What I Bought 3/30/2026 - Part 2

Alex invited me along for another weekend jaunt to Chicago in a couple of weeks. Let's see, the first time I did all the driving and wound up on an entirely incongruent sleep schedule as him and everyone else. The second time I got friggin' motion sickness or something from the Uber driver we used getting back from dinner one night. Am I doomed to disaster, or is third time the charm? Find out in a couple of weeks. Assuming I survive.

Spirit of the Shadows #3, by Daniel Ziegler (writer), Nick Cagnetti (writer/artist/colorist), Ferran Delgado (letterer) - Great, Bunnicula leveled up its vampiric powers to include wings.

So Erik's back from the dead - again - thanks to the witch that wants revenge for killing her sister. The sister who is still wandering the afterlife, gathering the pages of the book of Erik's life. Which is how we learn that his previous return was by the same doctor the witch attacked previously. And once Erik was back, he was deadset on reuniting with Katrina, only to find she'd married in the 2 years that passed. So he killed her husband, and showed off his corpse to Katrina. That went as well as you'd expect.

Hellena, however, is more interested in the fact the doc is the one who knew how to resurrect people. So she traps Erik in some magic bubble and rushes off the combine her magic with the doctor's science and - Erik escapes the bubble, disrupts the spell, and rather than Hellena's sister being resurrected, a bunch of ghosts start rising from the graveyard. Whoopsie.

Nobody could let things go in this world, apparently. Erik kept trying to either get back to Katrina or bring her back, causing more harm in the process. Hellena keeps trying to get back her sister, hurting others in the process. Katrina's father - who apparently killed Erik - is back as a ghost and ready to kill Erik again. Maybe the Doc realized it was a mistake bringing back Erik, but that didn't stop him from helping Erik use more women in his experiments. Nobody lets go, and nobody learns anything. Cyclical, except the orbit is widening, and the damage is spreading wider.

I am curious to see if any of these ghosts end up with weird powers, considering there's been no explanation for why Erik came back looking like he did, or why he can make a glowing green violin that produces notes that knock back supernatural creatures.

Is Ted OK? #2, by Dave Chisholm (writer/artist/letterer) - That's a strange choice for a design on your sunglasses. Most people just go with a skull, or a flag. 

I don't have the first issue yet, which is too bad, because apparently Ted either spontaneously combusted or flat out exploded. But he's OK, folks! In that he's up and moving around again the next day, to the confusion of Sarah, who was assigned to watch him. She's either not doing a good job, or doing too good a job, because Ted notices her following him, but recognizes she tried to help him.

So they talk, because Sarah thinks he needs a friend. Ted thinks the company he works at is actually staffed by aliens. And when things happen like his computer's mouse bleeding when he clicks too hard, or him finding a mysterious silo somewhere inside, you gotta wonder. But also, Sarah is able to see him no matter where he goes, thanks to something her computer is connected to. And there are worm like things that can possibly do something to specific memories in your head if you name what you want focused on?

It's all weird, is what I'm saying. There's a big guy with a manbun (never a good sign) that works with Ted and tends to loom threateningly. He also speaks in the sort of generic phrases that seem ominous when Chisholm constantly draws the guy so we're looking up at him. 'I'm sure we'll meet again soon.' that kind of thing. Still, Ted slips the leash long enough to see some things he's not supposed to, then get tranq darted. I'm not sure what they were, even looking at them, or I'd describe them. I'm as confused as Ted, which is probably a good move by Chisholm.

Although the issue ends on some reporter interviewing - and I use the term loosely, the reporter talks for 21 caption boxes or voice balloons, across 2.5 pages, without actually asking a question - some tech mogul trillionaire who somehow saved the world from some horrible devastation wrought by some terrorists in the Ukraine. The fact the tech mogul points out the guy hasn't asked a question 17 balloons in doesn't make it less annoying, but there it is. The mogul's got some big announcement, but whether that's going to be bullshit (probably), or something to do with what Ted found, I've got no idea.

Chisholm also uses a heavily orange color scheme for the tech mogul parts, after mostly sticking to greens, purples, and a sterile, whitish-blue for Ted's workspace up to that point. Without seeing the first issue, I don't know if there's significance to that. It's not quite the same shade as the clip we see of Ted on fire at the start of the issue - that orange has more red in it - or in the above panel - which has more yellow - but it's got a similar fire/sun vibe to it. So is fire going to be significant? Fire of knowledge? A Prometheus-type thing, where Ted learns something and is punished for it? Or is Sarah the one that's going to learn that awful thing, and it's about Ted?

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.

Saturday Splash Page #223

"Insertion," in RASL #12, by Jeff Smith

RASL was, I think, Jeff Smith's next book after he finished Bone. It ran 15 issues across 4 years. I remember a little discussion of it, here and there, on the comics blogosphere back when it started, but not enough to where I had any idea what it was about. I was pronouncing the title in my head like "wrassle", and assumed it was some sort of fight comic. It is not.

"RASL" is what people call Robert Joseph Johnson, who worked as a research scientist for a covert government project with his friend, Miles, and Maya, Miles' wife. Who Rob was sleeping with. Rob began to have concerns about the project and, unable to convince Miles to scrap it, sabotaged the whole thing and escaped via a different project. One that enables him to cross "The Drift" into parallel universes. Now Rob makes a living stealing things - like paintings - for people by slipping into those parallel universes, stealing the version that exists there, and coming home.

The series starts with Rob landing in the wrong universe after a heist, then getting attacked by a reptilian-looking guy that seems able to track him. After 2 years the government's caught up, and they want their stuff. Specifically, they want some journals that belonged to Tesla that were supposed to stay locked up, but Rob got hold.

Tesla is woven all through the book. Smith brings in the Philadelphia Experiment as an attempt to create the magnetic torsion field Tesla proposed as an invisibility cloak of sorts, but it actually moves things through space (and time.) The project Miles, Maya and Robert are working on is an idea Tesla had to draw power from the planet's ionosphere. Most of issues 6 and 12 are a Tesla biography. His rise, his "war of the currents" with Edison, his "World System," using the power of the Earth itself for a dozen different things (Rob says a test of the World System in Long Island is what caused the Tunguska event in Siberia.)

I think the idea is Tesla had these ideas, but initially only partially understood what he was dealing with. Once he gained a better (though likely still incomplete) grasp, he backed away in horror of the potential danger. Rob and Miles have repeated the cycle decades later. They were fascinated by Tesla and his work, but thanks to Tesla's journals, Rob now knows how bad an idea this is (though not bad enough he'll destroy the journals.) But he can't convince Miles, and won't show him the journals as proof, because he thinks that will only spur Miles on. He doesn't trust his friend, and maybe that's because Rob knows he's been a shitty friend himself.

That said, I don't understand the significance of the non-verbal, emaciated little girl that keeps popping up wherever Rob goes. He meets a guy at an abandoned gas station in one of the universes who claims the girl is God, but *shrugs*. She saves Rob's life late in the book, by getting repeatedly shot, where as one version of her falls, another completes the next step, then falls as it's killed, and so on.

There's an ongoing debate between Rob and Sal, the agent chasing him, about whether these are distinct parallel universes (Rob's position), or just shadows Rob is creating by traveling to them (Sal.) I think we're meant to take Rob's position as accurate, or at least more humane, but Rob's actions don't match his words. He uses the other worlds as a way to make money, and treats versions of people he knows back home as interchangeable. In his universe, Rob has a sex worker friend/acquaintance/hook-up named Annie, but if he's not in his universe, he'll visit an Annie in whichever universe he is in, if she happens to live in the same place and do the same work. When Sal kills "his" Annie, Rob tries to protect that other one. He's treating them like spares, or a resource (in this case, salve for his guilty conscience), not much different than what he says the government will do if they get his work and try to strip-mine the other worlds for resources.

