What I Bought 5/4/2026 - Part 3

I finished rewatching Soul Eater last week. It's funny that it takes about half the anime to get through maybe a quarter of the manga. If I ever actually get all those "perfect editions" of the manga, I guess I can expect a very different story. Hopefully one without chapters devoted to Excalibur, because that joke got old fast.

Is Ted OK? #1 and 3, by Dave Chisholm (writer/artist/letterer) - If "Ted" is another of Johnny Storm's bad aliases, then yeah, he's probably OK. Otherwise, no.

So, starting from the beginning: Sarah's job for Ayn-Styne is to monitor three employees in the marketing division for suicidal or homicidal tendencies, though she suspects only the latter is really important to the company. One of the three Sarah watches - as much as possible, no matter where the employee is - is Ted Green, who comes up with ads designed to play on people's fears. Ted doesn't talk to anyone, except a stray cat he visits on his way home. Sarah's concerned, but her boss can barely pronounce Ted's name, and Brody - the man-bun wearing macho idiot, doesn't think there's anything to worry about. So Sarah followed Ted, lost him, then drove her scooter right in front of him causing him to crash and his car to burn. But Ted was fine by the start of issue 2.

By issue 3, Ted's having nightmares where a blood (and mascot chicken head) covered version of himself spouts dire portents at him. Sarah's hanging out with Ted outside work, in an effort to help him, but in violation of the company's ethics code about fraternizing with co-workers (not that Ted knows that they're co-workers.) But Brody doesn't much worry about that when he pressures her into a date, because his department handles violations of the ethics code.

At a big presentation where their company head, Noah, announces he's running for President, and his employees are now his campaign team, Ted learns Sarah works for Ayn-Styne, freaks out and accuses his coworkers of being aliens, gets shot in the head by Brody, and then flies away, with Sarah. Meanwhile, the reporter from the second issue has revealed Noah's companies control all the militaries that are about to start a war over whatever's locked in that Dome.

One thing I'm curious about, Sarah is narrating all this in voicemails she's leaving for someone. Someone she hasn't named, but left behind when this job required her to move cross-country. Someone she says Ted reminds her of. My guess is the person is dead, and she's trying to save Ted as some proxy, but I don't know.

I'm also curious about the color schemes Chisholm is using. Ted's office space is this blue-white I assume is replicating fluorescent lighting. It's cold and almost unpleasant to look at. Kind of washes everything out. He kind of leaves behind a similar color as an energy trail when he flies. His apartment is mostly a darker, duller blue of his TV, which he uses for playing video games. Except when he wakes from nightmares, at which point Chisholm drenches the panel in a dark red. The same color returns, maybe a little brighter, during the whole crazy scene in the elevator with Sarah and Brody. Awakening from nightmares is like a rebirth?

Meanwhile, Sarah's office/apartment is a sort of bland tan-yellow. I guess it could be considered soothing, or at least not unpleasant. Also, no one has anything on the walls in their offices or apartments. There are shelves and coat hangers, but no posters, no paintings, no photo collages. I don't know if that's significant or not. Things seems a little more technologically advanced than we are. Motorcyles and airplanes leave lines of glowy rings as trails behind them rather than exhaust or anything. There are holographic ads that project off the billboards. So maybe everyone's abandoned tactile, analog representations of art? Although people still have phones, and Ted's using a console with a controller, but it looks about 8-bit in the graphics, if that, so it may be a deliberately archaic choice by him.

One other thing in issue 3 that Chisholm does three times - once on a single page, twice on double page - is almost do a splash page, but then have a single, rectangular panel in the far right corner. The last thing before you'd go to the next page. He didn't use that in issue 1 or issue 2, so I wonder why he brought it out 3 times here. There are other pages where the lower right corner panel is a square and the panels above and to the left give the impression of boxing it in, so maybe it's a sign someone's options are being closed off? Ted's, or Sarah's? Or both? 

Sunday Splash Page #426

"Not First Law Compliant," in Menace #11, by John Romita (artist), Joe Letterese (letterer), writer and colorist unknown

Menace was, as you might guess, a horror title. This is actually from the last issue, although it's not the cover story (that was "Locked In!") The robot has no name in the original story; the name Parker gave it is a reference to being in the 11th issue. In the Agents of Atlas ongoing, he's revealed as the 11th robot in what's called the "Menacer" series, and Suwan has a much more recent model, albeit one that can't compete on its own with all the Uranian science components M-11's gotten from Bob.

The original story is only 5 pages, revolving around a scientist who refuses to release his robot until it's perfect, to the annoyance of his business manager who wants the 5 million bucks they can get for it. The robot obeys commands, but doesn't know when to stop obeying. You tell it to pick up a chair, it picks up one, then another, and keeps going until it's picked up every chair. A flaw the manager isn't aware of when he gets impatient and tells the robot to kill "the man in the room." Which is the end for the scientist, but also the end for the manager, as another man in the room.

In Agents of Atlas, the scientist, realizing the people who commissioned him planned evil things, sacrifices his life force to the machine so it will have emotions and free will. The fun is that, with the '50s sci-fi robot design, M-11 doesn't make facial expressions. So no one, including his teammates, can really tell what's going on in his head. There's no indication Bob can read his mind, or that Venus' emotional abilities have any effect whatsoever.

Sometimes Parker plays that for mystery. Everyone is standing silently in Bob's spaceship, and M-11 suddenly shouts "Archiving!" before going silent again. Sometimes it's for comedy, when Gorilla Man thinks the robot needs a push to get angry to win the fight with M-21 and gets a personality module based on "The Greatest" installed. M-11 spends a few pages talking like Muhammad Ali before Bob reveals the module didn't work at all and M-11's just humoring Ken.

And sometimes M-11 sparks conflict. He's the one that contacts Bob and Ken about Jimmy Woo, and it's only late in the mini-series everyone figures out why. In the ongoing series, Jimmy has just about talked their way out of a fight with the Avengers when M-11 recognizes Wolverine's voice. Because Logan blew him up during a mission in Cuba in the '50s, and M-11, like Michael Jordan, took that personally. But Logan doesn't put the pieces together - so much for House of M giving him his memories back - and M-11 won't explain his actions to anyone. It's just a thing they have to deal with.

Oh well, not like killer robots and X-Men get along all that well anyway.

Saturday Splash Page #228

"Gorilla Mad," in Men's Adventure #26, by Robert Q. Sale (penciler/inker), writer, colorist, letterer unknown

Gorilla Man's first appearance is a horror story, significantly altered and embellished by Parker and probably other writers. In Agents of Atlas, Ken Hale was a big time sportsman and adventurer type, not unlike Rex Mason before he became Metamorpho. Except Hale started to get paranoid about aging and looked for a cure. Leading him to a legend about a gorilla man that never ages, never gets sick or dies. Ken treks into the jungle, gets lost, runs out of food and water, and then comes face-to-face with the gorilla man. He kills it, hand-to-hand because his gun is empty, and becomes it. But he won't age, get sick or injured, or die! Of natural causes, anyway.

In this story, though, Ken Hale just seems to be some guy living the suburban lifestyle with his wife, who starts being tormented by nightmares of two gorilla creatures fighting to the death. Things get bad enough he can hear the howls of the beast even while awake, so he's got to find a solution or go mad. One pipe-smoking guy (who Parker reveals was Mr. Lao, the dragon that's the power behind the throne of the Atlas Organization) gives him a lead to Kenya. Hale can't find any guides who either have any idea where to look, or are willing to take him, so he goes alone. And finds the gorilla man. He drops his gun and fights it, and kills it, and well, you know the rest.

Parker's approach works a lot better, since it provides a real reason for Ken Hale to go hunt down the gorilla man beyond "he started having nightmares, for some unexplained reason." Giving Ken the pulp hero-style adventurer backstory lets him fill the "gruff, but lovable" archetype on the team. Can't go wrong having a Ben Grimm on your roster! He can have all kinds of esoteric knowledge and skills he picked up in his travels and adventures, but still have plenty of things he doesn't know that can be explained to him (and us.)

