Owing to tagging along with Alex on the Quest for Archaic Turntables, I hit up the comic shop in the next town over again last week, and found both the comics I wanted. Was that worth the 5 hours in the car, dealing with every driver on Interstate 70 having lost their minds? Eh, hard to say.
Plesko monologues about how he just really likes to study the horrible things people do to each other. He worked with Bushman after the guy appeared to kill Marc, then helped Moon Knight later on. But he's tired of being an observer, hence the plan to drive the entire city murderously insane. Although that feels like he's still an observer, especially since he flies off in a helicopter, but I guess it's a matter of how much control the average person will have over themselves and what they do when the plan goes live.
Either way, no one can get to Marc to help, and he's bleeding out. Rosenberg, who has mostly kept the colors starkly defined in this series, matching the sharp edges of Cappuccio and Sabbatini's art, does a lot more blurring here. Not just the bloodstains on Marc's costume, or the smudged look of Zodiac and Plesko's masks. There's a lovely couple of pages of Marc asking Khonshu for help as he tries to move. Where the bid-skeleton's mostly been rendered in sharp detail up to this point in the series, here he's swirls of light and dark taking the shape of a beak or talons. Moon Knight's cloak seems to get bigger and heavier, weighing him down. It's a lovely couple of pages of a self-destructive guy at the end of his rope.
But with Jake and Steven urging him on, Marc drags himself to the control panel and blows the whole thing up, and him with it. Right. Sure. I note here that in issue 28, we saw Eight-Ball crawling through ventilation ducts without an explained purpose, then never saw him again until the last page of this issue, when we see he and the rest of the cast are apparently keeping the Midnight Mission going.
As for Zodiac, he didn't realize there's no more resurrection for Moon Knight, and makes a deal with the Midnight Mission where it lets him leave. To hunt and torture Plesko to death, apparently. So he's still on the loose, which is, unsatisfying to say the least. I hope he's not going to start calling himself Moon Knight, that would be obnoxious, even if it feels fitting for such a wannabe edgelord character.
Blood Run is a car race between a bunch of weirdos and their souped-up, heavily armed machines. There's a near constant string of commentary by an unseen announcer, making a constant string of sly jokes (using the term loosely) and puns. So, about as annoying as your typical pro wrestling announcer.
The main character, to the extent there is one, is Avalon Red, a bubblegum popping redhead in a boxy muscle car, but Pozios and Cardoselli surround her with a bunch of other unusual vehicles, their drivers given some brief introduction. Ice cream man, sheriff, mortician, trashmen, genius daughter of a time-traveler and a horndog stock car racer. Wait, what?
There's not much to it beyond the announcer describing these characters and the action, while we alternate between overhead or profile views of the cards (which are mostly muddy-colored outlines) and close-ups of the drivers. For most of them, that means close-ups of their deaths, while for Red, it mostly means close-ups of her glaring or blowing a bubble. Cardoselli still has an exaggerated, selectively simple style. Meaning, when he wants to go into more detail, the design on Red's shirt, the specific number of teeth one of the trashmen has, he'll do it. But when he doesn't think he needs it, stuff can really become just vague shapes in one color.
There's a few pages near the end about a specific grudge Red has against the trashmen (and vice versa), but characterization and plot are thin on the ground. The last page offers a reason for that, and I don't know how I liked it. Taken on its own terms, it works with the comic, it's that my expectations going in didn't match what Pozios and Cardoselli were looking to do.
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