Saturday Splash Page #152

 

"Nightmares of the Frontier," in Space Outlaws #2, by Marco Fontanili

Normally I wouldn't do a 3-issue mini-series when only two issues had been released. But considering the second issue came out a year ago, there's been no sign of the third issue, or even a re-solicitation, and given Scout Comics in general seems to be circling the drain, doesn't seem much point in waiting.

A dangerous alien escapes a Martian prison and crash lands on Earth in the American West of the 19th Century. Concerned what F-24K could do, the Martians (bug-looking things) send a killer robot, code-named "OV3RKILL" after the fugitive. F-24K hijacks the body of some poor farmer that was about to kill himself anyway, while the robot pulls a Terminator and takes the clothes of the first dumb cowboy he encounters. By the end of the second issue, the robot's just caught up to its target, and the real fight is about to begin.

A real fight we'll likely never see. It's a book light on plot or characterization, and long on style and vibe. Fontanili uses thick lines and heavy blacks in his work, making everyone's jaws or eyes stand in sharp contrast to their surroundings. A lot of close-up panels on the sort of body horror F-24K likes to inflict. Most of the comic is in black-and-white, with color - mostly shades of yellow or red - saved for added contrast or significant moments. So the poor farmer's eye may be colored in black-and-white, but the tendrils of F-24K's body that squiggle around it are in a bright magenta.

What I Bought 11/16/2024 - Part 2

While looking to see if the second season of The Invisible Man was available on any streaming services, last month, I found out the Roku Channel not only had that, but also Hardcastle & McCormick. Which was a nice surprise in a nostalgic way. I have vague memories - mostly of the car and the opening theme song - of watching it with my dad at some point. Unfortunately, they took it off the day after the election. Like, "Dumbest Asshole You Know Elected President - Again," wasn't enough bad news.

Deadpool #8, by Cody Ziglar and Alexis Quasarano (writers), Roge Antonio (artist), Guru-eFX (color artist), Joe Sabino (letterer) - I see Eleanor's developed her father's aversion to dodging.

A chunk of this issue is dedicated to Valentine explaining how their relationship with Wade ended. Essentially, they were taking merc jobs together, but Valentine started to miss research. So Wade took more merc jobs to pay the bills, while Valentine got wrapped up in their own work, and they drifted apart until Valentine just left. Seems like trying to explain to Wade they both need to pull back from work a little might have been the better option, but overall, that's much less disastrous than I expected.

That done, Ellie makes a pitch to Valentine to help resurrect Deadpool (whose corpse still isn't decomposing, and is currently chilling in a kiddie pool of half-melted ice cubes.) Valentine admits it sounds like magic's involved, but that's outside their expertise. Ellie is still banking on being able to figure out alchemy if she just watches enough online videos, which makes me wonder why Ziglar and Quasarano don't dust off Diablo, a character I know has figured out alchemy. Or maybe he's just doing magic he dresses up as alchemy? OK, I admit my grasp on Diablo's shtick is limited.

Whatever, Diablo's not here, but MODOK is! Yes, MODOK is using Big Pharma as a cover for whatever his latest schemes are. I guess the T.O.D.D.-bots should have been a clue, as are the administrative support people with lightsaber hands who try to kill Valentine for deciding to leave and help Ellie and Princess. The 'bots are dealt with, but MODOK may be a more complicated issue.

Part of me thinks Ellie's going to come to some kind of understanding with MODOK, if only because she can't keep charging headlong into everything. That didn't work for her dad, and he was a lot more accustomed to pain than she is. I guess I expect Ziglar and Quasarano to have her just sort of collapse at some point as the whole thing really hits her. But maybe not, if they're really bringing Wade back in a couple of months.

Whever I Go, I'm Still Me (Playing Video Games)

Alex and I are probably not great tourists. We don't spending a lot of time checking out notable landmarks. During our brief stay in Madison last weekend, we forgot to go see the plaque commemorating that time Elvis broke up a street fight by jumping out of his limo and striking a karate pose. The shame!

Besides comic stores and playing some mini-golf at a place that's apparently been in business since the '50s, we hit up 3 different arcades. One of them was just down the street from our hotel, and it was $8 for unlimited gaming, which meant we could unwind from 7+hours on the road by beating the X-Men arcade game on a screen that took up half a wall. We each only died. . .a bunch of times! 

(I did suggest Alex might want to stop spamming Colossus' special move right from the start, since it was draining his health, but he stuck with his strategy. I guess if you never run out of continues, why not?)

Even with Alex not waking up until after 11 the next morning, we still had a lot of time to kill before his gig, and the venue wasn't far from two bars with sizeable arcades, so we hit each one at different times. And the last one had a Spider-Man arcade game I'd never seen before. Part of the time, it's your standard side-scrolling beat 'em up arcade game (what the game calls "Big Mode".) You kick, you punch, you jump kick. There's a special move that drains some of your health. You fight a lot of cannon fodder that are just palette-swapped versions of each other.

The rest of the time, it's a platformer, where you move between all these catwalks and rooftops, hitting enemies with your webs or avoiding them by climbing ceilings, grabbing health recovery pickups as you go along. The game refers to this as "Wide Mode" since the camera zooms out, making Spidey a much smaller figure, so you can see more of what's going on around you.

Not that I'm an expert on arcade games, but I didn't feel I'd seen that combo in one game previously. While there seem to be a lot more health recovery items in Wide Mode, the game makes you fight bosses in each, so neither one is necessarily easy (although the fact you can avoid enemies in Wide Mode does allow for a bit of a breather.) Less appealing, your character's health seems to drop a little at a time, even if you're just standing there. I assume to make you keep moving, but it's a stupid mechanic.

The game doesn't skimp on boss fights, pulling out a sizeable chunk of Spidey's enemies, though you still end up fighting Venom a lot. Three times in the opening stage, then one more time at the very end (but there are three of him.) I guess if you really want to kick the crap out of Venom, it's a great game, and the fights against him are less annoying than the part where the Green Goblin flies off the screen, then comes back through lobbing bombs. That wouldn't be so bad if your character could move faster, but he can't, so it's a pain in the butt.

Like X-Men, you have the option to play as other characters. What's odd is the ones they picked, even allowing for Spider-Man not typically being on a team in the early '90s. Black Cat? OK, sure. She'd been an ally more than a foe for a long time. But the other two characters are Hawkeye and Namor. Which is actually what made me to stop dead in my tracks. No one was playing, so the game was rolling some gameplay footage, and there was Namor, crawling up the side of a girder like Spider-Man. So I decided I had to play, even if I did stick with Spider-Man the whole way through. Supposedly the characters play differently, and the game leaned into the notion of Namor being able to absorb and redirect electricity for his special attack.

I did beat it, though I burned at least 12 quarters in the process. The game really likes making you fight the generic goons while also fighting a boss, which was really frustrating. Except when you could grab one of the goons and judo toss him into the super-villain. Anyway, I got the 2nd highest score.

