What I Bought 11/16/2024 - Part 2

While looking to see if the second season of The Invisible Man was available on any streaming services, last month, I found out the Roku Channel not only had that, but also Hardcastle & McCormick. Which was a nice surprise in a nostalgic way. I have vague memories - mostly of the car and the opening theme song - of watching it with my dad at some point. Unfortunately, they took it off the day after the election. Like, "Dumbest Asshole You Know Elected President - Again," wasn't enough bad news.

Deadpool #8, by Cody Ziglar and Alexis Quasarano (writers), Roge Antonio (artist), Guru-eFX (color artist), Joe Sabino (letterer) - I see Eleanor's developed her father's aversion to dodging.

A chunk of this issue is dedicated to Valentine explaining how their relationship with Wade ended. Essentially, they were taking merc jobs together, but Valentine started to miss research. So Wade took more merc jobs to pay the bills, while Valentine got wrapped up in their own work, and they drifted apart until Valentine just left. Seems like trying to explain to Wade they both need to pull back from work a little might have been the better option, but overall, that's much less disastrous than I expected.

That done, Ellie makes a pitch to Valentine to help resurrect Deadpool (whose corpse still isn't decomposing, and is currently chilling in a kiddie pool of half-melted ice cubes.) Valentine admits it sounds like magic's involved, but that's outside their expertise. Ellie is still banking on being able to figure out alchemy if she just watches enough online videos, which makes me wonder why Ziglar and Quasarano don't dust off Diablo, a character I know has figured out alchemy. Or maybe he's just doing magic he dresses up as alchemy? OK, I admit my grasp on Diablo's shtick is limited.

Whatever, Diablo's not here, but MODOK is! Yes, MODOK is using Big Pharma as a cover for whatever his latest schemes are. I guess the T.O.D.D.-bots should have been a clue, as are the administrative support people with lightsaber hands who try to kill Valentine for deciding to leave and help Ellie and Princess. The 'bots are dealt with, but MODOK may be a more complicated issue.

Part of me thinks Ellie's going to come to some kind of understanding with MODOK, if only because she can't keep charging headlong into everything. That didn't work for her dad, and he was a lot more accustomed to pain than she is. I guess I expect Ziglar and Quasarano to have her just sort of collapse at some point as the whole thing really hits her. But maybe not, if they're really bringing Wade back in a couple of months.

Whever I Go, I'm Still Me (Playing Video Games)

Alex and I are probably not great tourists. We don't spending a lot of time checking out notable landmarks. During our brief stay in Madison last weekend, we forgot to go see the plaque commemorating that time Elvis broke up a street fight by jumping out of his limo and striking a karate pose. The shame!

Besides comic stores and playing some mini-golf at a place that's apparently been in business since the '50s, we hit up 3 different arcades. One of them was just down the street from our hotel, and it was $8 for unlimited gaming, which meant we could unwind from 7+hours on the road by beating the X-Men arcade game on a screen that took up half a wall. We each only died. . .a bunch of times! 

(I did suggest Alex might want to stop spamming Colossus' special move right from the start, since it was draining his health, but he stuck with his strategy. I guess if you never run out of continues, why not?)

Even with Alex not waking up until after 11 the next morning, we still had a lot of time to kill before his gig, and the venue wasn't far from two bars with sizeable arcades, so we hit each one at different times. And the last one had a Spider-Man arcade game I'd never seen before. Part of the time, it's your standard side-scrolling beat 'em up arcade game (what the game calls "Big Mode".) You kick, you punch, you jump kick. There's a special move that drains some of your health. You fight a lot of cannon fodder that are just palette-swapped versions of each other.

The rest of the time, it's a platformer, where you move between all these catwalks and rooftops, hitting enemies with your webs or avoiding them by climbing ceilings, grabbing health recovery pickups as you go along. The game refers to this as "Wide Mode" since the camera zooms out, making Spidey a much smaller figure, so you can see more of what's going on around you.

