Saturday Splash Page #237

"Truant Officers," in The Web #5, by Len Strazewski (writer), Tom Artis (penciler), Bill Wray (inker), Eric Kachelhofer (colorist), Vickie Williams (letterer)

The Web was a bit of a rarity in the Impact Comics line as an ensemble book (Black Hood had a revolving cast, in a sense, which we'll get to when Sunday Splash Page gets there.) Where the other books revolved around solo heroes, "The Web" was an entire government organization. It had existed since the late '60s, with a broad mandate to investigate the unusual, but seemingly really created to investigate the disappearance of that generation's superheroes, the American Crusaders. Without success.

There were multiple agents, with different areas of operation, varying levels of public visibility, and different approaches. They eventually got powered armor, although the power was transmitted from some central station, and required authorization to use, even before Web fell on hard times as the years passed and budgets shrank. Eventually they were roaming swamps in business suits, chasing reports of UFOs.

With the emergence of new superheroes they're back in business. More money (but also more oversight), and more staff. That's where Strazewski makes his mistake, the cast is simply too large. From top-down, you've got Powell Jennings, who is some dipshit prep-school goober appointed as head of the agency. Of the field staff that are holdovers from the earlier years, there's Bill O'Grady, in charge on-site (that's him in the flak jacket), "Big Daddy" Rothco (the bearded guy), the Sunshine Kid (a spiritualist/hippie type), St. James who gets brought in to run tactics, "Jump" Kennedy, a pilot whose girlfriend was abducted by aliens a decade ago, and Gunny Beaupre. There's another guy, who calls himself "Troy" but is referred to by others as "Brew", who shows up in another issue.

Among the new generation, there's "Win" Winfield, whose older brother is part of the same prep-school dipshits as Jennings, Rad Stiles, the aggressive dickhead of the cast, Buster Thomas, the scientist who devised the updated version of the armor, where the power boost circuitry is actually wired under their skin, and Saleh/Silver, a former DEA agent and St. James' estranged daughter. Plus, the three kids up there (from left to right, Jamal, Alyce and Kevin, although Jamal is sometimes white and sometimes black, depending on the issue), who found an old Web base when Big Daddy used it after stopping a theft in the first issue.

That's too many characters! Especially when we're told, in issue #2, only one of them was intended to be the actual "Web" that was out in the field, in public. Double-especially when they're crossing over with the other titles, or devoting pages to guest-stars. Buster teams up with The Fly in issue 5, the (3rd) Shield guest-stars in issue 12, and The Fly, the Comet, and a third hero get suckered into attacking Web in issue 9. Plus, the last two issues are written by Paul Kupperberg, listed as "guest writer," so he brought in yet another old agent (up to then unmentioned) for his own story.

As a result, the book feels overstuffed and directionless. Plots or character arcs make little progress. Some characters get basically nothing. Issue 8 implies Winfield's desperate to prove himself after being compared unfavorably to his brother all these years. That doesn't jibe with his behavior up to then, where he seemed content to stand back and let others lead. Nothing's ever done with the tension between Silver and her father, beyond the initial argument that shows it exists. "Jump" has one run-in with a UFO, this time with working armor, but it ends inconclusively and he doesn't tell anyone about it or try to get any help. I couldn't tell you a thing about Rad or Gunny. Not likes, dislikes, motivations. Nothing.

The kids - who insist on being called "the Posse" - get one back-up story where Big Daddy tries to teach them how to drive some vehicles. While they don't crash, they're reckless enough he yells at them to stop after two pages. Also, O'Grady talks about maybe using them for undercover or intelligence gathering, but putting them in bright yellow armor on loud vehicles, while likely to increase their life expectancy (at least the armor part) doesn't seem great for that purpose. At least the kids negotiated themselves $25/month in pay, which is $25 more than they were initially being offered.

Generally, the focus is on O'Grady, Sunshine, Big Daddy, and Buster. O'Grady struggling with an administrative role and chomping at the bit to do fieldwork instead. He never really sorts that out, never gets better at handling Jennings' particularly irritating brand of making unreasonable demands, then blaming O'Grady when they backfire. Sunshine spends a lot of time making remarks that are supposed to be sage or clever and pretending to kind of be above the fray, but it's Kupperberg who comes closest to addressing the flaws in that, as the laidback attitude lets a former agent who built his rep on a lie get put in charge of peoples' lives. There could have been something for Big Daddy, training the kids, but again, that got almost no page time. Thomas is a scientist by trade, who submitted to the procedure she developed after early attempts went badly. She isn't supposed to feel very confident using the armor, but that only crops up intermittently.

Maybe the plan was always for the "1 agent" bit to get thrown out by circumstances, but that could have been something to make better use of such a bloated cast. Have a real sense the characters are competing with each other to be that "1 agent", and the negative impact that has. Maybe Buster shifts towards tech support, coming up with new gadgets for the armor, or Sunshine sticks strictly with training. Some characters wash out, or maybe "Jump" vanishes pursuing his vendetta against the aliens.

Tom Artis draws the first six issues, then guest pencilers for three issues, then Hoang Nguyen for three issues, and Barry Horne draws Kupperberg's two-parter. I'm not sure Artis' art was suited to such a crowded book. His art looks alright in the larger panels, but once he has to cram more characters in, or the panel space shrinks, things get messy and disorganized. His art always looks very busy to me, a lot of small lines and hatch marks on faces and clothes, though I guess that could be Wray's inks. With room to operate, like a full-page splash, it's fine. In the 5th panel of a 6-panel page, with 4 characters involved, not so much. The coloring also overwhelms the linework at times, rendering characters indistinct blobs.

Nguyen fares better, at least once Mike DeCarlo starts inking in issue 11. The previous issue, the linework alternates between almost disappearing and giving characters oddly exaggerated mouths. DeCarlo seems to use a thinner line, but it's a stronger one. The characters are solid, distinct. The action is clear and easy to follow. Just in general, it's less busy-looking, but it's also an issue that focuses heavily on just Silver and how she ended up with Web, so there's not as many people in mass-produced armor running around at one time.

The book's also plagued by miscommunication between writer and art team. Panels that don't show what the dialogue implies is there. In several of those cases, it's like there's a one-panel delay between dialogue and art, the latter running behind the former. It's worst in the guest penciler issues from 7 through 9, so maybe it was a time crunch thing. There's a page of a fight in issue 8, a 9-panel grid, that's a complete mess of dialogue that doesn't seem to match the action. There's no flow to anything, to the point I'm not sure if you're supposed to read down the columns or across the rows, because it doesn't really work either way.

Taken as a whole, it's by far the weakest of the core six titles.

Random Back Issues #172 - The Spectre #57

This is the 8th issue of The Spectre to appear in Random Back Issues. God's loaded my dice.

Or maybe not, as the issue begins with Spectre finding the Pearly Gates busted open, and nothing behind them! No angels, no souls, no God. The Spectre and Jim Corrigan have been having their differences recently, but they both want to get to the bottom of this.

Corrigan suggests pounding the pavement, question some suspects. First to Limbo, where an extremely skeletal Deadman is hanging around, watching a bunch of shadows traverse a foggy canyon. Spectre explains God's missing, and Deadman busts a gut, to Spectre's displeasure. Deadman says his god, Rama Kushna, is still around, and he doesn't know the Spectre's God 'from spit,' but it ain't here.

Next stop, Hell. Two angels, Remiel and Duma, are running things, because Lucifer abdicated. Remiel is trying to reform Hell, make it a place souls are redeemed through torment. It's not going great. 'Whip them with love,' apparently being a difficult concept to get across. Duma is zoned out, ignoring Remiel to the point the latter considers murdering the former. 

Spectre kicks in the doors, wishing to speak with the Lord of Hell. Duma, finally showing some life, kneels before him and offers the Key to Hell. The Spectre barely resists, claiming he's no creature of Hell, which Remiel thinks is crazy talk. The Spectre can freely enter Hell, but not Heaven. Michael forced his compliance, and Spectre was given a Sisyphean task to complete, walk the Earth until evil is no more. Well, when you put it that way. . . God sounds like kind of a dick. Maybe it's good he's missing.