But I'm just thinking about how those are the three people Spidey ends up enlisting. Even if Dr. Strange was doing the old tarot card bit from Secret Defenders, I feel like he might stop and reshuffle the deck. There's a "Sorcerer's Stone" involved, which the Kingpin appears to have swiped, but he's not the actual final boss (SPOILER: it's Dr. Doom.) I guess Black Cat could have heard about the heist through her contacts. And maybe it's Atlantean, so Namor's pissed it got stolen, though it still seems like a member of the FF would have made more sense, given Doom's presence. Hawkeye? Hawkeye was just bored, saw the other three talking, and injected himself into the mix.

What I Bought 11/16/2024 - Part 1

The local comic store's orders haven't been showing up, which is why no reviews of new comics recently. However, I went with Alex to a gig in Wisconsin last weekend. Maybe not the smartest idea to do a 1,000 miles of driving in 40 hours, ahead of a week of inspections, but oh well. Among other things, we checked out a comic store, and it had all the books from the last two weeks I wanted.

Which is only three comics, but is still a welcome result.

Batgirl #1, by Tate Brombal (writer), Takeshi Miyazawa (artist), Mike Spicer (colorist), Tom Napolitano (letterer) - It feels like her foot is turned kind of oddly, but Cass is the fighting expert, so I guess there's a reason.

Shiva contacted Batgirl because they're both in danger from a group called The Unburied, but who basically look like The Hand's Blue Division. What the ninjas want, besides (apparently) Cass and Shiva's deaths, is not explained, but they're (apparently) dangerous enough Shiva decides it's better for her and Cass to run than fight.

I keep saying "apparently" because I can't shake the feeling Shiva's not to be trusted. Brombal and Miyazawa use this bit of smaller panels focused on Shiva's face or hand, with one-word captions describing what Cassandra is reading. Except Cass also mentions that her mother knows that skill, and knows how to deceive. And on the last page, when Cass leaps to Shiva's assistance, Miyazawa draws Shiva standing behind Cass wearing what I'd call a smirk. She was in a martial arts stance two panels earlier, but seems to have dropped it once her daughter gets involved. Is that because having someone to fight alongside her changes her approach, or because this is all part of her plan?

It looks as though Brombal's going to focus on Cass and Shiva's relationship. It's comparatively untouched compared to Cass' relationship with David Cain, and most of what we've seen is just them beating the crap out of each other, and temporarily killing each other. Shiva clearly enjoys pushing Cass' buttons, while Cass spends as much of the initial fight attacking Shiva in a way that lets them attack their opponents unexpectedly.

Calavera P.I. #1, by Marco Finnegan (writer/artist), Jeff Eckleberry (letterer) - Can he blow smoke rings with no lips?

In 1925, Juan Calavera is a private investigator who rescues a bunch of girls smuggling into L.A. for some rich white guy, with a little assistance from local reporter Maria Valdez and her trusty flashbulb. Despite the successful conclusion of the case, Calavera doesn't seem happy with the life he leads. So maybe it's fortunate that, later that night, his attempt to keep a grieving mother from killing herself or any innocent bystanders, ends in his death.

After that, Finnegan jumps ahead five years, where Valdez is running some kind of production company, when she gets a call that tells her to 'find the detective.' Oh, and she better hurry, because her son's been abducted by a clown. So she tries a ritual, and Calavera's back among the living. As a trenchcoat-wearing skeleton, which is kind of odd since we don't see him wearing a trenchcoat prior to this. But I guess even nights in L.A. can get cold with no blood or tissue wrapped around your bones.

Finnegan sticks with solid blocks of color on this book, but in duller tones than were used in Morning Star. I like the look of it, and his design on his characters seems more consistent. Doesn't feel like the colors swamp his lines, faces don't end up looking strange sometimes. The brief fight scene is laid out in a simple progression, but Finnegan uses yellow rectangles against a darker background for highlighting a point of emphasis. It's a nice touch, or maybe I'm just more interested in this story than I was Morning Star.

Blue Ruin (2013)

Dwight (Macon Blair) lives in his car on a beach in Delaware, until he learns the man who killed his parents 10 years ago is being released from prison. He goes to the prison, where we get a nice play in contrasts between this man living alone in his beat-to-shit Bonneville, with a ratty white-shirt, and a man who murdered two people, who gets picked up by a half-dozen family members in a limo. Dwight follows them to a bar, and clumsily knifes the killer in the bathroom. At which point everything goes wrong.

So it's a movie about revenge and how easily that can get out of control. How it's rarely anything like in action movies, how people don't stop to consider the consequences until after the fact. For all that his life seems to have come to a halt since his parents' death, Dwight's clearly not spent that time making plans. He tried buying a gun, but he lives off the money he makes recycling cans he finds on the beach. He's not getting a gun. He loses his car keys while killing the guy, which he doesn't realize until after he's cut his hand angrily knifing one of the limo's tires, which is too bad since that's the car he has to steal.

Which means his car got left behind. Which means the family knows who killed the guy. Which means his sister and her kids are in danger. Which means Dwight has to fix this, somehow.

Before and after, he walks around in kind of a wide-eyed daze. There's no urgency, but also nothing measured in his movements. He'll start towards one idea, then abandon it mid-stride for something else. Grab a pitchfork for lack of better weapons, then set it aside and decide to try and sneak out of the house and steal his car back instead. Hit a guy with the car, then go back and forth between throwing the guy in his trunk and taking the guy's gun. Which gets him an arrow in the leg. It could, in a different framing, be played for laughs, but here it shows how unprepared he is.

The camera angles sometimes so that the light flares in the lens and obscures him entirely from us, in the same way the voices of other characters often become indistinct as Dwight gets lost in his own thoughts. Everyone else we see has moved on with their own lives in one way or another, even if, like his sister, they still harbor some anger. He bailed on his friends without a word, and they grew up, got jobs. Now Dwight's just blown in and started all this, and they have to deal with it.

And Dwight knows this. Blair is soft-spoken, unsure, awkward and apologetic with everyone. Whether he's actually sorry I'm less sure of. He does seem willing to die if that would just end this thing (though that might be a death wish on his part), but he knows there won't be any guarantee the killer's family will leave it there. So where's that leave him? Ruining someone else's life like his once was, apparently.

Show Biz'll Kill Ya

You've heard of a bull in a china shop, now here's Rhino in the dressing room!

Down in Flames, Up in Smoke is the first 5 issues of the Amazing Mary Jane book Marvel had going in 2020. Mary Jane as the lead actress on what is a Mysterio biopic, and discovers in the first issue that the film is not being directed by the famous Cage McKnight, but by Mysterio himself.

(Mysterio assures us McKnight is fine, scouring the Falkands to find just the right penguin to star in, "Jaws, but with penguins.")

After an impassioned plea by Mysterio, who requested her for the lead role (for reasons I'm never entirely clear about), MJ agrees to stay on the film because she believes he's genuine about trying to make this film, and that's he's giving other former criminals or villains an opportunity (and paying them at industry-standard rates, he assures her.) From there, it's MJ helping Quentin Beck troubleshoot the various complications that arise in shooting the film.

The people financing the movie get cold feet and withdraw their money, forcing improvisation on a tighter budget. The guy playing Spider-Man loses his nerve and leaves. The guy playing Mysterio leaves when the big budget does. Several of Spider-Man's other enemies keep trying to sabotage the film, because they aren't happy with their portrayals. Which does result in a fairly ridiculous bit at the end where MJ, sans any powers or Iron Man armors, holds off six super-villains - Vulture, Rhino, Cobra, Stegron, Tarantula, and Scorpion - while the crew finish the last day of shooting.

