Life Stinks (1991)

Goddard Bolt (Mel Brooks), financial genius, just bought half of a several block slum from the city of Los Angeles, as part of a big, hideous development he's got planned. Problem, Vance Crasswell (Jeffrey Tambor), just bought the other half of that neighborhood, which is where he grew up. Crasswell proposes a bet: If Bolt can last one month there as just some penniless derelict, he gets Crasswell's half. If he leaves (as determined by a tracking collar wrapped to his ankle), Crasswell gets Bolt's half.

The first hour of the movie is Bolt struggling to find a place to sleep, to get some food, to get some money. Forced to rely on the assistance of other homeless people who take pity on this hapless dope in an increasingly ragged suit. Foremost among them is Molly (Lesley Ann Warren), who saves him from a couple of goons that stole his shoes, and gets her makeshift home burned down as a result. 

Brooks plays Bolt as a wildly overconfident guy out of his depth. A guy who says being left $5 million by his father is nothing. Warren plays Molly as initially a bundle of raw nerves and snapping teeth. She's impatient and frustrated with everyone she deals with, especially Bolt. It shifts during a sort of performance she puts on for Bolt that details how she wound up there. It starts angry, at herself and the guy she fell for, and turns increasingly sad as she reenacts falling apart (as she puts it, she's spent the last 8 years having a nervous breakdown.)

I thought the movie would show Bolt use whatever talents he possessed to manage success over the course of the month. We see his initial attempts to make money washing windshields or dancing, but those all fail miserably. Instead, the movie leaps ahead to the end of the month, when Bolt brings Molly along to his mansion, only to learn his lawyers cut a deal with Crasswell behind his back and took everything.

The physical humor got some laughs. Bolt's model of his development descends from the ceiling and crushes the model of the current neighborhood in a very on-the-nose display. He and another homeless man start slapping each other while arguing over which of them actually used to be rich and which has just lost touch with reality. Bolt finds a place to sleep in front of a door, only for the door to swing open, pushing him into the dumpster, followed by the restaurant worker emptying a trash can on him.

The last 30 minutes speedrun Bolt's nervous breakdown and suffering at the hands of an overworked and indifferent - really indifferent - medical system, being brought out of a catatonic state by Molly professing her love, and the two of them leading an army of the homeless in crashing Crasswell's big celebration for the groundbreaking of his hideous urban development. Culminating in Tambor and Brooks using construction equipment like Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots. All I could think of during that was nowadays Crasswell would have private security kill the homeless before they got anywhere close. Assuming the cops didn't do it first just for kicks.

Tambor's character has to be obnoxious to make Bolt remotely sympathetic, but even allowing for that, Crasswell is too annoying. His shtick is to enter a room and say, "It's ridiculous for me to be here. I should just leave, right? I should just leave. I'm gonna leave. *door closes* *door swing open and he walks back in* Anyway, . . ." Just irritating.

Robotic Doppelgangers are Such a Pain

Hope those poor saps are wearing proper protective equipment! That's a lie, no I don't.

Precarious Woman Executive Miss Black General volume 9 revolves around the Organization terrorizing the populace with a powerful robot that looks just like the General. The General takes off on her own to hunt them down and, well you saw the note. Outside of a brief run-in with the rabbit-cop's hotheaded partner, Jin doesn't bother showing the General trying to avoid arrest.

Instead, we get a chapter where the General takes refuge with her three clones and is forced to work at their maid cafe to pay off the food she ate. She is, of course, put in a much skimpier, ridiculous outfit than any of the clones wear, which only serves to humiliate her when she tries to play up her sex appeal to a group of guys addicted to pudding. I think there would have been plenty of comedy from the General trying her hand at customer service without the T&A, so it feels pointless. At least the General does eventually get to show some moves when she faces off with the robot.

The Villain League take their own measures to find and neutralize the robot, though we aren't shown any of the preparations, only the execution (which works, up to a point,) but most of the story is focused on the Hero League's efforts. Which are ineffectual and confounding to their members. The people in charge of the League - entirely unseen - don't have a good plan or assessment of priorities. Braveman and his two junior partners are teamed up with an ice-based character who is extremely effective at decisive action, but useless on a mission that involves running around until they encounter the target. Likewise, the leaders have declared both the robot and the General are to be terminated on sight, even though there's no indication the General's at all connected, and it's a pointless splitting of manpower.

This feels like Jin, once again, getting further in the weeds of the Hero League than I have any interest. I don't think this is going to turn out to be a case of villains infiltrating and seizing control of the League, if only because he did that plot several volumes ago. Rather, I think it's going to be a case the executives making decisions don't actually know anything about superheroics.

Or maybe the mistake was organizing at all. "Frosty-shi" observes that the robot is attacking people that are evil but protected by the law. It feels like the argument is, in the attempt to organize and work with the government, the heroes blunted their own effectiveness. The Hero League would never be given permission to attack a company that treats its workers poorly, or punish a slumlord. The Organization, and their robot, have no such compunctions. Similarly, when the Villain League spring their trap on the robot, the Professor laughs about how the robot kept its travel routes over heavily populated places to discourage any attacks by heroes. But villains don't care about that at all, so they can attack to their heart's content!

My guess is, neither did the original heroes - the rabbit-cop, the pervert turtle, the grandma ninja and a 4th character that appears now. They were "vigilantes", which probably makes them more like Golden Age Superman. See a scumbag, whup their ass. Usa became a cop to keep an eye on the Hero League, while "Oba-sama" tried to keep the League on course (the turtle went into the wilderness, either from cowardice or to avoid sexual harassment lawsuits.) Carcha disappeared and has returned to test whether things have gotten better. Are the heroes up to snuff, or are they only fit to get snuffed? Jin really tries to play Carcha up as terrifying, coloring his eyes black, covering the backgrounds in a gloom that seems to drip from the top of the panels, using thick lines like the character's strength is pulsing off him.

Volume 10, which is supposed to be out sometime soon, looks set up to be a fight between Carcha and the other 3 vigilantes, but Braveman and the General are both there, so I expect they'll get involved somehow.

Sunday Splash Page #332

 

"Diagnosis: Misery," in Marvel Divas #1, by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (writer), Tonci Zonjic (artist), June Chung and Jelena Kevic Djurdjevic (colorists), Cory Petit and Chris Eliopoulos (letterer)

Basically, Hellcat, Firestar, Photon (I forget which codename Monica was using then) and the Black Cat happened to meet at a speed dating event and became friends. So this is some sort of Sex in the City with superheroes, in what was one of Marvel's typical clumsy tries at "appealing to women", or something.

