Arcing to a Conclusion

I don't know. A solid portion of the U.S. sure loves the Confederate Army, who definitely lost. Or, for another example, Trump. Multiple times bankrupt, convicted of several crimes, lost an election. Complete loser, but beloved by a disturbingly large portion of the dumbasses in this country.

Tangent Comics Volume 3 collects the last 8 one-shots from the original Tangent Comics run. *Deep breath* In order, Superman (Mark Millar, Jackson Guice, Lovern Kindzierski, Comicraft); Wonder Woman (Peter David, Angel Unzueta, Jamie Mendoza, Pam Rambo, Comicraft); Nightwing: Night Force (John Ostrander, Jan Duursema, Gloria Vazquez, Comicraft); The Joker's Wild (Karl Kesel and Tom Simmons, Joe Phillips, Jasen Rodriguez, Moose Baumann, Comicraft); The Trials of the Flash (Todd DeZago, Paul Pelletier, Andy Lanning, Joe Rosas, Comicraft), Tales of the Green Lantern (James Robinson, J.H. Williams III and Mick Gray, Lee Loughridge, Comicraft, Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Mike Mayhew, Wade von Grawbadger, Georges Jeanty, Drew Gerard, Ostrander, Ryan Sook), Powergirl (Ron Marz, Dusty Abell, Dexter Vines, James Sinclair, Chris Eliopoulos); and JLA (Dan Jurgens, Darryl Banks, Norm Rapmund, Rob Schwager, Comicraft)

I'm not sure why they distributed the comics so unevenly between the volumes (6 for the first volume, 5 for volume 2, but 8 here.) Especially given the differences in goals of some of these stories. Superman, Wonder Woman and Powergirl fit in theme with the comics from volume 2. Each provides an origin and introduction for this universe's version of these characters, albeit with wildly different approaches.

Millar's Superman (real name Harvey Dent) is the sole survivor of a covert government experiment performed on a largely African-American town in an attempt to perfect a way to give people super-powers. It worked on one baby, in the sense that his mind is evolved far beyond a normal human's. A Man of Tomorrow. Wonder Woman's the result of an attempt to broker peace between two alien races by combining their genetics into one perfect warrior. Except both races consider her an abomination. And Powergirl is China's second attempt to create a superhuman warrior. She's a real success, but she's not sure she wants to be.

Millar's is fairly cynical, as Dent grows increasingly detached from humanity, dealing with crises because he just wants problems to solve rather than actually caring much about the people he helps. I mean, I doubt those people care, but his girlfriend does care that he's distanced himself from her. The bit where she confesses cheating on him and Harvey responds that he's a telepath, so he knew she was going to cheat before she did made me roll my eyes. I feel like this character heavily informs how Millar writes Reed Richards, but maybe it's just Millar in general.

Peter David turns his story into a running gag, as the title character spends an entire fight having an existential crisis. She's can't help but "wonder" whether she has any right to exist, or if she even does. It gets obnoxious after about three pages, but the payoff is apparently that she can reorder reality by thinking (or wondering) hard enough. She erases the aliens attacking her from existence by simply insisting they don't exist, to the extent all the damage from the battle vanishes, because the two who started the fight never existed to cause the damage in the first place.

Marz only actually brings Powergirl out at the very end of his issue, fitting into the idea of her as a designed weapon who wishes to make her own decisions. None of the people the story follows up to then - the U.S. President, formerly part of a black ops group, the guys from Nightwing, the Chinese government - see her as any thing but a tool to gain advantage. They're all just fighting over who has their finger on the trigger. When she finally arrives, in a design that makes me think of an elaborate doll crossed with NASCAR, they're left standing there gawking as she casually revives the dead and then leaves.

Trials of the Flash, The Joker's Wild, and Tales of the Green Lantern follow-up on the earlier appearances of each character. Green Lantern's is "multiple origins", as she relates three different possible ways (each by a different creative team) she came to exist. Sook seems to channel a lot of Mignola in his story, the characters very angular and sharply defined, while Jeanty's work is very similar to the Dodsons.

Dezago and Pelletier make Trials of the Flash into an extended cartoon, as the Flash's dad spends the entire issue trying increasingly elaborate super-science weapons to capture or kill her, only to have each backfire on him.