Gorilla Man might be the one that needs the team the most. Yeah, Namora being unfrozen is a definite upgrade for her, but once that was accomplished she could always return to Atlantis. Venus had found a place, Bob was living with the Uranians. Jimmy Woo obviously wasn't satisfied with how his career had gone, but he did still have a job and colleagues who either trusted him enough, or were desperate enough, to follow him down the Atlas rabbit hole (and get incinerated by Mr. Lao.)

Gorilla Man's apparently working for SHIELD - maybe in that monster version of the "Howling Commandos?" - but he didn't even know Woo recommended him for the spot. He doesn't seem to have any particular loyalty to SHIELD. He throws them over to help Jimmy without a second thought, so I doubt he formed any lasting friendships. But the guy who got him to stop hiding away in the jungle? That's the guy he'll go to the wall for, who helps him believe what he's doing matters.

That said, I think he's gotten easily the most use outside Agents of Atlas of any of the characters. He was performing some sort of role for the Avengers when they were based out of a frozen Celestial. May still be doing that, actually. He was on some "Agents of Wakanda" team a few years back. He's a talking gorilla, and like I said, he can be sort of the Ben Grimm on any roster, so naturally people are going to want to use him. 

What I Bought 5/4/2026 - Part 2

I got through Read or Die: The TV Series back in April on my anime rewatch. It was pretty good. I appreciate the silly sibling stuff between the Paper Sisters more than I remember in the past. Then Mr. Joker showed his face around episode 15, and it was ten episodes of me groaning, "Just shoot the fucker, stop listening to his bullshit!" But they never listen.

Generation X-23 #3, by Jody Houser (writer), Jacopo Camagni and Marco Renna (artists), Erick Arciniega (color artist), Ariana Maher (letterer) - So that foul-up where Laura got resurrected during the Krakoa era with a full adamantium skeleton, instead of just her claws, never got undone? Poor quality control.

The whole thing where the previous issue ended with X-Infinite saying Laura must be held responsible for two deaths is not really followed up on. Laura's alone in the infirmary, until some of those weird time shards show up, then vanish. So now Laura's got questions, and X-92's got a lead on answers. Which, predictably, point to X-Infinite, who is experimenting with some of Laura's skin that got scorched off.

As it turns out the kid's attempts to file reports that everything in the facility didn't work as well as they thought, Laura, Infinite and 92, escape. Infinite admits that, once the scientists figured out he was smarter than them, they made him help with their work. So all the other kids having multiple powers is his doing, and it's the old, a "Wolverine's healing factor could save them," bit. Well, at this point it's more like Laura's propensity for stabbing could save them. 

With the apparently abrupt passing of Jacopo Camagni, I don't know if Renna's going to be the regular artist on the book going forward. If so, I don't know if this issue is representative of their work. I would figure they were working under a time crunch, since they probably weren't expecting to draw 13 pages of this particular comic. Here, at least, Renna's style seems a little simpler than Camagni's. Faces and bodies are more basic shapes, fewer little details. Might simply not had enough time for as much shading, because I feel like that's a big difference between the two. There's more gradation and depth to Camagni's pages.

That said, Renna's art works perfectly well. The fight between Laura and X-Infinite is easy enough to follow. I'm not sure why one of the soldiers who attacked the facility is a giant, robotic crab-centipede-person, but it was a pretty impressive reveal. Got me to stop, blink, and wonder where the heck that thing came from.

Touched by a Demon #3, by Kristen Gudsnuk - As the city burns, one man tries to hide his eyes behind some strange wrapping paper.

Having concluded demons giving humans advice is not helpful, Frons takes the priest's recommendation of providing tools literally. So this week's client, Max, was given a chimp's paw, granting 5 wishes. Not a monkey's paw, mind you. No ironic comeuppance! But do I get a free frogurt with it? If you wish for one, I guess.

So after wishing for $10 million in an offshore account (the password to which he forgot), and an endless bag of weed and Adderall (which might have something to do with forgetting the password), Max starts messing around with people's free will. Making the girl he likes love him, making her kinks conform to his, for him to feel fulfilled. Stuff like that. But, as long as he doesn't try to make a sixth wish, he's fine.

Then he casually wished for them to not have to go into work and an earthquake knocked their office building - among other structures - down. I feel like Gudsnuk missed an easy joke there. When Max makes that wish, one of the chimp's fingers uncurls, and it isn't the middle one.

Despondent over another failure, Frons comes to the priest's church to aid in their relief efforts with a big sack of cash he. . .summoned from Hell, I think. Then he confronts Father Angelo, who he blames for giving him bad advice. Angelo either hasn't twigged to Frons being a demon, or is just jerking him around, but he claims to have found something that suggested fallen angels could be redeemed, and seems to be semi-related to Frons' idea of shattering souls to create something of pure evil. Except, you know, the flip side. Frankly, the idea of the soul as something you can chip pieces off of like some oversized ice cream cookie cake is maybe the part I'm having the most trouble with.

Oh, and the cop showed up at their office, looking into the disappearance of Wendy's family. And right as Frons' boss (Mammon) shows up. If somebody burned a roast I'm going to think I fell into an '80s sitcom. But no, in all seriousness, I'm really interested to see how Gudsnuk pulls this together with one issue to go. Interested and worried, since I actually like all these goofballs and I'm worried it's going to end badly for them. Especially Wendy, who did, you know, kill her asshole parents and her perpetually terminally ill older sister.

1222 - Anne Holt

A train crashes during a terrible winter storm in an isolated village in Norway. There's only one fatality - the man driving the train - and a hotel nearby offers shelter and food to everyone until the storm passes and they can be rescued.

Too bad people start dying. A well-known member of the clergy, then another member of the clergy who seemed to know something about what happened to his colleague. And there's a mysterious group that was traveling in a special carriage, who are sequestered with an entire floor to themselves. Nobody knows exactly who is up there, or what they're doing.

Trying to pull apart the puzzle is Hanne Wilhelmsen, a former cop, now in a wheelchair after getting shot a couple of times. Hanne really doesn't want any part of the mess, but figures they ought to at least attempt to gather some information for when the police can actually get there. She's aided by the person who runs the hotel, a lawyer who lives in the area, and a doctor that was on his way to a conference.

Hanne is an interesting choice for a protagonist. She's so reluctant, not just in her hesitance to get involved in the case, but about everything. She was traveling to meet with a specialist about certain quality of life issues she was dealing with, but doesn't seem like she really wanted to make the trip. She doesn't like to deal with people, explaining at one point that while they interest her, she prefers observing them through fiction. While her injury may have contributed to this attitude, the impression we get is she was already like that, and had been for a very long time.

She says she finds herself liking the doctor, but balks on the cusp of inviting him to dinner. He asks her to call him sometime, and she can come to dinner at his home. She says she will. Then she says she never did. I'm not sure someone's whose personality is so close to mine is really cut out for the lead role in a series of mysteries. It feels like Holt will really have to work to contrive circumstances for Hanne to get involved in mysteries if her instinctive reaction is, "Oh God, I have to be around people?"

It makes the fact she takes an interest in a teenage boy who seems to be traveling alone all the more inexplicable. Holt doesn't delve into Adrian's backstory, though if he's going to become a recurring character, I assume she will at some point. But I couldn't decipher why Hanne locked in on him to begin with, even before the murders started. He was pretty hostile towards both victims, but it never feels like the story is pointing to him as the killer.

(My money was on the doctor, especially once he made a comment that, as a dwarf, people weren't bothered by his condition because they didn't regard him as a threat. Plus, he's the one who suggests the second victim was stabbed with an icicle.)