I feel like the oddly proportioned, cheesecake J. Scott Campbell cover for the first issue (and the tpb) works at cross-purposes, but that's why I described it as "clumsy."

The two main threads, which end up tied together, are Firestar's cancer diagnosis, because she stopped wearing the suit Pym designed in the Busiek/Perez Avengers to help her deal with the effects of her powers, and Daimon Hellstrom being an insecure loser about not getting mentioned in Hellcat's latest book about her life. Dr. Strange is, of course, doing one of those "there are things magic can't fix" deals, but Hellstrom's got no such compunctions about promising to help, as long as it gets Patsy on an (almost literal) leash.

It's kind of a weird book, continuity-wise, because Aguirre-Sacasa's clearly referencing either current status quo (Brother Voodoo is now Doctor Voodoo, Sorcerer Supreme, Patsy's time being dead, Firestar's relationship with Vance), but he's either selective in how he does it, or flat-out ignores certain things. I mean, patsy already wrote a book about being dead, she was on a book tour at the start of the Busiek/Larsen Defenders run. It gets framed as Vance ended things with Firestar, which is technically correct, but it was because she didn't really seem to want to get married.

Monica's, whatever she wants to call it with Doctor Voodoo lurks in the background, but briefly steps to the forefront since he's the one who helps the others get into Hell to rescue Patsy. The Black Cat's attempts to get enough money to open an investigation agency, without relying on a gift from then boyfriend Thomas Fireheart (aka, the Puma) remains on its own track, never dovetailing with the other stories. Which isn't really necessary, but it adds to this feeling that Felicia is an awkward piece Aguirre-Sacasa couldn't quite make fit.

And maybe that works with her having operated on both sides of the law. But her subplot concludes with her taking a loan from the freaking Kingpin. Who screwed her over when he gave her bad luck powers, which seems like something she'd remember (see my earlier comments about a selective approach to continuity.) Rather than anything about her friends helping figure something out.

I don't know fashion, especially not women's fashion, and especially especially not women's fashion from the late-2000s, so I don't know if Zonjic does a good job there. It seems like each character has a particular style they favor for civilian clothes, and each is distinct, but hell, I don't know. He does give Hellstrom an look of someone trying real hard for casually sexy, but who just comes off as really sleazy. "Messy" hair that has to be carefully styled, always with the shirt halfway unbuttoned, assuming he's even wearing one, always stretched out over something. Even Gambit think Hellstrom needs to tone it down.

Saturday Splash Page #134

"The Big Headache," in Spider-Woman (vol. 1) #45, by Chris Claremont (writer), Steve Leialoha (artist/colorist), Tom Orzechowski (letterer)

Take what meds you need for your arachnophobia, because Saturday Splash Page is kicking off a Summer of Spiders!

I assume the thinking behind Spider-Woman was that people loved Spider-Man, so why not Spider-Man, but a lady? Of course, Jessica Drew's powers are very different from Peter Parker's, her origin involved her parents being scientists and HYDRA sending her to kill Nick Fury (or something, I never bothered that much with that part of her history), the most similar part of her costume is the webs under the armpits.

And that's good, that she isn't just Gender-Swapped Spider-Man. Just, feels like kind of an odd approach.

Her first ongoing series ran 50 issues, a number none of the subsequent attempts have even gotten halfway to matching. But the book doesn't have much stability, with regular changes in creative teams. From what I could tell, Marv Wolfman wrote 8 issues. Mark Gruenwald handled 9 solo, plus one he wrote with Josh Wilburn and two with Steven Grant. Michael Fleisher took over for 12 issues, J.M. DeMatteis for 1. Claremont wrote 12 issues, plus 2 others where he and Leialoha are given co-writer credits. Then Ann Nocenti handled the last 4 issues.

I own about 10 issues now, and I know the gist of the early part of the run because another blogger was doing recaps of them once upon a time. (Sadly, all that's left of his Fortress of Fortitude blog is the farewell post back in '09.)

But the arc of the book is about what you'd expect with a constant rotation of creative teams. Each writer takes their own slant, largely discarding the cast the previous writer constructed in an effort to either find something that works, or just plays better to their strengths and preferences.

Jessica starts with an old magician for a friend and a SHIELD agent as a possible love interest while she tries to learn about her past and start a life. Gruenwald sends both those guys out a year into the book and while Jessica continues to struggle to keep a civilian life going, she faces a string of second-tier (or worse) villains, several of whom Gruenwald would use in his Captain America run as part of The Shroud's "Night Shift" crew.

Fleisher pairs Jessica with a paraplegic named Scottie, who seems to act as her version of Oracle, guiding her crimefighting remotely. Except Scottie is more than a bit of a chauvinist, who gets annoyed when Spider-Woman does silly things like focus on saving endangered civilians instead of beating up the bad guy.

Claremont and Leialoha make her a private detective, because it's an easy way to meld her civilian life with the superhero side. Claremont also brings in Yakuza and ninjas, because of course he does. At least it feels like they have a strong idea for what they want the book and her status quo to be. The character's not flailing for some bit of stability any longer.

Leialoha's one of the artists with the longest tenure on the book, as he was drawing some of the Fleisher-written issues as well. It's either him or Carmine Infantino, who drew a lot of the first two years. I prefer Leialoha, he does some strong layout work for the fight scenes, whether she's up against Flying Tiger in the skies over San Francisco, or fighting an entire group of ninjas in the shadowy confines of a high-rise construction site. His version of Jessica Drew dresses for comfort, while Spider-Woman is, I can't describe it. Leialoha uses a heavy line that makes her both solid and defined, but sparingly enough she looks smooth. He really emphasizes her quickness and grace when she's gliding, and the art plays to that very well. She looks like she wouldn't encounter much wind resistance, but she'd hit like a tank once she caught you.

The book ended on issue 50, with the conclusion of some long-standing grudge between Spider-Woman and Morgan le Fay. Really seems like Jessica punching out of her weight class, tangling with a sorceress Dr. Doom would respect.

Random Back Issues #133 - Mekanix #6

Couldn't you just start a Facebook group, or get a bunch of cats or something?

We looked at an earlier issue of this 4 years ago, but we've jumped to the end today, with what is essentially an issue-long chase sequence.

The Student Union at the University of Chicago was hosting a meeting to decide whether to ban the mutant-hating group Purity from campus, only to have a bunch more of the person-sized, buglike Sentinels that wiped out Genosha crash the party. The only ones standing in the way are Kitty Pryde, former New Mutant Karma, and Shola, a telekinetic from Genosha attending school.

