2025 Comics in Review - Part 2

New comics total in 2025 was 112, up 18 from 2024, but still 7 less than 2023. Worse than every other year except 2020, 2021, and 2024. Could have been a little higher if Dust to Dust #7 didn't keep getting delayed, or Tuatha actually showed up, or I found a copy of Marvel All-on-One at a price I was willing to pay.

Although, through June, I was on pace for around 134 comics. The numbers cratered the second half of the year. I went from over 11 books/month, to less than 8, as all those mini-series I was buying early in the year either ended or started missing months, and nothing much popped up to replace them.

Dark Pyramid #1-5: Written by Paul Tobin, with PJ Holden as artist, a livestreamer goes missing right after finding something strange on Mt. Denali in Alaska. His girlfriend Becca goes to find him, and runs into a lot of strange creatures, including a very persistent monster and a bunch of murderous American soldiers. 

High Point - I thought the big party of Hooky's fans Becca and Shailene briefly take cover in during issue 2 was interesting. Mostly for the mixture of personalities, and trying to figure who would be useful or detrimental in Becca's search going forward. Then they all died, either from Eve (the monster), or the soldiers. But the part where Becca insists they need to go back to try and help the partygoers not run into danger, only to get trampled by a panicked mob, was not only good for establishing Becca's character, it was funny.

Holden's design for Eve was pretty cool, especially the second mouth on the back of its head. The human-faced goats were disturbing. 

Low Point - The fact Tobin and Holden spent most of an issue on that party of weirdos, only to then slaughter them shortly thereafter seemed like a waste. Maybe it was meant to establish just how far the government was going to cover things up, but I don't think it was necessary.

The ending was kind of a downer. "You can't beat 'em, so join 'em," is rarely satisfying to me, and this example was not an exception. 

Deadpool #10, 13-15: Cody Ziglar and Roge Antonio brought Deadpool back to life through some alchemical jiggery-pokery that was supposed to keep his and Eleanor's healing factors from being as overdone. Then they went to settle things up with Death Grip, who learned that keep shards of a sword that cuts souls inside your body is a bad idea.

High Point - I don't really care about the Arakko mutants, but the fight with Solem in issue 13 wasn't bad. Seemed kind of stupid they went to the trouble of bringing a magic sword, then waited so long to use it on a guy with adamantium skin, but whatever. Solem was at least sort of funny.

Low Point - I guess it has to be the 2 issue crossover with Ziglar's Miles Morales: Spider-Man book, since I dropped the title rather than buy a crossover. But I still don't really get what Death Grip's deal was, and making a point of saying Deadpool's healing factor is weaker now just felt kind of pointless. Just stop writing scenes where Deadpool heals so rapidly from extreme damage! You don't have to make an entire storyline about it! Eleanor didn't even have a conventional healing factor prior to this, Duggan gave her some weird thing that reset her age to the point when her mutant power manifested when she sustained massive damage, which is not the same as what Deadpool has!

Dust to Dust #2-6: JG Jones and Phil Bram's Dust Bowl murder mystery pressed on. The mayor's got issues, his PTSD-suffering brother is on who knows what kinds of drugs (administered by the mayor), the sheriff's trying to dry out, the mayor's future son-in-law's a cad, the big-city photographer's snooping around in ways the mayor doesn't like.

High Point - The sepia color scheme, broken up only occasionally by stark red, really captures the bleakness of the surroundings. For a specific moment, the big rabbit-killing round-up in issue 6. It didn't seem like they were killing the rabbits for food, but simply because the rabbits might eat their crops. If, you know, they could get anything to grow. It comes off as people venting their frustration and cruelty on something they perceive as a safe target. What are rabbits gonna do? Throw on a WWI gas mask and stab them with bayonets?

Low Point - Sometimes it's more apparent than others Jones is using photo references. The photographer will look a lot like Cate Blanchett sometimes, others not so much. The sheriff's mustache seems to shift in width and bushiness from one panel to another for no apparent reason.

I also kind of wonder if Jones and Bram can pull all these elements together in two issues. The rainmaker and his assistant, for example, feel like a case of maybe one too many pieces on the board. I mean, there's also the firebrand preacher guy that feels like he should be relevant, but hasn't done much of anything yet. Maybe it's all just supposed to be texture, fleshing out the world these murders are occurring in, but I'm not sure. 

