The late nights when I help Alex with a gig definitely take more of a toll than they used to. Lot harder to drag myself out of bed in the morning. Or maybe I'm better about recognizing I don't need to get up, so take the extra sleep. Yeah, let's go with that.
For today, two mini-series that wrapped up last month.
There's a lot in this. Blake's robot did finish patching up Nada last issue before rushing to Blake's aid, and now bot and creator are sort of woven together. No mention of the bot planning to swipe some of Nada's power or the threat that it's mind is linked across servers allover the world. Also, Nada's changed her helmet design and lost the trenchcoat. I didn't think much of it initially, but it's not a bad shift by Villanelli. The helmet covers everything except her mouth, which is maybe her real weapon. The rest is shielded, and she's ditched the coat that sort of billowed and hid her. She's ready to act openly, and expecting a fight.
The "ferals", minus the anthropologist, follow Nada to Earth, but the three kids don't agree with her plan to destroy power plants because that would shut down hospitals and kill people. They're more frustrated that technology was supposed to free people from drudgery and let them create, but it's being used to create art instead. So Nada rolls with it, telling Blake-bot to tamper with a quantum computer. Which is a different kind of machine, so it causes satellites to fall from the sky and fires in lithium battery factories, along with power outages. Which is probably fine with Nada, since I think her goal is just to convince Earthlings to destroy themselves and their world as revenge for what was done to her world.
There never is any resolution to the, "Earth was using Nada's world as an illegal landfill," thread.
Carol's late getting there because she got blindsided by Nitro, who is really just frustrated because he gets blamed for kill Mar-Vell. He didn't think the guy would jump on a radioactive bomb and get cancer, but now everyone hates him. Carol taking the name Captain Marvel just reminds him or how his notable accomplishment (I guess we're ignoring him blowing up a school in Civil War), made him a pariah. It's pitiful and sort of hilarious that he won by a complete accident, because he couldn't grasp Mar-Vell acting differently than Nitro would in that situation. What a moron.
Spider-Woman and the others show up during the fight with Nitro to help out and get Carol home. There's a bit where Carol is buried under an avalanche, where she wonders if she pushed the kids too hard, and that's why Nada was able to (initially) turn them. Maybe she's too bossy. By the time Spider-Woman shows up, Carol immediately gives her an order (even before the "glad to see you hug".) The panel above, the second and third caption boxes, that's basically the extent of her questioning whether she's off-track before doing the Principal Skinner, "it's the children who are wrong" meme.
She does set aside catching Nitro so they can get back to Earth, and leaves Nada to the ferals because she's best equipped to deal with plummeting satellites. So there's an ability to prioritize, to recognize which threat has to be dealt with by her, but I don't think she had an epiphany about how now everyone responds well to being bossed around or told to haul themselves up by their bootstraps.
There's something there about her demanding a lot of others, but no more than she expects of herself, but I don't think Nocenti pulled off what the story tries to suggest, that Carol did reach the kids. The three teens had their own notions of what's wrong with the world and how to fix it. Nada gave them power, but they wouldn't just follow her tune. Nada even acknowledges she chose people who were too willful. I think we needed one more real conversation between Danvers and the teenagers, after they've got their power and Nada's made her pitch, for me to believe Captain Marvel really impacted them.
Maple reaches town as Razorfist has the reverend crucified. her attempt to get Screw Driver up and moving only makes her a target, and as Screw Driver tries to shield her, this triggers some latent programming which causes Maple's body to transform into a Gatling gun arm to replace Screw Driver's missing limb. Which brings a swift end to Razorfist and sets what's left of his gang to running.
Fuentes and SB have that sequence span two pages, with three rows of panels. The transformation is on the top row, while Screw Driver turning Razorfist to scrap takes the middle row, which gets probably two-thirds the page space. There's part of me that gets this is the big deal, the end of the antagonist, and so it deserves the most space. But it feels like the transformation is more significant in light of later developments, and it's confined to three small panels in the upper right corner. Some of that might be SB's thick lines and rough coloring can't quite give it enough weight. There's no sense of triumph or surprise really in the art. It just kind of happens.
Anyway, Screw Driver collapses and Maple reverts to her usual form. The reverend, in all the show of humanity and gratitude I'd expect of a man of the cloth, insists they be destroyed. Maple's brother objects, as does the marshal and at least some of the other residents. Marcus keeps the residents from fighting by taking Maple and Screw Driver home. Screw Driver gets a new arm, but Marcus still leaves to help his grandfather fight the laws making automatons illegal.
So it's Maple and Screw Driver, together, the way Maple's mother apparently intended, as we learn via a message she tried to send into the future before setting out to look for Screw Driver. They never do explain how Screw Driver or Razorfist could see or learn of songs from the future, but Maple's mother figured that must mean there was a way to send messages from the past.
That's basically where it ends. The singing cowboy (automaton), his adopted daughter/weapon mod, and their big insectile robot steed. Roaming the west together, no doubt staying one step ahead of that reverend. It's not a bad ending. Some light at the end, but not all tied together neatly.
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