Saturday Splash Page #153

 

"Sacrificial Soul," in Soul Eater, ch. 2, vol. 4, by Atsushi Ohkubo

Hope this isn't the start of a trend. I don't actually own all of Soul Eater. Not the manga, anyway. I have the anime on DVD. But there's at least 15 volumes of the "Perfect Edition" Square Enix released, each of which I think is 1.5 volumes of the manga as it was originally collected. I own 3 of the 15. But I really don't know if I'm ever going to get the rest of it, so I might as well hit it now.

There are Meisters and Weapons. The latter are people who can turn into weapons for some reason. Meisters and Weapons work as teams to hunt down killers (who Atsushi bases on a variety of beings, both real and fake, ranging from Jason Voorhees to Rasputin) before they can become Kishin, which are some kind of immensely powerful demon-thing, or witches. If a Weapon eats the souls of 99 humans and 1 witch, they become a Death Scythe, which means really powerful and fit to be wielded by Lord Death.

But the main cast are still students at the academy. Maka and Soul came close to making Soul a Death Scythe, but the witch's soul he ate was just a cat(girl) with strong magical abilities. And because cats have 9 lives, Blair Witch, sticks around as a fan service character. There's some weirdo teachers, a witch posing as the school doctor who is secretly experimenting on Soul, and Maka's dad, who is Lord Death's Death Scythe, but also a horndog who can't understand why Maka has no time for a guy who cheated on her mother.

The main thing I notice about Atsushi's art, besides the excessive fan service, is that his art style is pretty different from most manga artists. His linework is much thinner, and he tends to stick with solid black for shading rather then gradations. He also tends to a lot of minimalist white backgrounds and surroundings, which I assume is also to keep the character linework from being overwhelmed or lost against the background. Not always; he has some nicely exaggerated and strange designs for buildings when he wants to establish setting, but he saves that for when he thinks he needs it.

A Hot Time on a Cold Blog

Narrator: TEMPERS FLARE INSIDE CALVIN'S APARTMENT!

Pollock: *in the hall outside* How the devil are tempers flaring already? Calvin hasn't even started giving thanks yet!

Cassanee: Deadpool?

Pollock: *rubs her chin* No, he usually causes exasperation, at best. Well, nothing for it but brave the unknown and -

*Pollock notices she's alone and the door's ajar. She rushes inside, where Cassanee's standing in the living room.*

Pollock: I wasn't done speaking!

Cassanee: Wasting time. Look.

*She points to the kitchen, where Calvin and Clever Adolescent Panda are jostling each other at the stove.*

Calvin: Come on, move over!

CAP: You move over!

Calvin: I need to open the oven!

CAP: I'm busy stirring, you can open it in a second!

Rhodez: *lounging on the couch* Yo, Cassanee, Pollock, what's up?

Cassanee: *holding up a bowl with a platter balanced on top* Jam tarts and mashed potatoes.

Pollock: Hello, Rhodez. I brought a vegetarian casserole. Have they been like this long?

Calvin: The guests are arriving and I still need 8 minutes for these toasted ravs!

CAP: You should have made them before the hush puppies!

Rhodez: *waves at the table* You can probably put the food there or the counter. I got here 10 minutes ago, and that's about when they started arguing.

Calvin: Are you daft? The hush puppies needed even longer!

CAP: My dumpling soup is at a critical seasoning stage!

Calvin: It's soup, just dump everything in at once!

CAP: *belly bumps Calvin* There's an art to this! You just don't understand!

Calvin: *smashes his forehead against the panda's* Just because some of us don't have all day to spend on one meal, don't go getting classist with me!

CAP: It's not classist, you're just lazy!

Pollock: *vaguely disappointed* I always thought I'd be happier when this day came.

Rhodez: Can't you just microwave the raviolis?

Calvin: They're frozen. With no Deadpool, I was hoping for an explosion-free Blogsgiving.

