The Only Way Out of the Nightmare is Through

In Among the Sleep, you play as a toddler who receives a teddy bear for his birthday. The bear comes to life, at least when no one else is around. Which means you aren't alone when you wake up that night and your crib is tipped over. Making your way downstairs through a dark house to your mother's room, you find she's missing.

From there, the game sends you to a peculiar cabin where you feed items that represent memories of your mother into a machine to open a door that takes you to different, nightmarish realms. The goal is always to find another memory and get closer to finding your mother. Sometimes it's a matter of finding your way where you need to go. Others it's about finding something you need to proceed. Maybe there's a sealed door and you have to find the item that acts as the key. Or you have to manipulate the environment to reach a higher path. Find some stuff to put on one end of a seesaw to raise the other end. Very late in the game, like, final level late, it adds the ability to throw stuff so you can knock over jars that hold things you need.

As you move through the game, there are towering, shadowy beings that will appear from time to time. Sometimes you just hear an inarticulate bellow, but on other occasions, you can see them roaming about. One part of a level, you're in some sort of library in a swamp. (In a nice touch, the words on the spines of the books are unintelligible because the kid can't read yet.) The shadow is roaming the aisles, and so you have to pick your spots, ducking from beneath one bookcase to the next without being spotted. (The toddler is significantly faster when he crawls than toddles.)

Later, you're moving through twisted hallways filled with bottles. When you knock one down, and despite my best efforts, I did knock some down, the shadow will emerge, raging. You have to get to one of the cubbyholes or hiding spots that are too small for the shadow to enter. Sometimes, the presence of the shadow frightens the kid badly enough his vision starts to blur and shake. You can press a button to hug Teddy, but while that casts a glow on your surroundings, I'm not sure it does much to alleviate the fear. But I'm also not sure the fear does much to inhibit your movements, though I usually tried to stay hidden and still when those moments happened.

It's pretty clear, even before the search for mama begins, there's something going on here. Your house is full of boxes, there are scribblings of the kids you find as you progress, and it's always just the kid and his mom. Eventually, there are half-photographs of a guy. Ominous! For a while, I thought Teddy was going to turn out to be some evil thing, considering he kept encouraging me to chuck these memories into the machine. It turns out to be more mundane, and more disturbing. Yeah, the end of the game is a real kick in the head I did not see coming. And then it's over, and I was left sitting there thinking, 'Did that just happen? Is that it?' Very abrupt.

Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)

Alex had us watch Thunderbolts* as a precursor to this, due to the post-credits scene. I don't really think that was necessary, but it wasn't like T'bolts was a slog to watch, so why not? As for this, set in its own universe (and in the '60s) four years after the FF received their powers, they've become beloved heroes and celebrities. Now Sue (Vanessa Kirby) and Reed (Pedro Pascal) are expecting their first kid! Which is when the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) shows up to tell Earth, Galactus will be coming to eat their planet soon.

So, I like the visual aesthetic of the movie, even if the '60s aren't an era I have some massive fondness for. It looks different, distinctive, from all the other Marvel stuff, and that's nice. Let the creative talent's styles and influences show through. (Also, I suspect Reed likes to write things out on a chalkboard anyway, but being in an era before ubiquitous computers means it's not that strange he's doing a lot of calculations by hand.) 

I like they dispensed with the origin, trusting us to understand enough from the TV show intro. I like that the team went into space to try and stop Galactus before he got close, and the whole faster-than-light chase, escape around the neutron star, sequence. It felt right for the Fantastic Four, not winning by overpowering their opponent, but outsmarting them and leveraging their group's individual skills (Ben's piloting, Johnny's adjusting to shooting in a wormhole.)

I was expecting Ben Grimm's voice to be gruffer, but Ebon Moss-Bachrach is also playing a Ben who seems content with his circumstances. He's not wandering rainy streets in a trenchcoat bemoaning his fate, and even tells Reed not to beat himself up about what happened. This version is in a much better headspace than any of the prior film versions, though maybe that's why it feels like he got the least focus. (The rock beard thing was freaky however, and I did not like it.)

A lot of the film is, naturally, focused on Reed and Sue, as new parents of a child that's going to be far more than they thought, and who might be able to save the world, if they're willing to give him up. Reed having to learn to deal with the uncertainty and unknowable parts of raising a tiny human. Sue, probably putting that experience at the UN to good use, keeping the others focused and working to some sort of solution. Don't let Reed get too far into the impossibilities of things, take the time to listen to Johnny when he thinks he's on to something, even if it isn't clear what.

(I sort of like Reed and Sue's big fight isn't because Reed actually suggests giving up Franklin to save the world, but because Sue can tell he's at least run the math on the idea before rejecting it, instead of just categorically concluding, "No way." Reed of course presents it as how his brain works, assessing potential threats and vectors, then trying to devise countermeasures.) 

But Johnny (Joseph Quinn) gets this whole thread about deciphering the Surfer's native language. Instead of just being a shallow attempt to more successfully flirt with the shiny alien, it's ultimately a way to understand her, to reach her, and maybe turn her to their side. Admittedly, turn her with guilt over all the worlds that died because she brought Galactus there, but they were already going far afield from the Surfer switching sides because the nobility or kindness of Earthlings touches their soul, so why not? Given that, it does feel like The Thing doesn't get much time.

Reed's initial solution on how to, if not defeat Galactus, at least escape him, caught me by complete surprise. I'm not sure how he was going to account for the loss of tides when the Moon presumably got left behind, but they were on a tight schedule. Certain corners had to be cut. I also wasn't expecting the film's take on Galactus' ship or how he devoured worlds. It was a little more Darkseid than I would have figured. Maybe that was just the giant, burning maw in the center of the drill. So I don't know if I loved it as visualization for Galactus' process, but it was definitely an effective visual. That whole part where Reed detects the Surfer within the alien world and then boom! Here's a massive ship tunneling out like a worm from an apple. It really depicts the scale at which this threat is operating and how different this is from Mole Man, or Red Ghost and the Super-Apes.

What I Bought 11/26/2025

Back to work after most of a week off. Hooray. At least the snow they were calling for a week ago seems like it's mostly going to miss us. Especially since it's cold enough for it to hang around a while.

Black Cat #4, by G. Willow Wilson (writer), Gleb Melnikov (artist), Brian Reber (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - The way things are going for her in this book, I suspect she got halfway through the room when a security guard wandered by and remembered he forgot to turn the security system on.

The Cat and Tombstone have a discussion about why she's playing hero, which Felicia describes as a desire to calm things down so she can get back to business, but also because sometimes even a crook would like a pat on the head. Tombstone allows for that, but still has her locked up by Sandman, who somehow found everything she had hidden on her. Then he and Tombstone have a discussion, right next to her cell, about how the fake Spider-Man is shaking them down, but they found where he hides the money.

The vampire Felicia confronted a couple issues ago arrives, looking for recompense for her interference, and Felicia convinces him to get Night Nurse to come see him, so she can escape and get him the money to pay back her debt. She even agrees she'll stand before this Court of Whatever he wants to bring he to at some point, which at least feels glib in a way that's sort of true to the character. The Nurse brings a lockpick set, Felicia escapes (after a particularly unconvincing act by Night Nurse of being overpowered), and runs to the address Tombstone mentioned. Where she finds a bunch of cash, right before a SWAT team finds her.

This is a particularly incompetent depiction of Felicia. She can't hide something where Sandman can't find it? Flint Marko was no genius even before he spent years getting punched by Spider-Man and the Thing. He was on the 10 Most Wanted List, but as an armed gunman type, not some brilliant thief. Tombstone has Sandman take her away, then follows along separately to have a conversation right outside her door, and she thinks nothing of it? It doesn't scream "TRICK!!!!!" in massive letters?

It would be one thing if it was written where she's too angry at Tombstone over past history to think clearly, or if he'd given her the address as part of a deal. Steal the "extortion" money back, and we're square, or I'll rip your face off. That kind of thing. This? This is just Felicia being the most gullible dope in her own book.

Sigh. Wilson needs a big turnaround in this book, or I'm going to have to memory hole it.

Sunday Splash Page #403

"Who's President in 1857?," in Pariah Missouri by Andres Salazar (writer/inker/colorist/letterer), Jose Luis Pescador (penciler)

Set in the late-1850s, in a small town along the Missouri River in northwestern Missouri, Pariah Missouri is a sort of supernatural horror-mystery. There are lots of things going on in this bustling river town, new arrivals from all directions. Native American bounty hunters from the west, free black men from New Orleans, a pair of entertainers from the east. Of course, there are people leaving as well. Maybe "disappearing" would be more accurate. The town marshal for one, and a few teen boys vanish as well. 

Nobody is quite what they seem at first glance. The louche gambler, Hiram Buchanan, isn't just in town to throw dice and talk about how his suit came from Chicago. The man from New Orleans, Jean Lafitte, isn't much of a trapper, but he's got some other skills. And the entertainers have far more going for them than a Punch and Judy show and some fancy fireworks.

