Repeated Rejection

Hey, who wrote this law? *squints at the paperwork* Senator Jim. . .Balent. Well, nothing we can do about it, he's a duly elected official! The system works! *sobs uncontrollably*

Volume 8 of Precarious Woman Executive - I'm not typing the rest of that. Anyway, Volume 8 picks up after the failure of the Hero League and Villain Leagues to stop the "Organization". Both groups feel pretty humiliated and want to up their game so they're better prepared for the inevitable rematch.

With the Hero League, Jin goes the route of bringing in three of the founders to show these young pups how it's done. Except one of the old heads is basically Master Roshi from Dragon Ball, in that he's a bald old turtle-man with whiskers, who is a notorious pervert. He's there to be the butt of jokes, or try and grope various female characters. That is all Jin uses him for. Jokes about how ugly or how much of a coward Master Turtle is, or "jokes" about Master Turtle trying to grab boobs. This is mixed in with discussions of how the hero League can more efficiently organize and disseminate information and resources. That's right, it's an organizational efficiency review! Sigh. Jin is seriously overestimating how much I care about the Hero League.

The Villain League's efforts are more entertaining, in that there isn't as much bureaucracy, and more mad science. This where the manga shines, as usual, with the shorter one-off chapters that focus on a few characters. The General gets herself an upgrade, after several attempts that were declined for being indecent. The various seconds get together for a largely unproductive chat and Secretary-san eating a lot of pudding. The Robot Yakuza agree to take RX's latest invention a maid/secretary/guard robot out for field testing, which results in some awkward conversations with the police. Secretary-san takes the General's philosophy about not risking letting someone else take what she wants to heart, and gets a little forward with their boss.

The most significant development is that we see the moment Braveman decided to become a masked hero, when he saved someone from being crushed by a falling girder and they expressed fright at his face. Later, we see the moment when the General became infatuated with heroes, when a guy with a scary-looking face saved her from being crushed by a falling girder.

The coincidence isn't exactly a surprise, and since neither of them knows they met that day, it doesn't change the dynamic between them in the present. Although Braveman does express a level of relief when the General reappears to harass him after she'd been sick for several days, because he finds routine comforting. But later in the volume, he expresses frustration with her unwillingness to give up, because he feels he needs to grow and become a hero everyone can trust, whether he wears a mask or not.

What is interesting, and probably foreshadows a future development (or re-foreshadows it, given what happened in volume 4), is that the General's remark about her savior's face wasn't meant as an insult, so much as in surprise. As she narrates it, he looked how you'd expect a villain to, but he became a hero and saved her. She wasn't appalled by his looks, but impressed by his actions. It matches how Jin wrote them in an earlier interaction in the series, when the General met Braveman in his civilian identity, and remarked that he might look scary, but he should have confidence in himself.

It feels like there's a real face turn coming for her, as a character who admits she spends 10 minutes on villainy a year. But it hasn't happened yet.

Robocop: Dark Justice (2001)

Alex asked me to check out at least the first five minutes of this. He thought it was a crappy movie, a 'turd covered in burnt hair,' to use his description. It's actually the first episode (90 minutes?) of a very short-lived TV show, Robocop: Prime Directives. Be that as it may, I watched it, so I have to at least salvage a blog post out of the experience.

Set 15 years after the first movie, Robocop's still active on the streets, but may be starting to break down. There's only one technician assigned to look after him, and she admits some of his parts aren't even made any longer.

More than that, Murphy is struggling to understand why he's there. As in, why were they able to successfully revive him when all other attempts failed? Could be something in that, a spiritual crisis as Murphy concludes there was no higher power or purpose behind his survival, just him as a weapon in a dick-measuring contest between execs.

The main conflict, however, was a big lunatic with high-powered weaponry calling himself Bone Machine, who is causing the major portion of crime in "Delta City", if the pie chart shown during a news clip can be believed.

(Supposedly the city is much more peaceful thanks to Robocop, but with the way it's shot, it looks like a deserted slum, and the episode opens on a bunch of guys calling themselves "The Bombs" who are threatening to kill themselves and a bunch of hostages.)

Robocop teams up with a hotshot cop with the last name Cable, who was Murphy's partner before he transferred to Metro West and got shot to pieces by Red Foreman like a dumbass. The episode keeps doing these flashbacks of Cable being used as a human shield by someone, before finally revealing the guy was some kind of cannibal, and that Cable shot him after he was disarmed because they entered the house without a warrant, so the guy would have walked.

Except they found a live woman duct-taped in the guy's basement freezer who presumably could have testified he kidnapped her, so yeah, whatever. But part of the plot revolves around someone adding another directive to Robo's system, and him not being able to either delete it (as he did in the second and third movies) or find a clever workaround like in the first movie. He just succumbs to the directive, so the story can have him be guilty about it.

There's a thread about Murphy's son being a new hotshot in OCP's executive class, and being offered the chance to join some secret cabal (which also includes Cable's ex-wife) within the company dedicated to doing whatever it takes to save OCP. Also, it hints he's going to learn what really happened to his dad at some point. Which, if any of these people could act, might be fun.

There's so many strange pauses before people start talking. The conversation between Murphy's kid and Cable is like that the whole way through. I can't tell if it was edited poorly, so there's an extra second or two of footage before the person was supposed to talk that shouldn't be there, or if these folks just thought everyone needs to wait two seconds before responding to the most innocuous questions, but it's really noticeable. No piece of media needs that many dramatic pauses.

The effects are as bad as you'd expect from early-2000s TV. Poorly edited in fire, gratuitous us of slo-mo, ugly blur around people who are supposed to be speaking in front of a screen. If the idea was Delta City was doing alright, but the secret cabal are prepared to burn it to the ground to improve OCP's stock price, the visuals we get don't back it up.

What I Bought 11/22/2023

Well, alright, holiday's over, for the folks here in the States that celebrate it. Which means back to work for me. Booooooooo. But here's some comics, which work helps me to afford, so it all works out.

Fantastic Four #13, by Ryan North (writer), Iban Coello (artist), Jesus Arbutov (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Do you really need me to attempt a jokey comment for this cover?

First things first: In regards to Kelvin's questions after the previous issue, we are not told what the Savage Land of Dino-Earth is like. However, there is an offhand reference to "Moon Girl and Devil Human" made by the Dino-Thing. I'm assuming Moon Girl is a big red intelligent T-Rex, and Devil Human is a tiny, speechless ape. Or maybe Devil Human is King Kong, I don't know.

Anyway, plot stuff. Human-Earth Doom narrates this issue, because there were other portals and he and Dino-Doom have a plan, and they can't let the "heroes" (Doom always puts the word in quotes) interfere. They're going to combine the universes into one twice as large, with twice as much to rule. Which they will do together, equally.

You see where this is going.

Human-Doom trounces the Avengers and Dino-FF because he's got a gizmo that transfers quarks from one universe to a spot on top of another quark in the other universe, creating a powerful release of energy that can't be shielded against or absorbed. And he can precisely direct it, so he could put it inside their skulls, if they force the issue. They don't, but the two Things go after the two Dooms and point out that obviously they're going to betray one another eventually, they just hadn't realized the other Doom came to the same conclusion yet. Cue fight, cue Things rerouting energy, cue universes being pushed apart, cue Dooms being consumed in big explosion.

I like North's Doom. The arrogance, the insistence Stark refer to his as Doctor, not Victor. The sort of casual way he fights. Coello draws Doom as basically standing in one spot and just gesturing to defeat the attackers. He doesn't need to leap around or do anything so lowbrow as dodging. It does throw me when he calls Reed that, rather than "Richards". Granted, it was Dino-Reed, but I don't figure Doom makes much distinction, and "Reed" seems too familiar for someone Doom hates that much.

