Saturday Splash Page #140

 

"Meet Me at the Big Green Lady," in Spider-Man/Human Torch #5, by Dan Slott (writer), Ty Templeton (penciler), Drew Geraci and Greg Adams (inkers), J. Rauch (colorist), Dave Lanphear (letterer)

Released in 2005, Spider-Man/Human Torch was a humorous look at the antagonistic friendship between the title characters over the years. Each issue was set at a different point in their history, and involved the two either one-upping or saving each other, if not both at the same time. Critically, Johnny interacts with both Spider-Man and Peter Parker, while not realizing they're one and the same.

Though the fifth issue is set during the JMS/Bendis' New Avengers era, meaning Peter is a schoolteacher and Aunt May knows he's Spider-Man, Slott and Templeton stick mostly to before Peter's marriage to Mary Jane. This plays into the idea that Johnny can't believe Parker is somehow dating a different beautiful woman every time they cross paths, but it involves the creative team distilling the '90s into "clones," as Johnny keeps mentioning certain team-ups which Spidey responds to with "clone."

(Around the time this mini-series would have come out, I had a rough estimate that 4 years in our time equaled one year in Marvel time. Which means the entire Clone Saga would have been about 6 months, Ben Reilly's time as Spider-Man probably not even half that.)

It isn't until issue 3 (of 5) they even get to the '70s, in what is probably the most commonly cited issue online. Spidey, struggling to pull out of a depression brought on by Gwen's death, asks Johnny to give him driving lessons in the Spider-mobile. The Red Ghost and his Super-Apes get involved, and Spidey stops them with the power of fruit pies.

The various supporting casts are around - Spidey accompanies the FF on a trip inside a difficult-to-reach dimension when he and the Torch swap roles for the day; the Black Cat enlists Johnny's help on a heist inside the Wakandan Embassy when Spidey objects - but the focus is on the two leads. How much they envy each other, how much they can get on each other's nerves. But at the end of the day, neither of them really wishes the other ill. Spidey's not going to let Doom kill Johnny, and Johnny will lend an ear when Spidey's depressed.

What I Bought 8/28/2024

The heat and humidity this week has been like someone smothering you in a sauna with their towel. There was a brief reprieve Wednesday morning thanks to some clouds, so I decided to walk to the store after I got home, instead of driving there after work. Almost as soon as I got going, the clouds vanished and the sweaty towel was back. I had to hang my shirt up to dry a bit before chucking it in the dirty laundry and it was still damp 7 hours later.

Fantastic Four #24, by Ryan North (writer), Carlos Gomez (artist), Jesus Arbutov (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Don't be alarmed; contrary to what the cover suggests, the Inhumans don't appear in this comic.

The surviving alien, while requesting help in being shot back into space, explains that their people had wanted to travel to the stars, but found it too difficult, given the scale and energy requirements. Until they discovered a particle in the heart of their star that let them shrink and return to normal size. So they shrank down and repurposed photons from their sun as spaceships, so they could travel at near the speed of light. And because of that relativity thing I don't understand, they would only perceive a short period of time passing while journeying to other stars.

But it costs a lot, and you can't steer, so only the people with money to afford it could go. Then it turned out their star was dying, so the rich used it as a way to escape. And that's when the alien attacks Reed because he's not finishing prepping the particle accelerator. Because it turns out the people left behind as their star died aren't too happy with the ones who bailed, especially because it was all those exotic particles they harvested that killed the star.

(What I'm taking from this is we need to convince the billionaire dumbasses to get their asses to Mars before Earth is irrevocably fucked, so we can all have a good laugh while they suffocate or suffer massive and lethal genetic mutations from radiation exposure.)

So there's an unpleasant surprise on the way, and the alien wants to get gone before it arrives. The FF kind of look like chumps against what is basically a person-sized talking squid. Granted, a fireproof (why is it fireproof?) person-sized squid, but they took out Doc Ock a lot easier than this, and he's got super-strong metal arms. I guess it serves mostly to break up all the info dumping Sue and the ones decoding the transmission trailing the escape ships are doing. Zrixa escapes, Reed manages to catch up via another accelerated particle, but it's too late.

Not for Earth. Earth's fine, or as fine as the current state of the planet allows. Reed notes (and the issue is written from his perspective, trying to be precise, describe only what can be described and verified), the rest of the team have 4 dozen ways to handle the incoming problem. But the particle ship is flying towards nothing until the proton degrades, by which time, again with the relativity, the universe will be empty.

But, as usual, the universe finds a way to keep Reed Richards from dying, so he ends up back on Earth shortly after he left. I half expected them to encounter whatever the machine intelligence they encountered earlier this tried to contact, but it's something much different. At least Reed acknowledges he has no clear memory of how or why, and thus can't properly describe what he vaguely feels, but is just grateful to be home.

How to Communicate with Your Giant Mythological Pet

In The Last Guardian, a young boy wakes up in a cave beside a wounded and shackled creature, of a type he knows as a "Trico." Together, the two of them try to escape what turns out to be the remains of some ancient city set in the middle of a crater or hollowed-out volcano.

It's a mixture of platforming and puzzle solving, the former often required to achieve the latter. The boy may have to scale a tower, then leap across a series of what are essentially mobiles until he can destroy the stained glass image of an eye that frightens Trico. Or Trico is tired and you need to find these faintly glistening barrels that he can eat to replenish his energy and get them back to him somehow. 

There's no life bars or health meters; you can die if you fall too far, or be hauled off into the light by the living armors you encounter, but you just return to your last checkpoint. Likewise, Trico can't die no matter how many spears those armors chuck into him, but when you reach a point where the game says he's tired and doesn't want to move, that's it until you get him some food.

At other times, the puzzle may be figuring out what you need Trico to do to advance. Although it's often not figuring out what to do that's the problem, so much as getting Trico to do it.

There's also the aforementioned armors to contend with. This mostly translates into the kid running, although sometimes he has to figure out how to get past them to throw a switch without being grabbed. It would have been nice if the game told me I could help Trico by pulling the helmets off after he knocked them down, but I was probably 70% of the way through before it thought to mention that.

I didn't feel as though I had as much difficulty controlling the kid as Kelvin describes in his review. Usually when it came time to start inching over a narrow path, so long as I approached it slowly, the game would understand what I intended to do. I didn't run off cliffs much, but trying to make a jump I wasn't supposed to because I didn't understand what I was supposed to do and falling to my death? That I did several times.

The camera, however, was exhausting to deal with. It might rotate while I was climbing a chain or up Trico's back, and suddenly the controls are reversed. I became leery whenever I had to jump towards something, because the camera seemed to settle at an awkward angle that somehow threw off my aim. Died more than once that way. Not to mention if Trico and I were in a tight space together, the camera might be obscured entirely by a wall, ceiling, or Trico's body.

But trying to convey to Trico what I needed done was the most frustrating part. Sometimes he seems to understand without me doing anything, immediately jumping from one narrow pillar to another to cross a gorge. Other times, I had to keep pointing at a ledge or bridge and urging him to jump. 4, 5, 6 times giving the command before he'd actually do it. A couple of times very late in the game, I was trying to tell him to jump up, and he started back down instead.

The game is meant to play like a collaboration. You and Trico, working together to get out of this place. You open the gates and remove the weird eye symbols that bar his path, Trico scales the heights you never could and smashes the armors that catch you with ease. I felt more like I was stuck in a terrible escort mission. One where the person you protect is so stupid, it's like they're actively resisting your efforts to keep them alive.

That said, the game makes Trico expressive enough, and he saves the kid's hide enough, that I did end up caring about him and wanting to try and spare him injury if I could. It's a lot like taking care of my dad's dogs. Moments of great fondness and amusement intermingled with, "Why are you like this?!"

A November Surprise

November's solicitations didn't hold many new things that caught my eye, but there were a couple, including one in particular.

What's new that's coming out? I have told myself I'm going to ignore Venom War, but Kelly Thompson and Gurihiru are doing an It's Jeff! one-shot tie-in, and I'm sorely tempted.