Rhodez: He's not gonna be here?

CAP: *glares at Calvin* No, because Calvin's being a stickler.

Calvin: *glares back* No, because he's still dead in his own book, and he's not appearing in anything else I'm buying. So the two beers you brought are probably safe, unless Pollock's looking to get depression-wasted again.

Pollock: I have wine for that, thank you.

*Cassanee marches into the kitchen. She spins Calvin away from the oven and around herself with one hand, while shoving Clever Adolescent Panda to the side. The two end up switching spots.*

Cassanee: Calvin has longer arms. *puts the spoon into his hand.* He can stir, even while you open and close the oven.

*Calvin and Clever Adolescent Panda look at the spoon, the soup, the oven, and finally each other.*

CAP: She kind of ruined it.

Calvin: *sighs* Yeah.

Cassanee: Huh?

Calvin: We were just messing around. The raviolis are done. They're under the paper towel on the countertop.

CAP: And I'm just stirring to keep the soup from sticking to the pot until people were here.

Calvin: *folds his arms across his chest, eyebrow raised* You think I wouldn't allot way more time for food prep than I needed?

Rhodez: What the heck, man? What was all that yelling about?

Calvin: *shrugs* Something to pass the time. Our panda pal isn't into basketball, so we can't talk sports.

CAP: And Calvin hasn't seen any of the new sci-fi movies I have, and I don't want to spoil them. Besides, fake arguing is fun!

Pollock: Ladies, I propose a team-up wherein we beat the two of them senseless.

Calvin: Whoa, whoa, whoa, let's wait a minute here.

CAP: We should eat first! I really did work hard on this soup. *adds some pathetic sniffles and big, sad eyes*

Rhodez: I am pretty hungry.

Cassanee; Food first.

Pollock: *grumbling* Fine. But after that, pummeling.

Narrator: LATER, AFTER EVERYONE EATS WAY TOO MUCH!

Calvin: Im, impossible. No such thing. *lengthy belch as he slides out of his chair onto the floor*

CAP: *already sprawled on the floor* You look like you're gonna burst at the seams.

Calvin: What about you? You're almost a perfect sphere.

CAP: Perfect spheres are a panda's natural shape.

Pollock: *trying to sit up properly in her chair, failing miserably* That's true. We've investigated it thoroughly, and pandas are as close to a perfect circle as nature gets.

*Pregnant silence*

Calvin: And?

Pollock: And what?

CAP: What evil thing are you trying to figure out how to do with that?

Pollock: It's not about evil, it's about new potential avenues for research and invention!

Cassanee: Money.

Rhodez: *slumped on the couch* Yeah, your track record on nice stuff is pretty lousy.

Pollock: I'll have you know a perfect sphere is less affected by friction, which makes for more energy-efficient movement. It could even be a step towards a perpetual motion machine!

CAP: You're going to break the laws of thermodynamics?

Cassanee: Breaking laws. Evil.

Pollock: They aren't those sort of laws, you - *notices Cassanee is grinning* Oh, you're just toying with me now.

Cassanee: *shrugs silently*

Rhodez: Hey, uh, Calvin, what's with the tube coming out of the floor?

Calvin: Pollock's idea of a prank.

Pollock: You could get some use out of it if you were creative. Or if my lobbyists were earning their paychecks.

CAP: Going to use "perfect spheres" for your message tube mail system that you'll pick through?

Pollock: We just might at that! Except for the picking through your mail, of course. We pride ourselves on respecting confidentiality.

Rhodez: I'll just stick with the post office.

Pollock: It probably won't exist soon. I just have to make sure I'm the one who reaps the benefits of the increasing privatization of the government!

Calvin: If you're looking to reduce friction, Rhodez is your lady. She's got that down to science.

Rhodez: It was that or Deadpool would keep shooting at me.

Pollock: Would you to act as a test subject? There'd be compensation, naturally.

Cassanee: Fancy cheeses.