Fantastic Four #28-33: Ryan North spent the last six issues of this volume on One World Under Doom tie-ins, mostly with Cory Smith as penciler. Outside of Doom tricking Sue and Reed into finding a magic sword that might have threatened him, most revolved around Doom having turned the Thing back into Ben Grimm, and this somehow steadily negating/draining the rest of the team's powers, and them trying to reverse this.

High Point - Slim pickings. Doing extended event tie-ins ran contrary to the vibe of North established the first 2+ years on the book. Maybe issue 30, when Ben deals badly with the fact not being the Thing makes him feel weak and unable to keep him family safe, unable to feel confident when he assures them everything is OK. Or issue 33, written from HERBIE's perspective as the team makes a last-ditch effort to recharge their powers. Although Smith's art made me think the FF were being kind of malicious setting the robot up to sacrifice himself for them. Like he's a sucker they've tricked.

Low Point - The whole notion that one member of the team loses their powers, the others will start to as well is apparently left over from something Dan Slott wrote post-Secret Wars, but it's one North would have been better off leaving behind.

Sue Richards being able to create a force bubble that can protect people from time being rewritten, even after she ceased to exist (or was rewritten to never have powers), was also a thing I didn't really need or buy, especially since it just turned into a What If? issue where the most notable thing is Jean Grey and Namor being the last 2 heroes standing.

Fantastic Four #1-6: North, now paired with penciler Humberto Ramos, reboots the book back to #1, and give us 3 more issues of One World Under Doom stuff. Then, finally back to more done-in-one stuff, with aliens who mess with the parts of our brain that seek patterns in things, and the Black Cat being innocent of a crime, to Sue's consternation.

High Point - The page in issue 3 where, with Reed having tampered with Doom's "reset button" machine, Doom is stuck experiencing the same moment of the Thing smashing him in the face over and over again, because he can't simply take the hit (which knocked his mask off) and strike back. He has to make it so the hit never happened at all, because to have his mask knocked off is too great an indignity. Anyway, it's presented as the same panel, over and over, each row becoming more and more copies of the panel, for all the times Doom tries to find a way to turn things around in the split-second he's granted.

Ramos also reined in the excesses in how he draws faces and proportions enough I no longer feel like his art is slapping me in the eyes with a porcupine. 

Low Point - Some of the things North is implying the FF can do are straining my suspension of disbelief. Reed being able to stretch far enough into the Earth's crust to find stuff to make artificial diamonds to create huge subterranean arrows Sue can see from the air, a billion years in the future? Also, shouldn't those diamonds have been subducted back into the mantle by that point, due to plate tectonics?

Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt #1-4: John Allison and Max Sarin bring us another mystery for Shauna Wickle to solve, while she's stuck working in quilting shops to raise funds to repair her boat. I don't know how great a mystery it is - I had it pretty well figured out in issue 2, if not sooner - but then I didn't feel like the first mini-series really did much with the mystery, in terms of providing clues to the reader to solve it. Maybe I just don't understand baking, but I don't understand quilting either, and here we are.

High Point - Watching Shauna try to figure out how to act like a double agent for two people at the same time was a lot of fun. Her beat poetry performance in issue 4 was very cool, or maybe that was just the outfit Sarin gave her.

Sarin's artwork, the exaggerations and flourishes she provides as the characters go through emotional turmoil, fantastic as always. The part in issue 1 where she collapses into a gloopy puddle of tears at learning how much repairs will cost, then pulls it together until the moment she has to request a job, only to revert to the puddle, was just great.

Low Point - I don't know who "Prairie Lady" is, but fortunately, it's not necessary info. It's enough the quilters regard her as a big deal.

Tomorrow is the hodgepodge day. Lots of books with just a couple of issues, things I dropped, or just didn't last very long.

2025 Comics in Review - Part 1

We're back again, to look at all the new comics I bought over the last year. 4 days on that, then the Internet-mandated ranking of stuff on Friday. 17th verse, same as the first.

Avengers Assemble #5: The last issue of Steve Orlando's mini-series about an Avengers "Emergency Response Squad." Which, as pointed out by more than one person, just sounds like the regular Avengers, but what the hell. Anyway, they stop the Serpent Society's plans to turn everybody into snake-people for Mephisto, and then I think the concept continued as one of those online Infinity titles.

