Saturday Splash Page #158

 

"Glimpse Behind the Veil," in Silver Surfer (vol. 2) #31, by Steve Englehart (writer), Ron Lim (penciler), Tom Christopher and Keith Williams (inkers), Tom Vincent (colorist), Ken Bruzenak (letterer)

When I was a kid, most of the Silver Surfer comics I got were part of grab-bag things you could get a grocery stores, and it was usually issues from Ron Marz and Ron Lim's lengthy tenure on the title. I don't know that I was fond of the character so much as I was fond of the look of him. Lim's Surfer is this impossibly shiny figure, zipping around at light speeds on a surfboard, chucking around energy blasts. He looked pretty cool.

But that was always in brief glimpses. A single issue here, part 2 of a 6 part story there, an Infinity Crusade (bleh) tie-in maybe. The only continuous stretch I've read is when I picked up Steve Englehart's 30-issue stint as writer a few years back.

Englehart starts by getting the Surfer past Galactus' barrier by having him hitch a ride with the FF in their spaceship. That's it, all it took to outmaneuver Big G was a little help from some friends, which I suppose means Galactus didn't expect the Surfer to be able to make friends.

The Surfer then ends up in the middle of two battles, which is part of a whole thing Englehart seems to be exploring about binary systems and those who fit on neither side. On the one hand, the Elders of the Universe, now safe from Death after she banished the Grandmaster for his stunt in the Avengers Annuals, are trying to destroy both Galactus and the universe itself, so they can take his spot as the eldest beings in existence, since they'll be the sole survivors of the previous universe, as he was. I'm not sure it tracks as a motive, but there it is.

That conflict concludes about halfway through Englehart's run, a few issues after Lim takes over as the regular penciler from Marshall Rogers, but the other thread, a war between the Kree and Skrulls, keeps going throughout. The Skrulls have lost their shape-changing abilities, though they're trying to keep that on the down-low, and the empire's fragmented into five factions. The Surfer wouldn't take any notice, except the Skrulls first imprisoned Galactus' current herald, Nova, to try and force him to act against the Kree, and when the Surfer rescued her, that put his homeworld of Zenn-La on the bullseye.

So the Surfer's caught between two worlds, or two levels maybe. The man that still feels things for Shalla-Bal and his home, and the. . .entity, cosmic being, whatever, that wants to fly free across the cosmos. He's not strictly a person any longer, but he's also not the personification of some universal constant, like Eternity or Death. Not quite human, or not only human, but not divorced from it, either.

The first year of the book, which is focused mostly on the cosmic struggle, is drawn mostly by Marshall Rogers. Rogers uses a lot of panels with a wide focus, the Surfer as a tiny speck against a sea of stars, emphasizing the vastness of space and the Surfer's isolation. Or to spread his movement across several tall, narrow panels, where it's like, now free of Galactus' barrier, the Surfer's moving too fast to be contained by anything. He may go across the page, then loop back diagonally and down. Space is infinite, the first issue tells us (and the 31st issue repeats), and so the Surfer can soar in any direction he chooses.

The Surfer also ends up repeatedly blindsided or just outmaneuvered in both conflicts. The Elders catch him off-guard more than once, and outside the Obliterator, the Surfer doesn't really defeat any of them. Most run afoul of the In-Betweener (meant to represent some combination of Chaos and Order, from a reality where those are the forces that hold sway, rather than Death and Eternity), and the Contemplator messes with the wrong group of telepathic plants, as well as a comic relief character turned scheming backstabber that's apparently a stand-in for Tom DeFalco, who was interfering with Englehart's stories.

And the Skrulls manage to draw the Surfer in on their side by getting him to assault a Kree fleet by, gasp, lying to him! At which point, since he's proclaimed himself as the protector of Zenn-La to the Kree, they decide the planet is fair game, and the Surfer has no choice but to throw in fully so the Skrulls will help protect his home. Basically, he's a straightforward and honest guy, which makes him easy to manipulate, and he's too noble to simply abandon people he's sworn to protect, or even those who suckered him into being their allies.

Lim draws most of the book that focuses on the Kree-Skrull War, and, related to a more political conflict, his Surfer is more human. More defined musculature, fewer panels with a distant POV. The Surfer is still fast, but his movement is more often constrained to single panels. He's locked into this struggle, and it limits his movements. He's caught at the schemes of the Kree and the Skrulls, moving in response to what they do, rather than just soaring the spaceways.

What I Bought 1/3/2025

Well, the books from last year haven't arrived yet, but that's no reason to delay reviewing a comic from this year. Besides, with Snowmaggedon 2025 readying its assault for this weekend, who know when anything will arrive?

Batgirl #3, by Tate Brombal (writer), Takeshi Miyazawa (artist), Mike Spicer (colorist), Tom Napolitano (letterer) - Strangers you beat on a train.

