Sunday Splash Page #437

"Broken Hearts Club," in Apparently, Disillusioned Adventurers will Save the World, ch. 1, vol. 1, by Shinta Fuji (writer), Masaki Kawakami (artist)

Nick's a light warrior who, after he finds evidence another member of his adventuring party stole from them, is kicked out by the leader of said party. The leader's reasoning is, he raised and trained Nick, but Nick's grown to the point his values no longer align with the group's, so Nick needs to find his own place. Then Nick's girlfriend breaks up with him, because she was really only using him. In a depressive funk, he throws himself into worshiping an idol (which are like pop stars, I guess? I've never understood the "idol" thing) and soon exhausts all his money. He needs to join a new party, but how can he, after his trust was abused so badly?

Well, he can meet three other people, also drinking away their sorrows after having their trust abused. Each of them is also broke due to their vices. Gambling for Tiana the mage, women for Zem the excommunicated cleric, food for Karan the swordswoman. Nick proposes forming a party based specifically around not trusting each other. They'll only interact enough to clean out dungeons and collect things to sell, divide the money, then go their separate ways, free to blow their shares on whatever they choose. He even devises a plan where all of them are involved in guarding the money, so no one can cheat each other.

Obviously, this is not tenable for combat. They have to trust each other enough to describe their skills and weaknesses, or they won't be able to make a strategy. That sharing bleeds into other interactions. Tiana drags Nick with her to a casino. Nick teaches Karan math, because otherwise she won't be able to tell if the others are swindling her.

The arc is, at some point, they'll learn to trust each other fully, and that will make them invincible, as all of them turn out to be exceptional in their fields. Nick's former leader was the supposed greatest fighter in the world, and if Nick doesn't have the build for heavy weapons, he's probably the best around with a dagger. Karan is a dragonian, and carries the fabled enchanted broadsword of her people. Tiana knows multiple forms of elemental magic, and Zem has all kinds of spells to heal or buff the others' abilities.

They're eventually sent to investigate some ruins, looking for a magic weapon, the Sword of Bonds. Which turns out to be a sentient weapon that can essentially fuse those whose hearts are in tune and make a new warrior, one exponentially stronger. Except it's never worked between more than 3 people, and they were triplets. But the sword is certain there must be adventurers out there with that sort of trust and connection! Hint, hint.

The "Survivors" as they call themselves, don't really want the sword, but it gets them out of the ruins alive, so they agree to keep it. Just in case.

I bought the first 5 volumes before I stopped, though I think it's only gotten as far as volume 6 (the light novels it's based on may be further along.) The 5th volume gave Nick a chance for some payback against his ex-girlfriend and her party, where he not only beats her tiger-man boyfriend in a fistfight/math quiz, but the "Survivors", as they dubbed themselves, expose the Iron Tigers as cheaters and get them arrested. Then the back cover of the 6th volume said the Iron Tigers were coming back for revenge. They just got rid of them! How are they back already!? Are prisons in this world as porous as Arkham Asylum?

Mostly, the direction the series focused wasn't really doing it for me. It felt heavily centered on Nick, and to a lesser extent Karan. Not unreasonable since Nick's the most experienced adventurer, the one who suggests forming a party, the one who keeps putting himself out there in an effort to get them to work together and trust him. And Karan was left to die in the lowest level of a dungeon by her previous party because she was too naive to recognize they were using her, so her trust issues are the most severe. But the idea is the 4 of them growing to know and trust each other, and the series hadn't done anything with Zem - dude was basically a healing lamp who likes to hit nightclubs - and was just barely starting to dig into Tiana's backstory.

Maybe that's a reasonable pace if the series expected to go 15, 20, whatever volumes, but I didn't really feel like hanging on long enough for it to get there.

Sunday Splash Page #436

"The Whole World in Her Hands," in Ant-Man and the Wasp #5, by Mark Waid (writer), Javier Garron (artist), Israel Silva (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer)

Didn't plan on this being a Mark Waid weekend, but nonetheless. A mini-series from 2018 pairing the 2nd Ant-Man (Scott Lang), with the 3rd Wasp (Nadia van Dyne.) Almost said "2nd Wasp," but there was that stretch after Secret Invasion where Hank Pym called himself the Wasp. Lang was out in space helping the Guardians of the Galaxy with something and needs a ride back to Earth, or he'll miss his daughter's birthday party. Nadia grudgingly agrees to help, via some process where she builds a device to catch Scott if he rides the beam projected by the Nova Corps transmission system as a tiny guy. Scott has to jump into the beam precisely when she says, or he could get lost in the Microverse.

Does Scott forget to pick up the plant he's bringing Cassie as a gift, then end up jumping into the beam a split-second too late, missing the receiver entirely? This is post Ant-Man movie Scott Lang, of course he does! Nadia gives chase, and so begins an adventure in the Microverse.

Waid's clearly having fun with how weird physics get at sub-atomic scales, though he's understandably selective about what gets explained. Nadia makes a point that she and Scott are breathing, despite being smaller than an oxygen atom, can see despite being smaller than a photon of light. And while she says this, she scoops up a handful of what looks like earth, but Garron depicts the parts shifting into a bunch of fluttery, glowing green, they might be bugs, or they might be like flower petals, or the sub-atomic equivalent of one of those. Point being, things work differently here, and Nadia, being the theorist, wants to be cautious. Scott - who says in response to Nadia's questions that he did think about those things, then made himself a sandwich because he didn't know the answers - wants to get home, and not let anyone get hurt along the way.

That's how things play out over the mini-series. Nadia mostly tries to remain serious and calm and understand the science of the different things that go wrong with she and Scott during their travels. Like when there are suddenly several of her, because they've become living quantum particles, existing in several states simultaneously. Scott mostly doesn't understand what she's saying, but does his best to help by forming connections with people - first, what passes for insects in the Microverse, then with a maligned experimental scientist in a Microverse society - and by grounding Nadia when her emotions start to hit too hard. 

That's the undercurrent, past Nadia's hostility towards the man who "stole" her father's work. Nadia is trying desperately to impress a father she never got to meet, who never knew she existed. Scott, for all this version's many faults, is a guy who tries really hard to be a good dad. To be there for his daughter, and not make her feel like his love is contingent on her accomplishments. And so, in his slightly panicky way, he knows how to keep Nadia calm when things get too much or she starts to doubt herself.

Garron is able to keep Scott and Nadia looking basically normal, while the things around them look very strange. The Microverse scientist - who Waid writes a lot like one of the scientists you'd see in Marvel's '50s era sci-fi/horror comics - is a bizarre conglomeration of tentacles, holes, teeth, and green things that might be eyes. The way they're arranged makes no sense to my eye, but that's kind of the point. Things works differently down there. In the first issue, they encounter a type of creature that looks a bit like sheets hanging from a single hook, that shift between colors. How they speak, how they move, what they would subsist on and how they get it is not immediately apparent. How the predator pursuing them steals the "red" from them, causing them to become a pile of grey dust stuff, is also unclear. But as Scott points out when Nadia advises staying out of it, those beings are alive, and they're in pain. So Ant-Man and the Wasp get involved.

Sunday Splash Page #435

"Norse God of Annihilation," in Ant-Man (2022) #3, by Al Ewing (writer), Tom Reilly (artist), Jordie Bellaire (colorist), Cory Petit (letterer)

Released in 2022, this 4-issue mini-series centered around a mysterious future Ant-Man, who kept traveling back in time and briefly interacting with the previous holders of that title. His purpose, other than it has something to do with the ants they control, is kept a mystery until the final issue. By which time there are really much bigger problems to worry about (see above.)

Pym's story is set either prior to the formation of the Avengers, or very close to it, and involves him being targeted by a group of enemies from his solo book. No, the Scarlet Beetle wasn't invited. It also involves Pym and Jan's date at the movies being interrupted by a young Eric O'Grady, who throws popcorn at Pym. So Pym follows him into the lobby and sets ants on him. When Pym is captured, the Wasp finds him because Scott Lang is trying to break into the apartment and opens the soundproof window, letting out Pym's agonized screams.