Oni Press has the first issue of Calvera PI, a 4-issue mini-series about a guy revived from the dead to help solve a kidnapping, and maybe his own murder. It's written and drawn by Marco Finnegan, who was co-writer on Morning Star, which is not a ringing endorsement, but I might give him a second chance.

At Bay Press has Forgotten Frontier, a graphic novel by Tristan Jones and Alexander Bumbulut about presenting a more clear-eyed view and accurate view of the American West. On the one hand, it could feel like attending a history lecture. On the other, I enjoy learning new stuff about history.

That's all very well and good, but the one that really surprised me is that DC solicited a new Cassandra Cain Batgirl ongoing, by Tate Brombul and Takeshi Miyazawa. It only took a solid year, but DC finally put out something I want to buy. Will I enjoy this? It seems like it's going to focus on Cass' relationship with her mother, at least early on. Which is fair, Cass' first series was heavily focused on her and David Cain, but I tend to prefer when the character explores who she is independent of the parents whose philosophies she rejected. Guess I'll see in a few months.

What's ending? Nothing, really. Maybe next month.

And all the rest: Werewolf by Night, Babs, Red Before Black and The Pedestrian will all be on issue 4. Dazzler, Avengers Assemble, Loop and Body Trade are on their third issues. Marvel also solicited the 4th issue of Avengers Assemble, but it doesn't arrive in stores until December. Loop's first issue didn't actually show up this month, so hopefully the creators haven't landed on another dud of a publisher.

Rogues is up to issue 5, Deadpool to issue 8, and Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu is on issue 2. I didn't see Fantastic Four anywhere, which is strange. They didn't solicit two issues last month, and I don't remember anything about that being the last issue.

The Gods Must Be Crazy II (1989)

Yeah, they made two of these. This time, Xixo (the same character as Xi in the first movie, still played by N!xau, not sure why they changed the name) is chasing after a poacher's truck after his kids were fascinated by it and climbed on. Along the way he encounters an American lawyer (Lena Farugia) here for a conference who got stranded with a zoologist (Hans Strydom, seemingly going to Tom Selleck as Magnum P.I.) after a storm blew their light plane into a tree.

Plus, two soldiers on separate sides of what I think is a civil war, who take turns capturing the other and driving towards their respective bases. That's assuming the Communist soldier (who's from Cuba, so I guess they're in Angola?) can figure out which direction his base is.

There's still a lot of sped-up camera humor, whether it's the Cuban soldier driving between the brush trying to find his prisoner while yelling that it's against the Geneva Convention to escape, or the lawyer leaping on the zoologist's shoulders every time she sees a lizard. But this movie does a better job tying those gags into the story than in the first movie. When the lawyer only jumps onto a tree stump the third time, the zoologist makes a comment she only jumped 24 centimeters and that he was a little disappointed. A few minutes later, he steps on a honey badger and leaps on a big stone, prompting the lawyer to joke he jumped 124 centimeters. And then the movie lets the badger bit build, as first the zoologist throws his boot away so the badger can 'take revenge,' only to decide he can't walk around with one boot. He returns for the boot, then steps on the badger with his other boot, prompting it to follow him into the desert.

(He eventually gets the badger to leave him be, however, I expected it to make a dramatic appearance at some point later. Chekov's Badger never arrives.)

I actually liked this one more than the first movie, which I wasn't expecting. This movie, perhaps because it's 10 minutes shorter, is quicker to get the principal characters together so they can start playing off each other. The original spent forever on the gags about the ecologist and the crappy Land Rover, it brought the whole thing to a halt. Here, the zoologist and lawyer are quickly thrown together, the lawyer stumbles across first Xixo and then the soldiers, then Xixo finds the zoologist. The poachers are only loosely tied in, but they're really just there to create an excuse for Xixo to set out on another quest, the initial trail he follows that causes him to cross paths with all these "strange gods." Once he's helped them with their various problems, he resumes his quest and finds his kids.

Which I guess makes these movies the equivalent of the sidequests you encounter while playing a FallOut game. Instead of investigating a vault full of insane clones of Gary, Xixo helps a Cuban soldier who just wants to avoid being taken prisoner so he can catch the boat shipping him home.

Seeking Solitude in Sasquatch

Tyler Landry's Old Caves focuses on a retiree, living alone in a cabin in the woods. The man, never named, is methodically searching the woods. Landry shows bits of the cabin's interior that suggest he's looking for Bigfoot, but as the story plays out, it becomes apparent Bigfoot is really a symbol or avatar of what the man's after.

The book moves between present and past, showing the man's progress through the woods on a single excursion, contrasted with scenes of he and his wife when they first moved there. For the first half of the story, the wife's absence is unexplained. The old man carries a packet of letters, but for a long time doesn't read them. One flashback shows her being frightened by wolves appearing at the edge of the clearing where they grow crops. On his search, he finds tracks, and later encounters some of the wolves again. We're allowed to draw our own conclusions until Landry reveals the truth near the end.

It's a quiet book. Even the parts where he and his wife are together, set in summer, there are long panels of silence. One or the other working at something, or simply the two of them enjoying each other's company. In the present, the man alone in the forest, it's especially sparse. Those take place in winter, and the forest is blanketed in snow that erases much of the variety. It's an overwhelming amount of white, broken up by the shadows Landry uses to define the trees. Life is rarely seen, more often defined merely by the tracks it left in its passing. The man is, after all, looking for something that may not exist, and that he's never seen. He'll have to find some sign of it first.

While speech balloons and captions representing notes the man makes have soft borders, any radio broadcasts are outlined in jagged borders, demonstrating their intrusion into a world the man is trying to immerse himself in, where the hosts and their jabber have no place. When he sits in front of a fire or asleep in his tent, Landry draws so only the face is visible against a entirely black background. The man's pared his world down to simple binaries. Sleep or search. Find or don't find. Everything else was left behind, or didn't want to wait to follow.

Despite that, there's a sense of unreality, on unreliability of perception Landry plays with. Are we seeing his boots, the tops obscured by swirling snow, or is he seeing bare legs? Or is he mentally regressing to a more primitive mindset the deeper he goes? While the man sleeps, surrounded by darkness, shadows that look like arms envelop him or ruffle his hair. Is he dreaming of his wife, or of the creature he spends all his time seeking?

Sunday Splash Page #337

 

"Sweet Revenge," in Marvel Preview #4, by Steve Englehart (writer), Steve Gan (artist), Tom Orzechowski (letterer)

As promised last month in Saturday Splash Page, Many Months of Marvel is taking to the stars!

Marvel Preview was one of Marvel's black-and-white mags of the '70s. Judging by the covers, there's not consistent theme, as it may go from Blade, to Star-Lord, to Sherlock Holmes over the course of 3 issues. But all I've got is the 5 Star-Lord stories, so that's what we'll stick to.

Steve Englehart explains in a foreword to the first story that Marv Wolfman came up with the name "Star-Lord", then tasked Englehart with building a character and concept out from that. Englehart was apparently big into astrology at the time, and incorporated that. Beyond the part where the convergence of the planets is a big deal, I don't know in what way, but the foreword assures us you don't need to know or believe in astrology to enjoy the story. Fair enough.

Englehart's Peter Quill is an angry, driven one. His father was convinced he wasn't the father, but had a heart attack before he could kill the infant. His mother is killed by lizard aliens years later, but no one believes Peter. So he pushes himself into astronaut training, determined to be the best, intending to travel to space and take revenge. But he has no patience, interest, or care for other people, and it gets him passed over for the mission he wanted. Because no one could tolerate living in a confined space with him for long.

Quill tries to change, to tell himself he accepts his whole notion of revenge was foolish. But when the convergence occurs and the mysterious Master of the Sun promises one human with be selected for a glorious destiny, all bets are off. Quill seizes his chance - definitely killing some people in the process - gets his audience, and gets his shot at revenge. Whether it's real or just a fantasy to offer some measure of closure is left ambiguous by Englehart (but not by Claremont, who writes the next three stories.)