Or maybe not. When Spectre delivers the news, the demons go into a frenzy, calling him a liar and attacking him. Which does not go well, and makes the Spectre suspect Hell is behind it, until Remiel points out the demons are afraid. They exist in opposition to God, so if God's gone, will they cease to be? Oblivion terrifies even a demon. I guess Remiel never talked to Jason Lee's character in Dogma, since that guy preferred non-existence to Hell.

At a dead end, the Spectre departs, leaving Duma to cry over Michael's disappearance (I guess Duma loved Michael?), the demons to sulk back to their various fiery pits, and Remiel to remark that for the first time, he feels like he's truly in Hell.

Lucifer's enjoying retirement on a beach in Australia, watching the sunset. Must be nice to have a job that offered retirement benefits. He's unperturbed at Spectre's claim of God's absence, so Spectre sets out to question the pantheons of "lesser" gods. This will involve him barging into places he's not welcome and throwing his weight around like an asshole. Which could either be representative of Corrigan's style of police investigation, or the behavior of Christians throughout human history. Meanwhile, Lucifer sits on the beach, remarking the Spectre should have stayed and watched the sunset. 

{10th longbox, 70th comic. The Spectre #57, by John Ostrander (writer), Tom Mandrake (artist), Carla Feeny and Digital Chamelon (color artists), Todd Klein (letterer)}

False Flags - Stephen Robinson

Robinson's focused on Germany's "auxiliary cruisers," merchant ships or freighters that were re-fitted to be combat capable, then sent out under the colors and flags of other nations to prey on shipping. Robinson notes early in the book that, according to the Hague Convention, this was entirely aboveboard, so long as the ships raised the Kriegsmarine flag and removed all false insignia before they started firing. They could have the guns ready to fire before then, but as long as they didn't pull the trigger, it was totally cool.

There are four vessels Robinson focuses on: Orion, Pinguin, Komet (which reached the Pacific through Arctic Sea with help from a Soviet icebreaker) and the Kormoran. They operated in this role only through 1941, primarily in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, though some of the ships saw action in the South Atlantic and around the Antarctic. The Pinguin captured basically an entire fleet of Norwegian whaling vessels in the span of a couple of months. Great for the whales, probably not so great for Norway.

Although Robinson emphasizes that the goal of the raiders was not simply to sink or capture as many ships as possible. Rather, the point was to make it too hazardous for freighters and other merchant ships to travel alone, and to restrict the routes they could take. A convoy can only travel at the speed of its slowest member, so forcing more shipping into convoys, along more circuitous routes that hug friendly coastlines, reduces the amount of shipping that reaches Britain.

Which doesn't mean the raider ships don't want to do direct damage. Robinson tends to move chronologically, shifting between ships in each chapter. He uses remarks from the various captains' logs and memoirs, or articles and letters of the crews, as well as the comments of some of the prisoners from captured ships. Generally speaking, the raiders seem to have treated prisoners fairly well. Better than the blockade runners the prisoners were sometimes transferred to for transport back to Germany.

The comments also provide a sense of the captains' personalities and expectations. The captains of the Orion and Pinguin both clearly expected this to be like the raider activity in the First World War, where they could raise their flag and command a ship to stop engines and not transmit a warning, and everything would be orderly. Instead they find that a lot of these ships try to escape, broadcasting warnings about raiders and firing back (inaccurately) with whatever guns they were loaded with. (Norwegian and Greek ships seem to still, on the whole, surrender quietly, while British ships, unsurprisingly, do not.)

In contrast, Komet's Captain Eyssen didn't waste any time with that sort of "gentlemanly warfare." He raises his flag and fires some shots and tells the ship to surrender or it'll be sunk. If it doesn't surrender, it gets sunk. Period. Of course, Eyssen comes off as generally over-agressive and high on his own supply, usually at the wrong time. He gets it in his head to not only sink all the Dutch supply ships picking up phosphate at Nauru (OK), but, since the island has no defense, to shell the factory and the port as well, basically trashing the place. Except he disguised his ship as a Japanese vessel, and Japan got a lot of phosphate from Nauru, so he kind of pissed off one of Germany's allies. Later, he decided to sink some ships near the Galapagos Islands, which were within the "Pan-American Neutrality Zone", which pissed off the U.S. at a time when we were still not "officially" at war with Germany.

Robinson includes a lot of maps showing the route a given ship traveled over a certain period of time, with markers indicating places where they captured or sank a particular ship, or laid out a minefield. There are several times where ships lay mines, mostly around Australia or New Zealand, and while they don't sink many ships, once their presence is known, those countries' navies have devote some of their limited warships to dealing with that, rather than protecting convoys from U-boats and battleships. Which doesn't go so well for a couple of the raiders when they run into cruisers, but that's the risk of trying to draw your enemy's attention. Sometimes you get actually do get their attention.

'Wehyer had to first rendezvous with the Regensburg in the Marshall Islands to refueled before heading to the Carolines. After passing Santa Cruz, Wehyer decided to disguise the Orion as the Japanese freighter Maebasi Maru and the crew painted characters on the hull copied from a Kodak advertisement produced in Yokohama.'

The Set-Up (1949)

Robert Ryan plays a boxer. Not a great one, not a title holder. A small-timer, who fights once a week in a cramped gym, with a ring so small it sometimes looks as though a fighter could stand in one corner and connect with their jab when their opponent was in the opposite corner. His wife (Audrey Trotter) wants him to stop, but he won't. Not yet. But tonight he's facing an up-and-coming boxer, Tiger Nelson (Hal Baylor), and Ryan's manager and trainer each took money for him to lose in the 3rd round.

We missed the first 30 minutes finishing up Something Big. With this movie coming in at 73 minutes, that's a considerable chunk. By that point, Ryan's in the tiny locker room the collective group of challengers for the night are sharing, and his wife is roaming the neighborhood with a ticket to the fight, silently debating what to do.

The film switches between those two threads as each of the other fighters heads to the ring. We don't see their fights, just the aftermath. One fighter comes back bruised and with a swollen eye, shaken and being harped on by one of the trainers or medics. Another is carried in unable to remember who he is. Through it all, Ryan's sitting and watching and trying to prepare himself. Telling the trainer needling the loser to knock it off, nodding along with the fighter who is sure he can win, because all it takes is one chance. 

Meanwhile, Trotter is moving, seeking a distraction but finding reminders of what she's avoiding everywhere. She doesn't talk much, just walks, and wrings her hands, and the longer she walks, the fewer people are around. Until she's alone on a bridge, watching trolleys pass by on their way someplace else. Does she stick with a guy who keeps going out to get his brains pulped, or leave? Ultimately she's got to make that choice.

The fight is a wild thing. Ryan ignores his trainer's advice to stay and at a distant and wades in, throwing (and taking) punches like Rocky Balboa. It doesn't look good. The kid is landing a lot more punches, though my dad noted that when Ryan lands a hit, it always staggers the kid. But the ref is either bought, or just uninterested in enforcing the rules. Ryan takes at least two low blows, with no reaction. The kid rakes at his ears at one point, and later, when he's sent Ryan to his knees, doesn't retreat to a neutral corner. Instead he hovers, and throws another punch as Ryan starts to stand.

Sometimes when Ryan's knocked down, the camera maintains its position outside the ropes, but at least one time when he's flat on his back, it switches to looking down at his face, like it's the ref counting him out. Although the shot I really liked was right before the start of either Round 2 or 3. His trainer and manager have stepped back, but Ryan's still on the stool, leaned against the corner post, solid black background. He's all alone, more than he knows, and the only way out is forward. The view switches to looking over his shoulder at his opponent, already up on his feet, hands raised, corner full of people that have his back.

