Starting the New Year by Hitting the Snooze Button

Typically I listen to part of a Youtube music playlist while I scan through the solicitations. So I can sort of judge how interesting a month it is by how many songs it takes to make it through. It was only 8 for January's solicits. Granted, one of those was a 9-minute Deadmau5 track, but still, not a lot to make me stop and go, "Hmmmmmm, maybe. . ."

What's new that's coming out? Denpa Books has Short Game, which looks like a collection of Mitsuru Adachi's (Cross Game) shorter manga works. So maybe a bit like the Akira Toriyama Magna Theater I picked up two years ago.

Other than that? Ummmmm, I briefly entertained buying New Gods, but I think that was strictly a reaction to the Walt Simonson variant cover.

What's wrapping up? Avengers Assemble, and it sounds like it's Captain America's turn to become a snake-person. Ha, see how you like being responsible for the next 40 years' worth of America's downward spiral, Rogers!

And the rest: Let's see, we've got Metamorpho, Laura Kinney: Wolverine, Dust to Dust and The Surgeon (now listed as a 6-issue mini-series), all on their second issues. They're dealing with a rival to Sapphire Stagg, Elektra-Daredevil (is there some cutesy shortened name for that?), ecological disaster and, whatever 'the Hot Animal Machines' are, respectively. I'm guessing the Transformers from Beast Wars, filtered through one of those AI art things. Terrifying.

Batgirl, and Calvera PI are on their third issues, while Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu's up to issue 4. It's mommy issues, drug trade, and an imminent return to the grave to plague that group.

Beyond that, Body Trade is up to its penultimate issue (assuming I'm still buying it), Reed Richards is going to attempt to time travel to understand magic in Fantastic Four, and Deadpool's not dead any longer. Whether or not he's pool remains to be determined. On the manga front, volume 9 of Yakuza Fiance, so I better get back to trying to close the gap.

And that's it. Red Before Black was absent (and issue 3 didn't ship this month, either.) The Pedestrian's not back (assuming it will be at all.) Scout didn't even bother listing Rogues or Loop. I didn't realize Dark Harbor might just be another sub-imprint of Scout, but now Loop's absence makes perfect sense. Still, I guess 11 books isn't too shabby, assuming I'm actually buying all of them.

Two for the Seesaw (1962)

Jerry Ryan (Robert Mitchum) is a lawyer from Nebraska, having moved to NYC to flee his failing marriage. Tired of just walking the streets all the time, he visits a painter friend and briefly encounters Gittel (Shirley MacLaine) as she explains to someone else why they should buy an icebox for $5. Jerry ends up calling her and after a lot of faltering and hemming and hawing, they go out for dinner.

They seem like they're meant to be a couple that could have been good, but they met at the wrong time. Too late for Jerry, who is still hung up on his soon-to-be ex-wife, which Gittel realizes even if he doesn't. Too soon for Gittel, who's had one long string of loser boyfriends that play on her kindness and then bail, and doesn't know how to react to a guy who actually wants to help her.

Jerry feels like everything in his marriage was just handed to him, and wants to earn his success via hard work. But as soon as he and Gittel get serious, he starts trying to just give her everything. She has dreams of running a dance studio, he'll pay the rent on a place for her. She has ulcers, he monitors her diet, takes away the French fries and cigarettes. He didn't want to be a pet or charity case, but he does it to her almost immediately. And even if it's done out of love, or at least affection, it throws Gittel. So they argue a lot, about him not taking chances, or her trying to push him away. They find equilibrium for a time, but it seems to involve her holding herself back. Much less energy, much less activity.

It's a movie with Robert Mitchum, so of course there's a scene when he's getting a little too pushy and judgmental about her (admittedly self-destructive) habits and she snaps back with something he doesn't like, so he smacks her. MacLaine at least gets to smack the taste out of his mouth later.

MacLaine's character feels like a prototype manic pixie dream girl. Mouth running a mile a minute, always flitting to some new idea or notion, leaving Mitchum trying to keep up. But the movie avoids having Mitchum "fix" her. He maybe gives her some stability and kindness, lets her get her feet solid underneath her, but that gives her the clarity to ultimately demand more in the relationship than he can give.

In contrast, Mitchum is playing a sad sack, but one who hides it in a way that's really obvious that's what he's doing. He makes a lot of self-deprecating comments, and often seems at a loss for what to do in a way that has nothing to do with Gittel's swing in mood. Like he wants to take command of his life, chart his own course, but he's so accustomed to 12 years of his wife and father-in-law doing it he doesn't trust his own judgment enough to start. Gittel acts like the catalyst that gets him moving again, but when she's fully herself it still leaves him feeling like he's following someone else's tune.

Neither of them can exactly be themselves to stick with the other. The movie uses this technique of having them talk on the phone, and making it look like they're on opposite sides of a wall. Close, but still separate. It contrasts their living arrangements - hers in bright colors and full of stuff, his a dingy place with sparse furnishings - and their attitudes. Gittel's always moving, while Jerry pretty much stands in one place. The opposites attract, but combust when they mix.

Baseball, in the Baseball Manga? Absurd!

Do you want somebody to say that?

After going a long time thinking I'd never find a copy of the 7th volume of Cross Game at a reasonable price (meaning, not $70 or more), I stumbled across someone selling a copy on Amazon for about $15 this January (as of last week's manga review, we moved on from stuff I bought last year.)

In a sharp, and welcome, departure from the all-consuming teen melodrama offering that was volume 6, volume 7 actually spends a lot of its pages on baseball. It's the beginning of the last tournament to reach Koshien this group of players will have, so it's now or never for Ko and Akaishi to make Wakaba's dream a reality.

Adachi doesn't only focus on the Seishu Gakuen squad, as their old foe Coach Daimon's team would face them in the second round. If he makes it that far, because in his path is a team led by Azuma's old teammate Miki, the one who left even before Daimon got fired because he wanted to play on a team where everyone loved playing baseball.

Adachi takes a different route with each game Seishu plays. The first one is such a dominant win the game is called after 5 innings (mercy rule), and is primarily used for a joke about how half the guys on the team asked Aoba if she'd go on a date with them if they reached certain achievements - one using two stolen bases as the benchmark for example - and none of them hitting the mark. Ko promised he'd get double-digit strikeouts if it meant they wouldn't go on a date, and pulled it off, though he apparently didn't realize it until Aoba mentioned it. But was Aoba disappointed? Oh no, the internal conflict!

The second game is a tense pitcher's duel against Miki's team. Miki's the ace pitcher now instead of the centerfielder, and while he's not on Ko's level of dominance, he gets results. Adachi wisely focuses on how Seishu keeps getting guys on base, but Miki always bears down and keeps them from scoring. Only late in the game does Aoba note that the opposing team hasn't gotten a single hit off Ko, leaning into the notion of how good a pitcher he is.

The third game is really just used to set-up a gag for the fourth game, as Ko tries to figure out why he was throwing harder than normal (in the process helping his team finish the game before a rain delay could begin.) When he asks Aoba for her perspective - because his motion is based on hers - if there was anything different with his mechanics, her observation leads to him walking a bunch of guys in the next game, though they still win easily.

The fifth game is likewise breezed through in a couple of pages, as the story shifts focus to Akane, who is in the hospital for another round of treatment for an unspecified condition. Aoba spends a lot of time with her, while Ko seems determined to just push through and keep playing, reasoning there's nothing he can do but hope things turn out well. And he knows how little good that does. The main issue is Akaishi, who's thrown by the whole thing and who struggles in the 5th game. This as the ace pitcher and elite slugger of Ryuou Gakuin, the presumptive favorites and team that knocked Seishu out of the tournament last time, remark that Seishu's catcher (Akaishi) is the one big advantage Seishu has over them.