It feels a bit like Dr. Strange's origin. An immensely talented man, focused only on his own desire (in this case, revenge) learns to grow beyond that and embrace truly helping others. Not exactly the same; Strange's change is driven by a desire to not feel powerless to help the Ancient One, while Quill's seems prompted by the way taking revenge clears the anger from his mind.

In Claremont's stories, Quill's grown as a person. He travels the cosmos helping those in need. He tries to refrain from killing, while still defending those who are helpless as he once was. He's still capable of being outmaneuvered or overcome, but he tends to act calmly and rationally. The challenge is in understanding what he's dealing with, as it's a big universe, with many creatures and people Star-Lord's never seen.

Claremont and Byrne give Star-Lord a shapeshifting intelligent spacecraft, called Ship. Quill and Ship have an empathic bond - because of course they do - and when Quill's badly injured and it's difficult for Ship to save him otherwise, she assume the form of a woman to help him out. In some cases, Ship is the one advising Star-Lord to observe and think, while in others he has to rein in her desire for vengeance. Byrne and Carmine Infantino each draw ship's default form as almost sculpted. Smooth, no seams or visible engines, wings that angle in a gentle arc, rather than the sharp angles of every other ship they encounter. It gives Ship a recognizable, alien appearance, even among all these other alien spaceships.

(Nobody after Byrne ever draws Quill wearing the helmet, though. Not even when he's zipping around in space. Don't know why. Didn't like it, maybe.)

After Claremont's third story Star-Lord appears in a different book - which we'll get to next week - then returns for one more appearance. This time it's a Doug Moench/Bill Sienkiewicz/Bob McLeod story, and, well, it looks fine, but the writing. . . Moench takes the approach that Quill's refusal to kill is not only naive, but makes him culpable for the murders of the people he doesn't kill. The person he doesn't (initially) kill is a man out for revenge on the warlord who stole his people's planet, then experimented on the survivors until they became lion-headed beast-people. Oh, and he's the last of his people. Quill doesn't stop him from killing the warlord, and he can't figure any way to get the planet-threatening weapon away from the beastman, except to kill him.

Besides ignoring that Quill's not responsible for the actions of other adults, Moench ignores that Quill killed two people in the Claremont/Byrne story in issue 11. Englehart wrote Peter Quill as a man of great potential, held back by his resentment and bitterness. Claremont writes him as someone who (mostly) progressed beyond those vices, and meets the incredible mysteries and challenges of space with indomitable will and ingenuity. Moench writes Quill as an inexperienced dope that has to be schooled by every people he meets. A blunt instrument with no gift for subterfuge or lateral thinking.

Saturday Splash Page #139

 

"Future Super-Ex Boyfriend," in Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane #3, by Sean McKeever (writer), Takeshi Miyazawa (artist), Christina Strain (colorist), Dave Sharpe (letterer)

We'll look at the two mini-series that preceded this in a couple of months in Sunday Splash Page, but for now we'll start at the end. Set in some vaguely mid-2000s Midtown High School, the book mostly follows teenage Mary Jane Watson as she tries to navigate high school and figure out what she actually wants in life.

That is apparently a very difficult question, because MJ vacillates constantly over the course of 20 issues. She wants to try dating Spider-Man, so they give it a shot and it's awkward. So she tries playing a shallow party girl instead - "going plastic," she calls it - but that gets complicated. She tries dating Harry Osborn, but just doesn't like him enough. Harry dates a lot of girls, but isn't above manipulating MJ's feelings to get her back. Meanwhile, her friend Liz Allan's constantly insecure about her boyfriend Flash having a junior high crush on MJ, or some other girl stealing him away. And there's always old Puny Parker, the quiet friend (?).

If I ever had any regrets about being an introverted social outcast in high school, this book killed them, but good. All this drama and arguing and no one being able to stick to anything for more than five minutes seems exhausting.

McKeever keeps adding other characters to provide new angles for drama, but it muddies the water. When you've got Spider-Man and Firestar sort of dating, but Gwen Stacy is figuring out if she's mad at Peter or he's mad at her for telling Mary Jane a secret, and oh, here's Felicia Hardy as the new bad girl at school trying to steal Flash away from Liz, it's a bit much. Things end abruptly, or have to get shoved on the backburner for several issues until there's time for a scene dealing with it. I guess there were only so many permutations McKeever thought he could run through with MJ-Harry-Liz-Flash-Peter-Spider-Man.

Takeshi Miyazawa, who drew the two mini-series, handles the art for the first 15 issues, before Jeremy Haun takes over for the last 5. Miyazawa keeps the characters looking young; rounded, smooth faces lacking even the hint of facial hair - surprised Harry's not trying to grow a crappy mustache. Spider-Man's a skinny teenager, while Peter Parker walks with perpetual slumped shoulders and thick glasses.

It's usually several panels a page, mostly close-ups. Since this is a book about teenagers having big emotions, McKeever gives Miyazawa and Hahn room to focus on expressions and body language. A lot of "panel 1: comment, panel 2: silent reaction, panel 3: reply or follow-up comment." Liz, who is drawn as significantly smaller than the rest of the cast, is all about big gestures and open expressions of emotion (usually anger.) Hahn's not as adept at it - there are some panels where you can guess what he's trying to convey, but the art doesn't carry it - but the effort's there. It's not repeated panels of the two characters with the same expression or posture the whole time.

What I Bought 8/21/2024

I did something to my wrist a couple of days ago and it's been bugging me ever since. Don't know if I slept on it wrong, it objected to the way I held the steering wheel during the 6+ hours I spent on the road Tuesday, or what.

Here's the one comic from this week I found at the store.

Deadpool #5, by Cody Ziglar (writer), Andrea Di Vito (artist), Guru-eFX (color artist), Joe Sabino (letterer) - I don't think this is an appropriate father/daughter activity.

Deadpool, sans healing factor, continues his fight with Death Grip. It's back-and-forth, as Death Grip keeps busting out magic and talking about one of them learning from the other, while Deadpool shoots guns and hits people with his detached arm while making bondage jokes.

Deadpool cuts Death Grip's hands off, which would seem like a win, except Death Grip can shoot magic from his mouth like Piccolo and takes off one of Wade's legs at the knee. And right after Deadpool made a big speech about how he's finally going to take being a father seriously, unlike all those times in the past where he didn't take his interpersonal relationships seriously.

That's the problem with newbie villains. No respect for the proper arc of a story. That's the basic course most of Deadpool's banter runs along, references to a bit starting three pages ago, or that he did a dramatic pause because the writer felt it was needed. I didn't laugh, but humor is always going to vary I guess.

Eleanor and Princess show up, Elle shoots Death Grip with one of Taskmaster's exploding arrows, they make a dramatic escape, everything seems good, minus Deadpool being down two limbs and the healing factor that keeps his cancer at bay.

Di Vito's work doesn't look quite as smooth as it usually does. Don't know if that was an attempt to hew closer to Roge Antonio's art on the series thus far, or just a shift in style. Despite people losing appendages left and right, the violence doesn't seem quite as graphic. Maybe Di Vito's art is still too clean for that effect. Eleanor does look suitably ridiculous wearing a mishmash of her father and Taskmaster's outfits when she makes her big arrival.

Fevered Star - Rebecca Roanhorse

Following from Black Sun, Fevered Star is in, a lot of ways, about moving pieces into place for a conclusion. This isn't to say nothing happens, but there's a lot of political maneuvering and plotting for plans that don't pay off yet.

Though Roanhorse switches focus each chapter, the two main characters are Serapio and Naranpa. In the wake of his massacre of the Watchers at the end of the first book, Serapio has a lot to deal with. A increasing following look to him as a god, but he's increasingly aware of the fact he's just a tool of an actual god. The Crow God feels it's been kept locked away by the Sun God too long, and Serapio was its weapon. The only reason he's alive is he didn't kill the true Sun Priest, because Naranpa had been overthrown (and nearly killed) by grasping schemers in her midst.