Lang's presence is apparently to set up Jan letting him use Hank's old Manhattan lab whenever he wants as a favor, though Scott has no idea what she's talking about. How, exactly, he forgot meeting a diminutive flying woman while trying to break into an apartment, the occurrence of which apparently convinced him to move back to Florida, I don't know, but it certainly makes the whole thing feel needlessly convoluted.

Reilly and Bellaire try to modify their styles or approaches to mimic the eras the stories are set in. In this case, Bellaire uses mostly solid, basic colors, what would be bright colors, but the shades give the impression of being a little faded, or maybe yellowed? Reilly, meanwhile, has a sort of stiff, solid line to his figures - although his O'Grady has a wicked smirk straight out of Ditko's style - and straightforward layouts of 5-6 panels per page.

O'Grady gets the second issue, shortly after he stole the experimental suit, as he doesn't know it can generate Pym Particles (thanks to Skrull tech Skrull-Pym built into it), so he tries digging up Scott Lang's Avengers Disassembled-corpse. Because he's an idiot. Lang's is set in roughly the present day, and involves he and his daughter trying to shrink Ultron (at this point partially Hank Pym) into the Microverse inside some Asgardian-rune inscribed Vibranium coffin.

In the second issue, Reilly and Bellaire try to mimic Irredeemable Ant-Man. Reilly does a pretty good Phil Hester impression, with more heavy blacks and a stronger, more squared-off look to the characters. Some occasional pages of characters just sitting in one place for a bunch of panels in the same position, thinking over things. Bellaire uses a lot of a muddy orange-red that I definitely feel I saw regularly in Marvel comics of the mid-2000s. It's giving me New Avengers flashbacks, and I don't like it!

Third issue is closer to what I think of as Reilly's art style, at least based on Walter Mosley's The Thing mini-series. Much lighter line than Hester, busier than the Pym story, and Bellaire uses more variety in the shading here than the prior two issues. Softer shades if Cassie is a little embarrassed by her dad, or bright, sharp shades for explosions or lightning. The layouts are more dynamic and varied in panel count, there are more elements that jump across the page or through panels.

This is still the era of Lang being regarded a joke by most other heroes, so Stark and Thor are pretty disrespectful. No surprise from Stark, but I'm disappointed with Thor. Where's your humility, hammer-boy? Did you trade it to get back your arm? At least Cassie tells her dad to stop sucking up to them, and references Scott saving the world in World Hive, though he shares credit with her. Because he's a good dad.

They get interrupted by Black Ant (the robot duplicate of O'Grady from Remender's Secret Avengers) and the coffin gets flung somewhere in time. Ewing ties things into Age of Ultron, which I could do without remembering exists, but I can't tell what parts of the explanation were actually from that, and what are things Ewing bolts on for his own purposes. Either way, the four Ant-Men deal with an Ultron hopped up on Odin-sauce, and that's that.

This time around, Bellaire's color work really dominates. It's a lot of solid blocks of color, bright blocks, and Reilly's lines almost vanish under it. Which might be something about the mythic nature the heroes of the past have achieved in the future, that leaves them blurrily defined because there's so much that got lost over the centuries. (Future Ant-Man definitely wasn't expecting O'Grady to be like he was.) 

But what, exactly is Ewing driving at? There's a bit at the end, as they get ready to try their plan to stop Ultron, where Pym says all the World's Smallest Hero can do is 'think big.' The Ant-Man of 2549 found his "nano-swarm" couldn't fix an ecologically devastated Earth, so he cloned a bunch of extinct ant species. They lacked any natural instincts. So he fucked around in the timestream to measure how past Ant-Men controlled insects as part of some plan to install the instincts. His time traveling provided a guide for Ultron to find his way back into the timestream. Big plan, big fuck-up, big problem. Pym's own examples of overreaching are well-known, but after that, it feels stretched.

O'Grady is just trying to stay alive, and going about it in the dumbest way possible. Maybe the over-reaching is that the suit exists. Skrull Pym internal monologues that it was only Pym's need to prove himself that made the Skrull build such a suit (which contains Skrull technology that might give him away) in the first place. Lang, though, is trying to be careful. The Avengers don't like that he's bringing the coffin to New York, but he argues it's got the most precise equipment, and this is the sort of thing - shrinking a hybrid of a genocidal artificial intelligence and its creator into a micro-universe - you want to be precise about. As it turns out, Ultron-Pym figured out how to communicate on the ant-helmet's frequency and was subtly guiding Scott there, but it still doesn't feel like taking unjustifiable risks for uncertain gain.

So is it the inferiority complex thing? Pym, well, again, the history of his attempts to prove himself that end disastrously are well-established. I don't feel like Ewing accounts for '60s Pym meeting both an endpoint of an artificial intelligence he created and seeing what happened to himself. Although maybe '60s Pym's bold statement that if he ever does create and AI, it'll be a lot better, is the over-reaching thing again. Lang is constantly scrabbling for respect and to try and look cool so his daughter will look up to him. Zayn Asghar apparently wasn't content with a "nano-swarm" that could at least rebuild homes and stuff. No, he has to bring back ants to fix the planet's ecosystem, by himself.

But then there's O'Grady. A petty, selfish, small-minded, dim-witted putz. He's entirely realistic about just how likely he is to survive if he can't shrink to escape danger. It's not an inferiority complex if you are, in fact, inferior. He doesn't care enough about anyone but himself to bother trying to do something big to prove himself. There's Black Ant, who is planning on being a henchman for Ultron, and really wants to do a good job on this escape attempt, but still kind of half-asses it. He's boasting Lang won't be able to call ants for help because he bribed them with really good sugar, for Pete's sake. This is not a serious person.

Sunday Splash Page #434

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Splash Page #433

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday Splash Page #432

"Beauty and the Bowl Cut," in Amazing Mary Jane #1, by Leah Williams (writer), Carlos Gomez (artist), Carlos Lopez (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer)

In late 2019, Marvel tried giving Mary Jane Watson her own ongoing series. I'm not clear on the thinking, maybe her fans were getting annoyed by all the focus on Gwen Stacy (albeit an alt-universe version with super-powers), or Marvel just figured there'd be enough carry over from people who bought Amazing Spider-Man to make it work?

Whatever the reason, they tried it. Whether due to sales or shipping disruptions with COVID, the book solicited 9 issues, but only shipped 6. The first 5 were collected into a tpb that I reviewed in November of 2024. Those issues involved MJ being cast as the love interest in a Mysterio biopic that turned out to be directed by the actual Mysterio, posing as auteur director Cage McKnight, who Mysterio suckered into visiting the Falklands to find the perfect penguin to use for the "Jaws of penguins."

MJ decides to go along with this insane idea, and ends up basically saving the film by managing Mysterio's over-the-top temperament, finding them a new backer when their funding gets pulled, covering for the actor playing Spider-Man when he chickens out over a little thing like irate super-villains attacking the set because they don't like their likenesses being used in the film.

(Although Cobra? Stegron? Tarantula? Really digging the bottom of the barrel there, Mysterio. Was Hypno-Hustler considered too cliche?)

Williams leans into Mary Jane's charisma and knowledge of the world of movies as things that keep filming rolling, along with the idea that hanging around Peter Parker has given her a commitment to helping people try to make the best of second chances. I'm not clear on what MJ and Peter's relationship status was, other than they're on good enough terms to talk regularly over the phone, but there's also an element of guilt for MJ that, while Peter knows she's working on a movie about Mysterio, he doesn't know Mysterio is actually the director. She's doing something she believes in, but recognizes there's a risk that it could damage her connection with someone really important to her if it backfires.

While it stretches my suspension of disbelief MJ can hold off the entire "Savage Six" by herself (with some help from robots of the Original 5 X-Men Mysterio built previously for some reason) long enough for the movie to finish shooting, I definitely prefer Williams' writing here to the work she did on Gwenpool Strikes Back, which may be the only other thing she's written that I've read. Meta-commentary humor is a tricky needle to thread, so maybe that's to be expected.

Carlos Gomez's art is very clean and expressive, really capturing the dramatic personality Mysterio has, as well as Mary Jane's range of emotions. When she decides they need to leverage Mysterio being much angrier than the actual Cage McKnight, she hams it up a little to appeal to Mysterio's ego. When their equipment is being repossessed, she plunks herself in the director's chair with a megawatt smile and chats with the repo guys like old friends. When she discusses the risk she's taking trusting Mysterio is genuine about this with a member of the crew, she draws in on herself and stops making eye contact.