Rhodez: I like cheese, but not that much.

Pollock: It wouldn't be cheese! Well, I guess you could spend the money on whatever you liked, so it could be cheese.

CAP: Don't agree to let Pollock experiment on you! I'll get you cheese for free, because we're friends!

Pollock: Stop undercutting free enterprise with your socialism and friendship!

Calvin: Socialist Government Cheese, and Friendship Cheese are entirely different things.

Rhodez: *groaning and patting her stomach* Man, I don't want to eat cheese or anything else right now. I'm gonna have to run so much tomorrow.

CAP: I think this is the most we've ever discussed cheese on this blog.

Calvin: Probably, but we're done with that now. Who's giving thanks first?

Cassanee: You.

Pollock: Agreed.

Calvin: Me?

CAP: Yes, so we don't end on such a down note. And I'll go last!

Rhodez: Is that any better? We're all gonna feel bad we aren't as cool.

Calvin: I second Clever Adolescent Panda's suggestion.

Pollock: *sputtering* Why?

Calvin: To make you wallow in your inadequacy.

Pollock: Swine. *gets up slowly and staggers to the fridge* Then I need wine.

Rhodez: Can you grab my other beer?

Calvin: OK, so this year. . .kinda sucked.

*A collective groan. Pollock and Rhodez each take long pulls from their respective drinks.*

Calvin: Work's been shit for a variety of reasons, and my car started acting up a month ago. But, the car's fixed, and wasn't too expensive. The pay for work is, well, it's good enough for my un-travagant lifestyle.

Cassanee: Un-travagent?

Calvin: Like extravagant, but the opposite. I haven't done as much writing as I'd like, but I've done some, at least. Nobody important to me died, including me. I went on a couple of brief trips with Alex that were good. This stupid tube Pollock installed is at least a faster way to get my laundry back upstairs, and. . .that's all I got.

Pollock: Oh God, that was terrible.

Calvin: Wait, I remembered something else. Clever Adolescent Panda got Pollock in the face with an egg! It was egg-cellent! High five!

CAP: *stone-faced* I really shouldn't after that pun, but hitting Pollock with an egg was fun!

*They high five*

Pollock: You're both dolts. It was another year of unparalleled professional success. I met several foreign dignitaries who are extremely interested in cheap energy for a variety of interesting uses.

Calvin: Meaning, the perpetual motion machine would allow railguns and laser cannons and whatnot to charge up much more quickly.

Pollock: Who leaked that to you? I mean, not at all. It's about less obtrusive, um, hydroelectric dams! That's it! So that fish can maintain their migration and breeding patterns.

*Four unimpressed faces look back at Pollock.*

Pollock: Oh, whatever! You'll rue the day you doubted my interest in conservation! *folds her arms and pouts*

Cassanee: Another drought year, but not too hot. Tourism was good, even if rafting was tricky. Bears and raccoons were arguing over how to split the peanut butter, but we sorted it. No new problems. Finished a new back porch for my home.

Pollock: So you can sip moonshine and look at all the happy creatures dancing on your lawn?

Cassanee: They don't dance. Run and hop. No moonshine, either.

*Everyone looks at Rhodez, who is asleep*

Calvin: Dang, she didn't even finish the second beer. That just leaves you, panda pal.

CAP: I climbed to a temple in the mountains north of our village and studied how to better harness my energy. Next time I face someone who can turn intangible, it won't be so hard to smack them in the face! *smacks one paw against the other for emphasis* All my friends and family are doing well. The penguins renewed their treaty with us, so we shouldn't have any fighting for a long time!

Calvin: No punching demon sharks this year?

CAP: No, but I hugged it out with the ghost of an angry snow leopard that was terrorizing a village near the temple.

Calvin: Solving problems by hugging? *shakes head* What happened to you? You used to be cool.

CAP: I hugged people then, too! And I'll Hug you if you don't watch out!