Uncanny Spider-Man #4, by Si Spurrier (writer), Lee Garbett (artist), Matt Milla (color artist), Joe Caramgna (letterer) - Guys, the giant genocide 'bot is behind you.

Kurt sits back to watch Spidey protect the pizza delivery guy from anti-mutant mobs. Until one of those Stark Sentinels shows up and declares, this guy ain't a mutant, but we're going to take him in for possible mutant sympathizing. Oh, and Spider-Man's a mutant, too. Those pages look very rough. Garbett's line isn't as smooth, the shading is less of a gradation, it just all looks rushed. It gets better in place later in the issue, but overall, the work's not as strong as it was the first two issues.

I saw someone insist that was probably the Vulture's doing, but I can't imagine he's high enough up the ladder to muck with those Sentinels' programming. More likely this is the machine's first step in eliminating other potential threats to their ascendance besides mutants. Now if they'd get around to killing Judas Traveler and MODOK. . .

Mystique tries to fire on the crowd with a bazooka, so Kurt finally gets off his ass and redirects the rocket into the robot. He chases Mystique, leaving Spidey to deal with the pizza guy and the crowd of bigots. Silver Sable has another date with Kurt, where she has little more success than the Bamf in getting Kurt to stop running away from dealing with real problems. But it does convince him to talk to Mystique. . .in another comic that I'm not going to buy, so oh well.

And then Silver goes ahead and catches Kurt (maybe) because that bigot on her payroll is gonna blab to everyone otherwise. So Spurrier's Silver Sable is both unprofessional and incompetent, because that dude is a meathead, but he managed to get a bug on her.

Setting aside the Mystique & Nightcrawler stuff, which will be resolved in that one-shot, I still expect a lot of this stuff to remain unresolved at the conclusion of this mini-series. Will we know who sent the Bamf? Probably not. Will Kurt free the Hounds with his Hopesword? Maybe, but wouldn't bet on it. Will he even kick Vulture's ass? You'd hope he could manage that much. It just feels like there's way too much here to conclude in one issue, unless Spurrier has decided that once Kurt stops running from his problems, he's hyper-efficient at solving them.

Sunday Splash Page #298

 

"Riposte", in Lady Rawhide (vol. 1) #5, by Don McGregor (writer), Mike Mayhew (penciler), Jimmy Palmiotti (inker), Steve Buccelato and Company (colorists), Kenny Lopez (letterer)

As someone who bought a lot of Topps baseball cards when I was younger, it's strange to think of them as publishing comics, but here we are. Looking over the history, it's mostly licensed stuff. Xena, X-Files, Jurassic Park, Mars Attacks.

Other than X-Files, which ran 42(!) issues, it's mostly mini-series, but Zorro made it an even dozen, if you count the zero issue. In issue 3, Don McGregor introduced Lady Rawhide, a costumed vigilante that hated Capitan Monastario for blinding her brother, but had no great love for Zorro, either. She might have thought he was hot, but that's entirely different.

That's all background for this mini-series, where Anita Santiago and her aunt have traveled to San Francisco to stay with an old acquaintance, while Anita investigates whether rumored herbs might be able to help her brother. Although Mayhew draws the brother's injuries in flashback as less a burn around the eyes, and more something spread across the face. Lot of boils or blisters, part of the mustache gone, and the caption boxes say he suffered partial paralysis of the face. Maybe that's meant as Anita's memory of what he looked like in the immediate aftermath, filtered through her horror at what happened, or her present anger at Monastario.

Anyway, the story is not about Lady Rawhide's Search for Some Good Weed, but her hunt for a serial killer stalking the town and targeting women. She rescued a doctor from an anchored Russian ship, as the mob singled him out, but that won't do any good if she can't find the true killer.

McGregor layers in the mystery of the killer around her hosts, as Don Rafael is up to something that takes him out of the hacienda at night, and leads to much shouting between he and his wife. But the wife's also a crack shot. But their son likes to go off in the woods alone to hunt. This is all set against Anita's efforts to investigate without appearing an improper young woman. At least, when she's not dying her hair crimson and leaping around swordfighting in that outfit.

McGregor has several character comment on the outfit, but also notes on page 1 of the first issue that's exactly what Anita was going for: a distraction. But also that it's better suited for Los Angeles' climate than San Francisco's chilly air. And she made herself some chaps for when she's riding a horse to avoid chafing. Mayhew draws them as huge, fluffy things, like what you'd see a character wearing on a dude ranch for kicks, rather than what a vaquero would traditionally wear. But with her costume lacking pants entirely, maybe the extra padding's necessary. 

The story ends with more than one mystery solved, but not much in the way of happy resolutions.

Saturday Splash Page #100

 

"Metatextually Correct," in Tales of the Unexpected #3, by Brian Azzarello (writer), Cliff Chiang (artist), Patricia Mulvihill (colorist), Jared K. Fletcher (letterer)

Post-Infinite Crisis, DC released several mini-series that were, I think, mostly meant to get people hyped for changes they'd made to one character to another. There was a Creeper mini-series, one about an OMAC (the Infinite Crisis types, not the Jack Kirby guy), yet another attempt to reinvent Billy Batson, and Tales of the Unexpected.

The lead story in Tales of the Unexpected was to sell former Gotham Central lead character Crispus Allen as the new human host for the Spectre. For some reason, DC thought having that story to end with Allen being forced to take vengeance against his own son, for the crime of killing the bent cop who murdered Allen, was a good idea.

As far as stories about the DC Universe being run by a cruel and capricious god go, the back-up story by Azzarrello and Chiang worked a lot better. Professional skeptic Doctor 13 and his daughter Traci get caught in the crosshairs of the mysterious four "Architects", who've decided they and a variety of other oddball characters - including Captain Fear, Infectious Lass and Genius Jones - from DC's past no longer have a place in it.

And Dr. 13's an odd character. Difficult to like, arrogant, condescending, cynical. A guy who calls Doctor Fate "Doctor Fake", and assumes every weird thing the DC Universe holds is the equivalent of a Scooby-Doo villain of the week. Can you have a character like that in a fictional universe like these, and not have him become a complete punchline? The guy who insists, no, that vampire is just some really determined cosplayer on PCP. No, there is no way Nazis trained a bunch of gorillas to try and fight for them. No, a caveman would not write a warning in modern French alongside their cave painting.

But that being the case, why wouldn't he deny that four weirdos - never referred to by name, and often masked, but it's Morrison, Waid, Johns and Rucka - even have the capacity to deny his existence, let alone erase it?

Chiang and Mulvihill make the whole thing look beautiful and bright. Let the weird characters look and be weird. I, Vampire gets hit by a subway train, he's still talking to Dr. 13 while his body is gruesomely chopped across the rails. Dr. 13 insists there cannot be a bunch of Nazi gorillas fighting a tank and a Confederate ghost, and Jeb Stuart's horse drops a load of ghost horse crap on his face. It's a big fictional universe, there are gonna be odd little backwaters. Or there should be.

While I'm not sure Dr. 13's appeared since, Traci was part of Jaime Reyes' supporting cast for a time, and I, Vampire got an ongoing series during the New 52. Though I'm pretty sure it was one of the first wave that got canceled, so it's still hard to get by out there on the stands.

A Holiday Ascension

Narrator: WITHIN THE UNPLEASANTLY CHILLY CONFINES OF CALVIN'S APARTMENT!

Calvin: Unpleasantly chilly?

Clever Adolescent Panda: He's right, can we turn up the heat?

Calvin: Do I look like I'm made of money? Just huddle over here by the oven.

Rhodez: You're turning into a dad.

*There's a knock at the door. Calvin throws his friend a flat look as he goes to answer it.*

Calvin: Absolutely not. I'm just cheap as hell and you know it.