Shola's doing most of the work, as he's got some serious TK power and combat training in how to use it courtesy of his parents. Also, Sentinels like these killed his parents and everyone he had back home, so he's got plenty of anger for fuel. He encases the Sentinels in a big energy bubble, but these are the adaptive-style of Sentinels, so they figure out some way to escape and attack from underground.

Shola tries to draw their attention so Karma can escape since possessing people isn't a terribly effective power against robots, but two follow her down a dead end alley. Fortunately, Kitty shows up, having gotten lost in the building and pulls Karma through the wall (Karma apparently describes being phased as swimming through oatmeal.) Kitty leaves the wall phased to fool the Sentinel into thinking there's no barrier, then turning the wall solid again to trap it. She even calls it a 'poor bunny', which sounds more like a Psylocke expression to me, but the X-Men do so much psi-linking they probably all ought to speak in a weird melange of each other's verbal tics.

Except there were two Sentinels chasing Karma, and they're down to Karma trying to smash it with a pickax before Shola shows up and launches the thing into the air. Meanwhile, the cops showed up! Well I'm sure everything is under control now! The Sentinels register genome patterns within the range of potential mutants, and elect to attack. Shola gets tagged, but Kitty's able to phase him to keep him safe, for now.

Needing to clear potential casualties, Karma uses her power to make all the students and cops calmly walk away from the battlefield, while Kitty calls for help. Tom had been dating the head of the Purity group, but decided he wasn't a bigot, so he shows up in his car and the three mutants pile in and burn rubber. About the time they reach the university industrial complex the Sentinels catch up. Kitty phases everyone out of the car and then into the tunnels leading to the building where her group was trying to figure out cold fusion. The experiment was sabotaged, but there's still tons of heavy stuff to trap and crush all the Sentinels, if they can be lured in.

So Karma possesses Shola (with his permission) to push him past his limits. Kitty uses herself as bait while Tom, who the Sentinels ignored because he's a baseline human, pulls the lever to dump all the stuff. Kitty phases the Sentinels so they can't try to escape, though they figure out how to hurt her. Kitty uses Tom to pull herself through the junk before Shola/Karma compress the Sentinels down into nothing. I'm not sure if Kitty needed the help because she was tired, because of something the Sentinels were doing, or if it was the strain of escaping the TK field.

All that done, Kitty visits her school-mandated therapist and admits she's a mutant, then goes to the bar where she works part-time (and where the FBI is still surveilling her) to meet up with her friends. We can't have too happy of an ending, as Alice Tremaine, the leader of the Purity Group, found a little bit of one Sentinel at the student union and is helping it rebuild itself in her parents' basement.

{7th longbox, 20th comic. Mekanix #6, by Chris Claremont (writer), Juan Bobillo (penciler), Marcelo Sosa (inker), Avalon (colorist), Tom Orzechowski (letterer)}

Secret Life of the City - Hannah Bjorgaas

Bjorgaas is back home in Oslo after the conclusion of a job as a tour guide for Antarctic cruises and feeling a bit at a loss, starts taking long walks within the city. These walks make her more aware of the elements of nature which exist and even thrive in an urban environment. 

The book is her exploring those elements through her own observation or conversations with experts. One chapter might focus on ants, seen through the prism of her discovering a line of them from a colony outside her porch into her kitchen. She'll describe how ants and their colonies function, the different roles, the importance of smell or touch for communication, the relationship certain species have with the aphids infesting her bean sprouts.

Or she might discuss seagulls. How their numbers are diminishing in the wild, while thriving in the city. This includes a ferry trip to the fishing islands of Fleinvaer, once home to abundant gull and tern populations. There's an effective bit where the fisherman who takes her out there cuts the engine and they just bob offshore. No sounds of calling birds, where they were once abundant.

Bjorgaas and the people she speaks with discuss current or past research on the species she focuses on (Bernd Heinrech and John Marzluff both get mentioned in the chapter about crows), but she works to keep the information accessible to laymen. How the aphids' waste provides nutrients the ants don't get from the rest of their diet, or how the types of lichen that dominate cities has change from those that thrive with high sulfide content in the air to those that can handle high nitrogen content as air pollution laws have prompted changes.

Bjorgass attempts a few studies of her own, from nighttime surveys of calling birds to trying to bury underwear in different soils to study decomposition as a measure of soil micro-biome health. That last one ends up being especially funny as one of her urban locations has been torn up and paced over in just the few weeks since she buried it. The scientist she had spoken to told her that often the soils in cities didn't originate there, but was scraped off from somewhere else and trucked in, then compacted to the point it's a poor growing medium.

'As I sat under the beech tree, it felt like I was eavesdropping on the blackbird's private chat room: the night. Not only do city blackbirds switch to a higher frequency in order to talk to each other in peace, they have also found their own rhythm: they start singing up to five hours earlier than their cousins in the forest.'

Overlapping Time-Hopping

I was thinking recently about how, while many Marvel superheroes or teams may have time travel foes, you don't see a lot of crossover between the different groups of time travelers*.

Kang's the big Time Travel Guy at Marvel, and he does periodically go to war with other time travelers. But it's usually himself, meaning either the person he was/will become, or alternate timeline Kangs. Occasionally he and Dr. Doom cross paths, but it's not always a conflict. Even when it is, it's not necessarily a battle across time.

Mostly, though, I was thinking about the X-Men. They're littered with time travelers, both friends and foes. Cable, Stryfe, Bishop, Rachel Summers, Trevor Fitzroy, yadda yadda. There's a several, and they always seem to be trying to do something. Granted, sometimes the "something" they want to do is in direct conflict with the "something" one of the others is trying to do, so they may cancel each other out.

But not always. I could see the argument Kang doesn't care what they do, because if he's in the 20th/21st Century, it's to conquer it, so whatever outcome Cable hopes to achieve for 1,000 years from now is irrelevant anyway. But Immortus was usually more interested in controlling time itself, which seems like the sort of thing that might inhibit someone like Cable.

Or take someone like Zarkko, the Tomorrow Man. Not too impressive to look at, definitely not a first-stringer as villains go. A guy who traveled to the past to steal weapons he could use to dominate his peaceful era. But, again, resisting a would-be dictator seems like the sort of thing most the mutant-related time-hoppers would be ready and willing to do.