Babs #5, 6: Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows' barbarian lady mini-series. Babs and her friends escape from the mines and challenge the jackass that's convincing all the idiot peasants to enslave everyone that isn't a human. It isn't a pretty win, and the peasants are about as ungrateful as you'd expect, but it's still nice to see a stupid dickhead die in embarrassing fashion. And the idiot orc guy sort of comes to his senses, without being rewarded for it, which is good.

Batgirl #3-14: Tate Brombal's story about Batgirl and a bunch of other characters fighting these angry magic-flower-huffing ninja guys. Lady Shiva appears to sacrifice herself for Cass, prompting lots of confusing grief and vengeance related feelings. Then two issues (drawn by Isaac Goodheart) of flashbacks to Shiva and her sister's past, none of which explain why the hell Shiva would have a kid with the guy (David Cain) who killed her sister instead of, you know, killing him. Then there was the reveal of a new sibling for Cass, and then more fighting flower-huffers. Steven Segovia drew the most recent issue, and Takeshi Miyazawa drew the other 9 issues.

High Point - I liked Cass' refusal in issue 3 to deal with Shiva's crap and just start throwing hands at the League of Assassin. I don't think Shiva - or Nyssa, or any of the others - have earned any leeway or benefit of the doubt, so Cass might as well follow her instincts. These are bad people, kick their asses. If Shiva wanted to be a mom, or be treated with respect like one, she should have tried being one in Cass' first however many years of her life.

Miyazawa's got a heavier line than I'm used to seeing in his art, but it gives Cass a more ragged look during the moments where she's losing her grip. And the fight scenes look really nice. 

I'm not sure whether Tenji, Cass' half-brother, is a high point or not. There's really not enough of him to tell so far. He's compassionate, but inexperienced, which seems like a bad combination in this story. I'm not saying he's got "sacrificial lamb for angst purposes" stamped on his forehead (because he'd have to be Hector Hammond, or Peyton Manning to fit all that), but I don't like his odds of surviving. 

Low Point - I feel like Brombal's going to the surprise reveal or SHOCKING BETRAYAL! well too often. Cass has a brother! Nyssa al'Ghul lied about the history of the city! The Unburied have a mole amid their enemies' ranks! This is why I suspect Shiva's not dead, because it would be another bait and switch.

Black Cat #1-5: G. Willow Wilson decided to write a Black Cat series where Felicia tries to be a hero, but is really bad at it. She tried to stop some smugglers, and got crosswise of Daredevil and a vampire. Then Ms. Marvel interrupted her attempt to stop some other guys who were smuggling alien plants. Then she got crosswise of Tombstone and ended up in jail, and I was done with this book.

High Point - Ummmmm, you know, I got nothing. The variant cover I bought for issue 3 was cute? Gleb Melnikov has drawn all the issues so far, so credit for maintaining the same artist for 5 consecutive issues.

Low Point - I could see Black Cat struggling at heroing because unexpected complications keep arising, and people make assumption. Some of that even happens, what with the guys smuggling not furniture, but a vampire. But mostly, Wilson is writing Felicia as kind of an idiot. OK, Tombstone tricked her. Fine. Why is her response to confront him face-to-face and shout schoolyard insults, instead of stealing something important or sabotaging one of his other schemes? It's just idiotic. Also don't like the breaking the 4th wall stuff. Just reinforces my feeling that this was a pitch Wilson originally intended for Harley Quinn.

Bronze Faces #1-6: Written by Shobo and Shof, with art by Alexandre Tefenkgi, a trio of friends decide to recover as many of the Benin bronzes that were taken to display in various European museums. While things start off well, old rivalries and hurts start to undermine things from within. 

High Point - Shobo and Shof really took their time with the relationships between Timi, Gbonka and Sango, pulling apart all the different tensions between them, the protective vibe that veers into possessiveness the other two seem to have over Timi. Tefenkgi did some excellent work with the layouts, like doing a double-page spread of a large, circular room for the setting of a conversation between two characters, where the smaller panels progress in a ring around the two pages. Or some of the exaggeration for effect, like Sango being drawn as huge or on fire when she loses her temper.

