United They Kick Ass, Divided the World Burns

Indivisible starts with 4 warriors fighting a god that's intent on destroying the world. After that battle, we switch to a girl named Ajna, who lives in a village in a forest with her demanding and emotionally stunted father. He's always on her to "remember her defense" during training. Until he dies in an attack by the armies of Ravannavar. Someone didn't take his own advice! Ajna's confronted by one of the soldiers, a swordsman named Dhar, and defeats him.

Dhar's sucked into her mind, an (initially) unwilling passenger as Ajna sets out to take revenge on Ravannavar. She meets many more characters along the way, with a variety of designs (based on a wide variety of cultures), backstories and combat styles. From Leilani, a girl from with a Pacific Islander look who's following a prophecy she's supposed to save the world and carrying a sword ringed with shark teeth, to Zebei, who looks like (I think) a Mongolian archer who protects a city/monastery in the mountains, there are 19 other characters who can potentially join up with Ajna as fighters, plus several more that offer services from hints, upgrades, combat training and alternate costumes. Some are mandatory, others are only unlocked if you speak to them and do whatever's needed.

The gameplay's a mixture of things, but always side-scrolling. The battles are RPG-style, where you have a party of up to 4 characters. Whether a character can attack is based on whether there's at least one filled circle beneath them. Different characters recharge those at different speeds, and different attacks - basically depending on whether you press up, down, or nothing on the controller when you attack - take longer or shorter times (something I didn't know until I read it online earlier this week.) Certain attacks build up your "iddhi" or spiritual energy (that bar in the upper left corner), which can be used for more powerful moves.

Blocking drains iddhi, especially the more characters you have blocking simultaneously, and the longer they're doing it. The game will show you the path of an attack and who's being targeted, but it's still sneaky. The enemy may move closer to strike the person in the rear of your party, but the path of the attack means it also hits the character in front if you aren't on the ball (each character's assigned one of the 4 buttons for their attacks and it also activates blocking.) If you time it right, you can even get a little health back instead, so there's an element of awareness beyond just reflexes to it.

When you aren't fighting, you're platforming. Spiked pits, spiked walls, spiked ceilings, electrified signs and floors. Platforms that crumble within seconds of your touching them, narrow passages to slide through. The plot requires a lot of backtracking and revisiting of locations, and there are little red gems scattered about to help make it worth the while. Collect enough, you can upgrade your offensive or defensive abilities, but many of them will be in places you can't reach the first time through. As the game progresses, you pick up new skills to reach those places, and brother, do you need them.

This game delights in making you chain numerous skills, especially in the long, long climb to the final boss. Taking the above image as an example (and far from the most challenging.) Use the spear to pogo across the spiked floor to the right wall. Wall jump between the right wall and those glowing blocks (which will begin to crack and crumble once you touch them). Reach the faulty stone platform. From there you might be able to use one of your skills, or a combination, to go straight up, past the spiked platform to another glowy, fragile block. Or you can use a combination of skills to reach the left wall and scale between it and the vertical blocks there. That gives you a chance to pogo across the spiked platforms to the glowy block.

It's a lot, is what I'm getting at. Fortunately, the game is generous with the save points, even if it doesn't feel like it when you have to make it through 2 or 3 of these horror chambers in a row. Also, there's usually more than 1 way to make it across, so if you find yourself more adept with certain skills than others, you can still cobble together a strategy.

OK, so that's how it plays, what's it all in service of? The story has an obvious arc. Ajna's very angry and very stubborn. She keeps bulling ahead, getting goaded until she loses her temper, and the situation does not improve. Ravannavar is actually trying to unleash the sealed-up god who created the world (that was after she destroyed the last one, which she had also created after the one she destroyed prior to that, and so on.) Ajna inadvertently helps bring this about, but she just keeps taking the same approach - charge ahead and punch whatever tries to stop her. You can see how it's going to go a mile away, and the game only reinforces it the more the other characters point out that maybe she ought to listen to other people.

Which is a little frustrating, that you can see it but not turn her away. Instead of her guilting Thorani into sticking with them on this quest, stay in Tai Krung and help with the plague that's set in. Stay in the Iron Kingdom and try to deal with the slime burying everything. Actually work on finding Quadira's missing brother. After playing a game like The Outer Worlds, the lack of control feels stifling. But I remind myself I'm not playing as me, watching all this crap happen to other people. I'm playing as Ajna, who's angry and mourning her dad and guilty about things unsaid and hoping if she just keeps going she can fix everything she messed up.

The back half of the game, after that all blows up in her face, is a bit more satisfying. You get the option to help all the people she's gathered to her with various business of their own. This can vary from helping Kampan recover the gold stolen from her by the King of Thieves, to helping Razmi destroy the demon sealed within her lantern before it kills the spirit of her tiger friend in there.

The downside to these is they involve a lot of backtracking, and it's a lengthy process. Wherever you need to go for the first part of a quest is inevitably far away from any portal or exit to reach whatever place you need to go next. In many cases, you're only in a location long enough for a single conversation, then it's lots of running and jumping to get to another exit. But, those aren't required to do, though it gives Ajna a chance to level up some more, and boosts the strength of each friend as you complete their quest. It boils down to how much of a completist you are (I definitely was this time), and how much the idea of helping these other characters matters to you (quite a lot in my case.)

And the game wants you to care. In addition to letting the other characters get involved in conversations Ajna's having, you can venture to Ajna's "Inner Realm", where these characters all hang out when not helping you fight. There you can just, talk to them. About silly things, usually, like Razmi's question about the weird dark thing she'd seen slithering around in Ajna's mind (which comes as a complete surprise to Ajna), or Baozhai's awkward attempts to flirt with Thorani by talking about making beer. But it builds their personalities, making them more distinct while creating a sense of unity between Ajna and them. That despite the differences, and several of the characters get frustrated with Ajna, they're all in this together.

It worked on me. I helped them with all their quests, and near the end, when Ajna concludes she has to finish this alone, I took the chance offered to say good-bye to each one. Watching each character fade as they're released from her mind was a melancholy feeling. I almost didn't want to win, because it meant it was all going to be over. Razmi's good-bye, which I saved for last, got to me. Big surprise, the darkly sarcastic loner who loves to read and burn things was my favorite character.

For a game I bought on a complete whim based on the back of the case, Indivisible worked out really well.

May's Low on Turbulence

Continuing recent trends, the May solicits didn't have a lot outside Marvel that did much for me. And Marvel's too busy with some vampire-themed crossover to release anything new I give a crap about. With the cost of things going up, maybe it's in my wallet's best interests.

What's coming out that's new? Aaron Wroblewski and Ezequiel Rubio Lancho have Blood and Fire coming out through Red 5, about the civil war in 16th century Japan that signaled the rise of the Tokugawa Shogunate. The solicit doesn't give any sense of what approach they're going to take to that event, beyond that it will be violent, but it might be worth a look. At least worth checking subsequent solicits for further information.

Sticking with civil wars, Dark Horse has the tpb of Yellow, by Jay Martin, about a soldier trying to escape a second American civil war, and the decisions he makes along the way.

Yen Press has Penguin Highway by Tomihiko Morimi and Keito Yano, about some kids trying to solve the mystery of why a bunch of penguins showed up in their town, and where they vanished to. That's just random enough to be interesting!

What's ending in May? Night Thrasher and Power Pack: Into the Storm will both be wrapping up.

And, what's left? Marvel's got three mini-series at issue 3: Black Widow and Hawkeye, Ms. Marvel: Mutant Menace, and Jackpot and Black Cat. Fantastic Four will focus on Ben and Johnny working at the same part-time job, Vengeance of the Moon Knight has the Shroud, I mean Moon Knight still targeting the previous Moon Knight's supporting cast. I thought he said he'd leave them be in issue 2, but I guess he called that off after they went after him. And in Deadpool, Wade decides to have Taskmaster run a boutique mercenary agency(?) for him.

