What I Bought 5/4/2026 - Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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