Beyond that, he can't get anyone to see him as a person. Not can't; they won't. They don't want to see him that way. He's something to worship, but also something to help them achieve their desires, and he's slowly realizing that's all he's ever been to anyone, all the way back to his mother. The one exception was the Teek helmswoman, Xiala, who is making her own fumbling attempts to help Serapio from a distance, and Serapio misses that. Having had a taste of being truly seen, he would like more, but it's not going to happen yet, if ever.

Naranpa's journey is in the opposite direction. She has to come to grips with the fact that in surviving the betrayals and Serapio's attack, she's become something more than just human as well. I don't know if it's her being older than Serapio when he found himself in similar circumstances, or if it's a result of her recent betrayals at the hands of people she thought she could trust, but she seems to grasp that they're both being used by gods as intermediaries more quickly.

Part of the difference is, Naranpa is shown seeking out information to understand what's happening to her. She talks to different people and explores levels of the Watcher's library that were forbidden to her in the past. Serapio knows only what he was told by his teachers and his mother. Who were, of course, setting him up to do their bidding, which rather slanted the perspective they offered.

That said, I was surprised that Roanhorse starts to set Naranpa up as the matron for a reviving clan in the city, then abandons that idea within a handful of pages. I suppose it's part of the character's journey, that she has to accept that her battles are elsewhere, but it felt like an abrupt pivot. Or maybe Roanhorse figured there was enough political jockeying going on in the other plot threads.

Roanhorse keeps the story moving at a brisk pace. She doesn't end every chapter on a cliffhanger, but she's excellent at leaving things at a point that hint towards future conversations or confrontations that you really want to see. I intended to take seven days to finish the book, a nice leisurely pace, and tore through it in four instead.

'He watched his arms pulse black and feathered, and then solidify into flesh, only to burst into birds again. He screamed, a roar of terror, as he willed himself back together.'

The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980)

An empty soda bottle is tossed from a plane and lands among a family of Bushmen in the Kalihari. A journalist (Sandra Prinsloo) grows tired of being told to only run happy stories of no substance in the paper and takes a teaching position in Botswana. A Communist guerilla and his men are on the run after their attempt to assassinate the president and his cabinet fails.

With the way my coworker described the movie, I expected it was about the Bushmen and the soda bottle. That they'd find many different uses for it, but the desire to have it would cause great strife among them. The movie dispenses with that in the first 10 minutes, at which point Xi (N!xau, and that's how IMDb writes his name, so I'm going with it) decides that if the gods won't take this evil thing back, he'll carry it to the edge of the world and throw it away. That quest ultimately brings him into contact with the other two threads.

The movie plays out like slapstick comedy at several points. A local ecologist (Marius Weyers) is sent to pick the teacher up in a Land Rover that isn't finished being repaired yet. It has no brakes, and he's told he won't be able to get the vehicle started again if the engine dies. So the journey has extended gags of him hopping out to open a gate, but the vehicle starts rolling back downhill, and he has to chase it while trying to chock the wheels with rocks or hop in to drive it back to the gate. These sequences have no dialogue, just goofy sound effects, and the film is sped up. The would-be assassins roll up on the presidential building and stop so quickly one of the guys is flung off the front of the jeep (lot of car-based gags.) When they kick open the doors to the cabinet meeting, the doors bounce off the walls and slam shut in their faces.

Combined with the unseen person narrating all the parts where Xi is involved - because almost no one speaks his language - it also feels like one of those Goofy shorts, where he'd try to demonstrate how to build your own barbecue or get physically fit and it was a complete disaster.

Speaking of disaster, the ecologist is smitten with the schoolteacher, but becomes a complete doofus around women. He can't decide whether to shake her hand or not, he starts tripping over himself, he tackles her to the ground to save her from a rhino he hears coming. Except she never sees the rhino, so she figures he's just a pervert. The actors sell it; Weyers seems like he just wants to crawl in a hole and die as he keeps fucking up, while Prinsloo alternates between confusion and deep concern that she's alone in the savanna with a man who is possibly not well in the head.

What I Bought 8/14/2024 - Part 2

Now that Blood Hunt's over, it's safe to return to a couple of books I steered clear of the last two months. One of them is getting canceled soon (only to be rebooted immediately, because Marvel), but oh well.

Fantastic Four #23, by Ryan North (writer), Carlos Gomez (artist), Jesus Arbutov (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Hey, the FF found the world that produces the probe from Star Trek IV!

Sue and Johnny are taking Nikki and Jo on a shopping trip to New York. I guess Arizona doesn't have the right kind of salsa for their refined, East Coast palettes. Interrupting a fight between a couple of dudes and some vampires (who can all walk around in daylight now), the city comes under barrage by some invisible force.

It's happening across the world, as Reed figures out when it wrecks the device he was testing to see if it would detect magic once Doom inevitably starts throwing some around. The shape Gomez draws Reed's head when it gets hit is appropriately weird and goofy-looking. Since this issue is narrated by Johnny, he simplifies Reed's explanation to, "the Earth is being hit by subatomic particles moving incredibly fast, except they aren't harmlessly decaying on impact like normal."

The FF shrink to the "preonic" level, and find a black sphere. Someone's turned these particles into starships. Except, as it turns out, the aliens inside are all dying or dead. They do find one alive, and manage to translate that it wants to get off Earth. Yeah, you and every billionaire.

It's a decent little science mystery, the kind of thing the Fantastic Four are better suited for than the other superteams, so that's good. North is trying to incorporate the new status quo, because of course Reed would be concerned about Sorcerer Supreme Doom (and of course he'd be certain magic has to obey the laws of science as he knows them.)

Vengeance of the Moon Knight #8, by Jed MacKay (writer), Devmalya Pramanik (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - See what happens when you let Khonshu loose? Giant Moon Knights, rampaging through the city.

The Midnight Mission has been sheltering people from vampires, and the vampires are ready to just blow the place up and be done with it. As Reese and Soldier make a last stand, the sun comes back, but it doesn't burn any vampires. Well, that's both cool and inconvenient for our heroes.

Oh, but Moon Knight's back, too. So they trounce a lot of vampires to spread the message to get lost, and Marc wants to continue his therapy sessions with Dr. Sterman, but first he's got to have a little chat with Khonshu, about what Old Bird Skull wants. And what Khonshu wants is the Shroud dead. 

Pramanik's art is a lot looser than Cappuccio's, tending to exaggerate hands or perspective to let one image or part of a character dominate a panel. So Moon Knight attacks a vampire, his legs are tiny things in one corner of the panel while his face and upper body command the rest. Pramanik's willingness to exaggerate sells the exhaustion of the characters. With Cappuccio, even when they're shocked or angry, the linework is stiff enough it feels restrained. Here, everything is looser, the emotions are bigger, Reese's hair is messier. She looks too tired to put any sort of calm facade.

Rosenberg's also keeping the colors less starkly defined. More blurring or mixing for the backgrounds. Especially when the sun comes out and the backgrounds are really just a mixture of overpowering yellows. Previously, even during daylight scenes, it felt as though light would be constrained to a narrow band of a specific shade, and that was it. Maybe all the characters are just too tired, or maybe it's a new day, where Marc doesn't feel like he's so constrained by his fears or the suspicions of others.

Sunday Splash Page #336

 

"Tron's Revenge," in Marvel Premiere #18, by Doug Moench (writer), Larry Hama (penciler), Dick Giordano (inker), P. Goldberg (colorist), Artie Simek (letterer)

We looked at Danny Rand's first series last year during Iron Spring, but this is where he debuted. It starts with Danny's defeat of The One, the killer robot that, according to Kaare Andrews, was programmed to lose to Danny. His departure from K'un-Lun to find and kill Harold Meachum for his betrayal of Danny's mother and father. The string of killers and traps Meachum's prepared, all for a final confrontation with a man who essentially destroyed himself before Danny got the chance.

That takes four issues. Roy Thomas and Gil Kane handle the fight with The One and Danny's origin. Larry Hama takes over as penciler from there, first with Len Wein, then Doug Moench as writer. By the time Hama and Moench are replaced by Arvell Jones and Tony Isabella, Danny's being hunted on suspicion of killing Meachum (Meachum's daughter Joy making the accusation.) I think I mentioned last year Danny seems to spend a lot of time hunted by the authorities for murder, and here's the first occurrence.