I'm not sure what Williams had planned beyond this - I think issue 6 is a premiere for the film back in NYC, so presumably Peter was going to learn the truth at some point - but I wouldn't have minded seeing more.

Sunday Splash Page #431

"Full Speed Ahead," in All-New X-Factor #1, by Peter David (writer), Carmine Di Giandomenico (artist), Lee Loughridge (colorist), Cory Petit (letterer)

In 2014, Peter David returned to the "X-Factor" concept for a third time. Having previously written a government super-team of dysfunctional personalities, then a detective agency of dysfunctional personalities, this time he took the approach of a team sponsored by a corporation, Serval Industries. Staffed by dysfunctional personalities, of course.

Polaris is team leader, but swings between trying to mediate amongst the others and getting extremely aggressive at the drop of a hat. (Or a scratch from a cat.) David doesn't ever explain what's going on there, just treats it as something everyone knows about. Even Warlock's dad the Magus knows about her mental instability. I don't know if David intended to delve into it later and the book got canceled first (20 issues, not a bad run for Marvel in the last 20 years), or simply considered it sufficient to establish the fact.

Similarly, he references Polaris attacking Quicksilver at some point prior to the book starting without ever explaining that. Despite this, Pietro joins, because if he didn't join teams of people who tried to kill him he'd have to be a hermit. He's there as a mole for Havok (currently leading the Uncanny Avengers), something Gambit, who decides this is a better gig than teaching at Wolverine's school, immediately picks up on.

Gambit's also apparently King of de T'ieves Guild, and one of his guys rips off Serval, which he pulled off by shackling Danger, Xavier's old sentient Danger Room. Once freed, but with her memories in disarray, Danger sticks around. Serval tries to buy out an up-and-coming company that turns out to be run by Magus, posing as a human, and working with Warlock. So the team visits Doug Ramsey, who is planning to commit suicide to avert dreams he has of becoming an awful villain in the future.

Why does Carmine Di Giandomenico (who draws all but two issues of the series) have Doug waking from these dreams with his eyes and mouth glowing? Why is Doug having these dreams in the first place? Why does he have a goatee in the dreams, wearing some mechanical suit with Doc Ock tentacles a bubble helmet that makes him look more like Trevor Fitzroy? Who knows, it's never explained! But he decides to join, with no indication he thinks this will avert the future, seemingly just because. Warlock decides he'd rather hang with his old buddy (and pine after Danger) than work with his dad, so he joins. Eventually the team emancipates a young girl with mutant powers from her wealthy, mutant-hating father. Without really asking her before doing it, but since her dad wants nothing to do with her (being a mutant) and her biological parents appear to die, she sticks around.

It's a haphazard roster of people who weren't happy where they were, and figured they might as well try this. Quicksilver seems to be there out of some desire to be a good brother to Polaris - David devotes a fair amount of pages to Pietro's moral conundrums and past messes - while Danger doesn't even seem to have a reason. She questions why they're a team, why they're doing the things they do. Then why are you there?! Watsonian, because being around people seemed to help her pull herself back together. Doylist, because David needed a character to be inappropriately blunt and it couldn't always be Pietro.

The antagonists are one-offs, dealt with over 1-2 issue stories. An AIM scientist drawing mutant power into himself to become (briefly) a mutant. A guy calling himself Memento Mori, who has a whole evil organization with loads of shell businesses and lots of power, who actually turns out to be sort of an offshoot of a spell gone wrong. An Egyptian death-goddess reborn in a child's body. Those all basically vanish at the end of their respective stories (the scientist ends up locked in Serval's basement, where the CEO makes a job offer, but we don't see him again.) Even Magus, or the technomancer thief that captured Danger, don't show up again.

If there's a unifying theme, it's each is drawing on someone else's life or strength for their goals. The technomancer couldn't get into Serval's systems alone, so he imprisoned Danger, to I guess draw on her computing power and adaptability. Hoffman is stealing power from mutants to make himself a (big, glowy, shouty) god. Memento Mori's a fringe case, because he doesn't know the truth about how he got the powers he has. His wife had, at the time, feared her own powers and pushed them off on him.

Granted, the Magus doesn't really fit. He willingly changed his approach, to keep the Technarch from extinction. He even employs humans at his company, embracing Warlock's ideas. When Warlock decides to leave, Magus lets him go. (It is really annoying Marvel has two different pairs of characters named Magus and Warlock.)

My guess is, the antagonists were to give the team something to deal with in standard superheroic style, while things were moving in the background with the CEO. Except the book ran out of time. Maybe if they hadn't wasted 3 issues on AXIS tie-ins. Shouldn't have taken half that. Longshot's powers shouldn't even work if he's now constantly using them for selfish ends because he got "inverted" or whatever it was called. Anyway, David reveals at the very end the CEO is connected to Miguel O'Hara/Spider-Man 2099 (also running around in the present at the time, also in a book written by David.)

As mentioned, Carmine Di Giandomenico is artist for all but two of the issues. I appreciate the level of detail in the surroundings, the depictions of Danger and Warlock's malleable forms. Individual cables or external plates are visible, and they shift in different ways as well. Danger largely sticks to turning limbs into cannons, while Warlock opts for more variety, turning into high-tech motorcycles or armor for Doug. One all-business and individualistic, the other whimsical and more cooperative.

I don't feel like there's great flow from panel-to-panel during fights, but the action within each panel is usually well-rendered. Di Giandomenico shows off Gambit's agility with a variety of flips and dodges, while Quicksilver's speed is sometimes depicted by having the movement handled off-panel (he beats Havok in a game of pool in the span of two panels, and we don't see a single shot) or with the light from the uniforms leaving trails in his wake. Quite why the costumes have glow-up parts on the ribs and back of the hands, I don't know.

Not a huge fan of the costumes, really. The color scheme is OK - yellow and grey is an unusual choice, at least - but I don't like the odd lenses Polaris, Gambit and later Cypher wear over their eyes. I guess the right angle lines are meant to simulate a business suit or something, or maybe a vest with the flap you can leave open like some British admiral, but it's kind of an odd choice for a team uniform.

I don't know if David ever played out the things he hinted at after this book ended. I'm guessing not, since it was about some amorphous future for Marvel, and I doubt Peter David had the clout at the time to set the tone for something like that at Marvel. That gets saved for someone's Big Summer Event Comic. Future Tensed. Forced Future. Something short and punchy like that. Plus, Hickman's Secret Wars was lurking in the wings to (briefly) upend the apple cart. 

Sunday Splash Page #430

"A Fractured Mirror," in All-New Wolverine #1, by Tom Taylor (writer), David Lopez (penciler/inker), David Navarrot (inker), Nathan Fairbairn (colorist), Cory Petit (letterer)

Around 2016, Marvel killed Wolverine. Marvel, being Marvel, didn't let the concept lay fallow. They pumped out more Wolverine books than ever. Wolverines, about a bunch of characters that weren't that particular Logan, but liked to carve things up with claws, so close enough. Old Man Logan, because some dumbass thought we needed more of Mark Millar's bullshit in the Marvel Universe. And All-New Wolverine, which was about Laura Kinney trying to take on the legacy of her genetic donor. I hesitate to apply the label of "father" to Logan, given how bad he was at it.

Tom Taylor wrote the title, which ran for 35 issues, plus an Annual. It had a host of artists, because of course it did. Pretty much a different primary penciler for each arc. David Lopez on the first six issues, Marcio Takara and Ig Guara splitting the next six, Nik Virella and Djibril-Morissette-Phan on the third story, Leonard Kirk on the fourth arc, Juann Cabal on the fifth, and mostly Ramon Rosanas in the sixth arc, some "Old Woman Laura" thing I didn't keep, as should be self-explanatory given my comments in the previous paragraph.

Taylor's focus is on Laura trying to branch out and build a life, with friends and loved ones, while also moving beyond her past as a weapon. He starts by establishing Alchemax - this was when Alchemax was a thing in the present, rather than just in 2099 - cloned Laura. The clones were implanted with nanites to block their healing factors and lack claws - or so it seems - but the few survivors are trying to take out the ones responsible before they die. Of the four, only one appears to survive, the youngest, named Gabby (later Honey Badger or Scout.)