(This probably ties into an old discussion we see Rob had with "his" Annie at one point. Rob is fond of saying it's never to late to fix things, but Annie points out Rob never actually fixes anything, he just patches over them. He tries breaking things off with Maya, but won't come clean with Miles. He can't protect his Annie, he just latches onto another one.)

Also, Sal tells Rob the reason they never meet themselves on these jaunts is they "subsume" that universe's version. Sal seems very concerned about being unique, simply by the fact of his existence, so he can't accept those other universes may be equivalent to his. (To the extent Rob cares about "unique," I think he would define it by what you do, rather than the mere fact of existence.) And, assuming Sal's correct, that result runs against the idea of the other universes as distinct. Why are Rob and Sal always taking over the form of the Rob or Sal of the universe they've reached? Why are they never pushed aside, to exist separately, or caught in the back of the mind of the one they've merged with?

Though it does make me wonder if that's why Rob was having blackouts at one point. He thinks it's because moving through the Drift is hard on the body, and he was doing it too many times in a short span, but I don't know. Supposedly his universe is the only one where Tesla lived long enough to try and develop the World System idea, but he doesn't know how many realities there are, so he can't be sure. Maybe there's another Rob out there, running the same race.

What I Bought 3/30/2026 - Part 1

The anime re-watch has reached Outlaw Star. It's been a while, so I didn't remember it takes nearly a third of the series to really get them out into space in their new ship. We're into April, and I'm almost caught up on comics from the first three months. So let's get to that, with a couple of second issues from early March.

D'orc #2, by Brett Bean (writer/artist), Jean-Francois Beaulieu (colorist), Nate Piekos (letterer) - Can't go anywhere without some guy in a cape showing up and dramatically screaming.

D'Orc tries climbing a plateau to hide from the forces on both sides trying to kill him, only to find a bunch of warriors looking strangely emaciated. Then a bunch of kids with odd masks show up and start stabbing D'Orc with knives that are stealing his time. Then the kids' boss shows up, and he's a time lord and D'Orc won't abandon the kids, so he gets all his time stolen and decays. Oh well, terrible fate averted!

Except the ghost of the headless chicken, thus far useless, is able to possess the time lord and reverse the aging and free the imprisoned orphan army. Then D'Orc insists they restore the time stolen from all those guys who were going to ambush him and remarkably, it doesn't backfire. The warriors don't try to kill him, and in fact agree to look after the orphans. So things are looking up! Too bad there's an angry dwarf on his tail.

So it seems like Bean is leaning towards the idea that the prophecy that D'Orc will destroy the world is going to occur in that he convinces people on both sides to abandon this light vs. dark and fighting to the death, and focus on gentler notions. Of course, there's also this berserker side of him that keeps creeping out, where Bean gives him glowing eyes and which Beaulieu sometimes colors the characters grey against a red background, and other times colors D'Orc red.

Not sure what that's about, and it feels like Bean is hinting more about the shield, or at least its abilities. The time lord thought the shield would make him immortal. Was he going to decapitate himself and exists as a ghost like the chicken?

Touched by a Demon #2, by Kristen Gudsnuk - Quite a disparity between the crying cursed family and the cheerful employees. At least we can see Frons keeps his employees happy.

So, Wendy killed her awful parents and her sickly sister, who was, let's face, going to die as soon as Wendy could stop her parents from using her as an organ farm. But it wouldn't help their salvation attempt to kill the girl, so instead Frons and Zuzu hide the bodies in the graves of some people who died in the 1800s, and give Wendy a job.

First job, get them more business! So Wendy and Elaine - an influencer who died in prison after some product she made go viral killed people - get the business popular on social media. By hawking free pens. Example 1,347 that I don't understand social media.

This does net them one client. Sergio feels he has blown his relationship with a wonderful woman and lost her and his son. So Frons and Zuzu not only help his confidence, but also help him learn to be more considerate and attentive to his wife's feelings. And they found the motel room where his wife and son are living! And she has a restraining order on Sergio? And the cops showed up? And. . .

Look, should I have laughed out loud at how things play out? Probably not. Did I? Obviously yes. I don't exactly know why, it's a horrible fate. Maybe because Frons and Zuzu worked really hard to help him, and Sergio seemed to take the lessons to heart. He was honest and clear about what he wanted, he acknowledged that he wanted to be loved, he wanted to show he was worthy of being loved, it was just too late, and he took things way too far.

Frons, despondent at another failure, wanders to a church. That he can't enter, but the local priest has to smoke outside, so they chat a bit. Father Angelo seems willing to investigate whether a demon could be redeemed, or be penitent at all. Which I guess is the question, does Frons regret siding with Lucifer, or does he just feel unappreciated in Hell and think the grass would be greener on the other side? He does seem to want to help people, but are his motivations the right ones?

Oh, and some cop is investigating Wendy's disappearance, and that of her family. Boooooo, butt out cops! Didn't you cause enough harm to Sergio's family today?

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned - Walter Mosley

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned is a collection of short stories, loosely connected about Socrates Fortlow. Scorates spent 27 years in an Indiana prison for killing 2 people. When he got out, now 50 years old, he moved to Los Angeles, and has, as of the point when most of these stories take place, spent the last 8 years living in a two-room shack in an alley.

Mosley has a few recurring characters across the stories - a partially paralyzed WW2 veteran, a young boy named Darryl that Socrates sort of becomes a surrogate father to - but the stories remain focused on Socrates. In many cases, it's about him struggling with the anger and urge to do violence that a nearly-three decade stint of incarceration did nothing to dissipate. "History" is, I think, set during the riots that followed the verdict in the Rodney King trial, and Socrates deliberately keeps himself inside his home the entire time, because he's afraid what he might do if he goes outside and joins in.

But Mosley also uses that story for a flashback to an earlier time in Socrates' time in L.A., where there was a bookstore he frequented that helped him come to a conclusion about who one should be angry at, and who they want you to be angry at, and who is really following the "rules," which he thinks of as acting in ways society deems acceptable, but might in the way most people might think of it. It's a little like the Joker's spiel in The Dark Knight, about people and their "plans", but from the perspective of a man who feels like he foolishly followed those plans and is only now realizing it, rather than the guy bragging about how he's too smart for all that.

The stories also often deal with the difficulties of going through life as a black man, whether that's being hassled by cops, or debating whether it's OK to tell the police you know who's setting fire to abandoned buildings now that people have started dying as a result. Or just the hassles of getting a regular job, or even just getting an application from the supermarket where you'd like to work to try and apply. These often tie back into Socrates' anger, his desire to meet the disrespect or humiliation the world tries to heap on him with violence. Just how much crap can he be expected to take, and how much is the world going to throw at him?

They aren't all like that. In one case, Socrates realizes he's never gone to see the ocean in all the time since he moved to L.A., so he goes to the beach and ends up meeting a couple of people who share a bonfire with him for a time. It's still not entirely cheerful; Socrates is motivated by thinking of a younger man he beat up not long after he moved to L.A., who he's watched slowly descend through life, and that he wishes he'd apologized to, maybe tried to explain himself. And if Socrates would have asked that young man why he didn't get out of there and do something better with himself, then shouldn't he try to do the same? Go somewhere else, even just for a day, and do something different?