Beyond the notion that all these characters' goals on so different or on such different scales they don't conflict, the other easy answer is there have been conflicts like that, but with all the time travel involved, they're resolved in such a way we don't notice any changes to the timeline.

The thing that interests me is, most of the time travelers are used to fighting their enemies in one specific time. Kang fights the Avengers at whatever point he happens to show up to challenge them. Cable picks a specific point to stop Apocalpyse. They can pick the battleground (allowing for however accurate the writer wants their time travel capabilities to be.) Against another time traveler, that could go out the window, and it might be interesting to see who could adapt to losing that advantage the easiest.

* I'm less sure about DC, although Flash's foe Abra Kadabra's from the future, and I can't recall him tangling with the Legion of Super-Heroes or anything like that.

The Station Agent (2003)

Finbar (Peter Dinklage) inherits an unused train station. He seems content to live there, reading about trains, walking the rails and watching trains go by, but a few people in the area keep trying to make friends.

Joe (Bobby Cannavale), who's supposed to be running his dad's food truck until the old man feels better, but that situation persists. Joe is loud and nosy in a way that would be even more obnoxious if you thought he was acting that way on purpose, rather than just oblivious. Cannavale's enthusiasm and "big golden retriever" energy is the source of most of the humor in the film, especially contrasted with Dinklage playing Finbar as very quiet and reserved, prone to answering questions with one word or less if he can get away with it. Olivia (Patricia Clarkson) is a divorced painter that nearly hits Finbar with her car twice in the span of minutes. Which, again, would be more annoying if it wasn't obvious she was just kind of scatterbrained.

The arc of the movie is pretty predictable. Finbar resists their initial attempts to make friends, feeling that it's out of pity or some lurid curiosity about his dwarfism. And the movie does have plenty of people staring at Fin or whispering about him behind his back in the grocery store or the bar, with Fin mostly acting as though he doesn't see/hear it.

Gradually the three become friends anyway, all of them "walking the right-of-ways" together or having meals outside Joe's truck or at Olivia's house. Then one of Fin's attempts to go outside his normal bubble ends badly (involving a young woman who works at the library, played by Michelle Williams) and Fin lashes out, resulting in his being isolated once again. But he can't go back to being a solitary person again, because he cares too much about his friends, and there's eventual reconciliation.

It seems significant, though I'm not sure how, that Finbar never rides a train at any point in the film. He reads about them, watches them go by, has a train he thinks would be the best ride (the Zephyr out of Denver), and is even convinced to train chase by Joe at one point. But he never actually uses one. I guess it's something about how he was living his life, a spectator rather than an active participant.

Team-Building via Goblin-Killin'

Don't look at me like that, it's a good title.

The second volume of Apparently Disillusioned Adventurers Will Save the World picks up where the first volume ended. The new party, having made it through their first labyrinth with little trouble, decide to hit a second one that same day. This time it's the Goblin Forest, full of, you guessed it, dragons.

Sorry, forgot goblins aren't clever enough to pull that kind of trick. Initially, this is used to show how powerful this group of characters are. In the first battle, the spell Tiana casts simply to thin the goblins' numbers, instead kills all 10 of them. In the next battle, Karan cuts two goblins in half with one swing.

(Nick also briefly explains that "labyrinths" are just places rich in a miasma, a sort of goo that transforms plants and animals into monsters, and you have to kill the monsters to disperse the miasma and keep the monsters from growing strong enough they attack nearby villages. I don't get how killing monsters gets rid of the stuff that created them in the first place, but I think this is meant to explain why adventurers keep coming back to these places.

Also possibly to assuage any concerns the reader might have about goblins having their own culture and this really just being genocide-for-sport. Nope, nothing like that here! Those goblins are just poisoned, uh, horses, that's it. Yeah, horses, bent on killing everyone and everything you hold dear! No need to worry about sentience or have any qualms about killing them!)

Aside from that, the remainder of the Goblin Forest excursion is devoted to Nick's attempts to get Karan to relax in battle a little, instead of always checking that the others aren't getting ready to backstab her, and showing that Nick's not just "The Plan Guy," but a skilled fighter himself.

The manga remains focused on Nick and Karan after the goblin fighting, as it only briefly touches on what Tiana and Zem get up to with their portion of the rewards. Instead, we see Nick trying to pick out an accessory for Karan to replace a pendant of hers he accidentally broke. He crosses paths with Karan and we get a bit more of Karan's backstory and a little more trust building between the two characters. (And we see the trust building is working later, as Karan doesn't hesitate to take a beating from an enemy immune to physical attacks until Tiana can ready a spell to defeat it.)

The chapter ends with the group on another mission, this time to explore an old training labyrinth in the hopes of finding a mysterious magic sword. Many parties have searched, and none have succeeded, but a secret panel opens at the final dead end, so maybe this group's luck is looking up. On the other hand, it's a magic sword said to be powered by the bonds of trust between a party, so maybe this is a cursed chalice, like me getting an offer for a high-paying job that involves interacting with strangers constantly.

Sunday Splash Page #331

 

"Deep in the Red," in Marvel Comics Presents #110, by Ann Nocenti (writer), Steve Lightle (artist), Kelly Corvese (colorist), Bill Oakley (letterer)

Marvel's most successful pure anthology run (at least here in the U.S., maybe not overseas), running for 175 issues from the late-80s to the mid-90s. A real staple for the "5 comics in a bag" things at the grocery stores of my youth. Four stories in each issue, different creative teams. Usually a mixture of done-in-ones and multi-chapter stories, spread across several issues. So the image above is from chapter 2 of an 8-part Wolverine and Typhoid Mary story, but that issue also had a one-off story about Nightcrawler encountering a Jack the Ripper-style killer in the streets of London.

Confession time: I own about 30 issues, but they've all been dismantled. I pulled the staples, gathered the page of the specific stories I wanted (like the one above), and then clumsily reassembled them, thereby removing all the chaff. Mostly stories about Venom, War Machine, or Vengeance. Those three really dominate the back half of the run.

As expected, it's a real mix. You get stuff like Sam Keith-illustrated Venom vs. Wolverine stories, or early Pat Lee on a Beast one-shot. Alan Davis dusting off his ClanDestine characters again. Gerry Conway and early Scott Kolins on a 9(!)-part Young Gods story. Nocenti wrote a pair of multi-chapter arcs about Typhoid Mary crossing paths with first Wolverine, then Ghost Rider, culminating in the entire 150th issue being devoted to a story with Wolverine, Daredevil, Vengeance and some vaguely-Silver Sable looking lady all gunning for Mary for various reasons. All of those drawn by Lightle.