I also appreciate they didn't skip on showing the heists and how they were pulled off. I know that wasn't necessarily the focus of the mini-series, but I like heist stuff, so it helped scratch that itch when we get to see how Sango pulls it off in issue 5, or the train heist in issue 2. 

Low Point - There were times I felt like we needed more focus on the other members of their crew. I could usually pick up on relationships between them - two of the guys are brothers, for example - on the second read-through, but it didn't always feel like I had a grasp on them as individuals. So when one guy decides to grab the money and run, it doesn't exactly come out of left field, but it doesn't have much emotional impact.

Calavera P.I. #3, 4: The final two issues of Marco Finnegan's horror-noir story. Where the revived skeleton manages to save his friend's son from a crazy grief-stricken woman who intended to sacrifice the kid as part of some weird process to resurrect her own child. I'm not clear on how the kid made it back after he fell into the portal, whether it was something he did, or the private investigator managed, but happy ending.

That's it for Day 1. One ongoing I'm still buying, one I'm not, the conclusions of a few mini-series, and one complete mini-series. Tomorrow is pretty evenly split between ongoing and mini-series.

Sunday Splash Page #408

"Spider-sicle," in Peter Parker: Spider-Man (vol. 2) #37/135, by Paul Jenkins (writer), Mark Buckingham (penciler), Wayne Faucher (inker), Transparency Digital (colorists), RS and Comicraft (letterers)

Following the general mess that was The Final Chapter, Marvel canceled most of their Spider-titles, rebooting two with new first issues. Amazing Spider-Man, helmed by Howard Mackie and John Byrne, and Peter Parker: Spider-Man, by Mackie and John Romita Jr.

Quite why anyone thought having both books written by Howard Mackie of all people was a good idea escapes me, beyond the fact nobody at Marvel was making good decisions in the '90s. Case in point: that stretch, which lasted about 18 months, is known primarily for Mary Jane appearing to be killed in a plane crash and Peter dealing with being a grieving widower.

Romita Jr. eventually moved to Amazing when Byrne departed, which is also when Paul Jenkins and Mark Buckingham took over Peter Parker: Spider-Man. While they weren't able to entirely avoid plotlines in Amazing (such as Norman Osborn drugging Peter's toothpaste so he could make him dress up as the Green Goblin and attack Peter's friends in some twisted attempt to make Parker into his new heir, no I'm not kidding), they did get to do their own thing most of the time.

(They adapted pretty smoothly to J. Michael Straczynski having Peter move into his own apartment and become a teacher. Jenkins actually had Peter strike up a friendship with a neighbor, more than JMS did, and alluded to the difficulties of getting papers graded when you were out late fighting the Rhino.)

"Their own thing" was, especially for the first year, mostly done-in-one stories about Peter's life. How it shifts to accommodate Spider-Man, and frequently, how other people perceive Spider-Man. One issue might be about a young boy in a troubled home who imagined himself as Spider-Man's sidekick, with Spidey as a sort of parental figure who reminds him to work on his math and be forgiving when his mother forgets to sign his permission slip for the field trip. Another is about how different cops see Spider-Man, or a private investigator who thinks he's pieced together Spider-Man's secret identity (based on assumptions about what the man must be like in his civilian life to act like Spider-Man.)

Jenkins and Buckingham were also the creators of my favorite entry of Marvel's "Nuff Said" Month, as they penned an issue where Spidey comes under attack from a veritable army of criminal mimes.

Jenkins' version of Parker is a bit of a dork. Not as funny as he clearly thinks he is - there's an issue where Peter tries stand-up comedy and bombs completely - and always seems a bit harried. Like there's just a little too much on his plate for him to handle. It fits with Buckingham's depiction, where Peter always seems to have bags under his eyes and look a little older than you think he might. It's a stressful life, and all his neuroses and guilt complexes don't make it any less so. At the same time, Buckingham's Spider-Man can often look graceful, then just as swiftly look like a fool, but always seems to pick himself back up.

