was happening, he would put a finger to his lips. Berg might not have anything going on, but he wanted people to think he did. He would arrive in town, call someone and expect to be treated to dinner and possibly allowed to live with them. Then he might just up and vanish, not heard from for years or ever.Moe wanted to be noticed, but not imposed upon. Depending on who's interviewed, Berg was either excellent at listening and learning about others, or only interested in talking about himself (again, only in very particular ways.)

It's hard to tell from that if Berg was happy, however one might define that. Some of the notes he kept would suggest no, but that he wasn't able or willing to change. Certainly in the '50s he didn't want to work because he kept thinking the CIA would call. At least one agent points out Berg's tendency to draw attention to himself by acting mysterious was exactly the wrong one for a spy. You're supposed to blend in and move unnoticed, which Berg was capable of when he chose, he just didn't always choose it. 

Also, Alan Dulles didn't really get along with Berg when they met in Bern during WWII, which hurts the odds he'd tap him for a job. Count that as a point in favor of Berg's character. Dawidoff is far too kind to that Nazi-shielding shitbag Dulles.

The family situation Dawidoff paints is likewise a bit sad. Berg and his father never seem to have seen eye-to-eye, his dad contemptuous of Berg being a "sports" rather than some respectable position. His brother resented Berg being the favorite anyway, and Berg's brother and sister apparently hated each others' guts, although no answer is available as to why. None of them marry, none of them have kids, there's no reconciliation before their deaths.

'What to make of this lawyer who wasn't working on Wall Street, this linguist who wasn't teaching at Princeton, this ballplayer who didn't seem interested in playing ball? With Berg, potential was a red herring.'

A Curtain Wall

I've not made any particular secret of my dislike for Vegeta. As entertaining as it sometimes is to watch him run his fat yap and then get his ass kicked, the guy is perpetually making things worse by being an idiot, yet has a legion of devoted fans who insist Vegeta's fuck-ups are every other character's fault.

So I think a fair amount about Vegeta's first trip to Earth, when he was ultimately beaten to a pulp and trying to crawl to his spaceship. Krillin had Yajirobe's sword and was ready to run Vegeta through with it, and then. . .he let Goku talk him out of it. Viewed positively, he put his faith in his best friend to handle things if this turned out to be a bad decision. Negatively, he just hot potatoed responsibility to someone else.

(It's more likely Krillin is just not comfortable with killing in cold blood. He wouldn't use the shutdown remote on Android 18 to give himself the chance to destroy her, either. Although she was experimented on against her will by Dr. Gero and hadn't actually killed anyone. As opposed to Vegeta, who committed genocide for Frieza, and was fully ready to kill Gohan - a five-year-old - when he came to Earth, with no compunctions whatsoever.)

I was thinking of an AU where Krillin decides it's too risky, that it wasn't just Goku's call, because all their other friends fought to protect the Earth (and several died). And it isn't as though Goku's unbeatable. He already died once, and he didn't actually win his fight against Vegeta, it was a team effort. So, what if Krillin just went ahead and killed Vegeta?

Someone responded that without Vegeta, everyone else would die during the Cell or Majin Buu sagas, which doesn't seem right at all.

Remove Vegeta from the Buu Saga, it never even gets off the ground. The whole reason things go sideways (besides Supreme Kai being awful at his job) is Vegeta decides to work for Babidi to get a power boost, because he can't wait any longer to fight Goku. Take him out of the equation, Goku and Gohan can handle all Babidi's guys by themselves. Dabura's the only mildly dangerous one, and he couldn't finish a very rusty Gohan. Goku would dust his ass in three minutes.

Cell Saga? OK, no Vegeta means no half-Saiyan kid with Bulma. So what? Bulma built the time machine, she can just use it herself. Goku is apparently the one who originally beat Frieza when he came to Earth, so that's handled. Bulma passes on the warning and the medicine to treat the heart disease that kills Goku. Maybe does a better job describing the androids, or maybe not.

If the illness puts Goku out of commission for a while, Piccolo seemed able to handle Dr. Gero, so between him and the others, they can at least destroy Android 19 and keep Goku from dying. I don't know if everybody gets their asses kicked by 17 & 18 without Vegeta around to instigate, but it's possible if Android 16 vocally insists he must kill Goku. Don't see any reason they'd be any more direct in getting it done than they were in the timeline with Vegeta, though. So Goku has time to recover, he and Gohan train in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, and then it's really just a matter of how thin you want to cut the margins.