While Mysterio put her through a sort of boot camp when she took over as Spider-Man for the last scene, and insisted on practical effects, including X-Men robots - which really seems like more an Arcade thing - it still seems a bit much she held them off solo as long as she did.

Williams writes MJ as extremely adaptable, able to think on the fly, and work with sudden complications. Whether that's due to her past experience in Hollywood, or her experience being in a relationship with a super-hero, I'm not sure. But she pretty much keeps the movie on track and is near constantly helping Mysterio make it better, whether that's with make her character more well-rounded, with her own motivations, improving the dialogue, or leaning into the fact Beck is way more hot-headed than the actual Cage McKnight.

Carlos Gomez, who draws all 5 issued (with Lucas Warneck assisting on issue 3) goes all-in on the dramatic poses for McKnight/Beck, whether he's hitting tables or shaking his fists at the sky. Mary Jane, in contrast, is drawn as much more relaxed and upbeat. Constantly having to rein Beck in and keep his eyes on the prize.

Mysterio's written as extremely passionate about this project, to his detriment, as that's how he loses his primary funding, but also with very specific notions on "art", and that what he's creating is going to be art. He hates the idea of using illusions to compensate for the budget cuts, because he feels it compromises the genuine nature of the film. He seems like he would simultaneously be great to work for (enthusiasm and work ethic undeniable) and terrible to work for (temperamental as all get out.) Williams has him make reference to possibly not having much time left, but I have no idea what that refers to. MJ's character also seems to be based on a woman who influenced or supported him at one time, and I have no idea who that is, either. Sure hope it wasn't Karen Page! 

Gomez's work reminds me of Mark Brooks', back when Brooks drew Cable/Deadpool. Especially in how he draws Mysterio, the shape of his head and jaw, the way he shades things. It's fine, overall; the story doesn't give him the chance to stretch himself the way he has on Fantastic Four. He's mostly drawing regular people, and a lot of the time they're talking while walking through sound stages or riding in golf carts.

Williams and Gomez mix in periodic phone conversations between MJ and Peter Parker, who knows what movie she's working on, but not who is actually directing it. I'm not clear on their relationship status at this time, other than they're at least on good terms. At one point, MJ starts playing music over the phone and insists Peter dance with her for 20 seconds, while he's in the grocery store, so I'm guessing things were in a decent place.

Sunday Splash Page #349

 

"Sunrise Over the City," in Mary Jane and Black Cat: Beyond #1, by Jed MacKay (writer), C.F. Villa (artist), Erick Arciniega (color artist), Travis Lanham (letterer)

After Nick Spencer's stint as writer on Amazing Spider-Man, but before Zeb Wells', Marvel handed the book over to a small team of writers. Peter Parker was laid up after getting hit with a lot of radiation (courtesy of the U-Foes, I think), and so Ben Reilly stepped in as Spider-Man in the interim while Captain America and the Black Cat tried to help Peter recover. Except Ben was being sponsored by the Beyond Corporation, and they messed with his head, and it all ended badly.

In the midst that was this one-shot, where The Hood, sans his namesake piece of fashion (courtesy of a Hawkeye mini-series I didn't read because it was written by Matthew Rosenberg, and he's on my no-buy list since that crappy Multiple Man mini-series), finds out Felicia Hardy's been visiting this loser photographer in the hospital and uses Peter as leverage to make her retrieve his hood. Mary Jane happened to be there when Felicia arrives, so she claims MJ is part of the crew she needs for this job to get MJ clear. Then the two of them work to track down the hood in one night while Peter sleeps through the whole thing.

Much of the part where they try to track down the hood is kept light and kind of breezy. MacKay's working the whole thing around the idea everybody wants something. Robbins wants his hood; Felicia and MJ want Peter to be safe; each of the people they question wants something in exchange. Except Mr. Fear and the Shocker, who just get their asses kicked. And I know Shocker's treated as a total joke these, but MJ really shouldn't be able to do anything to him with a baseball bat. The whole point is the suit cushions impacts!

Ahem. The heist comes when the trail leads to someone who doesn't want anything from them, it's set up in such a way Mary Jane's talents as an actress can play a role. Villa has a lot of fun with the expressions, as neither lady is happy with this set-up. So there's a fair amount of frustration and sarcasm on both their parts, as well as times where each of them is in their element and moving with total assurance and confidence.

The story does require me to accept the idea that Parker Robbins is any actual threat to Peter Parker, which is hard to manage. Yes, Parker's nowhere near full strength, but we're talking about an ordinary guy with one gun. No special magic cloak, no super-powered henchmen, or any henchmen for that matter. Just loser-ass Parker Robbins. (If the concern was Peter blowing his secret identity, that's another matter, but that's not how MJ explains her demand Robbins not even point his gun at the sleeping Peter.)

The important thing is, the Hood winds up dead. The long nightmare is over! Then Benjamin Percy brought him back in Ghost Rider. Booooooooo!

Saturday Splash Page #151

 

"Down the Barrel of a Gun," in Spectacular Spider-Girl #2, by Tom DeFalco (writer), Ron Frenz (writer/penciler), Sal Buscema (finished art), Bruno Hang (colorist), Dave Sharpe (letterer)

A 4-issue mini-series from 2010, where New York City is in the middle of a gang war between Black Tarantula and an old-school Maggia guy enhanced with cybernetics. No, not Silvermane. This guy calls himself Silverback. I guess DeFalco and Frenz thought Silvermane would have to be dead by now or something.

Mayday promised her parents she'd stay out of it, but it's not sitting well with her. But she's got enough problems as it is. There's a horribly-dressed weirdo named Wild Card who keeps kicking her ass and telling her to stay out of the conflict. I mean, the outfit is bad. Like he's trying to fight her by making her go blind. Her clone/sister April is really getting into her Mayhem identity, and is actually working for Silverback.

Oh, and Frank Castle came out of retirement (that he spent in South America, where he still periodically fucked drug lords up) because Silverback was a guy he left crippled as a message before ending his war on the mob. Years of reading Garth Ennis' Punisher leave me unable to see Frank doing either of those things. Not ending his war on the mob, and certainly not leaving a guy alive as a message. "People scare better when they're dying," is definitely a philosophy the Punisher subscribes to.

The story has a feel of DeFalco and Frenz clearing the decks. They probably know this is one of the last Spider-Girl stories they're going to write, and they try to definitively move the old guard off the board, both characters that existed before Spider-Girl, and ones that didn't, but are supposed to pre-date her. Silverback and the Punisher bite the dust. Black Tarantula opts to leave New York with Arana, basically removing him as an issue. Peter (once again) accepts that he needs to trust his daughter can handle things. Even the two goons of Silverback's that are based on DeFalco and Frenz (I guess they didn't de in the wilds of Jersey) end up turning state's evidence in the hopes of being able to start new lives in witness protection elsewhere.

Silverback turns out to be a puppet of another villain, and that villain gets killed by Mayhem. Which sets up April's continuing descent into a "lethal protector" type as Mayday's biggest issue. Especially combined with her desire to assert her individuality as the true, only daughter of Peter and Mary Jane, which would come to a head in Spider-Girl: The End.