(Also interesting to contrast how these writers describe Danny as obsessed in his training from the start, where Andrews depicted him as a scared, bullied child who wanted no part of fighting at first. Andrews' run really was just the entire character filtered through a funhouse mirror.)

Isabella also has Danny trying to find Colleen Wing and her father, who are under attack by a mysterious cult that wants a book the professor found. And through all that, this strange ninja keeps showing up. The ninja's the one who actually killed Harold Meachum, and they keep helping Danny, right up until they try to kill him.

It's only at this point, after 8 issues, that Danny finally removes the mask. But the way the issues were written, he really has just barreled from one crisis or battle to another ever since he defeated The One. The moment he reached New York, he was under attack, so he hasn't even had the chance to really accept that his hunt for revenge ended, bitterly, no less.

It's the last three issues, written by Claremont, that begin to have Danny trying to live in this world, very different from K'un-Lun. The first two, drawn by Pat Broderick, act as an interlude as Danny has to rescue Colleen from a nutjob soldier with metal skin called Warhawk, and then thwarts the attempted assassination of a princess of Halvan (a country I think subsequent Power Man and Iron Fist writers would use.) John Byrne joins the book for the last issue and Claremont dives into the story that would segue into the start of Iron Fist, with Angar the Screamer helping mind-warp Colleen as part of Master Khan's attempt to bring Danny to heel.

The thing I notice is every writer, in addition to giving Danny's various kicks and punches specific names - Dragon Stamp Kick, Ram's Head Blow, that sort of thing - writes in second person. It's "you" who is attempting the kick, or "you" that feel the jolt of electricity through your body. The writers still have their own quirks - Claremont writes in a recognizably Claremont style - but I was surprised they all stuck to that convention.

The artists are a mixed bag. Kane's work seems busier and heavier than normal. I'm not sure that isn't Giordano's inks, though it's not as noticeable when he inks Hama's pencils, so who knows. Arvell Jones has the loosest approach to anatomy and proportions, as arms and legs seem to stretch and joint oddly once the fights start. But his fight scenes are more often compressed into lots of small panels - they go with 16 panels for one page during his fight with Batroc in issue 20, and the fight only runs about 3 pages total.

There's been some discussion in Paul O'Brien's series of posts on Daredevil villains about Gene Colan always seeming to cram a lot in the last few pages because he was spreading the action out so much over the first 15 pages. So I don't know if it was Isabella's plotting or how Jones laid out pages, but he doesn't get a lot of room to let his art breathe. Either way, Kane, Hama, Broderick and Byrne all get (or use) a lot more space for the fight scenes when they're drawing, and it's too their advantage. If the writing is going to emphasize all these martial arts moves, give the artist room to show them off a bit.

I own one other issue of Marvel Premiere. The last one, which doubles as the last appearance of Star-Lord prior to the '90s mini-series we looked at last month (which wasn't even the same character.) But we'll be seeing plenty of Peter Quill over the next three weeks.

Saturday Splash Page #138

 

"Cat Chase," in Spider-Man Unlimited (vol. 3) #14, by C.B. Cebulski (writer), David Finch (penciler), Danny Miki (inker), Frank D'Armata (colorist), Dave Sharpe (letterer)

Summer of Spiders bids Jessica Drew adieu, and says hello to a fellow with radioactive blood!

Spider-Man Unlimited was, back in the '90s, a quarterly anthology book.  Because four monthly Spider-Man titles was not enough of the Webhead. It was born under an ominous star, its first two issues acting as start and finish of Maximum Carnage. 

Usually one lead story, sometimes part of whatever crossover was running through all the Spider-books that month, but sometimes a standalone story. Doc Ock stealing research equipment for an unknown reason. A guy announcing himself to the public as Spider-Man and becoming a public sensation, to Spidey's annoyance. Then various shorter back-ups, maybe focused on a villain or supporting cast member. What Mary Jane's thinking as she watches Peter fight Boomerang. Will Cardiac, in his day job as a heart surgeon, save the life of a crooked CEO he tried to kill the night before? Stuff like that.

The second volume was 5 issues based on that weird late-90s cartoon where Peter chases the symbiotes to Counter-Earth and fights Beast-Men and stuff like that. Whatever. Volume 3 went back to the original formula, but every other month. Probably most notable for Locke & Key co-creator Joe Hill writing a story in one issue, otherwise basically like Volume 1, standalone stories that needed a book to be published in. In the above issue, the lead story is Felicia making Peter repay a favor from Millar's Marvel Knights Spider-Man by breaking into Latveria's embassy to steal what is ultimately revealed as a spider-tracer with Peter's fingerprint on it. They fight a Doombot, that's about it.

The second story, by Joe Reitman and Ron Garney, is about a guy who works on the crew for New York City that clean up after superhero battles. He's gathering up any left over weapons he finds, apparently intending to become a villain, in spite of Spidey leaving a gift basket outside his window as a thank you. More of an interesting idea, albeit one that's been done before in various ways.

What I Bought 8/14/2024 - Part 1

I expected I'd find 3 of the 5 books out this week I was interested in, and one would be a first issue. This isn't the first issue I was expecting to find. Maybe the universe is really trying to impress upon me that Werewolf by Night is better off ignored.

Babs #1, by Garth Ennis (writer), Jacen Burrows (artist), Andy Troy (colorist), Rob Steen (letterer) - Who would expect a dragon to be guarding this massive hoard of gold, hidden within a mountain?

This issue mostly establishes the tone Ennis and Burrows are going with, while offering a bit of characterization and backstory for Babs, which may or may not be anything like her true name. A motley collection of what I think are supposed to be medieval equivalent to annoying comic fans online accuse her of being Grizzlock the Barbarian, aka Grizzlock the Patricidal, who killed her father (obviously), the male and therefore much better, King Grizzlock. Babs denies it, and they're clearly morons mistaking her for a different sword-wielding woman warrior. But her talking sword mentions (amid copious profanity) she both dropped out of princess academy and that there's a kingdom somewhere she could return to as queen.

Beyond that, Babs drinks to excess with a friend, kills a couple of squirrels (which are called "tree-runts") because her chainmail bra needs a new lining, and ends up hiding in a tree from an angry bear that got shot in the butt with one of her crossbow bolts.

Also, a bunch of knights calling themselves "Ivory Knights of Unblemished Virtue" are on the march, and the group of morons (who might also be meant to mock incels) think they want to join. Will Ennis eventually have Babs make a lengthy and profane speech about what a bunch of {insert the filthiest terminology you can imagine} all of them are? Almost certainly! Will it be funny? We can hope so.

I feel like Burrows is trying to walk the line of having the characters look more or less normal for the setting, but still be able to do the sillier stuff the story requires. Like Babs swinging a goblin by his ankles at his buddies, or having the talking sword flip Babs off. When Babs' friend Izzy relates how all the loot she got from a dragon hoard had to go to reparations for a leprechaun parade she and her chariot plowed through, the contrast between the oblivious leprechauns still playing harps or mandolins or whatever, and their comrade being bloodily dismembered has a certain dark glee to it.

For the less macabre bits, a looser or more comically exaggerated approach might work. Guess that depends on if they really want it to play this, but it certainly doesn't feel like it's one of Ennis' "serious" works.

The Tao of the Backup Catcher - Tim Brown with Eric Kratz

Brown's book is about what it is to be a backup catcher, both in terms of what sort of jobs you're expected to fill, how one finds themselves in the role of backup catcher, what sort of life tends to result from that designation, and the mindset one can develop if they embrace the job.

His primary window into the world is Erik Kratz, who played for 9 major league teams over 11 seasons. It's kind of crazy to me that over the course of his career, I only attended 9 baseball games, and he was the starting catcher in 2 of them. I saw 8 of his 951 career plate appearances (he went 0-for-8.) Kratz played for a lot more than 9 minor league teams, and between being sent up, down, released, traded, waived, and so on, switched teams more than 3 dozen times before he retired at the end of the 2020 season.