Regret is a strong element in the stories as well. Regretting not apologizing to that young man, or writing to a young woman he knew before prison, or that his mother died long before he served his sentence. The regrets gnaw at him sometimes, waking or asleep, in different ways. Which might be why so many of the stories also revolve around him trying to talk to someone younger and maybe set them straight. Maybe he can't help them, but he doesn't want anymore regrets about not trying. 

'C-plus, Socrates thought to himself when he returned to his back-alley apartment. In those days he was still sleeping on three area rugs piled one on top of the other. He wrote the grade down on a piece of paper. For years he gave himself a grade every day. Anytime he wrote down failure somebody had been hurt by those big rock-breaking hands.'

Silent Fools

*Calvin and Clever Adolescent Panda approach Calvin's apartment building.*

CAP: *sets a bucket on the ground below Calvin's balcony* So you finished Now and Then, Here and There?

Calvin: Yeah, it was about as depressing as I remembered. Although I thought 6 of the 8 characters in the opening credits died, and it's actually only 5.

CAP: That's something.

Calvin: Yeah, but I'm not sure I'm happy Abelia survived. Hamdo was a bastard, but he was also a useless idiot. She was the one who made everything actually work.

CAP: Oh. Maybe she'll reform and do better.

Calvin: One could hope, but evidence of such personal improvement is thin on the ground in our world. *pauses at the door* So, you ready for whatever Pollock's got planned?

CAP: *pumps fist* You know it!

*Calvin unlocks the door. It swings open. Human and panda freeze in the doorway*

CAP: I wasn't ready for this.

Calvin: Who would be?

*Calvin's living room is full of people wearing headphones, doing Irish folk dance in their sock feet. None of the dancers acknowledge the two arrivals, simply continuing to jump and thump their heels against his carpet in perfect synchronization.*

Pollock: *steps out of the kitchen* Do you enjoy my present?

Calvin: No.

CAP: What is it?

Pollock: Silent Riverdance.

CAP: Huh? 

Pollock: I heard that the dolt's DJ friend sometimes participates in "silent disco", where everyone listens to the music through headphones while dancing. It's a similar concept.

Calvin: But there are three DJs in a silent disco, so the audience can switch their headphones between the different channels and dance to whatever they like best!

CAP: *watching the dancers* Yeah, this seems like it requires a lot of coordination.

Pollock: Astute observation, Accursed Furball.

Calvin: *pinches the bridge of his nose* I, I, just, *soul-deep sigh of exhaustion* why?

Pollock: Why what?

Calvin: Usually you at least have some half-baked notion about making money off your pranks. Silent disco works because people pay money to come listen and dance to different music and see what the DJs mix and how well they do it. None of that is present here! *gestures emphatically at the dancers with both hands*

Pollock: This is entertainment you hire to watch, not participate in.

Calvin: Who wants Riverdance without the sound of the heels clopping on the wood floors? People like noise!

Pollock: Not people prone to migraines. Should they be deprived of the joy of this cultural dance sensation? 

CAP: You don't like noise, either.

Calvin: Whose side are you on?!

CAP: *backs away* Easy.

Pollock: *sniffs haughtily* I thought you'd be happy. I'm pivoting away from weapons design and energy development towards entertainment.

CAP: Really? *suspicious* Why?

Pollock: There's no future in those fields. Humanity is cooked. So the best thing to do is capitalize on the human instinct to ignore such grim truths by offering distractions in exchange for money. I'm considering starting a series of escape room venues where you can either pay to play, or pay to watch other people play through a two-way mirror. You get to laugh at their failures and stupidity, letting you feel superior without ever getting off your pimpled duff!

CAP: That just sounds like a game show.

Pollock: Yes, but the people playing can pay an extra fee to see the recording of what their audience said, in case they want to get revenge. And for an additional fee, they can rent a room specifically to enact that revenge. We're going to offer a variety of weapons.

Calvin: For an additional fee.

Pollock: You think it's cheap getting an authentic spear made of walrus tusk ivory?

CAP: You leave the walruses alone!

Calvin: Yeah, isn't it bad enough they have to go through life looking like that? All wrinkled and those goofy whiskers and big teeth. . .

CAP: Don't bodyshame them!

Pollock: The panda is right. I only buy walrus ivory from people who use the whole animal.

Calvin: Use it for what?

Pollock: How should I know? I'm in the entertainment business, not raising livestock.

Calvin: It's great to see your sleaze game hasn't lost its fastball, but can you get this out of my apartment before the floor gives way?

Pollock: I suppose, but first I need you to fill out this online survey about our service.

Calvin: My phone can't do that.

Pollock: I'm afraid it's required.

CAP: You can use mine. *hands over phone*

Pollock: But first you'll have to create an account.

Calvin: Password required?

Pollock: At least one number, symbol and capital letter.

Calvin: G-e-t-F-u-c-

Pollock: As long as it meets the requirements.

Calvin: It says system update required.

Pollock: Oh, you must need to update the app. It'll only take a few hours. We're so popular, it really slows down our servers.

Calvin: Nuts to this. *tosses phone back to CAP and stalks past the dancers towards his room* 

CAP: Doesn't that kind of thing increase the likelihood of bad reviews?

Pollock: It's fine, I have five employees dedicated to creating fake accounts and spamming 5-star glowing reviews.

CAP: At least you're not using bots.

Pollock: Of course not! Lit majors come much cheaper. Need less water than cooling towers, too.

CAP: I think you're overdo to get beat up. 

Calvin: No, we're way past the beating stage.

*Calvin steps back in the living room carrying a rifle. The folk dancers begin dancing in unison towards the door*

Pollock: Now hold on, that's a little extreme.

Calvin: Why? You tried really hard to kill me once. With a sword. And armed goons. More than once, honestly. Turnabout's fair play.

Pollock: *backing away* But not on April Fools! That's not the spirit of these things!

CAP: Can't we just hit Pollock with a pie instead?

Calvin: I have no pie. I have nothing in the fridge suitable for hitting someone in the face -

Pollock: He really doesn't, I checked. 

Calvin: - unless you want to use a frozen brick of cornbread. Besides, we did the cake thing last year. And eggs the year before. And pies not too long before that.

CAP: Because it's classic!

Calvin: So is shooting people.

Pollock: Alright, I'm sensing some dissatisfaction with the Silent Riverdance idea. How about this instead: Silent Rodeo.

*Clever Adolescent Panda and Calvin both pause*

CAP: How would that even work?

Pollock: *bullshitting* Well, it's still in the developmental stage. We're considering covering the audiences' ears, so they can only see what's happening in the arena, and have to imagine the screams of pain. Or we'll gag the riders and hold the competition in a mud or jello wrestling pit, for softer, quieter landings.

CAP: That just sounds weird.

Calvin: *lowers the rifle* Yeah, I don't think that's viable as a business.

Pollock: But it got your guard down! Hah!

*Pollock dashes onto the balcony and leaps over the rail. Her right foot lands in the bucket. And won't come out.*

Pollock: What the hell?

CAP: Glue! I told you it would work!

Calvin: *high-fives CAP* When you're right, you're right. 

CAP: Good luck driving your rental car with that on your foot!

Pollock: That's fine! I'll just catch a ride with the dancers! *looks around, sees the van pulling onto the street* Wait up!

One of the dancers: We're off the clock, boss. We're hittin' a bar.

Pollock: I'll pay you overtime to drive me home!

I'm not naming this guy: OK, pile in.We want to run some ideas for the performance past you.

Pollock: *grimacing* Oh, you have notes. Delightful. . . 

Calvin: Wow, Pollock pays overtime. Maybe I should apply for a job there.