The few multi-part stories Jenkins did in his 30 issues were a mixed bag. There was a vengeful parent who at first appeared to be like a Super-Adaptoid, but was more of a low-grade mutant Mysterio. But, proving he didn't play favorites (or that he read the fan responses), Jenkins fed that guy to Doc Ock in a story that felt needlessly convoluted (chips that could control people being placed in advanced cybernetic limbs), but nonetheless played Octavius as a vicious, determined threat.

Then Jenkins brought Norman Osborn into play, although the story is most notable for Humberto Ramos shifting from cover artist to interior artist. Talk about whiplash, going from Buckingham to Ramos was like a brick to the face. Actually, a brick to the face might have been preferable to Ramos' weirdly disjointed, oddly proportioned, undead-esque sunken eyes, art. I could not figure out why Marvel thought this guy had any business drawing comics.

To be fair, even with Buckingham on pencils I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it. However cool I might have originally thought the reveal of Norman as the mastermind behind the Clone Saga was (and I have to sadly admit I was excited to get that comic because i thought it might be worth something, silly me), I was thoroughly sick of Osborn by the time this story rolled around. Especially when Jenkins goes to the edge of Peter killing Norman Osborn, only to pull back, because that would mean Osborn "won," somehow. Osborn had already, just in this story, beat the shit out of Flash, dumped booze on him, put him behind the wheel of a truck and driven it into the side of Peter's classroom, putting Flash in a coma that appeared to be the result of a relapse into alcoholism. That's a pretty solid win, but at least if he's dead he can't enjoy it.

I know, if Jenkins killed him, someone else would just bring him back, and we'd still have Norman trying to be good or whatever the hell is going on in the Spider-Man books right now.

All that is to say, that story got tossed from the collection (possibly into the trash) many years ago. Jenkins and Buckingham left the book at issue #50, turning it over to Zeb Wells and a host of pencilers for 7 issues until the book was canceled. Jenkins took up the second volume of Spectacular Spider-Man, occasionally working with Buckingham. While "Peter Parker" has been placed at the front of at least one volume of Spectacular since, this particular title has been left behind. 

Saturday Splash Page #210

"The Black Sun Group," in Roche Limit #2, by Michael Moreci (writer), Vic Malhorta and Kyle Charles (artists), Jordan Boyd (colorist), Ryan Ferrier (letterer)

On the edge of the Andromeda Galaxy sits an anomaly. Like a black hole in that it swallows light and energy, but without the intense gravity. Around it sits a dwarf planet, Dispater. On and within Dispater, a colony, Roche Limit. The dream of the son of a billionaire, the colony was failing before Moiratech and its 3 founders stepped in, with a vision of finding new resources beneath the surface. That vision has failed as well, and the colony is now a backwater land of criminals and addicts, in thrall to a drug made with the only unique mineral found on Dispater, a drug known as Recall. And it's into this that a cop from Earth arrives, looking for her sister, Bekkah.

Roche Limit was an odd book for me in a particular way. Up to then, certainly in the lifespan of this blog, the titles I bought were in some sense known quantities. The majority being from Marvel and DC obviously. Even the selections from other publishers were mostly things I knew previously from TV (the Buffyverse stuff, Boom's Darkwing Duck title), movies (the various Rocketeer mini-series), video games (all the Bloodrayne stuff.) Of the rest, I knew GrimJack from my cousin's collection of the original series well before the Ostrander and Truman did Killer Instinct or Manx Cat. Atomic Robo and Empowered had both been praised by multiple comics bloggers I read for years before I got around to try either.

Roche Limit? It was its own thing, not a continuation or extension of any pre-existing concept. I didn't know any of the creative team by prior work. The book being titled after an astronomical concept I was familiar with happened to catch my eye, and that, seemingly, was enough to take a chance. Which means this mini-series is, in some way, the start of all the oddball stuff I've bought from various other publishers over the last dozen years.

As to the mini-series itself, Moreci has things several threads that cross or combine at different points. Sonya, an Earth cop who spends all her savings and most of her pension to buy a ticket to come find her sister. She runs into Alex Ford, a slick-talker who knows more than he's telling. Alex is also the creator of Recall, which is all that's keeping him alive, but also what's keeping him in the colony.

There's also Janice, a nightclub owner missing an eye, and her chief goon, looking for several girls who've went missing just like Bekkah. You have Moscow, the drug lord who controls Alex, but is increasingly less concerned with such matters. A Dr. Watkins, who keeps dumping people into the Anomaly. The bodies he brings back are comatose at first, and rapidly rotting from within, while odd, glowing stone appear in the mines outside the colony.