Gabby's the one constant presence throughout the run, despite Laura often trying to handle things alone to protect her new kid sister. Taylor writes Gabby as very quick to get excited about things and equally quick to judge. She's usually got some funny or clever remark ready, but a lot of Taylor's writing seems to revolve around that kind of quippy dialogue. It probably works here because Laura is mostly subdued. She's the quiet core all the more bubbly or outgoing characters orbit.

Besides Gabby, Maria Hill and Nick Fury (the one they put in the Marvel Universe that looks like Sam Jackson, 'cause Whitebread Nick Fury was/is busy being a Watcher) show up a few times, usually with something they want Laura's help with. Critically, Taylor makes these tasks Laura trying to rescue or help people, rather than kill. In the second arc, they need her to look for several missing SHIELD agents. In the fourth arc, it's a dying alien child who said Laura's name before keeling over of some engineered plague. People wanted her to kill, to take advantage of how much punishment the healing factor would let her take, but now she's using it to save lives.

To that end, Taylor uses the third arc to get rid of the "trigger scent" that sent Laura into berserker furies. As far as I know, nobody's undone that yet. Fittingly, that arc is the one that seems to delve most into previous Laura Kinney stories, as she's being hunted by Kimura, the woman who trained and/or tormented her in the Facility, and Gambit shows up for support, after being a big part of Laura's first ongoing series.

There's also the fifth arc, where a group of people who lost loved ones to various Wolverine-themed characters formed a support group to hunt down and kill them with bullets made of broken shards of the Muramasa Blade. Laura has to convince them she understands what they lost, because she lost part of herself being made into a killer, so she wants to help them by finding and punishing the ones who did that. Which is swell, but doesn't really address the fact she saved Sabretooth, Lady Deathstrike or Daken, who don't have the excuse they were kids when they were slaughtering people, nor have they demonstrated much regret.

But regret never stopped Logan from killing people. Why should the knockoffs be any different?

At times, though, the book feels like Wolverine Team-Up, as every arc has some guest star. Dr. Strange and the Wasp both appear in "Four Sisters", as well as the time-traveling teen Angel, who at least has the excuse of being Laura's boyfriend. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl shows up in the story Marcio Takara drew, which is a fun little team-up about rescuing a squirrel that Laura's actions endangered, and then Old Man Logan and HYDRA-Cap show up in the obligatory Civil War II tie-in. You've got Gambit and Teen Jean Grey in the third arc, plus Tyger Tyger, Maria Hill and Nick Fury, then Laura travels to space with the Guardians of the Galaxy to find the source of the sick alien kid.

It's old hat for the new kid to meet up with established characters and get their stamp of approval. In the '90s, Spider-Man was a lock for a guest appearance by issue #3 in every new Marvel book. But it feels like Taylor spams that particular button. I guess the point is to use people who knew Logan to contrast Laura to her predecessor, but if the idea is her reinventing herself to be someone who protects, then maybe the focus could have been on non-super powered characters that were being saved by her?

I know, that's silly. All supporting cast members must be supers themselves now.

As far as the artists go, I'm always partial to Lopez's art. He's got that clean linework with expressive body language and faces I enjoy. It works with Taylor's tendency to do 3-panel sequences of "action-silent panel-reaction." Laura tells Angel not to hug her until her ribs heal. He pats her head instead. She asks if he did that, he freezes, then acknowledges the obvious. Or Taskmaster catches Laura's kick, talks shit, she extends the claw in her foot through his hand, he screams in pain.

Takara's work is a lot rougher, the characters more blocky, but the art captures Squirrel Girl's cheerful and earnest personality, as well as Gabby's excitement and Laura's resignation that she needs to make things right. Kirk, I think is like Rick Leonardi: He needs a strong inker or his figures get a little like a wax figure left in the sun. Things kind of stretch and elongate abnormally. There are four different inkers in that story, including Kirk himself, and sometimes the details start to slip, but mostly it works. The Guardians of the Galaxy look appropriately alien, if there's slippage, it's when Laura gets emaciated because her healing factor is overworked by the alien plague. Deadpool and Gabby hit it off and are all smiles with each other.

Cabal's work is a little stiff in the fights, but he's good with emotion and he's the only artist I've seen that leans even a little into the fact part of Laura's DNA comes from a stocky, burly man. Laura's traditionally drawn as sort of a waif. Partially (OK, mostly) because it's usually guys drawing the comics for guys and they want the girls to look the traditional sort of cute or hot. But also somewhat so she looks like this unsuspecting girl, who turns into a tornado of murder. It's not as though Cabal gives Laura body hair, or a square head, or hair swooped into little wings, but he does give her more musculature, especially in the shoulders and back, than I can recall most artists doing.

Logan came back eventually, somehow. Laura went back to being X-23. Then she was Wolverine again, at the same time as Logan. Now she's back to X-23, but still dressing like Wolverine? I don't think they've ever given her a brown-and-orange costume like Logan had. It's only ever the yellow-and-blue, or sometimes black-and-red when she's in X-Force mode. I'm not sure what that means, if anything. The artists want to use colors that are more sharply distinct? 

Sunday Splash Page #429

"Mid-Air Collision," in "Mad-Matic" from Akira Toriyama Manga Theater, by Akira Toriyama

In contrast to yesterday's entry, it feels like I bought this more recently than 3 years ago, but the blog posts don't lie. This is an omnibus collection of what was originally a 3-volume release of assorted shorter works Dragon Ball Z and Dr. Slump creator Akira Toriyama did over the years, going back to the late-1970s.

It's fun to see the evolution of Toriyama's style, alongside his difficulties finding a story idea or concept the fans like. His first two strips, Wonder Island and Wonder Island 2, have a MAD magazine feel to them in the short, squat figures and reliance on either pop culture references - the protagonist of the second story is "Dirty Herring" - or what seems like entirely random, absurdist humor. There are two suns in the sky. But one's an egg, with a 3-headed dragon inside, but all their necks are tangled. That kind of thing.

By the 4th entry, Pola & Roid, Toriyama starts to find the groove he'd adopt for early Dragon Ball. Desert settings with lots of rocky spires and plateaus. Plucky but somewhat boy-crazy heroines in swimsuit battle armors and legs that seem long relative to their upper bodies. Dimwitted but (mostly) decent guys who don't know how to behave around a girl that's flirting with them. Joke villains that are either pathetically weak or just kind of stupid. It's mostly comedy, where even the shifts towards action are played as gags. A giant lizard just reading his dialogue without inflection and defeated with a squeaky hammer. A giant fiddler crab challenges the hero - an interstellar cab driver - to rock-paper-scissors. The evil emperor's secret weapon is a rubber band.

One of the bits that's interesting, at least in volume 1, where Toriyama talks about the process for making some of the strips, is how often his work ended up being unpopular. Even after he shifts away from the style of the Wonder Island strips (both duds with the readers), his two Chobits adventures - an inept hick cop who looks a lot like adult Goku meets essentially an alien genie in a flying teapot - in his words, 'failed to garner any fans.'

By volume 2, as he adds a bit more action, though still with a heavy lean towards comedy, you start to see more of his aesthetic in machinery. The hover bikes, the spacecraft or aircraft with the vertical surfaces at the ends of the wings, attached to egg-shaped central cockpits. The idea of "capsule houses" shows up in Tongpoo - a young cyborg crash lands on an alien world while trying to learn the fate of an earlier space exploration mission, and the sole survivor is a ditzy girl - and The Elder is a long chase between a secret agent in a car full of James Bond gadgets and some perverted old sheriff in a jeep drawn in the "squashed nose-to-tail" shape Toriyama uses for so many cars.

The Elder is also where Toriyama starts in with the "creepy old man groping women" stuff, which is, not great. Up to then, he was mostly restricting the pervert humor to young guys accidentally (key word there, accidentally, the hick cop in Chobits being the exception) stumbling on a lady in undress. In those cases, most of the characters are either confused or apologetic.