CAP: You want to work for your nemesis?

Calvin: If it meant I could retire sooner? Probably. 

Hell is for Heroes (1962)

A company that was really hoping they were getting shipped home, are instead shipped up to a section of the Siegfried Line. Soon after, most of the company is sent to reinforce a different section of the line, leaving just six guys to cover a hill, a much larger Nazi force stationed on the opposite ridge.

You've got Sgt. Larkin, stuck trying to make this untenable situation work. Corporal Henshaw (James Coburn), a bit of a tinkerer. Private Corby (Bobby Darin), the souvenir hunter, and a couple of others that are mostly there to make numbers. Their ranks are supplemented, if you want to call if that, by Homer (Nick Adams), a Polish teen that escaped from a labor camp, desperate to prove he can be a soldier, and a company clerk who got lost with a jeep full of typewriters (Bob Newhart, I know, I was surprised, too.)

But the one to watch out for is Reese (Steve McQueen), who just got transferred into the company after a court martial for nearly drunk-driving a jeep over a colonel. Reese is surly, rude, with a scraggly beard and eyes that regard everyone with hostility. He's the one person actually happier - though that may not be the right word - about going back to the front rather than home. Combat is probably when things are quietest inside his head.

Most of the movie is a cat-and-mouse game, though we only see the U.S.'s side of it, with the Americans trying to fool the Nazis into thinking they're still at full-strength up here. For example, a full company would send a patrol out into no man's land at night, but that would require 10 soldiers, which *counts on fingers*, nope, 8 soldiers total doesn't leave 10 to spare. How to make enough noise to simulate a patrol?

At times, it's almost lighthearted, Henshaw having a bit of a laugh as he using a backfiring jeep to simulate a tank, or the soldiers telling the clerk to pretend to talk on the phone with HQ once they realize the bombed-out pillbox has a hidden mike. But there's always a tension underlying it; these are stall tactics. If the Nazis figure it out before the rest of the company returns, these guys are cooked and they know it. You see it in a brief battle when one member of the squad leaves his foxhole to help the others, because there doesn't seem to be anyone attacking near him. And then more Nazis emerge from the night, and he gets gunned down.

So when Reese suggests a dangerous plan to sneak across and hit the enemy pillbox before daylight, you can figure that some of it is him being eager to fight, to go find trouble rather than wait for it to find him. But he's also not wrong that if they sit and do nothing, and the rest of the company doesn't return in time, it's going to end badly, for them and the rest of the forces in the area if the enemy get wild behind their lines.

The crawl across the minefield is tense, and I really couldn't tell if it was going to work or not until the movie answers it. The climactic battle, in contrast is kind of a dud. Reese's fate was sealed the moment the lieutenant starts barking about a court martial, and in general, it's just not that well-staged, outside a few bits (specifically, the part about using the flamethrower for cover and Reese charging through an inferno)

Hostile Product Recall

Hey, what's this? Can it be? A review of the first graphic novel I bought in 2025, only three months into 2026!

Volume 1 of Jef Bambas' Model: A revolves around a robot that, due to an incident with a weather vane that damages its antenna, stops receiving the command to stay shut down. Making its way out of the storage room, it finds itself in what appears to be a run down factory. Before long he runs into a different model of robot which, given the nightstick it carries, is some sort of security guard.

The remaining five issues are a prolonged chase. First between Model A and that Model B and then, a whole bunch more Model Bs. The story is silent, although Bambas uses caption boxes on two occasions, when the mysterious overseer robot is receiving status updates about all the robots that are being taken out.

Bambas plays the chase like a cartoon, with Model A as Tweety and the Model Bs and Sylvester or Elmer Fudd. Gags where Model A, while evading the attacks of a Model B, causes a girder to get damaged so the entire building falls on Model B. Or gags about Model A hiding in a barrel, looking both ways to confirm the coast is clear, then hopping out and immediately running into a guard.

The factory location provides a variety of settings for those gags. Model A fleeing into a room with only one exit, that turns out to be the arsenal. A stretch of Model A trying to scale the wall of the compound and escape. The Model Bs are building new structures, so there's an issue that's mostly Model A trying to pretend to be part of the construction crew, with all the potential for physical comedy that allows.

Besides the differences in their shapes, Bambas also makes Model A more expressive. Which is impressive for a rectangular prism with one eye. But the bent antenna and the crack in one corner of his casing give him something distinctive. The antenna can flop around as Model A panics and flails. The bent corner causes a crease that acts like an eyebrow when Model A squints at things.

The volume ends with Model A's attempt to scale the wall thwarted by the first Model B he encountered, now significantly more battered. With a bent antenna of its own, it seems to have also gained the ability of more expressions. Like the expression of revenge! 

Sunday Splash Page #420

"Dead Duck Pond," in The Punisher (vol. 6) #19, by Garth Ennis (writer), Steve Dillon (artist), Matt Milla (colorist), RS and Comicraft's Wes (letterers)

The Punisher was originally an antagonist for Spider-Man, a guy who took it upon himself to punish criminals by killing them, tricked by the Jackal into thinking Spidey was a criminal. After that was cleared up, Frank Castle hung around, scuffling with Spider-Man and Daredevil over his lethal approach. But the U.S. loves a guy who shoots people we think "deserve" it, especially if he uses high-powered firearms, so he got an '80s mini-series, which, well, what I remember of it, Mike Zeck's art was really good.

Then Punisher got an ongoing series. And another, and another. And maybe also a quarterly series. Yep, the '90s were banner decade for punishing, but things got stale, so then you got the stunts. Frank is badly injured and gets a surgical procedure that gave him black skin. Went crazy and killed Nick Fury, had amnesia for a bit. Then he died, and there was an "angel Punisher/supernatural hitman" bit. We, uh, we don't like to talk about that.

Then they gave the character to Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon for a 12-issue maxi-series under the Marvel Knights imprint. They took it back to basics, just Frank targeting a crime family, but with a dark comedy twist that let them get away with depicting some excessive violence. Like the issue where Ma Gnucci and her guys hunt an injured Frank through a zoo, and Frank uses the animals to thin out their numbers. Culminating in him punching a polar bear to get it pissed off enough to swat a guy's head clean off his shoulders. Or Ma Gnucci hiring the Russian, a mountain of a guy, who also happens to be president of the Smolensk Daredevil Fan Club and dies, as I believe Wizard put it, choking on man-boob. Wizard loved that maxi-series.

And I guess the fans did, too because Marvel, never one to pass up a chance to run something into the ground, gave Ennis and Dillon an ongoing Punisher series, also under the Marvel Knights label. Except all Ennis could really do was be more extreme with the absurd aspects. So the Russian survives suffocation and decapitation because some military agency put him back together. Oh, but the procedure gave him huge boobs! And the Russian loves them! Or Spider-Man shows up, gets immediately knocked out by the Russian, and the "team-up" is Frank holding Spidey up as a punching bag. Or Frank and Wolverine fight a gang of little people, and Frank runs over Logan with a steamroller.

The one person who might pass for a supporting cast was the pitiful Detective Soap, part of the task force assigned to catch Frank in the maxi-series, now passing info along to Frank and generally being the butt of every joke. I think at one point a story strongly implies, if not outright says, Soap picks up a hooker in a bar that is actually his mother.

The other writers who occasionally took a turn weren't much better. Example, Tom Peyer wrote an arc about a guy outfitting taxis with all sorts of lethal weapons, so it's essentially the Punisher in Twisted Metal. Frank steals one of their taxis, but because he didn't pick up the Daily Bugle's editorial cartoonist, and said cartoonist is black, the Bugle soon has a cartoon about racist cab drivers. The bad guys recognize Frank Castle from a caricature. Like there are at least 2 million scowling, dark-haired white guys in New York City.