Boom! has issue 2 of Blow Away, and Mad Cave has the second issue of Morning Star, and one of the kids has gone missing in the woods. It's fine; let it be a learning experience for the little rugrat. Nature is great for that! Scout also has issue 3 of Rogues. At least they didn't solicit another issue of A Haunting on Mars. We should be up to issue 3 now, but there's not been a sign of issue 2 yet.

And on the manga front, Zom 100 volume 14 ensures I fall ever further behind on that book, while Seven Seas solicited volume 10 of Precarious Woman Executive Miss Black General, but it doesn't actually come out until August.

Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

Evelyn's (Michelle Yeoh) running a failing laundromat with her husband (Ke Huy Quan), who she feels doesn't take anything seriously enough. She's caring for her aged and distant father (James Hong), she's losing her daughter (Stephanie Hsu) whether she realizes it or not. Oh, and the laundry's in dutch with the IRS (as represented by Jamie Lee Curtis' character.)

In the midst of all that, Waymond starts acting weird, claiming he's a version of him from another universe, who need Evelyn's help to save the entire multiverse from the Jobu Teriyaki. Jay-ne-ne Topeka? Klatuu verada niktu? It's a person whose mind has fragmented across the multiverse and is trying to pull the entire thing into a void of destruction and ruin. Evelyn has to fix it, by drawing on the abilities of other Evelyns, assuming she can avoid having her own mind shattered by the experience.

I did not expect this movie to be as funny as it is. The weird, random stuff people have to do to build the connection to a different version of them. Like eating chapstick. The whole "Raccacoonie" running gag had me doubled over laughing. The bit where Evelyn and her daughter are rocks, because it's a universe where no life ever developed. Waymond beating up security guards with his fanny pack - or is it a utility pouch? Let's ask Cable. Even the part where Evelyn falls into the same line of thinking as the Jobu Tupaki, falls into nihilism, and we see her destroying happiness, hers and others, across multiple universes, because the way she goes about some of it is just funny.

The movie plays a bit with the notion of an infinite multiverse, mostly in the form of the "hot dog fingers" reality, but also the universes with no life. Kind of would have like to see one without even any planets, just swirling forms of energy or something. Minor thing. And of course the big question of whether anything you do matters if there's a universe out there somewhere for every decision you could ever make. Maybe you didn't take that trip to Tuscany, but there's a (better tanned and more fluent in Italian) version of you who did, so did it matter what you chose?

I like the "ending" in the middle of the movie, before things resume. The fact it does address that feeling of the meaninglessness of existence, before offering an answer as to why it does matter. That Evelyn starts out treating the whole situation as a nuisance, just another thing her silly husband dragged her into. Then it's an escape, a way to feel control, or feel like a better version of herself. Then it's a way to save her daughter, but Evelyn sees it as something in opposition she has to fight. That doesn't work, of course. It's like another excuse, way to avoid the real issue.

Also appreciate that the resolution doesn't come with her just telling her daughter all these positive things, but when she's totally honest. Even with stuff that's critical. Does that mean Waymond was right about starting divorce papers as a way to bring about a real conversation? You have to mark the fault lines before you can try bridging them?

If either was going to win Best Supporting Actress, I would have gone with Stephanie Hsu over Jamie Lee Curtis. Hsu's role was the more complex and impressive bit of work. The frustrated and exhausted daughter, getting dragged down by expectations she can't meet (or doesn't want to) from someone she doesn't think has any business criticizing her. Repeat that experience hundreds, thousands, millions of times, and see how hopeless it leaves you. How everything is just a joke at that point.

Yeoh and Quan get to take different approaches to dealing with connecting to other versions of themselves. Quan's always a separate guy, separate experiences, even when the "Alphaverse" Waymond is inhabiting Evelyn's Waymond. Different posture, different ways of speaking to her (Alphaverse Waymond is much more assertive), but that similar compassion. It's take real skill to say, "You can do anything, because you're so bad at everything," and not come off like a dick.

Yeoh's always the same Evelyn, but she gets to see how the other Evelyn's lived, inhabit their lives for a minute. So there's that element of confusion, or envy, before she snaps back to her life, which she feels is slowly grinding her to paste. She moves like she's checked out during the early stages of the movie, just going through the motions, then slowly comes to life as she gets into the multiverse stuff. You can see her getting cocky when she thinks she's got a handle on it, right up to the point she finds out who the Jobu Tupaki is.

Anyway, it's very good. Shocking, right?

Overheated Iron Doesn't Last

Iron Fist: The Living Weapon - Rage finds Danny Rand drifting through life, haunted by unfulfilled promises. Lots of panels of him staring blankly into space, or just going through the motions of his day-to-day life. He keeps thinking of his parents' deaths in the mountains near K'un-Lun, how he trained and killed a dragon to gain the power to come back to New York and take revenge.

Except the Howard Meachum he found was a shattered man, having already broken himself waiting for the sword to fall. So what did Danny get? A company he doesn't care about, a skyscraper that was destroyed some indeterminate time ago (~5 years ago our time, at the end of Immortal Iron Fist) he just leaves standing as a wreck, a mystic city he's supposed to protect that he never visits.

That last one's a problem, because the city comes under attack from a new foe, that's also an old foe. Or a couple of old foes perhaps. Danny doesn't know a thing about it until a small child shows up with a big package strapped to her back, begging him to return.

That. . .does not go well, in a lot of ways.

Kaare Andrews takes a real scorched earth approach to, basically everything from Immortal Iron Fist. Lei Kung the Thunderer is the new Yu-Ti? Nope, he dead. The new Thunderer, just one of many girls Lei Kung was training in secret to overthrow the previous Yu-Ti, gets perfunctorily blinded by Davos, who, the last we saw him, was trying to make amends by guarding the dragon egg until it was ready to hatch into the next Shou-Lao. Well, he backslid in record time.

The new dragon, somehow already very large, is beheaded. The city is burned to the ground. Davos chases the child to earth and slaughters a bunch of cops and other people in a hospital. John Aman, the Prince of Orphans, is hanging out in K'un-Lun when Danny gets there, even though a) he's the Immortal Weapon to an entirely different city, and b) he apparently didn't do shit to stop the burning and murdering.

He does expect Danny to take over as Yu-Ti, though what good that would do while the enemy is still out there I don't know. Moot point, as Danny destroys the Tree of Immortality in a fit of, you guessed it, rage. Danny's abdicating all responsibility to anything other than beating the shit out of people, but he failed at that, so what's left?

Andrews draws and colors the book, and definitely goes for stylish for effect. Characters as dark outlines against backgrounds of solid color. Lots of close-up panels on a fist striking someone, or blood spattering, or bones breaking, often colored like a photo negative. The fact Danny gets broken to pieces, forcing him to essentially pull himself back together from scratch, doesn't do much to dispel the Dark Knight Returns vibe the art gives me. The bit where the word "DEATH" is in the background, and sometimes are the panels themselves is a nice touch. The attempt to bring a real style to it works, I'm just less sure of the story that style is in service to.

Oh, and Andrews throws in that Danny suppressed memories of his mother having an affair with Harold Meachum prior to the journey into the mountains. Not sure what that added, other than some additional destruction of innocence. Andrews does repeated flashbacks that show that, actually, Danny was bullied by the other kids under the Thunderer's tutelage, and kind of a crybaby unless you taunted him about his mother. In which case he turned into a berserker. To be fair, Duane Swierczynski did the same thing in his initial arc of Immortal Iron Fist, having Danny kill a thing that killed Iron Fists by essentially just fighting like a pissed-off child.