Calvin: *Flees - slowly - in mock terror* Anything but that!

Pollock: Now that foolishness is done, it's time to strike. *looks at Cassanee and Rhodez* Are the two of you with me?

*Rhodez is still asleep. Cassanee shrugs.*

Cassanee: Maybe.

Pollock: Excellent! First, I'll need you to sign this legally binding contract that confirms I'm the leader and promises your unquestioning loyalty to me until either our enemies are crushed, or I betray you to spare myself harm, under penalty of - 

Cassanee: Never mind.

Short Month Doesn't Mean a Short List

I don't think the February solicits necessarily had more books I was interested in than January's. But there was definitely more outside the Marvel/DC sphere I gave a glance to.

On the other hand, no solicitation for Red Before Black, Dark Harbor's vanished entirely from the publisher list, while Scout was down to one book (with two covers). Although a couple of their books are supposedly actually coming out this week, so maybe they're resetting (again.) Deadpool's doing a crossover with Miles Morales: Spider-Man, so I'm probably skipping it this month.

Just the sort of two-faced skullduggery I'd expect from a month that doesn't keep a consistent number of days.

What's new? Shobo and Shof Coker, with Alexandre Tefenkgi as artist, are starting Bronze Faces at Boom!, a six-issue mini about a young man and his friends trying to take a lot of artifacts from the Kingdem of Benin back from the British Museum.

Dstlry has the first issue of B. Clay Moore and Mack Chater's Last Flight Out of Wichita, a crime story set in the '70s about a couple of guys who make a bad choice for quick cash and are on the run. It is 48 pages, and I guess the paper quality is pretty high, but $9 makes my Cheap-Sense tingle.

Mine is a Long, Lonesome Grave is Justin Jordan and Chris Shehan's book through Oni Press about a guy fresh out of prison who finds out someone in his hometown put a hex on him that'll kill him in a week, if he can't figure out who it was and kill them first. Seems like he's going to cut a swath through the town to the extent he'll end up with a dozen lethal hexes on him, but maybe not.

Amaze Ink has Jef Bambas' Model A graphic novel, about a robot that wakes up in a factory as an obsolete model, surrounded by unfriendly newer robots.

What's ending? Babs wraps up, and Calavera PI. So does Body Trade, though I already decided to drop it. Nerts to that book!

And the rest: Marvel's kicking off One World Under Doom, which is a 9(?!) issue mini-series. At least it makes sense for Fantastic Four to tie into that, but man, it better not be for 9 months. Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu is up to issue 5, Laura Kinney: Wolverine's at issue 3, same as Metamorpho. Batgirl's at issue 4. Dust to Dust and The Surgeon are also on their third issues. In the former, the mayor's covering up murders. In the latter, the title character has decided a massive siege is the perfect time to leave.

Seven Seas has the 8th volume of No Longer Allowed in Another World, and Yen Press solicited the 2nd volume of Blade & Bastard, though I've not read the first yet, so that may be entirely irrelevant to me.

The Duellists (1977)

For 15 years in the early 19th Century, Gabriel Feraud (Harvey Keitel) keeps challenging Armand d'Hubert (Keith Carradine) to duels. Sometimes Feraud wins, sometimes d'Hubert wins. The latter never kills Feraud, and Feraud is never able to kill d'Hubert, so the whole thing continues. Across countries and military campaigns and promotions and regime changes, their paths will cross and Feraud will send a friend to issue the challenge again.

The movie stays focused on Carradine, who tries to progress with his career and his life, only to be periodically interrupted by this asshole demanding another duel. Sometimes he tries to train, to prepare. At other times, he's on the verge of panic beforehand. He tries for a detente during the retreat out of Russia, but Feraud's not having it. Carradine manages at various times, to be amused, indignant, exhausted and resigned.

