Random Back Issues #126 - Power Company #2

Hey, it's a rough economy out there. The superhero market is flooded with folks trying to either make enough to get out or make a big enough name to avoid dying in a big event.

The Power Company's first mission is to keep a group of high-tech mercs called the Strike Force from stealing a mysterious stone ring with a big pretty gem from a museum. The gem got hit by an energy blast and out popped a green guy with a staff, riding a dragon.

He calls himself the Imperial Dragoneer and asks what world that the "Dread Master" can add to his dominions. When no one has any clue what he's talking about, he decides they're thieves in the temple and it's time to get to killing.

The team is completely disorganized and getting their butts kicked until Skyrocket - who hadn't even accepted the offer to join - takes command and gets them sort of working together. At which point the mercs re-enter the fray, the brief moment of cohesion is over, and the Power Company get the humiliated.

At least the mercs didn't make off with the "stone doughnut," as their boss puts it. That's sort of a success! Except they stuck a tracker on the dragon, so they'll find it sooner or later, even if their employer - a Dr. Cyber - is kind of a dick. It seems like a time to cut your losses, but you stiff one mad scientist type and so you're blackballed. It's a rough job market for merc teams.

In the aftermath, Witchfire - a musician who uses real magic in her shows - is already looking into music videos and movie deals in case this falls through. Bork's worried he's going to lose his job because he stopped keeping the dragon in a choke hold and got smacked halfway across the city, and Manhunter vanished as soon as the fight ended. As for Skyrocket, she figures they ought to be more worried about the Dragoneer's claims his master would take over the world.

On the plus side, Striker Z's buddy, who used to work for S.T.A.R. Labs before turning to movie special effects, upgraded Skyrocket's flight and power harness. Her parents built it, but they're dead and she doesn't really know how to fix it.

Manhunter checks in. Turns out he didn't bail, he was just busy tracking the Dragoneer his own way: following a big dragon flying around in the daytime. He tracked it to Alcatraz, where the Dragoneer's got the ring set up on a pile of trash. I picture the dragon thinking like a Flinstones' appliance: 'Sigh, it's a living.' Again, rough economy.

The Dragoneer waves his wand and makes a magic sign and says what this world needs is - well, he says a lot of stuff about sin and darkness and a doubled moon, a piece of ice-blue shadow. Doesn't really lend itself to a parody of "Love Potion No. 9." The Power Company's hiding in a fog bank Witchfire conjured up, ready to attack, but Strike Force is on the ground, ready to swoop in once the heroes do all the hard work.

Bold of them to assume the heroes will actually succeed.

In other developments, a woman in a hotel sees Manhunter on TV and is very distressed by it, putting in a call to Japan. And a cop hassles a teen sleeping on a bench in a train station, but the teen's intrigued by a for-hire super-team. She'll end up being the last member of the team, whose introduction we covered 4 years ago.

{8th longbox, 80th comic. Power Company #2, by Kurt Busiek (writer), Tom Grummett (penciler), Christian Alamy (inker), Alex Sinclair (colorist), Comicraft (letterer)}

One-Shot Harry - Gary Phillips

Set in 1963, One-Shot Harry is about a black photojournalist trying to uncover the truth behind the death of a wartime friend of his.

At least, that's what the book is about some of the time. Phillips spends a lot of pages fleshing out Harry Ingram's life, the day-to-day realities of making a living taking photos of ugly deaths, of dealing with white cops who wouldn't hesitate to hit Harry with a nightstick even if he wasn't taking photographs. Additionally, there's a subplot involving a member of a local councilman's campaign that Harry starts dating. Anita's parents are pretty far to the left politically, and a diary with the names of several of their friends has gone missing.

So Harry's theoretically looking for that, on top of investigating his friend's death, trying to finagle work, dealing with the long-term scars of fighting in the Korean War, dealing with the difficulties of his side-gig as a process server, and questioning his career choices. Looming over all that is a visit to Los Angeles by Martin Luther King.

I'm not sure Phillips manages to keep all threads together. Or the plates spinning, depending on which metaphor your prefer. There's a long stretch of the book after he agrees to search for the diary for Anita where it isn't mentioned at all. And that subplot sort of sputters out at the end. But the mystery of his friend's death doesn't really lead to any real conclusion. Harry knows the death wasn't accidental, and he may have killed the two guys personally responsible, but they're just mooks. The mind behind it remains untouchable.