And with that, Summer (and Fall) of Spiders draws to a close.

Random Back Issues #140 - Step by Bloody Step #2

Why does this happen wherever I go with my fiercely protective armored giant?

The giant and the girl continue their journey, though tensions are continuing to run high, since the girl still doesn't know where they're going or why. The giant forbids her from visiting a village in the distance, so she scales a bluff at the first opportunity, only to find the village of greenish, goblin-like people being annihilated by enormous black airships. By the time the giant catches up, one of the ships targets them, and she slips from the giant's grasp, only saving her self by catching a thorny vine.

Pricked by the thorns, her blood prompts a burst of plant growth, lifting her high enough the giant can grab her and haul ass into a forest, all of which is observed by men in a smaller airship, who have taken hostage a farmer who tried to befriend the girl last issue.

Eventually, the pair reach a beach. While the girl alternately splashes in the waves and sulks in the shadows, the giant kills more potential threats and builds a big raft to cross the ocean. The girl does, while carving a scowly picture of herself on a tree, find several more carving nearby. Mystery!

Unfortunately, being extremely single-minded and direct makes their course easy to predict, so at the far shore waits a group of armed men. One shot wounds the girl, and when her blood hits the water, the giant goes berserk. Too bad the ones in his path are more of the green people, noticeably shackled around the ankles. They're slaughtered, to the horror of both the girl and the farmer, but to the glee of the soldiers, one of whom takes aim at the girl. The farmer shoves him, spoiling the shot - no doubt saving all their asses from that pissed off giant - and they withdraw.

The girl sees something in the sea and tries to push the raft there, but the ocean itself rises to bar her path, much like the desert did at one point last issue. The giant insists they keep going forward, and the girl's resentment only grows. Meanwhile, the farmer's been hauled before the prince? general? that's been tracking the pair, and gets an ultimatum: Help us out, or see what we do to your wife and kid.

Well, when you put it that way. . .

{10th longbox, 209th comic. Step by Bloody Step #2, by Si Spurrier (writer), Matias Bergara (artist), Mattheus Lopes (colorist), Jim Campbell (letterer)}

A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf - John Muir

This is the journal John Muir kept on his journey from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico in the second half of 1867. He took a train from Indianapolis to the Indiana/Kentucky state line, then hiked to Savannah, Georgia, before taking a ship into Florida, then hiking across that state and ultimately taking another ship to Cuba.

While the book is broken into broad chapters, it's arranged within those chapters as daily entries he made. These can involve Muir describing different plants he saw, waxing at length about how palmetto groves lack the grandeur of Wisconsin oak forests, or fretting about alligators once he's far enough south to be stumbling about in a swamp after dark.

The book includes some pictures, albeit not ones Muir furnished, but they're few and scattered, so this is nothing like a field guide. It's more a travelogue, and interesting for the way in which he travels. Most of the trip he's reliant on strangers being willing to share food and shelter with him, so their personalities or topics of discussion may be the focus for a given day. Most want to discuss the recently-concluded Civil War, or complain about the North, but Muir occasionally meets someone that shares his interest in botany, or will at least listen politely while he talks about it.

He's briefly robbed once, only for the guy to return the satchel once he finds nothing worth taking. Later Muir encounters a gang of horsemen, and it's probably only his scruffy appearance that causes them to leave him be. There's a fairly lengthy section where, to save money until the funds his brother forwarded arrive in Savannah, Muir makes himself a little shelter in the Bonaventure graveyard. He describes how peaceful and clear he finds the air, and how the songbirds initially gather at the entrance of his shelter to raise the alarm, but gradually grow accustomed to him and go on about their days.

I found a person sleeping in a cemetery once. I assumed, once I was close enough to hear snoring and know they weren't dead, they were sleeping off a rough night. Maybe they were on their own trek to some distant coast.

Sometimes Muir digresses into thoughts on humanity, particularly man's relationship with Nature, or how certain people perceive that relationship. He's lightly amused by those who insist everything on Earth was placed there by God for Man's use, when it's abundantly clear there are plenty of plants and animals that weren't. Plenty of plants can kill a person if ingested, as can any number of animals. Yet the notion that all organisms, including humans, are part of an interrelated world, rather than a hierarchy with us at the top, doesn't track.

Even reminding myself of the era this was written in, it's still jarring when Muir comments favorably on how 'well-behaved' the black folks in Savannah are, because they take their hat off if they see a white man on the street, and leave it off until he's out of sight. Or when a couple share some water with him around their campfire and he sees their child playing naked in the dirt and regards the whole thing as some incredibly primitive thing. Maybe they don't want to have to wash the kid and the clothes, Muir? Maybe money's tight, and maybe there's a reason that would be the case for a black couple in the South in the 1860s?

When it comes to people, Muir might be better off sticking to plants.

The last 20 pages are actually a letter he sent after leaving Cuba for New York, then sailing from New York to California, and describe his time in the Yosemite region. The prose gets a bit too purple for me there, and something about the break in the tale threw me to where I couldn't get fully invested in that section. It would have been better served to act as the introduction of a book solely about his California experiences, and leave his departure from Cuba, or at least his arrival in NYC, as the end of this tale.

'I think that most of the antipathies which haunt and terrify us are morbid productions of ignorance and weakness. I have better thoughts of those alligators now that I have seen them at home. Honorable representatives of the great saurians of an older creation, may you long enjoy your lilies and rushes, and be blessed now and then with a mouthful of terror-stricken man by way of dainty!'

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)

Major General Clive Candy (Roger Livesay) is in charge of the Home Guard during World War 2, and prepping for an exercise where the Guard must defend London against British regular army soldiers, pretending to be an invading force. The war is supposed to start at midnight, so he's caught entirely off-guard when the guy in charge of the "invaders" (who is dating Candy's driver), barges into the Turkish baths six hours earlier and takes him prisoner. There's a scuffle, and the movie dives into flashback through Candy's entire career.

In the early part of his life, he was the one ignoring orders and traveling to Germany to meet an English governess (Deborah Kerr) who wrote to him, concerned about the propaganda being spread about the British's actions in the Boer War. He confronts the one spreading the stories, insults the entire German Army for considering the man one of them, and fights a duel over it with a German officer (Anton Walbrook).

And after that, Candy as a person was basically set in stone. His ideas of how how war should be fought were locked in, and he couldn't adjust to a world where the enemies didn't follow notions like duels, or waiting for a prescribed time to begin fighting. Nor is he aware that the younger generations in his own country don't think as he does. Not only that, he figures out too late he's fallen for Edith (Kerr), after she and Theo (Walbrook) have fallen for each other. So he spends the rest of his personal life looking for a woman that can recreate the one he let slip away.

Kerr's character is only referred to after that point in their lives, so you can chart the course of years in the changes in Walbrook and Livesay. Walbrook turns grey, needs a cane, loses some of his boisterous good cheer and becomes more soft-spoken. The interwar years weren't kind to him, as he fled Germany after Edith died and their kids wouldn't attend the funeral because she was English.