Keitel is kept at a distance, a sort of mystery. The movie begins with Feraud in a duel with what turns out to be the son of Strasbourg's mayor. Why are they dueling? We don't know. Ridley Scott keeps the camera positioned over Keitel's shoulder. So we see his opponent's obvious fright, the panicked way he waves his swords and weaves and stumbles, but we don't see Keitel's expression as he keeps after him.

He challenges d'Hubert because d'Hubert was the unlucky guy ordered to find Feraud and inform him the general has placed him under arrest. Feraud was at a party in the home of a well-to-do lady, and this was apparently too great a humiliation to ignore. But maybe that's just an excuse. Years later, during Napoleon's 100 Days, when Feraud has rejoined Bonaparte's army (and d'Hubert, now married and walking with a limp, refuses), Feraud claims their duels were because d'Hubert disrespected Napoleon. I don't know whether to think Feraud is lying, or if he simply doesn't remember how it all started.

I'm inclined towards the latter, given the comment a lady friend (played by Diana Quick, who seems very important early in the film, but then she drops out of the story partway through, which confused me) of d'Hubert makes when she sees Feraud. That Feraud is feeding his spite on d'Hubert. Which I assume means, he's chasing something (death most likely), and d'Hubert is a convenient target. He insists d'Hubert is a 'general's poodle', long after neither of them is serving under that general. When Feraud's friends insist the man has a reputation for bravery in combat (though outside the brief section in Russia, we don't see much of the campaigning they do), Feraud doesn't respond or even react. It doesn't matter. He must kill d'Hubert because the man disrespected him and honor demands it. And so d'Hubert must be a dishonorable man himself to do such a thing.

It's interesting to watch the progression of their duels, though I don't think we see all of them. The first is impromptu, held in and around the house in Strasbourg where Feraud stays, and is interrupted when the woman who lives there leaps to Feraud's defense, clawing d'Hubert's face. The second is formal, held in a field with seconds and all that. The third is probably somewhere in Egypt, in a dim room in a mud-brick house. Both of them are already bleeding in several places, but they fight until they can't even lift their swords and end up rolling around in the dust.

The final duel is with pistols, in the ruins of an old castle. Which I thought was a real mistake for d'Hubert, fighting on uneven terrain, given his limp. But I guess he expected familiarity with the place to give him the edge. Feraud's long-time second died in Russia, so he found so other like-minded Bonapartists to help. d'Hubert doesn't tell anyone about it, and lets one of those two act as his second. When one complains it's hardly a fit place, he dismisses that, pointing out they're here to kill each other, and any place is fit for that.

It's the fourth duel that intrigued me, albeit for a strange reason. This one is on horseback, riding at each other in a forest with sabers. d'Hubert has somehow developed a rep as a great duelist (no idea if Feraud's in the same boat), so people are treating it like a sporting event. A general even set up a breakfast party to watch the proceedings. Again, the movie stays focused on d'Hubert, whose mind is whirling with thoughts of how he's going to die and can barely draw his sword, like his body is refusing to commit. Feraud is again seen only from a distance, close enough to see a determined scowl on Keitel's face, but not much more.

So here's the odd thing I was thinking about during that lead-up. Just stick with me. In the Adventures of Brisco County Jr. box set - I said stick with me! - there's a bit where Bruce Campbell's talking about the horse riding and how the guys who trained him and handled the horses had been working on Westerns for decades. He talks about a scene where he has to ride the horse down a street in the midst of a stampede, and waiting for his cue in the alley, he can't get the horse to calm down. It's twisting and stomping and whatnot. When he complains, the handler makes Campbell get down and climbs in the saddle himself. The horse is perfectly still, and the guy remarks, "Yeah, it's the horse that's nervous."

I tell you that you that to get to this. As both men prepare to charge, d'Hubert's horse is standing nice and still, while Feraud's is thrashing about and turning in circles. Now, maybe that's just a matter of the specific horses, or maybe Harvey Keitel sucked at riding a horse. But it's interesting to look at from the Watsonian perspective or what it says about the two riders. You could read it that d'Hubert's horse is picking up on his fears and that's made it timid and reserved, while Feraud's horse is getting amped up from Feraud being ready to do this thing.