He flips things a bit in the final entry in the collection, Go Go Ackman, where the demon title character is actively repelled by any hint of female sexuality. He's supposed to be killing people to collect their souls and a convenient gust of wind reveals the lady he'd targeted is wearing a thong? Nope, he's outta there. It's not like Sand Land, where the "demon" characters are far less evil and cruel than the humans. Ackman really does seem to want to kill people, but I guess he's supposed to be young enough - by devil standards - that sort of thing is still icky to him. Or Toriyama just want to draw women in underwear without having them get murdered, in a story ostensibly starring a devil kid out to murder people.

Anyway, some of the entries are stronger than others, but it's fun to see what elements and themes recur and how he mixed and matched them in different ways over time.

Sunday Splash Page #428

"Indecent Descent," in Agent of W.O.R.L.D.E. #1, by Deniz Camp (writer), Filya Bratukhin (artist), Jason Wordie (colorist), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (letterer)

Not knowing Deniz Camp's work, I made a guess about the tone of this mini-series based off the first cover, where the main character is shooting a robot in the head while scarfing a burger, wearing jeans and a hoodie. I thought it was going to be sort of silly. It is not. 

Philip works for WORLDE, an agency dedicated to either stealing potentially destructive elements, or destroying them. Whether that's a guy from the 25th century looking to use his future science to be a mega-violent hero, or some deranged Russian scientist who created a vast family of robotic children.

Philip's gift is some sort of ability to see the world mathematically, then make that work for him. Like releasing a wind-up monkey toy amid a bunch of armed enemies, counting on it making one of them step back, fire high, and for that shot to cause a massive car wreck that launches a small family sedan into the group of armed enemies, killing them all.

All of that Bratukhin illustrates in great detail, with lots of little scratchy lines and so many dots on faces it's like a pointillist warm-up exercise. It's kind of exhausting just imagining drawing it, and Bratukhin keeps it up for all four issues. Lots of little details in WORLDE's HQ, in the places Philip travels, in Philip's home.

Because Philip uses his skill well enough he's granted certain special privileges. Like time off to go, well, WORLDE doesn't know where he goes (or so Philip's boss, the talking orangutan, says), but we do. He goes home to his family. Which is the ugly side of the mini-series. In every single issue, Philip deals with some weapon or perceived threat that is really just someone trying to protect the family they've created.

And in every one of those situations, he kills them or takes their family away. The Russian scientist is allowed one of his "children", but he's now a prisoner of the WORLDE, expected to build weapons for them. A mother that took some eyes that let her see the future, is brought in alive, but Philip's idea of kindness is to hack the eyes so they just replay a particular happy memory of hers, three times an hour, forever, while she's strapped in a chair in WORLDE's facility. When a kid is mean to his youngest daughter on her first day of school, Philip sends some sort of bomb to the kid's house which leaves the kid traumatized and probably orphaned.

What's that saying, hurt people hurt people? That's Philip to a T. He seems loving with his family, indulgent even. Let's his daughter have two hot dogs even though she got sick last time she ate that much. Let's her watch a violent superhero movie with him, then tries to settle her nightmares. Tries (and fails) to construct a doll house. I have no idea what they think he does for a living, but probably not killing people on the regular for a talking orangutan in a striped sweater vest.

With everyone else, Philip is alternately sarcastic, condescending, and sanctimonious. Especially other agents he's forced to work with, none of whom share his reticence about killing. But the reticence doesn't actually stop him, so as one of the other agents points out, what's the difference if he feels bad about it? He clearly doesn't feel bad enough to do something different. Is consigning that woman to a life reliving a memory of the husband and child another agent killed a mercy?

I lean to "No," but I didn't like Philip very much, which might cloud my judgement. At the end of the day, Philip has drawn his lines fairly clearly. He will protect his family. Everyone else is expendable to that end. Philip also says, in the issue with the mother and her future eyes, that you can't run from the past, because it's always just ahead. The issue is written in reverse order, working backwards through the fight, so the past is waiting on the next page, but it feels significant. Is Philip running from his past as a child raised in some WORLDE "school", but just waiting for more psychic trauma ahead?

I don't know. Camp doesn't show us Philip's childhood, only has characters make vague references to it. All I can go by is what's on the page, and that's rarely someone's past. We see a particular mission one of the other agents went on, mostly because his telling of it doesn't match reality, and when Philip kills the 25th Century cosplayer, Bratukhin draws the image in profile, with dozens of little panels showing past moments of the guy's life, expanding in a cone from the back of the guy's head like blood spray from the exit wound.

I don't even know if Camp wants us to like Philip. It feels like there was more to the story - a new agent called "The Dream" is introduced in the fourth issue, but other than using him to show some of what goes on in WORLDE, there's no payoff there - and it was originally solicited as five issues, before only being four. Maybe there was more coming that would have produced some sort of resolution. WORLDE does something forcing the issue, makes Philip unable to work for them and have his little family. He has to choose. The WORLDE waits for no one, we're told. Why should Philip be any different?

Or maybe not. Scout Comics going down the drain amid a storm of accusations of breaches of contract with the various creative teams might have something to do with that.

Sunday Splash Page #427

"Cement Shoes," in Adventures in the DC Universe #6, by Steve Vance (writer), John Delaney (penciler), Roy Boyd (inker), Bob Le Rose (colorist), Tim Harkins (letterer)

And we're back to the start. The first new "A" was going to be A Calculated Man. Turns out it didn't have a splash page, and I decided I didn't want to waste an entry on something where I was just going to complain about the conceit of the series the entire time when it didn't even have a splash page, so out of the collection it went!

As for Adventures in the DC Universe, I think this book was one of DC's offerings aimed at younger readers, like the comics they based on Batman: The Animated Series and the '90s Superman cartoon. Even though the artists sometimes used the character designs from the Timmverse cartoons - the last issue of the series, #19, is a Wonder Woman and Catwoman team-up using the later cartoon design for Selina, with the jet-black costume and the crooked ears - these weren't necessarily set in that continuity.

Issue 14, while using a Flash who seems rather like the overly cocky version from the cartoons, has him challenged to a race by the '90s, leather-jacket wearing version of Superboy. Issue 13 has the Martian Manhunter teaming up (or being saddled with) Impulse. Most of the issues have a lead feature and a back-up, and issue 6's back-up involved Power Girl helping stop a cargo ship full of experimental weapons from making landfall.

I only own a few issues - like the Marvel Adventures line, this series being done-in-ones means it's perfect for picking and choosing issues with an interesting concept - but it looks like Steve Vance, who wrote every issue, usually tried to connect the lead feature and the back-up in some way. Issue 8's lead is Booster Gold and Blue Beetle taking a gig in Hub City and finding themselves double-crossed, while the back-up shows how the Question (reluctantly) bails them in the course of pursuing his own case. Or Aquaman saves that drowning guy, but is too preoccupied with finding Ocean Master to think anything of it beyond surface dwellers dumping garbage in his waters again. In the Power Girl story we learn the guy is actually a fed that was trying to track down the guy who stole the experimental Russian weapons.

Delaney tends to exaggerate for comedic effect, which is what the story asks for, but I'm not sure it's always the best choice. Should it be played for yuks that Aquaman's just floating there, watching this guy drown? He's supposed to be the hero, right? I don't know what I would have made of that if I read this when it came out and I was closer to the target age. But if the story asks for comedy, he provides it. He can draw action sequences, he nails the look of the characters. He and Vance seem like a pretty good team.

Sunday Splash Page #426

"Not First Law Compliant," in Menace #11, by John Romita (artist), Joe Letterese (letterer), writer and colorist unknown

Menace was, as you might guess, a horror title. This is actually from the last issue, although it's not the cover story (that was "Locked In!") The robot has no name in the original story; the name Parker gave it is a reference to being in the 11th issue. In the Agents of Atlas ongoing, he's revealed as the 11th robot in what's called the "Menacer" series, and Suwan has a much more recent model, albeit one that can't compete on its own with all the Uranian science components M-11's gotten from Bob.

The original story is only 5 pages, revolving around a scientist who refuses to release his robot until it's perfect, to the annoyance of his business manager who wants the 5 million bucks they can get for it. The robot obeys commands, but doesn't know when to stop obeying. You tell it to pick up a chair, it picks up one, then another, and keeps going until it's picked up every chair. A flaw the manager isn't aware of when he gets impatient and tells the robot to kill "the man in the room." Which is the end for the scientist, but also the end for the manager, as another man in the room.