There's also a lot of random stuff by writers or artists I've never heard of, lots of very '90s art with absurd physical proportions and a severe lack of visual clarity. That's the risk with anthologies titles. You pay for stuff you don't want along with the stuff you do. I don't think that's why Marvel and DC can't sustain books like that any longer; more likely fans are conditioned to dismiss anthologies as "unimportant" titles. Either that or the majority of writers and artists can't do compelling, or even entertaining, stories in 8 pages.

Saturday Splash Page #133

 

"Plot Threads," in The Spire #1, by Simon Spurrier (writer), Jeff Stokely (artist), Andre May (colorist), Steve Wands (letterer)

The spire in question is a city, one where the buildings are built almost atop each other, rising into the sky like a pyramid that went through redesigns at several points. From the land surrounding it, a barren plain of rocks that look a bit like skulls, it's an imposing and bleak grey monument. Within, a maze of different levels and social strata, all narrow alleys and vertical handholds along the outside of buildings.

Many of the inhabitants look basically like humans, but there are others who don't to varying degrees, and whose abilities are certainly different from humans. In polite company, the varied lot of them are referred to as "Sculpted." Less politely (or alertly, depending on the speaker's level of peripheral awareness), they're called "Skews."

Constable Sha, head of the City Watch, is a Sculpted. Able to project wire-thin tentacles from her body. Also able to knit or reform her body as needed, although this can have deleterious effects on the mind, depending how far you go.

The Spire is a mystery. Who is the mystery killer Sha is tasked to apprehend, and why are they attacking their particular targets? Why is the new Baroness, no fan of the Sculpted in general or Sha in particular, so pissed about this particular killer? Why doesn't Sha know her past or of any other people like her? It seems like several mysteries, layered upon each other, but with brief flashbacks every issue to a tense carriage ride, it's eventually revealed as one, very old, mystery. Some people try to run from ugly truths, others to bury them.

Stokely creates some varied designs for the Sculpted. Frog-like in one case, in another what seems like a bunch of asparagus that have bundled together into a bipedal organism. The Sculpted without eyes sometimes wear wooden masks with press-on eyes, so others will find them less off-putting, and hopefully not fear them so. Sha has a messenger/comic sidekick, a lumpy and battered looking fairy-thing called Pug. It's like someone mashed together a satyr's lower half with the naked upper torso of a child's doll, put fly wings on the back and a peeled potato going bad atop the shoulders.

Sha is very much a Spurrier protagonist, much like Hum in Coda. Cynical, sarcastic, impatient, disrespectful. Likes to talk, though rarely about what's useful. If she complains and snarks, then the other person may push back. Then she can grumble and insult them more. If that doesn't produce results, then she has something to complain about. Win-win.

What I Bought 7/5/2024

My usual comic guy got shorted on his Marvel stuff last week, but I had to visit a different store to pick up a new longbox for Alex, and that guy had Deadpool, so let's take a look at one of the only comics I'm planning to buy this month.

Deadpool #4, by Cody Ziglar (writer), Roge Antonio (penciler), Eric Gapstur (penciler/inker), Jonas Trindade (inker), Guru-eFX (colorist), Joe Sabino (letterer) - Can't stop staring at Death Grip's swollen-looking lower lip.

Taskmaster puts Eleanor through her paces, where we see she can eventually figure out how to do acrobatic stuff by watching. The move she does when that happens doesn't entirely match the Spider-Man flip Taskmaster used on her two pages earlier, mostly because she kicks him in the back of the neck on the way down), but I don't know if that's her combining the stuff she's seen him do or something else.

I'm also not sure who's drawing which parts. The lines seem smoother is the first half of the book, fewer extraneous little lines, which makes me think that's Gapstur. There's also one panel where Wade's eyes turn into big hearts because he's so happy about how cool Ellie is that doesn't feel like something Antonio would do, based on the previous three issues.

And her healing abilities also let her build strength faster because she doesn't need to rest long between workouts, though Taskmaster doesn't think she can get super-strength out of it. That's a relief, I was worried Ziglar was going to go nuts with this idea, he said, insincerely.

Still, Deadpool is not prepared to let Eleanor join him on missions, especially not when Death Grip sends a persona video advising Wade to either visit, or prepare to receive visitors. Never one to overlook the chance to ruin someone else's toilet, Deadpool and Taskmaster go to temple. The cannon fodder are, well, cannon fodder, but Death Grip does something that seems to remove Deadpool's healing factor, then cuts him across the chest.

It seems like, if you've incorporated a blade that nullifies healing factors, there's no need to do a specific move to remove said healing factor. Just cut the guy. But I don't really get this cult, either. The acolytes are hoping Deadpool will teach them his ways of being unkillable, but Death Grip is trying to kill him. If they see death as a gift, shouldn't they not want to learn how Deadpool is so hard to kill? Shouldn't they all see him as an abomination?

Maybe this'll make more sense if I read the whole arc after it wraps up next month.

Fen, Bog & Swamp - Annie Proulx

The subtitle of the book is, "A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis," though the book is not so narrowly focused as that. Proulx does spend time discussing how bogs were dug up over turned over for conversion to agriculture, or how swamps were drained or otherwise dried so they could be "useful." Often at public expense, but for the benefit of a very few who buy up all this new land.

She also describes the ecological differences between fens, bogs and swamps. I have helpfully included a photo I took at the Knoxville Zoo several years ago that provides a definition. What plants and animals dominate those habitats, or find refuge there. This can take the form of pages about the immense amount of life found in one cubic foot of Sphagnum mosses in a bog, or the eventual extinctions of the Bachman's warbler or ivory-billed woodpecker.

But Proulx also spends a lot of pages describing how humans have used these locations, back when they were less destructive towards them. This takes the form of pages and pages about all the various archaeological evidence that's been found in bogs, and the new evidence it provides for the lives of Mesolithic people. It also results in Proulx going into great length talking about the destruction of 3 Roman legions by the Gauls, not in Teutoberg forest, but in a narrow pass along the edge of a bog.

Not that this isn't a cool story, and I guess you could argue it relates to human usage of peatlands, but it feels a tad off-course. As do some of the digressions into the destruction of the rainforest. Again, this relates to climate change, release of great amounts of carbon dioxide, but not really about peatlands themselves.

I suppose I expected to learn more about the ecology of the peatlands, be it fens, mangrove swamps, prairie potholes (which are mentioned in passing.) The section about mangrove swamps and the specific challenges different countries were finding in restoring them was very interesting, for example. But that's not really what the book is, given Proulx spends as much time relating stories from her childhood involving exploring fens or swamps, or quoting the reactions of different writers to those sorts of places, as describing anything biological.