During the fighting, the camera also keeps showing us certain members of the crowd. A blind man who has someone describe the action, and at one point is cheering for the kid to closer Ryan's other eye. A middle-aged woman shouting for someone to "kill him!" She doesn't care who gets killed, as long as she sees it. A younger guy that gets really into it, throwing jabs and flinching like he got punched. A heavyset guy who is eating something different each time we see him. Early on, most of them are scornful of Ryan - we hear someone in the crowd call him "grandpa" - but they're ultimately just as happy to see him lay out the kid.

(I joked with my dad the middle-aged woman was really yelling at the vendor, telling him to keep feeding that guy until he popped.)

And there's the gambler, with his irritating lady who makes big bets because she knows the fix is in. Too bad for her nobody told Ryan until the fight was already going. Too bad for Ryan, the gambler won't accept that explanation. It's a quick shift, Ryan back in the locker room, getting congratulated by the medical staff, all weary smiles as he wonders where his guys are. And then the gambler walks in, the medic leaves, not in a hurry, but he won't meet Ryan's eyes.

Which is when it all starts to hit Ryan how bad this is going to go. He was ready to walk into the ring and face a boxer who was supposed to be younger, faster, stronger, better than him, but he's not ready for this. Now he tries to run, but just like in the ring, there are no other exits. He's got to walk forward into another fight he's not going to win.

What I Bought 7/2/2026

I decided July is "fish or cut bait" month for several books. Maybe not the best time for it; there are already two mini-series ending this month. But there were a couple of new books I picked up I intended to decide whether to stick with them, and a couple of others that I think have gotten a fair shot, but need to really sell me on them. So we'll see how that goes.

The Deadman #2, by W. Maxwell Prince (writer), Martin Morazzo (artist), Chris O'Halloran (colorist), Good Old Neon (letterer) - Boston Brand unwittingly dissolved the blood doorway that would lead those souls back to their proper realm.

Deadman needs to know what that demon was, but the only book that would tell him was destroyed. Fortunately, not until after it was read by a guy with a perfect photographic memory, who Deadman and Batman once arrested. For breaking into a museum to read rare books, the man was sentenced to Blackgate Prison. That seems not at all insane.

Deadman tries to possess Batman to get into the prison, but Bats apparently trained his mind to resist such things. Of course he did. Plastic Man was helping Bats with some case involving drug-smuggling mummies, so Deadman takes him instead. As he's getting info, an inmate takes his meds which cause him to turn into a giant plant guy, who deals Plastic Man a mortal blow. Good work, Deadman! OK, fine, he keeps Plas' soul from moving on, and the Bibliophile tells him the creature he saw is from Hell. 

If "The Bloom" is someone I'm expected to know, I don't. Morazzo's got a little Frank Quietly in his art. Mostly I guess the texture of his characters, their faces. Sort of rough, pebbly effect to their skin and wrinkles and whatnot. His Batman definitely tends towards the broad and bulky end of the spectrum. No nimble acrobat here!

The theme of the issue might be "change." The first page is Rama Kushna explaining how souls go through cycles of rebirth, and in each life accumulate good and bad in their karmic ledgers. And Deadman keeps making assumptions about people. He assumes Plastic Man just became a hero on a whim, a flip of the coin, but learns different when he possess him. Gets caught flat-footed by Batman's efforts to not only resist possession, but develop tools to let him communicate with Deadman's spiritual form. He seems to expect the Bibliophile to be some monster, but decides just by looking at him in prison that he's no bad guy. Duh. He broke into a museum just to have new books to read.

(There's also this thing, it was in the first issue as well, that presents people as equations. "Lorna - 3 Nights Sleep = 1/2 Lorna" And in both cases, the person who has been reduced to "1/2" tries something to help, something from their past, and it doesn't work. The equation still comes out to "1/2 Lorna." So you can't fix anything going back? Well, I'm completely screwed.)

So is Deadman changing? If he keeps making assumptions about people, keeps thinking they can't or won't really change? Still hanging on to attachments from a life he can't have? 

Batgirl #21, by Tate Brombal (writer), Stephen Segovia (artist), Rain Beredo (colorist), Tom Napolitano (letterer) -  That's definitely a very cool cover by David Talaski, with the falling flowers and the eyehole as a prison window.

While her friends try to escape the cops - who are called "TUCOs", and I'm offended on behalf of Eli Wallach's character - Cass is stuck inside some mental trigger thing. Dr. Forget-Me-Not wants Batgirl to solve the murder of the little girl, using only what she can glean from her own memories. Which she now has access to all of, even when she was a baby.

Except she (and we) see all the memories from the third person perspective. She's watching herself fight the little blonde girl, who was Forget-Me-Not's attempt to create an ultimate weapon by making a person you can program with whatever identity or thoughts you need.

Forget-Me-Not and David Cain argued about something, which Napolitano (I'm assuming) renders as unintelligible squiggles because Cass didn't understand words at that point in her life. I can't decide if that makes sense, ignoring the question of whether I should be worrying about something like that in a plot like this. I don't understand what birds are saying when they sing, but I still remember what the song sounds like. Cass as she is now could probably piece some of it together from the sounds.

Whatever. She knows the girl was killed with a large knife. She knows she had the knife at one point during a spar with Bronze Tiger, but it disappeared. She knows Cain and the doctor left her and the other girl alone at some point because of the argument. The girl tried to hug her and Cass didn't understand what that was. And so Cass comes to the conclusion she's the killer. 

I'm assuming there's some kind of bait-and-switch there. Not that Cass couldn't have killed someone else before she learned to read body language. More I don't see what it adds to her as a character. She gets to feel bad about killing someone who was victimized at the hands of the person who should have protected her, like Cass was? Plus, Segovia's consistently drawn the killing wound as the big slash the goes diagonally across the entire torso. Would a kid roughly the same size as the victim make a wound like that?

Sunday Splash Page #434

"Bug-mageddon," in Ant-Man: World Hive #2, by Zeb Wells (writer), Dylan Burnett (artist), Mike Spicer (colorist), Cory Petit (letterer)

A 5-issue mini-series released in 2020, World Hive finds Scott Lang still in Florida, now living in an ant-hill, where he has lots of passive-aggressive conversations with the colony's queen, named "Pam." The security consulting business he had during the brief, Nick Spencer-written ongoings a few years earlier is gone. Instead, he takes jobs like locating missing bees for the Florida Beekeepers Association. He patrols once a week with his daughter Cassie, formerly the Young Avenger Stature, now going by the "Stinger" codename she used in Spider-Girl's universe.

In the TPB, Burnett says he used Chris Samnee's Ant-Man design as a basis to model Cassie's costume. I can see it, in how the purple sections are sharply defined by rigid sections of black, but it mostly looks like the MC2 version's costume, with the amounts of purple and black switched and some ankle bracelets I can't perceive a purpose for. Cassie's helmet does get an upgrade later that causes it to sprout Kirby Hat-style antennae that let her project commands to bugs more forcefully. Which someone, I don't know if it's Burnett, Spicer or Petit, depicts as big, brightly colored words that take up most of a panel background.

To Scott's dismay, Cassie wants to move to California to join Kate Bishop's West Coast Avengers roster. Because it's hard for young heroes to get respect, and no one in the hero community is respecting Scott Lang. Not even when his search for the missing bees leads to The Swarm, the Nazi made of bees, who's on the run from several other creatures made entirely of types of arthropod, acting on behalf of the "Bug Lords", who decided they've had it with these damn primates thinking they run the planet.

The Bug Lords look like something that might have crossed over from a kaiju flick, especially once they get some Pym Particles. So maybe it makes sense Scott looks vaguely like Ultraman when he's fighting them in the final issue. Spicer makes them bright, almost neon, colors so they jump off the page, or maybe just dominate it, since they take up most of the page. Their emissaries, Thread (silkworms), Tusk (beetles) and Vespa (hornets) are a lot cooler. Burnett gives them body characteristics and styles that fit the types of things they're made of, but also draws them so you can see how they're comprised of lots of smaller bugs.