Not that I'm an expert on arcade games, but I didn't feel I'd seen that combo in one game previously. While there seem to be a lot more health recovery items in Wide Mode, the game makes you fight bosses in each, so neither one is necessarily easy (although the fact you can avoid enemies in Wide Mode does allow for a bit of a breather.) Less appealing, your character's health seems to drop a little at a time, even if you're just standing there. I assume to make you keep moving, but it's a stupid mechanic.

The game doesn't skimp on boss fights, pulling out a sizeable chunk of Spidey's enemies, though you still end up fighting Venom a lot. Three times in the opening stage, then one more time at the very end (but there are three of him.) I guess if you really want to kick the crap out of Venom, it's a great game, and the fights against him are less annoying than the part where the Green Goblin flies off the screen, then comes back through lobbing bombs. That wouldn't be so bad if your character could move faster, but he can't, so it's a pain in the butt.

Like X-Men, you have the option to play as other characters. What's odd is the ones they picked, even allowing for Spider-Man not typically being on a team in the early '90s. Black Cat? OK, sure. She'd been an ally more than a foe for a long time. But the other two characters are Hawkeye and Namor. Which is actually what made me to stop dead in my tracks. No one was playing, so the game was rolling some gameplay footage, and there was Namor, crawling up the side of a girder like Spider-Man. So I decided I had to play, even if I did stick with Spider-Man the whole way through. Supposedly the characters play differently, and the game leaned into the notion of Namor being able to absorb and redirect electricity for his special attack.

I did beat it, though I burned at least 12 quarters in the process. The game really likes making you fight the generic goons while also fighting a boss, which was really frustrating. Except when you could grab one of the goons and judo toss him into the super-villain. Anyway, I got the 2nd highest score.

But I'm just thinking about how those are the three people Spidey ends up enlisting. Even if Dr. Strange was doing the old tarot card bit from Secret Defenders, I feel like he might stop and reshuffle the deck. There's a "Sorcerer's Stone" involved, which the Kingpin appears to have swiped, but he's not the actual final boss (SPOILER: it's Dr. Doom.) I guess Black Cat could have heard about the heist through her contacts. And maybe it's Atlantean, so Namor's pissed it got stolen, though it still seems like a member of the FF would have made more sense, given Doom's presence. Hawkeye? Hawkeye was just bored, saw the other three talking, and injected himself into the mix.

What I Bought 11/16/2024 - Part 1

The local comic store's orders haven't been showing up, which is why no reviews of new comics recently. However, I went with Alex to a gig in Wisconsin last weekend. Maybe not the smartest idea to do a 1,000 miles of driving in 40 hours, ahead of a week of inspections, but oh well. Among other things, we checked out a comic store, and it had all the books from the last two weeks I wanted.

Which is only three comics, but is still a welcome result.

Batgirl #1, by Tate Brombal (writer), Takeshi Miyazawa (artist), Mike Spicer (colorist), Tom Napolitano (letterer) - It feels like her foot is turned kind of oddly, but Cass is the fighting expert, so I guess there's a reason.

Shiva contacted Batgirl because they're both in danger from a group called The Unburied, but who basically look like The Hand's Blue Division. What the ninjas want, besides (apparently) Cass and Shiva's deaths, is not explained, but they're (apparently) dangerous enough Shiva decides it's better for her and Cass to run than fight.

I keep saying "apparently" because I can't shake the feeling Shiva's not to be trusted. Brombal and Miyazawa use this bit of smaller panels focused on Shiva's face or hand, with one-word captions describing what Cassandra is reading. Except Cass also mentions that her mother knows that skill, and knows how to deceive. And on the last page, when Cass leaps to Shiva's assistance, Miyazawa draws Shiva standing behind Cass wearing what I'd call a smirk. She was in a martial arts stance two panels earlier, but seems to have dropped it once her daughter gets involved. Is that because having someone to fight alongside her changes her approach, or because this is all part of her plan?

It looks as though Brombal's going to focus on Cass and Shiva's relationship. It's comparatively untouched compared to Cass' relationship with David Cain, and most of what we've seen is just them beating the crap out of each other, and temporarily killing each other. Shiva clearly enjoys pushing Cass' buttons, while Cass spends as much of the initial fight attacking Shiva in a way that lets them attack their opponents unexpectedly.