Livesay, however, grows louder with age, even as he gets fatter and balder. Where as a young man he was able to project a quiet confidence, or at least be quiet occasionally, now he's got to loudly assert his knowledge and authority. Theo can express concerns about how the British will treat the Germans after the Great War, and Candy will get everyone at the table to assure him England wants a healthy Germany for trade and whatnot. Nothing to worry about, you see. Walbrook gives Theo a sort of weary indulgence, a man who knows his friend means well, but also that his friend has no idea what the heck he's talking about.

Who Doesn't Need a Crater to Hide in Right Now?

Being the God of Manga ain't easy.

The Crater is a collection of 18 comics Osamu Tezuka produced, with one exception, over the course of 1969 and 1970. Based on the foreword, these aren't the only stories he wrote and drew in that time, but the ones he felt were the strongest.

A lot of the stories veer towards a Twilight Zone vibe, usually with some sort of twist or surprise ending. "Good Fortune" involves two boys vying for the same girl, and trying to use a pipe that leads to a strange river that lets you travel back in time to gain the advantage. One boy ultimately gets swept away by the current and is taken to a point before he was conceived, and ceases to exist. "Two Dramas" appears to be about a poverty-stricken young man in the U.S. named Jim, who keeps finding himself briefly in the body of a well-to-do Japanese teen named Ryuichi. Each chafes under the expectations of their parents, and each eventually falls in love with the same girl. The end most likely is, and isn't, what you'd expect from that description.

Several involve either supernatural forces, often with specific rules that need to be followed. On some occasions, like in "Sacrifice," the main character follows the terms of the agreement. It's unclear how much of a choice she had, but she doesn't attempt to dodge her fate In others, like "The Octagonal House," the protagonist doesn't follow rules and pays the price.

There are a few stories that don't involve otherworldly forces. In "Sergeant Okuno," a pilot is presumed to have died heroically crashing his damaged plane into an enemy radio tower. Really, he made an emergency landing on a desert isle and it took a while to make a raft and return home. But he's already been declared a hero, so the brass are insistent he must live up to the story they told, regardless of his disinterest in dying for his country.

"The Jumbo" (written in 1974, the on exception to the time frame) revolves around passengers panicking because a presumed to be deadly spider is loose in the cabin. It's one of those stories where the stress reveals the true nature of the passengers, as a white journalist from South Africa immediately blames the black woman in the row behind him for bringing the spider on-board. Another passenger seems attractive to the spider and is increasingly covered in webs, while her boyfriend refuses to help her at all.

There's an afterword written by an Ada Palmer, titled "The Cruelty of The Crater," which investigates the different stories within the apparent framework of a karmic cycle Tezuka seemed to explore most fully in a longer series titled Phoenix. I defer to Palmer on that. Rebirth or second chances do come up in several stories, but what seemed to recur to me was that once a decision was made, it had to be lived with. The consequences might be known or not, but they'd have to be dealt with.

The Ryuichi in "The Octagonal House" tries a different life, and when it doesn't turn out better, when throwing away his career for love backfires, forgets there's no going back. All the characters in "The Bell Rings" are haunted by decisions they made that can't be taken back. Some were made of spite, others of fear. At least one seemed to be of ignorance. But the reason is irrelevant; the action and its consequences remain with them, even as they continue to live.

The heads of the military in "Sergeant Okubo" can't accept the lie they told the public is just that, and try to force reality to conform to their wishes. They get the dramatic, destructive plan crash they wanted, just not where they wanted it. The main character in "Bag Containing the Future" time travels in the hopes of stealing another person's, better, future, only to find the quality of no one's future can be determined simply by outside appearance.

Tezuka's tends towards rounded, smooth-faced main characters. Ryuichi is the name of a bunch of different characters, but his look is generally the same. The women all fall in a general range of "slender limbs and necks with long, flowing hair," unless there's some specific reason to make them look different. The supporting casts or sidekicks tend to be more distinctive. The guy who eventually erases himself in "Good Fortune" has fat pursued lips like a puffer fish (or a butthole). It's a malleable enough style to allow for exaggeration for comedic effect, but also work for the frequent fistfights that break out.

(Tezuka himself appears as a supporting character in a few stories. Always as he does in the image at the top of this post, though usually with a slump-shouldered posture that says he's heard one too many diatribes from his bosses about deadlines. His survival rate in the stories isn't great, either.)

He rarely gets graphic with his violence. People are shot, but it's shown with them wincing or falling over, the area hit stained dark. A black character is repeatedly branded in "The Two-Headed Snake", an even is hit in the face with the brand, but the marks seem to disappear later. But Tezuka he knows when to use it for effect. The end of "The Octagonal House" is one example. "The Man Who Melted," which is a story with a bit of a "repeat history if you don't learn from it" vibe, is another.  Even in "Bag Containing the Future," the way he draws the bag (attached to each person's butt) makes it seem incredibly gross that anyone would want to cut it off and attach it to themselves.

Sunday Splash Page #348

 

"The Big Dance," in Mary Jane: Homecoming #3, by Sean McKeever (writer), Takeshi Miyazawa (artist), Christina Strain (colorist), Dave Sharpe (letterer)

Homecoming was actually the second of two, 4-issue mini-series that preceded Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane. However, the first mini-series (titled simply, Mary Jane), didn't have a splash page. And both mini-series (and really, the 20-issue ongoing that followed) are part of a single, continuous arc anyway, so it seems to work.

As far as the mini-series, everything builds to Homecoming, mostly because Liz Allan is obsessed with being named Homecoming Queen, and Flash being named Homecoming King. So everything has to be perfect for her big moment. Get that? Everything. Must. Be. Perfect. McKeever writes her as so high-strung and insecure I'm surprised her head doesn't fly off. It is funny to watch her yell at Flash for almost beating up some guys pranking MJ, but she flips out and nearly attacks a cheerleader from another school for talking to Flash. That Flash actually got in the way of that makes him the bravest man alive.

As for Mary Jane, she's trying to amp herself up for going to the dance with Harry Osborn, when really, she wants to go with Spider-Man. Harry's nice, and he takes her nice places, although that makes her self-conscious about her own financial situation, but he doesn't excite her. So she's going back-and-forth on that, trying to find a spark with Harry that's only occasionally there, while Liz keeps pointing out how ridiculous it would be to go to the dance with a guy in a costume. When she's not yelling at Flash for one thing or another.

Then it turns out Flash has a crush on Mary Jane, which is manageable, until Flash hears from Harry (while Flash is trying to get Harry to fix things with MJ, after Harry broke it off because she wouldn't help him cheat on a test) that MJ had a crush on Flash in junior high. And then Homecoming doesn't go the way Liz wanted, even beyond Spider-Man and the Vulture almost ruining the game-winning field goal, and things blow up real good. Emotionally. No actual explosions.

In the earliest issues you can see Miyazawa finding the range, so to speak. MJ's hair has a lot more bounce and curl in it early on compared to later. Not Todd Mac or Erik Larsen level curls, but not Romita Sr. hair that hangs straight down. And there's a few panels where the shape of her face or the size of her forehead shifts dramatically. But by the end of Mary Jane, he's found his groove (although Flash Thompson's affection for cowboy hats is an interesting choice.)

