Loosen that Belt

Question that occurred to me a couple of weeks ago: When a waiter or waitress asks if you saved room for dessert, have you ever saved room?

For me, the answer is no. At a restaurant, I'm loading up on the main course. If I really want dessert, I've probably got something cheaper at home. Alex said the same, but said his fiance always saves room for dessert. I asked a few co-workers during a lull in a "team-building exercise", and two of the five indicated they did. Although they also said they had to check the responses of the other people at the table before saying so aloud.

Still, that leaves three for which the answer was apparently no. And overall, I've got 5 "No" and 3 "Yes." So I put it to you, delightful readers, do you save room for dessert?

Anna and the Dead (2015)

Anna's parents are getting a divorce, and send her to stay with an aunt and uncle for two weeks while certain things get sorted out. I assume it's which parent gets stuck with Anna, who suffers from narcolepsy and possibly hallucinations. But she's on new medication to help with that, though!

It's not working very well, because Anna starts seeing dead people. A dead kid floating in the surf at the beach. A man standing underneath the tree outside her window. Or she hears voices of lots of kids crying in pain from the middle of a field. These are not things that make one popular at their new school, to say nothing of the opportunities it provides the aunt for passive-aggressive comments, or for the uncle to peer disapprovingly over his glasses at her (while reading the paper in a room with only a blue light. Strange lighting choices people make in this town.)

Anna eventually becomes friends with a guy named Josh, who clues her in on a bit of gristly local history, as well as some bad history of his own, with his father vanishing suddenly several years ago.

The suspense and uncertainty is about what the locals are hiding, not what the ghosts Anna's seeing are up to, and definitely not whether she's crazy. I might have been open to that sort of film, but the movie gives that hand away early when Anna reviews footage from the camera she left at the foot of her bed (presumably to make sure she didn't get up and sleepwalk), and she misses a brief shot of the kid she'd later see in the ocean. So even if the kid she found in the surf is suddenly not in cradled in her arms, we know she's not nuts.

The movie's pacing feels uneven, as it seems to take a long time to get into the notion of what's going on with the town. It starts out seeming like this is just something about Anna, and its over halfway done before anyone's getting into why there are all these ghosts. It never explains how the ghosts know Anna can see them, or really explains why what's happening is happening. Though I appreciate there's no scene at the end where someone sits there and lays the whole thing out for us. Josh and Anna learn the "what", but the "why" isn't so immediately important to them.

And the time it takes showing Anna trying to fit in with the other kids, and how awkward things are with her relatives, at least helps make her feel like more of a character. She seems to drift a lot, quiet and always giving off this air like she's got one arm wrapped around herself to feel secure. It also helps build the relationship between her and Josh so that the various clues the movie drops don't feel too ham-handed. Anna doesn't know the town, so Josh tells her things about it as a way to make conversation.

What I Bought 10/28/2024 - Part 2

You may have noticed last Friday's post vanished for about a day. It was, for some reason, flagged as spam. Odd, considering it's a type of post I've done literally hundreds of times previously. I did go ahead and send them some feedback that it would help if they could provide a little more detail into why a particular post was violating community guidelines, because otherwise it's hard for me to know what I messed up, so I can avoid going through this whole mess again in the future.

Anyway, with that spectacular start to the week out of the way, and the latest chance to see whether the ramshackle, bastardized form of democracy in this country will survive still to come, let's talk about comics.

Babs #3, by Garth Ennis (writer), Jacen Burrows (artist), Andy Troy and Lee Loughridge (colorists), Rob Steen (letterer) - Everybody's just waiting for the show to begin.

Babs kills a few stragglers of Tiberius' guys, who have taken all the dwarves prisoner (along with their silver), thanks to Mork the Orc's info (I keep expecting Ennis to spell "Mork" with a "c", to match "orc".) Burrows draws it violent, if cartoonish, considering one guy gets his face neatly sliced off, but there's not entrails flying around or anything. Which Mork and his buddies are busy showing to Tiberius, because Mork's still convinced that a group of orcs, goblins and trolls working with a bunch of guys who want to drive non-human races out can't possibly go wrong. Shades of that Our Dumb Century headline, "Japan Forms Alliance with White Supremacists in Well-Thought-Out Scheme."