Holt throws in several threads that end up being unrelated to the mystery, and I can't tell if these are things she's putting in place for future stories, people that Hanne will encounter again in other contexts, or if they were simply red herrings for the readers. There are also several references to earlier events in her life, like the President of the United States shooting an FBI agent in Hanne's living room, that I suspect would be expanded upon later. Maybe Holt was going to work backwards?

'If the perpetrator had actually been in the lobby when Cato Hammer's death was announced, we could only hope that he or she accepted the incorrect cause of death as a temporary declaration of peace from the hotel management.

People must be kept calm at all costs.

Including the perpetrator.' 

What I Bought 5/4/2026 - Part 1

Last week, things started going haywire with my computer protection whenever I got on the internet. I was getting concerned, but whatever was going on seems to have resolved itself on Monday. I know I'll have to get a new computer eventually, but not yet.

Originally, the stuff I ordered from April weren't projected to arrive until today, but it showed up on Monday afternoon instead, so we can dive in.

Dust to Dust #8, by JG Jones (writer/artist), Phil Bram (writer), Jackie Marzan (letterer) - I think he needed to make the "O" bigger, because it looks like the sign says "NOV" instead of "NO."

Things come to a head. The rainmaker's foul-up starts a fire that burns down the church, revealing the corpse of the baseball player and the preacher's daughter. The sheriff went to confront the moonshiners, except they've been dead for like three issues. Sarah the reporter tries calling the feds, who are slowly making their way to town, but get waylaid by the dangling corpse of the rainmaker and a sudden artillery barrage that makes them crash in front of the lunatic in the gas mask.

Meanwhile, the mayor's losing his grip, as he starts trying to kill his daughter when she says she's leaving, with Sarah and the sheriff making the last-second save. The fight is a lot of small panels of discrete actions. A punch, someone screaming, a hand near a safe. You can figure out what's going on, but there's not a lot of flow to it. Anyway, the mayor enters full "kill everyone and blame it on the sheriff" mode. Which does not pan out.

So, I'd been hemming and hawing over whether the mayor or his PTSD-afflicted brother was the guy in the gas mask killing people. Turns out it's sort of a two-man operation, the mayor picking the targets and the brother killing them. Also, the mayor stole his brother's girl while the guy was off at war, and so it was actually Van's daughter that was going to marry the now-deceased baseball player.

I feel like it's way too late in the game to be revealing secret parents, but this whole thing is paced weird. The rainmaker makes sense in the broader drought-afflicted aspect of the story, but he really just feels like an excuse for one more body on the pile. The firebrand preacher is just kind of there, I guess to have a daughter to fool around with the baseball player and a convenient church to burn down. The sheriff sort of gets his act together at the end, but he doesn't really do much. Sarah is as responsible for saving Jenny as he is, and Van is the one who kills the mayor.

Spirit of the Shadows #4, by Daniel Ziegler (writer), Nick Cagnetti (writer/artist/colorist), Ferran Delgado (letterer) - Problem with the blue guy wearing a Darkseif skirt, you get a bad view when looking.

Still moving between flashbacks and the present, though we're getting flashbacks as told by Erik and by Elizabeth finding pages of the book. The doc that brought Erik back to life is the one who killed him, on the orders of Katrina's dad. The dad wanted his wife back, and considered Erik an acceptable guinea pig for trying to bring someone back. Then Erik killed the dad by burning the house down, Katrina had followed him there and died as well, with no body to try to resurrect. So Erik started abducting women - like Elizabeth - to try and use as hosts for Katrina's soul.

In the present, the witch and the ghost of Katrina's dad are trying to make Erik extra-super-duper-dodecatuple-dead. No afterlife at all, no resurrection, because your soul's just destroyed. Which can apparently done by a spell, if the person asks for it. So they make Erik think he's got no chance whatsoever of being reunited with Katrina which, based on what I've seen through 4 issues, yeah, he shouldn't. The doctor makes some pitch to Elizabeth that maybe by saving her back in issue 1, he started to save himself, but, come on. She was dead and in that situation because of him. Give me a fucking break. 

So what we've got is an endless string of people who can't accept losing someone and just pass the pain on to someone else. Laemmle wanted his wife back, but she was already beyond his reach and all he ended up doing was killing someone he resented for trying to take something else he deemed his. Erik couldn't let that pass, and his revenge cost him Katrina, except he couldn't accept that and killed Elizabeth and a lot of other women. And now Elizabeth's sister is out for Erik's head because she thinks he's cost her the chance to bring her sister back.

But Elizabeth's a more forgiving type, so she's going to try and save Erik, which requires her to confront a sister she doesn't seem to recognize. So we'll see if someone finally breaks the chain. It won't be Laemmle, considering he's animating a suit of armor and ran the doctor through at the issue's end. Oh well, the doc was pretty smug for someone complicit in the deaths of a lot of people at the hands of these grief-afflicted dopes.

Hangmen Also Die! (1943)

Set in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, a doctor who is part of the resistance manages to assassinate the "Reich Protector", aka the Nazi currently running the country. Who was nicknamed "The Hangman", so you know he was a friendly guy.

Dr. Svoboda's (Brian Donlevy) getaway driver got hauled away before they could, er, get away, so the doc fled on foot, and Mascha (Anna Lee) helped by sending the Gestapo the wrong way. Later, when he can't find a place to hide from patrols, he spends the evening with her family in their apartment. Where he claims to be an architect who met Mascha at an event, but then shows a surprising amount of medical knowledge.

Must be nice, going to college when it was cheap enough you could switch majors that casually.

The Nazis, as they like to do, gather up hundreds of citizens and stick them in a camp, promising to execute some each day until the assassin is handed over. This includes Mascha's father, a professor played by Walter Brennan.

There's really two key threads in this film, both revolving around the assassination, tied together by Gestapo Inspector Gruber. One is whether Svoboda should surrender himself, the other about a member of the underground who is actually working for the Gestapo, his point of contact being Gruber. In the latter, there's focus on a debate among the underground about what to do, growing suspicion of Mr. Czaka (Gene Lockhart), and his eventual exposure.

In the former, you have Svoboda struggling with guilt over innocent people dying because of him, and Mascha, torn between wanting to save her father and not wanting to help the Nazis. There's an element of peer pressure in both. A resistance member convinces Svoboda not to turn himself in, even after the doctor explains his intent to write a confession and then kill himself with the gun he used. At one point the resistance tries to redirect Mascha's carriage to convince her not to talk, and when she panics about being abducted and makes a scene, everyone on the street starts harassing her about why she wants to speak to the Gestapo if they haven't summoned her.

The film also checks in on Brennan and the other prisoners periodically, as they have their own debates about whether the assassin should give himself up to save them, or whether they'll agree to speak over the radio to the public. Of course, the Nazis have already prepared their speeches, which is the point the film really hammers again and again. Collaboration is a sucker bet. The Nazis will not honor the terms. They'll make promises, but once they have what they need, there's no reason to keep them. They aren't your friends, they won't protect you when the ax is about to fall, as Czaka finds out.

The last third of the movie is almost like a heist or con film, as many people band together to keep Svoboda's name clear, by pinning the assassination on Czaka. It's clever enough, and Lockhart really sells Czaka's bluster as a cover for how panicked he is as he realizes his fellow Czechoslovakians are turning against him, and the Nazis are only too willing to swallow the lie. Plus, it follows the theme of everyone being in this together, because the resistance manages to pull together "witnesses" to implicate Czaka where the Gestapo can find no links between them to suggest it's a frame-up. They managed to get everyone on board with this plan, in a short amount of time, leaving the traitor alone, with no one to speak for him but himself.