Sunday Splash Page #311

 

"Keep Things Bottled Up," in Locke and Key: Head Games #3, by Joe Hill (writer), Gabriel Rodriguez (artist), Jay Fotos (colorist), Robbie Robbins (letterer)

Welcome to Lovecraft ended with Sam Lesser dead, but the creature from the wellhouse on the loose, and posing as a student at Tyler and Kinsey's school. In Head Games, we find out the creature was once a friend of the Locke's father, Luke Carvaggio, or "Dodge."

Even 30 years hasn't been long enough for all memories to fade, so much of this mini-series is Dodge trying to cover his tracks, killing or otherwise incapacitating people who might recognize him and ask inconvenient questions. He's not very smooth at it - his attempt to make the death of a teacher look like suicide is seen through within minutes - but there's no way to easily tie any of it to him.

And the introduction of the Head Key makes thing a lot simpler for him, unfortunately. The key unlocks the top of a person's head, allowing them to take out or put in anything they want. There's even a nice bit of magic where the person using the key is able to look down into their head, so they aren't groping around blindly.

This lets Rodriguez draw some weird scenes, as we get a look inside both Bode and Tyler's heads. Some of the memories are true to life, such as Tyler's of him standing over his father's casket (plus or minus Sam Lesser whispering over his shoulder.) Bode's are much brighter and more fanciful, like some grand amusement park where everything is exaggerated. His conception of the creature in the wellhouse is therefore too off-base for the other Locke kids to recognize Dodge (or "Zack" as he's going by).

Likewise, Tyler's attempt to catch up on his schoolwork backfires because just stuffing a book about Machiavelli into your skull so you have all the information, doesn't mean you can craft a coherent essay. That said, it's interesting how Hill filters these actions, and Kinsey's removal of both her fear and ability to cry, are based on a desire to be able to jumpstart their lives. Tyler's sick of everybody looking at him with pity when he admits he hasn't done his homework, and he wants to play hockey, because it's something normal and people seem to want him around. And Kinsey's tired of crying and being sad and afraid to make friends with anyone, so she makes it so she can't be.

(She also catches the eye of a guy who looks like he thinks Quentin Quire was a fashion icon, but that'll become more relevant later.)

These are predictably bad ideas, but I can't say I wouldn't have jumped at the chance to do the same thing in my teen years. Hell, I'd probably give serious thought to removing my capacity to feel fear right now.

Saturday Splash Page #113

 

"Big Talk," in Suicide Squad: Raise the Flag #8, by John Ostrander (writer), Javi Pina (penciler), Robin Riggs (penciler/inker), Jason Wright (colorist), Rob Leigh (letterer)

The Squad got another ongoing series in 2001, written by Keith Giffen, about a Suicide Squad commanded by General Frank (formerly Sgt.) Rock. It lasted a year, and I rarely hear much good about it. Or much about it at all, really. In late 2007, John Ostrander came back with an 8-issue mini-series that revolved around, of all things, the return of Rick Flag. Curious, since Flag rather emphatically died setting off a small nuclear device in the Jihad's mountainside base a couple of years into the original Suicide Squad.

But he and Rustam wound up in Skartaris (yep, from Mike Grell's Warlord), and Flag eventually got back to the world. The Squad he returns to is back to be run by Waller, but she's gotten a bit nastier, which is terrifying. The explosive bracelets are gone, replaced with little bombs implanted at the base of your skull. Although it turns out Waller has one herself, implanted a long time ago, and only one person knows that code.

I don't really buy that. One of the major reasons things went the way they did for Flag in the first volume of Suicide Squad was because Waller didn't trust him, and therefore didn't confide in him. He didn't get any support from her, and acted on incomplete information to try and save the Squad. On the other hand, it would be like the Wall to put her life in the hands of a guy she largely dislikes and who feels the same way about her.

Javi Pina and Robin Riggs are the penciler/inker team, and their work is very clean, easy to read and follow. The action makes senses, the emotion is there. It's in my wheelhouse for the sort of general look I like, but I'm not sure it's right for this book. McDonnell had the squared-off, strongly outlined look that made everyone look rough and ragged, plus the hard shadows that could swallow characters up. Isherwood was a lot smoother, but also added a lot of detail to the faces, playing up the wrinkles or the bags under the eyes, the toll of the work. That's not really present here. It's good superhero comic art, but maybe not good Suicide Squad art.

Ostrander adds some other elements to the mix. Former General Wade Eiling, now the near-unstoppable Shaggy Man as one of the Squad's newest "recruits." Plastique, who betrayed the team in the first story arc is back, unaware this isn't her first term of service (because Waller had her mindwiped after Plastique betrayed them, before accepting the more upstanding personnel's objections and shelving that.) Boomerbutt is dead - thanks, Brad Meltzer, you fucking putz - and in his place is his son, Owen. The one with super-speed. Like his dad, he manages to get on Deadshot's bad side.

There's also the usual assortment of second and third-string villains, like Windfall from Force of Nature, or Twisted Sister. They're there primarily for the body count, but Ostrander remembers to give them enough focus so we have some idea of what they're like, so that we might actually care if they die or not.

Random Back Issues #124 - Guardians of the Galaxy #15

Pity we never got a proper team-up.

We're smack in the middle of War of Kings, aka the War of Stupid Assholes, and so are the Guardians. The team tried splitting up and approaching the respective rulers, Black Bolt and Vulcan, separately about ending the war before they tore apart space-time.

Vulcan's a psychopath, so that was a no-go. Worse, the Imperial Guard has a mage who tagged Adam Warlock with some sort of "witch-mark" that allows them to track him back to Knowhere. The Inhumans were no more receptive, and then Phyla-Vell took Crystal hostage when the Guardians left. And the Inhumans have a teleporting dog that allows them to follow.

Beseiged from both sides, Warlock and Cosmo's shields fall. Mantis and Star-Lord convinced Crystal the threat of universal destruction is real, but Black Bolt doesn't care. He grabs Crystal, and the Inhumans bounce like the useless jackasses they are. Which still leaves two-thirds of the Guardians hounded by the Imperial Guard.

The Guardians scatter - that is literally how Star-Lord describes his plan, "Scatter!" - unable to communicate because Oracle is somehow a stronger telepath than Cosmo, Mantis and Moondragon combined. Sounds like bullshit to me, but whatever. Star-Lord appeals to the ruling council on Knowhere, and the Luminals (essentially the Avengers of planet Xanth) for help, but is told to surrender for everyone else's benefit. Yeah, surrender to the tender mercies of people who serve Vulcan.

Mentor, the Brainiac-5 of the Imperial Guard, plans to take control of Knowhere and its ability to send forces anywhere to strike directly at the Inhumans, but the Guardians rally. Gamora and Phyla aren't down with "Scatter!" as a strategy and opt to hack their way through the Shi'ar. The mage and some other soldiers use the mark to track Warlock, but he's able to transfer it to her. When the soldiers use their enchanted weapons, they track the mark and kill her. Nifty, and all it took was Warlock's skin turning purple, which, combined with him rending the soldiers limb from limb certainly isn't concerning!

Mentor loses the Continuum Cortex when the remaining third of the Guardians - Rocket, Groot, Drax and Major Victory - 'port in. Rocket gets a little feral, clawing up Mentor's face while telling him they just reinstalled Lilandra on the throne. Even with Phyla, Gamora and Warlock joining the fray, Mentor has a good laugh as he runs with his oversized dome between his legs. Lilandra's just been assassinated (by a Raptor in Darkhawk's armor.) The bad news doesn't stop there, as Knowhere comes alive to warn Adam the fate of all existence depends on him. All existence is pretty fucked, then.