So that leaves Night Force and JLA, the former of which heavily leads into the latter, albeit with a lot of stuff about different covert organizations at war with each other. There's Nightwing, but also Meridian, which is like Nightwing but in Europe. Night Force, who think they're fighting Nightwing, but are actually being used by it. And there's a "Dark Circle" which may stand above both, or not. Really feels like something that needed more time to play out. But hey, we find out the USSR is still run by Vampire Josef Stalin. I still think "cryo-frozen, uses a giant mech suit" Stalin from Simonson's FF run is better, but that's pretty cool.

The big ending though is that Stalin's attempts to harvest the souls of three-quarters of the Doom Patrol goes haywire once Night Force shows up and end up combined into some missing puzzle piece monster calling itself the "Ultra-Humanite". Or maybe like a mech whose joints are connected by electric arcs. That rolls into JLA, where the Humanite somehow has armed soldiers surrounding the U.S. capitol building, while he's still busy crushing the Secret Six in two pages somewhere else. And yet another secretive cabal decides they need to kill every superpowered being they can find (except the Ultra-Humanite), and their fuck-ups bring together Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and the resurrected original Atom.

It doesn't really work, since it's hard to believe they could actually work together. Jurgens dials back Superman's detachment a bit (though he ignores that Millar's story ended with Dent offering his girlfriend the same powers), but this group just doesn't seem likely to mesh. Wonder Woman's off in her own world half the time and Batman's got his big redemption quest. And Atom's only around for as long as Green Lantern's power let him stay that way. And how did Batman get from London to Missouri so quickly? And why the hell not wait to try and kill the other superpowered types after the Ultra-Humanite's dealt with? See if they solve your problems for you, or failing that, at least wear each other out.

Maybe I just liked the Secret Six group more and wanted to see more of them in action.

Saturday Splash Page #131

 

"A Farewell to Stars," in Starman (vol. 2) #76, by James Robinson (writer), Peter Snejbjerg (artist), Gregory Wright (colorist), Bill Oakley (letterer)

Peter Snejbjerg came on with issue #50, and remained the series artist until its conclusion in issue #80 (ignoring the "resurrected" issue #81 from the Blackest Night event). At that point, Robinson was already a couple of issues into the "Stars My Destination" arc, aka the story where Jack goes into space looking for his new girlfriend's missing brother, the previous, bemulleted Starman.

I've heard the second half of Starman is generally considered the weaker half, with the space arc a prime culprit. And I can see it. Robinson spent the first four year building up Opal City as a major part of the book, then sends the book into space for a year, because he seems bound and determined to tie every star-themed character into the Starman legacy. So they get diverted into the 30th Century, so we can learn the Legion of Super-Heroes' Star Boy is going to become Star Man, and eventually return to the 21st Century under a different name.

Robinson tries to work this stuff into the build-up for the big "Grand Guignol" arc, having Jack help out Adam Strange on Rann, so that Adam will try to repay the favor later, but it does feel like an overlong digression. To say nothing of the detour into Krypton's past to meet Teen Rebel Jor-El..

That said, I do like Grand Guignol (minus the way things went with Nash, the original Mist's daughter.) I can appreciate Robinson trying to bring everything he'd spent 60 issues setting up together - all the foes, the Shade's backstory, the ghost of Jon Valor, on and on - into one big throwdown for the fate of Opal City's present and future. He wanted to do a big story, and I feel like he pulled it off. Made us care about the characters and the stakes enough to justify all the set up and foreshadowing.

Snejbjerg's version of Jack Knight is cleaner, better put-together. He smooths out a lot of the lines and wrinkles, makes the hair less of a rat's nest. Jack still dresses mostly the same, the aviator goggles and the leather jacket, but it doesn't look like he's slept in them for two weeks straight. Jack also lost the tattoos as a result of death by disintegration, followed by resurrection via Rannian science. I don't remember the dying having that much in the way of ramifications for Jack long-term, so I wonder if Snejbjerg just didn't want to have to draw the tats any time Jack was shirtless or in short sleeves.

The book concludes with a few last loose ends, a handful of mysteries Robinson hadn't revealed the solutions to yet. More important, it ends with Jack retiring from the role as Starman, passing the cosmic rod on to Courtney Whitmore, who would take on the name Stargirl. She's kept the title ever since, and Jack's stayed retired ever since. Even the Blackest Night tie-in issue was about The Shade and Hope O'Dare, nary a Jack to be found.