Voice from the Doorway: We certainly do.

Rhodez: *raises a root beer from her seat on the couch* Pollock!

Calvin: And that's why you go through money like a kid away at college with their first credit card, right?

Pollock: *enters the apartment, sets a dish on the countertop* I'm a job creator. All my spending is a boost to the economy.

CAP: Technically, isn't all spending a boost to the economy?

Pollock: Yes, but you only get to claim tax benefits if you do a lot of it.

Calvin: *claps his hands* Can the balloon juice!

Cassanee: *lounging in a camp chair* Balloon juice?

Calvin: You keep discussing economics and we'll be in comas before we even start eating.

Pollock: *takes a seat at the other end of the couch* I see you made it here again, Cassanee.

Cassanee: *shrugs* Rhodez picked me up.

Rhodez: It was on the way, and I wanted to see the place again.

Pollock: Yes, it would be chilly to drive all the way here on your tractor.

Cassanee: *casually kicks Pollock's shin* I have a motorcycle.

Calvin: Point kinda stands then, doesn't it?

*Everyone stares, including Pollock*

Pollock: Did you just, agree with me?

Calvin: That it's not great weather to be driving in an open air vehicle? Yeah. Especially when Rhodez has a good ride, assuming the fine people of America's Crotch haven't hit it again.

Rhodez: They haven't, but man, don't call it that. I live in the elbow.

Calvin: *wrinkles his nose* That just sounds weird.

CAP: *nods while wearing a solemn expression* It really does.

Rhodez: Fine, y'all are ganging up on me now!

Pollock: I hesitate to ask, but was Deadpool invited?

Calvin: I dropped his book before spring, so no.

CAP: You really did give it less of a chance than Tiger Division.

Calvin: Yeah, but sticking with that mini-series the whole way through was a mistake.

Rhodez: You do that a lot.

Calvin: Yes, I learn slowly, if at all.

Calvin: *sighs and hangs his head. An awkward silence settles over the room. His head shoots back up* So! Who's ready to eat? I went with the fried fish and hush puppies route, plus some of my mom's cornbread.

CAP: I brought some of my bamboo noodle soup! *hefts a big bowl over their head* I didn't know how people would want to spice it, so I set those out where you can add what you want.

Pollock: Is bamboo actually edible for humans?

Calvin: *waggles his hand* I tried a little earlier. It's like noodles of extra-crunchy celery.

Pollock: But can you digest it?

Calvin: Guess we'll see in a few hours.

Rhodez: Calvin said breakfast food was always OK, so pancakes. With the good maple syrup. Also, I brought some root beer, because I know Calvin doesn't drink good soda.

Cassanee: Venison burgers and mashed potatoes.

Pollock: I brought a vegetable tangine, and a cheesecake with crushed cookie and sour cream frosting.

*The cake seems to pulse from the sheer amount of sugar contained within it.*

Rhodez: Damn, that thing looks loaded.

Calvin: We'll need one of those bunkers from Oppenheimer just to protect ourselves when we cut it.

CAP: *sniffs the cake* Is this a trick to kill us?

Pollock: I believe there's a no killing truce for these gatherings?

Cassanee: Could just make us sick.

Pollock: *indignant* You don't have to eat it if you don't want! I'll take it to work!

Calvin: Whoa, whoa, whoa, let's not be hasty. I'll have some. . .just let me update my will first.

Narrator: LATER, AFTER EATING!

Rhodez: *sprawled on the couch* Oooof. I'm gonna need to run so much next week.

CAP: *slides out of his chair into a big furry lump on the floor* Uh-huh.

Pollock: Yes, that was. . .a lot. The soup was quite tasty, furball. Very hearty.

CAP: Th, thanks. So was the tangine.

Pollock: What is the magenta spice, with the citrus tang?

CAP: Requingyou, and no, I'm not going into business selling artisanal spices with you.

Pollock: Of course not! The new generation want to do it themselves. Sustainable growth and all that. Just loan me a few shoots and - 

CAP: No.

Rhodez: *tries to rise off the couch, fails* Did anyone try the cake yet?

Cassanee: *curled up in her cloak in the camp chair, points to the balcony* Calvin.

*Calvin is standing very still, his back to them*

CAP: Calvin?

*No response*

Rhodez: Is somebody humming?

Pollock: It's not humming, he's vibrating.

Calvin: *voice rising and falling in pitch* I see the beginning and the end. The birth of inspiration and frustration. The gaping cold maw of entropy and obsolescence. They intertwine, the paths not taken and those yet to be. The distraction and disaffection of the hand. . .

CAP: He's talking in vague portents!

Pollock: *tries to cover ears* Yes, it's quite annoying. Shut up, clod, and let us enjoy our deep sleeps!

CAP: *trying to roll to an upright position* If we don't stop him, he'll ascend to godhood!

Rhodez: *also trying to get up* Pretty sure if Calvin becomes god he'll kill everybody.

Pollock: *rolls her eyes* Oh please, he's not going to ascend to godhood. At best, he'll vibrate at higher and higher rates until he pierces the fabric of spacetime like a sword, and is thrown into another reality. *perks up noticeably* That sounds like an excellent outcome, actually.

CAP: Really? What happens when you pierce spacetime like that?

Pollock: Typically? An extreme release of. . .uncontrolled energy. Oh.

CAP: *very sarcastically* Yeeeeeeeeees, oh.

Pollock: *on her feet* We have to stop him! I'm not being killed by an imbecile overloaded on cake!

*Clever Adolescent Panda tries to grab hold of Calvin, but the closer they get, the more they slow down. Their fur undulates as though walking into an oscillating wind, until they're finally repelled. The floor creaks ominously, the humming growing louder every second.*

Pollock: We need to disrupt the wavelength! *hurls a tiny metal sphere. It explodes, but the shockwaves are slowed by those emanating from Calvin, until they hang suspended in the air.* That's sub-optimal.

Calvin: *voice taking a deeper resonance that rattles the sliding glass door* The alternative waits on a throne of impatience and discards. Dreams swirl into a Play-doh ammonite of death.

Cassanee: *stands beyond the range of the vibrations, holding a plate* There are still hush puppies and potatoes left.

Calvin: The resolution is served with a side of impulse control problems.

*Calvin takes the plate and scarfs down the food. The vibrations begin to slow immediately. The apartment stops creaking and Calvin's eyes become visible again. He collapses in a heap on the floor.*

Calvin: Owwwww. Why does my entire body feel like a Charlie horse?

Pollock: *staring at Cassanee* How did you know that would work?

Cassanee: *deadpan* Carbs can weigh you down.

Calvin: You ain't kiddin'.

*Pollock and Clever Adolescent Panda crash comically to the floor in disbelief. Pollock picks herself up, looking disgusted.*

Pollock: I can't believe I participated in a pratfall. Let's just give thanks, already.

CAP: Me first!

Pollock: What? No!

Rhodez: Oh, let 'em go first.

Calvin: I'm not gonna argue.

Cassanee: *shrugs indifferently*

CAP: I'm thankful for my family and my friends back home, and all of you. Even Pollock! And I'm going to thank our audience, since Calvin won't bring me around for the anniversary anymore.

Calvin: Ha, nice try, but I'm incapable of feeling guilt right now about anything except how much I ate!

CAP: Fooey. I'm also thankful that Lufonz' robot body is holding up, and that he's not being harassed by robots or wizards. And that I got to punch a demon shark in the nose before it ate a bunch of kids on a field trip.

Calvin: *lifts head off the floor* Punching sharks is very 2006 blogosphere.

CAP: And you're always at least 15 years behind on trends.