I think I bought this after Greg Hatcher touted it in one of his columns, probably back when he was still writing on CBR's Comics Should Be Good blog. There are two GNs, though I've only read the first. Can't find the second volume on its own, and I hate to double-buy things, which has held me back from buying the collected edition. Salazar sets the scene and several of the major players early on, then gradually peels back the layers. This also helps to establish why some characters would help Hiram, besides money. Even as one, obvious threat is dealt with, Salazar is setting up something bigger in the background that would threaten the entire town, and goes into its roots.

So there are characters that don't do much in this first story, that I imagine become critical in the second. Like a survivor of a band of Artful Dodgers that has a "peep stone" that guides him to buried things. Or another marshal, friend of the departed town marshal, who decides to stick around until he learns what happened to his friend. With a name like "Kane", I expect his response won't be pleasant.

Salazar tends to have certain colors dominate the pages. Mostly orange or blue, where everything is colored some shade of those. Occasionally, he'll go against the grain for effect, such as a casino that's most in orange and red, except for one lady, whose dress is a deep blue that really pops against the surroundings.

Pescado has a busy line, detailing every ruffle in the cuffs and train of an upper-class lady's dress, or scratching in the deep lines and stubble on the face of another drunken layabout gambler. He gets a lot of variety in the characters, either by clothing or facial hair or build, so you learn to recognize them, even if you aren't sure what their significance is yet. 

Pariah seems large, not in terms of having a lot of people or buildings, but everything seems spread out. The rooms and lobby of a hotel, the streets. The deck of the steamboat seems to stretch forever into the background. Except on rare occasions where there's a crowd, rooms seems empty. Like everything has been built to accommodate growth that hasn't started yet. Or, like the town was built for more people, and it subsequently depopulated, like it's all that remains of some ancient capital whose builders long since abandoned it. I'm sure it's more the former, a town whose founders have big plans, but given the circumstances, the latter doesn't seem out of the question.

Saturday Splash Page #205

"Prison Break," in Rocket Raccoon (vol. 2) #2, by Skottie Young (writer/artist), Jean-Francois Beaulieu (color artist), Jeff Eckleberry (letterer)

After his mini-series and escape from Halfworld, nobody much used Rocket Raccoon for the next 20+ years. I've heard Peter David had a panel in one of his Captain Marvel runs where Rocket's pelt was a rug on someone's floor, because, well, I assume he thought that was funny. As with all Peter David's humor, your mileage will vary. Then came Annihilation: Conquest, and Rocket is drafted into Star-Lord's Dirty Half-Dozen. He was a regular in the Abnett/Lanning Guardians of the Galaxy. Probably Bendis' version, too, though I didn't touch that with a ten-foot pole.

Then Rocket shot to super-stardom, courtesy of the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, and that, more or less, brings us to this solo book, with Skottie Young as writer and sometimes artist. Young leans into the movie portrayal, with Rocket as a merc who does essentially anything for money. Rescuing kidnapped princesses, stealing stuff, blowing up giant undersea monsters.

I was never totally drawn into this book, in no small part because I found this Rocket Raccoon a scumbag. Part of the initial story is Rocket, under suspicion of murder, also being hunted by an army of angry princesses he wooed and then scammed out of money to pay off his gambling debts before vanishing into the night. In other words, Young's Rocket is one of those people who dates you to steal your bank info. This did not make me inclined to see Rocket escape the princesses' vengeance, or even really to see him beat the rap for a murder he didn't commit.

(He is, eventually, ordered to pay back all the money he swiped or go to prison.)

When I wrote a Favorite Characters post about Rocket Raccoon, I said that if Mantlo's version was an Errol Flynn swashbuckler, Abnett and Lanning's was more in the line of Bruce Willis, the wise-cracking cynic. Young's version is basically Deadpool, a violent lunatic who occasionally does good things while leaving a trail of ruined lives. Innocent of that particular murder, Rocket still killed a lot of other people, though he argues they're all justified. And the killing is largely a joke, as he even has a catchphrase, assuming "BLAM! Murdered you!" qualifies. When he pleads his innocence to Quill, Star-Lord correctly guesses that Rocket is in the middle of murdering someone right that moment. Movie Rocket was no saint, always focused on a payday or at least protecting his and Groot's hides, but this version seems tipped even further towards, if not villainy, close enough to shake hands with it.

This Rocket also doesn't know anything about his past. The last two issues are him breaking the terms of his probation to pursue a lead on the mysterious "Book of Halfworld," and learning that he is possibly not the only one of his kind in the universe, as he apparently tells everyone. The climax is played as a joke. None of the answers the book provides are satisfactory, and Rocket decides it's stupid to worry about where you came from. Life is somewhere ahead of you.

Eh, it's not the worst lesson I've seen in a comic book.

Young's artwork is fantastic, however. Wild and expressive and exaggerated. His aliens, if still broadly bipedal, can look weird or gross as the situation requires. There are motorcycles that transform into rocketpacks, all manners of spacecraft and weird monsters to blow up (though some of that was drawn by Jake Parker, artist in the back half of the series.) Rocket is far more expressive than a raccoon is likely capable of, and that's put to good use. He's alternately charming, pitiable, or homicidal, depending on what he thinks he needs from one moment to the next.

Mignola and the various GotG artists stuck closer to a raccoon's true body type in their renditions. Chubby body with short, stubby limbs, Rocket walking on the pads of his toes. Young goes leaner, with stick-figure arms and legs, what look like regular feet, and a scruffier fur coat. Past Rockets looked like they put some care into their appearance, but this version actually looks like he spends most of his time one step ahead of angry creditors/cops/ex-girlfriends. His eyes are just red-orange orbs, which also lends a feral air.

I don't think this was ever one of my favorites during it's 11-issue run, not with the Duggan Deadpool, Waid and Samnee's Daredevil, G. Willow Wilson's Ms. Marvel, or the Soule/Pulido She-Hulk run going concurrently. But it was the ongoing series that got me back up to buying 10 titles from Marvel in Summer 2014, for the first time in 7 years. Of course, that only lasted 3 months before Avengers Undercover ended, and Rocket Raccoon itself was canceled by the following summer during Hickman's Secret Wars. But if I didn't necessarily enjoy reading it, the art was always fun to look at.

It's Time to Get Stuffed

Narrator: ON A CHILLY MORNING, MEAL PREPARATIONS CONTINUE IN CALVIN'S APARTMENT!

Calvin: *stirring a big pot* He's right, it's definitely a "chili" morning.

Clever Adolescent Panda: I don't think your recipe is spicy enough to be chili.

Calvin: *gasps* How dare you insult my father's recipe. *raises the oversize wooden spoon* En garde!

CAP: *backs away* Wait, get a weapon that isn't covered in food! I don't want stains in my fur!

Calvin: *jabs the spoon towards the panda* Renounce your heresy first! 

Rhodez: *chilling on the couch* I like his dad's chili.

Calvin: Thank you. *still jabbing the spoon at the retreating panda*

Cassanee: *staring out the sliding door* Spilling chili on the floor.

*Calvin shrieks and grabs paper towels, in the process dripping more chili on the linoleum. Meanwhile, a knock at the door.*

Rhodez: *answering the door* Yo, Pollock.

Pollock: I heard a scream, don't tell me one of you decided to kill Calvin when I wasn't here to see it?

Rhodez: Nah, they're just arguing about Calvin's chili and it got messy. 

Cassanee: Play-fighting. 

Pollock: Don't be so sure. Disputes about chili can turn violent. *casts a hopeful glance towards the kitchen* Did it? Turn violent? Is that why Calvin's on the floor?

CAP: I wouldn't hit Calvin -

*The panda notices Calvin looking at him with an extremely unimpressed stare, and remembers various Bonks to the Head delivered over the years*

CAP: That hard.

Calvin: Yeah, Panda Claus only brings gifts to good little CEOs, if such a thing exists.

Cassanee: Panda Claus?

Calvin: Sure! Big, jolly, hairy chin and jowls, doesn't take crap from evildoers?

Rhodez: *looks at CAP* Is he talking about you?

CAP: Maybe. I don't take crap from evildoers.

Calvin: Anyway, the chili *glares at CAP* is ready, and I managed to actually make some decent home fries. And, I remembered I have the extra sleeve for the table, so we can all fit around it like semi-civilized people!

CAP: I brought a salad, and those potato-flour doughnuts you told me about. Isn't that too many potatoes?

Calvin, Rhodez, Cassanee: No such thing.

CAP: *a little stunned* Ohhhhhhhh. . .kay.

Pollock: *scoffs* If it's starches they want, I brought a fine alfredo pasta, and a white bean puree. Also wine, but that's just for me.

Cassanee: Cornbread and deer steaks.