That part is by design, as Phillips often has Harry's internal monologue focused on just how far he can go, even defending himself, when the people trying to harm him are white. Harry isn't of a mind to go a suicide run for revenge, so there's only so far he can go in the society in which he lives. It might also be that Phillips has further stories starring Harry Ingram in mind, and there's further plot development in mind down the line.

There's a trick to adding history of a place without making it feel too much like an infodump, and Phillips mostly manages it. Having Harry as a photog and process server, where he both has to know his way around town, and know what sorts of neighborhoods he's going into ahead of time, helps. I don't know how historically accurate those parts of the book are, but Phillips writes in such a way that it feels like real history.

The only reason I question it at all is that late in the book, there's a bit about Ingram and a childhood friend having dreams of building their own submarine after reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Ingram says they would have named it the Fantastic, after the Fantastic Four. Except Ingram's a Korean War vet, so his childhood would have been the 1940s, not the 1960s. It's just a little detail, and I was reading an "advance uncopyedited edition" that turned up at a book sale, so maybe that was caught and fixed subsequently.

'There were two nicks from bullets grooved in its casing and Ingram rubbed one of them for luck, as he always did. He'd brought the camera home from the war. Fleeting was the notion of photographing normal people doing normal things. Where was the kick in that? Melancholy moments like the one he'd had last night he invariably washed away with booze.'

What I Bought 4/11/2024

I wasn't in the totality of the eclipse last week, but that's alright. The one several years ago swung right through town, so I didn't even have to go anywhere then.

Fantastic Four #18, by Ryan North (writer), Carlos Gomez (artist), Jesus Arbutov (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Once again, Sue's attempts to get Reed's attention fail.

It's Alicia as a private detective, trying to find the missing egghead Professor Richards on behalf of his main squeeze, Susan Storm. Ben (in his human appearance) works for/with Alicia. As either her eyes, or muscle, depending on the need.

The story follows the usual pattern of dead-end suspects. Johnny as the dissolute brother who is in debt to the local nightclub owner (role filled by the Mole Man.) Namor as an honest, but arrogant, cop that's hung up on Sue. Gomez doesn't shift his art style much beyond adjusting character's looks and fashion to match the motif. Maybe softens the lines around Sue's face, makes the eyes a little bigger to fit the "dangerous beauty" role. Johnny still has that terrible mustache, though.

Arbutov colors most of it in grey, with certain objects in color. Sue's dress, Namor's uniform, the lights and door of Mole Man's club. I don't really get the rhyme or reason of the choices of what to color. Why Ben's cup of coffee, or the seats in the diner where Alicia questions Johnny?

The whole thing ends up being the result of a Cosmic Cube falling into the hands of just about the last character you'd expect to get their hands on it. No, not Willie Lumpkin. No, not HERBIE. Just stop guessing! Reed turns out to be shielded from the effect (how is Sue's force field holding when she doesn't even know she can do such a thing?) to guide Alicia to it, and she undoes what was done. Though, in noir fashion, she does it knowing it'll erase her world, but that she's already lost a key part of it, so this is the least amount of losing she can end up with.

Ms. Marvel: Mutant Menace #2, by Iman Vellani and Sabir Pirzada (writers), Rob Di Salvo (artist), Erick Arciniega (color artist), Joe Carmagna (letterer) - The cover list Di Salvo as artist, but the interior still says Godlewski. Oh Marvel, when will you stop being a clown car of a company?

Lila Cheney grabbed Ms. Marvel because Lila stupidly made a contract with Mojo, and when she didn't accept him rewriting the terms of said contract, he abducted her most loyal fans. Kamala was the only X-Man she could find, so here we are.

The rest of the issue is Kamala posing as a new member of Lila's group to keep Mojo occupied while Lila looks for her groupies. This starts with Kamala doing some truly terrible mugging for Mojo's cameras. Then, when it turns out the youth demographic really likes "Chord", Mojo throws her into a million different things while Lila's still trying to figure out how to detach her fans from some gizmos they're hooked into which make them, 'real-life engagement bots.'