In the first mini-series, McKeever makes a couple of references to MJ's mother that never really get expanded on. She interrupts a call between MJ and Liz by loudly demanding MJ come down for supper, and the school counselor (who I think turns out to be the Looter), makes a remark about whether MJ's mom is working at the moment, since MJ's grades are sliding since she started working to pay for her Homecoming dress. Probably could have done more with that in the ongoing, and cut down on constantly expanding the net of people caught in relationship drama. Instead, he introduced a story right at the end about Flash taking a job to help his family pay bills, and the parents stay entirely off-screen, referred to, but never seen.

Saturday Splash Page #150

 

"Curtain Call," in Spectacular Spider-Man (vol. 2) #27, by Paul Jenkins (writer), Mark Buckingham (artist), D'Israeli (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer)

Marvel canceled the first volume of Spectacular Spider-Man after 264 issues, as part of a larger, post-Final Chapter paring down of the line that resulted in just two monthly Spider-Man books (Amazing and Peter Parker.) Of course, they made Howard Mackie writer of both those titles initially, so I'm not sure that's an improvement.

After about 5 years, they canceled Peter Parker: Spider-Man and restarted Spectacular. Paul Jenkins had taken over Peter Parker: Spider-Man about a year before JMS took over Amazing Spider-Man, and Jenkins and Mark Buckingham had worked together for a couple of years (with Humberto Ramos taking over as artist for an arc or two and man, was that a stylistic shift.) A lot of Jenkins and Buckingham's stronger stuff were one-off stories, sometimes sweet, sometimes silly.

With Spectacular Spider-Man, however, Jenkins shifted to more multi-issue arcs, with a variety of artists. Humberto Ramos for a Venom story, Daimon Scott for a Lizard 3-parter. An Avengers Disassembled 4-parter that resulted in Spider-Man turning into a Spider-Monster briefly and getting organic webshooters.

None of those issues remain in my collection, and they've all been gone for years now, so clearly I wasn't digging them. What's left behind is again, two standalone issues, albeit one (about the Kingpin crashing a superhero poker game) was drawn by Talent Caldwell rather than Buckingham. The other, the series finale, is Peter having an extended Christmastime conversation with Uncle Ben at Ben's graveside. Buckingham adopts a faux-Bill Watterson style for flashback panels of Ben and Peter making Calvin & Hobbes-esque snowmen to annoy Aunt May. Again, it's a little silly and a little sad (it is, after all, Peter essentially trying to not have a breakdown by talking to an imaginary version of his dead uncle), and a little sweet.

I think this volume got canceled to make room for Marvel Knights Spider-Man. Which I skipped in Sunday Splash Page because I only have one issue (where MJ turns out to be a pool shark and whips a creepy fan's ass with a pool cue) and there's no splash page, and I don't care enough about that title to bother breaking my rules for it. Steve Ditko or Colleen Coover can flout the splash page rule, but lesser mortals can go pound sand.

Random Back Issues #139 - Lead City #1

Colman Cooper, his wife Pearl and their son, are heading west in a wagon train. As you can see, that didn't go well, and they fell behind enough they went ahead and tried a different route. Which results in their being caught in a blizzard and Pearl taking sick.

Things are looking bleak, but the storm passes and lo, there's a town ahead! Two towns, actually. One on a hill overlooking the other. Recognizing it's better to scout the high ground first (reduces the chance of something dropping a boulder on your head), Colman enters the town on the hill and finds. . .the remnants of some sort of battle. Spent cartridges, bloodstains, a real mess.

He does find one live person, who advises him to seek the doctor in the town, Duganville, below. he also advises Colman not to enter Lead City unarmed in the future. Well, sure, a town built on mining lead, you need tools for that.

The doctor diagnoses Pearl with diptheria, and with some annual event about to take place, price gouging is all the rage. Colman tries holding back enough money for supper for him and his son. No dice. OK, save enough for supper for his kid. Sorry, no. But maybe if he sells his oxen. . .

Medicine acquired, with enough left over for dinner - and cake for Isaiah! - the quiet evening's disrupted by some loudmouth proclaiming himself the "Huntsville Hammer", who almost immediately locks horns with a doughy Irishman named Neil Kelly. But any fight will have to wait, because the board is open!

What that means isn't immediately clear, but the Hammer and Kelly both throw their names in the ring, with money to back it up. Four more follow in succession, although Jiao Long Ru Ren draws Kelly's attention (and mockery). Meanwhile, Colman figures out what's going on, and sends Isaiah to retrieve a gift for Pearl the boy was hiding for his dad. By the time he returns, the man Colman met on the hill explains this is for a free-for-all gunfight, with big-time killers all after a 10 grand prize, and Colman don't want no part of this!

But Colman disagrees and, even after a very large black man in a Union uniform, carrying a tiny Native American girl doll and the title, "Reb Stalker Walker" enters the competition, pays into the mix with a silver locket or watch, something like that. That makes 8 contestants, so the field is set, and the fun begins the next morning.

{6th longbox, 81st comic. Lead City #1, by Eric Borden (writer), Kyle Brummond (artist)}

Loosen that Belt

Question that occurred to me a couple of weeks ago: When a waiter or waitress asks if you saved room for dessert, have you ever saved room?

For me, the answer is no. At a restaurant, I'm loading up on the main course. If I really want dessert, I've probably got something cheaper at home. Alex said the same, but said his fiance always saves room for dessert. I asked a few co-workers during a lull in a "team-building exercise", and two of the five indicated they did. Although they also said they had to check the responses of the other people at the table before saying so aloud.

Still, that leaves three for which the answer was apparently no. And overall, I've got 5 "No" and 3 "Yes." So I put it to you, delightful readers, do you save room for dessert?

Anna and the Dead (2015)

Anna's parents are getting a divorce, and send her to stay with an aunt and uncle for two weeks while certain things get sorted out. I assume it's which parent gets stuck with Anna, who suffers from narcolepsy and possibly hallucinations. But she's on new medication to help with that, though!

It's not working very well, because Anna starts seeing dead people. A dead kid floating in the surf at the beach. A man standing underneath the tree outside her window. Or she hears voices of lots of kids crying in pain from the middle of a field. These are not things that make one popular at their new school, to say nothing of the opportunities it provides the aunt for passive-aggressive comments, or for the uncle to peer disapprovingly over his glasses at her (while reading the paper in a room with only a blue light. Strange lighting choices people make in this town.)

Anna eventually becomes friends with a guy named Josh, who clues her in on a bit of gristly local history, as well as some bad history of his own, with his father vanishing suddenly several years ago.

The suspense and uncertainty is about what the locals are hiding, not what the ghosts Anna's seeing are up to, and definitely not whether she's crazy. I might have been open to that sort of film, but the movie gives that hand away early when Anna reviews footage from the camera she left at the foot of her bed (presumably to make sure she didn't get up and sleepwalk), and she misses a brief shot of the kid she'd later see in the ocean. So even if the kid she found in the surf is suddenly not in cradled in her arms, we know she's not nuts.

The movie's pacing feels uneven, as it seems to take a long time to get into the notion of what's going on with the town. It starts out seeming like this is just something about Anna, and its over halfway done before anyone's getting into why there are all these ghosts. It never explains how the ghosts know Anna can see them, or really explains why what's happening is happening. Though I appreciate there's no scene at the end where someone sits there and lays the whole thing out for us. Josh and Anna learn the "what", but the "why" isn't so immediately important to them.