And then there's the history of the colony itself. Each issue begins with part of a recording by Langford Skaargred, the idealist who started the colony. He had a dream for it, but like most dreams, when brought into reality, there were pieces missing, or things that just no longer made sense. He turned to Moiratech for financial help, but their dream, to the extent they had one, was simply more of what they already had.

Neither got what they wanted. Roche Limit is no shining waypoint on humanity's trek to another galaxy, nor is it a great hub of commerce and corporate profit; it's a decaying, crime-ridden backwater Earth is all too willing to ignore. What Malhorta and Charles show us are tight clusters of apartment buildings, rehab clinics with cracked walls and dirty floors. Watkins has a dingy dissection lab with pipes and cables all over, and rooms full of cages. Janice's nightclub looks a little brighter, a little nicer, but it's an isolated outpost. The Moiratech CEOs seem to live in a vast auditorium in a skyscraper overlooking the city. It's big, and empty, and there's just nothing to it. No business takes place, no discoveries, no growth. More a tomb than anything else.

Likewise, the people we see are often small, taking up limited space in the panel or on the page. They're dwarfed by walls that hem them in, or an Anomaly that sucks them in and spits them out like the husk of a sunflower seed. Lots of people brandish firearms in this mini-series, but even when they actually shoot someone, they're not drawn as looking powerful or cool. Guns aren't much use in this situation, at best a temporary reprieve. 

Faced with a spiraling situation, we see the choices people make when about what's important. Some, like Moscow, embrace nothingness as a truth. Others retreat into their pasts, via Recall, but it leads to the same point, rotting them out from within, just faster. Still others focused on meaningless turf battles. Moreci introduces another crook who thinks that Moscow's lost focus and he can seize control of the drug trade. Great, he can be the biggest tick on a tiny, disease-riddled dog's ass, but that's enough for him. You could possibly lump Janice and Woodbury into this category, but there's at least some suggestion Janice actually cares about the girls that are going missing, and is trying to protect more than just her status. And when things fall to pieces, she and her crew face it together.

Sonya and Alex, ultimately, are striving to find someone they care about to move forward. Even if Alex knows there really is no future for him, he figures he can help someone who believed in him. Sonya and Bekkah both have experience with what drug addiction costs, but rather than fall back into reliving the happy times before it ruined things, they each, in their own way, try to make something better going forward.

Which makes it seem like this is an existential struggle against nihilism, in which case Skaargred's failure was not in the attempt, but in the fact he gave up. He saw his dream fall apart, and rather than try to salvage it, or even help anyone, he consigns himself to the vacuum. As for the Moiratech CEOs, they were only concerned with profitability and found themselves engulfed by something greater. In the process, it seems to have taken the drive from them.

It's strange; I would have figured people considered as successful as the 3 "explorernauts" had a rapacious will to consume and control, to have. As they are now (that's them in the splash page), they're marionettes with a lazy hand on the strings. Maybe they think, by granting Watkins time for his research, they'll learn how to control all this, but it feels like they want the takeover, but have no drive to make it happen. Content to wait for some critical mass to be reached. It's Moscow who lights the match and Moscow who, eventually, eliminates them as surplus to requirements. Downsized, in a sense.

What I Bought 12/26/2025

Almost as obnoxious as all the ads for these sports betting apps I see on the rare occasions I watch TV, are the ads for this stupid Taylor Sheridan show. I'm tired of seeing Billy Bob Thornton, looking like a rotting cloth sack leaking cow shit, informing us that his wife owns the business, but he runs it. Yeah, that's what any sensible person would be concerned about. I wouldn't trust him to order a combo meal in the drive thru, let alone run an oil company, or whatever the hell the "business" is.

In other news, this is the last new comic of 2025. So next week, is Comics in Review.

Hector Plasm: Hunt for Bigfoot #3, by Benito Cereno (writer), Derek Hunter (artist/letterer), Spencer Holt (colorist) - Did Hector steal the live boar cloak from Bigfoot? Hope he washed it, that thing can't smell good.