It's funny to think Mike Allred did a Fantastic Four run that culminated in Scott Lang kicking Dr. Doom's ass and showing how awesome he was, and within a year, it might as well never have existed, because a movie came out, and Scott's been written as a well-meaning (if he's lucky) loser ever since. Thanks, Paul Rudd!

This story does not break that trend. Again, Scott's living in an anthill. Not some miniaturized science lab next to an anthill. Not even a miniaturized trailer next to an anthill. Just, in the anthill, storing his Pym Particle capsules with the colony's eggs, getting nagged by the queen. Burnett draws him with constant stubble and bags under his eyes, and Wells has Lang act awkward, panicked, or stick his foot in his mouth all the time. (Though Wells writes Spider-Man as even more of a goober, getting jealous and snippy because the Black Cat seems to like Scott, and not even because they bonded as fellow thieves, which I would have at least found sort of understandable. Clearly a guy Marvel should let write Amazing Spider-Man for several years!)

That said, Wells does play up one aspect of Scott's character I've always appreciated: he actually cares about the bugs he asks for help. I never saw much of that in Pym, who has a detached perspective that seemed to treat them as test subjects, and Eric O'Grady flatly did not care. Controlling bugs meant he had a ready supply of cannon fodder to die for him. Lang names them, worries when the ant he flew (Chumley) to track the Swarm disappears, gets angry when a bee he enlarged to close a cave entrance gets devoured from the inside-out. The bugs, even when Pam is frustrated with Scott, seem to like and respect him. Enough to help him against a would-be world conquering insect guy.

There's probably something in there about how the bugs judge Scott by what's in his heart, what he intends, possibly something they can pick via the nature of how the helmet allows him to communicate with them. Meanwhile humans are judging him by what he looks like and how successful he is at what he tries to do. Although you'd think insects, especially colony species where every member of a hive has a specific role to fill, would be less forgiving of, "I tried my best, but I failed."

Scott also lets Cassie face the main bad guy herself, because he swiped her helmet and she feels like she needs to be the one who gets it back. Scott is worried and keeps almost jumping in, but when she tells him to wait, he listens. He shows faith in her abilities that the Avengers don't show in him. But it impresses Cassie, which is more important to Scott. At least until the next time he starts feeling insecure.

Saturday Splash Page #236

"The Congregation," in Werewolf by Night (2023) #1, by Derek Landy (writer), Fran Galan (artist/colorist), Joe Sabino (letterer)

A one-shot released in the fall of 2023, revolving around Jack Russell, aka the Werewolf by Night, and Elsa Bloodstone, arriving independently at a ominous castle in the mountains of Colorado. Both are seeking Doktor Nekromantik, and a young woman he's abducted to sacrifice to some nefarious purpose.

Landy contrasts the duo's via internal narration through the story. Jack's is overwrought and dramatic, while Elsa's is breezy and flip. Jack makes his way up the mountainside and tears his way through the creations of Nekromantik that bar his path, while Elsa simply skydives out of a plane in which she hitched a ride, that was owned by some vampires she subsequently killed. When the two run into each other in the castle, Jack spends three caption boxes thinking about how people - like him - let Elsa's attitude slide because she's so pretty, and he could have loved her, if he thought he deserved to be happy. Elsa's caption is, 'He smells of dog.'

The situation they find themselves dealing with is more complex than they expected, as Nekromantik is after revenge, but not against either of them. They're far too late to save the young woman, and Jack spends the last page moping how that's another person he failed, and his life is violence, while Elsa's internal narration insists that it would bother her, if she thought about it. But why do that, when life is so hard already? They reach the same endpoint, but draw different conclusions from it.

Other than the last few pages, which take place the following morning, the story is set entirely at night, and Galan goes with a limited and stark color scheme. Everything, save the glowing red eyes of the shadow creatures Nekromantik made, is colored some variation of black, white, or grey. It allows for a sharp, high-contrast look that plays up the shadows.

Except for Elsa, who is Technicolor in a world of black-and-white (the scenes in the jet before she reaches the castle are also in color.) A bit more bronzed than you might expect for someone who spends her time hunting monsters at night, but her clothes, her hair, the flash of red if she uses the Bloodstone, all of that is in color. It sets her apart from everyone and everything else in the story, including Jack. 

Which is something to explore. In terms of color, Jack is treated as the same as Nekromantik, his monsters, and the thing he seeks to summon, while Elsa is not. Why? Simply because she's still human, despite the weird alien rock in her palm she got from her caveman father? Jack is human, at least some of the time. Is it something about purpose, that Jack and Nekromantik were each driven by some stronger motive, duty or revenge, while Elsa at least gives the outward appearance she's just there to make monsters go boom? I don't think it's a matter of the others being driven by baser instincts, because Jack keeps narrating about how he's trying not to lose control and just tear things to shreds, so he's clearly resisting those urges.

What I Bought 6/29/2026 - Part 2

I almost never get $10 bills back in change. Because yes, I buy most things with cash. It's a chemical affliction. Whether it's a automated checkout thing or a good old human cashier, I usually receive two $5s instead. Which seems odd. Why bother with two bills when one will do? Did Trump do away with $10s because Alexander Hamilton's not even a President, not like Ben Franklin?

Babs: The Black Road South #4, by Garth Ennis (writer), Jacen Burrows (artist), Andy Troy (colorist), Rob Steen (letterer) - This feels like the sort of thing Babs will give Izzy grief about endlessly.

Our protagonists survive sledding off a cliff on a frozen barbarian and end up in a great sea of - well, let's not discuss what they're floating in. Babs is still playing cagey about her prior trip, though she's starting to suspect the Samwise stand-in has to be behind all this. Troy washes the whole sequence on the sea in this dull greyish murk that just looks nasty. Like the air would have a tangible texture that clings to you, and it would be awful.

About the time Izzy points out the Orb couldn't have been destroyed, because otherwise all the great evil in Mordynn would typically get sucked into a great hole, they notice Lilith Lazuli isn't dead. Or, she was, but the eldritch properties of the land brought her back. Sort of. She's about as articulate as your typical zombie, but she gets them to shore.

Where they're met by an army of pig-men mercs, working for the angry little hobbit. He hauls them off to some camp, rather than the tower where the great evil is sort of sulking and doing not much of anything. Because the hobbit's working on his own, to get the Orb. Which shouldn't be possible, unless someone had formed a soul bond with said Orb. Someone like Babs.

I think the thing that surprises me is that she'd actually think she could get away with selling it. Just seems like the sort of thing where any person eager to get their hands on it, is also the sort of person you couldn't trust to honor the terms of whatever deal you made with them. Hmm, maybe she'd been drinking when she made the arrangement. 

Is Ted OK? #4, by Dave Chisholm (writer/artist/letterer) - See? The doc agrees with me, last month's cover was nausea-inducing.

Dr. Paganini explains what's going on with Ted. She had a theory that human consciousness is stored somewhere other than inside your brain, but a place our brains access. A place with enormous storage capacity, and enormous energy potential. And Noah thought that could be a way to create true artificial intelligence. "Artificial intelligence", in the sense that he created a human body artificially, with no animating mind or spirit, and needed something to make it go.

They tried somehow linking the bodies to people who were dreaming, allowing access to what she called "Soul Space" through a shared doorway. It worked, and didn't require ten simultaneous nukes going off, which was the other notion she had for how to open a doorway into that space.

Except the further along things got, the more she sees that Noah's not after whatever she and the other scientists think he is. He wants to have an artificial human, but it needs to be able to use that Soul Space energy to do cool stuff. Like a lightning punch! Well sure, if I built an artificial person, I'd want them to be able to do cool shit. She figures out he's trying to build a video game character. Literally. The character in the game Ted plays before going to sleep each night. Who dies and is reborn with a different cool power.