One of the group manages to track at least part of Babs' history through various vague sources, so we get a quick recap of her life. Essentially, she's kicked a lot of ass, usually without intending to draw attention to herself, but she has a real knack for picking losers. Makes money, blows it on gambling or land speculation. Works for a doomed side in a war, and not, apparently, out of some desire to help the underdog.

Meanwhile, Babs is arguing with her sword while rescuing the dwarves (and killing more of Tiberius' guys.) Barry objecting to being stuck in the ground as a placeholder made me laugh a little. In addition to the dwarves having nothing to pay Babs with - but they're good for it, they swear - Tiberius' guys seem to have taken Babs' friend Izzy prisoner as well. So she's going to have to give chase, on a boat full of elves. Which is apparently a horrible fate.

The whole thread with Tiberius and Mork, I'm just waiting for their inevitable and humiliating deaths. But watching Babs kind of blindly hack her way through life, careening from one situation - I almost called them adventures, but feel like that's not really what they are - to another, is entertaining. She seems to simply act on her first impulse at gaining any new piece of information, and that's a lot of fun.

The Pedestrian #3, by Joey Esposito (writer), Sean von Gorman (artist), Josh Jensen (colorist), Shawn Lee (letterer) - Stop, in the name of not getting harassed by creepy weirdos in masks.

The, whatever the thing with all the hands is, drops Jimmy at the same place where those two young boys' dad works. Meanwhile, the boys are talking their babysitter, Kira (the girl who Jimmy tried to mug in #1) into investigating a place they think The Pedestrian will show up next. Instead, they run into a bunch of the guy on the cover, in a nifty sequence by von Gorman where the Don't Walk signal flashes, and it appears on their faces each time (and more appear each time), but then vanishes when the signal goes dark.

The cop lady shows up to help, though I feel like von Gorman has the most trouble drawing her face. Like he's trying to add a few more lines to show she's a bit older than Kira, but mostly makes her face seem kind of indistinct, or like her lips are pressed on, Mr. Potato Head-style. Whatever, she's going to drop everyone where the boys' dad works, but it's closed. That's ominous.

Randy, having been fired after nearly getting killed by Jimmy, is helping the crossing guard lady get Pedestrian up and running again. By gathering a bunch of road signs. Relax, they're from a salvage yard, she's not committing vandalism. Just in time, because the cop and the kids get attacked by a whole mess of the mask guys, who the kids' dad has been recruiting for, some reason.

I don't think he is the entity, which said it needed to find a real dirtbag, but he's clearly working in concert with it. Jimmy seems to have accepted it because he's tired of feeling like he's just there to be manipulated by the "important" people, and wants to make over people feel helpless, too. So I'm guessing the doctor gave up the idea he could provide for his sons while doing something good, and accepted doing this crap for a good paycheck.

Sunday Splash Page #347

 

"Land of the Dead," in Marvel Zombies (2015) #1, by Simon Spurrier (writer), Kev Walker (artist), Frank D'Armata (colorist), Clayton Cowles (letterer)

In 2015, when Marvel canceled all their ongoing titles to play along with Hickman destroying the universe in service of his Secret Wars, the need for product was filled by a bunch of mini-series, allegedly set on different pieces of the patchwork world Doom cobbled together from what survived the Beyonders' attempts to destroy the multiverse. I bought 3 of those mini-series. Mrs. Deadpool and Her Howling Commandos is long since excised from my collection. The second book we'll get to next month. The third, is this thing.

I never really got into the Marvel Zombies fad. Maybe the premise just felt too much like a '90s What If? blown out to increasingly bloated proportions, what with multiple mini-series going back to the same well. Obviously I'm not entirely immune to a "everybody dies" story, just look at last week's entry, but it's rarely my favorite thing. But Spurrier had written something I liked previously, and Kev Walker drew the hell out of Avengers Arena, and I liked Elsa Bloodstone (and my list of books was dwindling), so here we are.

And the zombies are not really the focus. One does manage to teleport Elsa far away from her post along "The Shield", a giant wall I think Doom made out of Ben Grimm to hold back the section of zombie world he incorporated, but it's mostly Elsa wandering the wilderness with a peculiar child that she wants to protect for reasons she can't explain. All the while something else is tracking them. There are still other zombies, an entire gang of them led by a Mystique, and they retain their intelligence because they keep a Deadpool tied up and take out a little of his brain to feed on everyday via, as Wade puts it, "le Spork."