The movie blessedly avoids a romance subplot between Svoboda and Mascha, though they have to put on appearances a couple of times. That introduces an additional element of tension since Mascha is engaged, and it doesn't appear her fiance knows what's going on. When Gruber starts buddying up to him, there's real concern this is where everything will fall apart.Mascha is torn between fear for her father and anger at both the Nazis and Svoboda, with Lee depicting her as almost whipsawing between emotions at times, then scrambling to undo the damage one hasty decision made, with another hasty decision. Donlevy spends the entire movie walking like he's wearing cement boots, the guilt just weighing him down.

A Poisoned Heart

That's your excuse for all your bad habits. The smoking, the excessive consumption of sleeping pills, making people drag you around in a coffin. . .

In the seventh volume of No Longer Allowed in Another World, Annette, Tama and Nir have learned it's Archibishop Elton running a secret prison beneath the castle that holds Otherworlder children and sends them out on missions. But Elton is a dear friend of Annette's, can she find the strength to confront him?

Well she better, because he's beaten up Sensei and thrown him in a cell, and dispatches Yamada's crew of do-gooders with ease. Sensei at least has the fairy whistle he was gifted, so he can call on Solulu - stress-eating after dealing with him a couple of times - to free him, but in typical fashion, he's more interested in what's going on inside Elton than actually stopping the guy.

Annette does get it together, but her big plan of using light magic against a goblin doesn't work, because the holy robes Elton wears negate the effect. She's still able to protect Itsuki, an Otherworlder she mentored when he first arrived, though it leaves her badly injured. And that's when Sensei shows up. It's a little strange because writer Hiroshi Nota has Sensei praise Annette for her convictions, then tell Elton that he's 'furious.' But all that results is him trying to dig into Elton's motivations.

I'm not expecting Sensei to start throwing punches, but at least exhale some cigarette smoke in the Elton's face if you're really that angry. It feels like something that was set up for the splash page as a big "oooooh" moment, but there's no pay off. Sensei's always demanding people tell him their life stories and motivations, being furious has nothing to do with it.

At any rate, the backstory is that when Elton was first assigned as a representative of the Church to Blau Kingdom, people didn't want a goblin around. Except Queen Saphira, a child then, who believed all races could be friends if humans just opened their hearts to others. Elton tried to make it a reality, even reaching out to an Otherworlder named Kaoru, who got sent here without any special skill and embraced apathy and cynicism. Which are very cool attributes, but not helpful for surviving a medieval fantasy kingdom. Elton eventually got through, and after being intensively trained, Kaoru was assigned to Saphira's guard.

And then Kaoru and Saphira caught feelings, a bitter pill for Elton, who loved Saphira for her kindess and acceptance. So he sent Kaoru off in an attack against the Dark Lord and decided all Otherworlders were good for was attack dogs. Elton, understandably, gets pissed at Sensei pulling out all his hidden pain and crimes, but his freak out leaves him vulnerable to a combo attack from Annette and Nir. Even that doesn't quite end things, as there's one last reveal that paints Elton and Annette's boss, His Holiness, in a ominous light.

So Annette stands on her own, even when Sensei isn't backing her up. Nir continues to grow in bravery and skill. Tama, doesn't get much of anything (and trend that will continue into the next volume.) There's possibly something put in play with one of the Fallen Angels, who makes a last second save and was someone Saphira and Elton know. Maybe he'll get involved again later, assuming the apathy and cynicism haven't overtaken his heart once more.

Sensei does actually finish the story he writes based on Elton's pain, but the people of the kingdom have developed their own idea about Elton and who he his. Sensei bows to popular opinion, so it's another unpublished work.

Sunday Splash Page #425

"Cliffs of Peril," in Marvel Mystery Comics #82, by Ken Bald? (penciler), George Klein? (inker), writer and letterer unknown

Namora has the earliest appearance of the characters that would go on to be the Agents of Atlas, making her debut 15 months prior to Venus. A bunch of crooks - who own their own submarine, as crooks commonly did in the 1940s - attack the undersea kingdom - not called Atlantis, because it seems to be in the Pacific - Namor and Namora call home while Namor's off pursuing crooks in Asia. Everyone gets shot in what is essentially a jewel heist, but Namora's only grazed. So when Namor comes home, they team up, and catch up to the crooks when they try to rob a gambling boat.

Seems like you'd try that before throwing on scuba gear to attack an entire kingdom. Scale up, not down.

Namora gets saddled with the old chloroformed and taken hostage bit, but Namor sends her a message in a broadcast meant to make the crooks think there's a lot of jewels hidden in a particular place. The trap works, the crooks are caught, and Namor foists Namora off on his old friend Betty Dean. Which is what he did with Namorita about 30 years later. I guess when you're a grouchy dickhead like the Avenging Son, you only have so many people to ask for unreasonable favors.

As first appearances go, it's not a stunning debut. Namora gets a couple of hits in, but gets k.o.'ed twice and taken hostage. She does figure out the hidden meaning of Namora's message, and we're told she's strong enough to break the handcuffs if she gets some water splashed on her, but that happens off-panel, so it's not like she makes a dramatic escape and clocks some guy about to shoot Namor in the back. Her biggest contribution is that she heard one of the crooks referred to by name. Which we don't actually see in the comic, so when she said the name was 'Stoop', I thought she just didn't know English and one of the guys said "stop" for some reason.

Prior to Agents of Atlas, Namora spent 30+ years being dead, until M-11 decided that the poison probably didn't kill her, only put her in a coma or something. Quite how it figured that out, from thousands of miles away, I have no idea. Parker plays her up as a the team's (physical) powerhouse. When the team starts to fragment under surprise reveals, she brings down Bob's flying saucer with one hit. Gorilla Man clocks her in the face with a big metal pipe and it barely scratches her.

Leonard Kirk's preliminary sketches show he wanted her to have no pupils as a result of resurrection, but that seems to have been overruled. Probably because she was only mostly dead. Her ankle wings are more like the wings of a flying fish than a bird. She's got some of that same noble air as Namor, but it doesn't tip over into grating arrogance like it does with him. Maybe she's less insecure than Namor, doesn't need to make such a show of things, or maybe having lost so many decades, and having been largely forgotten, gave her some perspective. She understands the weight Jimmy Woo assumes, first as leader of this team, and later as the leader of the Atlas Organization, because she knows a little about ruling.

Outside of maybe Gorilla Man - people love talking primates! - Namora probably got the most use outside Agents of Atlas. She got drawn into the Incredible Hercules book, and she and Herc had some kind of a romantic thing going for a minute. Of course, then Parker started something up between her and Namor, and I'm going to have side with Gorilla Man who observed, 'guess they even got hillbillies under the sea.'

Unfortunately, Mark Millar killed off Namorita in Civil War right about the time Agents of Atlas came out - Parker says that was a total coincidence on the timing - and by the time Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning brought at least a version of Namorita back in Nova, Agents of Atlas had pretty much run out of chances to find a receptive marketplace. Neither character has gotten much use in the last 15 years, and I definitely don't recall any sort of mother-daughter reunion. 

Saturday Splash Page #227

"Heavenly Body," in Venus #1, by George Klein? (penciler), Lin Strater? (inker), writer and letterer unknown

I'm not proud of that title, but I make do with what my brain provides. Also, Jeff Parker says in the HC edition of Agents of Atlas Ken Bald was the artist, or the creator of the character, but the Grand Comics Database has it updated to their best guess being Klein as penciler.

Venus started as more of a romance mag. Venus is the actual goddess of love, and lives on the planet Venus, which, because this came out in 1948, has lush wooded hills and oceans, rather than barren rock, crushing atmospheric pressure and sulfuric acid rain that never reaches the surface. But Venus is bored with all this idyll, and wishes she could go to Earth and meet a guy.

By the magic of plot contrivance, she is somehow whisked to Earth, and deposited in the middle of a street in New York City, where a cop tells her she can't just walk around like she's sleepwalking, because it's 'demoralizing.' Would you rather she walked around staring at her phone all day? A Mister Hammond sees all the commotion, and decides this lady is just the publicity stunt he needs to make his beauty magazine, creatively named "Beauty Magazine", a big hit. Presumably none of the other beauty mags on the stands had thought of using pictures of pretty girls.

