What I Bought 5/31/2024 - Part 2

For part 2, we've got the second issues of two series, and I'm writing this on the 2nd. I hope Batman will at least knock on the door rather than crashing through the window.

Blow Away #2, by Zac Thompson (writer), Nicola Izzo (artist), Francesco Segala and Gloria Martinelli (color artists), DC Hopkins (letterer) - It's a quick trip to the bottom of the hill. Quicker if you don't care what condition you make it in.

Brynne finds a camera at the base of the mountain, but it's frozen solid, so she takes copies of her own footage to the nearest village where the sheriff is not on the same page about there being foul play. Brynne finds the locals uninterested in talking with her, minus a pilot who flew the two climbers in a few times, and that they worked with a local hunter. Likely the guy whose traps Brynne messes with.

The camera thaws and the footage reveals one of the climbers was nervous about something, and was recording the trip without his buddy's knowledge. The rest is unknown, but someone went through Brynne's cabin while she was away, the sheriff's looking funny at her (or Brynne's paranoid, I didn't really get the sense the sheriff was thinking of her as a suspect from their conversation), and her boss is on her butt to get those bird photos, which Brynne has decided don't matter.

We get a few more panels about some incident from Brynne's past. It looks like she recorded a man committing suicide, possibly in her office while they were talking. But there's never any dialogue, and it's always just one panel at a time, so it could turn out to be something entirely different. Much like Brynne's attempts to piece things together from the various footage she's found. Some of which has convinced her the climbers switched jackets at some point before reaching the summit.

I can't really tell that from the art, so maybe we're meant to take that as commentary on Brynne's character, that she jumps to conclusions based on insufficient evidence. The way Izzo draws the scene, as small panels of still images from the footage, where the climbers are little more than brightly colored stick figures, it doesn't really look like "Red" barely moved from being shoved, as Brynne sees it, given how far apart the two appear in the panel.

Morning Star #2, by David Andry and Tim Daniel (writers), Marco Finnegan (artist), Jason Wordie (colorist), Justin Birch (letterer) - It's Night of the Giant Children.

The family prepares to scatter the ashes, but the daughter, Marabeth, has some things to work through. Feeling abandoned by a father who willingly jumped out of planes into forest fires, mostly. Her mother tries to explain it, but it's unclear if that helps. And Charlie always seems at a remove. Jo reaches out to draw him into the hug and it looks like he steps back. At least, he's still at arms' length after the hug.

But the ashes get scattered and next morning, Charlie's gone. The ranger isn't answering the phone, so Marabeth goes looking while Jo waits to see if Charlie returns. No sign of Charlie either way, but Marabeth encounters a deer acting a little strangely. Not nearly so strangely as it does once it's out of sight, however.

The conversation that felt most relevant was thee part where Jo and Marabeth discuss which parent each kid is more like. Marabeth think Charlie is the one who takes after their father, while Jo is sure it's Marabeth. I think it says the most about how Marabeth saw her father, and how Jo sees herself. Jo describes Charlie, and herself, as feet in the air, head in the clouds. Charlie hasn't seemed at all connected to reality or the rest of his family up to this point, so I wonder if that's how Marabeth sees her father. Always off chasing some fantasy or dream.

Meanwhile, Jo saw her husband as a solid sort, protective, an anchor, based on how she compliments Marabeth and trusts her to take a rifle and go look for Charlie. But Nathan's the one who accepted a candle from a Romani woman and gave it to Jo, promising that as long as she burned it, he'd always come home to her, which seems pretty "head in the clouds" to me.

As for the weird animal behavior, I don't know. Something's infected them or duplicated them, I assume. What and why, no idea.

Volition (2019)

Jimmy sees glimpses of the future. Mostly he uses these to grab unattended cigs and place just enough bets to keep the rent paid and the booze flowing. Real low-rent burnout loser energy. When he agrees to help an old friend sell some diamonds for some Zimbabweans (who stole the diamonds from some guys in Angola), it goes from what he initially sees as a simple handoff to a series of events that end with him dying gunshot on a floor.

The broad question is the matter of destiny or free will. If you see what lies ahead, can you change it, or is it preordained? Jimmy takes the outlook that it's the latter, so there's no point fighting what he sees. Until it's his own death, apparently. Jimmy's mother died in a car wreck when he was 7, and his adoptive father worked on a project for a drug which actually allows for time travel, yet somehow your past self is able to see what you experienced. So Jimmy has really just been getting flashes of things his future time-traveling selves experienced his entire life.

(I think that's how it works. There was some particle physics gobbledy-gook I missed while I was getting my laundry.)

Anyway, because Jimmy seems to avert his death, only to watch a nice woman he met that day named Angela die instead, he starts repeatedly taking the drug, trying to jump to different points earlier in that day to save her. In that sense, it's a grimmer version of the 1955 scenes in Back to The Future II, with Jimmy trying to avoid letting his Earlier That Day self see him, while we see the same events play out with new context.

You know those zombie movies where the characters act like they've never seen a zombie movie before? This is like that, but for time travel. Eventually there are 3 Jimmys running around trying to keep Angela alive, and none of them recognize how their actions are feeding into each other. Some of that can be explained by the fact each Jimmy is increasingly injured, and the repeated use of the drug isn't doing their minds any good, but it still seems like Jimmy has to keep choosing the dumbest approaches possible.

Example: On his first attempt, Jimmy outmaneuvers the two goons that are trying to double-cross the boss and swipes the diamonds from the motel safe where Earlier That Day Jimmy hid them. He then runs to his adopted father's house, to ask him to give his past self the diamonds when he arrives shortly. OK, I get he was warned to avoid his Earlier That Day self. So he can't just hand them to that version of himself.

But he must have realized he's the reason why the diamonds weren't in the safe when Earlier That Day Jimmy and Angela returned to the hotel room, and he knows the boss will arrive at Dad's house soon. If you want to return the diamonds, why not just hide near the house until the boss shows, step out, hand them over, and explain how his cousin tried to pull a fast one? Why deliberately involve more people?

The point seems to be to hammer home the idea that things are predestined and it was always going to end this way for Jimmy, creating a sense of futility before the very end of the film. Which could either be an affirmation of how everything is predestined, or a counter that just because you can't see the differences produced by your actions doesn't mean they don't exist.

What I Bought 5/31/2024 - Part 1

Walking in the rain is nice sometimes. Having an umbrella helps, although I think not having any particular destination is more important. It brings a different sort of quiet from snowfall or stifling heat. Not necessarily better, just different.

Anyway, here's a final issue and a first issue.

Night Thrasher #4, by J. Holtham (writer), Nelson Daniel (artist), Matt Milla (color artist), Travis Lanham (letterer) - The city is warping around them, so either Thrasher's found some sort of gravity drive for his suit, or Elvin's anger-fueled powers are going to a new level.