But as with the best zombie stories, they're really there to give the non-zombie characters a way to show their true selves. Spurrier and Walker keep showing us flashbacks of this Elsa's upbringing with her demanding bastard of a father. Who insists on no weakness, and goes so far as to expose his wife to a horror that shreds her sanity so he can have her taken away, because she was interfering in his training of Elsa. So Elsa is constantly confronted with the notion of how her father would deal with this frightened, secretive child with no survival training or combat instincts, who for some reason doesn't turn after being bitten. And then she keeps going against that training, right up to the point they encounter something much worse than a zombie.

Walker mostly gets to draw various Marvel characters in various states of physical decay, and his does it very nicely. When he's not drawing that, it's mostly the flashbacks of Ulysses Bloodstone being an emotionally constipated ass towards a very young Elsa, who looks suitably frightened or sad. It makes a nice contrast from her as an adult, where she's mostly glowering with gritted teeth or looking irritated while stomping some zombie's skull to a pulp and cursing about the annoyance of the whole situation. Which also serves to contrast her from her father. Even after all the training, she still refuses to just accept the harsh realities of the life she's stuck in and bear it stoically. Is constant sarcasm and cynicism a better approach? Eh, probably not.

And with that, we bid farewell to Many Months of Marvel.

Saturday Splash Page #149

 

"Skyscraper Showdown," in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man (vol. 1) #78, by Bill Mantlo (writer), Al Milgrom and Jim Mooney (artists), Bob Sharen (colorist), Joe Rosen (letterer)

Should this title be in the letter "P"? Maybe, but Summer (and Fall) of Spiders can't waste time worrying about alphabetizing!

(Slightly) more seriously, when I started the word document I'm working from, I only had issues from after the book dropped the "Peter Parker" portion of the title, so that's how it got listed. As Kelvin noted when we looked at the first volume of Web of Spider-Man, the idea behind this title seemed to be they were going to focus more on the Peter Parker side of Spider-Man. Except it wasn't like Amazing Spider-Man was all costumed antics, all the time. The job, the scrambling for rent, the schoolwork, the elderly aunt, the girl troubles, that's always part of Spider-Man, albeit the ratios of the components vary with era and creative teams.

So, in practice, Spectacular Spider-Man is just another book about Spider-Man. And at least when I was a kid, it was the secondary book. Amazing got the hotshot artists, the MacFarlanes and Larsens. Spectacular got over 100 issues of Sal Buscema, albeit the last 20 or so doing breakdowns with someone else on finishes. Buscema is steady, reliable, can make sure all the information you need is on the page, but he's not flashy. Plus, most of the issues I read as a kid were part of J.M. DeMatteis' stint as writer, when he would spend entire issues on Peter in some hallucinatory state, confronted by the trauma of losing his parents as a child. Given the choice, I'd rather have read about him fighting a Spider-Slayer.

So, unlike with Amazing Spider-Man, where I have decent chunks of several different creative teams' runs, or even Web where I mostly have Gerry Conway's stuff, my Spectacular Spider-Man collection is a hodgepodge of different writers and artists. Bill Mantlo/Al Milgrom for 4 issues, all centered around this big showdown with Doc Ock, and Peter wanting to get really serious with the Black Cat. 6 by Peter David, 4 of those his and Rich Buckler's "The Death of Jean DeWolff." 3 by Conway/Buscema (Acts of Vengeance tie-ins), 2 by DeMatteis/Zeck ("Kraven's Last Hunt"), 2 more by DeMatteis/Buscema. 2 by Ann Nocenti and James Fry (Typhoid Mary's involved), and then 4 by a combo of DeMatteis, Glenn Greenburg and Luke Ross. Three of those are tie-ins to Spidey's "Identity Crisis" story, and the other was a joke issue about the "League of Losers."

It's mostly scattered issues tying into some larger event or story I liked, or else a brief, single story that had some specific hook for me. Nothing longer than 4 consecutive issues. DeMatteis and Buscema did a pretty good job with Harry Osborn's slow downward spiral over about 2.5 years, but it's not one I wanted to keep a lot of around. It's in the background for long stretches, and the foreground wasn't grabbing my attention much. Plus, even when it is the main story, it's pretty depressing until the last minute.Watching Spider-Man's best friend slowly implode under the weight of all his father's sins is not exactly an uplifting saga.