Ennis came back after that for the remainder of the book's 37 issue run. Sometimes with Dillon on art, but sometimes Tom Mandrake or Darick Robertson. The only issues I have are this one, where Frank runs into his old neighbor from the maxi-series Joan the Mouse, and issue 28 (by Ennis and Mandrake) where Elektra keeps killing the guys Frank is targeting before he can. I read somewhere once, that was the only Marvel comic that referenced the Frank Miller/Bill Sienkiewicz Elektra: Assassin. It's only a brief reference Frank alludes to in terms of what he's able to learn about her, but apparently every subsequent Elektra writer just kind of decided to ignore that book.

Basically, Marvel Knights Punisher is the comedy bits of Hitman, minus any of the meditation on brotherhood, the human capacity for self-justification, or the cycle of violence. It's just Frank killing lots of criminals, and sometimes it's presented as absurd, so you should laugh.

Saturday Splash Page #222

"Opaque," in The Ray Annual #1, by Christopher Priest (writer), Oscar Jimenez (penciler), Chip Wallace (inker), Pat Garrahy (colorist), Starkings and Comicraft (letterers)

The Ray got one Annual, in 1995. The theme for DC's Annuals that year was "Year One," which for a lot of characters I assume meant a flashback to some tale in their earlier career. In Ray's case, Priest said it had been one year since he learned the truth about himself, and maybe the reality of the life he was living was setting in.

The crux of the story is Ray trying to stop an airliner from crashing. He didn't stop the crash, but he managed to control it enough to save most of the passengers. 112 people, alive because of him. But as Ray sees it, 18 died, also because of him.

Because the one who attacked the airliner was Death Masque, the computer program Ray built and forms with his powers, that's gained independence. Death Masque wanted to teach Ray a lesson, specifically about being concerned with anyone other than Masque itself. Ray's old friend Jenny was coming into town on that airliner, and Ray, worried about the rift he was sensing between them, planned to propose.

The issue is a little confusing, as it hops between the aftermath of the crash and the events leading up and including the crash. Ray's considering getting drunk for the first time, his father shows up and unsuccessfully tries to give him a pep talk. Death Masque pretends to be Happy Terrill once he hears Superman is lingering around the crash (because every passenger is certain they saw Superman saving the day, which Ray is almost relieved about), and asks if he would speak to Ray, because Ray looks up to him. Superman initially declines, then appears to reconsider. Except wait, it was actually Happy using his powers to disguise himself and Ray kicks his ass, revealing him to be Death Masque. Except Ray thinks that's just another trick by his dad. Then Jenny, who Ray notes wasn't among the survivors, shows up, because she missed the flight entirely.

At that point, I wasn't sure Ray's grief wasn't causing him to hallucinate. Or, since she responds to his proposal with "Good-bye," if he wasn't replaying some earlier conversation in his head that actually lead to her being on the plane. Like, that's why she died, moving away from him, and he made one last-ditch play, Death Masque objected, and she died. And then Superman actually does show up, except Ray thinks it's his dad again and well, *gestures to the top of the post* When Ray wakes up, the two of them talk about how hard it is to live up to people idolizing you, but it's something you have to consider, blah blah, Ray doesn't get drunk.

I'm still not sure if we're meant to read the fight as Ray really beat Death Masque, so all his later fears and whinging that he can't do it was wrong, or that Death Masque threw the fight to sell his trick that this was really another manipulation by Happy. Considering Ray loses every other single time they fight directly, I assume the latter.

The point seems to be that Ray still hasn't moved on from his childhood. He's still trying to date the girl that was his best (only?) friend. When the grief over everything gets too much, Ray tries to return to his childhood home, which someone else owns and inhabits now. He's idolizing Superman instead of trying to be the best Ray he can. I don't think that was a necessary story, considering the point of the mini-series was for Ray to embrace his new reality and move forward, but Priest seemed to think it was relevant. Seems undercut by all Death Masque's manipulations.

Maybe Priest just wanted to write Jenny out, since she never appears again. I don't think he really replaced her in the supporting cast. Ray's main girlfriend ends up being a future cop who gives him instructions how to return to his time, and it turns out Ray saved her when she was a little kid and gave her those instructions to give to him, which implies a fairly large age gap, and we mostly see them interact in a future where Vandal Savage did shape Ray into a ruthless corporate type.

But if the point was removing useful voices around Ray so, "ask Vandal Savage for help," seems like a good plan, then mission accomplished?

What I Bought 3/25/2026

It was 90 here yesterday, but I will not turn on my air conditioning. Not yet. Plus, it's barely into the 50s today. Lousy Smarch weather. Here's two comics from this week.

Fantastic Four #9, by Ryan North (writer), Humberto Ramos (penciler), Victor Olazaba (inker), Edgar Delgado (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - 

The FF get their tails kicked by Evil Sue and run with their tails between their legs. Galactus gets left behind. Ha! Regular Sue tries to reason with Evil Sue, since fighting her isn't working. Talking doesn't work either. In fact, Evil Sue decides she ought to make another just like her, and Johnny barely manages to cut in before his sister gets the same brain surgery.

Oh, and Earth is being attacked by aliens of some sort. I don't know what they're supposed to be; Ramos just draws them as big purple things with sort-of grasshopper legs. Don't really think that should be such a serious problem just because the FF aren't around. The Avengers and the X-Men deal with aliens, too!

I have to wonder at Evil Sue's motives for wanting to make Regular Sue just like her. If she can do everything, if the rest of the FF are useless, if Galactus is no match for her, what does she need a duplicate for? I kind of hope this isn't a Killing Joke, where she wants to prove anyone that goes through this will end up acting like she does.

I'm toying with the possibility she wants to die, and figures another Sue like her is the only thing strong enough to do it. A death wish wouldn't really track with her notion that she no longer feels guilt, but unless Evil Sue has a very different educational background from Regular Sue, she's not a brain surgeon. How could she be sure she burned out the right part of her brain? She admits she's holding back, that she lets Sue hit her with some attacks to see if she'll go for the kill. She's playing with the rest of the team, just throwing things at them to keep them busy while she tests Regular Sue.

I guess that could just be villain ego. Get to the end and find out Evil Sue is just like Doom, she like monologue and show off too much.

Generation X-23 #2, by Jody Houser (writer), Jacopo Camagni (artist), Erick Arciniega (color artist), Ariana Maher (letterer) - Laura is this how you make friends?

All the teenagers with powers were kids being experimented on in the facility where they currently live. But, as the apparent leader, who calls himself X-Infinite, tells us, one of the test subjects got loose and released some kind of vapor that killed everyone. And X-Infinite is the only witness. Not suspect at all! 

The handful who didn't die stuck around and call it home. They tend to have several powers, as a result of being experimented on, and they all refer to themselves by their experiment numbers. X-73, X-92, and so on. More concerning, X-Infinite insists on referring to Laura as "X-23", despite her repeatedly saying her name is "Laura." Not concerning!

Scout participates in a little training exercise with the others - just enough to give us some general sense what their powers are - until X-73 suddenly starts generating heat. Or fire. Either way, he's not immune and despite Laura's encouragement - to the extent, 'You have to control it!' qualifies - he blows up. And when she wakes up, X-Infinite says she has to answer for his friend's death.