'Bodies were deposited in both fens and bogs. Van der Sanden points out that in fen bodies the soft tissues decompose but the skeleton persists. In bogs the soft tissues are preserved but sphagnan dissolves the bones.'

The Quarry (2020)

A man (Shea Whigham) is found along the side of the road by a preacher traveling to his new assignment. The man won't say what he was doing there, but the preacher can guess he's on the run. He pulls off in an old quarry far from anything and offers the man a chance to confess.

The man kills him instead, then assumes his identity and assignment, rather than, I don't know, just taking the van and any money and running. The first night in town, he doesn't heed the caretaker's (Catalina Sadino Moreno) advice and bring in his (the preacher's possessions), and they get stolen. Including his bloody shirt. As it turns out, the thieves are her family, and she's also in a relationship with the widower sheriff (Michael Shannon). "Relationship" might be too strong a word; he comes to her place for sex, but never stays the night or for breakfast the next morning.

And so, while the sheriff hunts and arrests Valentin, and ultimately charges him for the murder of the body in the quarry, the man tries to be a preacher, telling others about God, forgiveness, and all that, while watching another man be hunted and tried for his crime.

Whigham plays his role as soft-spoken, when he speaks at all. You'd almost expect that the sheriff would remain silent, allowing the killer to expose himself, but it's the reverse. Shannon always fills the conversations they have, mostly by talking about himself or how the town's gone downhill. He clearly envisioned this as a job where he'd be respected and beloved, the big lawman, and it hasn't worked out like that. Whigham lets him talk and never reveals much of himself.

Everything Whigham does say could be taken two ways. When he tells his (rapidly growing) congregation that he, 'just reads the words,' they take it that he's merely a vessel for God's words to reach them, and so there's no reason for him to speak down to them as the previous preachers apparently did. When really, he's just grasping at straws to keep this facade up. He begins a prayer for the dead man, but is too overcome to continue speaking. No problem, the congregation take it that he's encouraging them to pray aloud as a group. And so it goes.

The way the movie ends - the man asking forgiveness from one unable or unwilling to give it - makes me wonder what the true preacher was running from. He drank excessively, and didn't seem to have much zest for his assignment. He mentions he loved a woman once, which makes me wonder if she was underage or married, but says no one knows about it. But it feels like, when he encouraged Whigham to confess his sins there in the quarry, that he might have been looking for his own absolution, as Whigham is at the end.

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.

Sunday Splash Page #330

 

"Bank Fraud" in Marvel Adventures Super Heroes (vol. 1) #14, by Paul Tobin (writer), David Baldeon (artist), Sotocolor (colorists), Dave Sharpe (letterer)

So Marvel eventually canceled Marvel Adventures Avengers and replaced it with this book. Instead of a more or less stable cast, this book took a couple of different approaches.

Sometimes it was more of a Marvel Team-Up. Dr. Strange enlists Spider-Man to help deal with some mystical monster babies that eat the threads that hold reality together, or Hawkeye and the Blonde Phantom investigate bank robbers who claim to have Bruce Banner as a hostage and might dose him with laughing gas to unleash a crazed Hulk. Other times the book would have two different solo adventures, similar to the old Tales to Astonish where Ant-Man and the Hulk each got a story. Either way, all done-in-one adventures, usually with some clever solution by the heroes.

Then near the end of its 21-issue run, Tobin started a series of stories about people, first one, then, entire towns, going crazy. The heroes would team-up, then continue working together in subsequent issues and eventually decide they should maybe just go ahead and form a team.

By the time the book started over with a new first issue, we were back at the Avengers after all. Yeah, I don't know. Kind of an odd roster; lot of traditional Avengers - Thor, Vision, Iron Man - but also Nova as designated rookie, and the Invisible Woman (in a non-FF, incredibly generic, outfit.) Black Widow joins up, apparently at the behest of Reed Richards. Who, on the one hand is vaguely concerned about Sue's well-being, but also doesn't really listen to Natasha's reports (especially when she mentions there's sparks between Sue and Captain America.)

Saturday Splash Page #132

 

"An Uneasy Mantle" in Starlord #2, by Timothy Zahn (writer), Dan Lawlis (artist), Bill Oakley (letterer)

We'll see a lot more Star-Lord in a couple of months in Sunday Splash Page, but today we're looking at a slightly more recent appearance of the name. When I say "recent", I mean mid-90s instead of late-70s or early-80s.

I'm not sure why Marvel decided to dust off a character concept that hadn't appeared in 15 years. Trademark issues, probably. Timothy Zahn is best known for various creating the Admiral Thrawn character who appeared in most of the Star Wars novels he wrote. I'm not sure what about the Star-Lord concept appealed to him.

I say "concept", because Zahn ditches the Peter Quill character, in favor of Sinjin Quarrel, a character of his own creation born with telepathic abilities. Among his culture, that marks him for work in justice, except Quarrel's powers are weak, in the sense he can only read your mind if he touches you. There's no indication if his ability is weaker in any way other than distance.

Assigned to an out of the way world of limited importance, Quarrel finds the fabled "Ship" of Star-Lord's. The element gun and costumes are there (none of the little waist-mounted jet pods, however), as is the holographic projection Ship developed for itself when Claremont wrote Star-Lord, but no sign of Star-Lord for many years now. So Quarrel takes on the identity, initially just to protect himself, but later to investigate an aristocrat on the planet he was assigned who seems too successful at taking control.

The story is a bit of a thriller, Quarrel trying stay alive and find evidence to bring down the man he's up against. There's a very large, very pale crime lord who lives in a big tower involved (Space Kingpin, basically, or maybe Space Tobias Whale), and an infiltration that involves deception. Plus, Quarrel has to overcome his reluctance to act as Star-Lord after he learns the source of what the element gun fires.

Lawlis paints the comic, which works better than I would have expected. The action is a bit static, but the plot avoids any kind of extended, running battles in favor of quick sequences where Star-Lord uses the element gun. But Quarrel is an expressive character, and the bright colors are suited to the clean and futuristic settings. There are hives of scum and villainy, but all that is beneath the surface. Appropriate when the hero can see beneath it with just a touch.

Random Back Issues #132 - Elsewhere #8

Bye everybody! We'll be back in 20 pages if it turns out our home planet sucks now!