Goku went to save Piccolo and Tien from Halfway-Perfect Cell while Vegeta and Trunks were in the room. But those two used the entire year (24 hours in the outside world), while Goku and Gohan only used 11 months (22 hours) and emerged even stronger.

Best outcome, they emerge early enough Goku can still save Piccolo and Tien, then kill Halfway-Perfect Cell with no trouble. Worse outcome, Goku's too late to save either of them, but still kills Cell before he finds 18. Worst outcome, Goku gets there before Cell even absorbs 17, beats him easily, but 16's programming, recognizing he can't win outright, forces him to kamikaze. He blows up himself, Goku, 17, 18, Piccolo, and maybe Tien if he's gotten close enough. Whichever outcome, Cell's not going to be able to trick Goku into sparing him by promising a better fight if Goku just lets him find and absorb however many artificial humans he needs.

(Feigning remorse and promising to be better might work, but I think Cell's got too much Frieza and Vegeta for that. They both throw tantrums when they find themselves losing, rather than beg. When Cell couldn't beat Gohan, he tried to blow up the whole world. Same as Vegeta, same as Frieza on Namek.)

The one place where Vegeta might actually be useful is the Namek/Frieza Saga. Eventually. He kills a lot of Frieza's guys (but also a village of innocent Namekians), prompting Frieza to activate the Ginyu Force. Which leads to the whole thing with Goku getting his body swiped by Ginyu and beat to hell. The healing from that gave him enough of a boost to at least hold up against Frieza for a while, for the Spirit Bomb/Super Saiyan stretch.

Minus him, the Namekians still wreck all Frieza's scouters, which lets Krillin, Gohan and Bulma stay hidden. Krillin and Gohan still rescue Dende and escape Dodoria (who basically gave up looking for them and flew off, then was killed by Vegeta), get a Dragon Ball from Guru, get their potential unlocked. All without a lot of fighting.

Does Frieza get annoyed enough to call in the Ginyu Force if it's simply a matter of there being pests he can't locate? Does Goku arrive first, try to distract Frieza so his friends can swipe the other Dragon Balls and make their wishes? Or does everyone get wiped out because Frieza decides to stop fucking around? In canon, Vegeta's also a moderately useful punching bag to keep Frieza occupied, so the odds are steeper if he's unavailable and Goku's not as strong. Even there, Vegeta or one of the others might have been able to kill Frieza sooner, if Vegeta hadn't goaded him to really transform, which put Frieza beyond any of their strength levels.

So at best, Vegeta sometimes cleans up messes he made. Sort of.

Horror in the High Desert (2021)

I was unclear at first if this was an actual documentary about a young man who went missing in the backwoods of Nevada, or a horror movie done up as a documentary. The answer is the latter, if you really want to know. They even tease the sequel, which I guess came out last year, at the very end.

Anyway, this guy George liked to go hiking far out in the middle of nowhere, alone, and one time, he doesn't come back. So most of the movie is recorded interviews with his roommate, his sister, the one news reporter, or the guy his sister hired to investigate when the cops wouldn't let her help.

So, there's some backstory, some video clips of George walking through train yards or talking to sheep he encounters in the middle of nowhere, interspersed with these interviews about the progress of the case. They found his truck, but not in a place he'd normally hike. There were bare footprints in the ground around the truck.

The movie hinges entirely on George being a secretive person. He never tells anyone where he's going when he leaves on these hikes. The private detective discovers George had met a man at some point, which doesn't factor into his disappearance, but does go towards the secretive nature. And most critically, he had a blog where he posted his videos, and no one in his immediate life knew about it until years later.

Which starts a wider search for a mysterious place he located on his penultimate hike. The place is not located (except maybe in the sequel?) but his video camera shows up. So the last twenty minutes are the grainy, grey-and-black video recording we've seen in movies ever since the Blair Witch Project. People running and hiding among trees in the dark of night, panicked breathing, quick glimpses of creepy people with sharp, pointy objects, abrupt ending.

On the plus side, only 80 minutes long, so I don't feel like I wasted too much of my life on it.

What I Bought 6/10/2023

I had to run to the next town up on Saturday, and figured I'd try the comic store there, since it's more likely to have books from smaller publishers. Lo and behold, they had both books I wanted from last week. It also looked like they were going to go back to stocking DC, after they dropped it when it switched distributors (something about the reduced discounts not making it worth the cost.)