I don't feel like Houser is being particularly subtle that something isn't on the up-and-up with X-Infinite. On the other hand, he isn't wrong that maybe they're safer in this secure facility than accepting Laura's offer to join whatever mutant school is currently available. If they don't think of themselves as mutants, or even if they do but don't particularly want to get missed up in X-Men nonsense, that's their business. Laura doesn't need to be proselytizing. 

Brains: A Zombie Memoir - Robin Becker

Jack Barnes is just another victim of a zombie apocalypse, or maybe not. Even if he shuffles like a zombie, moans inarticulately like a zombie, and wants to eat brains like a zombie, Jack still thinks like he did when he was alive. Unfortunately, given he was an English lit professor, he thinks in overwrought terms, thinking of himself as a spokesperson for his kind, when he's not comparing his situation to popular culture, which he tends to sneer at.

Barnes travels to Chicago, with the idea of meeting Howard Stein, credited as the guy who created the virus that caused all this. Surely his creator will recognize how monumental a zombie who can think and write is! In what he surely sees as a promising development, Jack encounters other zombies who retained different skills, forming a makeshift family of sorts. Joan, a nurse who's retained those instincts and can sew zombies up as their bodies degrade. Guts is a fast zombie. Ros (short for Rosencrantz, as Jack dubbed him) can speak.

(Although the book is fairly inconsistent about what zombies are capable of in general. Even though Jack remembers how to start a car, he can't make his body do it. Neither can Ros. But Jack and another zombie figure out how to start and sail a ship later on, and the group figures out how to put on waterproof gear before hiding in the bottom of Lake Michigan.) 

I imagine you need a character with Jack's inflated sense of self-importance to drive the script. A guy who alternately thinks of himself as a Moses, or a civil rights leader, or a new Adam when he brings along a pregnant woman he bit. I can't imagine any of the others, if they had been the one to retain that level of cognition, deciding the thing to do is find the guy who created the virus and convince him the undead are some new race that needs to be accorded equal rights. Maybe Ros or Joan would try to find Stein and see if he had a cure (other than a bullet in the head), but I doubt it.

So Jack's personality is essential to how things play out, the urge to make some great mark, to leave a record. Hence his memoir. That said, reading his delusions of grandeur can get tedious. I rolled my eyes a few times, thinking this guy needed to get over himself. Maybe it's supposed to be funny, his earnest writing about how proud he feels of Guts, scampering off to bite someone's ankle, or discussing how the undead are really the next evolutionary step, then rambling about brains for a paragraph.

Occasionally he sees the way his body is decaying and he can't bear to look, or he thinks about his wife (who he ate) and misses her deeply. Maybe it's meant to be him making the best of his situation. He got bit, he turned, nothing he can do about that. So, put a positive spin on it. The cold doesn't bother him! He doesn't need to breathe! Zombies could be a net positive for the planet, helping dispose of the people nobody wants around!

'"You shot my friend," Ros gurgled.

Annabelle looked up. "Dude, you can't talk," she said.

"Says who?" Ros said. Annabelle looked at me. I shrugged my shoulders and attempted a grin. A dollop of my cheek fell off at the dimple. Joan would have to repair that when we got back.'

A Little Turnover in June

Well, I was expecting a drop-off in the books I'd buy from the solicitations for June, and there is the possibility of that. Certainly it feels like the circle of publishers is continuing to shrink, but I found a couple of things I might buy, which is something, at least.

What's new? There's another It's Jeff book from Marvel, Brand New Jeff Week, although the Gurihiru team isn't listened as the only art team, which may be a caution. DC is releasing a new book, The Deadman. I find Deadman sort of interesting, but I can't really tell from the solicit whether W. Maxwell Prince and Martin Morazzo's meditation on life, death, and everything else is going to be up my alley.

Mad Cave has the first issue of Junk Punch, by Paul Tobin and Carlos Olivares (with a back-up story by Colleen Coover), about a world where people have all sorts of strange compulsions. The main character's, as you may guess, is hitting people in the groin. Is that going to help her solve a string of other compulsion-related crimes? Actually, I'm more curious if this compulsion strictly relates to male genitalia, or she just hits anyone in the groin, regardless of the equipment.

What's ending? Ahoy says the final issue of Babs: The Black Road South will be out in June, but given issue 3 didn't show up this month I suspect that will not be the case. If you think of it as a one-shot, It's Jeff! would also be ending in June.

And the rest: Batgirl has Cass investigating a murder, but also she's missing memories. Fantastic Four has Reed and Johnny traveling back in time to stop an alien who decided it would be easier to conquer Earth in the past. Marc Spector: Moon Knight and Generation X-23 are both on their fifth issues. Moon Knight's doing a focus on the Asgardian drug dealer Achilles Fairchild, while Laura's still attacking the X-Facility. Moonstar has Dani either saving her parents or the world, which definitely feels like one of those things where whatever choice she makes, she'll second-guess it.

Is Ted OK? is having a big reveal in issue 5, setting up the finale, where we will finally learn whether Ted is in fact, OK. Meanwhile, D'orc is contending with a lava dragon and a fortune teller. 

The First Wives Club (1996)

Elise (Goldie Hawn), Brenda (Bette Midler), and Annie (Diane Keaton) were old college friends who reunite after another friend commits suicide in apparent depression over her ex-husband marrying a much younger woman. Something the trio can relate to, as all three of their husbands - played by Victor Garber, Dan Hedaya and Stephen Collins, respectively - likewise threw them over for younger women. So they decide to get revenge on the guys who used them up and spit them out for a newer model.

I think I got curious to watch this after it came up in someone's retrospective on Diane Keaton after she passed away. And I think Keaton gets the best role of the three leads. Brenda seems to mostly be dealing with things by trying to maintain the connection with her teenage son, and keeps worrying about her weight. Midler kind of defaults to sarcastic all the time. Elsie is confronting the lack of roles for women in Hollywood once they reach 40, basically fighting mortality in service of her ego. She's bitter (understandably), but in an entitled way. She's owed the starring role in the hot young director's new film (the director played by young Timothy Olyphant, was not expecting him.) 

Annie, meanwhile, is this overly cheerful, stammering Polyanna who makes excuses for everyone and tries to get everyone to get along. Not the free spirit types Keaton often played so much as someone willfully ignoring reality in favor of, not so much a more pleasant alternative as a blander one. Then, every so often, she snaps. You get a glimpse of it in her therapy session, where she resists her doc's orders to hit her with the foam bat, but once she goes for it, hits her three times in rapid succession. She's a bundle of energy and expression, locked down tight by years of trying to coddle her husband's insecurities.

Sometimes it breaks free in quieter ways, when Elise and Brenda convince her to sing aloud. Sometimes it's explosive, like when she gets tired of the other two attacking her for trying not to take sides in their argument and shrieks that they're both selfish and storms out.

No wonder her ex-husband turned what was supposed to be him asking for divorce into one last roll in the sack, then asking for the divorce. She must be dynamite in bed.

*beaten to death*

Ouch, jeez, I'm just kidding. I did expect I'd laugh more than I actually did, though I didn't know going in it kicked off with a suicide. There were a couple of scenes - their trip to a lesbian bar to enlist Annie's daughter in their plan - but it's not so much a movie that makes you laugh as one where you grin at a good one-liner. But it also has a lot to get done in 100 minutes. Establish each woman's current situation, get them together, get them started on revenge (while periodically returning to developments in their individual lives), the part where things hit the rocks between them, the reconciliation, the eventual turning of their plan to a higher purpose.

Maybe I was too invested in them pulling off their plan to laugh at their failures along the way. 