Calvin: Point taken. *lays head down again*

Rhodez: Still digging my new job, even if it's really expensive where I live. I got some cool coworkers, and the scenery's nice and I feel pretty good about things. And now I have an apartment, so no more shared housing! Whoo, yeah!

Calvin: *pumps fist once in solidarity* Shared housing sucks!

Cassanee: Drought meant it wasn't a good growing season, and not as much river traffic, so fewer tourists. But our town and the raccoons and the bears all helped each other, so there wasn't any fighting. Hosted a big festival at the community center to bring in more people. No one hit an elk this year.

Calvin: Elk are smarter than deer.

CAP: *snorts* Barely. They all have concussion problems, just like goats.

Cassanee: Heard a few rumors of weird things farther northwest, but they might be made up. Not sure. Something to check out next year. *she gestures to Pollock*

Pollock: Another year of uninterrupted success - 

CAP: What about on April Fool's Day?

Pollock: Uninterrupted success for my company. With the turn away from the increasing nightmare of social media towards tactile experiences, Creative Industrial Alternatives is doing better than - 

Calvin: We have a strict, "no self-promotion" rule on this blog!

Pollock: *huffs* Fine. The business is doing well, my employees seem largely satisfied, although I wish more of them would come in to work. It's too quiet at the office. My personal life is a whirlwind of wining and dining the elite!

Cassanee: Sounds exhausting.

Pollock: Very. That's it for me. Who's left?

CAP: *eyes go wide* We left Calvin for last.

Pollock: *terrified* No.

Calvin: Yep.

*There's a group scream and the guests awkwardly attempt to reach the door.* 

"Out of my way!" "Me first!" "Move, accursed furball!"

Calvin: If you leave, you don't get to see our panda pal dressed up as a baby.

*The room goes silent. Cass, Pollock and Rhodez turn slowly*

Cass: *starry-eyed* Really?

Calvin: *holds up camera* Really.

CAP: *pleading* Calvin, don't.

Pollock: My security cameras didn't catch any footage of that. *tries to sit with some dignity after the earlier panic* Very well, let's hear your thanks.

Calvin: Work was - 

Rhodez: Aw man, why do you always start with work?

Calvin: To get it out of the way. Work was about as usual. Nothing tremendously horrible for me, just a lot of extra regular work because we were shorthanded in one way or the other for most of the year. We're about to swap out the work truck I liked to use for something new that will probably have a billion recall notices on all its stupid computerized shit, if the last new truck is any indication.

Pollock: Ask Cassanee to borrow a tractor.

Cassanee: Tractors have computers, too.

Pollock: *aghast* Ye gods, why? They can hardly expect Billy Bob to operate that?

Calvin: I think it's usually GPS, but it's not the operating that's the problem, it's when the computer says there's a problem and there isn't, but it stops working anyway. Whatever. No car issues, no health issues. Survived my visit to America's Crotch to see Rhodez back in summer. The visit was fun. I've never seen so much lightning!

CAP: Is that a good thing?

Calvin: As long as it isn't striking me or anyone or thing I care about, sure. Alex gave me his PS4, so I'm only one generation behind on consoles, which is as close as I expect I'll ever get to being current. Didn't do as much sightseeing as I intended, but I got out and about a little bit. Pulled another successful prank on Pollock.

Pollock: Successful?! Your plant didn't even grow the way you intended!

Calvin: But I have photos of you trapped inside a giant bubble like a goober, and I got away without being covered in pollen, unlike some other people I could name.

Cass: Photos?

Calvin: You know it! Gather round, and have a look.

*Clever Adolescent Panda and Pollock each lunge for the camera* No!

The Day The Sun Stood Still - Poul Anderson, Gordon R. Dickson and Robert Silverberg

Published in 1972, this was a collection of 3 novellas by three separate writers, each based around the premise of how the world would react if, for one day, the Sun stood still in the sky for an entire day in response to a global request for God to send humanity a sign.

Anderson and Silverberg's stories, "A Chapter of Revelation" and "Thomas the Proclaimer", respectively, both alternate between and macro and micro view. Anderson intersperses news reports of official government responses or current events among conversations between individual people. Silverberg takes a similar approach, but he uses things more like press releases or testimonies from eyewitnesses.

In either case, the person who prompts the outpouring of prayer that seemingly produces the response is an unassuming person. In Silverberg's case, Thomas truly seems to have had a vision that told him to fix his life and devote it to others. In Anderson's, the prophet is a non-churchgoer that owns an auto body shop and doesn't really know why he got the idea to suggest everybody ask for some sort of sign.

They both end the same way, so maybe that part's irrelevant.

Dickson's story, "Things Which Are Caesar's", doesn't worry about who suggested the idea, or even really suggest that it was brought about in response to prayer. Only that somehow, word got around the Sun's going to stop, and people are waiting to see what happens. He focuses his story entirely on a small group of people who've chosen a campground to see the event, and stays there. In particular, his main character is a man named Ranald, who was apparently alive the last time this happened, and is convinced nothing will change. People will be momentarily awed. They may briefly feel some greater connection. But then it'll turn to the usual proclamations that only a certain group of people have the correct interpretation, everyone will start arguing about which group that is, and things will go on much as they always have.

It's a bit of a paradox, in that Ranald doesn't believe people can change - not individuals, not people as a whole - so what is the point of living? But at the same time, he can't bring himself to give up on living until he can understand why they're there.

Anderson and Silverberg seem to agree in the sense that whatever brief community there is after the event soon falters in the face of factionalism, as everyone rushes to plant their flag as to what it means. It's proof Communism is the problem! No, it's proof that it's time to throw off the white supremacist yoke! No, it was actually a sign sent by Satan! No, it's a sign we need to believe without all the ceremony and idols, you know, rational belief! And on and on.

In those cases, the wider scope allows the reader to see that society more or less collapses as people leave jobs that seem meaningless, although one of the stories ends with a character expressing hope something better will rise from the ashes. I would suspect it's going to be a theocracy, which would not fit my definition of "better". Dickson doesn't offer any hint of that. Maybe some people can change, but there's no sense of what's going on in the world, other than people are going to disagree about the meaning.

The heaven and hell of free will, basically. Get to decide for yourself what it all means, but nobody's required to agree with you, nor are they required to be polite about it.

'"And what's happened now doesn't prove a God either. It only mocks all reason. A discontinuity. An impossibility. Either the laws of nature are subject to meaningless suspensions - are, maybe, mere statistical fluctuations in howling chaos - or else a Being is able to abrogate them at whim - and in either case, we'll never understand."'

Good Thing It's a Short Month

I didn't expect February solicitations until the end of this week, but I guess everybody bumped them up a week with holidays imminent. So, February! Good news or bad news? Well, it's not looking great. I think a third of the things I wrote down I have no intention of buying, I just wanted to comment on their existence.

Like the new DC mini-series Suicide Squad: Kill Arkham, where Amanda Waller has seized control of Arkham Asylum and is basically letting all the inmates run amok to see who survives. The winners form her next Suicide Squad! DC has turned Waller into Darkseid. If you're weak, you're of no use to her and should die. If you're strong, you serve her until you die. I mean, that's some Apokolips (or Apocalypse, for that matter) shit right there. Sigh, moving on.

Blood Moon Comics re-solicited (for at least the second time) Ice Canyon Monster. Nice try, but I'll believe that when I see (and I still won't buy it even then, it had its chance.) Seemingly random among all the Archie-related stuff, Archie Comics is releasing a Jaguar one-shot. Are they testing the waters to try and bring those characters out again? I don't typically do more than skim over their stuff, so if there's been a Shield or Fly one-shot recently, I missed it.