Shiva is trying to get Cassandra to trust her by actually talking to her, albeit in a manner that doesn't so much extol Shiva's virtues as it does dismiss Cassandra's connections with those she insists are her family (meaning, the assorted Bat-crew.) You know the spiel."They don't see the real you, not like I do. My blood is yours, etc."

What might have been more successful was Cass seeing train cars full of people who follow and worship Shiva's teachings, not simply as a destroyer, but as a protector and healer. Shiva leaves that mostly to one of her adherents, Jayesh, who treats Cass's wounds while explaining all the different faces he's seen of Shiva. Which is probably meant to get Cass to start seeing her mother beyond the simplistic deceiver viewpoint she's adopted thus far, especially as the conversation takes place during a walk through the train cars full of people who smile at her and go on about their lives and apparently love her mom. There's a nice panel where two kids are playing and as they run past, Cass pulls her cape in close so they don't get tangled or tripped by it.

All the while, Cass is searching for a threat and not finding it, until one poor ninja steps in and she's off to the races. We get five full-page splashes of Batgirl beating League of Assassin asses, while internally insisting there's nothing of her mother in her (rather, she's parts of all of her friends, like 'Barbara's will and Stephanie's heart.') Meanwhile, Shiva's chasing her down the train - and defending herself from the assassins, trying to reason with Cass. That the fight ends at a car with Nyssa Al Ghul and two people I don't know, and these are still more allies, doesn't do a lot to help Shiva's case.

Also, Jayesh's brother died when Cass and Shiva reached her temple, and Miyazawa draws both of whom looking like the guy that called out Batgirl, only to get beaten by Spoiler, in Cassandra's first series. I'm not sure if either of them is meant to be that character - Jayesh doesn't mention that fight, so it'd have to be his brother - or it's just a particular look some of her followers adopt.

I assume the point of the train fight is that Cass is behaving the way she claims her mother does. She doesn't protect anyone with that unnecessary attack, she only hurts people. I doubt these chumps would do much against the Unburied, but they might protect some of the non-combatants in the other cars. 

Still, it's hard for me to take Shiva at face value, even before we found out she teamed up with an Al Ghul. She claims the Unburied were coming after Cassandra whether Shiva showed or not, but doesn't explain why. Has never explained why any of them are considered threats to the Unburied, though I'm starting to assume Brombal is going for some "mystical plant" explanation for Cass's skill. Shiva got some of the plants, and the gain was passed to her daughter. It would explain all the insistence on blood Shiva's doing (beyond her trying to assert her connection with her daughter.)

The Best and Worst of Last Year's Distractions from Life

Welcome to 2025. Hopefully you spent the last night of 2024 doing something you enjoyed. With that preamble done, let's get to business.

BOOKS

27 books read this year, 15 fiction and 12 non-fiction. Fiction had more misses than non-fiction, which isn't surprising since I tend to get non-fiction that appeals specifically to a particular interest of curiosity, whereas fiction I'm more grabbing whatever catches my eye.

As far as the best fiction, I'd lean towards Black Sun and Fear of the Dark. The former did an excellent job laying out the world and the stakes for the characters specifically and in a larger sense, while still leaving surprises and mysteries for the subsequent books. And Fear of the Dark kept a lot of threads in the air successfully, without ever letting one of them set aside too long. And I liked Paris as a main character. Smart and insightful, but not in a way where he's always 10 steps ahead, and brave when he doesn't have time to think about it.

For worst, Nasty Cutter and Koko. Nasty Cutter didn't so much let certain threads lay fallow too long as it seemed to just forget about them entirely. And yet, a large part of the conclusion was predictable from early on, so there weren't really any effective surprises. Koko was just too padded out, the epilogue was entirely unnecessary, and the attempts to get us into the mind of the killer felt like Straub tried hard, but just didn't work and made me want to skip ahead until he started writing normally again. There were several others I read this year I didn't like, but Basil's War, for example, had the advantage that it maintained its momentum so I could breeze through it, and Interstellar Empire at least had an interesting concept behind it, even if Brummer didn't explore the part I really wanted him to.

OK, non-fiction. The Great Air Race, because I love aviation stuff, and the stories about all the challenges the pilots faced were really interesting to me. And Lancaster focused on the pilots enough, their motivations and backstories, to get me invested in them, even though the race was over a century ago. After that, there are several possible contenders, but I'm going with PrairyErth. There are definitely parts of the book that work better than others for me, but I feel like I can see what Least Heat-Moon was going for, even if I didn't always enjoy it. I like the way he digs into the history of this one specific place, not only what's remembered, but what is either on the verge of being lost, or already lost. How easily things get hidden or covered by time or ignorance.

But Least Heat-Moon is going to pull a rare feat, because I'm putting Blue Highways on my least favorite list. There are places where he lingers long enough to begin that deeper excavation, but most of the time he's skimming the surface of these places as he passes through. Plus, there's an element of wistful longing that I don't enjoy that I think is absent (or less noticeable at least) in PrairyErth. And then Fen, Bog & Swamp just wasn't what I was hoping for. Too much on history, not enough on ecology, and sometime the ecology isn't even about fens, bogs or swamps.