But that's part of the life of the backup catcher. Teams like to have you around for all the little things you do, until they decide someone who can do the big things is more important to have. Then you're looking for another job. Kratz tends to remain pretty upbeat, but doesn't sugarcoat the times he questioned what he was doing, hanging on in the minors, or when he got frustrated that what looked like a chance to stick somewhere evaporated again.

Brown tends to focus on a certain aspect of the job or process in a given chapter, speaking with Kratz or any number of other backup catchers, past and present. For example, what it means to become a starter's "personal" catcher, as Eddie Perez was for Greg Maddux for a time. Or even just what your job is a catcher with regards to your pitcher. Sometimes you have to be almost like a parent, other times you have to challenge him. Brown relates a story where Yankees' catcher John Flaherty went out to the mound to tell Randy Johnson not to ever show him up by yelling at him about where he set his stance, during a game. Or the work backups put in helping pitchers warm-up before games or in the bullpen. How exhausting that can be, but you do it because someone has to, so why not you?

Other times, it's focused more off the field. The grind for Kratz and his wife Sarah, as they have to constantly move. Find new apartments, set up electric and phone service, break current leases, scramble to cover rent (minor leaguers get paid basically dick.) The jobs they work in the off-season, the way Kratz carves out any time he can after a full day of construction work to take some practice swings.

Despite that, the tone of the book is light. The guys Brown talks to all made peace with the roles they ended up with. All of them would have loved to be the starting catcher, but whether due to talent deficit, lack of opportunity, or just bad luck, it didn't happen. But they found something they could do, and they tried to do it the best they could and most of them found a sort of peace with that, in the good days. Brown details all the little things the backup does to help the team, the unglamorous stuff, but in a way that makes the backup catcher seem like the man behind the curtain, rather than the unappreciated janitor.

'What comes of this is a league - a culture, even - of backup catchers reasonably sure they could be No. 1 catchers, but who are rigorously invested in the day in front of them. Most would defend their jobs, their teammates, and the final score with the thick end of a fungo bat. As soon as they go get it. It's in the blue bag up in the dugout tunnel. Which they know because they put it there after batting practice. When they helped clean up the field. Just to be helpful. It wasn't gonna pick itself up.'

On Our Merry Way (1948)

Oliver Pease (Burgess Meredith) works for a newspaper, transcribing ads for lost pets. His wife (Paulette Goddard) of 7 months thinks he's the paper's "roving reporter", asking the man on the street a different question each day. She thinks the questions are terrible, so she came up with one of her own for him to use.

Pease also is about to have his furniture repo'ed, because he bought what a top-level reporter could afford to sell his lie. He also likes to play the ponies, so he's in hock to a big goon for 180 smackers. Set to lose his furniture, his wife, and his teeth, Pease bluffs his way into the publisher's office and gets to be the roving reporter for a day.

The movie is really a series of three vignettes, connected by Pease meeting these people while he's running from the leg-breaker. The first is the tale of how two jazz musicians (played by Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart) lost control of their band when their bus broke down in a certain little town. It has an extended bit where they try to rig a contest for a spot in the band so the mayor's kid wins, but Fonda is playing in a rowboat under the pier and he and his music get seasick as the boat gets more unstable.

In the third, a couple of card sharps (one played by Fred MacMurray) stumble across this hellraiser of a kid, nephew to a wealthy guy, living in a cave in the woods. They figure to get a reward for bringing him back, but find themselves outmatched by the kid at every turn, though it's the rich uncle (a nervous wreck from the kid's pranks) who gets a lot of laughs with his overwrought reactions.

The second one, though, Pease interviews a famous actress (played by Dorothy Lamour) who explains how her career took off after she gave a verbal dressing-down to some spoiled brat of a child actress for being so rude to an aging actor. The kid reflects on what Lamour told her and helps them out, which is fine, it fits with Pease's actual question (more so than Stewart and Fonda's story, though that owes to how Pease phrased it to them.) It doesn't fit with the other two in terms of tone, or with Meredith meeting all these people during his clumsy escapes of the legbreaker. Unless I was supposed to laugh when we see the kinds of movies Lamour's character makes now. She's doing a song-and-dance number as some "island princess" trying to avoid all these buff dudes wanting to woo her or something. Perhaps I'm underestimating the popularity of such movies in the 1940s.

But Stewart and Fonda always play well off each other, and the MacMurray story isn't bad. Meredith is alternately funny and pitiable. Despite being a liar, you can tell he's trying to get this one thing right for a woman he's accepted he'll lose.

Tomorrow Never Comes, But Yesterday Returns

The Drunken Pratfall Down the Stairs of Progress.

The fourth and final volume of The Terrifics, titled The Tomorrow War, covers the entire last year of the book's run, which covers essentially two stories.

In the first story, Bizarro grows frustrated he can't halt the progress of science on his homeworld of Htrae, which keeps rendering him irrelevant. A discussion with "Mr. Terrible", helps Bizarro realize if progress can't be halted or reversed on his world, that means it can be halted on Earth. So he gathers a team with his world's versions of The Terrifics and sets about trying to reverse time.

This somehow requires them to destroy Phantom Girl's homeworld, at which point Bizarro decides he's having more fun doing that, and starts looping back to relive the experience. Which has disastrous effects on the timeline. The Terrifics have to stop him, yadda yadda.

The second arc involves Mr. Terrific trying to turn Gateway City in a better place, through SCIENCE! Problems naturally arise, but it turns out Mr. Terrific is part of an entire group of super-scientist types, like Ted Kord and Ryan Choi. It's a nice concept, but it swells the cast to an unwieldy degree, especially when most of the existing cast get so little time as it is.

I mentioned it in Saturday Splash Page #93, but the book feels much more like a Mr. Terrific book than a proper ensemble cast. A lot of the focus is on the tension between he and Ms. Terrific, a Laura Holt from another universe who became a costumed hero after her husband Michael died in a car wreck. The two are trying to recreate what they had with their deceased partners, but are finding it difficult. Michael and Laura have very different ideas about what constitutes progress and how to go about achieving it. Specifically, Michael saved a rapidly advancing artificial intelligence that would eventually subjugate all organic life, and Laura thinks that was a terrible mistake. Especially since he made the decision on his own, without consulting anyone else.

Once Laura departs - called away by "some presence" or God, whichever - it's Silas Stone (Cyborg's dad) that Terrific butts heads with. Now because Stone is even more bottom line focused than Mr. Terrific. Maximize the innovations for profit, kill people possessed by little bouncing Parasite heads because it's safer for you than taking the time to figure out how to reverse the process. Essentially science minus any humanity, just efficiency and self-interest.

Gene Luen Yang kills off Simon Stagg, setting up the arrival of a prodigal son who has his own plans for the city. He spent his years away in Gotham, so you won't be shocked to learn that those plans are pretty hazardous to the well-being of the people. This gives Metamorpho the closest he'll get to any focus, as he has to deal with the loss of someone who's been a thorn in his side for years, but means a lot to the most important person in his life. Other than that, his characterization revolves around exclamations involving Egyptian gods or elements ("What the Francium?", for example.)

That's more than Plastic Man or Phantom Girl get. Plas gets to worry about his son a little and stretch (no pun intended) his powers during the fight with his Bizarro-counterpart. Phantom Girl? I know Bgztl ends up OK after all Bizarro's stupidity is undone, but it seems like her homeworld and all her people being repeatedly destroyed for some chalky moron's amusement would have some kind of impact on her. Given she and her mother had an argument the last time they were around each other, you'd expect a bit of time spent on some sort of reconciliation in the aftermath of a near-death experience.

Stephen Segovia draws most of the Bizarro arc, with Sergio Davila handling the conclusion and the "Tomorrow War" arc. Segovia shows more flexibility in his art, able to draw aged-down versions of the cast as time gets wonky, or adopting a stiffer, more heavily inked approach when they're regressed to '90s or '80s versions of themselves (in those issues, his work reminds me a lot of Lenil Francis Yu's, albeit less heavy on the cross-hatching.)