I reviewed the first half of Elsewhere 2.5 years ago, but today we're looking at the last issue. Having found a doorway back to Earth, Amelia Earhart and DB Cooper step through and find themselves facing a bunch of soldiers and guns.

Kept under observation for a month, an officer with a lot of ribbons on his chest finally explains to Earhart it's the year 2018. While she and Cooper (which we learn from a partially redacted psych profile is not his real name) try to adjust, Earhart spots a native of Korvath talking with a scientist.

A little arm-twisting gets the guy to spill the beans. Some hikers stumbled across a part, the government built a facility around it, stabilized it, and sent troops in. They captured a native and eventually came to an arrangement: the U.S. keeps troops out, and receive an elixir that promotes cell regeneration. Find it hard to believe the government hadn't already gone back on their word and just conquered the place. Or at least given whichever side offered the sweetest deal weapons to help seize/maintain power.

But the scientists did want to study a Korvathian, so this elder sent Gwenore through, and told her beloved, Earhart's pal Cort, a bullcrap story that she'd been abducted. Earhart and Cooper make the scientist take them to Gwenore. Cooper knocks the nerd out, and they try to reach the portal, but encounter some soldiers.

Not much of a problem for Gwenore, and they send her back home. Given a choice between arrest or life free on an alien world, Earhart and Cooper run through the portal, using another grenade to destroy the Stargate-looking thing stabilizing the portal and saving Korvath from the perils of imperialism. Hooray!

Earhart and Cooper reunite with Cort and Gwenore's people. Meyrick, who made the deals with the U.S., chooses exile over what I assume was going to be a painful execution. Have to imagine if the book had continued he would have popped up allied with some new group of troublemakers. And the last we see of Earhart and Cooper is them flying the big gargoyle-looking creatures while Earhart promises maybe she'll tell us about more of their adventures some day. But as CCR once noted, someday never comes. At least it hasn't in the subsequent six years.

{4th longbox, 75th comic. Elsewhere #8, by Jay Faerber (writer), Sumeyye Kesgin (artist), Ron Riley (colorist), Thomas Mauer (letterer)}

Koko - Peter Straub

A group of guys who served together in Vietnam band together a decade later to try and find another member of their group they suspect is committing brutal murders in Southeast Asia.

All of them seem to be doing this as an escape from their current lives. Harry Beevers wants the fame of capturing a burgeoning serial killer. Conor has nothing better to do. Michael seems to be using it to flee a rapidly disintegrating marriage, plus dissatisfaction with a pediatric practice in the suburbs, where he treats the colds of rich kids. The only one who doesn't go is Timo, and that's because he has a restaurant he's trying to save, plus a young lady he's hung up on. He's not doing great at managing the life he's created since the war, but he's trying harder to keep it than any of the others are, even if it's like clutching at sand.

The book has strong parts and weak parts. It's longer than it needs to be - the epilogue, where one character theorizes what happened to their comrade after the final confrontation - feels unnecessary. The scenes written from the killer's perspective are a sort of muddle of things that clearly hold meaning to the killer, but aren't written in an engaging enough manner to make me care. It feels like reading gibberish for a page or two.

There's a lengthy detour in the back third of the book where Michael and a couple of other characters visit Milwaukee, hoping to learn something about their friend to help find him. The information is important in certain regards, but it didn't need nearly as many pages, since most of the trip is them sitting uncomfortably in people's living rooms having awkward conversations that aren't a great read. I would have been satisfied with Straub sending the characters off for a few chapters, and have them summarize their findings when they return (which they end up doing anyway.)

The parts where they're actively trying to find the killer, or have the feeling someone is following them, those parts were tense and interesting. Timo trying to keep his life together, but unable to stay out of the search entirely helped build a connection between him and the reader. Maggie's kind of a fun character, offering an outsider perspective while not trying to simply ignore the war and its effects that, say, Michael's wife does. That said, there were times I wondered if there's an equivalent term to the old "Mystical Negro." "Spiritually Enlightened Asian"? Maggie always seems to know exactly what's wrong with Timo or the other guys emotionally or mentally. Quite why or how she has this remarkable insight, I don't know.

Anyway, a leaner, more focused book would have made for a better read.

'Beevers turned to them with an unblinking gaze. "Some day I'll want you to remember who first said we could all see a lot of money out of this. If we handle it right. Mucho dinero."

"Hallelujah," Conor said. "The Lost Boss is gonna make us rich."'

What I Bought 6/28/2024 - Part 2

Wrapping up June's books with the final issue of a mini-series, and the midpoint of another mini-series.

Black Widow and Hawkeye #4, by Stephanie Phillips (writer), Paolo Villanelli (artist), Mattia Iacono (color artist), Joe Sabino (letterer) - Kind of surprised the symbiote doesn't cover Natasha's hair.

In the present, Black Widow shows up to rescue Hawkeye, Damon Dran hits both of them with hypersonics, but Natasha's able to pull through long enough shut it down so Hawkeye can shoot Dran with arrows made of the symbiote. Seems weird that would do anything, since Hawkeye shoots him with an exploding arrow in the Silver Age flashback and Natasha says that won't stop him. Maybe the symbiote's eating the guy from the inside-out.

The flashback ends with Iron Man smashing into the Soviet embassy to arrest Hawkeye and the Black Widow both for treason. So Natasha stabs herself with an arrow to exonerate Hawkeye and makes her escape. In the present, Hawkeye explains he realized during the diplomat's speech that the guy had been poisoned sometime earlier, so it was too late to stop the assassination. All he could do was kill the guy himself so it wouldn't be pinned on the U.S. government and used as a pretext for war.

The point being, rather than Hawkeye following the trend he and Natasha usually do, where one of them sacrifices themselves to protect the other, Clint asks if she'll accompany him back to the U.S. to help him face the consequences.

In theory, I like the idea of them breaking this cycle of alternating martyrdom, but does it really do any good here? Unless Black Widow found proof of Dran's plan we don't know about, there's nothing to exonerate Hawkeye. All he's got is his word, unless someone did an autopsy and found traces of a poison. Without proof of Dran's involvement in the poisoning, that brings about the result Hawkeye's trying to prevent.

Blood and Fire #2, by Aaron Wroblewski (writer), Ezequiel Rubio Lancho (artist), Es Kay (letterer) - Someone is setting up a very strange Valentine's Day surprise. 

The last remaining samurai squares off against four of the new shogun's men. He gets three before the fourth throws snow in his eyes and slashes him across the torso. Which brings us to where the first issue started, him on his knees, looking about to be executed. But as he tells a vision of his wife and daughter he'll see them soon, they become some angry shadowbeast that demands he fight.