Thrasher, Silhouette and their kid army charge into the mix. The lead cop won't listen to a vigilante and the situation, unsurprisingly, continues to escalate. So Thrasher has Sil grab the cop and the community leader while Thrasher knockout gases most of the crowd (including the kid army he worked hard to get to trust him) and gets Rage out of the police transport.

To the surprise of no one, bringing a prisoner you just freed to the cop who arrested him doesn't improve things. Rage and the cop are immediately at each other's throats, and the councilman gets shot in the scrum. Not fatally, though in the first two panels Daniel draws the bloodstain is on the left side of Ikolo's tie and then shifts to the right side (away from his heart). Thrasher makes a plea to the other two to help him save this community on the grounds they all want to preserve Harlem's soul.

Objection! Night Thrasher is presenting as facts things not in evidence. The cop's been presented as wanting to protect property, and at best, "keep the peace", but there's no indication he actually gives a shit about "the community", what with the stop and frisk of random civilians and hassling anyone who objects.

Obviously it complicates the ending immensely if Holtham doesn't write the cop as being reasonable enough to let Elvin off with 10,000 hours of community service, with Dwayne as essentially the parole officer. Even if you figure Marvel's not going to let the story say cops are brutal thugs who enjoy abusing their power and authority, it's still more likely the captain isn't going to buy in. Even if Ikolo, Elvin and the cop all think they're helping the community, they likely won't agree on what that means enough to work together. Then Dwayne has to choose where he lands.

Keeping an antagonist element that Dwayne has to work against while he resumes the Taylor Foundation's work and tries to help Elvin and those kids would have been a stronger conclusion to the arc Holtham was writing. At the start, Dwayne was going to leave entirely because these pieces of his old life were too messy. The choice to stay feels less complicated if all the side that have been at each others' throats for months decide to be pals and work together.

Blood and Fire #1, by Aaron Wroblewski (writer), Ezequiel Rubio Lancho (artist), Es Kay (letterer) - The guy in the back looks like he's left himself wide open.

Set in Japan in 1563, the younger brothers of the current lord are summoned to his side, as he's near death. The samurai we're following is essentially head of security for the middle brother, soon to be new Lord Ishida. The younger brother is both clearly aware of the order of succession and clearly unhappy with it, so it's no surprise when he ambushes his brother and his security detail outside the manor. The lead character, whose name we are not given, makes it out with his boss, but the lord dies quickly and now it's a matter of whether the samurai can make it out.

Except it doesn't matter much, because we see at the start he's in the middle of being executed, and it sounds like his wife and daughter - who we see him interact with briefly before the mission starts - are gone, too. I guess it's meant to be a question of where he went from there? Did he try to make it home and fail? Did he try to kill the younger brother for his treachery? If so, did he succeed or fail? He might make it out alive - his head's still attached and I can't tell how bad his other wound is - but it feels like an odd place to start. Guess it depends what Wroblewski does with it from there.

Lancho sticks to black and white, except for the blood. The shadows are heavy, solid things. No shading or gradation for them. Everything's a stark contrast. The way things are "supposed" to work - the next in line inherits and the younger siblings pledge fealty or at least challenge directly and honestly - very different from what actually happens - an ambush from the forest with archers. Lancho also switches to more of a widescreen panel layout for the fight and the opening in the forest. Four or five wide panels stacked atop each other per page. In the more peaceful sections in between, there's more variety. Larger panels that take up half the page to establish setting, or smaller panels arranged vertically on one side for a brief exchange between father and daughter.

Sunday Splash Page #325

 

"Alien Infestation," in Major Bummer #1, by John Arcudi (writer), Doug Mahnke (penciler), Tom Nguyen (inker), Carla Feeny (colorist), Willie Schubert (letterer)

Lou Martin's a slacker geek, until he opens a mysterious package that arrives on his doorstep. Then he becomes a superpowered slacker geek, who despite his best efforts, keeps getting tangled up in various insanity. Bank robbers ditch their meticulous plans to instead crash into a convenience store while Lou's trying to get snacks. Weirdos in bad costumes are waiting on his lawn, expecting him to lead their team. Nazi Tyrannosaurs come marching through time portals. When he takes a babysitting job to try and earn a little cash, the kid is possessed.

As it turns out, Lou is the accidental subject of those two aliens' school science project. The aliens - especially the one scarfing all the mac n' cheese - aren't much smarter than Lou, so this has predictably not gone according to plan. But it does allow Arcudi a way to keep throwing Lou into situations he would never willingly get involved in, because the device that gives him powers also induces chaotic events in his vicinity.

Lou also gained a sort of super-intelligence, albeit one that usually only works when he's not thinking about it. (While trying to remember what he did over the weekend, he converts a VCR into a sort of blaster.) Which is another way for Arcudi to bring in additional chaos, since Lou may not even know what the thing he created is or does, once he realizes he's done it.

It all gives Mahnke the chance to draw a lot of strange stuff, as he continues to develop and expand the style he grew into on The Mask mini-series he and Arcudi worked on. He can capture the outsized physiology of characters like Lou, making them look superhuman while emphasizing how they don't behave superheroically. Lou's usually slouching or leaning on the nearest table or counter like it's too much effort to stand up. The people who wear spandex are not flattered by it, because their gaining powers isn't some great cosmic hand at work, but a couple of goobers from outer space trying not to lose their scholarships.

The coloration Feeny gives the aliens, combined with the segmented carapace Mahnke draws makes me think of caterpillars. Except these two aren't going to transform into something beautiful later. The doofus stays stupid, and the other one just gets meaner as his science project keeps backfiring on him.

Nobody really grows in the story. The last storyarc is one when a much older Lou (looking a bit like Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, minus the mustache) has to go back in time to try and convince his younger self to actually, you know, actively try to stop something bad from happening. They eventually pull it off, but Lou isn't inspired to be a do-gooder or anything like that. He just wants to go back to watching TV and playing video games.

Saturday Splash Page #127

"Let Loose the Bunnies of War," in Starslayer #17, by John Ostrander (writer), Tim Truman (artist), Bruce Patterson (guest collaborator?) Janice Cohen (colorist), John Workman (letterer)

Starslayer was Mike Grell's creation, about, near as I can tell, a Celt space pirate named Torin MacQuillon and his crew, getting into various space pirate-style hi-jinks. All while not wearing a shirt of course, because this is a Mike Grell character.

I say, "near as I can tell," because I only really own back-up stories. Dave Stevens' "The Rocketeer" started in the back of the earliest issues of Starslayer, when it was still being published at Pacific. That only lasted through issue 3 - long enough for Cliff Secord to use the rocket to rescue a stunt pilot. After issue 6, the book moved to First Comics, and in issue 10 John Ostrander and Tim Truman introduced a little character named GrimJack.

