What I Bought 6/2/2025 - Part 2

I love that in this year's NBA playoffs, "get a 15-point lead on the Indiana Pacers," is the worst possible thing you can do. With last night's Game 1 win in the Finals, the Pacers have now won 5 games (out of 13 total wins) where they were losing by 15 in the second half. It's bonkers, and hilarious, and just fantastic, really. 

Bronze Faces #3, by Shobo and Shof (writers), Alexandre Tefenkgi (artist), Lee Loughridge (colorist), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (letterer) - I still question how easily anyone can breathe and/or see through those masks, but they do grab attention.

Ogiso's still making waves with their heists of the Benin Bronzes, although it occurs to me, I don't know what they're doing with them. I'm not sure of what happens if a museum receives a donation of something stolen from another museum, so I don't know if they could just give them to a museum in Nigeria.

It may be a moot point, because even if the cop that's hounding them wasn't closing (in the party of a heavily armed private security company), the group itself is starting to fracture. The two brothers, Liam wants to take what they've earned and bail, while Declan's getting swept up in the symbolism of the work. Cisse, their forger and phony i.d. man, is hiding something. I'm guessing he's tipping off the detective.

But the real fault lines are Sango, Timi and Gbonka. Sango knows the other two are sleeping together, and this is making her pissy and volatile, to the point she treats the last member of their crew, who she's sleeping with, badly when her mood sours enough. I'm waiting to see if Shobo and Shof go into the backstory for those three a little more, because there's clearly some stuff going on. Especially with regards to how Sango seems to think everything within her view should belong to her, including Timi, that I'm not getting. So she just comes off as a spoiled child. If she really wanted Timi, maybe she could have tracked him down sooner, before all this. But it didn't interest her or suit her then, so she didn't. Snooze you lose.

Most of the issue is people in the crew talking, and Tefenkgi repeatedly goes with a panel-in-a-panel approach. The main panel shows most of the scene, and then the smaller one is like a zoom in on one person's face. And sometimes the other person in the scene is talking, so the tail of the voice balloon comes from the edge of the panel or somewhere beyond it. Nice way of grounding the smaller panel within the larger scene, but still guiding the focus where the creative team wants it.

Dark Pyramid #3, by Paul Tobin (writer), PJ Holden (artist), Sara Colella (color artist), Taylor Esposito (letterer) - Is this what happens when a population of goats gets isolated up on a mountain?

Becca seizes a moment of distraction to clock the general in the face with a rock, then smash some remote thing that was controlling or guiding Eve. So now Eve's killing soldiers and party people, which at least affords Becca and Shailene a chance to resume fleeing. They make it above the treeline and find a landmark because Hooky live-streamed himself peeing on the rock. Whatever works, I suppose.

Then they find a bunch of goats with human faces, who mostly say "Interior?" Then the military catches up, and while Becca and Shailene are able to convince Eve (who somehow got ahead of them without being noticed) to go attack the helicopter instead, that does nothing when General Cho and his boys show up. And then they kill all the goats as "abominations." I'm not inclined to disagree, but why are you just getting around to this now, and shouldn't you save some bullets for when Eve gets back?

I don't get the deal with Eve particularly. I can sort of parse some of what she says, and the bit where she picks up the rock Becca used and calls it "long sleeper", and "old friend" was kind of funny. Maybe it was meant to be disturbing, that Eve's maybe been around 60 million years, but it didn't hit that way. I do like Holden's design for Eve. The glowing eyes and thin slit of a mouth in front, then a huge, almost Venom-like grinning mouth on the back of the skull. And whatever Eve is, she can apparently twist her neck so the toothy mouth can face forward. Either that or she's able to run and jump backwards with great skill. Maybe that's the sort of thing you learn with 60 million years to burn.

Anyway, Becca and Shailene are back in the military's grasp, loaded on a truck, and oh, dang, looks like Hooky's dead. Tough break, can't even livestream a reaction video because General Cho will probably shoot them.