So Akaishi's got to get his shit together, because standing between them and Ryuou is a team that seems blessed. Every win's been by a single run, and in close games, things can turn on one little thing. Adachi shows the Nishikura team score their first run in a series of isolated panels on one page. A grounder taking a funny hop over Senda's head. A bunt, and the runner advancing to second. Then a pop fly that lands just inside the foul line. Little things that added up to cancel out a lead-off home run from Senda. The panels contrast Nishikura's coach looking on confidently from behind his glasses, all the while Ko is mowing down batter after batter.

The volume ends on Ko visiting Akane, then he and Aoba visiting Wakaba's grave. It's a signpost of their shared history, that Ko agrees to tell Aoba about Akane's surgery (while hiding it from Akaishi) and how far they've come from when they were kids. There's a flashback showing the two of them getting in trouble for throwing mudballs at each other in the cemetery when they were little.

With all that out of the way, it's time for the big showdown, which we looked at when I reviewed volume 8.

Sunday Splash Page #346

 

"Down a Dark Hall", in Marvel Universe vs. The Avengers #1, by Jonathan Mayberry (writer), Leandro Fernandez (artist), Lee Loughridge (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer)

One of a group of 3 mini-series about an Earth where everything falls apart and civilization collapses in a maelstrom of killing. But not zombies! No, everyone is still alive, they just randomly become really angry and really hungry. A bit like 28 Days Later, I guess, though the source of the problem is not disclosed in this mini-series (and I didn't read the other two, which focused on Wolverine and the Punisher, respectively.)

Mayberry uses Hawkeye as the POV character. Probably because he's the most human, or least superhuman. Highlights his exhaustion, the fatigue and frustration at fighting to hold a line that may not even exist, since there's no rhyme or reason to when someone changes. Despite that, he's not really a Hawkeye I find familiar - it's odd to see the Black Widow hesitating at killing former friends, when Hawkeye's apparently accepted the necessity - but it's a big multiverse.

Mayberry takes advantage to do basically whatever he assumes will be emotionally affecting. Captain America dies in the first issue, as the Punisher's hands. Hawkeye has to listen to an infected Luke Cage kill Jessica Jones and their child over the phone. Doom shows up at the end of the first issue, promising a solution. Deadpool hangs around him like a Renfield.

The heroes' numbers dwindle in a series of brief fights that are silent except for Hawkeye's caption boxes, rendered in short panels with a longview perspective. Hastily sketched figures, vaguely recognizable characters, killing each other. (It is funny that Multiple Man keeps popping up, presumably at least one dupe keeps surviving.) It works in the sense this is not the typical hero vs. villain fight but a struggle for survival, so Fernandez shouldn't draw it like a typical comic book fight.

Also, all the fighting is pointless, anyway, so there's really no reason to focus on it. Just death throes. Doom's "solution" is one of control rather than cure. *shocked Pikachu face* Hawkeye faces him down and wins, vowing to keep going forward as the last Avenger. Which could be either inspiring or pitiable, depending on your mindset, but it's ultimately meaningless. Thor, who left earlier in frustration with the moral compromises, returns infected and splatters Hawkeye's skull like a watermelon. This despite the fact the story keeps telling us the problem was something that was inside people all along. Thor's not mortal, so how did it get him? The answer is, of course. . .hey look over there!

Seriously, though, I think Mayberry just wanted to do a Punisher story where Frank can treat everyone in the world as a target, where he didn't have to worry about innocent bystanders and collateral damage. Because all Frank's ever wanted to do was kill, and everything else was just the thin leashes he imposed on himself.

Saturday Splash Page #148

 

"An Ill Wind Blows," in The Spectre (vol. 3) #27, by John Ostrander (writer), Tom Mandrake (artist), Carla Feeny and Digital Chameleon (color artists), Todd Klein (letterer)

Summer (and Fall) of Spiders is on a one-week hiatus, so we can get into the spirit of the season! Or is it the, specter, of the season? *arches eyebrow*

Audience: Boooooooooooooo.

The Spectre had been a bizarre figure, using comets and planets like whips and bludgeons to fight demons. He'd been the source of much ironic punishment to a variety of killers and criminals. He'd been a paranormal detective. In Ostrander and Mandrake's 5-year run, he's a bit of all those things, but mostly he's a being that needs to evolve.

Ostrander takes the approach that, after 50 years, dead cop Jim Corrigan never understood the task he was given as the Spectre. It wasn't to punish evil, but to confront, and most critically, comprehend, evil. The latter is difficult for both halves of the spirit. The Spectre itself was created to punish, without compassion or restraint. Corrigan's not big on those concepts either, feeling he's seen very little of them in his life, and so the guilty don't deserve them (though it's pointed out to him, "guilt" and "evil" aren't the same thing.)

As the Spectre tries to evolve and grow, Corrigan is forced to confront his past, his mistakes and his flaws. His tendency to focus on revenge, leading him to abandon Amy Beitermann and pursue her killer, when she pleaded not to die alone. To lash out rather than admitting he's in pain, which is not great when you have as much power as the Spectre. That's how an entire country (Count Vertigo's home of Vlatava) gets destroyed, an act of genocide that Ostrander never manages to square with the fact "Moonface's" old JSA buddies still speak with him after, let alone Superman or Batman letting that shit slide. The Spectre even acknowledges he killed children by doing so, and the Archangel Michael just handwaves it as 'extreme, but not unjust.' Are you fucking kidding me?

It's a part of the overall work that people (or souls) are often punishing themselves, rather than anything God's doing. And so Corrigan has to forgive himself his mistakes (in that regard, he's ultimately more successful than John Gaunt was in GrimJack.) But even if he came to some sort of peace with himself, that hardly means everyone else would be OK with it. Ostrander tried to go big to make a point of how dangerous a Spectre that's lost any sense of control could be, but in the process, created an anchor that sits around the character's neck for the remaining 4 years of the series. Even if the other characters don't mention it, I was always aware of what the Spectre did to Vlatava in, essentially, a grief-induced rage.

Part of the path of Corrigan's growth involves actually talking to people, instead of offering booming pronouncements before killing them in ironic ways. Ostrander uses a few existing characters like Madame Xandau or Reverend Craemer, who he introduced in Suicide Squad, and creates a few others like Amy (a social worker who happens to cross paths with Corrigan when he visits the man who helped murder him), or Nate Kane, a hard-nosed cop with a phobia about sick people. While they may sometimes console Corrigan, just as often they give him a metaphorical smack upside the head. 

That said, the book is far from focused on talking about feelings. Mandrake still gets plenty of chances to draw the Spectre dealing out horrific punishments or facing down slithering demons that make you feel grimy just looking at them. The Spectre often travels in another person's mind or soul, which gives the opportunity to get surreal with things. The Spectre may face a kaiju-sized version of the mobster that killed him, firing planets from a Thompson, or find himself caught in a funhouse of his own worst failures.

It helps to reinforce the growing divide between the two halves of the Spectre, one that is still ultimately a human soul, and one that isn't and never was. Corrigan will try to navigate these landscapes, while the Spectre, when left to its own devices, simply smashes through. It's a blunt instrument, and so long as Corrigan was content to be that way, there was no problem. But Jim Corrigan's a human, and humans can change, so that shared sense of purpose doesn't last.