But when things aren't going the way he'd like, Noah shifts to the nuke option. Being rich enough to have your thumb on the scale of several militaries helps. And that explains the Dome, if not how Noah was able to stand in a radioactive nightmare without issue. Unless he's given himself an artificial body and is drawing off that space as well.

The further into the story the Doc gets, the more Chisholm shifts how Noah is presented visually. He starts out positioned on the ends of panels, usually at the same level and size from our perspective as Dr. Paganini. He's sitting a lot, he's smiling, the colors are soft. Once the work begins, the colors shift to colder tones, like flourescent lights in a hospital. Noah tends to stand, and more than that, he tends to stand in the middle of things. Often stepping between our view of him and Dr. Paganini, making her smaller, pushing her to the edge of the panel, into the gutters. He's not asking about her work with interest, or promising that money won't be a problem. He demands she fix things, or insults "Soul Space" as a stupid name.

Having learned he was intended to be some next-gen human war machine, that his love for cats and paranoia are the result of Noah's capricious whims in how the "manowars" were programmed, Ted is ready to pack it in. He should just be destroyed. Sarah objects, making a whole spiel about Ted and who she thinks he is and that he doesn't get to give up. Ted comes around, decides it's time to stand up and be counted, and that doesn't go well.

I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop with Sarah. I'm not sure what that shoe will be. The person she keeps leaving voicemails for was someone Noah killed along the way? One of the dreamers, one of the mercs. That she's a dreamer, and all this is her and Ted sharing a consciousness? I can't quite buy that she's faking all this and is secretly loyal to Noah, because I don't think weren't meant to believe her internal narration is lies, even if it's remained vague who she's talking to. She's definitely projecting something about that person onto Ted, which he could end up seeing as a betrayal, if it's never really been about helping him, so much as him being a proxy for someone else she wished she could help. 

If These Walls Could Talk - Stan McNeal

This is a collection of stories revolving around the 4 consecutive seasons the St. Louis Cardinals made it to at least the National League Championship Series in 2011 through 2014. Sort of. Because it also includes a section on the 2022 season, when Albert Pujols came back for his last year and became only the 4th player to reach 700 home runs.

It more or less ignores the all the seasons in-between, minus some of the sections that discuss Adam Wainwright, since he was on the team throughout. Granted, the Cardinals didn't experience a ton of postseason success in the 2015-2021 years, but they did win 100 games in 2015, and they did make it to the NLCS in 2019, and they won 17 games in a row during the 2021 season to make the playoffs. And it isn't like the 2022 team was in the postseason for long, either. They lost a best-of-three series to the Phillies, in two games.

It's an especially odd reading experience because I guess, this being a revised edition, McNeal put the most recent stuff at the beginning. So you get the section on 2022, and then you jump backwards most of a decade, and keep working back from there. Each year is broken up into shorter pieces focused on a specific player or coach.

So in 2011, you've got a few pages on Matt Holliday and his injury issues, another few pages on Albert Pujols coming back from a broken bone in his wrist in 17 days (I forgot just how fast that dude recovered from injuries), Colby Rasmus getting traded for pitching, Chris Carpenter carrying the pitching staff (and behaving like an asshole on the field), David Freese's postseason heroics, Allen Craig's less-heralded postseason heroics, Lance Berkman's comeback year, Tony LaRussa's last season before (briefly) retiring, and Pujols signing with the Angels in free agency.

(McNeal titles that last one, "Pujols Takes the Money and Runs", which is certainly one way to describe Pujols exercising his right as a free agent to sign the contract he believes pays him the full value he's worth, after years of playing on one that paid him far less than his production merited because the collective bargaining agreement grants the Cardinals all the leverage in negotiations for the first 6 years of his career.)

But even within that style, McNeal usually doesn't confine a piece to strictly what the player did that season. The parts where he dips into the past - Holliday failing to catch a fly ball in the 2009 NLDS, David Freese not playing baseball at all for a year after he graduated high school - make sense, as part of the journey to whatever McNeal's really driving at. But he also discusses the player's later seasons and career trajectory, like Freese's continued injury problems after 2011 and how he was eventually traded.

A lot of the stories are ones I already knew from following the team, although there are details in there I wasn't always aware of. Shelby Miller and Joe Kelly being the best man for each other's weddings, and having a bet over whether either could get a hit off the other the first time they faced off after Kelly was traded to Boston (Kelly won that bet.) I'd forgotten about Holliday having to leave a game because a moth flew in his ear and he couldn't dig it out with his finger (and apparently attempts to sit in dark room, with just a little light coming through a crack in the door failed to entice the moth, because its head was too far in to see the light.)

It feels like there's a narrow sweet spot for this. You have to care about the Cardinals to begin with, but not in such a way where you were consuming enough writing about them at the time these events were taking place. Otherwise you know most of what you're reading already. Unless the reader is looking for the nostalgia fix, which is an impulse I can understand. 

'Matt Holliday went for $100 in 2011 but had dropped to $75 by 2014. Michael Wacha, on the other hand, jumped from $5 in 2013 to $70 in the 2014 Winter Warm-Up, following his breakout October. David Freese had an even greater one-year increase, going from $5 to $75 following his dream postseason. Matt Carpenter cost $40 in 2014 just two years after being free. Jon Jay, meanwhile, had been a model of consistency. In 2014 his autograph was priced at $20 for the third straight year.'

What I Bought 6/29/2026 - Part 1

The weather has turned miserable here in the last few days, in the usual manner of being hot, with a humidity that is nearly suffocating. At least it waited until the end of June to start. Really couldn't hope for better than that. Definitely will miss actually wanting to be outside for the next couple of months. Suppose that leaves me more time for comics, so let's get into the last few holdouts from June, starting with a first issue.

Junk Punch #1, by Paul Tobin (writer), Javier Olivares (artist), Francesca Vivaldi (colorist), Taylor Esposito (letterer), Colleen Coover (artist/inker/colorist/letterer) - Something about the color of her outfit, combined with the big smile makes me keep thinking I'm looking at Squirrel Girl. Maybe it's that the guy in the spacesuit near her butt resembles a big, fluffy tail?

Clara Castanelle has, as she explains to one of her victims on page 2, a chemical affliction that makes her compulsively punch people in the junk. When she's not doing that, she's getting drunk, feeding peanut butter to pigeons so bug-eyed I think they were crossbred with pugs, having orgies, and maybe, possibly, helping people with problems. If a fortune cookie tells her to.

The problem of the moment is someone stealing goals. Not life goals, but goals in soccer games. As in, the ball is flying towards the net, then swerves off into the sky for no apparent reason. Information gathered by a couple of her allies - a fortune teller named "Medium Cotton", who walks around in cowboy boots, underwear and a turban, is prominently involved - think a crime lord named Silverhand is behind all this. But, Silverhand's knows Clara's investigating and has upped the apparently preexisting bounty on her head so that she's the #1 target in the city, instead of #7.

My main takeaway from the first issue, is I may not be on the right wavelength for this book. Tobin and Olivares are clearly going for absurd, but it's not hitting with me for some reason. A guy named "Joey Bagoducks", who ends up with one of his ducks trying to assassinate Clara, only to turn out to be a dude in a duck suit after she punches him in the junk, that's absurd. Obviously. And people who try to assassinate her shout "ASSASSIN!" in a very different font (though Esposito uses that for several different words or phrases during the issue.)

But I spent most of the issue metaphorically scratching my head and wondering what I was looking at, instead of laughing. Maybe it's that things are too random, or maybe it's just Clara that's too random. She's goes from agreeing to help find the stolen goals, to forgetting what she was doing a page later, to flipping a coin to decide whether to enter a bar, then entering before the coin hits the ground, to having an orgy two pages later. The junk punching thing feels less like a chemical affliction, and more like something she does just whenever it catches her fancy. Which is true of everything else in her life.