Lev Gleason - New Friday listed 1903:Manhunt again, which I considered buying when they first solicited it a few years ago. I'm mostly putting here to see if I remember to pick it up this time around. Fairsquare has a GN called Terra Antarctica, by Agustin Graham Nakamura, about two Argentinian detectives who drive to a town in Patagonia and meet a confused man who keeps indicating something about going south. But the solicit says they're going to drive to Antarctica. You, you can't actually drive to Antarctica from South America, to my knowledge.

The cover suggests something like John Carpenter's The Thing, but who knows. Not those detectives, after they drive straight into the ocean!

Marvel's trying a Night Thrasher ongoing, by J Holtham and Nelson Daniel. I was not expecting that, but pickings are slim enough I might try it. Maybe this will trigger a renaissance for the OG New Warriors, he said with very little confidence! DC has a trade for that Spirit World mini-series, which sounded sort of interesting, but Alyssa Wong's writing has not worked for me up to this point.

Viz Media has the first volume of a manga called My Name is Shingo Perfect, which seems to be about a machine in a factory that develops consciousness, with unforeseen consequences. Could be a quiet rumination on the nature of existence, could be a terrifying tale of man's creations outstripping him. Could be a wacky comedy about a robot learning about the horrors of mortgages and poor infrastructure! "Why are these replacement bearings so expensive?" "Your robo-insurance considers them a non-essential and doesn't cover the cost." "But I need them to function!"

Look, I have to amuse myself as best I can.

As far as comics I'm pretty likely to buy it's. . .Fantastic Four 17 (which they put in last month's solicits, but with a February release), second issues of Vengeance of the Moon Knight, Power Pack: Into the Storm and Deer Editor, plus A Haunting on Mars 3. Which is, not a lot.

Area 51 (2015)

What could be more appropriate to the Thanksgiving season, than a movie about a bunch of under-prepared morons barging into a place they shouldn't?

Reid, Darren and Ben attend a party. Reid goes missing, the turns up standing in the middle of the road. Cut to 3 months later, he's preparing to break into Area 51. He's talked to people who know what the security measures are in the desert, and learned from them who has clearance to get them past security once inside.

The fact that Reid's brilliant plan to get help from this guy involves breaking into his house and stealing his i.d. badge and getting a fingerprint off a cologne bottle would indicate Reid's not thought this through terribly well. I mean, if this guy really works at Area 51, he's not going to report that his badge went missing in the morning? But they hang out at a motel/rest stop for a least a day after the theft before making their move.

Long story short, Reid, Darren and a woman named Jelena whose father infiltrated and went missing, break in while Ben waits out in the desert, and things go very wrong.

This is directed by the same person who did Paranormal Activity, so it's much in that same vein. All presented as footage Reid and the others recorded through their adventure. When things go wrong, it's great for conveying panic and disorientation. Darren running through hallway after hallway, up staircases, no idea where's he going, and it's not much more than blur because he probably doesn't even remember the camera's on.

The film does show at least one CGI alien, and it's really crappy-looking. They're better off sticking to shadows on the wall, or something equivalent to the hoofprints-in-flour thing they used in Paranormal Activity. Also, I don't really understand the part where Reid and Jelena are crawling through pipes, and suddenly they fall through into a blank white space. Unless the pipes were some sort of telepathic illusion and they'd been in the white place for a while already.

The problem with doing a film as found footage is, if the characters themselves barely understand what's going on, the audience is left guessing. Like, why do the aliens abduct who they do at the very end? No idea.

While Ben makes it clear he's just been humoring Reid, and grows increasingly nervous as Reid starts committing actual crimes in the run-up to infiltrating a base, it never details what's up with Darren. Why is he so gung-ho to do this? The film's not subtle there are underlying motives pushing Reid forward, but Darren's more of a cipher. He just seems to think putting on suits pumped full of freon to beat thermal scanners and risking being shot is a great idea.

A Winter That Never Ends

Deep in the woods of Russia, a mother and daughter try to make it through the winter. The winter is an unrelenting world of grey, the only color in the world the few red leaves trying to hang onto the trees. 

Otherwise, color exists only in Tatiana's dreams, which (via colorist Lorenzo Palombo) are tinged pink like bloodstained snow. Her husband was drafted for the Soviet invasion of Finland, and his unknown fate hovers over everything. Her daughter, Yari, asks for stories or fables, but they always come back around to when her father will return. If the Gnome King, can find anyone, could he find her father for her? There's a fable repeated within the story, about a father who goes to hunt a great monster, and warns his family they must stake him through the heart with a birch limb if he returns more than 10 days later. Yari insists that if it's not real, it can't be scary, but if it was real, Father would protect them. If he was there.

Food is scarce, news scarcer still. The only neighbor Rosi introduces in the story (making mother and daughter feel truly isolated) claims something attacked and massacred his goats. Yari found wolves torn apart in the woods. Yari thinks she saw something outside the window at night. All of this takes a toll on Tatiana, trying to reassure her daughter and hold herself together alone. She grows more short-tempered and prone to alcohol-fueled rage as the isolation drags on. This culminates in a scene where Yari has gone far afield exploring and doesn't make it home after dark. Tatiana sits at the table, muttering over her powerlessness and dwindling supply of vodka. She cries over what she assumes will be Yari's fate, until the girl returns.

It's never said, but I assume the mark over Yari's eye was from some prior outburst, either after the husband left, or one he simply wasn't able to prevent. In any scenes in the past where we see Yari and her father together, Ivan Fiorelli always draws Yari's back to us. We also never see all three of them together, which seems to imply neither Tatiana's happiest memories with her husband, or Yari with her father, involve the other person.

Rosi cuts away to check in on the husband's situation periodically. The details are as one would suspect. Insufficient supplies, insufficient leadership, insufficient forces. Point is, it's bad. You can tell where the story's going from a long way off, if the fable Yari wants to hear isn't enough of a tipoff. (Notably, the husband makes reference to promises he made his daughter, but never mentions his wife.)

Sunday Splash Page #297

 

"Moonlit Murder," in La Cosa Nostroid #3, by Dan Harmon (writer), Rob Schrab (artist), Zac Rybacki (computer assistant/cyber dotter), letterer ???

Set in the world of Rob Schrab's Scud, the Disposable Assassin, La Cosa Nostroid followed the rise of Tony Tastey as he used his computer know-how to climb the ranks of the mafia, until he was able to influence the outcome of presidential elections.

It's a lot like a lot of mob movies, where the guy starts out running numbers or something, shows an aptitude, gains power, and slowly reveals himself to be a monster that uses up and spits out all the people who helped him get where he is. It just happens to involve giant robots, clones of dead guys attacking weddings, and mind wipes.

Of the four characters that pilot the "macrobot" with Tony in this issue, he has one of them killed for showing more concern for his injured girlfriend than whatever fight they were in, and another for knowing too much. He has Alice, the girlfriend of the first victim, do the killing of the second, because after she survived her injuries, he had her upgraded with cybernetic parts and her mind fucked with to love him. Tony barely knows her, he and his wife were on the outs and he decided he wanted a replacement.

The credits page always includes, along with a suggested soundtrack, a list of who either Harmon or Schrab would pick to be the voice actors for the different characters. Besides being kind of sad how many of these guys are dead - James Caan as the Reagan-knockoff Governor, Tom Sizemore as Forehead, Robert Loggia for Doghouse - it's a little disturbing how good of a pick in 1997 Johnny Depp was for Tony Tastey. An outwardly charming guy, who is actually a relentlessly abusive and controlling psychopath.

Schrab does most of the panels with black gutters, creating a cinema frame feel to go with the high-contrast of the black-and-white art. I think it works better for the conversations than it does the giant robot fights or wedding shootouts, but for those he also tends to shake-up the page layouts. The mech fights involve a lot of small panels of each guy in their own cockpit, reacting to the action. Those can be grouped together to show unity, or scattered around the page like there were tossed haphazardly across it when things go wrong.