Oh, and the Starhawk the Guardians have had prisoner for several issues was able to manipulate the freshly-resurrected Moondragon into releasing her, and has vanished, taking Mantis, Cosmo, Star-Lord, Bug and Jack Flag along for the ride.

{5th longbox, 36th comic, Guardians of the Galaxy (vol. 2) #15, by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning (writer), Brad Walker (penciler), Victor Olizaba and Livesay (inker), Jay David Ramos (colorist), Chris Eliopoulos (letterer)}

Black Sun - Rebecca Roanhorse

The city of Tova, center of a great empire, is preparing to celebrate a Convergence, a solar eclipse. But not all elements are planning to celebrate in the same way. While the Sun Priest hopes to usher in a new era of the Watchers actually providing a service for the people of Tova beyond sitting in their secluded tower and issuing proclamations, there's a man named Serapio on his way to Tova that is part of a much different plan for the momentous day.

This is the first book in a trilogy, and it mostly focuses on the 20 days prior to the Convergence, as the Sun Priest Naranpa finds herself under siege from threats within the tower and without. She's a reformer who believes the priests can and should still serve a purpose. So she annoys the traditionalists who are fine doing the minimum and reaping the rewards, and the people who want to scrap the entire system and start over.

Nobody likes a centrist, though I did like Naranpa. She's written as a bit of an idealist, so we can see she actually wants to use her position to help people. At the same time, she's tried to bury her past as a child of the "Dry Earth" district, when all the other priests are "Sky Made." There's a class element to the resistance against her as well, and I'm curious if that's explored further in the later books. Roanhorse successfully builds the suspense and the threat, highlighting danger from one direction, while offering just enough doubt the reader isn't sure if Naranpa can trust the people she does.

The other half of the book is Serapio's journey to Tova, which is interspersed with flashbacks of all the people that have built him up to this moment, starting with his mother. It's poignant, and a bit intimidating that all these people have done their best to turn him into a weapon for their revenge. At times, Serapio's able to rationalize it as his destiny, or that he's becoming a god.

During the journey he develops a connection with Xiala, the boat captain who is from a group of people called The Teek. Xiala's people have their own form of magic, but she's exiled. So Roanhorse plays the contrast between Xiala, who can't go home to her people (the whys are currently unrevealed), and Serapio going "home" to a people he's never really met, to act as a doorway for their benefit. You don't really see his dedication waver, but there's enough uncertainty to create doubt as to what exactly is going to happen.

"Why didn't you go?" Serapio asked. "She seemed very interested in you."

"Shut up," she muttered, pushing him forward into the now-empty room. "Apparently, I don't want to have a good time with fun attractive people. I want to sit morosely in an empty room and drink alone with you instead."

Z for Zachariah (2015)

In the aftermath of some sort of radioactive apocalypse, Ann (Margot Robbie) lives alone on her family farm in a valley with an untouched water supply. She finds John (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an engineer suffering from radiation sickness and takes care of him until he recovers. The two then try to navigate their interactions, made more complicated when Caleb (Chris Pine) shows up. Three's a crowd!

With a cast of exactly three people, there's a lot of tension. John is attracted to Ann, though not great at expressing himself. Ejiofor uses a rough, almost hoarse voice, stops and starts a lot. Pine gives Caleb a good ol' boy twang, with the smile to match. Robbie plays Ann as in some ways immature or sheltered. There's a dinner where John and Chris each tell stories of bad times they experienced, while Ann mostly sits and listens. She's been there by herself for over a year, and hasn't had to fight for her life, or last bit of food. 

She's kind, but Robbie gives it a level of insecurity in her posture that makes Ann seem like a people-pleaser. Help people so they'll like you, which probably says something about her upbringing with her pastor father. Ann's very religious, while John is not. Caleb probably isn't, but he was raised that way long enough to fake it, at least. Or maybe he's genuine. It's to the movie's credit I'm not sure about what any of them are really thinking.

John would like to construct a water wheel to generate electricity, so at least the radioactive water fall that nearly killed him could be of some use. The only suitable source of wood is the church Ann's father built. So John withdraws the notion when it makes Ann uncomfortable. Does he do that out of a sense that he owes a debt for her saving his life, or because he's in love with her, or is it really as unimportant as he plays it off as? Just another "project"?

When Caleb encourages them to go for it, what's he driving at? Does he really think electricity's a good idea, or is it some other motive? Why does Ann eventually acquiesce? I suspect she fears she'll drive them both away, and doesn't want to be stuck there alone again, but maybe not.

What I Bought 2/14/2023 - Part 2

With the announcement of a possibly forthcoming Fantastic Four movie - third (fourth?) times the charm! - I was thinking about who would make a good Dr. Doom. Who has the bombast, the dramatic demeanor. Then I read some concerns about Pedro Pascal as Reed, because the person just sees Pascal as himself now, rather than whatever role he's playing. They mentioned Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, and my brain said, "Nic Muthafuckin' Cage as Doom."

Then I woke up on the floor with blood pouring from my eyes and ears. Anyway, comics!

Fantastic Four #17, by Ryan North (writer), Carlos Gomez (artist), Jesus Arbutov (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - So it wasn't aliens that seeded Earth with life, but the Accursed Richards? Figures.

Sue's helping with an archaeological dig in Arizona (because North established or reiterated that's what she has a doctorate in) which has found peculiar skeleton. 20,000 years old, but with European skeletal features. Oh, and there are scraps on clothing made of unstable molecules on the body. Using invisibility to compare the remains to the FF's - Gomez's stretchy Reed skeleton is highly disturbing, but only present on a splash page, so I can't show it here - leads to the conclusion the body is Sue, somehow.

So then we get the somehow. Reed brought Sue back to a point when the earliest arrivals were passing by that point, as an anniversary gift. Sure, he's off by probably at least 100,000, if not 200,000 years, if The Indigenous Paleolithic of the Western Hemisphere is on the money, but it's the thought that counts. Anyway, Rama-Tut shows up to kill them, right after he promised to do so in 1963's FF #19. And he's going to cheat like crazy, as every time they thwart him, he jumps back to before that, until they're overrun with Rama-Tuts.

Reed and Sue retreat to their time (4 years after Sue finds the body) to concoct a plan. Which involves building a gun that does science stuff, but also 3-D printing facsimiles of themselves. Meaning Reed has a 3-D printer that creates human bone and tissue. That feels kind of creepy. Sure hope he doesn't hit the "Asgardian Thunder God" setting by accident (or "accident".) 

Anyway, when Rama-Tut uses time tricks to swipe the gun, after Reed spends 3 panels explaining exactly what it does, he unwittingly shoots the duplicates, kept invisible until then, instead of the real deal. North writes Rama-Tut as a big gloater. Bragging, talking shit, the whole nine yards. Gomez has draws several panels of Rama-Tut looking smug. 

There's some handwavey explanation for why Rama doesn't just try again when he eventually figures out it didn't take, but more critically, Future Sue invisibly communicates with Present Reed and Sue that there's nothing to worry about. Sue can apparently make Braille with her powers, which isn't that out of line for the level of power she's demonstrated.

Not sure what Present-Day Sue is going to tell the people who called her in for that dig.

Vengeance of the Moon Knight #2, by Jed Mackay (writer), Alessandro Cappuccio (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Dead Pigeon Thunderdome.

It's Tigra's turn with Dr. Sterman, as she relates what happened in the confrontation with the new Moon Knight - she and Hunter's Moon got their asses kicked - and why she's convinced the new guy isn't Marc Spector. The latter of which involves a stroll down memory lane through her past lovers. We don't see any flashbacks, just her talking. Eyes darting away from Sterman's, or looking at something only she can see (figuratively). Fiddling with her hair or flexing her fingers, showing off the claws. Little tics, stuff like that.