Olivares and Vivaldi making Billowing City a cramped, dingy-looking place. Buildings stretches high above and almost obscure the sky entirely, but they aren't gleaming or impressive feats of architecture. Mostly lots of cheap neon lights and dirty streets, but lots of people. Wide variety of colors and outfits, but nothing garishly bright. Like everybody is so fully flying their freak flag they all kind of cancel each other out. 

Something Big (1971)

Colonel Miller (Brian Keith) is a cavalry officer about to retire, and his wife Mary Anna (Honor Blackman) is on her way to the fort to make sure of it. Unfortunately, there's Joe Baker (Dean Martin) to contend with. He's a dude from Pennsylvania that came out West to do "something big," which really means he's been having fun playing outlaw. But the woman he's supposed to marry (Carol White) is tired of waiting and on her way.

So it's now or never for the something big, which involves robbing the treasure hoard of Mexico's most famous bandit. For that, he wants to acquire a Gatling gun. The guy who has the Gatling gun (or will have it) wants a woman. You see where this is going. Baker is holding up stagecoaches, looking for a woman he feels would be appropriate according to the Scriptures, and eventually meets Mary Anna. I'm not aware of the Bible speaking of trading a person for a Gatling gun, but maybe it's a different edition. The Sleazy Bastard Edition. Meanwhile, Miller and his chief scout (Ben Johnson) try unsuccessfully to figure out what it is Baker's planning, beyond "something big."

My dad had autotuned his TV to turn to this because he'd never heard of it. He was not impressed, with any of it. It's more comedy than action movie - the first real action is over an hour in, when Miller catches up to Baker and beats the crap out of him for abducting Mary Anna - but it's not funny. There are some odd characters, but the movie is content to coast on the existence of their quirks, rather than have anyone do something that might prompt laughter. Here's a two-woman gold mine operation, and they're really horny! Baker's future brother-in-law walks around playing bagpipes and dressing like a Scotsman (while his sister speaks with what sounds like an Irish accent)!

The movie starts with a, I think bounty hunter, complaining to Miller that Baker killed his partner (for kicking Baker's dog.) When Miller makes it clear he doesn't care and won't do anything, the cranky guy vows to find someone with a 'fine, delicate hand', to write him a letter to Washington D.C. about this. The guy reappears only at the very end of the movie, still vowing to write the letter. He doesn't try to hunt down Baker, he doesn't try to hamstring Miller, nothing.

Baker has this whole convoluted plan about getting the gun, but he's also hijacking whiskey as a bribe to a local tribe to join his attacking force. Then he rides into town in broad daylight, the brother-in-law playing the bagpipes the whole time. But, having tossed the element of surprise (which it turns out he didn't have to begin with) in the garbage, he keeps the Gatling gun under cover, and half his guys are dead before he gets it into action. Fortunately, none of the bandit's men know how to duck.

Dean Martin expends no particular effort, all lazy charm, easily punctured. Keith seems to be trying to talk without moving his lips for some reason. Honor Blackman's carrying a high-class sensibility and ego, but is somehow taken by Martin's bullshit enough to encourage her husband to let him take the Gatling gun and try his stupid plan. That didn't make any sense whatsoever. He's been exhibiting the same sleazy, Gambit-esque "charm" since he held up her stagecoach, and she wasn't impressed then. And Keith agrees, but not because he's got some plan to recover the gun, arrest Dean Martin and the bandit all at once, just because she asked, I guess.

I'm legitimately disappointed. There were enough elements for either a good comedy Western, or a good action Western. The potential was there, I think the actors had it in them, but what they were given to work with was just kind of trash, and they didn't or couldn't elevate it. 

A Challenging Coursework

As Zuko is the brooding, morally conflicted bad boy of the series, the answer to that question is apparently, "90% of the fandom."

Avatar the Last Airbender: Ashes of the Academy centers around the difficulty in changing a people's culture and beliefs, especially about themselves and their nation, and how that starts with what you teach your kids. In this case, Zuko's half-sister is about to attend the prestigious the Royal Fire Academy. Given how Azula turned out, Ursa's got understandable concerns about risking a second daughter here, but Zuko's used Fire Lord Authority to devise a new curriculum, so everything will probably be fine.

It quickly becomes apparent the headmistress is not on board with the changes, and is still pushing nationalist, imperialist, classist doctrines. So Zuko, again via Fire Lord Authority, hires a new instructor. His ex-girlfriend, Mai. Without first asking Mai if she would do it. After she broke up with him, in part, because he treated her less like a partner in their relationship, and more like an accessory to escape from the responsibilities of leadership. Leading to him withholding important aspects of his life - like assassination attempts, or his asking his genocidal, abusive dickbag of a father for advice on governing - from her out of some misguided notion she needed "protecting."

I know the series' creators stated Zuko and Mai stay broken up for 3 years before getting back together. I don't know how far along they are in that break-up here, but Zuko clearly hasn't learned shit from his past fuck-ups yet (though he makes a halting step in the right direction in the last 15 pages.)

Mai takes the job, despite her own bad experiences at the Academy. Faith Erin Hicks (writer), with Peter Wartman (artist), and Adele Matera (color artist), give us several brief, sepia-toned, flashbacks to Mai's early days at the Academy as a student. Where her father encouraged her to befriend Azula because it would help her get ahead, and that it was better to be the powerful person (or friends with the powerful person) who does the trampling, rather than be the one getting trampled.

(Hicks puts all this social-climbing pressure at the feet of Mai's father, which I think is letting her mother off too lightly. From the bits and pieces we see of Michi in the cartoon, she was just as hard on Mai about behaving like a proper young woman and blah blah blah, think of your father's career, think of our status. Maybe the OGNs Gene Luen Yang wrote established it wasn't like that, or Hicks is making a comment on how Mai's improved relationship with her mother has led her to reduce Michi's culpability in the worse aspects of Mai's upbringing.)

We don't really see Zuko's curriculum, at least not in Mai's teaching. It's mostly when, on her first day, Kiyi keeps correcting one of her other teachers, who's reluctant to read the new, more accurate history of the Hundred Years War. Instead, Mai eschews having them read books in favor of going outside to dig in the dirt and learn about cicada-beetles or learning to walk a tightrope.

I didn't really picture Mai as being interested in insects, let alone digging in the dirt, but the point seems to be to show curiosity about the world around them (and Mai is well-established as hating being bored, which implies a certain level of curiosity), and not react to other people or creatures as threats to be destroyed. Which is contrary to what students were taught when Mai attended, a fact we see in flashbacks that the teachers encouraged - any slight against honor must be addressed in an Agni Kai - and Azula ruthlessly exploited, pitting friends against each other for seemingly no reason than she can. And that thinking has carried over to Kiyi's generation, like it carried from the generation prior, as one of her classmates says her parents warned anyone acting like her friend was secretly plotting to destroy her.

That's what Mai's facing, and in that sense, activities encouraging the students to work on projects together and treat learning as fun, rather than some zero-sum contest where they have to learn the most and apply it most ruthlessly against the other students, make a lot of sense. I do hope she's still taking time to teach them math. It can be used for things other than war and politics!

Sunday Splash Page #433

"Crystallized," in Amethyst (vol. 4) #2, by Amy Reeder (writer/artist/colorist), Gabriela Downie (letterer)

Released in 2020, Amy Reeder's Amethyst mini-series was about, I'm not sure. Not to believe in fairy tales, because things are rarely that simple? "Lies my parents told me?" Everybody loves to see a winner fall?

Given the sheer number of reboots, resets, re-brandings, whatever, I have no idea the specifics of Amethyst's situation in 2020. Reeder seems to incorporate the original Princess of Gemworld mini-series, but maybe nothing after that. Certainly nothing about Amethyst being a Lord of Order, which is one good thing. On the other hand, maybe there was some stuff from Bendis' Young Justice book reflected here? There's no explanation, for example, about why Amy's a blonde in all the flashbacks, but sports lavender hair here. But I sure wasn't reading a Bendis-written team book in the late 2010s, so I don't what, if anything, made carried over.