What I Bought 10/23/2024

When Microsoft sent out their monthly updates a couple of weeks ago, it did something where their stupid News & Interests feed wouldn't stay turned off. I'm used to their crap - I always check whether they've reinstalled their AI "Helper" before I open Word, and delete it if they have - so I long ago set N&I to not show up on my taskbar. Now, according to Task Manager, it was running in the background anyway. Always when I was trying to do something, thus slowing my computer down. I'd tell it to end task, it'd start itself back up again before long.

After trying at least 4 different things I found online, I finally hit one that actually worked. True, it seems to have disabled the Search function on my computer, but I'm willing to call that acceptable collateral damage. Especially since my laptop runs much faster now.

Dazzler #2, by Jason Loo (writer), Rafael Loureiro (artist), Java Tartaglia (color artist), Ariana Maher (letterer) - What is happening to Strong Guy's face? Or did they just shave Magilla Gorilla and figure no one would notice the difference?

Scorpia doesn't know who hired her, only that a lot of people took jobs to wreck Dazzler's tour. Oh well, the show must go on. Appearing on some morning talk show in London, Dazzler defends her music as not being solely for mutants, and neatly disses the host (who is wearing a suit so hideous, I think he must have escaped from Gotham.)

Then Dazzler goes nuts during her live performance on the show. No, wait, she was being mind-controlled. Oh, that's the X-Men's excuse for everything. The telepath's kind of mediocre at best, as it turns out to be one of the production assistants for the show. An anonymous person knew he was a mutant and threatened his family if he didn't make Dazzler look bad. Mission probably accomplished, but then Lila Cheney shows up to offer to get Dazzler to her next tour stop.

For some reason, I thought Lila was initially talking in lyrics, or singing or something. Not sure why, other than, "That live stream was hard to watch. Looked like you found yourself in quite the jam," read as so stilted I didn't think a person would actually talk like that. Especially not Lila Cheney, who I tend to expect to make more of a spectacle of her arrival. Or maybe "Wing! Bling! Ding!" sufficiently lowered the bar for my expectation of lyrics.

Anyway, outside of some vague interest in the person behind all this trouble, there's really nothing selling me on this book. Other than the flashback last issue showing her sparring with Domino, Loo's not doing much of anything with the characters he assembled as her road crew. Loureiro's art is fine; I like the civvies look Dazzler sports for the talk show appearance, and there's no trouble following the action this time around. But it doesn't impress me wildly or make me go "wooooooooo".

Run Through the (Concrete) Jungle

Dying Light is a first-person, free-roaming survival horror game. You're Kyle Crane, a merc dropped into the city of Harran by an organization called GRE to find data on the virus that's caused the city to be overrun with zombies. This requires you to cozy up with a band of survivors (who also saved your neck when you parachuted into disaster), and eventually a local tyrant named Rais. Over the course of the story, Crane decides he cares about the group of survivors, and becomes increasingly disgusted by Rais, and the GRE for making deals with him.

I say Crane decides he cares about the survivors, because the game is on railroad tracks as far as that goes. It isn't a matter of someone asking a question and you deciding how Crane answers or what he does. The closest you get to choice is deciding whether you want to bother with the loads of optional missions for the people of the city, ranging from scrounging around for coffee, to convincing a mentally handicapped man to let you have the medication for his now-deceased mother so it can help other people.

One way or the other, they pretty much boil down to fetch-it quests. It's just a matter of how many steps there are. Sometimes you can just go to a place, find the thing, and come back. Other times you're searching a general area, or sometimes checking multiple buildings until you find what you need. A pair of eccentric "geniuses" might need batteries from the bus station, so you've got to dodge, kill, or trick zombies until you can find buses with batteries that still have a charge.

At any rate, you're rewarded for this, and the effort of crossing the city and fighting increases your levels in those areas, which unlocks various perks that can make things easier. The ability to camouflage yourself by smearing dead zombie guts over your body, and the instant kill, surprise neck break move were godsends, especially used in conjunction. Great way to thin out a horde of zombies.

When you're crossing the city, you're relying on various parkour skills. Sprinting across rooftops, leaping from ledges, climbing vans or telephone poles to reach another vantage point. Most of the zombies are slow, shuffling types, although the person who tells Crane early on the zombies can't climb is full of shit. You very quickly encounter what I assume are former "Runners" (people who did the same jobs you're doing now), who chase you up buildings, over walls, through gaps in the fence until you can get out of their line of sight.

Overall, it's very similar to Mirror's Edge, although I found Dying Light more forgiving. I felt confident if I sprinted along a girder that I could guess when I'd reached the end and jump without accidentally running off it like a cartoon coyote. Which is not to say climbing wasn't tense. There were several times my heart rate went up, and a few where looking down or falling made me sick. One way or the other, the fact you've got Crane a long way from the ground, with very little between him and gravity, comes across.

The further along you go, the more varieties of zombies you encounter. I'm sure it's just to up the difficulty, but it feels like a sign things are going critical. More zombies are mutating into more dangerous forms, and it's only a matter of time before everyone's dead. Some like to stand on rooftops and projectile barf acid at you. Enormous hulks plod towards you with a piece of rebar with concrete around one end (including one variety that's green and wears purple pants.) At night, the worst of the worst come out. They look a lot like that one boss in Resident Evil 4, the insect thing you have to freeze and then shoot while its exoskeleton is brittle. Except there's dozens of them.

When you're just running around, you can hunker down in various safe houses, even choose to sleep the night away if you want. But some missions require you to be out at night. Your map in the upper right will show their location and which direction they're looking, and you have a "survivor sense" that will highlight important enemies and objects around you briefly if you need a more concrete perspective. I usually tried to sneak as long as I could, then run like hell once spotted. One positive, none of the Infected can swim, so if all else fails, head for the canals or the bay.

Sadly, the game insists that sometimes you not run from your problems. Though there are guns available, and even ammunition in decent supply, most combat is hand-to-hand. Weapons are often anything you can find, including part of an old gas pipe, or Old Reliable, a board with nails in it*. That said, a lot of people in Harran had machetes, sabres, billhook blades and things of that sort. This is what people resort to when there's no 2nd Amendment to guarantee their right to own as many guns as they can buy.

Weapons do wear down as you hack and clobber zombies and other humans with them, and each weapon can only be repaired so many times (and requires you have Metal Parts scrap available to repair it with.) There are also blueprints for modifications you can make. Adding a battery and coil of wire to a baseball bat so you can electrocute people as you smack them. I used those early on, but as things progressed I got out of the habit. Knowing the weapon was eventually going to be beyond repair made it seem pointless. Plus, I figured the crafting supplies were better spent on repairing weapons or making other stuff, like medkits and lockpicks.

Crane does get fatigued, so in the same way you can't simply run full speed across the city forever, you can't keep swinging your weapon like a madman forever. Eventually you have to let him catch his breath, though you can still dodge and retreat while that happens. Enemies don't necessarily show reactive damage if you target certain places - arms won't go flying because you severed one - but they do seem to die quicker if you can get them in the head than the torso, so trying to get the tiny white dot targeting reticule at the proper height can be worth the time. It isn't as simple as see enemy, hit enemy, either. Runner zombies can and will dodge and juke to avoid your swings, and Rais' men are fully capable of parrying with their own weapons. You've got to pick your spots.