It's perhaps not so surprising in some sense. Jack always insisted he wasn't the kind of hero who was going to patrol. Just a guy who would step up when Opal needed him. And the bargain he made with his father was for Ted to continue exploring ways to use stellar energy to help people outside superheroics. Well, Opal has a new bunch of protectors by the end of the book, and Ted's not going to be doing any further research. It is surprising in that I can't believe someone didn't drag Jack back out in one of the half-dozen revamps DC's done in the last 15 years.

Sometimes the characters get left to their happy endings.

Saturday Splash Page #130

 

"A New Knight," in Starman (vol. 2) #3, by James Robinson (writer), Tony Harris (penciller), Wade von Grawbadger (inker), Gregory Wright (colorist), John Workman (letterer)

James Robinson's Starman is a lot about legacy, but it starts with a legacy almost cut short. The eldest son of the original Starman is killed, just an hour or so into his first patrol. There's the younger brother, Jack, but he derided the costume and his brother not long before, so it seems unlikely he'll be able to fill the void, assuming he even tries.

Tony Harris is the primary artist for the first 4 years of the book, drawing around 3 dozen issues. He was spelled periodically by Steve Yeowell, or the guests artists who drew one-shot issues set at some point in Opal City's past. Harris' Jack Knight is a bit of a scarecrow, all wiry limbs and scruffy hair. Sort of a perpetually weary look, with his face lined with deep shadows. Aviator goggles and tattoos, a leather jacket he doesn't wear to his big showdown with his brother's killer because he doesn't want it to get torn up.

Maybe that fits for a character who seems to love the past. Jack's an antiquities or collectible dealer, depending on where the line between the two is drawn. Things with some age, made rare by time or circumstance. Stuff with some history to it. It fits for a book that is so concerned with history, be it Jack's, his father's, the Shade's, Opal City, or even the name "Starman." Everything in the book builds on something from the past, starting with Starman's history with The Mist and expanding from there.

The Mist is probably the main villain of Harris' run. The series opens with an all-out assault on Opal by the original and his two children, Kyle and Nash. From there, it's Nash who engineers another attack later on and haunts Jack for long stretches of the book. Jack makes a trip to New York, teaming up with Wes Dodds and Dian Belmont to track down a memento of the original Mist, all in an act of mercy towards what appears to be a shattered old man. Some of that works better than others - Robinson's build-up of Nash ultimately ends with kind of a wet fart - but it generally serves to highlight the sort of Starman Jack's going to be.

Robinson sows a lot of seeds in the early going, introducing the Starman of the '70s, a Talokkian named Mikhail, plus a gentle version of Solomon Grundy. A theater poster that draws people into Hell, one of whom is a Sherlock Holmes stand-in. The ghost of a pirate wrongly executed. Most don't conclude until after Harris has left, save for "Solly's" arc, and even that only so much as any arc ever concludes for Solomon Grundy.

Opal City itself is a big part of the book, and Harris does his best to make it feel, again, like a place with history. A harbor town, with bridges spanning the waters. Some of the taller skyscrapers, the high-end apartments and business sectors, wouldn't necessarily look out of place in Batman: The Animated Series, albeit a bit brighter. Opal's got some shadows, but it's not that kind of dark. But there's also older neighborhoods, the ones Jack tends to frequent. Smaller structures, stone archways and bridges. Homes that have space for hanging gardens in them, but also steep rooftops with little clock towers scattered about it. I don't know architecture, but Harris' art gives the city some personality.

But like I said, Tony Harris leaves the book after 4 years, right about the time Jack leaves Opal for a somewhat shorter period. . .

Saturday Splash Page #98

 

"Cryptkeeper", in Tangent Comics: Green Lantern, by James Robinson (writer), J.H. Williams (penciler), Mick Gray (inker), Lee Loughridge (colorist), Dave Lanphear (letterer)

In 1997 and 1998, DC released a series of comics taking place in a new universe. Green Lantern, for example, became a woman in a cloak with a green lantern. The Atom, one in a family line of heroes stemming from an early nuclear age experiment. The Doom Patrol, a group of time travelers, returning from the 2030s in the attempts to avert the World That's Coming. That's not what it was called, I just like the phrase. 