During its stint as a back-up feature, GrimJack had three storylines. The first, "Mortal Gods", establishes the nature of Cynosure, a nexus where different realities phase into and out of contact with each other, and where each has its own natural laws that govern it. A bum can cross the street and become a god, with all that entails. Truman establishes Gaunt's look, with the beret, the cloak that conceals pistols, the scar over the eye, the death's head grin when he's got a god that's wandered out if its realm dead to rights. It also establishes his version of Cynosure, all dirty, narrow alleys, buildings with peeling wallpaper crowded together.

Ostrander sets up not only that Gaunt knows all about how the city works, but also his unwillingness to abandon friends, even in the face of a beating, or when the friend is pleading with him to just go. Also, that if you decline GrimJack's first offer to walk away, you don't get a second chance.

"Buried Past" establishes vampires exist and that Gaunt knows a bit about them and magic, but it ends up being more about Gaunt's past. Only a bit, about the one period of time where he found a little peace before it all fell apart. 

And then you get "Night of the Killer Bunnies," where Gaunt (unwisely) agrees to help a dimension of talking cartoon animals avoid death at the hands of vicious, giant, heavily-armed rabbits. But it does expand the range of the types of worlds you could expect GrimJack to interact with. It's not going to be strictly medieval or gritty noir type settings.

As annoying and ridiculous as Gaunt finds the whole thing, he still completes the job. It's also when Ostrander and Truman introduce Blacjacmac, Gaunt's best friend and leader of his own team of mercs. Much busting of chops commences.

After that, Ostrander and Truman handle an entire issue of Starslayer, as Torin's been captured by some doofy aristocrat in Cynosure, and his crew hire GrimJack to help with the rescue. A lot of the interactions between the Starslayer cast tend to zip right past me, but this is first time we see GrimJack encounter Chris Heyman, a Space Marine that pops up later in GrimJack during a conflict with the serial killing cyborg Kalibos, and the Sphinx, a wizard Gaunt fights against and with at various times through the Ostrander/Mandrake run.

The team-up story highlights a certain tendency of GrimJack's, where if you behave haughtily towards him, as the woman who owns Torin's ship does, Gaunt will really jam you up on his prices. If you behave fair and honorably, he might make a decision that's very poor for his bottom line. That would come up early in GrimJack, where a kid has only single coin to his name, and Gaunt accepts that a sufficient payment to find the kid's dad.

Random Back Issues #128 - Amazing Spider-Man #677

I do not believe for a second Peter Parker wears Axe Body Spray. That's a Lance Bannon move all the way. Peter uses plain Old Spice, or some industrial-strength perspiration fighting deodorant you buy in 5-gallon jugs.

Peter is depressed because his current girlfriend broke up with him. I have no idea who that would have been in 2012, so whatever. Peter webs up some loser trying to rob a joint and that is the only moment he'll manage even mild competency for the rest of the issue.

The Black Cat appears on the fire escape and Peter tries (pitifully) to flirt. You've already seen how that goes. Felicia reaches her hideout and after a shower, discovers a spider-tracer on her costume. Then the cops bust in. No, he didn't actually put a tracer on her, it's part of a larger plot by shadowy organizations.

Next morning, Peter is late for a meeting at Horizon Labs. Oh yeah, I dimly recall that being part of his status quo for a hot minute. But work is canceled, because there was a theft of some hologram-projecting phone, by the Black Cat. Caught on camera, no less. Setting aside how uncharacteristically sloppy that is, she was deflecting Peter's weak game at the same time, so he knows something's not right. Time for a jailbreak!

OK, never mind, she's got that handled. Time to consult a legal professional! Failing that, talk to Matt Murdock, in the middle of his cat-and-mouse game with Kirsten McDuffie about whether he's Daredevil or not.

They meet up later at the Chrysler Building, so Spidey can lose a game of suicide fall chicken (or whatever you want to call it) to Daredevil. I know, "Man Without Fear," but Spidey is "Guy with vastly superior speed, strength and reflexes that would enable him to pull off moves Murdock couldn't on the best day of his life." I know this is "pretending to not be depressed" Murdock, and Waid's writing that book so he's going to make his boy shine, but come on. How the fuck does Daredevil, the universe's litter box, always manage to make Spider-Man the Daffy Duck to his Bugs Bunny? Every damn time.

Spidey suggests they go question the scientist whose hologram phone was swiped, but they find him being held hostage by a bunch of armed guys. Or do they? DD's radar sense says no one is there, and Spidey forgot the hologram-projecting phone that got stolen makes really good holograms. I wouldn't mind Daredevil being the one to easily see through the deception there if not for the entire rest of the issue making Spider-Man look like a hapless dope.

Dropping into the tunnel the armed guys used, Spider-Man is sure something is still up, because his spider-sense wouldn't go off if there had been nothing dangerous. Are you sure? Maybe you've just got indigestion, or it's warning you forgot to pay the electric bill.

Once in the tunnel, it is (of course) Daredevil who senses the trap and tries to get them to backtrack. Too late, the entire tunnel collapses and as Spidey tries to dig his way out, he grabs a power line that's protective sheathing breaks so that he gets electrocuted.

Well, Black Cat's glaring down at him by that point, so that's less down to incompetence than angry ex with probability powers. It doesn't get any better in the second half (which takes place in Daredevil, because the shadowy organization that framed Felicia is trying to strongarm her into stealing something from Matt.)

{1st longbox, 133rd comic. Amazing Spider-Man #677, by Mark Waid (writer), Emma Rios (artist), Javier Rodriguez (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer)}

PrairyErth - William Least Heat-Moon

This is about a single county in Kansas. It's about more than that, really - the prairies as a whole, what's happened to them since white folk got there, what's happened to the people who were there first, the nature of history and time, the ecology and the history, the psychology - but it's all filtered through this largely agricultural county in the Flint Hills, where the trees first start to fall away and there's nothing between you and the sky above.

Heat-Moon breaks the book up into sections, each broadly focused on the 12 primary quadrangles of the National Survey which comprise Chase County. There's a map of the quadrangle at the start of each section, and each chapter has what looks like a tic-tac-toe board with an extra column next to it, a dot in the box representing where he's at. 

He usually starts with a short chapter of quotes from various sources which outline what's going to be discussed with that quadrangle. That may be the quality of the grasses, the reactions of white American settlers upon reaching the Great Plains, quotations of Sam Wood, who was a notable abolitionist (though he still wanted black people and Indigenous Americans living in separate places), or even quotes from Tristram Shandy, which was an unwelcome reminder of my miserable experience reading that book.