Venus feels like a MacGuffin in that stuff happens around her and because of her, but she's not really doing any of it. She lost her powers in the abrupt trip to Earth, so she's a regular lady, except with no actual skills besides looking nice. Mostly it's Hammond doing everything. Hammond decides to run a story that she was discovered on a remote Pacific Island, Hammond fires his magazine editor when the guy refuses to go along with this nonsense. Hammond then names Venus editor, despite her complete lack of experience, and to the annoyance of his secretary, who Venus immediately tags as her enemy. How about making friends instead?

Goddess of love, unless she gives me a side-eye. Then it's on.

Later, the book shifted to more of horror bent, with Venus running into mummies and living skeletons, stuff like that. I'm guessing she got her powers back for that stretch, but I don't know for sure. Parker went with the idea Venus was a siren given human form - made to look like the actual goddess Aphrodite, to said goddess' irritation - by a Sorcerer Supreme that Golden Claw paid to act as security. She spent so running from that past and all the lives she took she forgot it entirely, until the worst possible moment for the team. Jimmy Woo helps her realize she's since used her powers to help people by ending conflicts and getting them to talk or maybe fall in love, and that seems to help.

The Agents of Atlas version is generally bubbly and friendly. Greets everyone with big hugs, changes her hair color to red once Namora's awake because the team can't have two blondes, that kind of thing. Someone that, at a glance, might be dismissed as an airhead, but she's perceptive and empathetic. Some of that is her powers, but she chooses how to use the ability, so some of it has to be down to personality. She chose to travel to the conflict-torn region where Ken Hale became a gorilla to end all the strife there. She's also the one who embraces her power when it's the only way to stop the team tearing itself apart. Jimmy Woo could encourage her, but Venus had to open up and do it.

The ultimate end of Agents of Atlas was Jimmy Woo embracing a destiny he didn't know about, and deciding to turn something used for evil towards good. All the characters are dealing with that to varying degrees, making the best of bad situations. Ken Hale accepting he's a gorilla and just hiding away is no good, Bob accepting he can't go back to Uranus. Venus has to deal with her origin not being at all what she thought, and having some skeletons in her closet as a result, but making the best of it with her friends. If they can make the world better, and she can help by ending fights faster, why not?

Random Back Issues #170 - Agent X #13

The guy in the lower right must be a carousel enthusiast.

Gail Simone's return to Agent X starts on a Portuguese cargo ship, where some of the crew decide to hassle an "unlisted" passenger, identity hidden beneath a cloak (and hidden by my clipping out the top quarter of that panel up there), who won't speak or drink with them. Apparently Portugal is big on being a cordial guest, because things rapidly move to them deciding to kill the passenger and steal his wallet.

They're interrupted by another guy wearing a (nicer) cloak and carrying a katana, who chops off one of the crew member's left toes and right fingers. He remarks he should have killed them, but seems to have developed an inconvenient conscience, as he removes his cloak and reveals. . .some guy you'd only recognize if you read Simone's extremely brief Deadpool run! We'll get to it.

Meanwhile, the star of the book, Alex Hayden, is moping in what remains of the amusement park he called home, after a bunch of guys tried and failed to kill him. One guy is left, the crier in the panel up there, and Hayden lays out all his recent screw-ups - sleeping with a best friend (Sandi), probably wrecking things with two women (Sandi and Outlaw), sleeping on a puke-stained Tilt-o-Whirl, the usual - before sparing the guy and remarking how inconvenient it is to develop a conscience. Lot of that going around, which is how you know this comic came out over 20 years ago.

Taskmaster showed up at some point with a job offer Sandi got them, and declines to discuss how he feels about Hayden sleeping with Sandi. The job involves playing chauffeur/bodyguard for Higashi, one of the leaders of the Four Winds, a mob that's had beef with Alex. Higashi also clearly has designs on Sandi, probably involving the bizarre trailer hitch he wears around his neck, and invited her along as a power play/dick move. Alex's attempt to pitch "smell novels for dogs," is interrupted by two girls on motorcycles trying to kill them and talking in, I guess broken English. Lots of, "am very happy to be killing you, tee hee," talk.

Alex loses a hand getting rid of an explosive-stuffed Hello Puppy, then gets kicked in the jaw and starts getting dragged alongside the limo, while Taskmaster tries to drive them to safety. Until Tasky gets shot in the arm and decides fleeing is for losers and slams on the brakes. Brief fight, they get Higashi to the big meeting, where he immediately accuses some guy with a man bun of sending the assassins and declares things settled between the Four Winds and Agency X.

Hayden's brief attempt to be the bigger man and not be jealous of Sandi possibly liking Higashi is rendered moot when she points out she wore a dress in Alex's favorite color. Good thing he didn't talk about this earlier, or he couldn't have complained about Higashi's hand placement so much while getting his ass kicked by giggling girls with pink Uzis!

After the party/conference, Sandi brought both Hayden and Taskmaster to her apartment to discuss being professional. What might be a good time for Hayden to mention he's shuttering the company is temporarily parked when Taskmaster notices the door's been tampered with. By the guy with the katana. Who turns out to be Black Swan, the telepathic assassin that was believed blown up with Deadpool! Except the non-responsive guy in the cloak is. . .Deadpool.

Who Alex immediately shoots in the forehead. To be fair, a commen response people have to seeing Deadpool.

{1st longbox, 20th comic. Agent X #13, by Gail Simone (writer), Alvin Lee and Udon (artists), Cory Petit (letterer)}

Tracking Gobi Grizzlies - Douglas Chadwick

There is a sub-species of the brown, or grizzly, bear that lives in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. However, given that the confirmed population at the time this book was released (2017), was less than 3 dozen, they may not be around much longer.

Chadwick was the writer portion of a writer-photographer team sent to Mongolia for a piece about the Gobi grizzlies for National Geographic in 2011. Then he came back to help for another 4 field seasons. Similar to Imperial Dreams, the book spends a fair amount of pages describing the landscape and the culture of the area. That the Gobi is a desert, but it's a seasonally cold, almost constantly windswept region. In addition to getting very little rain - 4 inches is considered a normal annual precipitation, and there was a 15 year stretch prior from 1993 to 2007 where it averaged half that - this is not a desert of sand dunes, but of rock. Tough granite the wind gradually breaks into grit that gets into everything, including Chadwick's eye, as he gets eye infections two years running.

Still, Chadwick seems to love his time there, for how different it is from anything else he knows. He describes the size of it, the seemingly endless expanse, is almost disorienting at first, but he comes to feel more at home the more time he spends roaming in his down time.

Most of Chadwick's time is spent in a particular protected section of Mongolia, the Greater Gobi A Strictly Protected Area, as that's the only confirmed range the bears occupy. He discusses the lives of the local rangers and biologists, who protect and study the "GGSPA", the challenges they face in getting funding, the issues with demands to utilize the resources for other things.

This is not like a national park in the U.S., where people can drive in and gawk at the critters. Access is restricted, so it's not paying for itself in tourism dollars. Mongolia has a strong pastoral culture, so livestock herders are allowed to bring their animals into certain sections of the GGSPA in the winter months to graze. This at least keeps them from competing with the bears for food (the bears are hibernating), but it's probably more grazing pressure than the plant life can tolerate.

Also, the Gobi Desert is rich in minerals, and a lot of Mongolia's economy was based on mineral extraction. So there are companies trying to get the government to open the area up so they can tear it apart. And there are the "ninja miners", people who take advantage of the desert's size and isolation to sneak in and run covert, small-scale mining operations. If caught by the rangers, they might get a fine, and their equipment taken away. Even if they shoot the rangers, they may not face harsher penalties, if they know the right people. So Chadwick also discusses the push-and-pull of trying to get government officials on the side of protecting this place and its wildlife - apparently it also has the only population of wild Bactrian camels - and how quickly the level of support can shift with changes in the administration.