Fantastic Four #8, by Ryan North (writer), Ivan Fiorelli (artist), Jesus Arbutov (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - For the record, that is not Spragg, the Living Hill in the background. Sorry if you were getting your hopes up.

Sue and Alicia head to town for a supply run, but notice something odd about the town. It seems as though it should have a lot more people, but no one else seems to notice. A store is open one minute, closed a half-hour later, and everyone acts as though it's always been closed. Finding this curious, the ladies return home to consult with the others and find only Johnny. Who has no idea who "Reed" or "Ben" are.

North has a bit of fun with the mental contortions the affected people go through to explain why they're in a photograph with people they don't know, or in Johnny's case, how they're the Fantastic Four when it's just he and Sue. I guess with A.I. art and photoshop and what not, it's pretty easy to explain being in photos with people you've never met. And now that I think about it, the mental contortions thing reminds me of my grandmother's explanations for why, if her mother was still living with her, (when she'd been dead over 40 years) she wasn't anywhere in the house.

(It led to one conversation where she was convinced her mother was wandering around somewhere, and when I pointed out she was dead and buried, my grandmother replied, "What's she doing up walking around then?")

Anyway, there's some sort of wood-creature that wants adoring subjects behind it, and now they've got half the FF on their side, so that'll be fun. More disturbing than that, or even the first few pages of the comic, where Johnny adds a backwards baseball cap and tank top to his terrible mustache look, is North has Sue call Alicia, "Allie", which is just weird to me. I've never seen any writer give her that nickname and it honestly threw me. Like, "really, we're doing that?" Maybe I've just never perceived Sue as a "nickname" person.

Sudden Death #1, by Alexander Banks-Jongman (writer), Robert Ahmad (artist), DC Hopkins (letterer) - Any crash you can walk away from.

Hank Kelly's a man focused on trying to regain custody of his daughter. His periodic suicidal thoughts are not helping. For the first dozen pages, Banks and Ahmad stick almost completely to 9-panel grids. Little squares of Hank or some other person's face. It lets you see the struggle, exhaustion and desperation in him, but also how isolated he is. The page at his therapist's office, the two share no panels. It's always him talking, then a panel of her talking. They might as well be in separate worlds.

On his way to the hearing, Hank is run over by a truck. For most of the comic, Ahamd (I assumed, there's no colorist listed) sticks to blue/white/black colors. It could be considered soothing, but given Hank's hangdog expression most of the time, it's more melancholy. The four panels immediately after he's hit are all in golden-orange. You'd think that would make them happier, but half of them show the dissolution of his marriage, so maybe it's just that these are strong memories that burn through the depression. 

Hank wakes up in a hospital bed five hours later, completely fine. There's no explanation he or the doctors can provide, but word's gotten out and there's already a crowd outside the hospital cheering for him. Meanwhile, somewhere else, a woman comes home, and as she relates her day to her husband, his body basically bursts apart.

That's where it ends, the implication that Hank's injuries were somehow shunted to this other poor guy. Why, how? Unrevealed at present. I can't imagine things will end well. Hank seems excited at the prospect of people cheering and adoring him, but he also doesn't seem like someone who handles pressure or people wanting to be close to him very well. That's not a personality well-suited for celebrity, even before someone finds out other people are dying because of whatever this is. We'll have to see when or if the next issue arrives.

Sunday Splash Page #274

 

"Life Number Eight," in The Jaguar #7, by William Messner-Loebs (writer), Chuck Wojtkiewicz (penciler), Mike Manley and Bruce N. Solotoff (inkers), M. Hollingsworth (colorist), W. Schubert (letterer)

My back issue project of late last year was the early '90s Impact Comics line DC put out with the old Archie heroes, so welcome to the first of those titles.

The Jaguar followed Maria De Guzman, freshman college student from Brazil, moving to Elm Harbor, Michigan. A sleepy little college town, which happens to have stuff like government laboratories hidden beneath it, and weird alien Sasquatches out in the boonies. Maria struggles to fit in, not aided by a cruel Queen Bee character who singles her out for torment, especially once they end up as roommates. (Messner-Loebs does expand on what's going on with Traci later, using her eventually as comic relief, and confidante.) 