In Agents of Atlas, the scientist, realizing the people who commissioned him planned evil things, sacrifices his life force to the machine so it will have emotions and free will. The fun is that, with the '50s sci-fi robot design, M-11 doesn't make facial expressions. So no one, including his teammates, can really tell what's going on in his head. There's no indication Bob can read his mind, or that Venus' emotional abilities have any effect whatsoever.

Sometimes Parker plays that for mystery. Everyone is standing silently in Bob's spaceship, and M-11 suddenly shouts "Archiving!" before going silent again. Sometimes it's for comedy, when Gorilla Man thinks the robot needs a push to get angry to win the fight with M-21 and gets a personality module based on "The Greatest" installed. M-11 spends a few pages talking like Muhammad Ali before Bob reveals the module didn't work at all and M-11's just humoring Ken.

And sometimes M-11 sparks conflict. He's the one that contacts Bob and Ken about Jimmy Woo, and it's only late in the mini-series everyone figures out why. In the ongoing series, Jimmy has just about talked their way out of a fight with the Avengers when M-11 recognizes Wolverine's voice. Because Logan blew him up during a mission in Cuba in the '50s, and M-11, like Michael Jordan, took that personally. But Logan doesn't put the pieces together - so much for House of M giving him his memories back - and M-11 won't explain his actions to anyone. It's just a thing they have to deal with.

Oh well, not like killer robots and X-Men get along all that well anyway.

Sunday Splash Page #425

"Cliffs of Peril," in Marvel Mystery Comics #82, by Ken Bald? (penciler), George Klein? (inker), writer and letterer unknown

Namora has the earliest appearance of the characters that would go on to be the Agents of Atlas, making her debut 15 months prior to Venus. A bunch of crooks - who own their own submarine, as crooks commonly did in the 1940s - attack the undersea kingdom - not called Atlantis, because it seems to be in the Pacific - Namor and Namora call home while Namor's off pursuing crooks in Asia. Everyone gets shot in what is essentially a jewel heist, but Namora's only grazed. So when Namor comes home, they team up, and catch up to the crooks when they try to rob a gambling boat.

Seems like you'd try that before throwing on scuba gear to attack an entire kingdom. Scale up, not down.

Namora gets saddled with the old chloroformed and taken hostage bit, but Namor sends her a message in a broadcast meant to make the crooks think there's a lot of jewels hidden in a particular place. The trap works, the crooks are caught, and Namor foists Namora off on his old friend Betty Dean. Which is what he did with Namorita about 30 years later. I guess when you're a grouchy dickhead like the Avenging Son, you only have so many people to ask for unreasonable favors.

As first appearances go, it's not a stunning debut. Namora gets a couple of hits in, but gets k.o.'ed twice and taken hostage. She does figure out the hidden meaning of Namora's message, and we're told she's strong enough to break the handcuffs if she gets some water splashed on her, but that happens off-panel, so it's not like she makes a dramatic escape and clocks some guy about to shoot Namor in the back. Her biggest contribution is that she heard one of the crooks referred to by name. Which we don't actually see in the comic, so when she said the name was 'Stoop', I thought she just didn't know English and one of the guys said "stop" for some reason.

Prior to Agents of Atlas, Namora spent 30+ years being dead, until M-11 decided that the poison probably didn't kill her, only put her in a coma or something. Quite how it figured that out, from thousands of miles away, I have no idea. Parker plays her up as a the team's (physical) powerhouse. When the team starts to fragment under surprise reveals, she brings down Bob's flying saucer with one hit. Gorilla Man clocks her in the face with a big metal pipe and it barely scratches her.

Leonard Kirk's preliminary sketches show he wanted her to have no pupils as a result of resurrection, but that seems to have been overruled. Probably because she was only mostly dead. Her ankle wings are more like the wings of a flying fish than a bird. She's got some of that same noble air as Namor, but it doesn't tip over into grating arrogance like it does with him. Maybe she's less insecure than Namor, doesn't need to make such a show of things, or maybe having lost so many decades, and having been largely forgotten, gave her some perspective. She understands the weight Jimmy Woo assumes, first as leader of this team, and later as the leader of the Atlas Organization, because she knows a little about ruling.

Outside of maybe Gorilla Man - people love talking primates! - Namora probably got the most use outside Agents of Atlas. She got drawn into the Incredible Hercules book, and she and Herc had some kind of a romantic thing going for a minute. Of course, then Parker started something up between her and Namor, and I'm going to have side with Gorilla Man who observed, 'guess they even got hillbillies under the sea.'

Unfortunately, Mark Millar killed off Namorita in Civil War right about the time Agents of Atlas came out - Parker says that was a total coincidence on the timing - and by the time Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning brought at least a version of Namorita back in Nova, Agents of Atlas had pretty much run out of chances to find a receptive marketplace. Neither character has gotten much use in the last 15 years, and I definitely don't recall any sort of mother-daughter reunion. 

Sunday Splash Page #424

"Blinded by the Bling," in Marvel Boy #1, by Russ Heath (artist), writer, colorist, letterer unknown

I'm just going through these alphabetically, but it's a little funny I picked the two titles that lasted the least amount of time, as, per Grand Comics Database, Marvel Boy's book only lasted two issues. Gotta love the cover, though, where the blurb declares him the 'newest, most amazing,' in line 1, then finishes with, 'finally in his own magazine!' on line 5. How can it be "finally" if he just got created?

Friction between grammar and hype aside, Bob Grayson's scientist father decided to live on the Moon with his infant son after his wife was killed by Nazis in the 1930s. Except their rocket got redirected and landed on the uranium crust of Uranus' surface. Ah, 1950s astronomy, gotta love it. Now 17, Bob's developed some level of telepathy - presumably from all that radiation in the planet's crust - and his dad's sending him back to Earth to try and prevent the outbreak of violence over a new continent rising from the sea. Bob gets a costume, a big red flying saucer, and wristbands that temporarily blind people with 'atomic radiance.' But no killing, Bob's got to handle things the old-fashioned way: punching.

Then he fights pirates who happened to get beached on the continent as it emerged from the sea and thought they'd declare themselves kings, tries and fails to convince the actual inhabitants that surface dwellers aren't all like those guys, and watches the island sink back beneath the waves.

By the time Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk were creating Agents of Atlas, there was a slight problem. Someone brought Marvel Boy back in the pages of Fantastic Four, as "The Crusader." He behaved erratically, attacking banks that wouldn't give him loans for medical supplies to take back to Uranus, and eventually was destroyed by his much more powerful wristbands (which later became Quasar's quantum bands.)

So Parker changed Bob's backstory. Not the part about him being from Earth originally, or his scientist dad wanting to escape the violence. But the people living on the surface of Uranus weren't true Uranians, who are an amoeba-like collective living deeper within the planet, but Eternals who tried to conquer Earth thousands of years earlier and were exiled. They were allowed to stay on Uranus by the true inhabitants on the condition they don't leave, their byproducts being useful to the collective. Bob's exploits as Marvel Boy were supposed to make him an ambassador of sorts, so Earth would invite them back, which is totally different from leaving, totally. As Bob puts it, 'the Uranians do not consider such fine points of detail.'

The Crusader was the child of the exiles, modified to resemble Bob, but brainwashed to be blindly loyal, who got hatched before he was ready when the Uranians figured out what the exiles were up to and destroyed them. Bob ends up stuck in a dying colony, until he's offered a place in the Uranian collective, where he lived for decades, leaving to help save Jimmy Woo. Which also means he left the collective forever. No going back.

So Parker and Kirk go away from the superhero aesthetic, leaning on the '50s sci-fi vibe. He's still got a flying saucer - silver-grey instead of red - and the sort of vaguely rubber spacesuit look you might see in The Day the Earth Stood Still or something similar. No more wristbands and fisticuffs; Bob leans on his technology and his telepathy, which has advanced from some low-level mind-reading to linking thoughts and creating illusions/altering perceptions.

Decades as part of a collective of a species very different from humans has changed him. In the early issues of the mini-series, he keeps speaking in an alien language and admits human minds are difficult to fool, because they're so strange to him now. His reactions and emotions seem muted; Venus observes that he used to blush around her, but now he barely reacts. Even as he settles in with his old friends, he maintains a detached air, with some occasional dry humor, mostly at M-11 and Gorilla Man's friendship.