For there, he shifts to a general physical description of the quadrangle: notable natural features or towns (more often the remains of towns since abandoned.) Usually a chapter focused on a current resident - a woman running a cattle ranch, the man who worked in a since-defunct limestone quarry whose rock went to the state capitol, the last holdout of a nearly-dead town - and then perhaps a chapter on a past resident. A woman who left a journal of her first year on the plains, composed mostly of the day-to-day of the life, or the will of a preacher who moved his family there and died shortly after, as a sign of what people considered essential equipment.

He might spend one chapter in 3 successive sections on a 19th Century murder trial revolving around a prominent rancher, which left only unanswered questions. Like why it's so easy to get away with murder in Chase County.) Or he might spend a chapter on the prairie chicken, or wood rats, or harriers.

So he moves from north to south and east to west, though a chapter may sometimes take us into an adjoining quadrangle, or even outside the county entirely, such as the Wonsevu section, which focuses heavily on the Kansa (bastardized by the white settlers to "Kaw") who were forced onto increasingly smaller reservations within Chase County and eventually sent off to Oklahoma.

But he's also moving up and down through time, looking at the past and the present, speaking with people looking at the future of the county - agriculturalists and high school students alike. He makes a point that the limestone the county sets on is the remains of an ancient sea. Rock set down in thin layers over long spans of time, eventually covered by soil similarly laid down (or stripped away) by wind and water over time. People live, and die, and more people live on top of where those past people did, and they die, and the cycle repeats.

And things are forgotten or ignored. He finds a grave in an out-of-the-way cemetery, all by itself. Whatever inscription it had, has faded over time. What little he can discern by a rubbing or changing the light leads only to dead ends. There's nothing in the newspaper archives, county historical society, or court records to tell him definitively. If any of the ~3,000 current residents know, he didn't find them. That bit of history is more buried than the limestone, which people know is there, but not so much as many of the Kansa traditions (to say nothing of those who lived in those plains even further back), who are in some cases barely more than suggestions or guesses.

So it's a meandering book, the approach matching his tendency to pull of on the side of a gravel road and just start walking in a direction. Sometimes the approaches work - the chapter where he tries to prove even an allegedly "pointless" town can have something going by doing covert observation from the back of his van for 12 hours - and sometimes it feels like he's just getting us lost in the weeds. He lets the residents, living and dead, speak for themselves, which can work better or worse depending on how free a hand he gives them. One chapter is basically a farmer just talking for 7 or 8 pages straight, just the transcript of it. It gives you a deep dive into one person's perspective, but it almost feels too narrow, too limited of a perspective. Prairies let you see for miles in all directions; that was like peering through a fixed toilet paper tube.

'Yet the fact remains: limestone is a rock not unlike bone; the fact remains: the chemical nature of the old seawater produced a stony land that produces good grasses that produce good, hoofed protein digestible to man. Flint Hills beef is a 250-million-year-old gift, yet the sense of history here goes back only to 1850 or sometimes a little further to the time of lithic weapons, and then it ceases.'

Heating Up in Late Summer

Hey, gimme one of those really BIG months, full of books I'm excited to buy!

Internet: *dumps August solicits on the bar* That big enough for ya, Yank?

*skims through the solicits* Yeah, that's pretty big. I guess.

What's coming out that's new? DC's continuing the descent of Amanda Waller with a level of super-villainy that no doubt makes Lex Luthor envious. Yeah, I'll pass on that. Marvel, besides the continuing flood of new X-books - how many charts will Jonathan Hickman make Greg Capullo draw in their Wolverine mini-series - and letting Liefeld write and draw Deadpool Team-Up, is starting up Venom War. Will I never be free of symbiotes?!

One version of Marvel's solicits listed Werewolf By Night: Red Band, which might be some sort of one-shot. I enjoyed that Werewolf by Night book I bought last year, although this one is apparently going to be polybagged, which has got my Shitty 90s sense blaring, so who knows.

Boom! has the first issue of Red Before Black, by Stephanie Phillips and Goran Sudzuka. I'm not sure I'm the audience for a 'crime thriller reminiscent of 2000s-era Vertigo', and Phillips hasn't exactly knocked my socks off, but it probably merits a first issue trial. Magma Comix has The Pedestrian, by Joey Esposito and Sean Von Gorman, about a stranger who "speed walks" into a city and quietly changes the lives of the people living there. You know, that could describe the shopkeeper in Needful Things, but I don't think that's what they're going for. Not the speed walking part, the quietly changing their lives part. He acted quietly, even if the results often involved guns or explosives.

Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows are working together on Babs, a 6-issue sword and sorcery mini-series about a barbarian thief with a talking sword, published by Ahoy Comics. I dunno, it's been awhile since I bought anything new by Ennis - based on the tags, it was the first issue of All-Star Section Eight - but this also doesn't appear to involve superheroes, so maybe it's safe from the impulses the capes bring out in him. Because I don't expect "restraint" is a word to associate with this book.

I've been wondering what would happen with some of the books that were solicited through Scout Comics, what with the bad press and apparent chaos of unpaid creators. For at least one book, the answer is, "get published by Dark Harbor," as Loop #1, which was supposed to be released last month, pops up there. Looks like half of the six books Dark Harbor's releasing in August were originally solicited by Scout. Hopefully this company doesn't go under between now and then.

What's ending? Morning Star and Blow Away will both be on their 5th and final issues, if I'm still buying them by then.

And all the rest? Well, Blood Hunt is over, so I can welcome Fantastic Four (double-shipping in August) and Vengeance of the Moon Knight back into the mix. Deadpool's in deep trouble and relying on his daughters to save him. I thought for a second the text meant Warda, the kid Deadpool was going to have with Shiklah at some point according to Duggan's post-Secret Wars run, before I realized they mean the giant symbiote dog.

Scout Comics re-solicited the third issue of Rogues. I notice they also cut out all those imprint lines they were starting up, back to consolidating everything they publish under one heading. Which is probably a smart plan.

Viz Media has the 15th volume of Zom 100. I actually bought the 4th volume earlier this month, so maybe I'll get there, eventually. Along the lines of series I'm way behind on, I also bought the first volume of Yakuza Fiance this month, so the solicitation of the 8th volume from Seven Seas is of interest to me (although it's description of Yoshino as having 'resting bitch face' seems highly inaccurate, not to mention rude.)

Best case scenario, that's 12 comics, more than June and July combined. Call it progress.

Any Gun Can Play (1967)

A gang steals $300,000 in gold from a train. One of the gang tries to steal it for himself, hiding it in a location only a medallion he wears will reveal. He gets killed by the bandit leader, the leader then gets caught by the Army.

At this point, the movie's intent to ape The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly becomes even more obvious than it already was in the opening scene, when the bounty hunter called "The Stranger" (that is how he introduces himself when asked) kills three guys with bounties, two of whom are obviously done up to look a lot like Angel Eyes and Blondie. The third guy doesn't look a thing like Tuco, foreshadowing how half-assed this piece of garbage is.