Davilla's work is, not less exaggerated, but exaggerated in a more typical superhero comic way. The oversized muscles and tree trunk necks, that kind of thing. The story doesn't allow for the level of variety Segovia had, but Davila handles all the extra cast well, using smaller panels to focus on a few characters at a time to keep things from getting to muddled or confusing. And he draws a city that looks futuristic in a way that makes sense given its designer. The vertical garden is actually several stories underground and sustained with an artificial sun. Which is a good use of space, but maybe not as aesthetically charming as it could be. But aesthetics aren't something I would really expect Mr. Terrific to worry about.

Sunday Splash Page #335

 

"Trolls Love Basements", in Marvel Knights #2, by Chuck Dixon (writer), Ed Barreto (penciler), Klaus Janson (inker), Haberlin Studios and Dave Kemp (colorists), Richard Starkings and Troy Peteri (letterer)

Marvel's late-1990s/early-2000s Marvel Knights imprint is probably best known for Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's 12-issue Punisher maxi-series, or the Christopher Priest/Mark Texiera Black Panther book (the longest running of the bunch.) There was also the Daredevil revival by Kevin Smith and Joe Quesada, and Inhumans, by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee. I got back into comics a bit late for most of those, but I did arrive in time for the last few issues of Chuck Dixon and Eduardo Barreto's street-level heroes team book.

The basic set-up is that Daredevil has once again decided Frank Castle Must Be Stopped. (No mention is made of the humiliating beatdown Castle gave him in issue 3 of Ennis' mini-series.) Since he hasn't had any luck doing that solo, DD decides to enlist some other friends and allies for the job. He encounters the Black Widow during a whole thing where Ulik the Rock Troll has come to Midgard looking for a valuable artifact. Natasha had met Dagger, who's looking for Cloak, during that. Dagger has no place to go, so she becomes a bit of a younger sister to the Black Widow.

It's got to be a measure of when the book was written that Black Widow by herself isn't enough to deal with the Punisher. I feel like these days she'd be written as taking him down in her sleep.

Shang-Chi was also defending a subway car full of people from Ulik's minions, and he's not happy about some of the crime in the area, so she's in. After that, the thing almost takes on a life of its own. Moon Knight hears about it and asks to not only join, but offers to bankroll them. With a headquarters and everything. Spector is not written anywhere near as dangerous or competent as he is these days, either. He takes a lot of damage, but less in the sense of "holy crap, we can't stop this guy." More, "this guy is overmatched." Zaran the Weapons Master shows up, working for Shang-Chi's unnamed dad and pretty well takes Moon Knight apart.

Oh, and Moon Knight hired Luke Cage, back rocking the yellow shirt and tiara.

The joke of the thing is, the group barely even sees the Punisher. Frank gets wind of the idea early on and tries to use his various stoolies to feed the team info so they'll take out possible roadblocks for him. They spend a couple of issues trapped inside Cloak's world while Dagger tries to reach him (with an assist from Dr. Strange.) They have a throwdown with Tombstone (colored more pink-tinged than I've ever seen) and a group of super-powered leg-breakers he hired. Black Widow gets targeted by someone using a Nick Fury LMD. Yes, that old bit. Shang's eternal problems with his dad derail the team before it can really get going.

Barreto draws 14 of the 15 issues, the exception being issue 14. Klaus Janson inks the first 6 issues. Concluding with, of all things, a Maximum Security tie-in that's all about Frank Castle fight some giant insectile alien in a crackhouse full of mind-controlled addicts. I've often heard that Klaus Janson inked book just looks like Janson's art, regardless of the penciler. And while that's mostly been my impression, Barreto is somehow the exception. The linework is definitely heavier, and with more cross-hatching than in other comics I've read Barreto drew, but not as heavy as other Janson-inked titles, and it's not as stiff, either.

I don't know if Janson consciously pulled back, if the preponderance of shadows in the settings made him dial back to avoid the whole thing being too dark, or if it was something else. Barreto's work is in a very superhero style, most of the characters with the idealized physiques and shiny costumes. Blood or violence is shown in outline or alluded to, rather than anything explicit or gory. The setting inside Cloak's dimension is rendered as just New York city under an eternal sunset sky. It's not the sort of bizarre, twisting architecture or swirling nightmares a Ditko, Colan or Mandrake might adopt. It's street-level superheroes, the emphasis on "superheroes" rather than "street-level."

Saturday Splash Page #137

 

"Gastrointestinal Distress Signals," in Spider-Woman (vol. 7) #1, by Karla Pacheco (writer), Pere Perez (artist), Frank D'Armata (color artist), Travis Lanham (letterer)

In the first year of volume 7, Perez usually draws the first page as a series of images of Spider-Woman against an entirely black backdrop. Like we were catching glimpses when a flashbulb went off. The second year, he shifted to a splash page that usually summarized what was happening, with a sound effect or some other large lettering forming part of the background. It's not quite Adam West Batman sound effects, but there's a bit of that feel, given the lighter tone of many of the stories.

But Spider-Woman's symbol formed out of acidic vomit is a hard image to top, so here we are.

Karla Pacheco's run started in 2020 with Jessica Drew feeling like crap and making little effort to hide it. She's wearing a new, mostly black costume - which Jessica comments makes her butt look amazing, but I fail to see a difference in how Perez draws it; must be some "black is slimming" thing - because she needs money and doesn't want to wear her traditional costume for playing bodyguard to some rich guy's daughter. The jacket and goggles of the Hopeless/Rodriguez runs vanish into the aether, though the motorcycle is around some of the time.

As it turns out, the rich guy, Michael Marchand, is Jessica's brother. Her parents had another kid after escaping HYDRA, but when he used their experiments on infusing arachnid traits to save his daughter from cancer, he forgot about keeping her from dying of the radiation. So after dosing Jessica with a serum that removes the regenerative abilities that protect her from the radiation, convinces her to help search for a cure because this same problem could manifest in her son, Gerry.

This is as much as Gerry, or Porcupine for that matter, factor into Pacheco's run. She literally sends them to a farm upstate for the first year, then has Jess dispense with any of the trust she put in Roger to help her fight in year two, so that he leaves right when he was about to propose. Fine, you don't want to deal with the status quo Hopeless left you (except to use the baby as a lever to make the main character do what your plot requires.) I get that. But once Roger's out of the book, Jessica constantly foists care of her child onto other characters, who nonetheless all reassure Spider-Woman she's not a terrible parent. 

Sure, compared to Magneto or Wolverine, she's awesome.

While the experimental drug Marchand's developed (but is unwilling to test on his daughter) boosts Drew's powers and restores the pheromone power (albeit to Bendis' version, where dudes fall for her, rather than the original version, where people instinctively don't like her), it also makes her increasingly angry and erratic. Jessica steadily alienates her friends by screaming at them, stealing their stuff, injuring them when they get in her way. She steals from Stark on behalf of her parents' old HYDRA colleague and attacks War Machine when he catches her. When Carol Danvers enlists her to help fight symbiote dragons in the obligatory King in Black tie-ins, because Danvers has to save her juice for the Final Boss (which ended up losing to an Enigma Force-using Eddie Brock anyway, and that might be the stupidest horseshit I've typed on this blog, thanks Donny Cates!), Jessica gets angry enough to break Danvers' arm.

Pacheco writing Spider-Woman as really angry all the time doesn't bug me. Hopeless wrote her with a temper - she wailed on an entire bar full of villains when she thought Roger was dead. So did Claremont if someone she cared about was hurt. And Danvers knew that Drew using her powers would kill her faster, and made her do it anyway, for one dragon. That's fine. I just have never cared about the strange muddle of HYDRA and the High Evolutionary that makes up Jessica Drew's origin. So the first year revolving heavily around that - Octavia Vermis being an old colleague of both Jess' parents and the H.E., there being homicidal clones of Jessica's mother in late-stage Clone Saga-level quantities, Marchand being her brother with ulterior motives - I ain't got time for that. Especially the High Evolutionary. If John Ostrander couldn't make me give a shit about that dude in Heroes for Hire, Pacheco had a less than zero chance. All his dialogue might as well be how the adults talk in Peanuts.