When Maria's attacked by a bunch of assholes while out for a nighttime jog, she transforms into a huge, feral warrior woman. Messner-Loebs initially plays it as Maria remembering the transformation as more of a dream, as The Jaguar was something her aunt told her about as a protector of the rain forest, and which terrified Maria. Maria eventually accepts that she's the one changing, and by halfway through the series has even learned to revel in her abilities.

David Antoine Williams was series artist for the first four issue, and there are similarities between his work and a Rich Burchett or Ty Templeton. Smooth, solid lines. Straightforward designs without a lot of messy cross-hatching or anything like that. Wojtkiewicz takes over as artist in issue 5, and ends up drawing 7 of the remaining 10 issues.

Williams' version of the Jaguar seemed like something Adam Hughes or Terry Dodson might draw. Buff, prominent, rounded hips and chest, just all around big. Wojtkiewicz tones that down a bit while maintaining the musculature. He also emphasizes the animal aspect more. Hair a bit wilder, shading the face to make the green eyes stand out more. When she runs, he draws her up on the balls of her feet and leaning forward, like she's a moment away from dropping to all fours.

Messner-Loebs has Maria gradually embrace being the Jaguar, trying to use it to do good. When she's approached about joining a super-team (because they tried hard to interconnect the books), she agrees. For someone who was frightened by her aunt's admission she'd killed men with this power, Maria doesn't seem that frightened of losing control herself once she understands what's going on.

Unfortunately, the Impact line went under from poor sales, so the book ended at 14 issues. Worse, it ended on a cliffhanger, as Maria and Traci fly to Brazil to investigate the murder of Maria's father and the seizing of her family's assets.

Saturday Splash Page #76

 

"Sorta-New, Semi-Different," Thunderbolts (vol. 1) #57, by Fabian Nicieza (writer), Patrick Zircher (penciler), Al Vey (inker), Hi-Fi (colorist), RS and Comicraft/RD (letterers)

Bagley departed Thunderbolts after issue 50, off to an exciting life of drawing multiple issues of exceedingly pointless conversations in Ultimate Spider-Man. Patrick Zircher, who had drawn some fill-in issues previously, took over as regular artist. He and Al Vey combine for a heavier line, making everyone look bulkier and rougher than they did under Bagley. But this is a rougher stretch, if that can be believed, so it fits.

At this point, Atlas was presumed exploded, Hawkeye was in jail, and Moonstone, Mach-Whatever and Songbird were pardoned, as long as they didn't use their powers. Jolt, Charcoal, and a not-dead Techno were roped into a government Thunderbolts/Redeemers squad, initially led by Captain America, but later by Citizen V (although Zemo hijacked his body in some mini-series I didn't read.)

Graviton pops up for the third time in the series, drafting Moonstone as a life coach to help him realize his full potential. Which seems to be, "rule the world", though I'm unclear on how his gravity powers neutralized all the telepaths and magicians. Great, Dr. Strange's body is suspended upside-down in the air, held in place by gravity. That's not much of a problem for a Sorcerer Supreme or Jean Grey.

Whatever, end game, the team (part of it at least, and Atlas is a being of ionic energy that inhabits Dallas Riordian's paraplegic body) reunite, stop Graviton, but get sucked through a wormhole and end up on, sigh, Counter-Earth. Nicieza already referenced that mess earlier in this stretch, where the girl Bucky, Rikki Barnes, shows up trying to force Doom to relinquish control and criticizing Captain America for not making tough choices. I don't know, my eyes glazed over. A world that inflicted Adam Warlock on us deserves oblivion.

I much preferred he and Busiek both using Cyclone as this persistent pest throughout their runs. Really smug and irritating, but usually fast enough to get away to be a pain in the ass another day.

Nicieza alternates issues between the team on Counter-Earth, and Hawkeye and a group of escaped super-criminals. Clint's a mole for SHIELD, searching for a weapon Justin Hammer tucked away that is much in demand. But Dum Dum Dugan also enlists Songbird (who didn't get sucked into the gravity vortex) to track Clint and the villains (Mentallo piloting Dreadlox, Plantman, Copperhead, eventually some others). Meanwhile, the rest of the T'Bolts are on a planet that's falling apart and trying to decide between helping the people, or helping themselves by getting the fuck off the planet.

Manuel Garcia takes over as artist for the Hawkeye parts in the latter stages, while Chris Batista handles the Counter-Earth issues. Garcia's work has a grittier texture than Zircher, while the colors are more muted, Hanna's inks heavier. But that part of the story is more small-scale, at least at first. Seemingly just a bunch of crooks scrabbling for money or power. It's only near the end it gets bigger. Batista's stiffer than the others, but he's pretty good at rendering weird-looking machines and characters arguing about acceptable sacrifices.