Like I said, it isn't a game that lets you make decisions. Crane decides to hide his intentions from Brecken and Jade, until he doesn't. He decides when he's fed up with the GRE, he decides he's going to continue to carry out missions for Rais instead of breaking his neck the first time they meet, which would have been my preference. The guy is clearly bad news, the sort to change the terms of a deal the moment it suits him, and clearly more on the ball than Crane is giving him credit for.

So I don't know about the emotional beats. Do I share Crane's regret when he first feels he failed Jade? Not really. Would I have liked the chance, later on, to fight Jade to make her take that last vial of Antizin instead of her jabbing me? Yeah. She was apparently a mixed martial arts' legend before things went to hell. That would have been a much more interesting fight than dealing with Rais' musclebound chief goon (seen in the image above, thoroughly dead), plus the clown car's worth of nameless goons who ran in to help.

That said, one thing Crane and I were in total agreement on was Rais talks too damn much. The entire final level - at least once I got out of the sewers where I died like 12 times - Rais is on a loudspeaker, going on about the usual shit. Blah blah, Crane's just a slave, blah blah, Rais is waiting at the top, as befits a king. Blah blah, firing a missile at you is totally fair. Through it all, Crane is screaming at him to just shut the hell up, which I really appreciated.

As for the final battle, once you've finished climbing all the way to the top of this partially constructed skyscraper, I don't know how I feel about it. It's very brief, and it's all quick-time events. Rais goes to stab you, press X or die. He's swinging again, press triangle or die! While there are occasionally quick-time prompts in the game, assuming you've unlocked certain techniques, no other boss fight had been like that. Which at least grants it novelty. And you get to see him die while bragging, which is nice. Certainly more satisfying than the end of Mad Max. I guess I just really wanted to hack Rais apart myself.

On the other hand, given how much damage even his regular cannon fodder could withstand, I probably would have thrown my hands up in disgust after the 20th machete slash to the face failed to kill him.

* Note: Board with nails in it may not actually be reliable.

Lucky (2017)

Lucky (Harry Dean Stanton) lives alone in a house in the American Southwest. He's got a routine - morning exercise, milk, coffee, crossword at the diner, buy milk and smokes at the corner bodega, home to watch his game shows in the afternoon, evenings at a local bar. A lot of people know him to say "hello", but it's hard to say how well any of them know him.

One morning, he falls. Just out of the blue. Doctors can't find anything physically wrong, except he's real old. Eventually, bodies break down. At first, Lucky doesn't really do anything different. Goes to the diner, goes to the store (although he buys 3 packs of smokes, but maybe that is normal), goes to the bar. His friends seem more concerned than him, but gradually Lucky branches out a bit. He pauses in his walk one day to visit a pet store, and buys the box of crickets people feed to their pet reptiles to set them free. He attends a birthday party for the son of the lady who runs the bodega, and even leads the band in some sort of song. The waitress at the diner stops by, and they sit and watch Liberace play while smoking weed.

It's about coming to some kind of peace with mortality, and the different ways people do that. Lucky's friend (played by David Lynch) is meeting with an attorney to make sure his estate will be used to care for his pet tortoise, President Roosevelt, who escaped early in the movie. Lucky tries picking a fight with the attorney (played by Ron Livingston), but sees him later at the diner and they have a conversation where the attorney discusses a time he was nearly hit by a bus on the way to pick up his daughter. That prompted him to set everything up for what happens when he dies. Lucky points out it won't do anything for the lawyer, but I think it does. Now he knows his family won't have to deal with any of it when the day comes. That worry isn't hanging over his head, so he can focus on being with his loved ones.

Stanton plays Lucky as taciturn, rarely more than a few words at a time. The camera alternates between watching his face from a distance you might hold a conversation at, and longer shots. The latter are usually when he's going about his rounds, walking down the sidewalk with a heavy, flat-footed step. It's a peculiar stride, by I'm assuming it's a way Lucky ensures he's got a firm base with each step. Either way, it's a unique gait.

The most he speaks is a brief scene when an old Marine (Tom Skerritt) stops in the diner one day, and the two compare war experiences (because Lucky was in the Navy.) Even there, Skerritt talks more, but Lucky puts a few consecutive sentences together. There are lots of things about him we don't learn. He calls someone on the phone at night, but we only hear Lucky's side of the conversations, and never learn who he's calling. The waitress asks about a photo, but Lucky only says they aren't his kids, not whose they are. His version of acceptance seems to involve setting aside pointless grudges and embracing the occasional opportunity to branch out, but otherwise, keep going as he has for some period of time. Alone isn't lonely, as he tells his doctor.

I was Promised There Would be No Math

Is that like algebra? 1+2 = KO?

Having found the Legendary Sword of Bonds, then allowed it to join their party, The Survivors spend volume 4 of Apparently, Disillusioned Adventurers Will Save the World dealing with Nick's old relationship drama.

While at dinner with Karan and Bond (the sword in its disguise as young person), Nick spies his ex-girlfriend Claudine scamming a young noble in much the same way she did Nick. Nick calls her on it publicly and she withdraws, which seems to end it. Until she shows up at the inn and dumps a mug of beer on Nick's head.

She's got her boyfriend and party leader, a tiger beastman named Leon, backing her up, but when he and Nick take it outside, Leon changes his tune. He offers Claudine to Nick, even suggesting Nick could sell her to a brothel if she's too much trouble. Nick finds the whole thing offensive and throws a punch, but the fight's interrupted before it gets too far by the head of the Adventurers Guild.

Vilma wants this dispute settled with rules, and in a way that isn't strictly brawn. Thus, a combination fistfight/math bowl. Nick and Leon will fight, but another member of each party takes a math quiz between each round. The winner's fighter gets to throw a free hit before the next round begins. And Karan, who just started learning math from Nick, draws the short straw.

Rather than spend a lot of panels showing Karan working hard on math, most of the remainder of the volume focuses on Nick training to fight a much larger, stronger opponent bare-handed. Since Tiana's accompanies him to the labyrinth where he's training, it's also used as an opportunity to delve into her past a bit. Not so much the broken engagement that damaged her ability to trust, but what came after that. It's nice to see a character other than Nick or Karan get a little focus, even if the plot itself remains firmly tied to those two.

Sunday Splash Page #345

 

"Self-Aggrandizing," in Marvel Two-in-One Annual #7, by Tom DeFalco (writer), Ron Wilson (penciler), Bob Camp, Mike Esposito, Frank Giacoia, Dan Green, Armando Gil, Chic Stone (inkers), George Roussos (colorist), Jim Novak (letterer)

The last, and best-remembered, of Marvel Two-in-One's 7 Annuals. The Champion (at this point presented simply as a powerful being from another dimension, rather than as the Elder of the Universe he'd become in Engelhart's Silver Surfer) wants to test Earth's worthiness in a challenge of athletic competition, as befits one who devoted himself fully to that pursuit. So he gathers a bunch of the physically strongest heroes on Earth to face him, one at a time, the Earth's survival on the line.

(I know Genndy Tartakovsky did a version of this in a "Dial M for Monkey" cartoon on Dexter's Lab, but I wonder if Akira Toriyama knew anything about it when he had the Cell Games in DBZ.)

Of course, like any guy that talks big about wanting people to bring it, the Champion's very specific about the rules and conditions under which it can be brought. Vision's disqualified for not being within the Champion's prescribed 'life-class.' Namor is sent away because he refuses to train, Doc Samson because he gets kayoed by the training-bot.