All that said, what this book has Imperial Dreams didn't is they actually find the bears. Not a ton of them; in an average field season maybe 2 bears get radio-collared after they end up in one of the feeder traps, though there are cameras set up around the feeders that capture images of many more. But enough Chadwick gets to see these animals up close, not just hear about them based on recollections of someone pulling up memories from half a century ago. They seem fascinating, if only for how different they are from what I picture when someone says "grizzly bear."

They're closer to the black bears we have in Missouri in size - the largest captured is slightly over 300 pounds, and there are a couple of young adult females that barely top 120 - and live mostly on plants. There's a stretch of a couple of pages where Chadwick describes trying to learn from one of the local biologists just what the heck these bears find to live on in this place, and since there's a language barrier, it comes to him pointing at various plants and miming like he's shoveling it into his mouth. (Apparently, one thing the bears eat in abundance is the tuber the local wild rhubarb have underground, but also the flowers of certain species.)

The nice thing with Chadwick coming back for several field seasons is you can see how the research group are trying to incorporate new ideas into their work, as they gain fresh information, and how well that does and doesn't work. The feeders are mostly grain pellets, but at one point, they try adding dog food to the mix to provide more protein, because the bears do eat flightless grasshoppers, gerbils, and small lizards. The bears ignore the dog food. Why? Unclear at that time, just like it's unclear why sometimes the bears will chew on a camel carcass (based on their poop), but other times they won't. However, adding additional feeders at the same oasis, but further away, so one bear can't monopolize the food source, seemed to give females with cubs more opportunities to get some extra calories they might not ordinarily have.

I also want to mention, this book has some outstanding photographs. Of the bears, and the people involved in the work, but also some double-page spreads of the actual terrain. I might not think so if I was actually wandering around out there, but it looks gorgeous, in a stark, austere kind of way. So maybe I would like it. I like open spaces; I'm the only person I know who likes traveling through western Kansas. 

'Trust me: semi-fresh grizzly shit full of partially fermented wild onion sprouts is definitely not a hoax.'

Summer Stalemate, Maybe

There was not much in the solicits for July that caught my attention. In the meantime, things I'm buying continue to wrap up, which means the list continues to shrink.

What's new? Can we just, fucking stop, with all the Godzilla crossovers? Marvel's been at it for a solid year, DC's on at least their second Godzilla and Kong meet the Justice League mini-series, and now IDW is going to have Godzilla rampage through Sonic the Hedgehog's world. I know we all long for a giant reptile to arrive and offer oblivion via the warm embrace of atomic fire, but enough already!!!!!

OK, OK, something I might be interested in. Boom! has Vampyrates, by Fred van Lente and Luca Pizzari, about a world ruled by vampires, and an overthrown queen who has to climb the ranks of a pirate crew. Feels like something I might wait for a trade on, but, if some of the other things I'm considering buying don't pan out, maybe this can take their spot.

Cosmic Lion, which seems to be one of several smaller publishers now operating under some larger heading, has a solicit for Side Quests to World Domination, which seems like a villainess and her lackey awakening in the present day and deciding they could get used to a world without magic? I don't know; I probably won't get it, but the pickings on new things were real damn slim.

Ablaze re-solicited the collection for Mark Russell and Roberto Meli's Traveling to Mars, about the first person sent to Mars being a pet store manager chosen because he was going to die of a terminal illness soon anyway. Russell's more "miss" than "hit" with me, but maybe if he doesn't lean so hard into his attempts at "clever" satirical commentary it could be interesting? Or I could just track down the back issues.

What's ending? Is Ted OK? wraps up, and I thought Moonstar was only a five issue mini-series, but the solicit for issue 5 says the final battle "begins." Is Marvel going back to doing everything in multiples of 6 instead of 5? At any rate, until I hear otherwise, I'm not ruling out that it's ending here.

Though it won't be out until August, Seven Seas Entertainment listed the 13th volume of Precarious Woman Executive Miss Black General. And it appears Jin was able to resolve everything in this volume, so that'll be it for that series. How well he managed to resolve everything, I guess I'll find out later this year. 

And the rest: Fantastic Four is shipping twice, each issue by a different artist, and apparently the artist for issue 13, Sorrentino, uses AI to help with their art. I probably shouldn't buy that, since I tend to think "AI" is a sham, and people who use it are hacks. Too bad; Johnny asking Sue to make his skin invisible so people would think he was Ghost Rider sounded like a fun plot idea.

Also not loving Marvel going back to shipping titles twice a month like it's the late-2000s. Desperation pouring off them like Axe body spray off some douchey guy with a popped collar.

Batgirl is still trying to solve a murder that revolves around memories she's missing. In the realm of books Vampyrates might supplant, The Deadman's got to deal with some soul-eating alien demon, and I still don't know if that title is going to be up my alley. Oh well, another month of solicits to parse before the first issue arrives. Ditto Junk Punch, also on its second issue, as is The Matron, where one of the characters loses their job when the owners sell their restaurant. At least there's no shortage of sources of resentment to fuel a murderous spree.

Generation X-23 has Laura trying to lead whichever members of the X-series are still alive by issue 6, and Moon Knight is teaming up with Blade to kill an evil building. D'Orc's trapped in a crystal and the solicit is promising a guest star, which worries me. I don't need this book tying into some other title I've got no interest in buying. If Marvel can't pull that stunt off successfully with me, Image hasn't got a prayer.

Balls Up (2026)

Brad (Mark Wahlberg), and Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser) work for a condom company. Elijah has ideas, but is incredibly socially awkward, while Brad is good at a slick sales pitch, but is, as Elijah tells him, an 'empty suit.' Their attempt to get their company named the official condom sponsor of the World Cup falls apart when Brad puts too much peer pressure on Brazil's representative (Benjamin Bratt), causing the man to throw aside 9 years of sobriety in a coke and nudity-filled bacchanal.

They get fired, but Santos' promise to get them a first-class trip to the World Cup went through before his career and life were destroyed by Brad's frat house jackassery. So they attend the final between Brazil and Argentina, Elijah gets hammered, decides the Brazilian sausage mascot is actually a plant by the rival company that got named the condom sponsor and is taunting him, and charges onto the field. Brad, the empty suit, rather than sitting back and letting it happen, gives chases and ends up blocking what would have been a game-tying goal for Brazil, making the 2 "es Stupidos" public enemies #1a and 1b in Brazil.

Watching this was not my choice. I have an aversion to Wahlbergs. Some would call it pathological, others would call it common sense. Anyway, Alex's friend Mike threw it on during the Chicago visit two weekends ago. I feel as though, if it wrapped after their escape from the drug lord's compound, it would have been fine. Not great, but about as good as could be expected under the circumstances. It would still run certain jokes into the ground - the guys trying to swallow their prototypes condoms full of cocaine drags on too long - but there were a few funny parts. If the bit with the caiman was the final splash of absurdist humor, that would have been a relative high point.

But there's a whole bit after that with a bunch of eco-warriors in the jungle that, again, drags for how few laughs it produces. Eric Andre and the other guy whining to each other about not getting any from the girl they both joined hoping to impress is just sad.

The phone translator gag isn't bad, the karaoke scene's worth a chuckle, maybe, although Wahlberg's singing voice was, I assume intentionally, horrific. Alex sang along to some lyrics during his gig that weekend, and I compared it to a cat being strangled while imitating AC/DC's lead singer. That's about what Wahlberg's voice was. The payoff to the initial meeting with their rookie public defender was, if not something that made me laugh, at least clever.