MOVIES

53 movies, albeit the first three I actually watched in 2023, but I reviewed them in '24, so whatever. My main takeaway is, while I've definitely cut down the number of movies I watch where I deeply regret it, there weren't many that I would say I loved. Maybe I'm just too jaded.

This is between movies that were never going to be good, and movies I can see the core of something I like that failed to materialize. A Better Way to Die is in the first category, because it was always just a crappy action movie that feels like it arrived 10 years too late for the genre, while Just Before I Go is in the second. But, Just Before I Go probably did what the people involved wanted it to, I just think there was something better in it. Then there's movies like Extract, which didn't cohere into anything. Whatever it wanted to do, I think it failed (I'd throw Stir Crazy into that category as well.)

With all that said, I'm going with Any Gun Can Play and 5th Passenger as the worst movies I watched this year. The latter was a throwback experience to me watching some shitty Netflix movie to have something to post about, which was not the plan when I picked it. Any Gun Can Play irritated me the way it couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a straight Italian Western, or parody The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. When it chose parody, it was a shitty parody. Not funny, not even interesting. Just a dull and unpleasant viewing experience all around.

I'm just going to list the contenders for best, and we'll go from there: Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Lighthouse, Spoor, Beyond the Black Rainbow, The Quarry, The Duellists, and We're No Angels.

The Lighthouse and Beyond the Black Rainbow are both on here based on their distinct visual choices, although Dafoe and Pattinson put on a real show in The Lighthouse. Both end kind of weirdly, although Beyond the Black Rainbow's abrupt resolution caught me completely off-guard in a way I'm still not sure whether I like the choice or not.

Spoor and The Quarry are both quieter films, where violence is mostly alluded to, but rarely seen on-screen, as the movies focus on either the aftermath, or what fills in peoples' lives around the loss. Spoor has the advantage that it's also a mystery, and I think it does a very good job of setting out clues without being too obvious that's what it's doing, instead making it seem like a view of how a character is perceived by others. You could maybe throw The Duellists in this group as well, as a lot of it is what Keith Carradine's character gets up to when he's not being challenged to duels by Harvey Keitel, and how those duels harm his life, even as they seem to aid his reputation.

Everything Everywhere All at Once had some real fun with the multiverse concept, while also doing a lot with the relationships between parents and children in a way that didn't seem over-simplified or preachy. It also had some good fight scenes, so that helps put it over the top. Spoor is really making a strong push in my mind, but I think it's going to finish 3rd. We're No Angels was just a comedy with a sort of Odd Couple pairing - although it was really 2 Odd Trios - but it got several laughs out of me, and not a lot of comedies this year can say that - Cadillac Man, Extract, and Stir Crazy all largely failed, for example - and that counts for a lot.

MUSIC

I only got 5 CDs last year. The Red Hot Chili Peppers Greatest Hits, Rozalla's Everybody's Free, My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade, Rage Against the Machine's self-titled album, and The Best of Miles Davis: The Capitol/Blue Note Years.

I'd probably pick the Miles Davis album as my favorite. I certainly liked it more than his Kind of Blue album. It doesn't surprise me I prefer a faster-paced jazz, but I know little enough about jazz I just stumble about until I run into what I like. Least favorite was Rozalla's, but that's my fault, because I was expecting a different version of "Everybody's Free." Needed to go into Aquagen's discography instead!

VIDEO GAMES

Worst game was Alekhine's Gun, because I could not get anywhere in it. Not that it was broken, that I could tell, just, I couldn't figure out how the game wanted me to play it to be successful. In terms of games I actually made some sort of progress on, I'd tap Until Dawn. It was fun on the first playthrough, but the jump scare aspect works contrary to the butterfly effect mechanic that encourages replaying it. There's enough overlap you come to expect the scares, at which point they don't work. Plus, I didn't love all the quick-time button press events. I could also make an argument for The Outer Worlds (felt like a watered-down FallOut), or The Last Guardian (looks great, plays not-so-great.)

Favorite games? Metro: Exodus and Indivisible. Metro: Exodus felt like it combined the gameplay improvements from Metro: Last Light I'd enjoyed, with the stronger story and character beats from Metro 2033. Maybe I was just in a more receptive state of mind, but I cared a lot more about the other Spartans than I did in Last Light, so I actually wanted to keep them alive. And taking the story outside the Metro at least allowed for a change in scenery, even if the actual gameplay is much the same.

With Indivisible, I liked the look of the game, I liked the combat, I liked the variety of skills they gave Ajna to navigate all the platforming challenges, even if the platforming itself often wore on my nerves and my patience. Mostly, I liked the characters beats and interactions. As with Metro, the game did a great job making me care about the characters I was working with, by encouraging me to interact with the outside all the fighting and mandatory cut-scenes. And it worked, to the point I wanted to help them with all their side quests (a marked difference from The Outer Worlds, where I was mostly helping my crew because it might lead to something funny, rather than out of any loyalty to them.)