Well, OK, hard to argue with that one.

For all his claim of skill, the Champion restricts the challenge to boxing, rather than open it up to any type of fighting. When the Hulk charges, intending to manhandle Champion, he's disqualified because Champion won't soil his hands with a 'mindless brute.' Thor's out for using a weapon, even though he's made it pretty clear he's not putting down the hammer (and can't because he'd still turn into Don Blake in 60 seconds if he did.) The only ones who really box against the Champion are Sasquatch, Colossus, and finally, The Thing.

Beyond that, DeFalco really plays up the challenge, as Reed Richards' devices confirm the Champion is more powerful than Galactus, and the Champion can erect an impregnable force dome around the boxing ring that no one can get through. The first hit Ben takes, he declares was a harder punch than the Hulk or Silver Surfer ever landed on him.

I think the story is usually lauded as a great Thing story for his unwillingness to give up. The ref calls the fight after the 3rd round, but Ben drags himself across the ring, leaving a bloody spit trail behind him, still insisting he hasn't lost. But the Champion touts The Thing as the best among the heroes because he's the only one who understands the spirit of competition, possesses the spirit to play by the rules, to survive and win at any cost.

Setting aside some of that seems contradictory - Can you be willing to pay any price to win and follow the rules? - I'm not sure it tracks. I can see the argument Namor and Thor were too haughty and proud to play along, even with the world at risk. Thor's more insulted at the boxing trunks he has to wear than anything else. But I think most of the others understand the stakes. The narration makes clear the Hulk's been trying to keep his temper reined in, that Colossus and Wonder Man are scared (for different reasons) but going to try their best. I guess the point is Ben Grimm's the only one actually excited at the prospect of this fight, but even that, Sasquatch also talks about having been a world-class athlete and how he's missed pushing his limits. But that's more about challenging himself than testing him against someone else, maybe?

Ron Wilson drew several issues of the monthly Marvel Two-in-One, and would draw plenty of issues of The Thing's subsequent solo book, but the gaggle of inkers doesn't help him here. Some panels are pretty good - the one of Ben, hands taped, marching towards us, the knockout punch Champion lands on Sasquatch - other panels look half-finished or the characters are awkwardly posed or positioned. I don't know which inkers did which pages, so I don't know who to wish Wilson had been able to work with for the entire issue.

And there's a lot to get through, between the set-up, the training, the build for the fight, the other heroes' attempts to intervene, and the actual fights, so much of the story is crammed into small panels, alongside a lot of dialogue. But Wilson works around it, using short, wide panels to demonstrate the Champion's strength, when he knocks Ben the length of the ring (and the panel) with one hit. Or zooming in for a close-up on Ben's battered face (weird to see him with a black eye) as he climbs out of a hole in the ring.

Saturday Splash Page #147

 

"Spiders Unite," in Spider-Girls #1, by Jody Houser (writer), Andres Genolet (penciler/inker), Triona Farrell (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer)

Spider-Geddon was, as best I can tell from reading the credits page, the second time a bunch of Spider-people from across the multiverse teamed up to fight JMS and Romita Jr. creation Morlun and his extended family of 19th-Century-finery wearing energy-vampires. This mini-series is the one and only thing I bought from that event. Why did I do that?

Probably in part because 2018 was the year the amount of stuff Marvel published I was interested dropped off sharply. They'd been solidly in the low-70s each of the previous three years, but in 2018 dropped into the 50s. Which is where they've languished ever since. So I likely hadn't adjusted and was taking chances on things I normally wouldn't.

Beyond that, this mini-series promised to focus on a small cast. Mayday Parker (going by Spider-Woman now), Anya Corazon (formerly Arana, now Spider-Girl, with predictive visions), and Annie Parker, the daughter of Peter and Mary Jane in the Renew Your Vows universe. Free of the literal armies that made up the main storyline, Mayday might get some actual focus. One of Morlun's family killed her parents in the previous event, leaving Mayday an orphan responsible for her infant brother. 

Which wasn't an isolated thing; Slott killed a lot of Spider-characters in that event. Not even in ways that really upped the stakes. Just to make numbers. Here's a one-page comic of Hostess-Fruit-Pie-Ads Spidey trying to stop Morlun with mass-produced pastries! And he's dead. Wasn't that great? Now let's spend more time on Octavius running around in Peter's stolen body!

(I have seen arguments online that's a different Mayday because the eye color is wrong. As though Marvel's paying attention to that. They can't even remember big events from a given character's past consistently.)

I thought maybe there'd be something to Mayday interacting with a younger version of both her parents (she met a high-school-aged version of her dad in a time travel adventure early in her solo series), but Peter and MJ are quickly drafted into the larger fight. Outside of a brief scene of MJ thinking about how they lost another daughter in childbirth years before Annie, nothing comes of it. Most of the mini-series is Mayday, Anya and Annie trying to figure out what Annie's powers are telling her while surviving against two of Morlun's siblings. There is a bit where Anya and Mayday try to use some sort of Green Goblin-themed battle armor to fight, but the goths completely no-sell it, so it's kind of a dud.

What I bought 10/17/2024

Can't go a day without somebody wanting me to drive halfway across the state to help them with something. People have apparently decided I'm someone at my job who can be counted on to help solve their problems. It wasn't intentional, I swear.

Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu #1, by Jed MacKay (writer), Alessandro Cappuccio (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - Moon Knight: he'll hit you with sticks. Daredevil's gonna sue for trademark infringement.

Moon Knight (or Mr. Knight) is on the streets, trying to shut off the flow of a new drug, which may in fact be fairy dust. The path leads to some former boxer turned Mista Big named Achilles Fairchild, who also has a chief enforcer named Carver. Carver doesn't talk, just carries a big magic sword, but Achilles talks enough for both of them. The conversation doesn't produce results, but it's probably more of a pissing contest, I mean, marking territory, I mean, a friendly warning.

Cappuccio keeps Fairchild sitting for the first half of the conversation, which means it was a surprise when he stands up and he's got several inches on Moon Knight. He didn't look that big, but it plays well as the moment when shifts from cordial businessman to hard-nosed drug pusher.

MacKay intersperses bits of a conversation between old Moon Knight supporting cast member (former) Lt. Flint, and a new cop, a Detective Frazier. Frazier is the cop who Doesn't Want to Play Nice with Vigilantes, and is openly scornful of Moon Knight's crew, who will therefore have to learn the error of their ways. Or die, I'm good with dying. Especially since Frazier is, gasp, working for Fairchild! Because she's hooked on the drug. I don't know, a bent cop is a pretty farfetched notion to expect me to swallow in this comic about a guy who dresses all in white and beats to shit out of people for his Skeleton Bird God.

I'm not sure if it's Rosenberg or Cappuccio, but the characters are less sharply defined than they were in the previous book. The colors tend to smudge and blur a bit, softens them a little. Or makes them dirtier, I suppose. Although maybe MacKay's going to have Moon Knight ease up a bit after his most recent death. Try a little compassion. You know, not hit people where it causes permanent disfiguring. Only temporary disfiguring.

Avengers Assemble #2, by Steve Orlando (writer), Scot Eaton (penciler), Elisabetta D'Amico (inker), Sonia Oback (colorist), Cory Petit (letterer) - I know Red Ghost can turn intangible, but his positioning on that cover is awkward. It looks like he's punching Night Thrasher, or waiting for Thrasher to run into the back of his knuckles.