And the time it takes showing Anna trying to fit in with the other kids, and how awkward things are with her relatives, at least helps make her feel like more of a character. She seems to drift a lot, quiet and always giving off this air like she's got one arm wrapped around herself to feel secure. It also helps build the relationship between her and Josh so that the various clues the movie drops don't feel too ham-handed. Anna doesn't know the town, so Josh tells her things about it as a way to make conversation.

What I Bought 10/28/2024 - Part 2

You may have noticed last Friday's post vanished for about a day. It was, for some reason, flagged as spam. Odd, considering it's a type of post I've done literally hundreds of times previously. I did go ahead and send them some feedback that it would help if they could provide a little more detail into why a particular post was violating community guidelines, because otherwise it's hard for me to know what I messed up, so I can avoid going through this whole mess again in the future.

Anyway, with that spectacular start to the week out of the way, and the latest chance to see whether the ramshackle, bastardized form of democracy in this country will survive still to come, let's talk about comics.

Babs #3, by Garth Ennis (writer), Jacen Burrows (artist), Andy Troy and Lee Loughridge (colorists), Rob Steen (letterer) - Everybody's just waiting for the show to begin.

Babs kills a few stragglers of Tiberius' guys, who have taken all the dwarves prisoner (along with their silver), thanks to Mork the Orc's info (I keep expecting Ennis to spell "Mork" with a "c", to match "orc".) Burrows draws it violent, if cartoonish, considering one guy gets his face neatly sliced off, but there's not entrails flying around or anything. Which Mork and his buddies are busy showing to Tiberius, because Mork's still convinced that a group of orcs, goblins and trolls working with a bunch of guys who want to drive non-human races out can't possibly go wrong. Shades of that Our Dumb Century headline, "Japan Forms Alliance with White Supremacists in Well-Thought-Out Scheme."

One of the group manages to track at least part of Babs' history through various vague sources, so we get a quick recap of her life. Essentially, she's kicked a lot of ass, usually without intending to draw attention to herself, but she has a real knack for picking losers. Makes money, blows it on gambling or land speculation. Works for a doomed side in a war, and not, apparently, out of some desire to help the underdog.

Meanwhile, Babs is arguing with her sword while rescuing the dwarves (and killing more of Tiberius' guys.) Barry objecting to being stuck in the ground as a placeholder made me laugh a little. In addition to the dwarves having nothing to pay Babs with - but they're good for it, they swear - Tiberius' guys seem to have taken Babs' friend Izzy prisoner as well. So she's going to have to give chase, on a boat full of elves. Which is apparently a horrible fate.

The whole thread with Tiberius and Mork, I'm just waiting for their inevitable and humiliating deaths. But watching Babs kind of blindly hack her way through life, careening from one situation - I almost called them adventures, but feel like that's not really what they are - to another, is entertaining. She seems to simply act on her first impulse at gaining any new piece of information, and that's a lot of fun.

The Pedestrian #3, by Joey Esposito (writer), Sean von Gorman (artist), Josh Jensen (colorist), Shawn Lee (letterer) - Stop, in the name of not getting harassed by creepy weirdos in masks.

The, whatever the thing with all the hands is, drops Jimmy at the same place where those two young boys' dad works. Meanwhile, the boys are talking their babysitter, Kira (the girl who Jimmy tried to mug in #1) into investigating a place they think The Pedestrian will show up next. Instead, they run into a bunch of the guy on the cover, in a nifty sequence by von Gorman where the Don't Walk signal flashes, and it appears on their faces each time (and more appear each time), but then vanishes when the signal goes dark.

The cop lady shows up to help, though I feel like von Gorman has the most trouble drawing her face. Like he's trying to add a few more lines to show she's a bit older than Kira, but mostly makes her face seem kind of indistinct, or like her lips are pressed on, Mr. Potato Head-style. Whatever, she's going to drop everyone where the boys' dad works, but it's closed. That's ominous.

Randy, having been fired after nearly getting killed by Jimmy, is helping the crossing guard lady get Pedestrian up and running again. By gathering a bunch of road signs. Relax, they're from a salvage yard, she's not committing vandalism. Just in time, because the cop and the kids get attacked by a whole mess of the mask guys, who the kids' dad has been recruiting for, some reason.

I don't think he is the entity, which said it needed to find a real dirtbag, but he's clearly working in concert with it. Jimmy seems to have accepted it because he's tired of feeling like he's just there to be manipulated by the "important" people, and wants to make over people feel helpless, too. So I'm guessing the doctor gave up the idea he could provide for his sons while doing something good, and accepted doing this crap for a good paycheck.

Sunday Splash Page #347

 

"Land of the Dead," in Marvel Zombies (2015) #1, by Simon Spurrier (writer), Kev Walker (artist), Frank D'Armata (colorist), Clayton Cowles (letterer)

In 2015, when Marvel canceled all their ongoing titles to play along with Hickman destroying the universe in service of his Secret Wars, the need for product was filled by a bunch of mini-series, allegedly set on different pieces of the patchwork world Doom cobbled together from what survived the Beyonders' attempts to destroy the multiverse. I bought 3 of those mini-series. Mrs. Deadpool and Her Howling Commandos is long since excised from my collection. The second book we'll get to next month. The third, is this thing.

I never really got into the Marvel Zombies fad. Maybe the premise just felt too much like a '90s What If? blown out to increasingly bloated proportions, what with multiple mini-series going back to the same well. Obviously I'm not entirely immune to a "everybody dies" story, just look at last week's entry, but it's rarely my favorite thing. But Spurrier had written something I liked previously, and Kev Walker drew the hell out of Avengers Arena, and I liked Elsa Bloodstone (and my list of books was dwindling), so here we are.

And the zombies are not really the focus. One does manage to teleport Elsa far away from her post along "The Shield", a giant wall I think Doom made out of Ben Grimm to hold back the section of zombie world he incorporated, but it's mostly Elsa wandering the wilderness with a peculiar child that she wants to protect for reasons she can't explain. All the while something else is tracking them. There are still other zombies, an entire gang of them led by a Mystique, and they retain their intelligence because they keep a Deadpool tied up and take out a little of his brain to feed on everyday via, as Wade puts it, "le Spork."

But as with the best zombie stories, they're really there to give the non-zombie characters a way to show their true selves. Spurrier and Walker keep showing us flashbacks of this Elsa's upbringing with her demanding bastard of a father. Who insists on no weakness, and goes so far as to expose his wife to a horror that shreds her sanity so he can have her taken away, because she was interfering in his training of Elsa. So Elsa is constantly confronted with the notion of how her father would deal with this frightened, secretive child with no survival training or combat instincts, who for some reason doesn't turn after being bitten. And then she keeps going against that training, right up to the point they encounter something much worse than a zombie.

Walker mostly gets to draw various Marvel characters in various states of physical decay, and his does it very nicely. When he's not drawing that, it's mostly the flashbacks of Ulysses Bloodstone being an emotionally constipated ass towards a very young Elsa, who looks suitably frightened or sad. It makes a nice contrast from her as an adult, where she's mostly glowering with gritted teeth or looking irritated while stomping some zombie's skull to a pulp and cursing about the annoyance of the whole situation. Which also serves to contrast her from her father. Even after all the training, she still refuses to just accept the harsh realities of the life she's stuck in and bear it stoically. Is constant sarcasm and cynicism a better approach? Eh, probably not.