Rhodez: Taco pizza! So much taco pizza!

*Everyone eyes the stack of 10 pizza boxes, as well as Rhodez's feral expression* 

Calvin: Is any of it for us, or are you planning to take it all back to America's Cro - America's Elbow?

Rhodez: Sure, you guys can have one.

CAP: One pizza, or one slice?

Rhodez: *shrugs* I don't know, man, we'll see. I brought some good soda, too, since Calvin buys Pepsi.

Calvin: Not this year! I've embraced being a Wine Bachelor! *extends his glass* Top me off, Pollock!

Pollock: *clutches the bottle fearfully* Not a chance! This is for when you start giving thanks!

Cassanee: Wine Bachelor?

Rhodez: Is that a thing?

Calvin: If there can be Wine Moms, why not Wine Bachelors? 

Pollock: *eyes Calvin speculatively* You know what? Fine. I want to see this.

*Pollock pours Calvin some wine. Calvin swirls the liquid ostentatiously, then sniffs at it a few times. Then swirls it some more. Another sniff. more swirling.* 

Pollock: Well? Go ahead, "wine bachelor."

Calvin: Wooo! *He downs the entire glass in one gulp. His body convulses, head twisting slowly to the side like it's on a spring. His face twists into a grimace* That is vile.

*Clever Adolescent Panda snickers. Pollock extends the bottle.*

Pollock: More for the wine bachelor?

Calvin: *expression still pinched* Sure, just *exhales loudly* haaah, gotta cut it with something. Can I get one of those sodas, Rhodez? Gonna see if I can make a "wine-and-root beer" the new trendy drink.

*The 4 guests recoil. Pollock corks the bottle.*

Pollock: I will feed you another cake that makes you capable of vibrating through the walls of reality, thereby killing us all, before I let you make such a liquid abomination.

Narrator: AFTER EATING!

Calvin: *sprawled on the floor* I'm glad I ran til I puked this morning, 'cause I got a hunch I ain't moving for a while.

Pollock: *slumped in her chair* You. . .just lack impulse. . .control.

CAP: *seated in the corner of the room, only upright thanks to the walls* I saw you undo your belt halfway through.

Pollock: *embarrassed* Calvin's suggestion to mix soda with wine just broke my will for a few minutes, that's all! When i returned to myself, I'd already eaten - 

Cassanee: *curled in the camp chair* 4 donuts.

Rhodez: And one of my pizzas *pulls herself off the couch long enough to glare, then falls back again*

Calvin: So, are we doing the thanks bit this year?

CAP: Of course!

Pollock: But Calvin can't go yet. I need to room in my stomach for the wine I'll need. 

Calvin: *staring at the ceiling* Whatever. Rhodez, you want to kick it off?

Rhodez: Huh? Uh, OK. I got a bigger, better apartment this year, and a cat. He's really cool. I got a big bonus for extending my contract, even if taxes took a stupid big chunk of it - 

Pollock: *sits up, looking alarmed* Taxes? Are we still paying those?

Calvin: Not you, oh mighty job creator.

Pollock: Whew. *slides back down in the chair*

Rhodez: Yeah, I still gotta pay taxes, but maybe by the time this contract runs out, the job market will be better. And my truck didn't wrecked this year, so you know, that's cool.

Calvin: Because you were smart enough not to drive when Florida got snow.

Rhodez: Damn right. *brief pause* That's what I got.

Calvin: Am I going now?

Pollock: No. Let the Cassanee regale us with the high point of her social calendar, the big hoedown by the outhouse.

CAP: *growls* Don't be mean. . .

Cassanee: No hoedown. No outhouses, either.

Pollock: My goodness, you just go right out in the - THWACK! *a tennis ball hits Pollock in the head* 

CAP: Thanks, Calvin!

Calvin: *still on his back, offers a thumbs up*

Cassanee: *smiles* Too much rain earlier in the year, none later, but we controlled the flood damage. Did have a lot of canoe trips. Beat up an ogre that emerged from the Dark Caves.

Calvin: Aren't all caves kinda dark?

Cassanee: Not like this.

CAP: It's a supernatural thing, right? Bad experiences that manifest as a force that eats light?

Cassanee: *shrugs* Probably. Two friends got married. Nice ceremony, but raccoons tried to steal the cake. Big mess, but fun. 

CAP: Neat. Not the raccoons trying to steal the cake, but the rest of it sounded good. I had a quiet year. I helped five lost spirits find peace, beat up two angry ones that were terrorizing people. Although one of them was haunting the person who killed them, but I proved it and got them arrested, so that counts as helping a lost spirit, too. I came up with a recipe for bamboo croquets that my family really loved! I don't think they're edible for humans, though, sorry.

Pollock: Perhaps Calvin could invite Deadpool next year as a test dummy.

Calvin: His next ongoing is being written by Benjamin Percy, so there's not a chance in hell of that. Keep going, panda pal.

CAP: I almost have wall jumps figured out, so I can scale buildings that way.

Calvin: Can't you just climb them using your claws?

CAP: Yeah, but that's not as cool-looking.

Rhodez: I don't know, it'd be pretty cool, you hauling yourself up a building like that. Bad ass.

CAP: I guess, but it's also slower. I want to be fast!

Calvin: A fast panda. Sonic the Panda.

Pollock: Hmm, I smell marketing opportunities.

CAP: *huffs* More like trademark infringement. Which of you is next?

Calvin: Well, you got room for wine now?

Pollock: *picks up the bottle and eyes it* . . .Yes. Go ahead and depress us. *Takes a long drink*

Calvin: Uh, well, work's been a pain in the ass for a variety of reasons, but I'm hoping things are coming together so I won't have to carry such a big load next year. Between the new guy being trained, fewer issues with the software, and one of my coworkers hopefully no longer teaching 2 days a week, other people might actually do some inspections!

CAP: This is an awful angry start.

Calvin: Right, yeah. OK, moving on. There haven't been any real bad things at home, so it's remained a peaceful refuge. I went on a trip with Alex across the eastern U.S. and onto the Atlantic Ocean, which was fun. Boston was much better to walk through than drive, but interesting to see. I would have liked to see more of Portland, and I learned 3 days on a cruise ship is probably my max, but it was a really good experience all around, and it seemed to pick up Alex's spirits. And we each got some art prints out of it, which Alex will probably at least get his framed and up on the wall at some point. Let's leave it there.

Pollock: That was. . .surprisingly positive.

Calvin: It's just your wine goggles.

CAP: No, it was. I'm proud of you. I knew you could be positive if you tried!

Calvin: Don't hug me or I might throw up again after all. Pollock.

Pollock: It has been a challenging economic climate, with the inconsistent tariffs and inconsistent economic messaging. Fortunately, we've made some real breakthroughs on perpetual motion as it relates to generating power for railguns.

CAP: Really?

Pollock: Indeed. We've even miniaturized them into handheld units suitable for riot control and, *becoming evasive* things of that nature.

Calvin: Pollock, are you seriously selling weapons to a wannabe dictator?

Rhodez: That's pretty shitty, even for you. 

Pollock: Relax, the weapons don't actually work at all. Quality control is very poor with this administration, as is any concept of physics or any other science. I could sell them a Super-Soaker filled with the fluid from glowsticks and convince them it was a magnet gun or some sort of neural disruptor. I'm just getting in on the grift while the getting is good! No one is getting hurt!

THWACK! *the tennis ball hits Pollock in the head again* 

Just A-Driftin' Along, In the Vacuum of Space

In ADR1FT (yes, the game uses "1" in place of "I"), you are Alex Oshima, commander of the crew aboard a space station built by Hardiman Aerospace. You wake up in the middle of chaos. Something has happened and the station is shattered the pieces drifting together. Thankfully, the orbit doesn't seem to be degrading, but if you're going to make it home, you have to repair some mainframes first.

What that involves is repeatedly going to the central spire of the station, which tells you a particular mainframe isn't responding. You have to make it to the section of the station related to that mainframe and acquire a new central processor or something like that, then bring it back. It's always the same error message, the part you grab is always the same (save the color.) Once you reach the right spot, it's a matter of pushing a button to initiate the sequence that gets you the part you need.

So the challenge is in making there. Alex is inside a spacesuit, and it has some mobility capability where you can direct your course, speed up or slow down. If you hit stuff, your suit starts to get damaged, cracks appearing in the visor. The jets that provide thrust and maneuverability are a shared resource with your air supply, so you have to keep an eye on that. There's still some equipment producing live currents that, if you hit them, do a considerable amount of damage to your air supply. Also, any time you move outside the confines of the station, the rate of air loss speeds up.

The suit is not at 100% when you begin, so there are some leaks even after you get it repaired. But the station is broken into pieces. You aren't accessing space by passing through airlocks or decompression procedures. You drift down a hallway and whoops, the part at the other end is no longer connected. Or you enter a room and one of the windows is blown out. So there's rarely a point where I would say the station is providing any sort of protection that ought to diminish the air loss.