What we've got is, Amy's Earth parents are alive and aware she's a princess from another world. They're proud of her, even if Amy finds it embarrassing and can't wait to return to Gemworld. Where she finds her kingdom destroyed, and all her people missing. Worse, all the people she thought were her friends turn their backs on her requests for help, throwing in a lot claims about how they always suffer in Amethyst's battles, and then she just flies off on her horse, and they have their own problems. Basically behaving like a bunch of citizens of Marvel Universe's Earth.

Reeder increases the variety between the kingdoms. The citizens of Turquoise have four arms now, Aquamarine is much more of an undersea kingdom, the people sporting smooth blue skin. Sapphire is more of a Blade Runner look, with towers and neon lights and tubes that can transport you places (sometimes against your will.) 

Amy manages two allies: a young woman from Turquoise named Phoss (with a giant caterpillar named Stan, because Phoss' girlfriend thinks Earth is fascinating), and the alleged prince of Aquamarine, Maxixe, who rides on a narwhal. The further things go, the more Amy learns all those stories she was told about House Amethyst being the beloved protectors of Gemworld were lies. Not that Dark Opal wasn't a threat, more her parents weren't fending him off from the goodness of their hearts. 

And yet, in the '80s Amethyst books, everyone is always expecting Amy to handle everything. Yeah, she asks for help, but she's also always on the front lines, trying to deal with the problem, whether it was Dark Opal, or Fire Jade, or that creepy little Chaos kid. And it cost her plenty, even if some of that is no longer in continuity. But the Gemworld motto is, "like parents, like child," and so they all assume she's like her parents and expecting them to bow and scrape.

Reeder does write Amy as more than a little conceited, prone to making demands or ignoring suggestions from other people. So it won't surprise you that she's terrible at diplomacy. Again, these people she's asking for help have been expecting her to bail their asses out since she was 13, and even if she's older, she's not that much older. Reeder draws her as still a little gangly and awkward, all her expressions are big ones because she's not used to moderating her emotions. She never had to, other people handled the calm stuff, she handled the hitting stuff. So it's hard for me to judge her for being hurt they all tell her to hit the road.

(Also, somehow, the initial outfit Reeder gives her, while more successfully evoking "magic princess" than the '80s look, is somehow less practical for someone leaping around swinging a sword. High heels, a big flowy dress she has to hike up to try and run. I guess she was planning on a fancy party. Eventually she switches to something with actual boots and leggings, maintaining the shades of purple color aesthetic, but making it less eye-searingly bright.)

But hitting the road, rather than flying over it, exposes Amy to more of the "true" Gemworld, which is important for her to grow as a person. Apparently Gemworld, like me with my Skittles, segregates their different gems. Except for one ostracized community, called The Banned, who use all different types of gems and are generally being run out of one kingdom or the other.

End game, Amethyst saves her people, defeats Dark Opal, gets no help from most of the kingdoms that used to be her friends, learns her birth parents are dicks, but finds a new community of people who want her to lead them. Although I would have liked some explanation from the person from Emerald who said Amy was a natural at being a king. Because she fought? Because she tried to protect people who couldn't protect themselves? There are certainly worse qualities. Either way, Amy accepts and messy, happy-cries about it. 

Saturday Splash Page #235

"Out of the Box," in West of Sundown #1, by Tim Seeley and Aaron Campbell (writers), Jim Terry (artist), Triona Farrell (color artist), Crank! (letterer)

Dooley O'Shaughnessy's an Irish immigrant deeply regretting getting involved in the American Civil War. As it's only 1861, he's got several years of it to go. Unless he dies in battle. Or happens to unearth a vampire who tried to sleep out the conflict in a grave.

Remarkable though the odds are, it's the third thing that happens, and Dooley spends the next decade as Constance der Abend's loyal assistant, helping her to slake her thirst on the corrupt or wicked. Robber barons, child killers, highwaymen, people like that. Until someone burns her home, and the native soil within her coffin, forcing Constance to return to the place of her birth. A town sits there now, Sangre de Moro, and it's home to its fair share of monsters.

The book ran 10 issues, split into 5-issue arcs, in 2022 and 2023. The first arc was Constance (or Rosa, as her birth name) trying to get some soil from where she was born, and finding her birthplace now home to some strange cult. She and Dooley are also pursued by Frankenstein's Monster and a creepy little scientist by the name of Griffin. The Monster found God and decided the Lord said kill monsters. Griffin just wants to dissect strange things in the hopes of unlocking the keys to something more.

In the second arc, the quartet have come to an uneasy detente, but new agents move into town at the behest of Dr. Moreau, and play to both Constance's ego (she was a renowned opera singer in New York before the flight west) and her thirst (she's trying to only feed on the evil, but the town is too small and lacking in such people.)

Seeley and Campbell pull in horror elements from a lot of sources. Unfortunately, most of them are ones I'm not familiar with, so any significance kind of whizzes right past me. I recognize Moreau selling the land he'd purchased to a brokerage in England run by a Renfield is a Dracula reference. That the "blind god" Griffin sees when he lets Moreau experiment on him is probably Lovecraftian. Maybe the grey little things roaming the wilderness that cry "ooot!" and have a paralytic tongue are (Canadian?) chupacabras. The fact Constance's father became a werewolf by eating part of the dog he killed trying to protect his wife and child (killing his wife in the process)? Don't get that. Is that a normal method of becoming a werewolf? I thought they had to bite you, not the other way around.

That's probably not an issue, other than I'm missing details. Seeley and Campbell establish that this or that constitutes a Problem, and the cast need to confront it. Terry and Farrell, who illustrate the entire series, keep the threats grounded and solid, only veering occasionally into something that hints at being beyond perception. Moreau's beast-people are basically human, just with animals parts stitched on here and there. But there's a banshee in the second arc, and her face is kept in shadow, save for her teeth, which gleam out of that darkness. In the first arc, the quartet pass through some weak point between dimensions and encounter something that's possessed a horse. Terry and Farrell channeled some strong Berni Wrightson for that creature.

The series really revolves around Constance and Dooley's relationship, and that's where I think it falls short. Not that it's a poorly set up relationship. Dooley feels grateful to Constance for helping him escape the war and educating him, but is growing increasingly uneasy at what he's part of. Constance likes Dooley, probably sees him as a bit of a wayward youth (he's an adult, but she's over 200, so it's a fair perspective) to guide and tease. She cares about him enough to mediate her hunger, but at the same time, resents him a little for his morality that constrains her.

The issue is, Seeley and Campbell leave a lot of things unresolved, or meat on the bone, if you prefer. The first arc turns on Dooley and the Monster, and to a lesser extent, Griffin, deciding to try and deal with this crazy cult leader who has his followers drinking the blood of Constance's father to try and ascend to some higher plane. Constance wants no part of it, until her father (who she claims to despise and want to see dead) points out she cares about Dooley. Then she turns around and shows up to help. Why then, due to words of someone she doesn't care about?

That isn't resolved by the second arc, when Dooley seems bent on trying to protect the citizens of Sangre de Moro from supernatural threats, but can't do much on his own. Even the Monster is limited. A lot of it falls to Constance, who still doesn't really care. Even with her native soil readily at hand, she needs blood, and desires praise from people she thinks are worth it. (Bit of a social climber.) When the eastern businessmen, Moreau's lackeys, show up, talking about bringing the railroad through town, which will mean more people, specifically more evil people, Constance is all ears. That they promise to build an opera house, praise her singing, only makes the offer sweeter.

But even if Constance acknowledges they played on her ego, and she should have listened to Dooley, the core problem is not resolved. Whether she continues to help Dooley with his defender of the night act or not, she's a vampire. She needs blood. Sangre de Moro is a pissant, backwater town in the middle of the desert. If she's going to willingly restrict her potential prey, she's going to starve. No solution is offered, not even Dooley occasionally opening a vein for her. The friction between Dooley's Christian morality, and the necessities of Rosa's existence, remain unaddressed.