Hector and the sheriff confront Jervaise in his office, where the instructor, sorry, professor, is only too eager to monologue about how he's communed with the spirit of some tribe of people that traveled here through subterranean tunnels. Not to prove how smart he is, but because he hopes to find the gold they used to make statues and idols and such.

Despite the sheriff's best efforts, Jervaise summons the ghost, eager for it to feed on Hector's blood for a boost. The caveman-ghost proving immune to bullets, it's a swordfight between him and Hector, while Jervaise goes increasingly loony on the sidelines, like some delirious sports fan. He's ranting and gesticulating wildly enough he tears the armpits out of his shirt (nice touch by Hunter there), not that it spares him the ghost's wrath.

Hector ends up beating the ghost, and the sheriff seems to deal with what's left of Jervaise. Which means, once Hector tells Lip all this, it's time to leave, Hector confident there are no Bigfoots around. Because, as he explains in a page behind some author notes by Cereno, the various subspecies were hunted to extinction during dedicated campaigns in the 1800s.

I'm left wondering about the witch and the ghost that Hector initially fought. Jervaise notified him about that as a lure, hoping to feed Hector to his caveman-ghost, but I'm not sure if the initial threat was something else Jervaise summoned, or a pre-existing situation. The ghost daughter said her mother bewitched her father to kill her fiance to protect their bloodline. Which makes me wonder if "Ferdie" (the fiance) was part of the same bloodline as the caveman-ghost (and Jervaise), or if that was just unrelated weirdness.

The Best and Worst Ways I Passed the Time Last Year

I'm not going to bother with a Music category this year. Not enough candidates. Just mark down The Catalogue featuring Requiem as the Best Album of 2025 and we'll move right along.

BOOKS

30 books read last year, 18 non-fiction and 12 fiction. The fiction was mostly in the first half of the year, and there wasn't a lot that stood out. A lot of things that were interesting or engaging in certain ways (the turns of phrase, the underlying concept), but less so in others regards (characterization, or the big reveal was something I figured out halfway through the book. Best would go pretty easily to Rebecca Roanhorse's Mirrored Heavens, where aside from one character implausibly surviving a situation with no real satisfying, she pulled together a lot of disparate threads into a cohesive and satisfying conclusion. The book never dragged, the dialogue had some snap to it, a well-written story to finish the trilogy. None of the others really come close.

For worst, as much as the good old boy in Randy Wayne White's The Man Who Invented Florida pushed all my worst buttons, I think I have to give it to Robert Richardson's The Lazarus Tree. It was a mystery, but there was never much tension or suspense. Certainly no one in the village seemed in any rush to solve the murder, and the main character really isn't trying to do that either, so much as figure out what his friend's teenage daughter is up to. It felt like Richardson spent a lot of time hinting at mysteries or secrets to us (but not his protagonist) about different villagers, but none of them were relevant to the actual story. At best, they felt like set-up for some future story, but that doesn't do much for me while I'm reading this.

The non-fiction tended to shift in areas of focus over the course of the year. A lot of baseball early, then a lot of biology in late spring-early summer. The back half of the year ran more to film history, with a little bit of political or archaeological history thrown in. I had a few more possible options here. I enjoyed Blood in the Garden quite a bit, which surprised me given my antipathy to the 1990s New York Knicks. No Name on the Bullet had some details and facts I hadn't seen about Audie Murphy, but a lot of things I had from other sources.

But for the best, I'd pick Roger Kahn's Good Enough to Dream and Edward George's The Cuban Intervention in Angola. Kahn captured a lot of the things I enjoy about baseball, without the irritating nostalgia-tinted perspective that jarred me out of David Lamb's Stolen Season. And Kahn also built a lot of humor into the book when describing the chaos of trying to run a minor league team on a shoestring budget. As for George, he gave me pretty much exactly what I was hoping for when I got curious about Cuba inserting itself into things in Africa. I got a sense of the different powers, the push-and-pull between them, the problems complicating any sort of resolution, and the descriptions of the battles were aided with actual maps and a clear organizational philosophy to the writing. On the Road of the Winds by Patrick Vinton Kirch would be a close third.