Each time you reach one of the computer stations to retrieve a part you need, the computer there also upgrades some aspect of your suit. Oxygen capacity, suit integrity, thrust speed and something else I forget. Unfortunately, it doesn't let you pick, so suit integrity is the last thing that gets improved, while it's the first thing I'd have augmented if given the choice, since that would reduce the air loss. The game provides a lot of opportunities to replenish your air supply, either by bottles floating around (all of which flash green to help you find them) or dedicated stations on the interior walls. So it isn't too hard to find more air, and you can get most anywhere with minimal thrust if you're willing to wait for Alex to drift there, but that's more complicated if the suit is constantly leaking air like a sieve.

The one time I died in the game, it was because I tried to reach a satellite the suit's scanner told me had something. The satellite was a ways out, it was very early in the game, and I didn't use my limited oxygen (which I also didn't replenish before floating into the void) wisely. After that, I settled for drifting slowly when I was out in the open, focusing thrust use on course corrections, letting inertia carry me where I needed to go. There's no time limit, so there's no reason to rush, save impatience. And if you float, you can watch the Earth below you, and that's pretty neat.

Once you have the four mainframes up and running again, you can board the escape pod at any time. But there are other things to seek out, if you care. The company wants you to recover things like a special camera and a hard drive. There are 25 solid-state drives floating around. You might also, you know, want to figure out what happened to your crew. (Spoiler alert: They're all dead.) The scanner will help you find things like that, although the crew's suits have a flashing red light you can see from far off. I do wish the scanner didn't think it was necessary to tell me about locked doors. Most of them can be unlocked simply by holding "X" as you float closer, so they're really just, doors. I don't need to know that, and it would significantly declutter the screen.

As you go along, you can also access audio logs of yours and the crew that shed some light into what was going on. Alex granted one crew member a transfer home, but not in time. She was also putting a lot of pressure on the crew to hit the marks in whatever it was we were trying to accomplish, and probably disregarding safety protocols in the process. Which certainly makes it seem like Alex is to blame, but there were things here and there that made me wonder if it wasn't the guy on the crew that this was his last mission. He'd been in space so much, he had incurable cancer, and was not happy about spending the remainder of his days on Earth.

If there was an ending that provided resolution, I never unlocked it. I reached a point where I had certain uplinks working again, but they couldn't transmit because some debris severed a cable. I could find the damage easily enough, but I could never get any guidance as to what to do to fix it. I checked every Youtube playthrough I could find, and none of those helped, though I'm also not inclined to sit there 2+ hours sifting through the videos. Eventually, I gave up and decided to send Alex back to Earth, leaving it at everything being her fault.

An Unexpected Reversal of Trends

So, the most recent batch of solicits. Quite a surprise. I used almost two full lines of my spiral notebook to write everything down, which hadn't happened since the solicits for October. Of course, a bunch of the stuff I wrote down for October I either didn't buy - all that Age of Revelation stuff - or it never showed up - Tuatha. So who knows what things will look like when February actually arrives.

What's new? Marvel's still spitting out more X-related books, and setting aside the terrible mistake handing Deadpool to Benjamin Percy is likely to be, this includes Generation X-23, written by Jody Houser, with Jacopo Camagni as artist. At least Houser is going to use Gabby as part of the cast right from the start, but the last time I bought a book with Laura Kinney, it didn't go great (see my dropping Laura Kinney: Wolverine after 3 issues.) I have better success when I wait until the book ends and I hear positive word of mouth. Still, my luck's got to turn eventually, right? Right?

Besides that, Jed MacKay's latest Moon Knight reboot is here, Marc Spector: Moon Knight. Is MacKay just determined to run through all historical Moon Knight titles before he calls it quits? At least Devmalya Pramanik is listed as artist. Hopefully he'll draw more issues this time around. And Kelly Thompson and Gurihiru are bringing another Jeff adventure with It's Jeff Meets Daredevil. Unless Matt Murdock's gotten real kinky, Jeff is safe from the Daredevil girlfriend curse.

IDW's releasing another Rocketeer mini-series, Rocketeer: The Island. The solicitation said it was from Dave Stevens, which quite confused me, since he's been dead for 15 years. But apparently the script idea - Cliff rescues Amelia Earhart - was from an outline of Stevens', but John Layman and Jacob Edgar are the writer/artist team bringing it to life. I don't know that I'll buy it, but it, along with Muppets Noir by Roger Langridge and Declan Shalvey (from Dynamite) seemed worth mentioning regardless.

Image has Brett Bean's D'Orc, about a half-orc, half-dwarf and some weird shield, that are somehow going to destroy the world, if the world doesn't destroy them first. It sounds like kind of dark comedy, but maybe not? Mad Cave has Is Ted OK? about an extremely neurotic and isolated guy who starts to have a breakdown, but a woman's attempt to help makes things worse. The description didn't really light my world on fire, but it's supposedly by Dave Chisholm, who wrote and drew Canopus, which I really liked, so, again, maybe?

What's ending? Nothing, unless I want to be a smart ass and list It's Jeff Meets Daredevil, since that's a one-shot.

Everything else: Batgirl appears to finally, after 16 issues, be wrapping up this War of Shadows. Thank Shiva, or whoever is responsible for that. Fantastic Four is still on the story about the Invisible Woman being some dire threat. Nova got his ship stolen. It'll probably be returned when the thief gets annoyed with Pip's constant calls. In Black Cat, Felicia is teaming up with Mary Jane. Who is Venom, if you were luckier than me and unaware of that particularly stupid development.

I saw someone in the House to Astonish comments section months ago refer to Kamala Khan as Poochie, because Marvel keeps trying to make her a big deal in the X-books. While I won't disagree with the wrongheadedness of making Kamala a mutant, rather than leaving her as the One Cool Inhuman, I would argue symbiotes are Poochie because Marvel is pushing those fucking things everywhere. They are in way more books, and seem to be a constant focus in one damn event or another. This is all Donny Cates' fault.

Babs: The Long Road South, and Spirit of the Shadows are both on issue 2, the latter now listed as a 5-issue mini-series. I wasn't sure what it was last month, so I appreciate knowing the potential commitment. It won't come out until March, but it was in this round of solicits so, Touched by a Demon will be at issue 2 then as well. 

Thunderbolts* (2025)

Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) is not living her best life. Alternating between drinking and scanning her phone, and running operations cleaning up messes for Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Until one of those operations runs her headlong into Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), Failed Captain America John Walker (Wyatt Russell), Taskmaster, and a confused guy in hospital scrubs named Bob (Lewis Pullman).

(Taskmaster ends up dying in the 4-way free-for-all. Chalk her up as another antagonist with lots of personality in the comics wasted by the movies. Batroc's another that's high on my list.) 

Figuring out they're the last loose end Valentina needs to clean up, they first try going on the run with the Red Guardian (David Harbour), then convince Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) to let them try and attack Valentina head on. Which fails miserably, because it turns out the medical study Bob was part of worked. He has the power of a million exploding suns. Unfortunately, the study didn't do anything for his myriad mental health issues, and having that much power only exacerbates said issues.

It was pretty good. Alex felt it was the best Marvel movie since Endgame, low bar that is to clear. I might put it above Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3. While Thunderbolts* has the Sentry (minus), it also feels less bloated than GotGv3 did in places. And I will grudgingly admit, the Sentry's whole deal does fit well with this group of damaged people, full of exposed nerves and insecurities, lashing out and crashing against each other. The messy, exhausted way Yelena goes about her work, the unhelpful advice she initially offers Bob about dealing with feeling everything is useless. The relationship between her and Alexi, where he keeps defaulting to this loudmouth, gung-ho guy, but when he really focuses on her, the young woman in front of him, he can actually help her.

I don't know if admitting that the time where he felt best was when he was a public hero, saving people on the streets and being cheered in parades, was the best answer, but it was honest, at least. I expected him to say the time where they were a family of four in the U.S., which would likely have come off as schmaltzy. Doubt Yelena would have believed it, either.

Bucky being a lousy Congressman, who can't get any bills passed, is awkward with the press, and clearly not taken seriously by any politicians, was both amusing, and felt entirely accurate. Honestly, I was trying to figure out by how and why he became a politician. It doesn't feel like something he would have any interest in doing.

Walker and Ghost get short shrift on their issues, with so much being taken up by Yelena and Bob. Russell seems to play Walker as more of a dumbass than I remember from Falcon and Winter Soldier, but maybe that's just him trying to puff up and impress people who are absolutely not impressed by his act. Feels like there could have been something with the notion that, at one time, the others at least had a semblance of normal family lives (before things went to crap), while things have pretty much always been crap for Ghost. Unless I'm misremembering her backstory, which, entirely possible. Yelena calls her out for not even being a good person and it's like, yes? When would she have received positive reinforcement for that development? When being used to steal equipment to try and keep herself alive?