Beyond that, the one-shots tended to take different approaches with the characters. Green Lantern hewed closer to the hosts of DC's old horror and suspense titles, acting as narrator for stories about people returned from the dead to complete one final act. Doom Patrol was one of those self-fulfilling prophecy time travel stories. The Flash - starring a bubbly teenage girl with light powers - was almost a cartoon, as her own father tried to capture or destroy her with an increasingly deranged series of goofy science super-weapons, only to have each one backfire like he was Wil E. Coyote.

Superman, written by Mark Millar, was about the surviving son of a bunch of highly unethical experiments the U.S. Army performed on African-Americans, gaining incredible intelligence and through that unlocking other capabilities of his mind. Like that whole thing about Deathstroke using the other 90% of his brain people supposedly don't, but if that turned you into Doctor Manhattan.

Wonder Woman was an extended play on the word "wonder" as the title character spends the entire issue locked in existential navel-gazing about whether she deserves to live, or is even alive, while fighting for her life. Because Peter David. Point being, the creators went a lot of different routes with these things.

The connections between the books gradually tightened as they progressed. Characters in other books would reference the original truth about the original Atom after it was revealed in that one-shot. The Joker -  a mysterious madcap woman pulling pranks to humiliate and expose both criminals and corrupt authority figures - got two one-shots. John Ostrander and Jan Duursema wrote two stories about a mysterious cabal lurking in the shadows of the U.S. government that relied on magic, called Nightwing. The power struggle between it and a similar group in Europe spilled over into other books.

Eventually several of the heroes form a team, a "secret six", but they don't do much together before being curb-stomped (largely off-panel) by some Soviet Ultra-Humanite, who got very little page time and just sort of shows up to be a big enough threat some characters that were content to mind their own business decide to work together. Maybe even form a league, devoted to some higher ideal.

There was another mini-series of sorts in 2008, Superman's Reign, but that seemed to be more about some of the Tangent universe heroes popping into the DCU

Spiked It Before Crossing the Goal Line

I'm into Week 7 of my attempt to weed things out of the comic collection. I've just about made it to the letter "T", though, so maybe soon I'll be through. It has given me the chance to go back through and reread a lot of things I hadn't in a few years, which can be good or bad, depending.

On the "bad" side of the ledger, I was going through James Robinson's Starman, and I got to issue #38, where the new Mist decides to prove her villain bonafides by killing a team of second-tier former Justice Leaguers that made their own French super-team. It's supposed to demonstrate her cruelty, her ruthlessness, her cunning (although I don't exactly buy she could successfully impersonate a member of the team for several days without them all being dumbasses.) It's supposed to be this big step in her taking over her father's villainous legacy and establishing herself as a force.

Except by the time Robinson gets to the Grand Guignol storyarc, when she finally returns to Opal City to confront Jack, she willingly becomes a lackey. Not to the Shade's foe Culp, but to her father. Just falls right in line with whatever daddy wants. Even when he says he's got a nuke and he's gonna destroy the whole city, including her, and the kid she produced by raping Jack Knight, she won't stand up to him. She lets him sweet talk her into handing over the gun, and she dies.

While probably a decent example of how abused children can continually fool themselves into believing their abusive parents actually do care about, it kind of undercuts the whole thing about her being any sort of a "master criminal". That, plus Jack pointing out she's the only one who ever refers to herself that way.

OK, so she's a pretender, a wannabe. What's that make the heroes who got completely bamboozled by her? If Robinson's going to build her rep on their corpses, only to turn around and show she was fooling herself all along, what was the point of killing the heroes in the first place? It possibly builds her up as a threat to Jack in the future, her trying to improve as a villain while he's finding his footing as a hero, but there's not much of a payoff to that. Jack has a longer battle with Culp, and then the real threat turns out to be Original Recipe Mist.

Just seems like a waste of time. There are plenty of other crimes she can commit to convince herself she's a real super-villain, that don't involve murder.

Starman Volume 7 - A Starry Knight

Solomon Grundy, got dentures from a horse on Monday.

Volume 7 is the beginning of Jack Knight's space adventure to find the lost brother of his girlfriend Sadie. A lost brother who also was the '80s Starman, Will Payton. Who I know nothing about, other than he had a mullet, I think. That's fine, Jack doesn't get anywhere close to him in this volume.