As for the fight, this new Moon Knight has at least one new trick. Namely, he can envelop someone in total darkness, which he likens to the new moon. Rosenberg kind of blends purple with black for taht effect. That's how - combined with some pepper powder to mess with her nostrils - he can take out Tigra. Seems like that shouldn't help with a cat's hearing, but oh well. Reese dares him to prove he's Moon Knight by taking over the Midnight Mission, but the building rejects him. I think the building lifts from its foundation before dropping in an attempt to squash him, but it's not really clear. Either way he leaves, telling them to stay out of his way. 

It's the Shroud, right? Got the shadow powers, knows martial artist, wouldn't need light to fight anyway because he's blind, kind of nuts. It's the Shroud. Can't decide yet if this is better or worse than Mark Waid writing him as a pathetic stalker loser in Daredevil. See how MacKay plays it.

Sunday Splash Page #310

 

"Peek-a-Boo," in Locke and Key: Welcome to Lovecraft #2, by Joe Hill (writer), Gabriel Rodriguez (artist), Jay Fotos (colorist), Robbie Robbins (letterer)

Welcome to Lovecraft was the first of, at that time, six mini-series following the Locke family as they return to the family home in Massachusetts following a family tragedy. It focuses primarily on the children - from oldest to youngest, Tyler, Kinsey, and Bode - since Hill's story operates on the "you become blind magic as an adult," principle. Which means it's Bode who finds the first of the mysterious keys and begins experimenting with their power. And it's Bode who discovers the echo in the wellhouse.

Most of this first volume is the kids dealing with what they went through, and how other people perceive it. Bode's teacher and mother think his cartoon about walking through a door and becoming a ghost and looking for his father is disturbing. Kinsey thinks Tyler is dealing with it by focusing on manual labor around the new house, when what he's really seeing is the dead he blames himself for. Kinsey tries to be as innocuous as possible to avoid being noticed, and runs from anyone that tries to get close.

Gabriel Rodriguez makes Keyhouse a massive, Gothic thing. Stone archways over huge wooden doors in the cellar. Elaborate wood walls covered in just the sorts of things that would encourage a small child to explore, and in the process discover hidden surprises. The violence isn't wildly graphic, but he'll come back to a shot of a person with their face busted in with a brick as Tyler replays that memory, or the peculiar way a body lands if you break the neck. Things that would stick with the characters, so they stick with us.

Any progress any of them might make is rushed by the surprise arrival of their father's murderer at their doorstep. Each of them end up desperate in their own way. Ty's desperation makes him try to be a martyr, and Kinsey takes a risk because she's determined to do more than hide to protect herself this time. But it's Bode, knowing the power of the keys but not who he's dealing with, that helps the echo escape and releases the problem that'll carry through the next five volumes.

Saturday Splash #112

 

"Into the Kobra's Fangs," in Suicide Squad #47, by John Ostrander and Kim Yale (writer), Geof Isherwood (artist), Tom McCraw (colorist), Todd Klein (letterer)

Issue #39 of Suicide Squad ended with Task Force X officially shut down, and Waller in prison for killing the heads of the Loa. Also, she let Ravan, Deadshot and Poison Ivy go free after they helped with that, as promised. As much as I've always wondered what Waller got up to that year in prison, the next issue began a new era for the book, what I'd call the "plainclothes" or "A-Team" era, which continued until the book's conclusion two years later.

Essentially, the higher-ups recognize they still need something like the Suicide Squad to deal with certain, unpleasant, problems, and Waller's the best combination of smart, hard-nosed and honorable to put such a thing together. But Waller's done being a civil servant, that just gets her left holding the bag when some politico orders her to make miracles out of a P.R. stunt. Now, the Squad are an independent group for hire. It gives Waller, and anyone who works for her, right of refusal, but also means there's no government protection if things go wrong.

But the pay is a lot better!

Ostrander and Kim Yale, who were co-writing the book by this point, retain some of the other core characters. Deadshot, who had become a compelling character with his own set of rules and perspective, but has to, in a sense, kill himself at one point. Captain Boomerang's still there, being a shitheel. There's a recurring gag after Boomerbutt causes he and Deadshot to get separated from their gear, where Deadshot makes casual threats about killing Boomerang, or debates whether to shoot or save him at different times. Waller and Vixen find Bronze Tiger, who's suffered his own nervous breakdown and is trying to act like a cold, ruthless man. Vixen wisely recognizes the emotional minefield that is and gets gone after two missions. Poison Ivy joins to save her butt from angry revolutionaries (this version is a far cry from the ecologically-mined version that exists today), and manipulates Count Vertigo, who begins contemplating ending his life.

If anything, this Squad is less psychologically stable than the earlier versions were.

There's also the mysterious Oracle, who had been helping the Squad going back to the Belle Reve days behind an anonymous identity. She was eventually revealed to be Barbara Gordon, Ostrander and Yale laying the groundwork to rehab the character after the DC muck-a-mucks decided The Killing Joke just had to be part of post-Crisis on the Infinite Earths canon. There's even an arc where Oracle takes command while Waller's incapacitated, maybe an early dry run for her Birds of Prey. And there's the Atom, seen above. The writers keep his identity a secret for less than a year, but then play with the questions of how he got a size-changing belt, and where Ray Palmer's at.

Geof Isherwood is the penciler for much of this stretch, with a variety of inkers, including himself, Luke McDonnell, and Karl Kesel. Where McDonnell tended to make the characters fairly squared-off, all sharp lines and stark shadows, Isherwood rounds the appearances more. The shading is more gradual, the faces more fleshy and textured. The angles used for perspective within the panels seems to vary more, things getting tilted or dynamic as another situation goes to hell. The new version of the Suicide Squad is in more of a grey area than ever, operating for briefcases of cash exchanged in conversations and meetings that never officially took place.

The lines about which side is "right" are obscured further, brought home forcefully in the final arc, when Waller's squad has to contend with a C.I.A.-sponsored version that's propping up a Latin American dictatorship, as the C.I.A. traditionally does. It prompts some soul-searching in Waller, or simply gets her to admit what she's known for a long time. This is a far cry from the version DC has today, who draws no lines in what she'll do, and expresses no remorse or regret for any of it.

Wasted a perfectly good character, they did.

The book seems to bring in bigger names as guest-stars. Maybe because the Squad has no official standing, so it's harder for the government to keep them out. Or because it allows for more variety in the types of situations they deal with, and where. Batman pops up a couple of times, once with Aquaman and Superman. Black Adam shows up for a 1-issue War of the Gods tie-in, that's more notable for involving Grant Morrison's stand-in from their Animal Man run.

What I Bought 2/14/2024 - Part 1

I saw the trailer for Deadpool 3. Not enthused at more multiverse stuff, but I will probably see it in theaters. Unless I forget (or subsequent trailers end up putting me off.) But that's months away, so for now, let's look at a first issue.

Night Thrasher #1, by J. Holtham (writer), Nelson Daniel (artist), Matt Milla (color artist), Travis Lanham (letterer) - Dwayne adopted Night Thrasher after realizing Night Window Cleaner just didn't fit his approach.

Dwayne Taylor returns to New York for the funeral of his old mentor Chord. That's rough, killing the surrogate father figure right out of the gate. But Dwayne's also there to close down the Taylor Foundation, to the consternation of several people, including Silhouette and a local councilman who was hoping the foundation could help revitalize Harlem while staving off gentrification.

Dwayne's set to tell the councilman tough luck until a bunch of kids rob a store and Dwayne realizes one fights like he does. The kids all work for some mysterious guy called "The O.G.", so maybe it's time for some night thrashing.