So he does. He makes it home, but home is on fire. His wife and daughter are dead. The shadow insists he kill them all. Which he'll get to, once he's made a funeral pyre. More samurai arrive, and promptly start dying. Is it the last holdout doing the killing? The samurai's definitely around, cutting off horses' legs and a man's head, and by that point, Lancho is drawing him mostly as a shadow. Maybe a few places that aren't shaded so heavily to offer a hint of a nose or cheekbone.

But at least one of the enemy sees a small girl at the edge of the forest, who then vanishes. That guy winds up getting dragged into the forest by something we don't see clearly. It's on the edge of one panel, the outline of either long hair or tentacles, and in the last panel we see of him, there are two barely visible dots - probably eyes - above him further in the background.

The Accidental Detective (2015)

Dae-man (Kwon Sang-woo) owns a comic store, but his real passion is blogging about solving crimes. He constantly closes the store early, or leaves his elementary school aged son in charge, so he can visit his friend Joon-Soo at the nearest precinct.

Then Dae-man goes out drinking with another mutual friend, and that friend's wife is dead in the apartment the next morning. Worse, Joon-Soo had helped her purchase a condo without her husband's knowledge, so it looks bad for him. His hope is that Dae-man can prove his innocence, but that's going to require convincing Joon-soo's boss, burnout former top cop Detective Noh, to let him help.

It's a buddy cop movie, the angry veteran cop with an eager rookie. Noh's got a rep as a badass, which Dae-man is at first awed by. There are multiple slow-motion shots of Noh walking with his long trenchcoat blowing around his legs dramatically in the wind. Which results in Dae-man trying to emulate him, to limited success.

What humor doesn't come from Noh insulting Dae-man (or Dae-man's occasional revenge pranks), comes from how much these guys seem to hate being married. Dae-man's wife is on his ass constantly, not without reason, about actually making enough money to support them and their two kids (she's a private tutor, for Detective Noh's kid, but I guess it doesn't pay enough.) Dae is always groveling and promising to do better, when he's not lying that he's busy at work. Noh mocks Dae-man for looking after his infant daughter, but he jumps when his wife cracks the whip just as readily. Her special ringtone on his phone is a blaring red alert alarm, and the picture is of a snarling tiger.

But the murders are all ultimately about unhappy marriages. Specifically, husbands being angry at their wives, so it's kind of an odd juxtaposition. I guess Dae and Noh still love their wives in spite of the apparent misery of their married lives.

What I Bought 6/28/2024 - Part 1

I had to drive through Illinois over the weekend, always an incredibly boring experience. I forgot that they really want you to know how close you are to road work, but never tell you how far the road work extends. The left lane closes in 3 miles, then 2 miles, then 1, then a half-mile, but nothing about how many miles the left lane is closed, which is what I actually want to know. How long am I stuck at the mercy of the slowest driver?

Blow Away #3, by Zac Thompson (writer), Niccola Izzo (artist), Francesco Segala and Gloria Martinelli (color artists), DC Hopkins (letterer) - Leaving nothing but tracks, shadows, and possibly a dead body or two.

Brynne's fixated on what happened to the mountain climbers. Asking questions, annoying the sheriff, who it feels like Izzo is drawing in the most suspicious ways possible. Face half in shadow, odd smirks or glares. Standing in front of one of Brynne's tables, eyeing a knife while Brynne's back is turned. It's like a blaring siren, to the extent it feels too obvious, though I can't figure the angle, unless it's meant to highlight Brynne's state of mind.

Because Brynne may have handed over copies of all her footage, but she didn't hand over the recorder the climbers had that she found. She's still poring over that, parsing silent looks or the fact Beardo is reading American Psycho, going frame-by-frame through the fight until she determines that when they both went over the side during their fight, one of them either got snagged on something, or was clipped to a safety anchor.

So, even with the sheriff having wanred her of a blizzard, Brynne follows their climb up the mountain (which Izzo does as a 9-panel grid starting in the lower left corner.) She finds some blood frozen on the snow, and a deep crevasse. before she can properly climb in, a rope gets tangled around her foot and she goes in the quick way.

With the one-panel flashbacks we keep getting of some previous project of hers that seems to have blown up, I feel like we're going to learn there was nothing suspicious. But part of that is because we've got basically nothing to go off. Brynne's got some blurry footage from her cameras and a few snippets (at least that's all we've seen) from their camera. None of which points to anything concrete. There's not even a body yet. It's similar to how the sheriff's being illustrated to seem suspicious, while we've got no idea why. The main thing it illustrates now is Brynne has a tendency to draw serious conclusions off little evidence.

All that said, I do at least want to find out what's happening, which is more than I can say for this next book.

Morning Star #3, by David Andry and Tim Daniel (writers), Marco Finnegan (artist), Jason Wordie (colorist), Justin Birch (letterer) - We've gone from gun to ax. Next issue they'll be down to a pointy stick.

Charlie's still missing, but now Marabeth's being chased by a weird version of the park ranger and a bunch of animals that talk in wavy voices balloons with elongated words. Marabeth flees across a river, but finds that weird pile or orange guys her dad and his partner found during the fire in issue 1. 

Meanwhile, Jolene gets briefly menaced by some flaming specter, then a whole bunch of funhouse mirror Charlies appear, also talking in the wavy voice bubbles with elongated words, asking her to help. Help Charlie, help them, help someone else?

This isn't working for me. Maybe the creatures, illusions, constructs, whatever they're meant to be, aren't supposed to be frightening, but it feels like, for how Marabeth flees, and how freaked out it's making Jolene, they should look more terrifying. But Finnegan's art doesn't sell it. The "park ranger", with his face entirely shadowed, and the spots where his glasses would be as white voids almost works. It's at least unsettling, but nothing further.

Maybe these scenes should be taking place at night, maybe it'd be scarier if the colors were darker, I don't know. But the story isn't really helping, either. We know Jolene feels stressed and probably guilty she didn't fight harder to get her husband to stay instead of going to fight this fire, but we still haven't seen much of Marabeth's thoughts, let alone Charlie's (outside the handful of panels in issue 1 that show all these odd things he sees in the world around him.) Does Marabeth resent having to find Charlie, does she envy him, does she worry about losing another member of her family? I feel like any connection or interest I have in the characters is the result of me working really hard to do so, not the result of Andry and Daniel's writing. I don't care much if any of them survive the story, let alone if they figure out what's going on.