I have absolutely no idea what that means. That they're forced to watch stuff to falsely pump up viewership numbers? Either way, Lila gets them loose eventually, while defeating a Spiral clone in a fight (and I call bullshit on that), but Mojo drugs her with something that tamps down her powers. Not enough they can't escape, but enough she can just barely send Kamala back home, where Red Dagger is waiting.

OK, Kamala has a space adventure. Fine, space opera is an X-tradition, and so is dealing with Mojo. But what was the point of this issue? We're halfway through the mini-series, and there was no progress on any major plot points. Not the cause of Kamala's weird spasms, not what the ORCHIS doctor lady is up to. She's getting shipments from ape-scientists (as in apes who are scientists), but if I'm meant to know who those apes are, I don't. Not the fact Kamala's friends think Ms. Marvel's a phony because they were mindwiped with regards to Kamala being Ms. Marvel and having been resurrected.

Literally any of that - Bruno helping Kamala test her powers, difficult conversations with Nakia, Dr. Gaiha actually making an overt move - would have been a better use of 20 pages than this.

X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes (1963)

Ray Milland thinks he's developed a chemical that will allow human eyes to see beyond the visible light spectrum. I mean, it worked on a monkey (who went catatonic a few minutes later). What could be the risk?

Well, it works, but Dr. James Xavier sees something besides what's underneath that paper, or under his friend's labcoat, and it freaks him out. Enough the organization that was funding the work decides there are no beneficial uses and cuts off his funding. Oh well, he's still got his career in medicine. Until he overrules the surgeon on an operation for a kid and removes the tumor he saw on her heart. Which makes him guilty of malpractice, apparently. I guess, "I saw it with my x-ray eyes" is insufficient explanation.

At which point the movie gets odd. Xavier's friend assures him they'll find a way to reverse what the serum has done, and Xavier freaks out, shoving his friend through a window, where he falls to his death several stories below. Now he's on the run, playing "Mr. Mentallo" at a carnival, where he comes to the notion of the barker (played by Don Rickles, with a considerable amount of sleaze.) Rickles, after seeing Xavier diagnose a woman's injuries after a fall, convinces him to set up in a dingy apartment as a "healer", who people can visit for cheap diagnoses they can take to the doctor for treatment. No expensive tests required.

Then he decides he really needs money if he's to continue his work, so he runs off to Vegas to win a crapload of money at blackjack. He wins too much, they get suspicious, his special glasses get knocked off, everyone freaks out at his eyes (very cool contact lenses), there's a car chase, things end badly. Whatever he's been seeing that the rest of us can't - ghosts, god, the devil - is too much to deal with. Everything from his friend dying to the end takes about 50 minutes (it's only an 80 minute film.)

It seems like the effect might fade if he stopped using the eye drops, although he also says the effect is cumulative. But he also says that the ability seems to wax and wane, where he can sometimes barely see through a layer of skin, so who knows. He's at a party, and we're seeing people's bare legs, or their bare shoulders and enough of their chests to understand he's seeing under their clothes. He sees into their organs, and sometimes it's actual footage of organs and others it's like a screen of a drawing from a book. The movie uses this yellow-gold ring in the middle of the shot to signify when we're seeing through his eyes, although as things progress, he starts seeing almost photo-negative shots of wires and buildings, or blurred kaleidoscopes.

First Contact with a Closed Fist

Life on the Internet.

I actually bought volume 4 of Star Power, titled The Lonely War, a few years ago, but didn't get around to reviewing it. I asked Alex for Volumes 3 and 5 for Christmas a couple years ago, he bought 4 and 5, and here we are. Well, the copy he bought is in better condition than mine, anyway.

Volume 3 (which I ended up reading online just to see what I missed) revealed the origin of Danica's powers, and also introduced a robot sentry. His designation is "T-O.M", and he's thousands of years old, so Danica naturally named him "Old Tom". With his permission, of course, because she's considerate like that.