The book stopped after 2 years and 9 issues with no conclusive ending. You can see it building, as the two remaining guys, Doghouse and Meredino, are both on their way out with Tony, one way or the other. My fingers would have been crossed for Tony's head to get splattered across a wall, but who knows if it would go that way.

Saturday Splash Page #99

 

"Arbor Day Surprise," in Tales to Astonish #13, by Stan Lee and Larry Lieber (writers), Jack Kirby (penciler), Dick Ayers (inker), Stan Goldberg (colorist), Ray Holloway (letterer)

Tales to Astonish would be Hank Pym's book for a time. First as Ant-Man, then Giant-Man, with the Wasp as his partner for much of it. Eventually, Pym would share the book with the Hulk, until being pushed out in favor of Namor as Marvel decided to gear a book towards fans of shirtless guys.

But before all that it was a book for short sci-fi/horror/suspense stories, the kind of stuff that would get reprinted in Fear. Minus two stories reprinted in that issue of Fear I linked, the only story I've got is the first appearance of Groot.

Or, a Groot, at least. It's your "monster of the week" fare, as Groot lands on Earth near an out-of-the-way town, and soon reveals himself, declaring his intent to take the town and its inhabitants back to Planet X for study. Which he's going to do by making the trees encircle the town and grow their roots underneath it and then carry the whole thing into space.

Where all the people will die from exposure to the vacuum. I guess Groot's people will learn at least one thing about humanity.

So this Groot is rocking some powers the Abnett/Lanning version didn't demonstrate, including the ability to draw strength from trees around him. This makes him too tough to burn, and the townspeoples' bullets can't penetrate deep enough to hit organs. But without guns and fire, what does humanity have? Why, science of course! The local scientist, who everyone (including his girlfriend) has derided as a milquetoast weakling for not picking up a gun at the first sign of trouble, saves the day with the power of termites he's been breeding in his lab.

The termites, high off alien lumber, went on a rampage, defoliating the entire valley and the local economy, heavily reliant on logging, tanked. Everyone left, except the scientist, who turned to making meth.

What I Bought 11/15/2023

I thought I found both of the new comics from this week I wanted, but upon a second glance, it was last month's issue of Fantastic Four. Oh well, leaves us with a Si Spurrier double feature.

Uncanny Spider-Man #3, by Si Spurrier (writer), Javier Pina (artist), Matt Milla (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - I ended up with the variant with the Vulture on it, and he looks really blurry. Is it supposed to be 3-D?

Nimrod and Vulture discuss recent attempts to deal with the "Creepy Crawler", as he keeps interfering in their plans. Nimrod's also not pleased Toomes hired Silver Sable, who refuses to leave until the job is done, under the cover of "professional ethics." Which don't preclude her canoodling with Nightcrawler in her off time.

Spurrier and Pina spend 5 pages on Kurt and Sable talking on a rooftop, with basically all the panels focused on them from the shoulders up, because they're both naked. Then another page on the lyrics to a Lila Cheney song Sable apparently really likes. If it's so critical the comic end next month that they're double-shipping this month, maybe cut some of the filler and make it a tight 4 issues, instead of a bloated five.

Kurt abruptly leaves to try and talk to his mother again, only to get attacked by Feral, Cloak, and Dagger, turned into Hounds by Toomes experimenting with the techno-organic virus. Did Dagger get caught in some other comic, because she was just fine last issue. But I guess this is why she couldn't find Cloak last issue, so assume he got caught sometime between issues 1 and 2, and her between 2 and 3.

Kurt cuts his way out of Cloak with his weird glowy "hopesword", and then Mystique shoots Cloak in the head. They show the large exit hole, naturally. It only slows him down, though one can't help but wonder what happens once the techno-organic virus isn't around the heal him up. Not like Mystique would give a shit either way, even if her brain wasn't a mess right now. Kurt's still arguing with the little ghost Bamf, what ever it is, and Mystique pulls a fade again.

Milla's colors maintain the feel of the book with the shift from Garbett to Pina. The Hound designs are pretty blah, nothing really remarkable or memorable about them. Some bright yellow-white bits, the old "yellow network of lines against black backdrop" from Warlock in places. I'm sure ORCHIS doesn't want the Hounds to be individualized - they're weapons - but it's still not visually interesting.

Coda #3, by Si Spurrier (writer), Matias Bergara (artist/colorist), Patricio Delpeche (color assists), Jim Campbell (letterer) - Lo, and I tell you, fear not the big marble being eaten by the big snake, for it, like a mouse's skeleton, shall pass.

Hum is trying very hard to stay out of what the preacher, formerly Mildew the Breaker, is doing. This new prophecy, which involves rewriting the end of the old world for a bunch of suckers. And a miracle, of course, or the appearance of one, which the mad illusionist is capable of creating. 

Hum is trying to focus on names for the possible approaching baby, without alerting Serka to that fact. For her part, Serka is aware the gnomad is going to use his new weapon to kill the preacher. Which could solve their problem of all these people trampling their garden, or make it much worse. They choose to get involved, though Spurrier and Bergara ignore the crowds outside for the entire discussion. It's just Hum and Serka and the pieces of their life. Hum fussing over her, Serka slowly armoring up. Glimpses of their respective steeds. It's ultimately about them as a couple, deciding what to do.

The miracle does not occur, nor does Mildew die. It doesn't matter. People believe what they want to believe, the only apparent deterrent is to kill them, and neither of the leads are up to that. Though they both lie to the other about how things went, Bergara contrasting what they say in solid panels with the typical color scheme, against panels with no borders done in basic shades of yellow for the truth. 

I mean, at least kill Mildew. Fine, he's a martyr then. But he doesn't benefit. Because he's dead. See if the threat of it's enough to make him change his tune, since this is all just a ploy anyway. Instead, Serka's got a notion to go on an extended vacation to seek a solution to the problem.

Six Isn't His Lucky Number

"Yo mama" jokes are passe. It's all about "my daddy" jokes now.

Venom: The Savage Six is the end of Rick Remender's stint writing Flash Thompson's - aka "Agent Venom" - adventures, and the beginning of Cullen Bunn's. In fact, the two of them co-write issues 18-21, which form the actual "Savage Six" portion of the trade.

The three issues prior to that revolve around Flash having been drafted into the "Secret Avengers", which Remender was taking over as writer from Warren Ellis. Flash trying to adjust to being on a team with Captain America (until Hawkeye takes over as leader), putting his foot in his mouth around Valkyrie, and having a whole other set of people to lie to about the fact the new Crime-Master knows who's wearing the symbiote. All of which also means more lying to his mother, his now ex-girlfriend Betty Brant, and his pal Peter Parker.

The Savage Six story itself is mostly Flash scrambling to protect his mother, sister and Betty from the fairly random assortment of villains the Crime-Master assembled. There's the Jack O'Lantern Remender and Tony Moore introduced in this series, but also The Fly, Death Adder from the Serpent Society(?), some digitized goof called Megatak, and the Toxin symbiote, bonded to Eddie Brock. It's not a great team since I'm not sure what history Flash has with Death Adder or Megatak. There's no meat to their presence, they're just here to make numbers.

At least two of those are Flash's own fault, as the Fly plays him with some sob story about a kid so that Flash lets him escape custody in issue 16. As for Brock, he was going around trying to kill all the symbiotes, and messed up Flash's attempt to put a bullet in Crime-Master's skull. Flash had to bail, and let Eddie webbed up to another symbiote bonded to him.

Flash ends up pulling the Fly's wings off, while Flash's mom watches, while Brock goes up like oil fire along with the symbiote because Flash can't pull him free in time. Not sure what point to draw from that. He showed mercy to one guy, and that guy turned around and tried to kill him. He left Brock to the wolves, then fucked up saving him.