I thought Pullman did a good job as Bob and the Sentry (Alex really liked the design for the Void, with the two tiny glowing pinpricks of his eyes as the only light.) I liked that even when he's the Sentry, and even as he starts to get high on his own supply, there's still something unsure in his posture and the way he looks at Valentina. Like when he asks her, wouldn't he qualify as God if he's stronger than all the Avengers, who included a god, it doesn't feel rhetorical so much as he's almost bracing himself for a cutting response which will reveal how stupid it is for him to even think such a thing.

Also, the bit in his mind where they encounter Methed-Out, Sign-Spinning, Chicken Costume Bob made me bust out laughing. 

What I Bought 11/20/2025

They've created all these stupid new systems at work, for things I could not give less of a shit about. This has not stopped people from sending me e-mails expecting me to learn procedures or do stuff related to these things, which makes me either want to scream at them to just leave me alone, or throttle them.

Nova: Centurion #1, by Jed MacKay (writer), Alvaro Lopez (writer), Mattia Iacono (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - With funds limited, Nova was forced to house the Worldmind in a less mobile mainframe.

Richard Rider's back to (still?) the last Nova, housing all the Nova Force. He's still determined to save every life he can, still getting chided by the Worldmind about putting it at risk by rescuing ships full of rich dumbasses from a black by doing crazy shit. But the Worldmind, wherever he's keeping it, comes with a cost. A financial cost. And people won't pay for help after you've saved their stupid asses.

Enter Pip the Troll (never a good sign.) For the low, low cost of 10%, he'll get Rich paying jobs to keep the Worldmind running. Paying jobs like hunting down the one responsible for stealing a bunch of that magic mineral stuff Krakoa was pumping out from a interstellar gang called "The Kree-Skrull War."

That is the stupidest gang name I've ever heard. Yes, you're Kree and Skrulls working together, and your leaders talk like a particularly condescending rich couple "It has pride, my love." "It" also has enough gravimetric power to incinerate you dipshits, and probably should. They're gangsters, doesn't that make them criminals? Shouldn't Nova Prime be taking down criminals?

Anyway, Rich takes the cash, and the accomplice left behind, Cammi, and gets ready to hunt down Ravenous. We only see him in a flashback to partway through Annihilation, so I don't know if half his face is still metal after Ronan crushed it.

It's not a bad engine for storytelling. Throw Richard into conflicts where he has to decide how much he's willing to compromise his values and what he feels being a Nova stands for, in exchange for the funds to keep the Worldmind - and the last vestige of Xandarian culture - alive. Although I've never seen anything of Xandarian culture except the Nova Corps. They got any decent poetry, films, anything except the desire to create an interstellar peacekeeping force that was not terribly effective? Certainly weren't doing anything about the Shi'ar routinely being run by nutsos like D'Ken, or the Kree and Skrulls from fighting all the damn time.

Do not love Rich sporting a goatee with a beard. Just looks weird. Would have preferred Lopez highlighted the facial scar Nova got in his first fight against Annihilus, but outside of Sean Chen drawing a small nick in his upper lip, nobody drew that after Annihilation. Guess it got erased via the magic of outer space medicine. 

Sunday Splash Page #402

"Ticket Punched," in Our Army at War #229, by Robert Kanigher (writer), Joe Kubert (artist), colorist and letterer unknown

The Grand Comics Database says this story was originally published in Our Army at War #149, but the reprint is the issue I have, so that's what I'm going with.

The fourth 4 DC war title we've looked at - after Fighting Forces, G.I. Combat, Star-Spangled War Stories - Our Army at War is by far the one my dad had the most of. I don't know if that owes to a specific preference, or simply which series was on the spinner racks when he had a chance to buy comics.

It seems like Our Army at War was a war comic without a main feature for its first several years. Sgt. Rock shows up in issue 81's "The Rock of Easy Co.!", but it wasn't until #90, "Three Stripes Hill!" that the cover actually says "Sgt. Rock." After that, he's the lead feature up through #301, at which point the book was simply retitled Sgt. Rock (though maintaining its numbering), and continued for another 121 issues.

With one exception, all the issues I have are in the #200-240 range, by which time Joe Kubert is writing a lot - though not all - of the stories, and Russ Heath is artist. That said, and no offense to Russ Heath, who's excellent, if I'm posting a splash page of Sergeant Rock, it's going to be one Joe Kubert drew.

Because much of the character comes from the visuals Kubert provided. The stubble, the ragged uniform and battered helmet suggesting someone who sees combat constantly, so there's no time for a fresh uniform or a shave. Issue 217 even jokes about this, as the "combat happy Joes of Easy" try to surprise Rock with a fresh uniform, only to find it got torn up by the shrapnel in their latest battle and he looks rattier than ever.

There's also the fact that when I think of "tough" in comics, characters drawn by Joe Kubert are what I picture. They aren't teeth-gritting, one-liner spitting badasses, or guys with huge muscles. Rock is drawn as fit, and more than one Sgt. Rock story ends with hand-to-hand combat. No room for shooting, so club guys with rifle butts or just punch them, but win the fight. But he's almost wiry, Kubert's shading emphasizing the outline of Rock's ribs more than his abs. The way Rock's clothes and those ammo belts hang off him, he looks like he's not getting near enough food. I can't imagine k-rations were all that filling or nutritious.

Kubert's characters are tough because they look like they've survived some shit. Mountains where all the softest materials wore away over time, all that's left are the most resilient elements. Rock survives countless encounters with infantry, tanks, artillery, aircraft, bombs, grenades, everything. He's inside a tank when it gets blown up more than once just in the issues I have, and if he has to be carried out, he's on his feet again before long.

And yet, Kanigher and Kubert and Heath all emphasize that Rock is still human and still capable of compassion. Even if he's a sergeant because he was the last guy alive on a 'certain hill he'd rather forget,' he takes the responsibility seriously. He looks after his guys, trying hard to keep them alive even when he knows there's gonna be casualties. If two wander off and get lost in the desert (issue #225), Rock goes out alone to track them down. If it's winter and everyone's exhausted, Rock handles the recon patrol himself rather than 'squeeze the last drop' from them (#228). If they get a new guy who acts like an army of one and gives Rock a lot of shit, Rock still leads the charge to save that guy when he gets captured (#214.) He lets them joke around when they're just marching, and will even toss some jabs back at them. He knows he's in a war, but hasn't let it steal his humanity.

Kanigher's stories tend to have some sort of hook that repeats. In "Surrender Ticket," it's that a Nazi officer has the idea of applying pressure to one specific unit of the GIs (freshly landed in North Africa), until they surrender without a shot, a demoralizing result. So we get repetitions of Easy Co. coming briefly under fire, a few guys (always introduced a page earlier) being killed, and then "surrender tickets" raining down, with more and more soldiers keeping them as the issue progresses. In "Easy's Had It!" Rock is worried the guys rely too much on him, that he's all that keeps them going. All his attempts to assert that he's a flesh-and-blood human like them, and that they have to keep going even if he falls, are undercut by him single-handedly saving Easy Co. from fighter planes or tanks. Until finally he does fall, and Easy has to take a hill without him.

(To be clear, it's not always this approach. Kanigher wrote issue 214, which focuses on the new guy, Private Hogan, and why he's so determined to be a one-man show.) 

Kubert doesn't necessarily shun this approach - we saw it in a Random Back Issue not long ago - but at least in the issues I have, more of his stories are a specific mission with some sort of twist ending. "Surprise Party" in 217 was one Kubert wrote and drew, "Dig In, Easy!" in issue #222 is another, where it's a question of what Easy Company will do once Rock is captured.

Regardless of the writer, there's always a sense war is an ugly business, and none of Easy are happy to be killing, or something has gone wrong. Issue 233 focuses on a new guy, Johnny Doe, who grew up in an orphanage, never adopted, and feels being a soldier is the first time he was ever wanted. So he kills (it's significant that Rock often talks of "fighting", but not "killing.") Kills Nazis surrendering, arguing Nazis have faked surrendering before (as Audie Murphy could attest). Kills farmers moving towards them with weapons, dismissing the possibility they might have been resistance fighters or just regular farmers.

Always quick on the trigger, always waving away Rock's questions or doubts with a lazy grin (afer one of Rock's questions, he says, 'If I'm wrong, Rock, I'll apologize.') The climax coming when Johnny is ready to drop a grenade into a house where the Nazis are holding hostages, because he's sure (or indifferent) that the woman at gunpoint is working with the Nazis. But he hesitates, and it's an open question whether Johnny dies because he held the grenade too long, or because Rock shot him to stop him. There's never doubt in the stories that the war needs to be fought, the Nazis need to be stopped, but Rock's written as someone convinced there are lines that shouldn't be crossed in the process. You can't take back killing someone, nor can you bring back one of your own that dies because you pushed the fight to a bloodier conclusion than necessary.