Calavera P.I. #1, by Marco Finnegan (writer/artist), Jeff Eckleberry (letterer) - Can he blow smoke rings with no lips?

In 1925, Juan Calavera is a private investigator who rescues a bunch of girls smuggling into L.A. for some rich white guy, with a little assistance from local reporter Maria Valdez and her trusty flashbulb. Despite the successful conclusion of the case, Calavera doesn't seem happy with the life he leads. So maybe it's fortunate that, later that night, his attempt to keep a grieving mother from killing herself or any innocent bystanders, ends in his death.

After that, Finnegan jumps ahead five years, where Valdez is running some kind of production company, when she gets a call that tells her to 'find the detective.' Oh, and she better hurry, because her son's been abducted by a clown. So she tries a ritual, and Calavera's back among the living. As a trenchcoat-wearing skeleton, which is kind of odd since we don't see him wearing a trenchcoat prior to this. But I guess even nights in L.A. can get cold with no blood or tissue wrapped around your bones.

Finnegan sticks with solid blocks of color on this book, but in duller tones than were used in Morning Star. I like the look of it, and his design on his characters seems more consistent. Doesn't feel like the colors swamp his lines, faces don't end up looking strange sometimes. The brief fight scene is laid out in a simple progression, but Finnegan uses yellow rectangles against a darker background for highlighting a point of emphasis. It's a nice touch, or maybe I'm just more interested in this story than I was Morning Star.

Blue Ruin (2013)

Dwight (Macon Blair) lives in his car on a beach in Delaware, until he learns the man who killed his parents 10 years ago is being released from prison. He goes to the prison, where we get a nice play in contrasts between this man living alone in his beat-to-shit Bonneville, with a ratty white-shirt, and a man who murdered two people, who gets picked up by a half-dozen family members in a limo. Dwight follows them to a bar, and clumsily knifes the killer in the bathroom. At which point everything goes wrong.

So it's a movie about revenge and how easily that can get out of control. How it's rarely anything like in action movies, how people don't stop to consider the consequences until after the fact. For all that his life seems to have come to a halt since his parents' death, Dwight's clearly not spent that time making plans. He tried buying a gun, but he lives off the money he makes recycling cans he finds on the beach. He's not getting a gun. He loses his car keys while killing the guy, which he doesn't realize until after he's cut his hand angrily knifing one of the limo's tires, which is too bad since that's the car he has to steal.

Which means his car got left behind. Which means the family knows who killed the guy. Which means his sister and her kids are in danger. Which means Dwight has to fix this, somehow.

Before and after, he walks around in kind of a wide-eyed daze. There's no urgency, but also nothing measured in his movements. He'll start towards one idea, then abandon it mid-stride for something else. Grab a pitchfork for lack of better weapons, then set it aside and decide to try and sneak out of the house and steal his car back instead. Hit a guy with the car, then go back and forth between throwing the guy in his trunk and taking the guy's gun. Which gets him an arrow in the leg. It could, in a different framing, be played for laughs, but here it shows how unprepared he is.

The camera angles sometimes so that the light flares in the lens and obscures him entirely from us, in the same way the voices of other characters often become indistinct as Dwight gets lost in his own thoughts. Everyone else we see has moved on with their own lives in one way or another, even if, like his sister, they still harbor some anger. He bailed on his friends without a word, and they grew up, got jobs. Now Dwight's just blown in and started all this, and they have to deal with it.

And Dwight knows this. Blair is soft-spoken, unsure, awkward and apologetic with everyone. Whether he's actually sorry I'm less sure of. He does seem willing to die if that would just end this thing (though that might be a death wish on his part), but he knows there won't be any guarantee the killer's family will leave it there. So where's that leave him? Ruining someone else's life like his once was, apparently.

Show Biz'll Kill Ya

You've heard of a bull in a china shop, now here's Rhino in the dressing room!

Down in Flames, Up in Smoke is the first 5 issues of the Amazing Mary Jane book Marvel had going in 2020. Mary Jane as the lead actress on what is a Mysterio biopic, and discovers in the first issue that the film is not being directed by the famous Cage McKnight, but by Mysterio himself.