Tom factors into a theme of characters wondering if Danica is up to the challenges of wielding this power. There are certain precepts a Star-Powered Sentinel is meant to uphold, and if she doesn't meet the standards, Tom's supposed to deal with that. Terracciano teases that out over the course of five issues, through a series of conversations between Tom and Beena, an archaeologist who had been a background character trying to befriend Danica in the first 2 volumes, and joined the main cast in the third story. So she gets her own little arc of being friendly with, then terrified of, Tom, before finding her resolve to learn from him as a way to protect Danica.

Danica herself is elsewhere, as she's been transferred to a special ship the Millennium Federation uses to travel to star systems beyond their "jump-gate" network. Danica questions whether she's up for making first contact with new worlds, considering her previous experience was the fighting a homicidal Scintillian queen in volume 1. She's also questioned by a psychological operative, or "psi-cop" (that Terracciano and Graham introduced in volume 3) under the pretenses of friendship. The mission involves her being far away from the friends she's made through the first 3 stories.

That the world she reaches is embroiled in some old race war between two groups who no longer remember why they originally started fighting doesn't help. Graham draws the two groups as distinguished by hair color, ear shape, and the color of their eyes. Not all that different from Danica (something she immediately notes), probably for the purpose of emphasizing how ridiculous it seems to her that these two sides are determined to commit genocide against the other. 

All Danica's attempts to protect them accomplish is making her an enemy of both sides. The commander of the emissary ship tells her to simply observe and report back, but Danica can't just float there and watch people kill each other. Worse, Mitch is receiving some sort of upgrades, but it's rendering him unable to communicate with her. So she's really on her own (though Mitch does eventually return late in the proceedings, with a solid light form that's kind of Gumby with a messy pompadour.).

Terracciano has Danica come close to breaking down a couple of times, including fleeing her observation post for a time. Which comes back to Tom's mission to make certain she's a proper host for the power, as well as the psi-cop's concerns that she may not be ready for the less-civilized circumstances beyond the Federation's borders.

(There are also references to Danica's relationship with her parents, where she seems to get along well with her dad, but her mother is overbearing and Danica's feelings for her are complicated. It seems to be her father who instilled in her the idea she needs to help people in a crisis, while her mother's the one who makes her doubt she's ever doing anything well enough.)

We get several panels switching between her watching with increasingly horrified expressions and the two races fighting and dying. Graham doesn't make it gory, mostly bodies slumped and staring vacantly, maybe some (purple-colored) blood stains. But there tend to be several dead bodies in those panels, and the places they're fighting are usually damaged or crumbling, indicating this has been going for a while. Either nobody has time to repair their homes, or no one bothers.

Danica does eventually find a way to help at least some people. The story avoids having her stop the fighting or convince everyone to get along. Instead she finds locals who don't divide themselves, and are considered heretics by both sides. I expected Graham to draw some of the children as having mixed characteristics, but he doesn't. Maybe to emphasize they're more different than Danica thinks from just looking at the surface?

There are also some background plots involving Grex, the angry lady in the panel at the top, interviewing one of those three pilots that tried killing Danica in the first story, and have kept popping up since then. Burke turned on the other two in volume 3, but his backstory here makes it seem like he was a decent guy who made a rash decision, then compounded it with more poor decisions. Making him discuss working for the Void Angels forces Grex to deal with her own past doing the same. 

There is a lot going on in these five issues, most of it pretty heavy. So Terracciano lightens things up with brief cuts to Danica's friends back on the space station watching a show called "Psi-Cop", which includes an episode titled, "Showdown on the Bikini Planet." It's ridiculous, but having the story begin and end with that brings it around nicely to how much Danica relies on her friends and likes having them around, and how difficult it was being away from them.

Sunday Splash Page #318

 

"Bugs' Hunt" in Locust: The Ballad of Men #3, by Massimo Rosi (writer), Alex Nieto (artist), Mattia Gentili (letterer)

Locust was originally solicited as an 8-issue mini-series, but for one reason or the other, it was split into two 4-issue minis instead. Ballad of Men picks up where the previous mini-series left off, following Max through the past and the present.

In the past, Max escaped Ford with Stella in tow, and we see him try to care for this little girl as they gradually escape New York City and travel into the wilderness. They camp out and he makes her pancakes, and Stella generally enjoys the whole experience. It's telling about what her life in Ford's hands was like that camping out in the winter and having someone make pancakes for her counts as a spectacular experience. Except Ford has never stopped hunting them, and eventually catches up.