The storyline concludes with Jessica back to normal. Her friends forgive her for her behavior. She shelves the new costume, which was transmitting data to Vermis the whole time and goes back to the classic look for year 2. Which is much more about Jessica Drew fighting random enemies. Marchand does pop up again, having given himself powers at the urging of his new girlfriend, but otherwise it's enemies like Lady Bullseye or two brothers who share a pair of enchanted swords and claim to be from Toledo, so Jess can make a bunch of terrible jokes about the city in Ohio.

That becomes her "thing" in the second half of the book, making bad puns and jokes. OK, sure. As long as the High Evolutionary isn't involved. Pacheco brings back Claremont/Leialoha supporting cast member Lindsay McCabe, who I don't think had been used since the (I think) Spider-Man annual story in the '90s where she enlisted Julia Carpenter to retrieve Drew's soul from the limbo where it resided.

The stories are a bit more lighthearted. Even if Rebecca Marchand has to help Jessica fight her dad, she does so in her own super-suit and with the aid of a dinosaur that I think they and Vermis either created or bred with the High Evolutionary's work. She rides it like a big, jagged-tooth pony! No feathers, though. Comic artists still hewing to the scaly hide conception of dinos. McCabe's doing stunt work in a Western and gets attacked by ninjas because she's hasn't paid off a debt to some Madripoor gangster. Bit lower stakes, more chances for bad jokes by Drew.

Drew gets some upgrades to the classic costume, so now the web gliders under the arms can detach and be used like those fighting fans in kung-fu movies. Perez and Pacheco seem to have fun with the fight scenes, having Spider-Woman use a variety of styles, although characters really seem to like arm locks. Lots of people gets arms broken or dislocated, it felt like. They take advantage of the settings, bring in surprise or random interference when it's appropriate.

I don't like that Perez seems to de-age Night Nurse. I liked how Marcos Martin drew her in Dr. Strange: The Oath, where she was probably late '30s. The outfit was loose enough she could move, but not to where it might impede movement or get caught on instruments. Now she's wearing a form-fitting nurse outfit all the time.

The last story is a two-parter where a bunch of the villains from the run try to form essentially a "League of Spider-Woman Haters" to get revenge, but they're chumps, so it mostly ends in hilarious disaster. Vermis can't get Stegron the Dinosaur Man to stop flirting with her, the Brothers Grimm are arguing with the swordfighter brothers about stealing their bit. Of the two halves, I definitely prefer the second part, even with the Devil's Reign tie-in where we find out the Skrull Queen from Secret Invasion somehow survived Norman Osborn exploding her head. Yeah, I don't know.

What I Bought 8/7/2024

There were two comics out this week I wanted. I only found one, but it's nice to have any new books after what a drag July was. There's possibly 5 comics out next week I might want! Five! Wow! And I was able to donate the stuff I pulled from my collection over the last year+, so that's a little more space freed up in my apartment.

Red Before Black #1, by Stephanie Phillips (writer), Goran Sudzuka (artist), Ive Svorcina (colorist), Tom Napolitano (letterer) - Are coral snakes arboreal? I guess they can be if they want to.

Val is in Florida, fresh off 8 years in prison, to ask her old platoon buddy Miles for a job. Not as a bartender, but for his other business - drug running. Miles blows a lot of smoke about how it isn't his call - mostly in a one-page stretch Sudzuka draws where Miles' body stays still and just his head and expressions change. Which makes him look a bit like a ventriloquist dummy someone's controlling. There's definitely an uncanny valley aspect to it. 

Eventually he comes around to a deal: An associate of his, a lady named Leo, stole a shopping bag full of cocaine, and is trying to sell it. Miles wants her dead, as a statement, and even knows a likely place to find her. Leo's attempt to sell the product goes south, and Val steps in to keep a bouncer from catching Leo. Given Leo took back the coke by driving an SUV into the room, I'm not sure why she didn't just, drive back out, instead of exiting through the club. I guess the vehicle was busted by then, although it isn't drawn like that. Maybe the point is that Leo is long on moxie, short on brains.

Anyway, Val has some sort of episode while fighting the bouncer, which Sudzuka draws as a fissure opening in the ground and Val being ensnared by a bunch of thin red vines, before ending up in a jungle. Svorcina sticks to muted colors for most of the issue, dull earth tones, but goes vivid red and greens as Val slips into the fugue state or whatever. By the time Val comes out of it, she's beating the bouncer senseless. Val is aware of what's happening to her, but not what's going on outside her head.

Out on the streets, Val passes up the chance to shoot Leo, then also declines the offer to get some grub at a diner nearby. Except there's an FBI guy waiting in Val's hotel room. She's out on a work release/Task Force X-style agreement, and FBI dude (OK, his name is Charles Lamb, but he's clearly a dick and we're not supposed to like him, so who cares) has no issue with Val killing someone if it helps him.

No, I don't think she can kill him if she argues presenting the corpse of an FBI agent would help her get inside Miles' organization. So that's where things stand. Miles wants Leo dead. Lamb wants Miles' organization brought down. Val wants to stay out of prison. I assume Leo wants to be rich.

The Ghost Road - Pat Barker

Following on from Regeneration and The Eye in the Door, Barker keep this book more tightly focused on Billy Prior and Dr. William Rivers. Prior has, despite the asthma and the shell shock that originally landed him in the Craigslockhart hospital, managed to pass muster to be sent back to the front lines. Most of his section of the book is related as journal entries he makes. They're dated, raising the question of whether he's going to survive until the Armistice or not.

The issues Prior had in the second book, where he lost chunks of time as a second personality or alter emerged, are absent. Prior had been intent on going back into combat, rejecting offers of a Ministry desk job , seemingly because he wants to prove he hasn't cracked. So perhaps having been granted the opportunity has settled the more acerbic alter that kept taking control.

I don't think it's a matter of Prior being at peace with himself, because that's not how Barker writes him. Prior seems in a constant state of agitation, like he can't help provoking reactions in others, and then can't help feeling a bit guilty about it after. We see a letter he sent to Rivers near the end of the book, where he makes a caustic reference to something Rivers brought up about how men like Prior will be the test of whether anything the psychologists did actually helped. On the next page, Prior notes he took the wrong tone, but had no time to get it right.

It reminds me of some of the stuff I've read about Hemingway, where he'd accuse a friend of hateful stuff in a letter, then apologize to them 3 paragraphs later in the same letter. Don't know what that says about Prior, except maybe he had problems before he ever went to war.

As for Rivers, he's still treating other patients, but much of the book devoted to him focuses on an anthropological study he and another man did of a group of islanders in Melanesia before the war. Head hunting featured prominently in the island's culture, but the British have outlawed it since colonizing the islands. Rivers feels like the prohibition of it has robbed the islanders of a certain level of vitality, and their cultural practices are also not quite adjusted for the new circumstances. Like the practices were necessary for the survival of these people, and a consistent alternative hasn't been found.

It seems to relate to Rivers "fixing" men like Prior so they can return to charging into machine gun fire. Guilt seems to factor heavily in the issues of his patients, going back to Siegfried Sassoon seeing the ghosts of men he knew on the battlefield, demanding to know why he's not there. I'm not clear on the link, however. Is it that it's ultimately destructive to have a practice where a widow must sit alone in a small house after the husband dies unless someone brings a head, like it's destructive to encourage people to go to war, but it's worse to try and take that away?

The islanders seem to regard death as a series of stages, as Rivers at one point disagrees with a wise man who tells him another member of their people is dead. Rivers points to the man's chest, still rising and falling, and argues he's not dead. The wise man has to explain that's a different kind of death. Some of the soldiers die entirely on the battlefield. Others make it home but are dead inside, and of those, how obvious the death of the soul is varies. One of Prior's fellow officers is badly wounded and ends up in Rivers' ward. He's alive, but in a lot of ways, he's already beyond the reach of his loved ones. The books don't deal much with the people who get left behind, the wives and parents and such. Not their story, I guess.

'My nerves are in perfect working order. By which I mean that in my present situation the only sane thing to do is run away, and I will not do it. Test passed?'