(Mysterio assures us McKnight is fine, scouring the Falkands to find just the right penguin to star in, "Jaws, but with penguins.")

After an impassioned plea by Mysterio, who requested her for the lead role (for reasons I'm never entirely clear about), MJ agrees to stay on the film because she believes he's genuine about trying to make this film, and that's he's giving other former criminals or villains an opportunity (and paying them at industry-standard rates, he assures her.) From there, it's MJ helping Quentin Beck troubleshoot the various complications that arise in shooting the film.

The people financing the movie get cold feet and withdraw their money, forcing improvisation on a tighter budget. The guy playing Spider-Man loses his nerve and leaves. The guy playing Mysterio leaves when the big budget does. Several of Spider-Man's other enemies keep trying to sabotage the film, because they aren't happy with their portrayals. Which does result in a fairly ridiculous bit at the end where MJ, sans any powers or Iron Man armors, holds off six super-villains - Vulture, Rhino, Cobra, Stegron, Tarantula, and Scorpion - while the crew finish the last day of shooting.

While Mysterio put her through a sort of boot camp when she took over as Spider-Man for the last scene, and insisted on practical effects, including X-Men robots - which really seems like more an Arcade thing - it still seems a bit much she held them off solo as long as she did.

Williams writes MJ as extremely adaptable, able to think on the fly, and work with sudden complications. Whether that's due to her past experience in Hollywood, or her experience being in a relationship with a super-hero, I'm not sure. But she pretty much keeps the movie on track and is near constantly helping Mysterio make it better, whether that's with make her character more well-rounded, with her own motivations, improving the dialogue, or leaning into the fact Beck is way more hot-headed than the actual Cage McKnight.

Carlos Gomez, who draws all 5 issued (with Lucas Warneck assisting on issue 3) goes all-in on the dramatic poses for McKnight/Beck, whether he's hitting tables or shaking his fists at the sky. Mary Jane, in contrast, is drawn as much more relaxed and upbeat. Constantly having to rein Beck in and keep his eyes on the prize.

Mysterio's written as extremely passionate about this project, to his detriment, as that's how he loses his primary funding, but also with very specific notions on "art", and that what he's creating is going to be art. He hates the idea of using illusions to compensate for the budget cuts, because he feels it compromises the genuine nature of the film. He seems like he would simultaneously be great to work for (enthusiasm and work ethic undeniable) and terrible to work for (temperamental as all get out.) Williams has him make reference to possibly not having much time left, but I have no idea what that refers to. MJ's character also seems to be based on a woman who influenced or supported him at one time, and I have no idea who that is, either. Sure hope it wasn't Karen Page! 

Gomez's work reminds me of Mark Brooks', back when Brooks drew Cable/Deadpool. Especially in how he draws Mysterio, the shape of his head and jaw, the way he shades things. It's fine, overall; the story doesn't give him the chance to stretch himself the way he has on Fantastic Four. He's mostly drawing regular people, and a lot of the time they're talking while walking through sound stages or riding in golf carts.

Williams and Gomez mix in periodic phone conversations between MJ and Peter Parker, who knows what movie she's working on, but not who is actually directing it. I'm not clear on their relationship status at this time, other than they're at least on good terms. At one point, MJ starts playing music over the phone and insists Peter dance with her for 20 seconds, while he's in the grocery store, so I'm guessing things were in a decent place.

Sunday Splash Page #349

 

"Sunrise Over the City," in Mary Jane and Black Cat: Beyond #1, by Jed MacKay (writer), C.F. Villa (artist), Erick Arciniega (color artist), Travis Lanham (letterer)

After Nick Spencer's stint as writer on Amazing Spider-Man, but before Zeb Wells', Marvel handed the book over to a small team of writers. Peter Parker was laid up after getting hit with a lot of radiation (courtesy of the U-Foes, I think), and so Ben Reilly stepped in as Spider-Man in the interim while Captain America and the Black Cat tried to help Peter recover. Except Ben was being sponsored by the Beyond Corporation, and they messed with his head, and it all ended badly.