But I wonder if it isn't the other way around. For all his doubts and frustration with this whole mess, for all he rides off at full gallop afterward like there's an army at his heels, d'Hubert never turns away from accepting Feraud's challenges. He might try to talk the man down the first time, he might try to slip out of a crowded tavern without being seen, but he ultimately accepts the situation and faces it (finally, at the end, taking control of it.) Whatever he thinks about the foolishness of this whole thing, he still believes in defending his honor. And so he's going to do this, and the horse is calm because of that resolve. I don't think Feraud is scared, exactly, although you have to wonder with how loudly he protests and insists, whether he's hiding something, but I think he's got a bit of a death wish. There's something off-kilter about the man, and his horse knows that and would rather be anywhere else than with this nut sitting on his back.

What I Bought 11/20/2024

I caught a bit of Spider-Man: No Way Home while I was in a hotel last week. Pretty much just the part once all three Spider-Men were in the same place. I found their conversations endearingly silly. The comparing of villains ("let's go back to the part where you were in space") and the stuff about Maguire-Spidey's organic webs. I'm sure the movie as a whole is a big mess, but that part, at least, I enjoyed.

Avengers Assemble #3, by Steve Orlando (writer), Marcelo Ferreira (penciler), Roberto Poggi (inker), Sonia Oback (colorist), Cory Petit (letterer) - I think the Night Stalkers ought to have checked with the Army on what happens when you shoot at a Hulk.

Four Avengers travel to a town where a bunch of vampires live and are under attack by a new team of Nightstalkers. The quartet - She-Hulk, Wonder Man, Living Lightning and Lightspeed - scuffle a bit, but ultimately protect the town. The main thing I took from that, besides remembering someone made Wonder Man a pacifist at some point (and it apparently still holds, for a particular value), is there's no sense of teamwork between this group. Last issue, you could tell Captain America, Hercules and Hawkeye had a track record of working together. This group, everyone just kind of splits up and flails about, fighting individual battles.

Meanwhile, Shang-Chi's figured out someone's been using the crises the team has faced as cover for heists and encounters this Tiger Snake. Who is a good enough fighter to sucker Shang-Chi into getting poisoned, though Shang escapes to alert Captain America. But the Serpent Society's got another new member, a very big one. OK, so? This Avengers squad has Hercules and She-Hulk. They beat up big dudes all the time. This is why the Serpent Society is a bunch of second-raters. "Our secret weapon is a guy on Pym Particles, but we named him after an extinct giant snake!" *extremely sarcastic golf clap*

I guess it's going to be a different artist every issue, then. Ferreira's art is a bit looser than Eaton or Smith's. Maybe a good touch to have when Bloodscream is sporting a mouth that could swallow a watermelon and huge teeth, but some of faces that don't belong to weird vampire-like people look kind of strange. He also likes overlapping panels, and squeezing together a lot of panels that are unevenly shaped. A tilted horizontal rhombus, on top of two narrower panels, all crammed into a quarter of the page. I don't know what effect it's supposed to have when I read it, beyond the sense maybe the page space isn't being allocated well.

Also, why the heck do characters keep saying it as "AVENG.E.R.S." I know, it's an acronym now, in that stupid, Vril Dox, "R.E.B.E.L.S. has another acronym inside it," way, but you can't pronounce the periods. It's just "Avengers." That's what it sounds like they're saying, they are Avengers, so just write it like that.

Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu #2, by Jed MacKay (writer), Alessandro Cappuccio (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - I'm confident 8-Ball is not going to stick the landing.