(She comments once during their flight west, that if he can't find someone, she may have to feed on him. Dooley treats it as a joke. I don't think it was.)

Maybe if the book continued, they were going to address that, but it's been over 3 years, so I doubt anything is on the way. 

What I Bought 6/24/2026

Alright, this is it. Last day - hopefully - I have to play fake boss. He's supposed to be back in the office Monday. I'm so ready to be done with the added stress. It makes me dread getting up, and makes me want to go to bed earlier so I can wake up and be one day closer to being done.

Here's two X-books.

Generation X-23 #5, by Jody Houser (writer), Marco Renna (artist), Erick Arciniega (color artist), Ariana Maher (letterer) - That is definitely a picture of Laura Kinney lunging at the reader, claws extended.

X-80, the time traveler that originally clued Laura into this whole mess, shows up to rescue her. This is a younger version than the one Laura met earlier, because time travel, although that power is one that was grafted onto her later. The energy blades X-Infinite uses are her original mutation.

While Infinite drags Gabby off to use as a genetic material source, and the rest of the cast figure out he's a bad guy, 80 takes Laura on a trip through the past to see how things got to that point. Infinite (X-39, then) used to try and protect the others by getting the guards angry at him, but eventually a Dr. Chiles (and for some reason that name seems familiar) convinced him to help her with this grafting of powers. Except she was only interested in powers rich humans would pay for, which apparently doesn't include having wings and feathers? I mean, there are lots of other powers I'd rather have, but it's not a bad power.

Laura and 80 rescue the others, then free Gabby. Whose enhanced senses somehow still work, even with the mutant power neutralizing collar on. Don't quite understand that. Laura's willing to leave Infinite there and take the others to safety, but 74 decides to blow him up. Except 66 - with the bird powers - throws herself on the grenade, so he's still alive.

If the point of this arc was to give Laura and Gabby a supporting cast - and the remainder of this bunch are going to live with them, so that seems to be the case - Houser probably should have moved faster. Speed-run Infinite's reveal as the villain, weed out whoever you were going to kill, get on with having Laura be a leader/mentor/friend to the survivors. Especially given Marvel's quick-trigger on the cancellation button these days, I'm not sure you can afford to burn 5 issues just getting to the actual point of your book.

(Also kind of strange to introduce the Kimura Scorpion-bot and not have it be a bigger deal. Maybe save that for after Infinite was dealt with, or vice versa.) 

Especially since none of the new characters Laura's going to be interacting with have much in the way of personalities yet. 92 is silent and lurks in the walls, 99 is chipper and playful, which seems to be designed for her to interact with Gabby rather than Laura. 74 is the one with a quick temper. That's pretty much what I've got on them so far.

Moonstar #4, by Ashley Allen (writer), Edoardo Audino (artist), Arthur Hesli (color artist), Clayton Cowles (letterer) - We got a zombie bear, zombie elk (stag?), zombie wolf, and zombie hyena? I was thinking this was in North America, in which case the hyena's a long way from home, but they end up in Iran, so maybe all those are native fauna.

Dani thinks it through and concludes Kyrion will want to kill her parents in front of her. So they have time to get to the tablet first, and hide it, then rescue her parents. Dani has enough of the residual magic from the sword infecting her to use it as a tracking beacon, so they fly to Iran on Brightwind. Dani says she learned a spell that can provide acceleration over short distances, but Colorado to Iran wouldn't seem to qualify as short.

As it turns out, this is where Kian grew up, and where he first started messing with magic, which is why his eyes are messed up now. Something else that's messed up: the native wildlife, which is back from the dead and running rampant. Kian tries some kind of spell to dissolve the reanimated corpses, but they just combine into a monstrosity that would make John Carpenter proud. I mean, that thing is truly disgusting looking, props to Audino.

Dani's able to panic the chimera by hurting it, then playing off the instinctive reaction that pain causes, which leaves them free to continue to the tablet. Kian keeps advising her to at least consider alternative approaches, like taking out Kyrion's backup and saving her parents, but Dani won't be swayed. She's certain she can save everyone if she does things her way.

It's funny she doesn't ever point out that if they don't keep Kyrion from getting the tablet, saving her parents will be a moot point, because he'll kill everyone. As it turns out, the tablet is somehow too big to move now, and Kyrion's brought her parents along to use it as a sacrificial altar. And Dani's arrows don't seem to be doing much. That's not a great turn of events.

I'm curious to see how Allen wraps this up. Kyrion and Kian both keep commenting on Dani's optimism or hopeful attitude, which feels significant in a story about accepting death as part of life. Or refusing to accept it, in Kyrion's case. Whether Dani saves people today, she can't save them forever, but she still persists in trying, and in believing she can save everyone today. I don't know where Allen's going with that. There's also the fact Kian's caught feelings, as we get a panel where he's very close and asking if she can lend him some courage, while Hesli colors the background a very soft focus pink. Dani's either oblivious or too locked in to notice, so I guess we'll see if Kian just booked himself a room in the fridge next month.

Redshift - Al Sarrantonio (ed.)

A collection of 30 stories by various authors, placed under the heading of "speculative fiction." The lengths vary, a few only a couple of pages, others closer to 50. It seems like they're supposed to be science fiction - Sarrantonio apparently wanted something like a modern version of what Harlan Ellison pulled together in the '60s - but some don't have much sci-fi. Joe Haldermann's "Road Kill" feels like the outline of a script for a serial killer thriller, with a tiny bit of science fiction tacked on at the end.

Sarrantonio's own offering, "Billy the Fetus," is a bizarre piece about the child of Billy the Kid and the woman who apparently killed him and every other man that fucked her, and what the fetus learned about the world from the songs she sang while he was in her womb. Harry Turtledove's is set in Afghanistan during the 1980s, and involves a dragon. It's not a bad story, I'm just not sure how it's either science fiction or speculative fiction.

It was rough sledding at times, is what I'm getting at. Thomas Disch's "In Xanadu" was probably the first one I actually enjoyed, and that was over 100 pages in. Either that or James Patrick Kelly's "Unique Visitors." Both are brief and focused on unpleasant forms of immortality people tried to buy themselves. In contrast, David Morrell has an entry, "Resurrection," about people sacrificing their present and futures for a bit of the past they can't bring themselves to let go of.

The most noteworthy thing to me about Joyce Carol Oates' "Commencement," was the realization I've apparently been confusing Oates with some other writer. Which one I don't know, as I thought she was part of the Lost Generation, hanging around Paris with Gertrude Stein and Hemingway. As for the story itself, I figured out the basic arc two pages in, and the rest felt like killing time until the climax. I didn't even attend my own college graduation ceremony, why would I want to read about a fictional one?

There were some stretches where I got into the stories more. Paul Di Filippo's "Weeping Walls" was farcical in a way I enjoyed. Meaning it was cynical towards targets I don't mind seeing take the hits. I wouldn't have minded it if were a bit longer (it was ~15 pages.) That was followed by Gregory Benford's "Anomalies," which was kind of clever, with a nice twist at the end.

I think I preferred stories where the characters are human or close enough the writer doesn't spend a lot of effort describing some alien being or setting, utilizing made up terms I can't visualize from what's on the page well enough to connect with the story. Like, "Pockets" had weird bubbles people can visit other places through and time moves differently, but the people are still basically people. Recognizable in their follies and desires, even if the setting is somewhat different. Stephen Baxter's "In the Un-Black," I couldn't really wrap my head around what sort of society he was trying to describe. Not well enough to care about the characters caught in it, anyway.

'He went to the bubble and kicked it angrily. He couldn't feel anything but "stop," with his sneaker on. It wasn't like kicking an object, it was like something stopped you, turned you back towards your own time flow. Just "stopness." It was saying "no" with the stuff of forever itself. There was no way to look inside it. Once someone crawled through a pocket's navel, it sealed up all over.' - from "Pockets, by Rudy Rucker and John Shirley