What I Bought 3/21/2026

I'd like to congratulate Afroman for beating the bullshit defamation charges filed against him by all those cops. If they didn't want to be immortalized in a bunch of music videos mocking them for looking for "kidnapping victims" in the pockets of a man's coat, maybe they shouldn't have done it in the first place. Also, "Lemon Pound Cake" made me laugh so hard the back of my skull hurt.

D'Orc #1, by Brett Bean (writer/artist), Jean-Francois Beaulieu (color artist), Nate Piekos (letterer) - The remains of another harvest festival gone awry.

So we got a medieval fantasy land split between light and dark, which as the map helpfully included on the inside cover shows are basically reversed mirrors. The land of light has an island on the northwest coast called "Heaven's Spleen," the dark lands have an island in the southeast shaped very similarly called "The Goblin's Teet." I thought it was spelled, "teat", but maybe the point is goblins are bad spellers?

The stretch of land in-between is called The Scar, and the two sides fight there constantly, making it a no man's land inhabited only by the title character. Whose name is not actually "D'orc", but we never learn what he's called, because as soon as he makes the mistake of explaining his parentage to two parties, but sides try to destroy him. Which suits his bloodthirsty talking shield just fine, but D'orc (sorry, kid) really just wanted some food.

So it's off to a tavern, where he gets involved in another brawl, this time trying to defend a poor chicken waiter from two fighters from each side. In the process, he loses control, does a Captain America with his shield and - decapitates the chicken. Whoops. The actual decapitation is off-panel, but we see the aftermath, although Bean's still is not going for realism, so it's not graphic or particularly horrifying. It's not even graphic in the way, say, Skottie Young's art can be.

Which is fine, the chicken's only sort of dead. Why the shield having a soul trapped inside it makes it a "death shield", and this allows the chicken's headless body to move while its spirit floats nearby? Not sure. I guess because Bean says so. He really wanted the visual of a headless chicken running around? I suspect that'll be D'orc's situation soon enough.

The gist seems to be, D'orc would just like to live his life, staying out of the either/or battles of the two sides. Or better yet, the two sides could stop being so bent on destroying each other and stop fighting. But everybody hates a centrist, so both sides are going to kill him. And he's likely going to get increasingly frustrated, or desperate, and destroy both sides just to survive. Maybe he'll meet someone that will ask his real name along the way?

Sunday Splash Page #419

"Feed Trough," in Prez (2015) #3, by Mark Russell (writer), Ben Caldwell (penciler), Mark Morales (inker), Jeremy Lawson (colorist), Travis Lanham (letterer)

The original Prez, a DC series about the United States' first teenage president, came out in 1973. Created by Captain America co-creater Joe Simon, it ran 4 issues, and from what I can tell, was about as accurate a representation of teens in the U.S. as you would expect from someone who had been writing comics for over 30 years by that point. Which is to say, not very. Ed Brubaker and Eric Shanower did a one-shot in the mid-90s under the Vertigo imprint, about Prez Rickard supposedly emerging during the '96 election, after two decades off the radar.

Then, in 2015, as part of one of DC's various post-New 52 branding exercises (DC You?), we got Prez, by Mark Russell and Ben Caldwell. Rather than set it in the present day, Russell sets the series in 2036, where Beth Ross is a 19-year-old working at a Li'l Doggies House of Corndogs in Oregon, and trying raise money to treat her father for some initially unknown illness, which turns out to be the deadly cat flu.

Beth goes viral when she accidentally dunks her pony tail in the deep fryer while filming a training video about proper grill cleaning. This doesn't help her raise the $4 million dollars her dad needs for nanotech treatment but, in a world where people can vote through social media, Beth wins Ohio in the 2036 Presidential election after a popular online personality touts her. To be clear, Beth is too busy trying to pay bills and visit her dad to ever run. The guy just gets the video extra exposure, and his followers decide to vote for this person they've heard of, rather than either of the lame-ass, middle-aged white men the two major parties are running.

The least believable part is that the other candidates are only middle-aged, rather than octogenarians.

As a result of Beth's win, no candidate gets enough electoral votes, so it goes to the House of Representatives, where each state gets one vote. This sets off a furious, hilarious and deeply pathetic scramble by each candidate to promise various spending projects and perks in return for a state's support. One side offers Ohio NASA. Texas' rep in turn demands 2 NASAs, plus a football stadium. In an attempt at extortion, states start voting for Beth, without keeping track of how many of them are doing so, and she gets elected. The system works - you over like a speed bag.

Beth isn't even sworn in until issue 3 (although it seems like Russell intended this to go longer than six issues), and spends most of issue 4 trying to pick a Cabinet (including a Neil Degrasse Tyson stand-in) and staff. Prez Rickard shows up as an aged, outcast Senator, offering to be her VP on the grounds the major powers won't try to kill her if they risk him becoming President as a result. Which doesn't stop random, gun-toting guys in hunting vests and American flag hats from taking their shot, literally.

I would give Russell credit for predicting the January 2020 insurrection, but white Americans waving guns around like fucking idiots whenever they feel the slightest bit aggrieved is, in the words of Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, not a prediction Meat-man, it's a fact of life. Likewise, the U.S. having armed sentry robots stationed around the world that are controlled by guys in beanbag chairs treating it as Call of Duty, getting yelled at by their boss for getting crumbs on the keyboard, feels less like satire or a prediction, than simply reality.

Morales has a loose enough style to pull off the exaggeration (or attempted exaggeration) of the story. Panels are filled with what I think are holographic pop-ups that, for example, offer a patient in the hospital more info about cat flu, if they pay a subscription fee, of course. The major antagonists are various CEOs, faces always hidden by glowing cartoon logos. Like Pharmaduke, or "Jack Smiles", who is always a big gold smiley face as he proclaims they run things, or he parachutes in to tell his employees the product they sell is time, because they make sure the consumer doesn't have to wait as long for stuff they could buy any number of other places. Or the news debate program - hosted by the blonde with the ludicrous hair in the upper left, or another one just like her - which has updated results on who the viewers think is winning, with the losers' face being covered by the flag as the outro music starts.

There's also a subplot about a self-aware killbot - developed in the notion it will save money if they can fire all those guys in the beanbag chairs - that doesn't like the things it has done, changes its name to Tina, and finds religion. Morales makes Tina appear both large enough to be menacing, but with an expressive digital face and body language.

Russell writes Beth as sarcastic, yet idealistic. Bright, but unfamiliar with how things are typically done in politics, which Russell (via Rickard), paints as a positive. Beth owes no favors for getting this far, so she doesn't have to give a Cabinet post to some incompetent dickhead because he campaigned for her.  Some of the outcomes are silly in the optimism, not so much Beth shutting down all the armed sentries and visiting other countries to apologize, but that many of the countries (though not Iran) accept the apology without say, demanding reparations.

Also, her end run around the CEOs and their pocket Senators is. . .to rely on someone even richer to help out? A guy who built a powerful computer, that has written every conceivable story in every language (we're shown the Oscars at one point, and he's credited as writer for 4 of the five nominated films.) Counting on a benevolent trillionaire doesn't seem any likelier to produce a positive outcome than relying on billionaires has. Maybe that was going to come back to bite Beth subsequently, but the book never got a second arc.

Saturday Splash Page #221

"Dark Light," in The Ray (vol. 2) #3, by Christopher Priest (writer), Howard Porter (penciler), Robert Jones (inker), Pat Garrahy (colorist), Ken Bruzenak (letterer)

About 2 years after his mini-series ended, and after he'd gotten some play in that era's Justice League titles, The Ray got an ongoing series. It lasted 28 issues, counting the Zero Hour tie-in #0, Christopher Priest the writer, Howard Porter the penciler for most of the first half of the series, Jason Armstrong illustrating most of the second half.