Wahlberg and Hauser do a decent job playing characters who don't have much in common other than they need someone to cover for their weaknesses. It so happens they each meet the qualifications for the other on that score, but they're bad at accepting that when there's anything of real importance on the line. Which felt like the point of the karaoke. With something that ultimately doesn't matter, they work together great, no friction. Once there's pressure, each of them start trying to prove something and they mess up.

Still, it feels strange at times that Brad actually cares about or tries to help Elijah, if he's such a self-absorbed guy with no values. I guess the idea is he's not a psychopath, incapable of caring for others, and playing the empty suit that says whatever will get him what he wants. It's that he's afraid to express anything deeper. I'm not sure there is anything deeper, though.  

Oh well, Track of the Cat could use some competition for worst movie in next January's Year in Review posts. 

Hard Work Means No Play

Injae got the first win of his boxing career over the awesomely named Rock Kang. Unfortunately, now he must face Kang's big brother, Boulder Kodos!

OK, that's a lie, he's just shadowboxing with his memories of Bakesan (currently on his way to prison for 6 years.) The fifth volume of The Boxer shifts focus back to Yu's career. Now the lightweight champion, he's being aimed directly at the junior welterweight champion, Yuto Takeda. Most of the volume is focused on Takeda, emphasizing his contrast to Yu.

Where Yu's the epitome of natural talent, Takeda is described, even by his coach, as almost entirely lacking in talent. The epitome of hard work. What's more, he fully buys into the idea that if you just keep trying, you can overcome any challenge. He feels like he should protect and inspire others, give them hope they can persevere and triumph as well. This as compared to Yu, who gives zero shits about anything other than his cat.

Yuto's backstory is that he looks up to his father, who was a silver medalist in judo and became a cop. Misaki, who was a gold medalist boxer before opening her own gym, was childhood friends with Yuto's mother and father. When Dad dies rescuing a woman from some muggers, and Mom is claimed by a lifelong illness weeks later, Misaki's left with in charge of a child she has no idea how to raise.Yuto wants to protect people like his dad, so he's got to be strong, so boxing.

Except he has no talent. It's actually kind of a neat contrast with Jean-Pierre. We were told the lightweight champ would slowly go through the motion of throwing a punch, making himself aware of every bit of what his body was doing and what it should be doing, in pursuit of perfection. Takeda has to go through every motion, every piece of action that goes into throwing a single jab and memorize it to then cram each piece together, because otherwise he can't do it at all.

There's some ups and downs in Takeda's story. A classmate he tries to help, who ends up running away and looks on the verge of committing suicide. A gifted fighter that abuses his skills as hired muscle, that beats Takeda again and again and again (and again and again, and so on), until Takeda starts making abrupt leaps in skill.

I'm not sure what JH's is going for with the strange growth curve. Setting up a certain development in the title fight with Yu for one, but otherwise, I'm not sure what it's meant to represent, if Takeda is supposed to lack in athletic talent. Can you brute force talent into existence?

Either way, it's the brute force he and Misaki are counting on to defeat Yu, as the strategy is simply to keep the pressure on Yu, give him no room to breathe, take every hit without stopping, until Yu gives out from exhaustion. Will that work? Ehhhhh, no.

Sunday Splash Page #424

"Blinded by the Bling," in Marvel Boy #1, by Russ Heath (artist), writer, colorist, letterer unknown

I'm just going through these alphabetically, but it's a little funny I picked the two titles that lasted the least amount of time, as, per Grand Comics Database, Marvel Boy's book only lasted two issues. Gotta love the cover, though, where the blurb declares him the 'newest, most amazing,' in line 1, then finishes with, 'finally in his own magazine!' on line 5. How can it be "finally" if he just got created?

Friction between grammar and hype aside, Bob Grayson's scientist father decided to live on the Moon with his infant son after his wife was killed by Nazis in the 1930s. Except their rocket got redirected and landed on the uranium crust of Uranus' surface. Ah, 1950s astronomy, gotta love it. Now 17, Bob's developed some level of telepathy - presumably from all that radiation in the planet's crust - and his dad's sending him back to Earth to try and prevent the outbreak of violence over a new continent rising from the sea. Bob gets a costume, a big red flying saucer, and wristbands that temporarily blind people with 'atomic radiance.' But no killing, Bob's got to handle things the old-fashioned way: punching.

Then he fights pirates who happened to get beached on the continent as it emerged from the sea and thought they'd declare themselves kings, tries and fails to convince the actual inhabitants that surface dwellers aren't all like those guys, and watches the island sink back beneath the waves.

By the time Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk were creating Agents of Atlas, there was a slight problem. Someone brought Marvel Boy back in the pages of Fantastic Four, as "The Crusader." He behaved erratically, attacking banks that wouldn't give him loans for medical supplies to take back to Uranus, and eventually was destroyed by his much more powerful wristbands (which later became Quasar's quantum bands.)

So Parker changed Bob's backstory. Not the part about him being from Earth originally, or his scientist dad wanting to escape the violence. But the people living on the surface of Uranus weren't true Uranians, who are an amoeba-like collective living deeper within the planet, but Eternals who tried to conquer Earth thousands of years earlier and were exiled. They were allowed to stay on Uranus by the true inhabitants on the condition they don't leave, their byproducts being useful to the collective. Bob's exploits as Marvel Boy were supposed to make him an ambassador of sorts, so Earth would invite them back, which is totally different from leaving, totally. As Bob puts it, 'the Uranians do not consider such fine points of detail.'

The Crusader was the child of the exiles, modified to resemble Bob, but brainwashed to be blindly loyal, who got hatched before he was ready when the Uranians figured out what the exiles were up to and destroyed them. Bob ends up stuck in a dying colony, until he's offered a place in the Uranian collective, where he lived for decades, leaving to help save Jimmy Woo. Which also means he left the collective forever. No going back.

So Parker and Kirk go away from the superhero aesthetic, leaning on the '50s sci-fi vibe. He's still got a flying saucer - silver-grey instead of red - and the sort of vaguely rubber spacesuit look you might see in The Day the Earth Stood Still or something similar. No more wristbands and fisticuffs; Bob leans on his technology and his telepathy, which has advanced from some low-level mind-reading to linking thoughts and creating illusions/altering perceptions.

Decades as part of a collective of a species very different from humans has changed him. In the early issues of the mini-series, he keeps speaking in an alien language and admits human minds are difficult to fool, because they're so strange to him now. His reactions and emotions seem muted; Venus observes that he used to blush around her, but now he barely reacts. Even as he settles in with his old friends, he maintains a detached air, with some occasional dry humor, mostly at M-11 and Gorilla Man's friendship.

I'm a little surprised having been part of a collective for so long, that Bob isn't more tactile with his teammates. Instead, he tends to stand apart, hands folded behind his back. But he also extends his esophagus to eat, and his helmet produces a Uranian atmosphere, so maybe it's a safety issue.

Saturday Splash Page #226

"People's Committee of Exposition," in Yellow Claw #1, by Al Feldstein (writer), Joe Maneely (artist), Stan Goldberg? (colorist), Irv Watanabe? (letterer)

When I started the splash page series in 2017, I tended to keep the entries short, before deciding I had a lot to say in some cases, and it was my blog, so I should go ahead and say it. But by then, I was already past Agents of Atlas. However, the hardcover of the original mini-series had the first appearances of each member of the team, and those are the only issues I have of those titles, so that's how we're spending the next 3.5 weekends.

I'm less enthused that the first entry gives us Yellow Peril and Red Peril nonsense, but that's '50s comics for ya, at least here in the States. Hopefully it was better elsewhere in the world.

Set sometime after Mao's Communist forces pushed Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist forces out of China, they're looking to invade Formosa and finish the job. But they can't possibly defeat the mighty American Navy directly, unless the legends of this ancient mystic the Yellow Claw, and his strange powers, are true. So a general goes looking, finds Claw, gets a demonstration of his mind control and crystal ball, and goes away thinking this is going to work out great. Except the Claw intends to use them to aid his own conquest of the entire world, starting by bringing down the U.S. from within.