Instead, he, Mikaal, and a projection of his father from the Mother Box helping to power his Gilded Age spacecraft first stumble on an extremely verbose version of Solomon Grundy, then are drawn into the 30th Century for a quick team-up with a couple of members of the Legion of Super-Heroes. Their return trip is a little off the mark, so they end up on Krypton, where they (naturally) run into a adolescent Jor-El.

The strain may be starting to tell on Jack. (This posting comic panels out of context is great. I should have started this years ago).

I'm curious how that story would have played out with Silver Age Krypton, with all it's weird rainbow fountains and whatnot. Jor-El still has the curious explorer streak here, but I imagine it's being discouraged more than it was in the Pre-Crisis version. After all that, they get back to the proper time and wind up on Rann.

When DC published Rann-Thanagar War as part of the run-up to Infinite Crisis, and cripes, that was a dog's age ago now, I remember some of the comics blogosphere taking mock-sides in the struggle. Most of the blogs I read seemed to favor Thanagar, on the basis of Rannians being a bunch of uptight weenies. Not all that different from the version of Krypton Byrne gave us, I'd say. I didn't have much of a horse in the race, other than Hawkman's an asshole, so I'm not siding with him. But given what they gave Jack and Mikaal as formal wear, Jack might have been better of staying dead.

This story is also the point when Peter Snejbjerg takes over as the regular artist, Steve Yeowell having handled the first issue in the trade and the third (the Grundy issue). Yeowell's Grundy is kind of freaky, not just because of his enormous teeth, but also how much more cruel he seems than normal. It actually feels like Yeowell's doing a bit of a Tom Mandrake look at times in that issue, which they heavy shadows occasionally blurring details or linework.

Of course, this Grundy is a lot more cunning than any Grundy I'm used to. Interesting how different this one is from the one Jack befriended, or the one that helps Culp in the big battle for Opal in a couple volumes. Well, Robinson spent a lot of time on the legacy of Starman, all the different people to carry the title, why not a legacy of Grundys, since he keeps popping back up?

Snejbjerg's first couple of issues, I feel like he's still getting a handle on Jack, but most of his other character work seems on-point. Granted, I don't have much room to judge most of these characters, like Mikaal's old foe, or Star Boy and Umbra/Shadow Lass, but they seem fairly recognizable to me.

So it's the usual sort of quest storyarc, where the character lands in places that are alien to them, but familiar to us. Convenient how that works, but we could always blame it on the Mother Box. That thing might not be in any hurry to go back to hanging around Orion, the big sourpuss. And Jack's enough of an oddball to make it interesting to see these places through his eyes. He's unphased when you might expect him to be, but gets shaken or stunned at the most unexpected times. Him grossing out Jor-El's dad by discussing, gasp, sex, was kind of hilarious. Although I'd half expect post-Crisis Kryptonians to use some incredibly damaging mind probe on what they'd no doubt consider lesser species.

Starman Volume 9 - Grand Guignol

I forgot to fold back the corner I dogeared to mark that page, which I think in certain corners of the Internet would get me tried as a war criminal. Never understood that bit of fanaticism, although I didn't even know it was a thing until stumbling across people arguing about it on Twitter (naturally). That's how I keep track of the passages I want to remember, or consider quoting when I do book reviews. How many note cards and bookmarks am I supposed to have on hand? Can you still read the page? Then it's fine.

Anyway, Volume 9 covers issues 61-73 of Starman, by James Robinson (writer), Peter Snejbjerg (artist), Gregory Wright (colorist), and Bill Oakley (letterer). Jack Knight returns from space just in time to deal with the army of villains assembled by an angry man with the Shade's powers who wants to cast the entire city into a horrifying dimension. Fortunately, there's a whole army of people to help Jack, too.

On the one hand, it's really impressive how many threads Robinson tries to bring together here. Plot lines that he established in the earliest issues of the series. I do love a story where the heroes who have to save the day are not the usual suspects. He moves between the various characters smoothly enough that you don't lose track of what everyone is up to. Plays to the characters' strengths - I enjoyed Ralph and Sue trying to solve a mystery while everyone else is scrambling around punching - and makes some of these villains I'd never heard of pretty interesting.

Not all of them. The Mist (the younger one) gets a raw deal. I don't know what it says that she seems like a mediocre villain, but she might have been the closest to Jack's arch-foe. Her dad is his dad's arch-enemy, Culp is the Shade's, who does that leave as Jack's, other than her? She's a sadist who talks big, but kind of chump, like Bullseye crossed with the Shocker.