In the present, Max and a young prisoner/devotee of Ford's he rescued for information on how to get into Ford's base end up captured by a different group of heavily-armed, unhappy people. Ford killed some of theirs, and while Max had nothing to do with it, he did happen to take a laptop belonging to one of the victims, which makes him suspect. But Ford, having already devolved into religious lunacy by the time he recaptured Stella, is making his grand statement, and there's no time for any other concerns.

Nieto keeps the colors dim and murky again, but it serves the story. For three-plus issues, any time we see light, it's a bad thing. It's the headlights of Ford's trucks as he catches up with Max and Stella. It's New York City, on fire because of Max's lunacy, driving the locusts out to swarm the humans who fled to survive. It's torches in some creepy underground ritual altar in Ford's new base, where he thinks he's going to make things right with God by killing Stella.

Only in the last few pages does he switch to a soft blue, as Max and Stella sail towards Iceland. It's still a washed-out hue, because this is no great, cheerful triumph. They haven't truly escaped whatever's come over the world, but they each found someone to care for and to be cared for them. The ending's also a bit of a role reversal from Rosi's Red Leaves, in that the child changes rather than the adult, but still retains some part of themselves, at least for now.

Saturday Splash Page #120

 

"Call-Out Post," in Stormbreaker: The Saga of Beta Ray Bill #2, by Michael Avon Oeming and Dan Berman (writers), Andrea Di Vito (artist), Laura Villari (color artist), Chris Eliopoulos (letterer)

Released in 2005, around the time Thor was being shelved for a couple years via a Ragnarok, this mini-series sees Beta Ray Bill return to his duties as protector of the Korbinites, right when they need him the most. Galactus has arrived, though the Korbinites see him as Ashta, a great destroyer god of their religion (Di Vito draws this as sort of giant purple jellyfish or flagellate protozoan), and he's hungry. As usual.

Worse, Big G has himself a new herald, and Stardust might be the worst of the lot. Stardust carries a religious fervor in its devotion to Galactus, so much so it regards beings refusing to be eaten as an affront. Not just those who try to fight Galactus. Even the Korbinites who are trying to flee, Stardust is intent on eradicating.

While it makes sense Galactus finds such devotion desirable in his herald, after all the others were either too self-serving or too moral, it still annoys me. Galactus knows this is happening and does nothing to stop it, which puts a lie to all those, "Galactus only does what he must," and "Galactus takes no pleasure in it," soliloquies. Then tell your herald not to finish off the genocide you start, you purple jackass.

Between Stardust and a Korbinite religious order that dislikes how Bill talks up the Asgardians, Beta Ray can't save the planet. But he puts up enough of a fight - including one bit where he slams Stardust into an asteroid, then uses Stormbreaker to drive Stardust's own spear through its chest - protecting the survivors, transferred into the glowy orb up there, that Stardust ups the ante to the point of endangering the entire universe by releasing some nightmare creature. The creature, called Asteroth, presents itself as a lady with bat wings and a Witchblade-esque costume. Di Vito didn't bring much of an other-dimensional hellbeast energy to that design.

It feels as though the mini-series kind of goes off the rails there. One too many additional elements, as Bill and Stardust team-up to try and fix Stardust's mess, and mostly fail. Asteroth is ultimately defeated, but Bill and his ship Skuttlebutt end up in some white void, thanked by mysterious beings for their efforts, and at Bill's request, sent to Asgard. Which is destroyed. So much for re-settling the surviving Korbinites there. Oh, and Asteroth hid its essence in the orb and feasted on the souls within. So much for there being any Korbinites to re-settle.

The end result is, Bill is reborn on Earth, in the body of a homeless man that's just died. He's still got Stormbreaker, and can transform into his traditional horse-face form (albeit with a new costume that mostly involves a more elaborate helm and no cape.)

I feel like most of this was ignored. I'm not sure Beta Ray Bill appeared in anything until JMS brought Thor back in 2007. Kieron Gillen referenced Galactus eating the Korbinites' home in Beta Ray Bill: Godhunter, but Bill describes the bit about nearly dying on Asgard and seeing some mysterious cloaked figure take what was left of the meta-orb as possibly just a hallucination.