Maybe the funniest part to me is the Claw enters the U.S. via a rubber raft from a submarine. Why not just enter the country in full splendor and mind control your way through any issues? Just to cinch the Claw's criminal bonafides, he tracks down the former commandant of Auschwitz and threatens to expose him if he doesn't help. Jimmy Woo only appears in the last few panels of the last page of the introductory story, far less than the Claw's grand-niece Suwan, who seems unsure of his plans, but unable to resist his powers.

This was just the first of two or three stories in the first issue, but unfortunately, it's all that's in the hardcover. Yellow Claw's the Fu Manchu, inscrutable Oriental stereotype with his insidious, underhanded schemes and whatnot. Woo doesn't have enough page time to establish much beyond being an FBI agent whose parents used to tell him stories about Yellow Claw. Presumably it was difficult for them to finish these stories, as every peasant we see runs screaming into the hills at the mere mention of the name. Suwan would, I guess, carry on a star-crossed lovers thing with Woo, trying to buck her grand-uncle's will.

Agents of Atlas ditches the obnoxious coloring and de-ages Claw a bit. Which, if he supposedly learns from some lama how to prolong his life, why let himself look 2 trillion years old? "Yellow Claw" becomes an Americanized bastardization of his true title "Golden Claw", and that's separate from his name, which ends up being "Master Plan." Which year, is cheesy, but fits into the notion Parker's playing with, that everything that's going on has been part of an extremely long-range scheme the Claw's been up to and had to adjust on the fly to various complications, mostly related to Woo's career path.

Because Woo did end up getting some use in Marvel in the '70s and '80s, but basically as just another SHIELD agent. You know how it goes, a writer creates a new agent they think is really keen, but every other writer has their own preference, so it's nice for creating a bench of actual SHIELD agents with faces and personalities, but none of them ever really rise to prominence. At least, not for anything good (looking at Maria Hill and her Gyrich-level obnoxiousness and incompetence.)

And that gets folded in. Golden Claw was supposed to be a villain Woo would defeat that create a legend for himself, but government bureaucracy - and racism, and the myth of meritocracy - being what it is, he got shunted into some dead-end desk job and that was it. So Woo aged, and stagnated, and grew frustrated and probably resentful of how his life turned out and seized an opportunity to be the big hero, expose a conspiracy, and got his team incinerated. Bob restores him, but to his last mental impression of Jimmy, recorded by his headband in 1959.

So you get young Jimmy Woo, hotshot secret agent type, in his prime, who also gets to be the "man out of time," having lost decades of his life. It's an opportunity to do things right the second time, minus the desperation and regret. (It also puts him behind in regard to how much things have changed for other people he once knew, which comes back to bite him in the ass when he goes looking for Suwan, who had a very interesting 50 years of her own.) Jimmy's operating outside the law, his team pulled together by trust and respect rather than an order from Eisenhower. Which also means they can't be disbanded on a whim by the shifting political climate. The work can continue for as long as they want to work together.

What I Bought 4/22/2026

I may be just about recovered from the Chicago trip. Of course, I have to go out for 2+ days next week for work. The annual spring inspection trip where my boss comes along. At least his presence saves me from having to talk to the operators, since he loves to do that.

Marc Spector: Moon Knight #3, by Jed MacKay (writer), Devmalya Pramanik (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - Stegman kind of Kelly Jones'ed Moon Knight's outfit there.

It's Moon Knight versus Bushman in a fear gas addled bout, with Zodiac being the most annoying pro wrestling announcer you can imagine. Yes, worse than Jerry the King Lawler screaming about "puppies," or Michael Cole existing on a plane of reality where he can interact with the rest of us. Honestly, Zodiac's glee at the violence just makes me wish Arcade was in the book. There's a guy that knows how to put on a show.

Moon Knight's losing, Bushman hacking him up while doing a whole spiel about how he created Moon Knight, and that'll always be true. Bleeding badly, Marc gets a visit from Steven and Jake, looking more ghostly than normal (Rosenberg colors them a sort of Ghostbusters ectoplasm green), who tell Marc Bushman's handling the fear gas' effects by causing fear so he doesn't feel it.

So Marc turns it around. That, actually, he haunts Bushman. The guy Bushman killed, who came back and kept kicking his ass. Who cut his face off, all that jazz. Moonie starts carving into Bushman, while Zodiac sounds about ready to achieve orgasm, and then, stops. Because he won't kill for anyone, not Bushman, Khonshu, or Zodiac. He will, however, kill Zodiac. Don't get my hopes up, man. Also, turns out something's going on in the city, and that's why none of the supporting cast found Marc.

Moon Knight's explanation for why he'd kill Zodiac but not Bushman is clever enough, but I think it's simpler, or maybe more selfish, than Marc makes it seem. He just doesn't want to give Zodiac what he wants, and Zodiac wants him to kill Bushman. So he won't do it. Which I guess means Zodiac better hire someone to cheer on Moon Knight killing him when (if) we get to that point.

Gullible's Travels - Cash Peters

This is the story of Cash Peters' last six months as the guy a radio station sends to check out weird or quirky roadside attractions and theme parks. Like the Sound of Music theme park, in Salzburg, which Peters has been sent to on at least 5 occasions.

OK, actually it's his last 18 months as the guy a radio station sends to check out weird or quirky roadside attractions and theme parks. It was supposed to be six months, but he was either really bad about shifting to another career path, or not working at it very hard.

This doesn't really include the Sound of Music theme park, outside a brief description of it as one of his periodic dissertations on how his job is not nearly so fun and keen as you imagine. Well shit man, I knew that as soon as I saw there was part of a chapter spent on the Precious memories park in Carthage, Missouri. I have driven past that place more than once for work, I can guess what hell exists within its confines and there is no realistic amount of money you could pay me to visit.

Though if there was a realistic amount of money, and I went, the end result would probably be much like Peters, in terms of people sending me e-mails telling me what an evil, horrible person I was. The difference is, Peters actually seemed fairly charmed by the set-up, whereas I would be on the verge of running out screaming, clawing at my face and speaking in tongues.

For the most part, Peters is taking a humorous, exaggerated approach. He's pretty evenly split between places he's excited to visit (the Museum of Dirt) and places he's basically going under protest (the barbed wire museum.) And in those categories, he's fairly evenly split between places he ends up enjoying (the National Bird Dog Museum,) and those he ends up hating or being swiftly bored by (the Museum of Dirt, Graceland.)

Either way, there are certain recurring gags. His tendency to seize on any opportunity that's free; he calls almost every PR person he encounters "Lisa," because apparently all PR people are named that; his 10 rules of life, of which there are 32; his phobia of confrontation because he's British. I was not aware that was an issue. I thought the British did confrontation, but in a very faux-polite, backhand insult manner. Like, you aren't sure if they're actually pissed, but you know they're looking down their nose at you? Well, learn something new everyday.

I think the parts I enjoyed the most were often the effort he expended trying to reach some of these places. When no one could confirm a place existed, and he starts calling around or accosting random people on the street or harassing his producer for help finding the place. Or when he thought he was getting a tour of a particular farm in Minneapolis, only to learn he was getting a formal tour of Minneapolis. So disappointed. Whether he actually finds the place, or whether he actually enjoys it once he gets there, is beside the point. I'm not sure there was one place he visited in this book that I would want to visit myself. But getting a front-row seat to his Sisyphean task of finding this place or that place is entertaining.

'I snapped shut my notebook and swore by the seven golden fleeces of Sinbad to track down this Museum of Dirt that nobody would let me see. It might take me a few days, but I would find it, oh yes, and when I did I would fix up an appointment with the curator personally, and insist that he give me a guided tour. And Lisa - well, Lisa could go screw herself-f-f.'