The movie starts an almost 3-card monty shuffling of the pieces. The bandit makes a deal with The Stranger and they split the medallion. But the bandit loses his half in his escape and so the Stranger throws in with the guy from the bank that got it. Then the bandit gets The Stranger's half away from him, but The Stranger steals the book of 18th Century titles from the records office while the banker and the bandit form an alliance. Around and around and around.

There's also an agent of the insurance company whose money was stolen. His role seems to be, after some conversation is finished, the camera pans over to reveal he was listening around the corner (or behind a curtain). Then he arches an eyebrow at us.

Rather than gunfights with long builds that are resolved in quick, sharp sequence, we get extended (and extremely boring) fistfights. The one in the bathhouse is interminable, as the only use of the setting is guys getting punched so they fall and break the cheap tubs. The goons are not any sort of credible threat, but they can all take more punches than Rocky Balboa so it takes forever to conclude, just to reveal, surprise! another double-cross and changing of allegiances.

Part of me thinks it was meant as a parody or spoof, especially given the climactic faceoff between all 3 of them and how it plays out. Except it doesn't fully commit to the bit, like say, Blazing Saddles or Airplane! It wants to mess with audience expectation and maybe laugh about it, but only sometimes. The rest of the time, we seem expected to take it seriously. Well, the best thing to do with shit is bury it, so that's what I recommend here.

Forces Weak and Strong at Work

Good try, very comforting.

Volume 1 of The Terrifics, titled Meet the Terrifics, is initially a get the team together arc. Lemire manages that by having Mr. Terrific's company bought up by Simon Stagg while Terrific was off doing something involving other dimensions. Stagg's presence means Metamorpho's there, as well as that Stagg will be messing with some science he doesn't understand. Namely, a door to the "Dark Multiverse".

Plastic Man was involved in the multi-dimension stuff, so Terrific brings him along. Except Plas has been in some sort of comatose state for 5 years, until the otherwordly energies wake him up. Lemire's going for a more volatile version of the Fantastic Four, and having Terrific (and Batman, apparently) basically keep Plas around for all that time, making no attempt to find something else that might awaken him, or locate anyone who might care about Plastic Man, is certainly Reed Richards at his worst.

A signal picked up through the doorway takes those 3 into the Dark Multiverse, where they find Phantom Girl (or a Phantom Girl, at least) stranded on a giant corpse, along with the machine sending the signal. She's able to bum a ride back to the right dimension, but understandably wants to go home. As does Plas, and Terrific just wants to study these readings and figure out who "Tom Strong" is. Metamorpho's arguing with his girlfriend Sapphire about what a crumb her dad is.

So Lemire concocts the idea that dark multiverse energy has bonded them, so they can't be more than a mile apart. Then he throws together a few other threats to basically force them to actually do stuff, since otherwise each of the four seem content to sulk otherwise. The end of the trade reveals a mysterious figure in a metal mask, who promises he'll find and kill Tom Strong first, nyah nyah. It feels like the pacing got wonky, because the end of issue 6 starts having multiple full-page splashes, one after the other. The last 11 pages have 23 panels total, so I don't know if Lemire intended more struggle for the cast before they triumphed, or Dr. Dread's monologue was supposed to last longer, but something definitely feels off.

The book has 3 pencilers in 6 issues. Ivan Reis is gone by the end of issue 2, replaced by Joe Bennett for the fight with the War Wheel in issue 3. Then Evan Shaner handles issues 4 and 5 before Bennett returns for issue 6, which is the second part of a story about an entire town being slowly turned into Metamorphos.

Bennett's art can at least lean in the same general direction of Reis', though Bennett's characters are bulkier and drawn with a much busier line. A lot of hatching and trying for extra texture, especially on Plastic Man and Metamorpho. Reis' Plastic Man is very smooth and almost artificially clean, while Bennett tends to draw him with sharper angles and joints, almost like his version is trying to mimic having knuckles or actual goggles on his face, rather than the goggles being part of him, which I assume is what's going on.

Shaner's work doesn't look a bit like either of the others, keeping his characters much cleaner and simpler in design and look. None of the artists seem to do a lot with Metamorpho's ability to change shape, but I guess with Plastic Man (who basically never holds one form or set of proportions for more than a panel) it feels redundant. Nathan Fairbairn colors Shaner's issues with brighter, more sharply defined tones than Marcelo Maiolo does for Reis and Bennett. Maiolo may be going for something closer to realistic coloring and shading. They both seem to work for the artist they're paired with.

Lemire writes Metamorpho as gruff and sarcastic, bickering constantly with Plastic Man, who is basically never serious. Mr. Terrific just seems exhausted by everyone else's presence, and whenever he's not barking orders, it feels like he's talking out loud to himself more than any of the others. Phantom Girl is alternately petulant and impatient, frustrated that when she tries to turn solid, she disintegrates whatever she touches. She's the youngest, so you see the guys each trying to help in their own way. Plas tries to keep her spirits up, Terrific gets a journal she can use without destroying it so she can interact with something.

It does feel like a book that's struggling to hold itself together, and not just because of the shifting art teams. Dread has to reveal himself to goad Terrific into pursuing him, by presenting Tom Strong as an answer to Terrific's questions. Lemire's version of Holt seems mostly interested in Tom Strong because he doesn't know who he is or how he encountered the giant creature floating in the void. He just wants to pull apart a mystery, but there isn't a sense of why the others would care, except they seem to figure Terrific is the best chance to break this bond between them. So they could just refuse to go until he fixes it. He can't go more than a mile without them, and he doesn't seem to really want them around anyway, so why not focus on that first? Prioritize!

Sunday Splash Page #324

 

"Targeted Advertising," in Mail Order Ninja vol. 1, by Josh Elder (writer) and Erich Owen (artist)

Timmy McAllister's a 5th grader with typical 5th grade problems: Annoying, brown-nosing little sister. Bullies that steal his Pokemon cards. Snobby rich girl that dominates the school.

Then he enters a sweepstakes and wins kickass ninja Yoshida Jiro, inspiration for Timmy's favorite manga, and now he's on top of the heap. He has the services of an expert spy to get dirt on his sister. An incredible fighter to deal with bullies. A status symbol to give his popularity a nitro-boost up the ass so he can overthrow the rich girl's stranglehold. All for the low, low price of a grown man's indentured servitude.

OK, the actual manner in which Jiro agreed to this sweepstakes arrangement is never disclosed. We know he lost his voice due to a poison blade used by his arch-rival ninja, Nobunaga (who naturally enters the fray at the behest of the rich girl when she moves to regain control of the town) but other than Jiro's an excellent dancer, that's about it.

The first volume is Timmy's ascension on Jiro's coattails. The second volume is Timmy learning to stand up for himself, as he has to rally the other kids to free Jiro and the town from the rich girl, who used her dad's money to smuggle powerful and ancient mystical artifacts out of China for Show and Tell.