The story bogs down in places. Trying to explain the wide range of crimes and personalities the Shade has demonstrated over his history as a character felt unnecessary. Maybe that's because I only know the character from this series. I don't know the stories where he had a "Shademobile" or plotted to blow up the world, so I haven't been trying to reconcile them. A few elements were set up earlier, but felt like they'd been left alone long enough that their sudden importance comes out of left field (the detective the Dibnys track down, for one). Granted I haven't bought volumes 5, 6, or 8, maybe Hamilton Drew pops up again there. Adam Strange and some of the other space trip callbacks felt out of place, like Robinson's trying to go a little too big. Especially since it seems to hinge on such personal animosities, Culp and Shade, the Mist and Starman.

But overall, I think the story treads on the good side of the line. I can't fault Robinson for trying to go big with it, to really have a grand climax.

Snejbjerg and Wright's artwork is clear and easy to follow. The heavy shadows contrast with the scattered flashes of light that normally mark the heroes fighting back. There's a two-page fight between Ted Knight and Doctor Phosphorous that's entirely an aerial view of Ted's home, with two different colors of light moving about across the panels. That was pretty slick. Culp's emergence, where his panels are darkness erupting against a bright red background, switching back and forth with panels of Jack being overwhelmed by the villain army done all in blacks and deep purples.

The next volume, which I reviewed two months ago, is the end of the series (not counting that Blackest Night tie-in issue where the title was "resurrected" for a month) and spends its time trying to tie up all the loose ends and decide where everyone stands when the music stops.

Starman Vol. 10 - Sons of the Father

This volume is mostly wrapping up loose ends. Jack's had a new addition to his life, and it forces him to make a choice about whether to keep being Starman or not. He spends some time in 1951, meets Superman (in the present, not in 1951), maybe helps his dad out, gets a last chance with his brother. We get some new status quo for the supporting cast and the city, and Courtney Whitmore gets to start her career as Stargirl.

The pace is deliberate, a lot of time spent on quiet conversations between one pair of characters or another. The big fight was in the prior volume, this is the aftermath. It has the feel of Jack taking his time, soaking it all in before the end. Or James Robinson trying to make a complete ending he's happy with. I wonder how well he succeeded on that front. At times it does feel like a history lecture at times, when they're recapping the history of the Starman legacy. I've read the issues guys, I don't need a 10-page Who's Who entry. But for the most part, it sticks to advancing or concluding characters' stories, and Robinson had developed them enough I wanted to know how things worked out.

At this point, I have 6 of the 10 volumes, mostly missing the middle third. I'd read enough reviews to know Robinson has a, let's say interesting, ear for dialogue. Jack especially speaks in phrases I wouldn't expect anyone to actually say. I mostly chalk that up to an affectation on Jack's part, like his taste in clothes or pop culture references. I'm actually more bothered by all the caption boxes filled with cursive handwriting from the Shade's journal. I can read cursive, but it's not fun trying to read it in these small boxes. It's actually a lot worse in Volume 9, where there's a lot more of the Shade's journal carrying the exposition load. I don't envy the letterer, Bill Oakley, having to deal with all that.

I prefer Peter Snejbjerg's art to Tony Harris'. Snejbjerg's is a little smoother, Harris' work seemed a bit scratchy, which maybe fit better for a rookie Jack Knight, struggling to get by. Snejbjerg seems to favor heavier inks, deep shadows for high contrast with Gregory Wright's colors. And there's a lot of variety in the colors, from the black-and-white spirit realm David inhabits, to the bright blue skies over Opal, to the deep reds near twilight in Ted Knight's 1951 home. It's all very good at creating a mood. Mostly calm in this volume, but with the occasional frantic moment.

As far as I know, no one has messed with Jack Knight since the end of this series. Which is surprising, given how Geoff Johns and DC can't resist dragging out every other retired or dead character, even if their creator had made it clear he'd prefer they not do that. Even Jack's brother David was hauled out for that Blackest Night tie-in, where the book was "resurrected" for one issue. Jack oughta bottle whatever he's got and sell it to the others. "Step right up, get your Stay Retired Elixir! Guaranteed to spare you a gory death in some Event book!"