A Massachusetts town is being haunted by ape ghosts. Lots of ape ghosts. Is it Silver Age DC month at Marvel and no one told me? So it's Captain America, Hercules, Hawkeye and Night Thrasher to investigate. Herc's the only one able to actually hit ghosts, so it's just as well the apes don't seem to be trying to hurt people. The heroes eventually figure out the apes are smart enough to speak, and that they were the Red Ghost's early test subjects. No powers, save enough intelligence to speak and plead for their lives. Pleas that were ignored.

The Avengers locate Red Ghost's house, let the apes torment him until they're satisfied and then Herc uses his mace's ability to absorb energy(?) to draw in the radiation holding the ghosts in the realm of the living. Another crisis averted, although the Serpent Society stole some bone fragments soaked in magic moonshine, so that's. . .concerning. I guess? I'd say the vocal dissent of members of the Society is going to short-circuit that plot before too long.

Anyway, credit to Orlando for an interesting problem for the team to confront. The ghosts of unethical animal experimentation. I didn't quite understand why, if Hercules can apparently understand the ghosts courtesy of the "All-Speak", why he let Hawkeye keep trying to read their lips. Did Hercules just not think of trying to understand their spectral cries? But that wouldn't explain why he's still letting Hawkeye have first crack even after that. I guess he just thinks it's a good challenge for Clint.

Oback keeps the colors murky while the team is dealing with the apes, then brightens things up considerably once they find the Red Ghost. Maybe because, once the team has a sense of the cause, things aren't so dire. Eaton's ghost apes are suitably anguished and angry looking.

Fear of the Dark - Walter Mosley

Paris owns a bookstore in L.A. in the '50s. It ought to be a quiet life, which is what he wants. When his cousin Ulysses stops by, Paris sends him away. Because Ulysses - or "Useless" as everyone but his mother calls him - always brings trouble with him.

But Paris can find his own trouble. Like sleeping with a girl whose previous relationship is not quite as over as she claimed. Paris takes to his heels, and when he returns to his bookstore hours later, the boyfriend's dead on the floor. As the boyfriend and lady were both white, and Paris is black, this could be a real problem were the cops to find out. Especially with Paris not knowing why the guy is dead.

The murder is connected to Useless' visit, but the whys and hows and what-fors are teased out slowly over the course of the book. There are plenty of digressions, as Paris roams the neighborhood, giving us peeks into the different lives and cultures of the city. Sometimes the enclaves different groups make for themselves, but also where they mix and coexist. Having never been a terribly community-minded person, the grand cultural map of the city, or the city as an organism, isn't hugely interesting to me except for how it impacts the story. I take more from it for the opportunities it gives Mosley to introduce new characters and sketch a quick, but interesting, background for them.

Mosley doesn't write Paris as brave, or at least, Paris doesn't think of himself as brave. Paris contrasts himself with his friend Fearless Jones (who has apparently been the protagonist of a couple other books Mosley wrote, not sure if Paris was in those, too.) From Paris' perspective, Fearless is never flustered, never afraid, can speak calmly with anyone, from a hired killer to a frightened mother to a white pastor. When they're put in a holding cell with a bunch of other guys, Paris is almost grateful to feel safe from the threats of the outside world, while Fearless is, as the names suggests unperturbed by the whole thing.

But even if Paris doesn't particularly care where Useless is, and is only dragged into the search by his aunt, he does keep digging. He keeps asking questions and trying to piece things together, whether his aunt is pressing him or not, whether Fearless is there to back him up or not. He was a likeable enough main character. Clever when he's got time to plan his approach, stubborn enough to keep digging, able to do something dangerous if it's really necessary, even though he's terrified. Although I especially liked the part where he hits his limit with his aunt and gives her a verbal dressing down. Mosley wrote that really well, the way the dam burst and it all just flooded out.

'Somebody overhearing our words would have thought that I was going down the wrong road. But that someone wouldn't have been listening between the lines. In his own estimation Tommy was a superior specimen. He only dealt with white people and was better educated than 99 percent of the Negro race. He would have felt he could dismiss me unless I intimidated him physically or intellectually.

Tommy could have kicked my ass up and down the block, so I used the only muscle I had.'

5th Passenger (2017)

An escape pod from one of a series of ships transporting some of humanity to a new world is discovered with only one survivor, one of the navigation officers. And she's comatose. Fortunately the ability to see a person's memories by slapping a pair of fancy blue goggles on someone's face exists, so we and the rescuers, can maybe learn what happened.

OK, so one thing that nags at me throughout this movie is that, even though we're allegedly seeing Lt. Miller's memories of the events, we often see Lt. Miller herself. As though we're actually seeing the memories of some 6th, invisible, passenger who was in the pod.

Now, it is pointed out or alluded to by more than one character that memory is not an ironclad thing. People remember what they want to, and memories are affected by perception. This, as you no doubt have guessed, factors into the answer to what happened. That said, it still bugs me that Lt. Miller's memories are to involve her being apart from herself.

The movie has the grounds for a good pressure cooker atmosphere, full of tension and frayed nerves. Earth seems to have been divided into "citizens" and "non-citizens." The latter aren't excluded from the ship - Lt. Miller, the livestock herder and the doctor on the pod are all in that category - but they're treated essentially as slaves or tools. Their uniforms even have a label on the sleeve that states "non-citizen". The two citizens expect them to be silent unless spoken to, and are indignant at the notion of even sharing an escape pod with "roaches", as one of the two describes them. The pod was also only supposed to hold 4 people, so they have less oxygen and food stores than expected. And Lt. Miller's pregnant with the livestock herder's kid (though he doesn't learn that until halfway through.)

Like I said, there's some fertile ground here, especially as Miller appears the only one with skills that might save them once the pod is sent off-course. But then they find another, damaged, pod, and it seems like there was an experiment on-board, and now it's on their pod, and it's almost Baby's First Alien flick. The addition of a monster doesn't entirely sabotage the social strata friction, but it looks so fake and so goofy it does a fair bit of damage. The writing doesn't help either. Lots of, lines that are clumsy attempts to provide exposition, plus some acting that thinks putting extra emphasis on every word creates extra emotion, too.

Burning Leaves and Burning Sands

Depends how good a dancer they are, and if you're in the mood to laugh at another's misfortune.

Having defeated one of the Seven Fallen Angels and repaired Tama's relationship with her father, volume 4 of No Longer Allowed in Another World finds Sensei and the others having stopped in the village of Toneriko, located in the shadow of the great tree Weltenbaum. But the village isn't doing so well, since a gang of Otherworlders set up a casino across the river, and have begun selling the leaves of the great tree as a narcotic to their fellow Otherworlders. Even one of the locals, a woman named Esche believed to possibly be a witch, has opened up a bar beside the casino and is raking in the money. She's even snared Sensei, not that he was a difficult catch.

Fortunately, an Otherworlder named Yamada, who fancies himself a protector of justice and honor, has arrived to trounce these wicked Otherworlders. And he does, even destroying their casino. Sensei's not impressed by Yamada's binary view of the world. As the villagers refuse to listen to Sensei's explanation of Esche's actions and run her out, then offer to pay Yamada to protect the village while they get down to the business of selling Weltenbaum's leaves as a drug, it would seem Sensei's correct.

Sort of. It's presented to us that all the money Esche made was essentially protection money she gave "Boss" to restrict his business to Otherworlders and leave the villagers alone. But right about the time Yamada destroys the casino, Boss was already planning to have his guys abduct some of the villagers and forcibly get them addicted to the drugs and gambling. So Esche's approach of conciliation was about to fail. Because Boss was never going to honor his word past the point it suited his purposes. That the villagers turned out to also be opportunists, simply lacking the vision to see the chance until someone else did it first, doesn't make Boss less of a scumbag or a threat.

