What I Bought 8/31/2024 - Part 1

I have today off for Labor Day, but the rest of the week intends to make me play for it. Another public meeting, oh joy. At least the weather has improved from last week's "sauna towel" experience.

Blow Away #5, by Zac Thompson (writer), Niccola Izzo (artist), Francesco Segala (colorist), DC Hopkins (letterer) - There was retailer incentive cover for 20 cents less, so I grabbed it. Looks basically the same, except it's like looking at the image through a grainy video camera.

Set a month after issue 4, Brynne's back in Toronto, using a crutch and still chewing over the experience on the mountain. Her boss announces a new documentary series about Nick's near-death experience, and Brynne will get credited because they're using some of her footage. Brynne learns there's two versions of footage on the server, because there were two cameras up there, one of them that wasn't hers.

And we're back to her poring over pixelated images frame-by-frame. As usual, it seems impossible to say anything for certain from the way they're presented by the art, but the story acknowledges that Brynne might just be seeing what she wants to, chasing ghosts. She talks her way into an interview with Nick and hides an extra camera in his office while his back is turned, then gets him to slip up and mention Andrew was sick with some terminal illness. Brynne gets footage of Nick and her boss discussing all this and how they can frame her, then leaks it online before confronting her boss, blowing up his plan to bribe her with fame.

I was a little confused that Matt, clearly aware that Brynne copied the camera files, and having received no confirmation she deleted them as he demanded, didn't warn Nick about her. But he seems perfectly willing to throw Nick under the bus when she confronts him at the end, so maybe the point was he didn't care. Nick may or may not have been helping Andrew with a mercy kill after one last climb (and Andrew may or may not have had second thoughts too late), but for Matt, it was only ever content. Get clicks, get eyes, get likes, so on. He clearly thinks he's clever and intimidating, but he misreads Brynne at every turn. She had a guy whose crimes she exposed shove a gun in her face before killing himself, Matt was never going to be intimidating with threats of lawyers, or even a hammer.

Rogues #2, by El Torres and Pablo M. Collar (creators), Monkey Typers (lettering) - This is actually just the cover to the first issue, but I didn't feel like tracking down the actual cover image.

The framing sequence for the issue is a guy in his library or writing room, feverishly scribbling down dire portents about horrors from beyond the veil preparing to attack and destroy the world. All of which is Bram and Weasel's fault, as we learn over the course of the rest of the issue. They got bored after a successful job left them comfortably well off and went for a walk. They returned a year later, sniping at each other and carrying a bag with an eye inside.

An eye which "voorps" them to the realm of Yog-Sothoth, who warns them they have opened a door that can't be closed, blah blah back to their world. Weasel talks Bram out of chopping the eye up with an axe, but fortunately demon dogs emerge from the fireplace, so the axe doesn't go unused. A subsequent flashback - within the original flashback? - shows they met a holy man in the north, who promised them ruins shown on no map, but full of treasures. Yeah, it was a trap, but they kill the Outer God he summoned and kept his eye, which they sell to the guy telling us the story. And then it starts raining frogs.

I can't tell if the writer, called Echpiel the Scholar, is eager to use the eye, or if he's just academically curious (in a slightly unhinged way) about seeing the emergence of these beings. Bram and Weasel are only starting to grasp this really could be something bad at the end, but I expect their response will still just be to try and stab whatever shows up while arguing with each other. Or maybe take a break from the arguing, which seems to be their default state, long enough to stab it, whichever.

The monsters, as drawn by Collar, don't really convey mind-shattering horror. They're large, there's usually a lot of tentacles, and there's liberal use of shadows to disguise things, but it is tricky to manage, I guess. It's easy to draw something disgusting or frightening in a body horror vein, but I'm not sure how you draw something and imply its presence drives you mad. Maybe you have to distort the image, or take a mosaic approach that suggests the viewer is losing their grip as they try to take in what they're looking at

In any event, it's probably moot since Bram and Weasel are the ones describing the encounters. They're clearly don't see the creatures as anything particularly horrific. Weasel dismissed Byatis, whose eye they took, as basically like a chimera. No big deal. Perhaps they're like the Tick, and you can't shatter a mind that doesn't exist?