And with that, we bid farewell to Many Months of Marvel.

Saturday Splash Page #149

 

"Skyscraper Showdown," in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man (vol. 1) #78, by Bill Mantlo (writer), Al Milgrom and Jim Mooney (artists), Bob Sharen (colorist), Joe Rosen (letterer)

Should this title be in the letter "P"? Maybe, but Summer (and Fall) of Spiders can't waste time worrying about alphabetizing!

(Slightly) more seriously, when I started the word document I'm working from, I only had issues from after the book dropped the "Peter Parker" portion of the title, so that's how it got listed. As Kelvin noted when we looked at the first volume of Web of Spider-Man, the idea behind this title seemed to be they were going to focus more on the Peter Parker side of Spider-Man. Except it wasn't like Amazing Spider-Man was all costumed antics, all the time. The job, the scrambling for rent, the schoolwork, the elderly aunt, the girl troubles, that's always part of Spider-Man, albeit the ratios of the components vary with era and creative teams.

So, in practice, Spectacular Spider-Man is just another book about Spider-Man. And at least when I was a kid, it was the secondary book. Amazing got the hotshot artists, the MacFarlanes and Larsens. Spectacular got over 100 issues of Sal Buscema, albeit the last 20 or so doing breakdowns with someone else on finishes. Buscema is steady, reliable, can make sure all the information you need is on the page, but he's not flashy. Plus, most of the issues I read as a kid were part of J.M. DeMatteis' stint as writer, when he would spend entire issues on Peter in some hallucinatory state, confronted by the trauma of losing his parents as a child. Given the choice, I'd rather have read about him fighting a Spider-Slayer.

So, unlike with Amazing Spider-Man, where I have decent chunks of several different creative teams' runs, or even Web where I mostly have Gerry Conway's stuff, my Spectacular Spider-Man collection is a hodgepodge of different writers and artists. Bill Mantlo/Al Milgrom for 4 issues, all centered around this big showdown with Doc Ock, and Peter wanting to get really serious with the Black Cat. 6 by Peter David, 4 of those his and Rich Buckler's "The Death of Jean DeWolff." 3 by Conway/Buscema (Acts of Vengeance tie-ins), 2 by DeMatteis/Zeck ("Kraven's Last Hunt"), 2 more by DeMatteis/Buscema. 2 by Ann Nocenti and James Fry (Typhoid Mary's involved), and then 4 by a combo of DeMatteis, Glenn Greenburg and Luke Ross. Three of those are tie-ins to Spidey's "Identity Crisis" story, and the other was a joke issue about the "League of Losers."

It's mostly scattered issues tying into some larger event or story I liked, or else a brief, single story that had some specific hook for me. Nothing longer than 4 consecutive issues. DeMatteis and Buscema did a pretty good job with Harry Osborn's slow downward spiral over about 2.5 years, but it's not one I wanted to keep a lot of around. It's in the background for long stretches, and the foreground wasn't grabbing my attention much. Plus, even when it is the main story, it's pretty depressing until the last minute.Watching Spider-Man's best friend slowly implode under the weight of all his father's sins is not exactly an uplifting saga.

What I Bought 10/28/2024 - Part 1

Another week survived. Ummmm, I guess that's all I've got in terms of an introduction. Given I'm writing this Tuesday, it's not even necessarily accurate. I may not have survived. Update: I did survive! Congratulations to me! Here's two comics from October I'm going to review, as I have done hundreds of times before, since whatever algorithm Blogger uses to determine community guideline breaks is apparently dumb as shit.

Deadpool #7, by Cody Ziglar and Alexis Quasarano (writers), Andrea Di Vito (artist), Guru-eFX (color artist), Joe Sabino (letterer) - Taskmaster with no eyes visible behind his mask looks weird. Like the saddest sword-wielding skeleton possible.

Eleanor is dealing with Deadpool being dead by being extremely violent, indifferent to her own well-being and screwing up jobs while making social media posts about it. Like father, like daughter, though I'm pretty sure this is why Deadpool was staying away from her in the first place, so she didn't end up like him. Also, how the hell has Preston not tracked Eleanor down yet?

Taskmaster is trying to help them track down and kill Death Grip, but that requires money, which requires they either complete jobs successfully (glares at Eleanor) or steal from someone who has money. Like some pharmaceutical/biochem company. A company staffed by robots named T.O.D.D. (no clue what that stands for), who speak in meaningless executive lingo about tabling ideas and whatnot. One is a little tougher than the others, though Di Vito can't seem to decide how big he is. Seems normal sized in one panel, then he's big enough Eleanor can kick him in the chest the same time Princess hits him there with one paw and it looks like there's still room to spare.

They get the money, but Princess wants to investigate a familiar smell, which turns out to be Valentine from Alyssa Wong's run. Credit to Ziglar and Quasarano for not trying to just sweep the previous writer's work under the rug, I guess. Beyond that, I'm not sure how this is going to play out, other than I expect Eleanor to try and bargain for help bring her dad back to life. She seemed to see a link between biochemistry and the online video about alchemy she was watching.

I'm guessing Full Metal Alchemist isn't a thing in the Marvel Universe, or Eleanor would know better than trying to resurrect someone via alchemy. But maybe she figures she'll just regenerate her body, so it's no big deal.

Body Trade #2, by Zac Thompson (writer), Jok (artist), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (letterer) - Groot really changed once he sold out.

Kim tries to break into the van with all the bodies. He fails, miserably, and the goon driver eventually drives away to deliver the remains. So Kim barges in on the extremely insensitive lady from last issue and steals a bunch of her files and her phone. He gives back the phone, though, which is how she takes a photo of his license plate. Batting a thousand here so far, champ.

He gets inside the branch office in Miami, makes a scene, catches an elevator and gets promptly clocked in the head with the but of a shotgun by security. But he gets to meet Ms. Wolfe, the local manager he thinks will get him his son's remains.

Instead she shows him a cutesy animated film (for which Jock goes with a simplified style and lighter tones) about what happens with the bodies, all the shareholders, I mean, sick people, that these corpses help. She keeps her distance pretty much throughout the entire conversation, such as it is. The one time she gets close is to dab some blood off his forehead where he got hit, and then she looks at it like she's almost confused by it. Otherwise, she either sits on the edge of her big desk, or goes to stand in front of the window. Either way, she's beyond his reach, face in shadow.

Which is her trying to dance around the fact his kid's body is G-O-N-E, but Kim's either dumb as shit or in denial. At which point she ditches any pretense of courtesy, reveals they know exactly who he is, and that they could easily have him killed. And they will if he comes back. Kim, of course, immediately calls some old friend from his ne'er-do-well days to request a gun.

So he's not going quietly. But Wolfe's going on vacation, and I suspect the child's body really is scattered across the world by now. Their coolant systems in the trucks are clearly second-rate, they can't afford to waste time. But if Kim doesn't do this, he has to deal with his apparent responsibility for his son's death (Wolfe brings it up, which makes 3 people in 2 issues so far, so I don't think Thompson's going to go for the fakeout), and clearly he's not ready for that. I'm not sure Thompson's really made me care, though.