Anyway, it turns out Esche was much more than she appeared, and the villagers are shit out of luck. Sensei, on the other hand, receives a gift to ease his distress. From there, the story ventures to yet another new region, the Samstag Desert. This is a Nir-focused story, since he's from here originally and brings the party to the orphanage where he grew up. Things are rougher than you'd expect, even for an orphanage in the middle of a freaking wasteland. Another gang of Otherworlders terrorize the region, making me believe that damn Isekai Jackpot Truck has been running people over like it's playing Grand Theft Auto, plus there's a terrible beast roaming the sands at night.

On the plus side, someone keeps leaving baskets of food on the door every night. Nir, who's struggling to match the stories he's told the other orphans of his being a great warrior, takes some solace in helping Mr. Saito collect food from an oasis for the kids. The orphanage comes under attack by the gang, and Nir demonstrates his courage, although not in battle exactly.

It's a pretty good arc, as Noda shows Nir's been defining courage too narrowly, thinking of it simply as someone who will charge into battle and crush enemies. When Sensei begins to take apart Mr. Saito's image of himself, it's Nir who leaps to the man's defense, and his own, since the things Sensei says are the same things Nir thinks of himself. We also see that even when Nir's down on himself, Annette and Tama each give his confidence a boost in their own way.

There's also the aspect that Sensei isn't necessarily correct about everything. Up to this point, his instincts have been right on, whether it was sensing the truth that there was something behind Suzuki's actions in volume 2, or that there was more to the story of Tama's estrangement from her father in volume 3, or recognizing Esche was not the collaborator the villagers believed her to be. I don't know if that's because he's from another world, and so he sees this one without preconceived notions of its inhabitants, or some innate sense for conflict or character arc that marks him as a writer. Probably the latter, since he admits that, in being so quick to label Mr. Saito a coward, he misjudged the man.

Takahiro Wakamatsu shows off his design skills more in the desert section of the book. Boss and his gang are sort of a bunch of stereotypical gangster types, with the dark coats and fedoras and thin mustaches. Not much to them. The guy leading the desert gang seems based off the Kuwabara character from YuYu Hakusho, but at least it makes him stand out visually, and his cheat skill to somehow turn animals into vehicles, is at least weird and kind of cool. Also, Wakamatsu draws a damn nice werewolf. Someone should send scans to the folks drawing that Werewolf by Night book and see if they take a hint.

Sunday Splash Page #344

 

"Some Thing Spooked This Way Comes," in Marvel Two-in-One #99, by Bill Mantlo (writer), Bob Hall (penciler), Kevin Dzuban (inker), Bob Sharen (colorist), Rick Parker (letterer)

Similar to Marvel Team-Up, but starring the Thing instead of Spider-Man. I know some folks prefer this book, feeling the Thing fits more readily into a wider variety of situations than Spider-Man. While I might agree with the assertion about the character (at least when it comes to crazy science/outer space stuff; neither of them is at home with magic), I don't think it works to the book's advantage.

Ultimately, whether it's an alien, a mad scientist, an Asgardian, a demon or whatever, The Thing's response is going to be, "It's clobberin' time!" Of the scattered issues I've read, not many rely on the fact Ben Grimm is a smart enough guy to qualify as an astronaut, versus his ability to punch things real hard and take more punches than Rocky Balboa.

There are broad stretches where one writer dominates. Steve Gerber writes the first 10 issues, then Bill Mantlo writes most of the next 15 issues (and pops up with writer credit on several other issues later), before Marv Wolfman takes over for most of issues 25-45. Mark Gruenwald writes about 20 issues between #53 and #74, including a 6-part story at Project PEGASUS involving Quasar and Giant-Man (Bill Foster), before Tom DeFalco takes over for most (but not all) of the final 25 issues.

The artists shuffle even more frequently. Ron Wilson is probably the closest the book had to a regular, and even he's not involved for 10+ issues at a time. Sometimes it's Sal Buscema or Ernie Chan, sometimes John Byrne and Joe Sinnott, or George Perez and Gene Day. Like Marvel Team-Up, which issues you want probably depends on either who's working on the book, or who they've got the Idol o' Millions teaming up with this month.

The book concluded at 100 issues, with a callback to the issue 50 face-off between '80s Thing and '60s Thing. Ben Grimm would subsequently get another solo book, that ran for 3 years.

Saturday Splash Page #146

 

"A Happy Sendoff", in Spider-Girl: The End, by Tom DeFalco (writer), Ron Frenz (writer/penciler), Sal Buscema (finished art), Bruno Hang and Sotocolor (colorists), Dave Sharpe (letterer)

"The End" was a loose group of comics Marvel did that were essentially the "final" story for a given character or group. The ones in the early 2000s were mini-series. One for the FF, one for Wolverine, 3 for the X-Men, one for the entire Marvel Universe (written by Starlin, so of course Thanos was responsible.) There were some one-shots in the mid-to-late 2000s. Marvel apparently revived it for 4 or 5 books in 2020, but I only learned that researching this post. 

To my knowledge, the best-regarded is Garth Ennis and Richard Corben's Punisher: The End, which basically says Frank Castle would never stop killing criminals, even if said criminals are the last humans left.

Spider-Girl: The End is 180 degrees from that book. Unsurprising, given the respective creative teams. Set after the strips in Amazing Spider-Man Family, Web of Spider-Man (vol. 3), and the 4-issue Spectacular Spider-Girl mini-series (which we'll see next month), we're told the story of how Spider-Girl died by a kindly old woman talking to a bunch of kids in what looks like an idyllic paradise.

The clone/symbiote hybrid, April Reilly, is still after Mayday to admit April's the original, as well as the better hero. They fight, a fire starts, May pushes her sister clear of falling debris, then is able to launch her clear of the explosion via impact webbing. As it turns out, the old lady is April, and we learn (though the kids don't), she tried to take May's place, but their little brother Benjy immediately knew she wasn't May, which tipped of MJ. April flipped, went full "lethal protector", to the point the government combined mercs with Carnage symbiotes, and civilization went down the crapper.

April gets a chance to go back and change things, and does, in the process tying off her own storyline. May returns home, unaware of the near miss, Wes, who had been circling as a possible love interest for a while, drops by and reveals he knows she's Spider-Girl, and that's where the issue ends. An actual happy ending!

Obviously, that wasn't going to last. . .

What I Bought 10/10/2024

The local comic shop didn't get any of its Marvel stuff last week - hence no Deadpool review - and this week's stuff didn't arrive until yesterday. But they did arrive, so let's make the best of it. In other news, the work truck I used Wednesday for what should have been a relatively brief excursion broke down, leaving me stranded in a podunk town near a very busy railroad crossing for 3.5 hours. Did my brain endlessly replay the opening song from In the Heat of the Night? You better believe it, especially the, 'I've got troubleeeeeees, wall to wall,' part.

Fantastic Four #26, by Ryan North (writer), Ivan Fiorelli (artist), Brian Reber (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) -  Dollars to donuts Reed's trying to pull Johnny under.

Most of the cast is in New York, trick or treating. Johnny stayed home to wait for trick or treaters that ever arrived, and Reed stayed home to keep working on a magic detector. And it's detected something in the basement! Johnny convinces Reed not to wait for Sue to return (when she could just make the floor invisible to see what's down there), and they get to excavating.