Owen's art has obvious manga influences, but still its own distinct style. He keeps the character designs simple and exaggerates for broad comic effect to match the mostly broad humor of Elder's story. The rich girl arrives at school almost on a parade float, and when her personal photographer temporarily blinds her with the flash, her coterie of yes-girls batter him in your typical cartoon smoke cloud of fists and anguished faces. That sort of thing.

I think I bought both volumes of this on the recommendation of Dave's Long Box. I know Ken at the comic store looked at me funny when I did. In his defense, I hadn't shown any interest in manga or things aping the style up to that point. Maybe he thought I'd hit my head.

Saturday Splash Page #126

 

"Me and My Mecha-Dad", in Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. #0, by Geoff Johns and James Robinson (writers), Lee Moder and Chris Weston (pencilers), Dan Davis and John Stokes (inkers), Chris Chuckry (separator), Tom McCraw and Carla Feeny (colorists), Bill Oakley (letterer)

Unwilling to leave any potential heroic legacy unplumbed, Geoff (spelled it as "Geoof" on the first attempt again) Johns created a successor to the Star-Spangled Kid in the form of the step-daughter of the original Star-Spangled Kid's sidekick. Who was a grown man who dressed like a barber pole when he was that sidekick in the '40s, then got lost in time, which explains why he's not a geezer in the '90s.

Johns uses the "new kid in town" approach of Courtney trying to make friends, crushing on a boy, fending off the local queen bee (who turns out to have been trained from birth as an assassin by her father who is also a dragon?) and trying to maintain a secret identity from her mom. There's also the antagonistic relationship with her stepdad, and Courtney leverages the fact he hasn't told her mother about his vigilante past (or his vigilante present) as blackmail to get to keep the cosmic converter belt. 

Eventually Courtney's mother takes a job at the school, but the book ended too quickly for anything much to come of that, or of Courtney's mother being in the dark about all of this. There's also a subplot about Pat's son from his first marriage, booted from military school, showing up and demanding the converter belt as his birthright. Again, the book ends too soon to play that tension out for long, either.

There's some monster-of-the-week stuff revolving around the school. The mysterious cult the queen bee character is part of that provides a steady stream of cannon fodder for Courtney to skirmish with over her stepdad's objections, aliens looking to take over Earthling bodies, disgruntled teachers with superpowers. Given the time the book was released, it feels influenced by Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but it's also not an uncommon hook for a book focused on a teen hero, so maybe just coincidence.

Lee Moder is the artist for most of the series, and he avoids making Courtney look too perfect. A bit gawky, long limbs like not everything is growing at the same rate. For all that Courtney tries to play being cool, she's drawn as being open with her emotions. I mean emotions besides sarcasm and disdain. She wears huge smiles when she triumphs, she glares when someone she cares about gets hurt. She's no hardened, experienced hero, the whole thing is still alternately fascinating and terrifying, and it shows.

The book ended after 15 issues, but by that point, JSA had been revived, and Courtney became a steadfast member of the team, gradually growing into the role. And she got another toy to play with, courtesy of Jack Knight, but we'll get to him in a few weeks.

What I Bought 5/22/2024

I finally saw one of those Cybertrucks in the wild a couple weekends ago. I only got a quick glimpse because we were going opposite directions on a divided highway, but I had to do a double-take to be sure of what I was seeing. 

Then I burst out laughing. It's just so bizarre, and ugly, it's hard to believe anyone would want to drive one, let alone pay 100 grand for the privilege.

Black Widow and Hawkeye #3, by Stephanie Phillips (writer), Paolo Villanelli (artist), Mattia Iacono (color artist), Joe Sabino (letterer) - Ghost of Hawkeye Past up there wondering, "What the hell happened to my fashion sense?"

In the present day, Hawkeye's not dying of poison, because the symbiote saved him. But it's presence is lingering, amplifying Hawkeye's inferiority complex. Probably in an attempt to get him killed and out of Natasha's life, symbiotes being greedy tar monsters. So Hawkeye tries to set up a meeting with Damon Dran - I've been flipping through my issues of Marvel Fanfare in preparation for that entry in Sunday Splash Page, so at least I know where Phillips got this dope and Snapdragon from - to bargain himself to save Natasha. Except, of course, Dran doesn't want Clint, so he's just turned himself into effective bait.

This mini-series, the present day portions at least, are not exactly doing Hawkeye any favors. It's him being mostly inept and incompetent so the Widow can keep saving him. Yes, the flashback sequences are about Clint storming the Russian Embassy to rescue the Black Widow, but even there, we see Natasha taking advantage of the confusion to free herself. Present Day Clint Barton is a hapless dope with apparently no peripheral awareness.

At least in the flashback we get to see him get Iron Man with an exploding arrow in the flashback sequence. That's after Stark calls Hawkeye "kid", and says it's better they let the Russians have Natasha, even though he agrees they'll kill her. Iron Man: Always ready to let someone else get it in the neck!

But seriously, there's one issue to go, and we haven't received an answer for how or why Hawkeye committed the murder. Or, in the likely event he's innocent - and sure I hope he is, I'm so fucking tired of stories about Hawkeye killing, and especially when it's somehow only a problem when he does it, while the X-Men are killing people willy-nilly like Garth Ennis is writing their book - how everybody got fooled. Or, how are he and Damon in contact in the first place?

Phillips has 20 pages left to work with, and presumably we also need some sort of conclusion to the flashback, but Phillips is not giving me a lot of confidence she can pull one of those off satisfactorily, let alone both.

What I Bought 5/17/2024

They tore up one of the baseball fields a mile or so down the road from my apartment. I thought (hoped) they were putting in some basketball courts. There's not really a good outdoor court anywhere close to my place. But I think it's for pickleball. Boooooooo. There's a couple of tennis courts like 200 yards away that hardly ever get used. Just tell them to play pickleball on those.

Ms. Marvel: Mutant Menace #3, by Iman Vellani and Sabir Pirzada (writer), Scott Godlewski (artist), Erick Arciniega (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Good thing about a Zombie Cyclops, nobody gives you any grief when you blow its head off with a shotgun.

Back in Jersey City, Kamala finds the Red Dagger waiting for her. He's rather confused that she's alive, since he escaped Emma Frost's non-consensual mind wipe and remembers Kamala died. It seems like Kamala maybe doesn't remember his name, something missed in the resurrection protocol, but there's still a spark between the two.

We are spared further awkward conversations and smoldering gazes by the arrival of Zombie Cyclops! Never thought I'd be grateful such a thing exists, but here we are. Zombie Cyclops is easily dispatched, Red Dagger stabbing it with 3 daggers held between his fingers (complete with "SNIKT" sound effect), which allows for more teenagers talking about whether to have a relationship or not. The part where Zombie Cyclops is still blithely firing optic blasts into the sky behind them as his body decays is kind of funny.