Jack C. Harris' mini-series was about moving beyond adolescence, growing and coming into your own, with Ray accepting his powers and symbolically shutting the door on the home where he'd spent his entire life up to that point. Priest carries that forward, but with more emphasis on the reality of being a "grown-up" versus the illusion.

Ray's an adult now! He gets to live in his own place! Earn his own money! Date the girl that was his childhood best friend! Hang out with his birth father! Be a superhero!

Except it's not such a great time. The only apartment he can get has no fridge, and comes with an ugly industrial sculpture bolted to the floor. He works at a fast food chicken restaurant. He has almost no furniture, because he spent his money on a souped-up laptop and a cardboard standee of Superman. Jenny, who was not only accepting, but encouraging of Ray embracing his powers, no longer seems to have time for him. Eventually there's a young woman he meets first in the future, then the present, then her future self travels back to his present to avert a bad future. There may have been at least one other brief romantic interest, but if so, the character made zero impact.

Happy Terrill turns out to be not just a congenital liar, as he's still deceiving Ray and Ray's mother - Ray thinks she died in childbirth, she thinks Ray was stillborn - but a domineering, frankly, abusive prick. When he thinks Ray isn't taking his powers seriously, Happy somehow makes Ray think he stole his powers, then dumps him in Chernobyl. Later, when Ray seems to have adjusted to not having powers, Happy disguises himself as a robber and jams a shotgun in Ray's face to terrorize him. It's like Happy took all his parenting techniques from Silver Age Superman.

I was entirely OK when it appeared Happy was killed by Death Masque, the game program Ray designed as a training tool, which subsequently slipped his control and eventually conquered a country. Unfortunately, Priest revealed Happy wasn't dead near the end of the series, which might have been with some notion of reconciliation, as part of a larger thing Priest was doing about family, but I wasn't really having it. If there was some chance Happy could fix all his mistakes, maybe, but he hadn't demonstrated that level of competence in anything, so everyone's really just better off if he's dead.

Ray's superheroing doesn't go so great either. Obviously the issues with Death Masque, which hang over the book throughout. Especially when one of the Justice League squads - I don't know which, that Triumph character was leading it, straight to the dollar bin I assume -  refuses to help, so Ray turns to Vandal Savage for some reason I'm sure was addressed in another book. Priest tried to acknowledge developments in Justice League comics that might impact Ray, but as I didn't buy those comics or care about them, it just ends up being confusing. Ray was gone for months because of what? Long-distance space travel time dilation? Huh?

His team-up with Superboy almost results in Ray killing Superboy, then almost dying against Brimstone because Ray exhausted all his power. Black Canary takes advantage of his school boy crush to get him to help her chase a crook through a dimensional doorway to another world, which later results in Ray having to fight Lobo, then time-traveling and messing up certain details of his father's life. The better half of Dr. Polaris contacts Ray to warn him about the return of the Light Entity, but when Ray can't make heads or trails of the warning, and neither can anyone else, he busts out Emerson. Which backfires when Polaris retakes control. Neron approaches Ray, initially as a woman, and after revealing his true form, Ray's more freaked out he kissed a guy than that the devil is bargaining for his soul.

Porter's work in less exaggerated than Quesada's. He tones down Ray's frankly ridiculous hair and Jenny stops looking like her skirts and suits are going to tear apart if she breaths too deeply. But he and Garrahy don't have the same knack (interest?) in playing with contrast in how they depict Ray's powers or appearance. He still looks similar when powered up, but there's less flair to it, less exaggeration for effect. Ray's not suddenly turning into a little bowl-cut version of himself while interacting with the Light Entity.

Though Priest doesn't entirely forgo embarrassing Ray for comedy's sake. Ray has to kick Lobo out of a space station bar to get Canary medical treatment, and on his initial approach, Lobo simply tears the top off Ray's helmet, taps his cigar ashes on Ray's head, then slams the helmet closed again. Ray gets attacked by Happy while still a little power-drunk from contact with the Entity, and after getting knocked into a clothing shop, emerges wearing a sun hat and a body-length green dress with polka dots. Porter's art has the pacing and body language to sell those moments, despite the times where you can feel his work veering into that '90 Image style of too much cross-hatching or characters gritting an impossible number of teeth.

It's strange, a big part of the series revolves around family. Ray's strained relationship with Happy, especially when he thinks Happy's dead. Ray trying to covertly kindle a relationship (not romantic!) with his mother, by pretending he wants to earn money mowing her lawn. (His mother assumes he's the result of some affair Happy had.) Death Masque is like a jealous child, especially once Vandal Savage starts sniffing around. It turns out Ray has a brother who is both older and younger than him, who comes into play in the last-third of the series. Ray's cousin Dean pops up occasionally, dealing out sage "wisdom."

I'm not sure what the goal is, given Priest also seems to be making the point, as an adult, Ray has to solve his own problems. Ray ultimately stops Death Masque, and settles down the Light Entity. He has to protect his mother and his younger/older sibling. He has to find their dad. He has to recognize Vandal Savage is a scumbag who was never going to help Ray, but instead groom Ray into something Savage could use. That fits with the notion of adulthood that, at a certain point, you have to take ownership of your life, but as far as the "family" aspect, I'm less sure. It's caring about his family that makes Ray stop whining about not being able to beat Death Masque, and just knuckle down and do it to save their lives?

What I Bought 3/18/2026

I did, in fact find a lot of books at the sale last week. Reviews of those start next week! Plus three movies, which I won't get around to reviewing for months yet. Still have all the movies I got at Christmas, plus Pluto's actually let me back in to a limited extent without an account, so I'm trying to finish off the films I had on my watch list before they change their minds. Plus I'll visit my dad sometime in the next month so, that'll be more old movies to review.

Marc Spector: Moon Knight #2, by Jed MacKay (writer), Devmalya Pramanik (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - Just another, ordinary, "getting the shit kicked out of him," day for Moon Knight.

Moon Knight and Zodiac are tearing through the Agence Byzantine guys, while Mr. Fear and Mr. Smith look on. Pramanik seems to be having a lot of fun with the layouts. One page that all the panels are of Moon Knight tearins through guys, the panels contained with the outline of his arm pulping a guy's face, with Rosenberg using bright red for the outline of the victim and the borders.

Fear's ready to get out of there, but Smith simply asks him to hand over a box with a set of sharpened dentures and starts telling a story of his childhood. And the reveal is, it's Bushman. You know, the guy whose face Marc cut off 20 years ago (our time.) I was under the impression he was dead but not no more he ain't.

Meanwhile, Marc's gone from pulping idiots in red outfits to trying to strangle Zodiac. Zodiac runs, still spouting nonsense about being determined to make Moon Knight all he can be. Then Bushman steps in, and before he can fight Moon Knight, Zodiac's found the control room, and pumps the room full of fear gas, encouraging Moon Knight to cut Bushman's face off - again. Well, that'd be rather trite, wouldn't it? Oh you fixed your face, I'll trash it again the same way. A little too Punisher and Jigsaw, innit it?

Actually, I'd wonder why Zodiac doesn't target Punisher, but I assume Frank's too straightforward and clinical in his killing for Zodiac to take an interest in him. Frank just shoots them or blows them up and goes on to the next. To the extent there's artistry, as Zodiac might define it, it lies in the sheer relentless attrition the Punisher inflicts.

Or Zodiac's really a punk that knows Frank would just blow his head off at first sight.