Maybe the conclusion is Flash sucks at this. The last issue in the trade is his final showdown with Jack O'Lantern, who went ahead and stole Flash's dad's corpse as a taunt. How convenient Flash spends the entire issue thinking about his abusive drunk of a dad, and how similar they are.

Artist-wise, this collection is a mess. I know, no big surprise from Marvel in the early 2010s. Lan Medina draws issues 15 and 18-21, with Robert Atkins handling some pages in issue 20. Declan Shalvey draws issue 22. Kev Walker draws issues 16 and 17. There's 7 inkers, including Shalvey inking himself, and Walker doing likewise, but only on issue 16. There's 3 separate colorists, and no, they don't correspond to the primary artists, as Chris Sotomayor handles issues 16-21. There's even two different letterers!

Of the various art teams, the Shalvey/Lee Loughridge pairing is probably the best for setting mood. Shalvey sticks to a lot of wide, short panels, and more than the other artists, remembers the way the symbiote looks when Flash wears it is just something he's making it do. So as Flash loses control or gets angry, spikes start to protrude from it, and there are panels where you can see it's shifting more towards its classic appearance. And Loughridge drenches panels in a particular shade, playing up melancholy or fury.

Walker's art has rougher texture, and he tends to illustrate the violence more vividly than Medina or Shalvey. He likes tilted panels with rough-edged borders, although at times it's difficult to tell if I'm supposed to read across two pages or finish one then move to the next. Either way, the more graphic approach feels like a good choice; this is Venom, not Spider-Man. What's more, it's a Venom desperate to fix his earlier mistakes, proves he's not a fuck-up who lets people down all the time.

Comparatively, Medina's work is cleaner, more straightforward. Easy to read and tell what's happening, but kind of flat next to the others. Walker's Flash looks tired, eyes narrowed, face pinched, and he's not even scrambling to keep people alive yet. Medina's looks way too clean for someone already beat up and allegedly feeling a lot of pressure.

Waiting for the Barbarians (2019)

Charting the life a magistrate (Martin Ryvale) posted at a garrison on the border of what I'm assuming is the British Empire, maybe around what would be Afghanistan today. The magistrate takes a pretty lax approach to his duties, preferring to spend his time sifting through ruins in the surrounding region and recording what he finds there.

As far as he's concerned, there are no troubles with the "barbarians", the nomadic horsemen who move between the plains and the mountains, but Colonel Joll (Johnny Depp), feels otherwise. From there, things begin to fall apart for the magistrate, and the region. Joll takes patrols into the mountains and returns with people he interrogates via "pressure".

After he's departed, the magistrate meets a woman who experienced that torture and forms some sort of relationship with her. I don't know if he's in love with her, or it's a paternal attitude, or merely guilt. Either way, he leads his own patrol in the lands beyond the fort to find some of her people who might return her to her family. This is poorly timed, as he returns to find some lantern-jawed thug (played by Robert Pattinson) of Joll's waiting with several charges.

On the one hand, there's definitely the idea that Joll and his ilk are creating the problems with the locals by going out and attacking them, arresting them, torturing them until they say what Joll wants to hear. I did find it curious that Joll uses pressure as a euphemism for torture. For a man with no bend in him, who believes in the absolute rightness of his duty and his perceptions, who treats the who thing with the assembly line boredom of filling out requisition forms, I wouldn't think he'd see any need to dress up with he does.

Joll encourages the locals who live in the garrison to regard the people still living in the mountains as The Other, to be ridiculed, scorned or beaten. To cheer the British soldiers when they bring in a bunch of prisoners with their hands stitched to their faces, and then connected to each other in a chain by those stitches.

Of course, when all this backfires, as it does, the soldiers flee with their tails between their legs (as well as everything of value in the garrison that wasn't nailed down), leaving the locals whose support they demanded to twist in the wind.

Ryvale plays him as a soft-spoken man with a permanent air of distraction. He's not much of an administrator or adjudicator to the people who live around the garrison - his decision on the man who stole his neighbor's pig to stop it from eating his garden was lazy and half-assed - but he also understands that to the people who were born here, he and the rest of the soldiers are perceived as a passing thing. Transients that will move on eventually. So long as they don't assert themselves, they're tolerated. That's why he perceives there to be no problems.

But he still refers to them as "barbarians", the same as anyone else. From his brief sojourn to return the young woman to her people, he might have realized that the nomads don't see much difference between him and Joll. I think he has his own illusions, maybe some "noble savage" claptrap, maybe just that he views them as part of the scenery he passes by on the way to whatever old ruin he wants to sift through that day. I think the reality he's about to face when the movie ends will be rather different.

What I Bought 11/4/2023 - Part 3

I knew the store in town wouldn't have this, but the online store I usually buy from at the end of each month came up empty, too. Had the 4 books we looked at last week, just not this. But with Alex was in the next town over at the end of the previous week, had an excuse to try the store there and viola!

Midnight Western Theatre: Witch Trial #2, by Louis Southard (writer), Butch Mapa (artist), Sean Peacock (colorist), Buddy Beaudoin (letterer) - Damn dapper gents, making the rest of us look bad.

The issue starts with how Sarah first met Corson in 1691, all honeyed words and offers of assistance behind a pleasant smile. In what passes for the present in this story, Sarah is working with the Plague Doctor to figure out where Corson is. The answer, wooing Ortensia with pretty dresses and creepy proclamations a woman will be happier in a specific role. Namely, wearing pretty white dresses like a princess.

Sarah shows up, tells Ortensia to leave, and shoots Corson in the head. Whoo, problem solved, let's get hammered! Or not. Corson's fine, which Ortensia expected. But he's still far too powerful, and as he brags he's going to take Ortensia from Sarah, it's notable Mapa draws Sarah with her mouth erased. That carries over even to the panel where we see them as they were in 1691, when Sarah was the young girl who got duped by Corson. 

I don't know if it's something Corson is actually capable of, or if it's an illusion reinforced by Sarah's feelings of helplessness. Like Corson only has power over her because she thinks he does, but he did an excellent job building that "reality" in her mind when she was younger. Feels like it'll be relevant before this is done, much the same way as the ceremony to bind Horse to Ortensia, even beyond death, will probably be relevant.

So that's where we are. Corson's a demon who disguises that he's shackling a girl within "elevating" her. Putting her on a pedestal, something to sit and look pretty, but never move or speak or think. I'm assuming he chooses women he can sense power inside, and then uses them like a battery. Or maybe it's just for kicks. He wears white, immaculate suits and hats. He talks sweet, puts on manners and offers gifts. All bullshit, but classy bullshit, so people fall for it. Sarah did once, and she's still scarred from it. Ortensia is now, we'll see how that goes.

Sunday Splash Page #296

 

"Hit the Dusty Trail," in Kino's Journey: The Beautiful World, vol. 1, ch. 1, by Iruka Shiomiya

Kino's Journey is Keiichi Sigsawa's (with Kouhaku Kuroboshi's character designs) highly successful light novel (I'm guessing that's like young adult?) series in Japan, about Kino, a teenager who travels the world with a talking motorrad named Hermes. Kino's rule is never to stay in any land they visit for more than 3 days, though that usually seems to be long enough. It was turned into a 13-episode anime back in the 2000s (it's one of my favorites), and Viz Media released 8 volumes of manga adaptations of the stories starting in 2017.

While Volume 1 kicks off with where Kino was from and how they both met Hermes and took the name "Kino", the manga doesn't progress in chronological order. A story later in volume 1 references a land Kino and Hermes visited with only one inhabitant, but we don't see that adventure until volume 2. Volume 5 has stories starring the woman who taught Kino to shoot, set in her younger days, and volume 7 is Kino's first trip to another land after staying with Master for some time.