More Zombie X-Men arrive! More fighting! A two-page splash of the fight taking place above an alley where Kamala keeps trying to convince Red Dagger her friends are normally very cool and not crazy zombies! The bit where Red Dagger throws one of his weapons on the end of a chain in the upper left corner, and it bounces around until it pierces Zombie Nightcrawler in the lower left (what had to be several seconds and multiple teleports later) doesn't really make sense if I apply any logic to it, but here we are.

Then the Inhumans show up, hopefully to bring some sort of resolution to Kamala's powers glitching out, which is happening with greater frequency. I also assume the ex-ORCHIS doctor lady, who is responsible for the Zombie X-Men, will be sending out Kamala's old body in her original costume to. . .I actually don't know what that accomplishes. It's very obviously going to be an inarticulate rotting corpse, but I guess she figures it'll hold together long enough to make Kamala "kill" herself in front of the city she loves? Don't see what the doctor - whose name I don't bother to remember because Vallani and Pirzada haven't given me a reason to care about her - gets out of that.

7 Chinese Brothers (2015)

Jason Schwartzman plays a guy just drifting through life. He lives in a crappy house with his dog (played, I believe, by Schwatrzman's actual dog, Arrow.) His nights are filled with drinking at home. Fired from his job as a waiter at a crappy Mexican restaurant for stealing, he applies at an oil change place because he thinks the manager is cute, though he's incapable of expressing that other than by playing the clown. His visits to his grandmother (Olympia Dukakis) in the senior living community are as much to buy pills from his friend who works there.

I kept waiting for something to really start to happen. Things happen, but they don't really seem to move to any sort of conclusion or climax. Schwartzman keys the car of his boss at the restaurant after getting fired, and the boss and some annoying, waiter, chef, something, break into Schwartzman's house and pee all over his bathroom, only to flee when Schwartzman comes home. Then the annoying guy comes back alone later, and when Schwartzman admits he keyed the car, punches him. Why come back and do that later, after you wrote unflattering comments on his photos his dog?

Why is there a scene of Schwartzman throwing his cap at a passing car, only for the guy to get out and argue with him about it and complain this has ruined his friend group's plans to celebrate his graduating from vet school?

I think it's because Schwartzman is waiting for something to solve all his problems. The something being the death of his grandmother, who he assumes will leave her money to him, her only surviving relative. The jobs are just his way of killing time until his ceases to need to worry about money and can, well that's the problem. It's unclear what, if anything, he wants to do. Which is related to the lack of any progress towards a climax, I have no idea what his character wants. To sit around and drink, I guess. Study whatever foreign language catches his fancy. Wait for the perfect woman to fall into his lap.

Everyone else in the movie is actively trying to do something, even if it's just their job, looking after kids, trying to form a connection when the opportunity presents itself. Living life, basically.

Schwartzman plays his character with the mixture of creepy and pathetic I associate with most of the characters I've seen him play. Due to my low tolerance or interest in cringe stuff, there were a few scenes of him making a fool of himself I just didn't want to watch.

Loaded Bases

That girl's about 5 seconds away from learning Giantopia definitely isn't inside her locker.

Gemma Hopper, the lead character in Brie Spangler's Fox Point's Own Gemma Hopper, is a 13-year old who feels like she's being crushed by the weight of too many things, unnoticed by anyone. Her mother is absent, the specifics only hinted at, and her dad seems to always be working. Which leaves care of her twin younger brothers, and the house in general, entirely to Gemma.

You might think her older brother Teddy could help, but he's busy being the hotshot baseball star, everyone's darling. Gemma's reduced to being the pitching machine for his hitting exhibitions. She's tall for her age, and awkward about it. Spangler draws Gemma looking twice the height of her best friend Bailey, and at least as tall as her brother or dad. School is an endless string of things, trying to get in with the popular crowd is a struggle, it's just a lot.

Some things Spangler shows us, like a three-page sequence of laundry day. A panel of Gemma moving through the rooms, gathering clothes, lugging them to the laundromat, washing, folding, and coming home to her little brothers still scarfing chips in front of the TV like they were when they left. 

Sometimes, Spangler leaves it to the imagination. When Gemma's letting her brother show off, she does it by throwing at least a half-dozen different pitches to the exact locations he tells her to. It's not commented on, since Teddy is swatting them all over the park, but that's pretty impressive for a 13-year, both in the number of pitches and the command of them she must have. So when she gets fed up playing the comic sidekick for Teddy's ego boost, it's sort of a natural outcome of what we've already seen.

Spangler avoids making the story just an airing of grievances of Gemma, by having her make her own missteps. Gemma has a few heart-to-hearts with Teddy that help her see his perspective on his own fame, even if Teddy's attempts to help feel at least a little self-serving. When taking Bailey's advice on a school project goes awry, Gemma throws Bailey under the bus in a moment of frustration. She tries to just ignore everyone for a day or two (Spangler illustrates this in a simplified style of Gemma navigating some dotted line trail like one of those Family Circus cartoon strips where the kid takes the ludicrously roundabout course to cross the street), and that gets her chewed out by Bailey when the girl finally corners her. Gemma's so wrapped up in what's weighing her down and thinking she's on her own, she missed the people who were actually trying to help her.

I'm not sure how I feel about the ending. Gemma gets her moment to shine and be seen, which is good. More importantly, while nervous, she doesn't run from it. Spangler has Gemma trying to pitch while being mocked by a spectral version of herself (with wavier hair), which Spangler outlines in red, rather than the blue that dominates the book otherwise.

But it still feels as though her father only notices the amount of stuff he just sort of dumped on her to deal with because he's been told she's really good at baseball, which he's crazy about*. In much the same way that baseball was just something fun he did with Gemma and Teddy, until he saw Teddy's talent. Then it was serious business for Teddy, and Gemma was left behind to handle all the things Mr. Baseball was too busy for.

* The twins are named "Pedro" and "Carl", and I assume that's for Carl Yastrzemski, but my mind first went to Carl Everett, who played on the Red Sox with Pedro Martinez and all I could think was, "You named your kid after the guy who said he didn't believe in dinosaurs because he'd never seen one?"

Sunday Splash Page #323

 

"Makin' the Sausage," in Mage and the Endless Unknown, by SJ Miller

Released last year, this follows Mage, who is a young, well, mage, as he traverses the world, on the orders of a cloaked figure with a coyote skull for a head to face the destroyers of the old worlds.

Miller mostly sticks to one image per page, with occasional pages with 2-3 panels if he wants a slightly quicker reaction shot. There's not much dialogue either, just a couple of expository word balloons.