Moon Knight asks Iron Man to look at this new drug, but Stark don't know shit about chemistry, so that's a bust. I was thinking this was a job for Hank Pym, and sure enough, that's who Stark mentions. Too bad he's dead. Or not, since that Avengers Inc. mini-series Al Ewing did established Hank's still alive, I guess. Something Marc knew even before his most recent death, but thus far neglected to mention to Tigra.

Well, I'm sure that's going to be a calm and reasonable conversation. Especially as the cops have decided to barge into the Midnight Mission, I presume being on this Fairchild guy's payroll, or under his thumb, or whatever.

Oh, and Moon Knight tried to hit one of Fairchild's shipments, but got punked by some old foe of his with perception-warping pheromones. Cubist has a nifty design, though it seems like one a lot of artists would get tired of drawing quickly. Rosenberg and Cappuccio have the background tilt to match whatever direction the action is going in a particular panel, so that the characters seem like they're always hemmed in by it. Nice touch.

Sunday Splash Page #350

 

"Masked Mayhem," in The Mask (vol. 1) #3, by John Arcudi (writer), Doug Mahnke (artist/colorist), Pat Brosseau (letterer)

A very long time ago - nearly 7 years - we looked at the comic based on The Mask cartoon. Wow, I way underestimated how long it'd take to get here. But before the cartoon, before Jim Carrey and "Cuban Pete" and smooooooooookin' hot Cameron Diaz, there was John Arucdi and Doug Mahnke's Dark Horse mini-series.

The first adventure - originally published in a book called Mayhem, and later reprinted as a 0 issue - is the only one that actually features Stanley Ipkiss. Ipkiss buys the mask for his girlfriend Kathy, then finds out about its powers after putting it on for a prank. Ipkiss does take revenge on people he thinks wronged him, but is more lethal here, and revisits old grudges, even killing an elementary school teacher he felt humiliated him as a child. After fighting, and killing, a lot of cops, Stanley decides to leave town. When he takes off the mask to pack, Kathy, having pieced it together, kills him.

So most of the mini-series is Kathy bringing the mask to Lt. Kellaway, the cop who was trying to bring in "Big-Head," but not explaining why the mask is dangerous. Frustrated after being stymied in his attempt to keep a suspected killer locked up (thanks to a crooked assistant District Attorney), Kellaway tries on the mask, and away we go.

Unlike the movie, using the mask doesn't help anyone grow as a person here. Stanley becomes kind of a gun-nut, wearing camo and poring over his list of enemies. When Kathy gets tired of his attitude and says so, he comes close to striking her before catching himself at the last second. Kellaway starts terrorizing suspects and witnesses, each time digging the hole deeper for himself. When he enters a hostage situation in a restaurant, intending to use the mask to stop it and become a big hero, he ends up fired because all the mob guys died, most of them violently. For example, two shoot each other, through him. Basically, the mask becomes addictive at the same time it brings out a person's worst qualities.

In a change from later stories, Arcudi has the mask actually speak to people when they aren't wearing it. Sometimes we can see the speech balloons, sometimes we can't. Mahnke also draws it making faces sometimes while it's just sitting on a shelf. Near the end of this mini-series, it and Kellaway are clearly having a disagreement about their actions while he's wearing it.

For all that "Big Head" is a cartoon character and so the damage never sticks, Mahnke does get pretty gory with it. Kellaway shoots himself through the hand as a test, then we get a panel of him peering at us through the hole as it drips blood. When he disguises himself as other people, the disguise comes off like a layer of skin, leaving bloody trails as it pulls away from his face. It's more of a horror story than a superhero story. The monster that gets shot in the head and barely acts perturbed. Except when he gets very angry and suddenly he's swinging a battle axe that came from nowhere at you.

Saturday Splash Page #152

 

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

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

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

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

What I Bought 11/16/2024 - Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Bought 11/16/2024 - Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blue Ruin (2013)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Show Biz'll Kill Ya

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Splash Page #349

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday Splash Page #151

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, when you put it that way. . .

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

A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf - John Muir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being the God of Manga ain't easy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Splash Page #348

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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