In the midst that was this one-shot, where The Hood, sans his namesake piece of fashion (courtesy of a Hawkeye mini-series I didn't read because it was written by Matthew Rosenberg, and he's on my no-buy list since that crappy Multiple Man mini-series), finds out Felicia Hardy's been visiting this loser photographer in the hospital and uses Peter as leverage to make her retrieve his hood. Mary Jane happened to be there when Felicia arrives, so she claims MJ is part of the crew she needs for this job to get MJ clear. Then the two of them work to track down the hood in one night while Peter sleeps through the whole thing.

Much of the part where they try to track down the hood is kept light and kind of breezy. MacKay's working the whole thing around the idea everybody wants something. Robbins wants his hood; Felicia and MJ want Peter to be safe; each of the people they question wants something in exchange. Except Mr. Fear and the Shocker, who just get their asses kicked. And I know Shocker's treated as a total joke these, but MJ really shouldn't be able to do anything to him with a baseball bat. The whole point is the suit cushions impacts!

Ahem. The heist comes when the trail leads to someone who doesn't want anything from them, it's set up in such a way Mary Jane's talents as an actress can play a role. Villa has a lot of fun with the expressions, as neither lady is happy with this set-up. So there's a fair amount of frustration and sarcasm on both their parts, as well as times where each of them is in their element and moving with total assurance and confidence.

The story does require me to accept the idea that Parker Robbins is any actual threat to Peter Parker, which is hard to manage. Yes, Parker's nowhere near full strength, but we're talking about an ordinary guy with one gun. No special magic cloak, no super-powered henchmen, or any henchmen for that matter. Just loser-ass Parker Robbins. (If the concern was Peter blowing his secret identity, that's another matter, but that's not how MJ explains her demand Robbins not even point his gun at the sleeping Peter.)

The important thing is, the Hood winds up dead. The long nightmare is over! Then Benjamin Percy brought him back in Ghost Rider. Booooooooo!

Saturday Splash Page #151

 

"Down the Barrel of a Gun," in Spectacular Spider-Girl #2, by Tom DeFalco (writer), Ron Frenz (writer/penciler), Sal Buscema (finished art), Bruno Hang (colorist), Dave Sharpe (letterer)

A 4-issue mini-series from 2010, where New York City is in the middle of a gang war between Black Tarantula and an old-school Maggia guy enhanced with cybernetics. No, not Silvermane. This guy calls himself Silverback. I guess DeFalco and Frenz thought Silvermane would have to be dead by now or something.

Mayday promised her parents she'd stay out of it, but it's not sitting well with her. But she's got enough problems as it is. There's a horribly-dressed weirdo named Wild Card who keeps kicking her ass and telling her to stay out of the conflict. I mean, the outfit is bad. Like he's trying to fight her by making her go blind. Her clone/sister April is really getting into her Mayhem identity, and is actually working for Silverback.

Oh, and Frank Castle came out of retirement (that he spent in South America, where he still periodically fucked drug lords up) because Silverback was a guy he left crippled as a message before ending his war on the mob. Years of reading Garth Ennis' Punisher leave me unable to see Frank doing either of those things. Not ending his war on the mob, and certainly not leaving a guy alive as a message. "People scare better when they're dying," is definitely a philosophy the Punisher subscribes to.

The story has a feel of DeFalco and Frenz clearing the decks. They probably know this is one of the last Spider-Girl stories they're going to write, and they try to definitively move the old guard off the board, both characters that existed before Spider-Girl, and ones that didn't, but are supposed to pre-date her. Silverback and the Punisher bite the dust. Black Tarantula opts to leave New York with Arana, basically removing him as an issue. Peter (once again) accepts that he needs to trust his daughter can handle things. Even the two goons of Silverback's that are based on DeFalco and Frenz (I guess they didn't de in the wilds of Jersey) end up turning state's evidence in the hopes of being able to start new lives in witness protection elsewhere.

Silverback turns out to be a puppet of another villain, and that villain gets killed by Mayhem. Which sets up April's continuing descent into a "lethal protector" type as Mayday's biggest issue. Especially combined with her desire to assert her individuality as the true, only daughter of Peter and Mary Jane, which would come to a head in Spider-Girl: The End.

And with that, Summer (and Fall) of Spiders draws to a close.