So it's mostly down to the art, and Miller tends towards a deceptively simple art style. It reminds me of a children's book. Maybe the one about the kid with the purple crayon, except Miller adds a lot of body horror to this story. I'd think the art style to "cute" to really work for that purpose, but Miller pulls it off. The mostly-silent pages, and the focus on Mage's expressions as it encounters these things, helps to sell it. 

It's not a peaceful world Mage stepped into, and he gets increasingly worn down and hurt as the story progresses. He's swallowed by some immense shadow thing, and its innards bite and corrupt his arm. So he blasts it off with the magic wand and grows an arm of vines in its stead. He meets either an anthropologist or a biologist - who Miller dubs "Fortune" - and they find more trouble. It's sad to see Mage go from cheerfully helping flowers bloom and greeting those he meets with smiles, to later keeping his guard up and trying to warn people away from his friend. The world has taken its toll in tangible and intangible ways.

It isn't all misery, thankfully. The infected arm becomes its own being (called "Double"), who helps Mage escape the shadow creature's insides. Fortune helps him repair his wand, and takes care of him after an especially brutal encounter that leaves him with a mangled leg and down an arm. Again. It's not clear how much good Mage actually accomplished, as Miller makes it clear this process has been going for a long time, and may go for a long time yet. But we at least see how his actions have made things better for those that follow, and maybe a community effort will speed things along.

Saturday Splash Page #125

 

"Aurora Borealis," in Station 16, by Hermann (writer/artist)

This isn't actually a full-page splash, as there were three other panels taking up the top quarter of the two pages, but it was the closest thing to it, and it's a cool image.

A Russian squad stationed in Novaya Zemlya receive a distress call from a weather station that has been abandoned for 50 years. Still, best to be sure. They helicopter in, and find an abandoned base. Then the aurora occurs, the helicopter vanishes, and the base is lit up and lively. Things go downhill in a hurry from there.

Hermann keeps the story focused on Grigory Grigorievich, the rookie on the squad. He's the one who hears the initial distress call, and when everything shifts, he's the one who finds a wounded man in a lab coat, who seems to recognize Grigory and accuses him of being a counter-revolutionary. Soon after, Grigory finds his sergeant, chained shirtless to a lightpost, and an unearthly blue that I think is meant for effect.

Oh, and he's missing his eyes. Lot of people missing eyes in this story.

Grigory is written as gradually going from uneasy to panicked. There's no planning or forethought, he just reacts as threats appear or recede. Shoot until the bullets are gone, run until he can't or there's nothing to run from. Though he does know the phrase, "spatiotemporal rift," so that's something.

Hermann uses a lot of small panels focused on Grigory's face, keeping him hemmed in. That's when he isn't using broad, short panels to remind us of the isolation. Whatever time he's in, Grigory is a long way from any help. The skips through time are erratic and unpredictable in duration and the amount of time lost. It doesn't always make sense - Grigory drops a scalpel under an operating table long after the base is abandoned, then finds it there when he is shunted back into the past a few pages later - but that adds to the disorientation for the reader and Grigory.

Random Back Issues #127 - Test #1

Looks more like Kansas to me. Maybe eastern Colorado.

Aleph's hitchhiking comes to an abrupt end after asking too many personal questions and gets dropped off somewhere in Iowa. Or Nebraska.

While Aleph converses with some sort of AI/Alexa thing, a bunch of guys in white SUVs show up. Aleph underwent a lot of experiments that involved modifications, and the companies that did those experiments want their proprietary technology back.

Judging by the flashback to Aleph's journey to the middle of nowhere, those aren't the first people they've killed trying to find Laurelwood. A town that was removed from all the maps. What's there? Aleph doesn't know, but they want to find out.

Their arrival is marked by immediately being stung by some mechanical mosquito, prompting Aleph to bolt for the nearest hotel to wait out whatever will happen. Takes a bunch of "brain pills" (use not detailed) and crawls inside the steamer trunk to sleep, while weird shadows watching through the mirror. You know, one of my coworkers briefly stayed in a hotel where she thought there was something weird about the mirror and promptly found a different hotel. But Aleph's in either no position or no mind to be choosy.

After another flashback detailing how Aleph escaped the research lab (having a fellow patient stab them bad enough to get moved to a less-secure place) Aleph's up and patching up the places where the seams are starting to show, it's time to investigate the town. Laurelwood looks a lot like a regular town, except for all the things that don't fit. Roombas cleaning the streets, VR helmets, grocery stores stocked with brands never seen before.

All of which seems to overload Aleph, who then somehow overloads the lights in the supermarket. Well, that'll get most anyone asked to leave, but the streets are full of more guys with white SUVs, so Aleph tries their luck in a bookstore, and gets a quartet of senior citizens wielding sabers for the effort.

{11th longbox, 75th comic, Test #1, by Christopher Sebela (writer), Jen Hickman (artist), Harry Saxon (colorist), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (letterer}

Hellfire - John Saul

You know how the story goes. There's an old mill, closed a long time, lots of ugly stories about the reasons why floating around town. The patriarch of the family that owns it dies, and his son resolves to turn it into a classy little shopfront. Even when people die under mysterious circumstances, even when his stepdaughter insists she's made friends with a dead girl who lives in a little room behind the stairs in the basement of the mill, he pushes ahead.

It ends badly. Really badly.

In a lot of ways, it's about the stepdaughter, Beth, feeling uprooted by her mother marrying a rich guy who lives in the big house on the hill. None of her old friends want to spend time with her anymore, and her stepsister and step-grandmother are snobbish assholes who treat her as garbage. She's trying not to make like difficult, so she's ends up with no one to confide in, except a ghost.

But it's also about the limits of what you can force to happen. The stepdad, Phillip, ignores any objections to the project. His mother objects that it isn't what his father wanted? Ignored. His wife Carolyn, Beth's mom, suggests that maybe there is something wrong with the mill and it should just be torn down? Ignored. Too much money sunk into it now.

And by that same token, Phillip tries to brute force the halves of his family together. It's to his credit that he defends Carolyn and Beth from his daughter and mother's cruelty. But he can't undo generations of claptrap about breeding and one's proper station in life. His daughter in particular, goes round the bend to what seems an excessive degree on Saul's part. Not the cruelty, but the fact she ultimately deigns to get her own hands dirty trying to get rid of Beth once and for all. Up to that point, Tracey's been content with harsh words and backhanded comments, spreading rumors among her friends. Suddenly she's up to murder she's going to clumsily disguise as suicide.

Like I said, it ends badly. For everyone, since this is one of those horror stories that ends on an ominous note, rather than a hopeful or relieved one.

'And even though he was crying, she knew immediately that he, too, had retreated into a private world where the mill could not penetrate. He, like herself - like all the children - had escaped into another world, oblivious of the world in which his body toiled.

The fire was spreading now, sending tongues of flame out across the floor as billows of smoke rose from the rags and filled the room with a choking fog.'