That's definitely someone getting thrashed. The one doing the thrashing is former Avenger and New Warrior, Rage. Maybe it's just from re-reading Suicide Squad lately, but Daniel's art reminds me of Luke McDonnell's in places. Not so much in the use of shadows, but in square-offed jaws and the slightly rough pencil lines. That's more at a distance. In the close-up panels, it's got a strong Sal Buscema vibe to it. A little more fluid in the characters' movements, not as over-the-top in the action sequences. Nobody goes flying across a room after a huge uppercut, but in the faces, there's a lot of excited, shouting expressions.

Holtham spent most of the issue with Dwayne trying to walk away from his past. New York's his past, Silhouette's his past (albeit a part he's not entirely willing to let go of), the Taylor Foundation is his past. So Rage, who Dwayne not only trained, but I think legally adopted at one point, is another part of that past. One Dwayne hasn't seen in a while, I'm guessing. My impression is, not since Dwayne's death in Civil War (an editor's note explains Dwayne came back in the Contest of Champions mini-series during Hickman's Secret Wars, which is one way to do it.)

Anyway, it's been a while. And Rage is using what he learned to train kids to push back against what they see as forces encroaching on the neighborhood. They're trying to make the place unprofitable for forces they think don't belong. The store owners are pushing back with the cops, violently no doubt.

I don't really understand why, if Dwayne admits Sil and the others made the Foundation what it was always meant to be, he doesn't just leave it in their hands rather than shuttering it. It would still let him put it in the rearview. I guess he plans to use the money to do something similar, but better right from the start. That feels like that's going to be a big part of this, Dwayne thinking it's better to just start clean, but realizing there's no way to start from 0 any longer. All he can do is improve things from where they are (which would tie in with the councilman doing his best to preserve the Harlem that's there.)

Space Cowboy-ing It Up

You board a colony ship, headed for another star system light years away. You wake up from cryo-sleep centuries later, courtesy of your standard Doc Brown/Rick Sanchez-looking mad scientist centuries later. You're the only one woken up, because the ship was presumed lost, and by the time it was found, "The Board" that controls the Halcyon System wasn't too interested in adding a bunch of cool, smart people to a situation that suited them so well. Which means you were woken up by, and are now working for, an outlaw mad scientist.

Of course, there's plenty of time for you to pursue your own interests in between jobs for him.

The Outer Worlds is FallOut, but in space. That's the shorthand description. It's in first-person perspective, you put points into different skill categories, which grants you a certain amount of leeway to complete missions in different ways. The whole setting has a general sense of decaying, capitalist folly, and most of the people you meet are morons. You curry favor or disfavor from various sects and colonies based on what you do. You can gather companions to crew your ship, or tell them to piss off. You can help them with their own personal business, or say, "We ain't got time for that shit!"

You can't actually say that, it's not a dialogue option. But the spirit of it is present in the options you do get.

The game offers you a "time dilation" feature for combat. Similar to the V.A.T.S. system in FallOut 3, it lets you target specific body parts, complete with a helpful descriptor of what targeting a particular limb will accomplish. Yep, that would have been really handy. . .if I remembered to use it. Likewise, I never utilized the companions' special abilities (nor did I remember how to activate them, or feel like bothering to look it up in the notes provided in the game.)

In general, I played Outer Worlds like I played the various FallOut games. I put a lot of points into Stealth, and a lot of points into Dialogue, and let the rest sort itself out. Having the full range of dialogue choices to trick, frighten or flat-out bullshit an enemy is a lot more fun than another "pew-pew-pew" gun battle.

I mean, I could have defended myself from those security forces at the relay station, but why bother when I can convince them I have both gained control of the self-destruct function, and that I'm prepared to use it? A battle avoided is a battle won.

This did lead to frustration with a big final boss fight I couldn't talk or sneak around. Felt a bit like Deus Ex, being encouraged to play a certain way for dozens of hours, only to be told that is not an option for this incredibly crucial sequence.

Despite what I figured initially, I did accept all six companions. Actually, I'm pretty sure I told Vicar Max to piss up a rope, but he was waiting at my ship when Parvati and I got ready to leave, so I must have just told him not to accompany me at that moment. And I ended up helping all of them with their personal quests, most of which weren't too exasperating, Parvati's being the notable exception. But I still liked her best, so I soldiered through her fumbling attempts to woo that engineer.

All the companion quests involve going somewhere and either finding a thing, killing a thing, or talking to someone. Whichever one it is usually sends us along to some other place, to find, kill, or talk to more things. But that's all the missions in the game, so I can't be too irritated. At least with the companion quests, I knew what I was working towards and why.

Typically when I've played FallOut games, I have a strong sense of who I want to help, and who I'm willing to backstab. Here, I felt like I was basically out for myself, and no one outside my crew got benefit of the doubt. Everyone sort of blurred into a barely-distinguishable mass of people who might try to shoot me at any moment.

Part of it was the game itself, where one of the groups that could like or dislike you is "The Board", but you hardly deal with them. You deal with specific officials who run specific companies that are or were part of The Board, but I never felt like those companies were tightly knit enough where one would care if I helped another company or not. Since they end up being either your ultimate foe, or your new partners, it seems like they should stand out or being a more notable presence in my life during gameplay. Like the Legion in New Vegas. There's a distinct person you deal with, you know where to find him, you know when you're dealing with his people or not. Instead, "The Board" is just a thing people mention, like a boogeyman. When I was directly contacted by the person in charge, my reaction was, "Who's this lady, and why does she think she can scare me?"

A Better Way to Die (2000)

A guy named Boomer (Scott Wiper) decides being a cop in Chicago sucks and leaves, to get back together with his old girlfriend. He stops to help someone whose car brokedown, only to knocked unconscious and have his car stolen.

At which point everything gets ridiculous. He's picked up by a one-armed man named Flash (Joe Pantoliano) on the hunt for a guy named Harry James. James is a fed that's gone missing after some sort of deal went wrong. They get ambushed, Flash gets killed, and Boomer only survives because one of the killers (played Andre Braugher) spares him at the behest of his cousin, who objects to killing an innocent schmuck.

When Boomer wakes up, he's back in Flash's car, but now it's being driven by the mother of Harry's kid, who contacted Flash in the first place and thought Boomer sounded like Harry over the phone. She has Boomer contact some blind slob Harry knew, pretending to be Harry to get a bead on where he's supposed to be, and from then on, it's everyone trying to kill Boomer because they think he's Harry. The feds show up, led by Lou Diamond Phillips as an alcoholic bent fed who probably invokes "national security" to get his drinks for free.

Absolutely stunned when IMDb said this movie was from 2000. Felt at least ten years older. So many guys with machine pistols, just spraying bullets everywhere and hitting nothing. Gratuitous cursing. Guys leaping backwards while firing their guns or trying to slide backwards while shooting. The girlfriend getting shot, just because.

Sometimes it feels like it's trying to be funny. The movie starts with Boomer about to go undercover at some sort of drug or gun meet. As in, it's going to happen in a few minutes, and the other two cops are still giving him advice like, "Curse more", and, "If you don't know what to do with your hands, scratch your balls. No one ever looked at a guy scratching his balls and thought that guy was nervous."

At another point, Boomer is on the run from the local hick cops after he accidentally shot the sheriff at the tail end of a gunfight in the local grocery store. He collapses in some old boy's shed, and the guy waves a shotgun, telling Boomer to leave. When Boomer pleads with him not to shoot that thing (because all the deputies are outside), the guy fires into the air, inciting the cops to open fire, killing the old boy and causing a fire that burns down the shed.