Saturday Splash Page #204

"Monkey Business," in Rocket Raccoon (vol. 1) #3, by Bill Mantlo (writer), Mike Mignola (penciler), Al Milgrom (inker), Christie Scheele (colorist), Ken Bruzenak (letterer)

Released in 1985, Rocket Raccoon was a 4-issue mini-series set on Halfworld, a bizarre planetary asylum where the "Loonies" are looked after by talking animals, including their protector, the raccoon himself, Ranger Rocket.

It's a strange book. Halfworld is divided into two halves, one for organics and one for robots. The robots, while they do produce the toys the animals devise to keep the Loonies entertained, are mostly busy building an enormous Oscars trophy of a ship, for reasons unknown. After all, there's an energy barrier around the world that should prevent anyone entering or leaving (the Hulk having been a notable exception.)

Most of the series revolves around a war between the two chief toymakers, Lord Dyvyne and Judson Jakes, because Jakes wants to be the sole toymaker and charge exorbitant prices. Rocket is really more concerned with translating the "Halfworld Bible", left behind by those who founded Halfworld and originally tried to treat the "Loonies." Yet he's drawn in because his lady love Lylla will assume ownership of the toy company Jakes runs once she's old enough, and that's enough to make her, and Rocket, a target.

The overarching feeling I get of Halfworld is that it's a system that outlived its viable lifespan. The robots adapted and grew and decided caring for illogical humans was exhausting, so they modified the animals meant as companions for the patients, and left the job to them. But increasing the intelligence of the animals has given them their own desires and needs. "To serve," is no longer good enough. Jakes and Dyvyne each turn their toymakers towards weapons of war like cybernetic killer clowns that speak in rhyme as they blow you up, or clouds of living bad breath that erase anything they touch. There are mercenary groups, led by Blackjack O'Hare, who serve only the highest bidder, or their own desires. The patients are now just, in the way. Collateral damage in a war for control.

Even Rocket, who never hesitates to leap into the fray and protect the loonies, is weary of them. He's trying to translate the Halfworld Bible for answers, but mostly he wants out of the Keystone Quadrant. He wants to know if sanity exists, somewhere out there, because he doesn't see any around him.

This is early Mignola, so it's quite different from what'll be on Hellboy. Busier, more complicated, shadows not nearly as large a presence. Which is not to say he can't still draw some terrifying things. The panel of a patient tearing off his face to reveal a leering clown mug underneath has stuck with me ever since I bought this mini-series. There's a 3-panel sequence in issue 2 of a partygoer being erased by the "Red Breath" Dyvyne unleashed. The coloring sometimes muddies Mignola's lines, but he's also cramming a lot into some of these panels, so that may have been unavoidable.

(Rocket also smokes a pipe, which feels like it codes him as much older than Lylla, who apparently can't take control of her deceased parents' toy factory from Jakes until she's old enough. And while Rocket can be melodramatic, he's not making a lot of quips or banter. He's a straight-laced, if somewhat resigned, hero.) 

Mantlo's script shifts from gags about the bizarre rituals the Loonies have concocted around the Halfworld Bible, or gags about "gorilla wars" and "Keystone Kops", to an extended "Masque of the Red Death" homage in issue 2, and a desperate fight in a Star Wars-style scummy cantina in issue 3. At times it feels like he's being satirical, at others, entirely serious. Which is maybe the point. Halfworld is a planetary insane asylum, and what goes on there may look crazy to us on the outside, but for those living there, it's life. Being the sole toymaker, and the power it would provide, is a big deal to Jakes. Enough to kill for.

Random Back Issues #164 - Batgirl #63

New city, but Cassandra's managed to find another older redhead encouraging her to have fun. 

It's been a hot minute since we've looked at Cassandra Cain's first book (almost six years!) In the aftermath of the garbage fire that was War Games, Batgirl is operating in Bludhaven, and has been messing with the Penguin (who moved in after Blockbuster was killed, I think in the pages of Nightwing.) Enough so, Cobblepot approaches a quartet of shadowy figures - (Alexander) Luthor's Society of Super-Villains, because we're in the run-up to Infinite Crisis - about getting rid of her. Specifically, he asks Deathstroke if he wouldn't mind handling it, describing it as a 'feather in your cap.'

Let's maybe keep Deathstroke away from underage girls, shall we? 

In the meantime, Cassandra's completed a morning workout routine she's done since childhood, though she changed the ending to where she doesn't decapitate the final dummy. Heading out to get a coffee from the shop near her loft, she overhears Brenda, the owner, talking about how the Wayne Foundation got her a grant to help her keep her store, and she's hosting a big party to celebrate. Brenda invites Cass, who demurs, claiming she needs to work tonight.

After thanking Batman for helping Brenda, and being warned the Penguin is looking for new alliances (see above paragraph), Cass decides to attend the party. But what to wear? Cass hasn't been to a party before, minus that cruise Barbara took her on 20 issues ago where Cass encountered Superboy. She tries a dress skirt and jacket that make her look like a mid-40s real estate agent for some firm in a small Midwestern town, but correctly notes it's no good, and makes some modifications.

Brenda seems to like it, but Cassandra is more interested by the mosh pit, and possibly some boy she sees bouncing around. Party Time is interrupted by an explosion and fire at the neighbor's across the street and Batgirl is soon Kool-Aid-Manning through a wall - to find Deathstroke holding Mrs. Brauenstein by the throat, Mr. Brauenstein already dead at his feet.

Batgirl asks 'stroke to put the woman down, so he breaks her neck and drops her. The fight is on! This is what got me to hunt down that issue of Nightwing discussed in Sunday Splash Page. While it's more involved here, Deathstroke is played as being in control. Within the first page he's shot a hole in her cape, shot off one of the cowl's ears, and gotten her to dodge a shot that took out a pillar and dropped the ceiling on her. Batgirl's monologue describes his body's movements as like a choir. 'Many different voices. All at once. But singing too fast. Too loud. The message is lost. Until it's too late.'

Batgirl escapes before the house collapses, the chase moving to rooftops. Noting Slade's deliberately moving slow, she opts to change the game, passing up an chance to attack, instead vaulting him and running, to an old churchyard. Deathstroke tangles her legs with a net, but she's able to pin his sword between her legs and kick him in the chops, cutting herself free as he gets hold of the net. There's a bit of flipping around before things end up with Batgirl pointing Deathstroke's sword at his face. But he knows she won't kill. And that's fine, because this is really a test for his daughter Rose, aka the Ravager!

Batgirl will handle that, but Deathstroke eventually uses Chemo to blow up Bludhaven and drugs Cassandra into taking over the League of Assassins (thanks Geoof Johns and Adam Beechen, you hacks!) But Deathstroke will also lose a fight to Green Arrow, so it's not all wine and roses for that creep.

{2nd longbox, 70th comic. Batgirl (vol. 1) #63, by Andersen Gabrych (writer), Ale Garza (penciller), Jesse Delperdang and Andrew Pepoy (inkers), Wildstorm FX (colorists), Pat Brosseau (letterer)}

A Thinker's Damn - William Russo

This is the book I mentioned a few weeks ago, about the making of first film version of The Quiet American. I'm not sure where the notion that it was about the government meddling with the film came with, whether my dad misunderstood what was in it or I misunderstood what he said about it, because that's not evident in the text.

A lot of things went wrong with this film, but the kind of things that go wrong with a lot of movies. Mankiewicz originally wanted Laurence Olivier and Montgomery Clift for his two leads, and went 0-for-2 for various reasons. I've never been all that impressed with Clift in the things I've seen him in, but if you want Clift and get Audie Murphy, that's probably not ideal. Murphy coming down with appendicitis shortly after reaching Saigon, which limited his availability, and what he was physically capable of doing, as Mankiewicz apparently had more action in his script originally. They really didn't use much footage from the months spent in Vietnam, with most of the scenes that go in the film being shot in Italy.

Russo also explains why we saw so little of Pyle and Phuong's courtship in the movie, because Murphy and Giorgia Moll couldn't demonstrate any romantic chemistry in the scenes filmed. Which tracks with Murphy's inability to fake it if he doesn't feel it. Although Mankiewicz apparently wanted it to be a torrid, passionate romance between young lovers. I've tended to picture Pyle, in the book and the film adaptations, as too straitlaced for that. Like, he's got to marry Phuong first.

But the script seemed to be the single biggest issue. From how Russo writes it, no one except Mankiewicz was actually happy with the script. Redgrave and Murphy, in possibly the only thing those two agreed on, felt the script was way overwritten. Both wanted edits made to the script, and both received assurances there would edits be made. But it doesn't seem like any edits were made until the film itself was hacked to pieces in an effort to trim it from over 3 hours of material to around 100 minutes.