I'm a little surprised having been part of a collective for so long, that Bob isn't more tactile with his teammates. Instead, he tends to stand apart, hands folded behind his back. But he also extends his esophagus to eat, and his helmet produces a Uranian atmosphere, so maybe it's a safety issue.

Sunday Splash Page #423

"Monsters," in Punisher: The Tyger, by Garth Ennis (writer), John Severin (artist), Paul Mounts (colorist), Randy Gentile (letterer)

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that in Garth Ennis' telling, the Punisher is the culmination of everything in Frank Castle's life. Not strictly the loss of his family. Not strictly Castle's 3 tours in Vietnam. Not even the final tour specifically, which Ennis and Darick Robertson depicted in the Punisher: Born mini-series.

(A digression. I occasionally see people say the end of Punisher: Born implies Frank made a deal with the Devil to survive the climactic battle at Firebase Valley Forge, because, as he's leaving the airport with his family, something is speaking to him about (paraphrasing) how, some day, it'll collect what it owes for keeping him alive.

I think it being the Devil is a bit too supernatural for Ennis' MAX imprint take on the character, and believe the implication is Frank unlocked something dangerous inside himself to survive. Similar to in the Avengers movie, when Stark suggests the Hulk was a manifestation of Banner's will to live, because the gamma radiation would have killed him otherwise. The monster saved Banner's life, but now that monster is loose on the world.

Frank Castle found something inside not only terrifyingly good at killing, but able to do so without remorse or hesitation. Something that would never relent. But having let it out once, it was never going to go back in its cage and stay there. Essentially, if Frank's family hadn't been killed, it would have been something else. Digression over.)

To that end, we have this one-shot from 2006. It begins and ends with Frank sniping some mob guys from a snowy rooftop, presented as his first as act the Punisher. The captions on Page 1 are, 'They'll blame it all on Vietnam. And they'll be right. And they'll be wrong.'

The meat of the story, however, is set during a summer sixteen years earlier, when Frank was a kid. It revolves around Lauren Buvoli, a girl Frank knows in the neighborhood, and Vincent Rosa, son of the local mob boss, though Frank doesn't understand that at the time. That's the needle Ennis tries to thread, showing us glimpses of Frank's personality or mannerisms that persist into his adulthood of extra-judicial mass murder, while also acknowledging there are lots of things a kid his age wouldn't understand.

So we see young Frank has a tendency to linger in the shadows outside the living room window and listen to his parents' conversations, which is how he hears that Rosa was also involved in something that got the Donegan girl into trouble. But when he asks the girl's little brother (after saving him from a bully), the kid can only say Rosa "made" his sister get a baby. He doesn't understand what that means, and neither does Frank. Frank sees a man on fire come tearing out of the factory where his father works, but doesn't understand it wasn't an accident, or what Lauren's older brother means when he asks how you hate someone that much.

Severin uses a heavy line, but with indistinct edges. Things are a little blurred or fuzzy, being pulled from Frank's memories. His father's eyes may be nothing but a thin line in one panel, Frank's attention seized by the burning man. Lauren's features are rounded and without blemish, shifted to something almost angelic in his remembering, while Vincent Rosa is definitely trying to imitate Dean Martin with his cigarette hanging loose and the curly hair done up. Mounts uses mostly soft tones, except for the violence, the fire, where the oranges and reds jump off the page in contrast to the more muted blues and blacks of men's work clothes and jackets.

The title of the story is reference to William Blake's poem, as Frank and Lauren are in an after-school poetry class taught by one of the priests. They read "The Tyger", and Frank interprets Blake's question of who created the "tyger" as suggesting there are things in the world not created by God. The priest naturally objects to the notion anything could exist God didn't make, but the notion lingers with Frank through that summer and apparently into adulthood. I'd say it depends on how merciful you envision your God to be. Old Testament God creating something like Frank Castle? Yeah, absolutely.

The one-shot isn't essential, except as part of the overall tapestry of Ennis' take on the Punisher, but it's a stronger story than The Cell, leaning less heavily on the brutality and shock value, and more on the idea there are those who prey on others. They may disguise it behind a winning smile or nice clothes, but they still regard you as food, and knowing that can be terrifying.

Well, it took over 7 years and 648 posts, but we finally made it through the alphabet. But as time - and the comics industry - wait for no one, now I've got to go back to the start and pick up all the stuff I bought since then. First, a special splash page project for the next 3.5 weekends.

Sunday Splash Page #422

"The Big Chair," in Punisher: The Cell, by Garth Ennis (writer), Lewis LaRosa (penciler), Scott Koblish (inker), Raul Trevino (colorist), Randy Gentile (letterer)

While Ennis was writing his MAX imprint Punisher ongoing series, he also wrote an assortment of one-shots and mini-series. The Cell takes place at an undefined point in Frank's story, where he surrenders himself to get into a prison with five particular mob guys, who are finally all together after many years.

Most of the story is spent on Frank engineering circumstances so he can get time with the five of them. Which involves manipulating the sadistic head guard - not difficult, the man's both aggressive and aggressively stupid - and igniting a race war among the prison population. The reveal at the end - coming after Ennis writes a bit where 4 of the 5 admit to something awful they each did, even by their standards, in the idea they need to confess to atone, but really feels like Ennis either going for shock value or to really sell us on the notion Frank should kill these guys - is these 5 are responsible for killing Frank's family. The consiglieri tried to whack the don, there was a lot of shooting without regard for anyone else in the vicinity by the hitman and the two bodyguards, people died.

The five die, although even in a MAX book, the violence is kept largely off-panel. Frank kills the brothers that were the don's bodyguards by beating them with a nightstick, but LaRosa just shows us the nightstick rising and falling as blood flies. He also continues to use Eastwood as a visual reference for Frank (and Danny Trejo for one of the bodyguards.) The don chokes out his consiglieri himself, but has a heart attack in the process. As he dies, Frank tells him that he can escape the prison whenever he wants, and go right back to killing criminals, until there's none left. Which is in conflict with what he told himself in The Slavers arc, that he knew he couldn't stop them, any more than he can the drug trade. He knows there's always going to be more of these guys.

Also, the don strikes me as a person that wouldn't really care what happens after he dies, but whatever. Frank's having a ball, I guess. "Look what you unleashed on your people, old man."

But it makes for a interesting tie to Punisher: The End, which Ennis did with Richard Corben. I don't own it, but I read it when it came out. Basically, some point much further down the line, the world is dying. Nukes, I think. Frank's been locked up a long time, but with everything falling apart, another convict helps him escape, hoping Frank will protect him long enough to find an underground bunker the wealthy have somewhere in the city.

Frank ultimately kills the people in the bunker, I think because they helped engineer all this. Even when they plead they've heard nothing from the other bunkers, meaning they might be the last of the human race. That done (and the convict who led him there also killed) Frank, dying of radiation exposure from the journey, heads back onto the surface, to spend his remaining time killing any other criminals he finds. There's no such thing as extenuating circumstances, no reprieve or possibility of redemption. That's something he told Micro in the first MAX arc, after Micro helped the CIA catch Frank to try and sell him on working for them. Frank ended up blowing Micro's head off.

At least in that sense, Frank does keep his promise. He keeps killing until all the men like that godfather are dead. Unfortunately, it's possible everyone else is dead, too. If so, to him, that just means there's no one left who requires punishing. The mission is complete, or he's dead. Which, in a sense, is also a way of completing the mission. Frank might not see it that way, but he almost certainly meets his own definition of needing punishing. During The Cell, he doesn't acknowledge that someone could be incarcerated and actually be innocent. He kills one guy simply because the man is a cellmate of the guy Frank wants to kill to ratchet tensions in the prison. Doesn't even know the guy's name, just kills him because he's in the way and in prison, so he must be guilty. 