Ultimately the two threads converge and at least some characters make it back to Regular-Earth. Zemo gets on a kick about actually trying to save the world from itself, but he had to wait to follow it up, because John Arcudi took over the book. I've usually heard that described as "Fight Club", and not fitting at all as a Thunderbolts book, but that's hearsay. Then Nicieza came back, then Warren Ellis did his Suicide Squad riff with Norman Osborn running the team, and then there was some other stuff.

What I Bought 6/3/2023 - Part 3

Friday, Friday, weekend time's upon us. Will I have a fun weekend? Who knows? Not me, because I'm writing this on Tuesday. Last two of the May books.

Grit N Gears #1, by Angel Fuentes (writer), Nahuel SB (artist), Carlos Mangual (letterer) - In a word of vague orange shapes, one robot, with one arm, stands. . .OK I'm bored with this bit.

So there's a one-armed robot named Screw Driver that gets run out of town for stealing. But he used to be a law-enforcing robot called Ranger One. Most of this is Fuentes and Nahuel showing how things got to that point. Ranger One was created by a woman whose deputy husband was recently slain. The robot's popularity caused them to make more cop-bots until one came to the idea the best way to prevent crime is to kill the people that could commit crimes. Meaning all people.

Cue the predictable human response to destroy all robots, and that's more or less how Ranger One ends up a one-armed fugitive, uninterested in helping his creator look after what is either her daughter, or a robot she built based on her daughter. That part is unclear. The kid was born alive, at least.

Nahuel avoids having all the automatons look the same. Ranger One has a tall cylindrical head, a bit like Scud the Disposable Assassin but with only one big eye. But the rogue, who calls himself Razoneck starts out with his central eye surrounded by a curved helmet and a circular microphone/exhaust port for a mouth. He may have alter attached a human jawbone to his face, too. None of his subordinates look like him. So there's a level of individuality that suggests these are real beings and not simple tools gone bad.

It's kind of an odd book, or I'm just not familiar enough with steampunk. Ranger One's activated in 1877, during the blighted presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes. But there are flying cathedrals, and Ranger One introduces himself by playing a song by Kenny Rogers, who explains has not been born yet. I'm disputing that fact, unless Highlander was about Kenny Rogers and I didn't know it, but it's a strange approach. Is Fuentes trying to do some evolution through the different types of Western heroes. Go from the Roy Rogers singing cowboy to more of a Randolph Scott sheriff to an Eastwood style antihero? If so, the story's cycling through pretty fast.

Impossible Jones and Captain Lightning #1, by Karl Kesel (writer/inker), David Hahn (penciler), Tony Avina (colorist), Comicraft (letterer) - The store only had the Dark Knight Returns parody, so I went with that. At least one of the character's has lightning powers, so it's appropriate.

Jones' attempt to let someone else steal an original printing of Shakespeare's writing, so she can recover it later and get the finder's fee, is ruined when the Bearded Lady and her Freakshow try to fight instead of just running away. So Jones ends up with the book, without it getting successfully stolen.

Then Captain Lightning shows up, asking her to stop the fabled Section Zero from stealing a mysterious rock from the local evil super-science corporation. Jones agrees, figuring it might make the Captain less suspicious of her. Section Zero does show up - two of them anyway - and they fight with our title characters across the city. Jones recovers the stone, then loses it down a geothermal vent when Captain Lightning tells her to hand it over. They argue a bit, a guy who looks like Mightor from the Hanna-Barbara cartoons finds the rock deep underground, that's pretty much it.

Kesel's still introducing more mysteries, or more hints. I'm pretty sure the "Volte Foundation" Captain Lightning mentions as someone the rock could be trusted with is probably run by the Captain's secret identity, and Jones thinks the guy is planning some run at becoming mayor. We got some more villains, though I'm not sure if ClownCar is just a bunch of clowns or one clown taht can duplicate himself, Multiple Man-style.

Not really much more on the origin of Jones' powers, beyond that we see them continuing to expand. She can make the lenses of her goggles function like binoculars, there doesn't seem to be a strict limit to how many additional limbs she can create. Let's Hahn play around with her look a bit, between those abilities and the stealth costume she whips up for the break-in.