The book is organized roughly chronologically, starting at Mankiewicz trying to get his two stars, but within that broad outline there are some curious choices. Russo will spend most of a chapter detailing Graham Greene's displeasure with the movie based on what he'd heard about the script (as they hadn't even started filming yet.) Then he'll spend the last handful of pages in that chapter discussing the choice of Giorgia Moll to play Phuong, and whether Mankiewicz actually entertained choosing a Vietnamese actress for the role, or if that was just another of those things he paid lip service to. Which feels like it would have been better saved for a chapter focused on Moll, if Russo had taken the approach of devoting each chapter to specific people, as they became relevant to the filming.

The book could also use some editing. Awkward transitions abound, and just a lot of phrases that are clunky or poorly arranged. Russo will mention a particular event once - some of the crew using a day off from shooting to visit Angkor Wat - in the context of a rare moment where Redgrave seems in good spirits. Then he'll mention the same event again in a later chapter, in reference to some other person, but write it like he never mentioned it before. It's just strange, and pulls me out of the narrative.

'Though Mankiewicz had agreed during their courtship period that Redgrave could edit the verbose script to his liking, by the time they were in Saigon, the director had changed his mind. The one pattern made clear during the preliminaries of the picture was that Mankiewicz made grandiose promises to all members of the cast and production staff about altering the script. He gave the impression he spent hours in re-write. In fact, the director seemed to have simply stonewalled all the requests. Mankiewicz never intended to change a word of his script.'

Overdue Movie Reviews #6 - Dark City (1998)

A man (Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a bathtub, with no idea who he is and a rivulet of blood trickling from his forehead. He finds clothes, but also a corpse, a woman with bloody spirals carved in her body. The clerk in the hotel lobby calls him "Mr. Murdoch," and advises him to go to the automat to collect his wallet, because his room is no longer paid up.

Soon he knows his name is John Murdoch, but it means nothing to him. The police are hunting him as a serial killer of prostitutes, led by Detective Bumstead (William Hurt.) John's wife, Emma (Jennifer Connelly), alternately helps Bumstead search, and protects John from him. But that's all of no importance, the real threat the mysterious figures in black trenchcoats and hats, skin unearthly pale, that are pursuing John with strange powers. Powers he seems to have as well, which only a Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) may understand.

Dark City offers a strong clue about itself early on, when Emma visits Dr. Schreber, who was supposedly treating John. After she enters his office - itself peculiarly arranged, as the door with his name on it opens onto another long hallway before reaching his lab - she finds Schreber studying a giant, circular rat maze. It's not apparent at first, but as the scene ends, you see there's no exit. The maze's outer walls are solid, the rats are placed inside by Schreber lowering them in, and simply stuck until he chooses to remove them. Nor is there any sort of prize in the middle of the maze, or anywhere else.

(I'm not sure what Schreber was purporting to study with that. What rats do in the face of futility? Do they recognize futility? Is that the equivalent of what Mr. Book and the rest of the "strangers" are seeking in humanity?)

Because that's what this city that John, Emma, Bumstead, everyone inhabit really is. A giant maze. Director Alex Proyas makes the city reflect this. The layout, where the buildings tower over the characters, penning them into narrow, dark alleys, or all the staircases that wind around and around in spirals. (In one scene as he tries to traverse the city, John climbs one flight of stairs, only to reach the top and the next flight take him down. Moving, but getting nowhere.)

But also the way places are framed in shots creates a feeling of artificiality. The room Bumstead's former coworker, Walenski (who has learned the truth on his own), shut himself in looks ordinary enough when we're standing outside with Bumstead and Walenski's wife. Once we follow Bumstead inside, we see his head nearly touches the ceiling. Like he stepped into a dollhouse without realizing it. On the other end of things, when John visits his Uncle Karl and is shown to his childhood room, the initial shot makes him look tiny as he stands in the doorway, the ceiling towering over him. The camera is positioned in the opposite corner from the door, and we feel impossibly far away from John, for what is supposed to be a child's room. Nothing fits, because it's all surface level manipulation by beings tinkering with things to see what happens.

(Later, when John is going through his childhood possession, looking for something that will spark recognition, the shot is framed so that he fills most of it, standing over his old desk, only a little of the room visible behind him. His surroundings seemingly have adjusted to him, or he's adjusted his surroundings, in the same way he unconsciously fills the childhood scrapbook of his time at Shell Beach.)

Not necessarily relevant to the design of the city, the design of the machine the strangers use to amplify their abilities is very cool. The giant metal face that opens down the middle to reveal a giant clock that stops at 12 when they begin their work.

There's a nice contrast between the human characters - John, Emma, Bumstead, even Schreber - and the strangers. The strangers always move with a deliberate stride, never hurried (it feels like Proyas shoots those scenes in slow-motion, maybe.) They fly, but in a singularly undynamic way, looking like they're standing on an invisible conveyor belt. Even when Mr. Hand has himself injected with the life Murdoch was supposed to get, he still moves the same, still speaks in his same deliberate cadence. He has these memories, but that doesn't mean he understands them, why they were meant to possibly motivate John to kill. The same way they seem to have given themselves names, but it's just, objects. Mr. Hand, Mr. Wall, Mr. Book. Occasionally an adjective (Mr. Quick, unless it's for "cut to the quick")

Because there's no apparent significance to the names to them. All their memories and experiences are shared, there's no real individuality. Their body is whatever corpse of one of their subjects they happen to inhabit. Schreber makes no effort to distinguish them, and they don't care about that, either. They may be trying to understand humans, but they haven't gotten anywhere. Mr. Book says it would take a human lifetimes to learn to "tune", i.e., alter reality with their mind, not considering that a) that's true for his species, not necessarily humans, and b) in a way, John Murdoch has already lived innumerable lifetimes. Each time he got another set of memories imprinted on him, it's another life.

Whereas John is scrambling around in a rumpled coat and clacks, wild-eyed as he tries to piece together what's happened to him, what's wrong with this city, why the sun never shines, why no one can tell him how to get to Shell Beach. When he really embraces his power for the climactic fight, Mr. Book stands ramrod straight, but John lowers his head like a bull about to charge. When he flies, he leans forward like he's about to do a Superman (one arm extended.) He shifts, he adjusts, his feelings factor into his actions, whether they drive him to smash through a wall, or surrender to protect Emma.

Schreber shuffles along, wheezing out sly lines a few words at a time. It's a very odd performance by Sutherland, I'm curious why he took that route. But Schreber is in a peculiar place. He's an accomplice to the strangers, but also a victim. As he explains, he was allowed to retain his expertise in the human mind, but made to erase everything else. He doesn't know the name he was born with any more than John or any of the others do.

Bumstead is, outwardly, the closest to the strangers. Tall and thin, a measured stride, initially unaffected by another killing. A man who focuses on details like untied shoelaces or goldfish spared a slow death by asphyxiation. It's clinical, just work, a puzzle to be solved, then set aside. Walenski's wild claims are something to dismiss. But the longer he's involved, the more he's drawn in. Hurt doesn't lose the stilted, slightly awkward manner, but gives Bumstead a willingness to question, a flexibility of mind the strangers lack. If Bumstead lacks the air of authority to make people halt when he tells them to, he at least seems able to get people to talk to him.

Connelly plays Emma as soft-spoken, but certain. She doesn't know what John's been doing since he "moved out", didn't know about his seeing a doctor, but she doesn't believe he's a killer. Even when they meet - their first meeting, really - in their apartment, and she can't understand what he's talking about, she doesn't hesitate to bar Bumstead's path so John can flee. The strangers would likely attribute that to the memories they've provided, though John and Emma would argue otherwise.

It was a little strange to me, that John could fall for Emma so quickly, minus the memories she has of their "relationship", when they had something like two brief conversations. But I imagine that's the point. Love isn't a matter of logic or rationality, something the strangers could have Schreber implant or remove at a whim. It's something that happens, sometimes in an instant, and can't be recreated if you simply put one of the two people in the same location with a different person spouting the same lines, like when Mr. Hand follows John's "memories" to his first meeting with Emma and finds her there. They have a pleasant enough chat, but there are no sparks, nothing forms between them.

(Also, John doesn't have the memories of Emma's infidelity he's supposed to, which lets him see her with a clear eye.)

The final showdown suffers a bit from the special effects limitations of the late '90s, so that you get John and Mr. Book throwing wobbly translucent waves from their foreheads. The times where they manipulate their surroundings, like Mr. Book making parts of the floor erupt into massive spikes around John, are better. If the big deal is the ability to manipulate to reality, then that's what the conflict should revolve around. And John does ultimately win by making that building with the water tower grow so it's in Mr. Book's path.

I read once that, at least in dreams, water is a symbol for reaching a truth. So the strangers being vulnerable to it is a nice touch, even beyond water being something humans need to function. John's pursuit of answers points to a beach, to crashing waves, the kind of thing that repels the strangers. And John is able to learn at least some of what he wanted to know, while the strangers never get what they were after. They purposefully keep at a distance from water, because it kills them and their notion that a person is strictly the sum of their experiences, and it's just a matter of making the right combination of experiences to produce the result you want.