And unearth a portal which spews forth ghosts of all sorts of extinct animals, which Reed theorizes are the spirits of ever animal that ever died there. Excited as he is at observing prehistoric beetles, the portal keeps spewing out ghosts, unless there's something constantly entering the portal from the other side. Fortunately, Johnny saw an article about a group of occultists planning to use a skull which constantly vomits blood to summon Mongaroth, The Charnel Destroyer of Flesh. So Reed and Johnny travel to the Paris catacombs and steal the magic, blood-vomiting skull (which also keeps saying "bleh", without halting the torrent of blood vomit.)

I had never considered how Johnny would absolutely be able to egg Reed on into bad ideas in the name of SCIENCE! Sue's aggravation with the whole thing is hilarious, as is Reed objecting to her description of their schemes as "zany." The skull's little top hat is a great touch. Ben and Alicia's dog is dressed as Jeff the Land Shark for Halloween, while Franklin's dressed as Spider-Man, which Johnny doesn't comment on, but you know he's annoyed.

Anyway, I loved this issue. It cracked me up, really great. 10 out of 10, no notes.

Interstellar Empire - John Brunner

This is really a collection of three novellas Brunner wrote, based around the notion of a steadily-disintegrating galaxy-spanning empire. The introduction describes an interest in ways to write "swords-and-spaceships" stories, and how the way to make it work is that the spaceships were in a sense inherited, or in this case, found by man in their early excursions off-world. So while humanity may have the ability to travel between stars in relatively short periods of time, they don't really understand how, and are thus unable to apply those scientific principles to other areas.

I think, though I'm not sure, that the stories - The Altar on Asconel, The Man from the Big Dark, and The Wanton of Argus - are set progressively further along in the decline of the empire. There seems to be less awareness of technology and more discussion of "sorcery", especially in Wanton of Argus. Though it's curious that in the first two stories, mutants are often exiled to the furthest reaches, if they aren't killed by a mob, but seem accepted in Wanton of Argus. The key player displays strange powers, yet no one tries to have him stoned to death, and his abilities are common knowledge. Maybe we're meant to read it as these worlds no longer can spare a ship to banish the unusual to the depths.

All three stores revolve around attempts to take control of a single world, although that world may hold the key to other worlds. There's always a manner of subterfuge, the person attempting to take control never what they present themselves as at first glance. The Man from the Big Dark is only 40 pages, so Brunner doesn't draw out the mystery as to what the person is like he does in the other two stories. The reveal is The Altar on Asconel is fairly clever, though I wonder how the main character so readily deduces everything correctly.

The reveal in The Wanton of Argus made me roll my eyes, as it involves time travel, and people from the future attempting to preserve their timeline and they've achieved utopia through mental powers that result in a level of interconnection undreamt of blah blah blah. I have yet to see the sci-fi story that could sell me on that sort of connection being a good thing.

Part of the issue was, I wanted Brunner to do more with the broader scenario, but that was outside the bounds of what he wanted to do. He makes repeated references to what the people who were either banished or voluntarily went to the edges of space are up to. How they're building and devising their own spacecraft, but their society is loosely organized at best, and any leader if vulnerable to overthrow at the first sign of weakness.

I was curious what it would look like. How do the mutants fit in, if they do? What's the overall quality of life? Do the different groups work together to prey on tradeships, or is it every group for themselves at all times? Stuff like that, but it's not what Brunner's into. Probably because he figures there's enough of that in human history already, but having access to advanced technology that's only vaguely understood and building an empire with it is something more rare.

"Now it happens also that a general who commands well in war does not rule wisely in peace. Something which does not happen, on the other hand, is that a man with no skill in strategy save in defending fishing fleets against the love-pat raids of our Klarethly pirates becomes a great Praestans."

The Wave (2019)

Frank (Justin Long) is an attorney for an insurance company, who just discovered a way the company can escape paying on a huge policy to a family where the father and husband died of an illness. He initially declines his friend Jeff's (Donald Faison) suggestion they party to celebrate - a disagreement about whether it's Tuesday or Booze-day - but after surveying the listless existence he inhabits while walking his wife's froo-froo dog in the middle of the night, he hits the bar.

One thing leads to another, he meets a girl, takes a drug from some weird guy and wakes up the next morning alone in that house, minus his wallet and late for the presentation with the boss about his big finding. Makes it to work, and while the presentation is a hit, he finds his grip on reality slipping. People become monstrous, words are distorted, random people keep telling him it's his 'big day.'

So Frank, with Jeff's help, is trying to find, in some order, his wallet, the girl, and the guy who gave him the drugs. He keeps losing time, ending up in places with no memory of how he got there. He finds the girl, but only in some dreamlike space. He finds the drug dealer, but only at a point before he met him. It's a movie where characters talk about the universe desiring harmony. I feel like, unless you count the end state of entropy as harmony, that is not what the universe is seeking, but whatever.

Frank threw things off pursuing something he convinced himself he wants because he's supposed to want it, and he has to balance that. The movie presents an apparent solution late in the film, then neatly cuts it off, only to provide an, arguably more satisfying, solution after that.

The focus sticks with Long as he scrambles around like a hamster being chased through a maze. He grows increasingly battered and erratic as he can't find a way out of the situation. Even when he finds a way to keep two friends from being killed by a different irate drug dealer, it's less that he's had an epiphany than he flailed his way into success. And they were in danger because of him. He couldn't accept his wallet was gone and just cancel the credit card. Couldn't accept he was having a bad trip and just go to a hospital or something. Everything has to get fixed right now, and he drags other people along in his wake, nearly smashing them against the reefs.

Anybody Need a Talking Sword?

The underpinning of a fantasy world is so often a grimy thing.

Following on from volume 2, the third volume of Apparently, Disillusioned Adventurers will Save the World finds the cast still in the ancient labyrinth, seeking the fabled Sword of Bonds. And they find it! Hooray, hearty handshakes and medals of congratulations all around!

Except the sword isn't very happy to be rescued from centuries of confinement, only to be turned over to the Adventurers Guild. But Nick and the others were hired to find and retrieve it, and besides, the only swordsman among them in Karan, and she's quite happy with her own sword.

Too bad the only way out of the labyrinth is through an immense, liquid metal golem. It's too powerful for Tiana's spells, and cutting it is useless, as it either heals up, or the severed pieces turn into smaller golems. The fight is everyone stalling and trying to find a plan, while slowly being driven to rely on the Sword of Bonds. Its ability can unite people whose hearts and minds are on the same wavelength into a warrior with their combined strength, squared. But the whole point of this group was accepting their lack of trust in others and integrating that into how they do things. Guess they're screwed, then.

The story's focus remains on Nick and Karan, as Nick offers to sacrifice himself to give the others time to escape, while Karan is the one who most vigorously rejects the offer. In the process, she opens her heart a bit about how much she appreciates Nick, albeit in a way that's kind of funny and makes him out to be a pain to deal with. And when the moment comes, Nick has to put aside his cynicism and trust in this whole notion of 'resonating wavelengths' if he wants himself and these people he leads to survive.

Golem destroyed and the Sword of Bonds' bonafides firmly established, the party has to decide what to do. Nick promised not to give the sword to the guild, but that's what they were hired for. The Sword itself has a solution, and the party gains a new member. There's also foreshadowing that a great danger looms in the future, and Bond will need this party to confront it.