Most of the stories are frankly depressing, focused on humanity's ability to destroy themselves. Or come up with excuses to destroy others, maybe. The country with only one citizen is an example of the danger of mob rule, as the majority always executes the minority after every vote. Much better than a tyrannical king. A woman neglected her family to develop automatons, and once the family is dead, decides she's the automaton built to serve her "family". Kino saves three guys from starving in the winter, and they turn out to be slave traders who ate their most recent prisoner when their truck broke down. The book's subtitle, "The Beautiful World" really feels like a joke, even if Shiomiya draws some lovely landscapes for Kino to travel through.

Shiomiya (I assumed based off how Sigsawa wrote them) writes Kino as generally nonplussed by any of this. They can be bright and bubbly like a child at times, dancing when a sudden downpour saves them from dying of thirst, or taking full advantage of a high-quality hotel room an an affordable price. But violence or cruelty rarely faze them. Maybe they've seen too much, or maybe they don't think there's anything they can do. These people want to be this way, and Kino's just a traveler passing through. They know what happens to travelers who object too loudly to local customs.

The manga ended with the former prince Shizu ending his wandering days to take on responsibility for a lost child, but there's no indication Kino or Hermes will do likewise. They'll keep traveling the world, occasionally getting lost or receiving bad directions. Staying three days at a time in a different land and then moving on. Not a bad life if you can hack it, I guess. I don't think I could.

And that concludes the letter K. Quick, I know.

Saturday Splash Page #98

 

"Cryptkeeper", in Tangent Comics: Green Lantern, by James Robinson (writer), J.H. Williams (penciler), Mick Gray (inker), Lee Loughridge (colorist), Dave Lanphear (letterer)

In 1997 and 1998, DC released a series of comics taking place in a new universe. Green Lantern, for example, became a woman in a cloak with a green lantern. The Atom, one in a family line of heroes stemming from an early nuclear age experiment. The Doom Patrol, a group of time travelers, returning from the 2030s in the attempts to avert the World That's Coming. That's not what it was called, I just like the phrase. 

Beyond that, the one-shots tended to take different approaches with the characters. Green Lantern hewed closer to the hosts of DC's old horror and suspense titles, acting as narrator for stories about people returned from the dead to complete one final act. Doom Patrol was one of those self-fulfilling prophecy time travel stories. The Flash - starring a bubbly teenage girl with light powers - was almost a cartoon, as her own father tried to capture or destroy her with an increasingly deranged series of goofy science super-weapons, only to have each one backfire like he was Wil E. Coyote.

Superman, written by Mark Millar, was about the surviving son of a bunch of highly unethical experiments the U.S. Army performed on African-Americans, gaining incredible intelligence and through that unlocking other capabilities of his mind. Like that whole thing about Deathstroke using the other 90% of his brain people supposedly don't, but if that turned you into Doctor Manhattan.

Wonder Woman was an extended play on the word "wonder" as the title character spends the entire issue locked in existential navel-gazing about whether she deserves to live, or is even alive, while fighting for her life. Because Peter David. Point being, the creators went a lot of different routes with these things.

The connections between the books gradually tightened as they progressed. Characters in other books would reference the original truth about the original Atom after it was revealed in that one-shot. The Joker -  a mysterious madcap woman pulling pranks to humiliate and expose both criminals and corrupt authority figures - got two one-shots. John Ostrander and Jan Duursema wrote two stories about a mysterious cabal lurking in the shadows of the U.S. government that relied on magic, called Nightwing. The power struggle between it and a similar group in Europe spilled over into other books.

Eventually several of the heroes form a team, a "secret six", but they don't do much together before being curb-stomped (largely off-panel) by some Soviet Ultra-Humanite, who got very little page time and just sort of shows up to be a big enough threat some characters that were content to mind their own business decide to work together. Maybe even form a league, devoted to some higher ideal.

There was another mini-series of sorts in 2008, Superman's Reign, but that seemed to be more about some of the Tangent universe heroes popping into the DCU

What I Bought 11/4/2023 - Part 2

It's actually almost light out when I go to work now, what with the clocks being set back. Of course, I get maybe 3 hours of sunlight to enjoy after I get off work, but I spend a lot of afternoons napping anyway, so that's not huge loss.

It's Jeff! The Jeff-verse #1, by Kelly Thompson and Gurihiru - I actually went with the variant of Jeff and the Black Cat. They were all the same cost, and Jeff gleefully eating jewels was an amusing image.

Much like the first It's Jeff from back in spring, this is a collection of short strips Thompson and the Gurihiru team did on Marvel's digital app first. And so it's mostly Jeff being adorable, or ravenous, or adorably ravenous. (Ravenously adorable?)

Gwen trying to find some way to make Jeff stop pulling at the bandages on his injured tail, and Jeff dealing with the indignity of Cone of Shame. Jeff encountering a toy store full of merchandise starring him. Unlicensed merchandise, no less. Remarkably, the guilty party is not Deadpool. Jeff being caught up in mad science where he's first shrunk and menaced by an ant, and then he and the ant become giant. Which leads to a funny gag of Jeff growing so large he wears part of Avengers' tower as a hat, which he then carefully replaces on the building after he climbs down.

Two of my favorites were when Jeff confronts a bully dog at the dog park, so that all the dogs can play with the ball and have fun, and the one where Gwenpool and Kate Bishop have him try on different Halloween costumes. The first demonstrating it's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's that one of the dogs is a shark.

The second for how comically exaggerated Gurihiru depict Jeff's teeth when he smiles, and how dejected he looks when the girls react in horror. They don't have him full on sobbing or anything, just slumped shoulders to go with a single tear in the corner of his lifeless, black eyes. Like a doll's eyes, except not as creepy.

It's fluff, but as before, it's cute fluff.

A Haunting on Mars #1, by Zach Chapman (writer/letterer), Ruairi Coleman (illustrator), Steve Canon (colorist) - Maybe if Carpenter had gone harder on the body horror, Ghosts of Mars would have been a better movie.

A small team is sent to the failed colony on Mars by a big corporation for. . .something. The specifics are not revealed, because our viewpoint character is a hacker the corporation caught after she released a lot of their private information into the world. So the soldier in charge isn't being very forthcoming.

Their shuttle crashes for some reason, forcing them to hike to the destination, where they encounter hungry dogs with big red boils on their bodies. The squad psionic deals with them, but about wipes herself and everyone else out in the process. The empath is not doing well surrounded by all the death and horror, and considering what they find at the mansion, he's probably not going to be feeling better any time soon.

Chapman tries to give a little backstory or a hint of personality to each character, granting that Ryker (the other soldier) has a personality of "complains a lot". Paz, the psionic, seems to have an overachiever thing going, or maybe she doesn't like following orders. They're all in vaguely similar armor, if colored somewhat differently, but Coleman uses enough close-up panels to show their distinctive faces.

It feels like the real conflict is going to be not between the squad and whatever that was on the last page (some horrible melding of man and tubing), but between Cass the hacker and Morgan the leader. Because there's no explanation for what went wrong with the shuttle, or why it crashed, and Morgan admits to the empath he's hiding things, but couches it as relating to the patents they're trying to recover.

When Cass was injured and it damaged the control collar, Morgan injected her with controlling nanites under the cover of sealing the wound. Cass took steps to negate that, so it's a question of if Morgan has figured that out yet, and can Cass figure out what's going on and take measures first? it may just be genre familiarity, but it feels significant we don't know specifically what they're looking for, and that Morgan knows more than he's telling anyone, even the people who aren't criminals doing a Suicide Squad stint.