Worst would have to be Peter Polack's The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War. It was more narrowly focused than what I was hoping for, concentrating on one extended battle in Angola without going much into the context or history. But it still had time for strange digressions about how many private security companies from South Africa operate in the Middle East these days. The description of the battle and movements of the various sides weren't well-illustrated to where you could picture what happened, and there was little clear flow in how he went about describing it.

MOVIES

First off, films covered as part of Overdue Movie Reviews are not eligible, because they aren't new to me, which is what this is focused on. Which leaves 44 movies, 11 of which were from the 2020s. Which is not a pattern I would have expected at the start of the year. Second most common decade was the '50s (7 movies.)

For best films, for all the late-70s to late-80s comedies I watched, I'd say How to Beat the High Cost of Living was the best of the lot. Or at least the one that made me laugh the most. Kid Glove Killer was a quick, compact but clever little thriller, and Escape to Athena was fun simply for the bonkers cast it had. But the top 2 would have to be two movies I watched very early in the year, No Name on the Bullet and Prey.

The former was great in the way this one person arrives, and his mere presence - because Audie Murphy mostly just sits, drinks coffee, and watches people go by - causes to the town to basically tear itself apart. All the ugliness and guilt the supposedly nice citizens are hiding makes them throw away what they profess to believe in so easily. The latter just built things up so well, paralleling the Predator taking on greater and greater challenges while at the same time Naru is slowly building herself up into that great challenge, using the skills she already has.

On the negative side, well, even James Coburn couldn't make me enjoy Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (combined with the general dud that was Killer Elite, not a great year for me and Peckinpah movies.) Arrowhead had potential, but it was a '50 Western, so it was never going to be what I wanted. But I think I knew what the two worst films were going to be back in the summer, and sure enough, it's The End and Fear Blood & Gold. I mean, Throw Momma from the Train wasn't really funny outside a couple of moments of physical comedy, but it was funnier than The End, which went to exhausting lengths to assure us Burt Reynolds' character was a self-centered coward, then doubled down on that through the rest of its run time.

And Fear Blood & Gold? Just nonsensical. If Santiago wants to escape from Oscar, why doesn't he run when he successfully spikes his beans? Why does Oscar, having been drugged once by Santiago, accept a hallucinogenic drug from his later? Why does Oscar shoot with his revolver turned sideways like he's some '90s gangbanger? Why does the film need the odd old man? Who captured Oscar and Santiago at the beginning of the film, and why did they never appear again? Just a total disaster, and not even bad enough to put me to sleep. 

VIDEO GAMES

I beat a lot of games this year, although maybe that's the wrong word, given how so many of them were structured around dialogue, with only a limited amount for you to actually do. Did I really "beat" Dear Esther or Firewatch, or did I just reach the end of them? Maybe "finished" is a better word.

Anyway, worst game is really easy. It's 890B, which was a frustrating, pointless piece of crap with stiff dialogue, no character development, with almost all the run time burnt on puzzles I could play on a graphing calculator back in the '90s. The game apparently has good and bad endings, but it there's just a single Achievement for beating the game, regardless of which you get. Because they know nobody is going to play this trash twice without being reimbursed for it. A buck-and-a-half, and still a waste of money. I mean, I figured out after 30 minutes that Hello Neighbor was not for me, but I can see how someone else might enjoy that game. Not 890B. 0 out of 5, send the game designers to the gulag and leave them there.

Best games is trickier, because, with all these short, fairly limited games I played, it's a case of which thing a game focused on that I preferred. Abzu was a beautiful game, and mostly very relaxing to play, but not exactly challenging or the sort of thing where I felt really invested in the story. On the other hand, I enjoyed aspects of the story and the character development in The Fall, but it was such a murky-looking game and I really hate aiming using the right joystick.

So, if I just pick two, I guess it'll the The Stanley Parable: DeLuxe Edition, and The Sinking City. Stanley Parable simply because it was hilarious. It's probably the thing I laughed hardest at all year, outside of conversations Alex and I had at various points during our trip in October. As for Sinking City, while I'm not a huge fan of sanity meters, and definitely didn't love the wobbly screen effects that accompanied a wavering sanity, there was still a lot to enjoy in the game. Searching for evidence, being given the option what to do with that evidence once you had it. The visual look of the characters and setting. They kept crafting simple and straightforward, so it was useful without having so many options I got paralyzed by choice and couldn't figure out what to do.