Sunday Splash Page #421

"Working Man," in The Punisher (vol. 7) #19, by Garth Ennis (writer), Leandro Fernandez (penciler), Scott Hanna (inker), Dan Brown (colorist), Gent (letterer)

Eventually, Marvel started up a MAX imprint, essentially comics with content that wasn't for kids. Nudity, graphic violence, various slurs and profanity. All on the table, and Garth Ennis got to write a Punisher book under this label, which meant no more cartoony violence about feeding people to zoo animals, no more goofball Russian with huge melons, no more arcs making fun of how stupid and useless costumed heroes are compared to a Hard Man with a Gun, Doing Hard Things (the most tedious of Ennis' various hobby horses.)

Ennis set Frank Castle loose in our world, more or less. There are no superheroes, no superpowers, save Frank's impossible ability to never kill anyone he doesn't intend to. Well, that and money, but that's always a superpower. In addition to the various organized crime types, the Punisher deals with crooked U.S. generals, slave traders, unscrupulous corporate scumbags, a group of women he made widows. Although that last group all died at the hands of their old friend, who they fed into the metaphorical woodchipper of marriage to a sadist mob guy. Ennis is very good at setting up antagonists that are horrible enough I'm fine watching Frank Castle extra-judicially murder them.

It probably also helps that many of them are connected to the levers of power in one way or another that my cynicism tells me that people like them - and they surely exist in this world, in one form or the other - will never face any real consequences from the legal system.

But it's the version of Frank Castle that Ennis presents here that interests me. In Ennis' telling, it's not just one thing that makes Frank Castle the Punisher. Not just his military service, not just his family's death at the hands of a mob shootout. Nor was it an immediate thing, like flipping a switch, but a gradual accumulation of factors until Frank felt he had to act. As one character in "Widowmakers" remarks, 'You're a soldier, so you gave yourself a mission.'

Some versions of Batman strive to eliminate all crime, so no little kid will lose their parents because they took a shortcut through the wrong alley, and may even think it an achievable goal. Ennis' Frank Castle does not, his outlook realistic in a very nihilistic way. Near the end of "The Slavers," when, having obliterated one operation, Frank thinks to himself that he could never stop it entirely, any more than he could stop the flow of heroin, or the tide from coming in. All he could do, was maybe make them pause for a moment. Frank gave himself a mission, but it's one that only ends with his death. (Or the human race going extinct, as in Punisher: The End.)

It's a difference Ennis explores in "Widowmakers", where we also have Jenny Cesare, out for revenge against her sister and her friends, and Detective Budiansky, who has a rep as a cop who ignores regs when he thinks someone needs to act. But when Budiansky seems like he wants to murder someone in revenge for his wife being shot (but not killed), all it takes is Frank asking if Budiansky wants to end up like him for the cop to withdraw. He still has someone to lose. Jenny gets her revenge, but with all the people she was after dead, she has nothing left. She's not going to go on killing criminals forever like Frank, but she can't see anything else. Frank has no one to lose, and in his mind, what he does isn't revenge, it's killing people who need killing, however he defines that, wherever he comes across them. There are always more, so the mission continues.  

And while it's a mission Frank chose initially, it's one he's locked into now. He might be able to take a break for a time, but he knows that at some point, he would see something in the news that would make him take action. And he knows what that means for himself. Even if he wanted to live a normal life, he can't. He's too fundamentally changed now for all that. His life - maybe existence is the better word - is all about death. Too many bullets are in the air around him for anyone to survive his presence for long. And that plays out in the series. There are 10 stories in Ennis' 60-issue run, and no character other than Frank lives past a 3rd story. Three strikes - if you're lucky - you're out

Micro and the CIA guy who hopes to recruit Frank die in the first arc, though the CIA guy's assistants, O'Brien and Roth, make it out more or less intact. More than you can say for mob schmuck Nicky Cavella's lackeys, Ink and Pittsy. Cavella and Roth's luck runs out in their next appearance, "Up is Down and Black is White." O'Brien survives that, as does her ex-husband, CIA prick and general scumbag Rawlins, but neither make it through "Man of Stone," and neither does General Zhakarov or his top guy, Dolnovich (like Rawlins, key fixtures in the third arc, "Mother Russia," though none of them actually met Castle then.)

Barracuda survived one encounter, but made the mistake of accepting the chance at a rematch. The generals who pulled the strings on Rawlins and Barracuda didn't meet the Punisher in "Mother Russia" or "Up is Down and Black is White," but once they do, it ends swiftly. Yorkie Mitchell shows up in 3 arcs, but only in flashback in the third, because he got killed. Budiansky only shows up in one arc, ditto social worker Jen Cooke. They get far the fuck away from Frank and everything he represents at the first opportunity. Even Nick Fury doesn't risk the odds, appearing only in "Mother Russia," and "Valley Forge, Valley Forge."

Near the end of "Long Cold Dark," after Frank describes a scene of O'Brien looking briefly free of the demons that haunted her, he says, 'Memories like that, I try to kill. But you can do something with it, if you like.' Castle tries very hard to take emotion out of the equation, whether because it makes him sloppy, or because it makes him realize what a hellish prison cell he's made his life. The fact he still has that memory to relate to O'Brien's sister speaks to his inability to bury that part of him. Ennis likes to present things that drag it out of Frank.

Children in danger a couple of times, ones Frank can save the way he couldn't save his own. Nicky Cavella trying to throw him off by digging up the bodies of Frank's wife and children and pissing on them. Maybe even the generals sending a team of elite U.S. soldiers after him in "Valley Forge, Valley Forge." Guys who believe in serving the same things Frank believed in once. Threats, certainly moreso than the mob guys, but not one Frank can declare needs punishing. But also not a threat he wants to allow to stop him. That's what makes it a little different. With the children, or Cavella's nonsense, Frank's response is simply violence, but more brutal. Rather than calmly shoot someone, Frank dismantles them. Barracuda is left as something barely recognizable as human.

The soldiers, he can't do that, and there's only so far even he can go against that many highly trained guys that he won't kill. Ultimately, he doesn't really fight his way out, so much as survives for being unapologetically what he is. The generals try to pretend at still being soldiers, or caring about anything but saving their own asses and their post-career seats on various corporate boards. Frank is the Punisher, full stop. He doesn't compromise, he doesn't quit, he doesn't pretend. One of the soldiers, upon seeing the remains of an attack the Punisher made, compares him to the Xenomorph. 'I admire its purity.' And for the most part, he's not wrong. Even the Punisher's compassion often expresses itself through violence.

The book went through several pencilers over 60 issues. Lewis Larosa, Doug Braithwaite and Lan Medina each drew one arc. Goran Parlov drew three (with Howard Chaykin drawing the first part of "Long Cold Dark" for some reason, his work looks nothing like any of the others, let alone Parlov's), and Leandro Fernandez drew four arcs. I think Fernandez is the best of them. Larosa and Medina each lean a bit too much into photo reference. Budiansky sometimes looks exactly like Sam Jackson, and Larosa is clearly cribbing from Clint Eastwood for Castle, to the extent it gets distracting.

Parlov's art is exaggerated and cartoonish enough it feels like it would have been a better fit for the Marvel Knights book. The Punisher is running around with forearms like Popeye in some of those panels, and the level of violence Punisher and Barracuda inflict on each other isn't far from what Punisher and the Russian did (though Parlov's art makes it look more brutal than Steve Dillon's, though maybe that was just the more lax hand a MAX book got.)

Leandro Fernandez seems to strike a nice balance over the course of "Up is Down and Black is White", "The Slavers", and "Man of Stone." His characters look tough, or craven or arrogant or whatever, but in a grounded way that you could see real people looking like that, without any obvious famous people being lightboxed into the panel. He can do the shocking or graphic violence, make a person who truly looks like they've been through hell, but not go so over-the-top it knocks me out of the story entirely. (There were some panels Parlov drew where I had to stop and sort of shake my head. "What did I just see? Jeez," kind of thing.)

Brown's colors likely help with that. He tends to keep the figures in more muted tones, often almost washed out skin color. These are not people who go around in daylight. It's their surroundings that are lit up, like the world is on fire, which makes for a stark contrast.

Ennis left the book in 2008, after 60 issues. Surprisingly, Marvel didn't cancel the series and renumber it. Instead they kept it going and Gregg Hurwitz became the writer. I gave him two issues and concluded I really didn't need to read any more Punisher comics. And that's stayed true for the 18 years since, but Ennis wrote some other Punisher stuff at the same time as the ongoing, so that'll occupy the next two weeks.