Braugher's character really wants to kill Boomer, but objects to the others prolonging the suffering, and they end up as, I don't even think they're uneasy allies. Boomer doesn't give a shit by then. Braugher's kind of manic in this, but it makes him more interesting than anyone else, since the rest of the cast are playing variations on "emotionally constipated hard man."

Also, I'm not if Boomer is meant to be read as autistic, or OCD or something. He does this thin after stressful situations where he taps one side of his head with two fingers. When pressed if he's nervous, he always mechanically replies, "Nobody's nervous." His watch is set to go off at meal times, which he announces like, "9:00. Breakfast time. Breakfast time is 9:00." It was an odd performance, because he seems like he's just out of it for long stretches. Maybe that's all the concussions from getting knocked out.

People Call Me a Space Trashman. . .

In one ear, out the other.

Volume 1 of Makoto Yukimura's Planetes Omnibus starts with a crew of space garbagemen, essentially. Fee, Yuri, and Hachimaki's jobs are to clear debris that orbits Earth so it doesn't cause horrific space disasters. That's where it starts, before it starts concerning itself with the challenges of life in space, the reasons people go into space, the people left behind, humanity, the universe, all that stuff.

There's a lot of lovely imagery. Their spaceship is a tiny, squat thing that reminds me of a mini-sub, and all the panels of the interior emphasize the cramped conditions, pulled in tight around whichever character is the focus, but with machinery or instrument panels intruding around the edges. There's no room for anyone to be alone inside the ship.

Outside the ship is another matter, and Yukimura uses a lot of large panels or full-page spreads of the characters floating above Earth, or a single figure in a spacesuit tromping across the Moon's surface with nothing but a field of stars above them. Emphasizing the size of space, and the isolation. There's some figurative imagery, such as Hachimaki seeing a version of himself in a spacesuit that torments him with the things he doesn't want to admit, or a strange cat he sees when he nearly drowns on the way back from a beer run. I don't get the cat thing, but the interactions between Hachimaki and the phantom are deeply affecting. How calmly the phantom tries to tear him open (verbally), and how visceral Hachimaki's reactions are.

The art does work against something the story keeps bringing up, that people are always in space. Earth is in space, we're told, so we're already in space all the time. Except the art shows there's Earth, and there's space around it. When Hachimaki's adrift, he's not on Earth, where he could lay on his back in a field alone for days. He's in space, where either his air is going to run out, his blood is going to boil, or he'll move out from behind the moon and be cooked by radiation. It's not something the visuals would let us ignore, so the idea rings false.

Most of this is focused on Hachimaki, who's the youngest of the crew. He's the one who gets injured because he hasn't been taking proper care of himself and has developed low-gravity issues with his bones and whatnot. He's the one who survives being adrift for a time, and has to overcome the psychological stress that results if he wants to achieve his dream. He wants a spaceship of his own, but he needs a lot of money for that, so he needs a bigger, more high-profile job that will open the doors to greater opportunities. And there just so happens to be a mission coming together to go to Jupiter to try and harvest helium for fuel. Of course, once Hachimaki rededicates himself to this goal, he abandons concern for anything else, and he's told he's lost his humanity by the girl replacing him on the garbage crew, Tanabe.

Which is sort of my problem with this series. Hachimaki seems to be the main character, but all we get is people telling him he's wrong, he doesn't understand, he's mistaken. When he considers that maybe he should get away from space after his injury, Fee hits him and calls him a sissy. When he decides he's going to push himself so he'll be selected for the Jupiter mission, Tanabe screams in his ear about being heartless.

He gets lectured by a member of a terrorist organization that plants bombs that kill people because they object to the exploitation of space's natural resources about how far he's willing to go. He gets crap from his dad, who says he's going to retire from being an astronaut, then changes his mind and accepts a spot on the Jupiter mission because the guy in charge is such a heartless piece of shit he'll surely make it work. He gets his ass kicked by his little brother in an argument over which of them better understands the realities of traveling in space.

I don't expect the protagonist to have everything figured out from the jump, but Yukimura's writes his main character basically having nothing figured out, and getting lectured by people I'm not convinced have any grounds to do so. Especially because we never see any pushback from anyone else against these characters. No one beside Hachimaki argues with Tanabe when she decides she knows best what a dead man really wanted. Lockwood, the project director, ignores or dismisses anyone who raises concerns about the project or the 300+ who died in a reactor explosion. The terrorist guy just, gives up, because Tanabe kissed Hachimaki to keep him from killing the terrorist. All these people are also apparently following their own codes with no question or reservations, but Hachimaki's the only one constantly being called to task for it.

Which kicks off one of those romantic subplots between two characters who fight and bicker and argue constantly, and I have been very clear I think that stuff is bullshit. I managed to keep one eye from rolling clean out of my head at that development, but it was a near thing. Overall, it's lovely to look at, but the writing pisses me off.

Sunday Splash Page #309

 

"Into the Trapper Keeper Zone," in Limbo #2, by Dan Watters (writer), Caspar Wijngaard (artist/colorist), Jim Campbell (letterer)

I reviewed this mini-series 3 years ago, but in brief, an amnesiac private investigator gets hired to protect a nightclub janitor from her Mexican wrestler boss (who is also the city's main drug lord), and finds things much more complicated than he expected.

I don't know they went with an '80s aesthetic for the technology and shades, but Wijngaard colors the main characters in solid, bright colors, making them stand out from all the background fillers who are colored like regular people. There are some nice page layouts when characters travel through otherwordly or metaphysical realms. Characters upside-down, or leaping outside one panel to reach another. Fitting, since this whole thing is a rat running a maze, essentially.

I'm not usually a fan of stories with mortals getting jerked around by higher forces trying to settle a bet, with no way to strike back or defend themselves, but it doesn't become apparent that's woven through the whole thing until over halfway through. The ending leaves open the possibility of the whole thing repeating itself, but there doesn't seem to be much point unless Watters and Wijngaard decided to focus on one of the other characters caught up in the whole thing.

Which probably marks where I stand on the issue the higher forces were arguing about, i.e., the mutability of man.

Saturday Splash Page #111

 

"Trouble's Coming," in Suicide Squad #14, by John Ostrander (writer), Luke McDonnell (artist), Carl Gafford (colorist), Todd Klein (letterer)

Oh yeah, here's the good stuff. I was tempted to use the splash page from #13, as a mirror to the one I used for Justice League International, but if I;m going to talk about Suicide Squad, I have to talk about the Wall.

Ostrander created Amanda Waller, and despite rarely being directly involved in missions through the first 3 years of the book, she's always the gravitational force the book rotates around. It's her suggestion to Reagan to use incarcerated super-villains to handle jobs for which the U.S. government would prefer deniability. The Dirty Dozen, but with superpowers, essentially. A few recurring villains (and a few heroes to keep them under control), with others on both sides of the bars rotating in and out on an as-needed basis.

Waller's a wonderful character. She's atypical in her appearance, not just in being a black woman in a position of authority. She's short and wide, but in no way a comedy sidekick. She's an older woman,, with grown children and a murdered husband, and it shows in her face. She's got lines and wrinkles, she's been through some shit. 

But beyond that, she a character that both truly believes Task Force X is a good concept that can do valuable work to protect the world, while being motivated by the desire to have power that will grant her control over things. She's principled enough to object to the Squad being used to rescue an imprisoned dissident Soviet author (who, it turns out, doesn't want to be rescued), but also ruthless (she would no doubt argue pragmatic) enough to turn her back on rescuing Nemesis when he's caught by the Soviets during that mission. Or to publicly stand down as head of Task Force X after a congressional investigation, only to have her replacement be an actor who is merely the public face while she continues to run things from behind the scenes. She'll stare down Batman without blinking, but she can admit when she's in the wrong, assuming there's anyone around whose opinion she respects to point it out.