The Dangers of Civic Duty

Some guests are so demanding.

In Juror 13, things aren't going great for Jeremy. He's not over his girlfriend, Dawn, breaking up with him months ago, and his boss seems to suspect him of poor work handling insurance claims. His coworker Jake is trying to help take his mind off things, but strangely, watching Jake act like a pig to women in bars isn't doing much for Jeremy's mood. 

On top of that, he has to call in every night to see whether he's needed for jury duty. Being the conscientious sort, Jeremy calls in, and on the second night, is told to report to the courthouse the next morning. Once there, the person at the front desk remarks that he's 'Juror 13', but doesn't tell him what that means. Jeremy approaches the door he's directed to, depicted by artist Makoto Nakatsuka in 5 staggered, parallel panels, a strange swirling void around the door, and -

Jeremy's back at work! Where things get worse. He's handed one of Jake's claims, for a taxi crash. But the cab has none of the proper licenses or permits. Jake's not too happy about Jeremy handling his case, or when Jeremy gets handed Jake's expense account and sees a $200 charge for a steakhouse. Jeremy's boss seems more hostile and ready to assume the worst than ever, and now federal investigators are snooping. Jeremy's worried, but when Dawn actually agrees to meet, she assures him it's probably nothing.

If it's nothing, why is Jeremy now fleeing federal investigators on a stolen motorcycle? This continue to spiral until a big twist ending I really didn't see coming. It does have something to do with Jeremy's jury duty, which I had kind of dismissed by that point as either irrelevant, or sort of a dark joke. Jeremy's the 13th juror at his own trial, because he's judging himself, that kind of thing. The actual reveal is darker than that, and pretty effective. Especially since it presents an ending where the ripple effects will last for a long time after. Props to writer D.J. Milky for that.

Sunday Splash Page #401

"Skeleton Crew," in One Piece, vol. 46, ch. 442, by Eiichiro Oda

One Piece is, obviously, still not finished. There have been over 700 chapters since the one pictured above, and yet, not done! But, as there is no chance in hell I'm going to try and track this entire series down, we're going to hit it now.

So, One Piece is about Monkey D. Luffy, a kid whose dream is to become King of the Pirates. The last King of the Pirates died over 20 years ago, and, as he stood on the execution platform, announced to the world he left all his treasure in a mysterious location. The notion got started that whoever found the treasure would be the new Pirate King, which kicked off an "Age of Piracy," so there's no shortage of competition. There's also the fact Luffy ate a "Devil Fruit", which, while it made his body like rubber, with all the stretching and inflating that allows, also means he sinks like a stone in the water. As a pirate, sailing the seas, that's a bit of a pothole. So is the fact that he's often an impulsive idiot, in the sense of not learning basic seamanship before setting sail, or diving into the ocean to catch a fish he saw, despite the whole thing about sinking in the ocean.

Luffy travels the world, gathering a crew, each with their own dreams ranging from becoming the world's greatest swordsman, to making a complete map of the world, to finding a fabled place where all the ocean currents intermingle and all the world's fish can be found. They end up fighting pirates a lot, less over treasure than because those other pirates are hurting innocent people. The "Straw Hats" (named for Luffy's hat, a gift from a pirate he admires, who received it from the previous Pirate King) occasionally pursue treasure, but usually end overthrowing a dictator in the process.

On the one hand, it's often silly. The Straw Hats all behave like dorks or idiots at times, or have comical reactions to something ill-advised their captain does or says. Zoro and Sanji will start fighting with each other in the middle of a fight against enemies. They might fight a pirate that looks like a clown and is very self-conscious about his big red nose, or a guy whose Devil fruit lets him take on properties of things he eats, so he eats a house to gain protection, or eats himself to slim down and resume chasing someone through doors.

There are times the crew's disorganized, chaotic approach feels out of place in a tense situation, but it does contribute to that feeling this is not some well-honed, elite tactical unit. This is a friend-group of (mostly) teens trying to find their way through difficult situations on the fly.

Because Oda also establishes, almost from the start, that this world is deeply fucked. Luffy finds his first crew member tied to a post in a Marine base, where Zoro is enduring 30 days without food as part of a bet with the entitled son of the base's commander, as a way to protect a young girl and her mother. The brat runs roughshod over the town because his father kills anyone who opposes him, and fully intends to have Zoro executed as soon as watching him starve ceases to be entertaining.

The further along the series goes, the worse things get. There's a "World Government", but it's only real concern is maintaining the power of the people seated atop the world, in a "holy city" thousands of feet above the seas. The citizens of that city have almost unlimited leeway, including being able to murder other people if they see fit, or claim them as slaves. If a pirate takes over a random island, they don't care. If pirates kill or plunder from innocent people, not their problem. It's notable Luffy had defeated plenty of pirates, Marines, and even attacked the symbol of their judicial system, but it was only once he punched one of the holy city's citizens that an Admiral came down to squash him like a bug.

The Marines (or Navy depending on which translation you see) are ostensibly the peacekeeping force, but they can only help the regular people so long as the Government allows it. If the Government orders an entire island, and all its inhabitants killed, the Marines must either obey or die as well. Pirates can be offered positions as "Warlords", which means they help the Government out when requested, but can otherwise do whatever they want, including overthrow the governments of nations.

Luffy's grandfather is a famous Marine, but we see firsthand how useless he and his belief that he can serve "Justice" ultimately are, when he sits and watches a child he was entrusted with get killed, simply for who his father was. Monkey D. Garp can't bring justice to the worst people on the planet, because they're the ones giving him orders. The system isn't broken, and therefore can't be mended from within, because it works exactly the way the people who set it up want it to work.

Which is how it keeps falling to Luffy and his allies to fix all these situations, overthrowing dictators, crushing people who use others for experiments, for slaves, who starve a population or strike them with drought. When the system was built to be inherently biased a certain way, you won't get anywhere working within its structure.

(You'd think the fact his own son left the Marines to start a literal revolution would have tipped Garp off, but apparently not.) 

I don't love everything about the series. Oda leans a lot into "humor" about characters being perverts. Brook, the skeleton in the picture above, tends to ask women upon meeting them if he can see their underwear. Or Sanji's bemoaning the fact someone else go the invisibility Devil Fruit he always wanted, for sneaking into women's baths. The proportions Oda gives most of the women would give the worst excesses of '90s Image artists a run for the money, and that only seems to have gotten worse as the series progresses. There's not really any room in Robin or Nami's torsos for organs, unless they've somehow moved to inside their boobs.

Also, there was a big reveal in the last 100 chapters or so that Luffy's Devil Fruit is not what we had been told it was all this time. Instead, his is a super-special Devil Fruit with a historic lineage that the World Government wants contained. And I know that "the protagonist is actually really unique in some way," is a common shonen thing. Goku's an alien, Naruto's the vessel for an incredibly powerful spirit fox, I feel like there was all kinds of shit going on with Ichigo Kurosaki. But I liked the idea Luffy had what was regarding as a fairly low-level Devil Fruit, but, through his creativity, he could fight guys who control sand or lava or gas or manipulate time.

Plus, it's not internally consistent that the World Government knew the fruit was "disguising" itself as a "rubber" Devil Fruit, but this young pirate shows up, causing trouble with a rubber Devil Fruit, and they don't immediately send out the big guns to stop him? They wouldn't even have to explain why they're sending an Admiral after a rookie pirate with a bounty of only 30 million (it's over 3 billion now,) because they never have to explain. Especially if they pick the right admiral, AKA, the mass murdering Admiral Akainu.

Anyway, I like the series best up through the Ennies Lobby arc. Probably related to my preferences when it comes to superhero team roster sizes, I liked the Straw Hats at a crew of 7. It was manageable, you could, in theory, give everyone some time as the lead, or with a subplot, and everyone would be able to bounce off each other with some regularity. I wouldn't say the stakes were smaller - they were still stopping attempted coups, taking down power-mad tyrants and challenging the Government - but things were a little more focused.

The Straw Hats are up to 10 now, but there's maybe 2 crews allied with them, and an entire fleet that claims to follow Luffy, that I'm not entirely sure he even knows exists? And all that means a lot of time spent on backstories about this character or that character, many of whom I don't care about. The whole thing with Trafalgar Law and Dolflamingo might be One Piece's equivalent to Jean Grey and Scott Summers in the "dooooooooooon't care," category. And that means we might go dozens of chapters without any real focus on a character I do care about.

The series is supposedly in its "final arc", but I feel like I've been hearing that for 5 years. Oda seems to have so many plates spinning at once I don't know how he's going to bring things to a conclusion. That's his problem to solve, though there have been enough things he teased early in the series that paid off or turned out to be significant later, that I suspect he's had it largely worked out for a while.