And that's the arc of the first 3 years of the book. Waller keeps grasping for power, keeps pushing for control, and it gradually burns out all the people who act as a check on her. It's hard work to push back against a relentless Wall every day. And as those people - Dr. LeGrieve, Nemesis, Nightshade, Rick Flag - depart in one form or the other, Waller only plays her cards closer to the vest, only grasps even further, too sure she's got it all under control because there's no one pointing out she doesn't. And it all blows up in a 3-issue arc where most of the Squad ends up on Apokolips, which is not a good place for them.

It isn't all grim, however. Ostrander works in humor here and there. The addition of Dr. Light, when he was still a walking punchline, or Punch and Jewlee and their oddball married couple routine. Reverend Craemer, as an outsider, is able to make observations with a dry wit. Captain Boomerang is, as Dave's Long Box once noted, a complete and utter dick. Which makes it fun when his scheme of committing crimes as Mirror Master leads to his being pranked by the entire prison. The mystery of the Pie Thrower, who manages to get even Lois Lane at one point 

(Ostrander doesn't bring in the A-listers much, but it makes sense when he does. Batman would object to criminals being released early. Lois Lane would absolutely dig into something like Task Force X. Pity we didn't see Lois and Waller clash more.)

Luke McDonnell is the series artist for the first two years, and parts of the third year. The series doesn't lend itself to some of the larger spectacle that his time on Justice League of America with Gerry Conway did, so the skills he showed there doesn't get much run. The battles are smaller scale, fought uglier, dirtier. The art is usually less flashy, the characters drawn with less exaggerated physiques, the  colors less eye-catching. Boomerang kills a super-speedster in the opening arc by stunning him with a boomerang to the back of the head, then simply kicking him off the roof in a tall narrow panel McDonnell does in shadow.

He gets to cut loose occasionally. The back half of the issue that splash page is from involves the Squad traveling to another dimension to rescue Nightshade's brother. There are some freaky temples and shadow monsters in those issues, as well as some nice work in panels where some sorcerer guy is burned up and shattered from within right in front of them. The main cast still look the same, not too dynamic, typically overwhelmed or dwarfed by what they're up against, but the surroundings are a far cry from the usual setting. After that, they wind up in an entirely different place and encounter Shade, the Changing Man, who hangs around for the next 20+ issues.

But that's one of the fun things about Suicide Squad. Amid the late-stage Cold War struggle and Islamic terrorism-related threats, you'd get arcs where they end up in another dimension, or discrediting some white supremacist who's trying a Robin Hood shtick.

Random Back Issues #123 - Spider-Woman #10

Who hasn't wanted to toss a crying baby into a vat of molten lava? Be honest!

Up to this point, Spider-Woman's been working with an old enemy, Octavia Vermis (???), to find a cure for an experimental serum she was dosed with. The serum boosted her strength, but made her unstable, to the extent she chewed out and pushed away all her friends. Which leaves her to contend with Octavia's sudden but inevitable betrayal, alone.

Octavia's already run the High Evolutionary (written as more sane and down-to-earth than I've ever seen) through with a lance and killed her daughter. Again. But Ophelia's a clone, so she'll just make another. Jess was cured in the previous issue, which means she's not under Octavia's control, but she's too shitty of an actress to fake it and keep the element of surprise.

Cue the fight scene, with each of them trying to hurt emotionally as well as physically. Jess' contention she has people who love her is countered with the fact absolutely none of them are here right now. Octavia's argument she made something of her kids is rebutted with the point they might have sucked because they're clones of a shitty person.

That one's a palpable hit, but it earned Jess a kick in the old joybox, so. . . Palpable hits all around. Then Octavia suggests Jess would do the same to her own son, make him a perfect obedient copy. Jess responds by getting Octavia in the face with a venom blast, so Octavia sics an army of clones of Jess' mother on her.

Jess kicks a control device into the lava and the clones, programmed to retrieve it, follow. She gets the lance out of H.E.'s chest, he activates his array, Jess kicks Octavia into it, and she's turned into a possibly mindless dino-person. The Evolutionary keeps Octavia around while he rebuilds his lab, and Spider-Woman goes home.

First to her son, because he's her kid, but also because she's going to use him as a shield when she apologizes to her unhappy friends - Hawkeye, Iron Fist, Night Nurse, Luke Cage and War Machine. It works, because none of them are prepared to go through that terrifying facsimile of a child, but there's still one more person to make up with, and Carol's not in the mood. She accuses Jess of always denying her problems or running away from them. I feel like Carol Danvers does at least as much denying or running from her problems as Jessica Drew - the whole alcoholism thing, anyone? - but that doesn't jibe with Marvel's current conception of her character, where her only fault is she's just too awesome and people resent her for it, so whatever. They hug it out.

{10th longbox, 176th comic. Spider-Woman (vol. 7) #10, by Karla Pacheco (writer), Pere Perez (artist), Frank D'Armata (color artist), Travis Lanham (letterer)}

An Immense World - Ed Yong

In the opening chapter, Yong introduces the term "Umwelt," used by a German biologist in 1909 to describe how an organism perceives the world around it. It's compared to houses, each with their own unique configuration of windows. Essentially, that there is a variety of sensory information all around us, but not all animals perceive the same aspects, or in the same fashion.

From there, it each chapter focuses on a different type of sense, and the various ways they're expressed by animals. It isn't, as Yong takes pains to stress in the chapter about smell and taste, about how much "stronger" one organism's sense may be than another's. After all, if you say a dog's sense of smell is 5 times greater than a human's, what's that mean? They can smell things five times further away, five times fainter, retain the scent in its absence for five times longer?

No, the point is how they differ, and how this informs the way those animals perceive the world and exist in it. So in the chapter on hearing, Yong notes that not all insects can hear, but that for those that can, the ears are located in almost any location you could conceive of. Often, the location of the ears is related to what specifically they're trying to hear.

Crickets have ears on their legs, and when they detect the call of a potential mate, that information causes the legs to move towards that sound even before the information could be transmitted to the brain. Sharks have their electric sense, via the Ampullae of Lorenzini, and researchers noticed that when an electric current is passed in front of a shark's snout, it blinks. This is because that sense has an limited effective range. It's the one sharks use right before they bite, and sharks take pains to protect their eyes before they bite. The detection of the electric current prompts that response.

Yong talks with a lot of different researchers about a wide variety of animals, covering senses from sight and sound, to the perception of pain or magnetic fields. Different senses are better studied than others - taste was relegated to a half-dozen or so pages at the end of the scent chapter, because not much work's been done with it - while vision got one chapter for sight, and one specifically about seeing color.

Of course, the matter of the other animal's Umwelt is theoretical, because even if we can know that certain insects see ultraviolet light, or that frog embryos can detect the particular vibrational frequency of a snake chewing and begin hatching in response, we can't really know what those things "feel" like for them, because the animals can't tell us. We can chart what section of a bat or dolphin's brain activates when it receives its echolocation information, but do they "see" it in their mind the way that Daredevil does? What does a geomagnetic sense look like?

In that way, the book can only go so far, but I think Yong knew that going in. His point is for us to be more aware that other animals do have very different perspectives of the world, and we can have impacts in ways we don't consider. The last chapter is about the problems of light pollution on insects and migrating birds, noise pollution on songbirds or whales, undersea cables throwing off electric senses. Those things don't seem to hamper us, so we don't consider them, but for creatures who look at the world through different windows, it's a problem.

'If Speiser is right about this bizarre setup, it means that even though each individual scallop eye has good spatial resolution, the animal itself might not have spatial vision. It knows when eyes in a certain region of its body have detected something, but it has no visual image of that object.'