What I Bought 10/28/2024 - Part 1

Another week survived. Ummmm, I guess that's all I've got in terms of an introduction. Given I'm writing this Tuesday, it's not even necessarily accurate. I may not have survived. Update: I did survive! Congratulations to me! Here's two comics from October I'm going to review, as I have done hundreds of times before, since whatever algorithm Blogger uses to determine community guideline breaks is apparently dumb as shit.

Deadpool #7, by Cody Ziglar and Alexis Quasarano (writers), Andrea Di Vito (artist), Guru-eFX (color artist), Joe Sabino (letterer) - Taskmaster with no eyes visible behind his mask looks weird. Like the saddest sword-wielding skeleton possible.

Eleanor is dealing with Deadpool being dead by being extremely violent, indifferent to her own well-being and screwing up jobs while making social media posts about it. Like father, like daughter, though I'm pretty sure this is why Deadpool was staying away from her in the first place, so she didn't end up like him. Also, how the hell has Preston not tracked Eleanor down yet?

Taskmaster is trying to help them track down and kill Death Grip, but that requires money, which requires they either complete jobs successfully (glares at Eleanor) or steal from someone who has money. Like some pharmaceutical/biochem company. A company staffed by robots named T.O.D.D. (no clue what that stands for), who speak in meaningless executive lingo about tabling ideas and whatnot. One is a little tougher than the others, though Di Vito can't seem to decide how big he is. Seems normal sized in one panel, then he's big enough Eleanor can kick him in the chest the same time Princess hits him there with one paw and it looks like there's still room to spare.

They get the money, but Princess wants to investigate a familiar smell, which turns out to be Valentine from Alyssa Wong's run. Credit to Ziglar and Quasarano for not trying to just sweep the previous writer's work under the rug, I guess. Beyond that, I'm not sure how this is going to play out, other than I expect Eleanor to try and bargain for help bring her dad back to life. She seemed to see a link between biochemistry and the online video about alchemy she was watching.

I'm guessing Full Metal Alchemist isn't a thing in the Marvel Universe, or Eleanor would know better than trying to resurrect someone via alchemy. But maybe she figures she'll just regenerate her body, so it's no big deal.

Body Trade #2, by Zac Thompson (writer), Jok (artist), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (letterer) - Groot really changed once he sold out.

Kim tries to break into the van with all the bodies. He fails, miserably, and the goon driver eventually drives away to deliver the remains. So Kim barges in on the extremely insensitive lady from last issue and steals a bunch of her files and her phone. He gives back the phone, though, which is how she takes a photo of his license plate. Batting a thousand here so far, champ.

He gets inside the branch office in Miami, makes a scene, catches an elevator and gets promptly clocked in the head with the but of a shotgun by security. But he gets to meet Ms. Wolfe, the local manager he thinks will get him his son's remains.

Instead she shows him a cutesy animated film (for which Jock goes with a simplified style and lighter tones) about what happens with the bodies, all the shareholders, I mean, sick people, that these corpses help. She keeps her distance pretty much throughout the entire conversation, such as it is. The one time she gets close is to dab some blood off his forehead where he got hit, and then she looks at it like she's almost confused by it. Otherwise, she either sits on the edge of her big desk, or goes to stand in front of the window. Either way, she's beyond his reach, face in shadow.

Which is her trying to dance around the fact his kid's body is G-O-N-E, but Kim's either dumb as shit or in denial. At which point she ditches any pretense of courtesy, reveals they know exactly who he is, and that they could easily have him killed. And they will if he comes back. Kim, of course, immediately calls some old friend from his ne'er-do-well days to request a gun.

So he's not going quietly. But Wolfe's going on vacation, and I suspect the child's body really is scattered across the world by now. Their coolant systems in the trucks are clearly second-rate, they can't afford to waste time. But if Kim doesn't do this, he has to deal with his apparent responsibility for his son's death (Wolfe brings it up, which makes 3 people in 2 issues so far, so I don't think Thompson's going to go for the fakeout), and clearly he's not ready for that. I'm not sure Thompson's really made me care, though.

Starting the New Year by Hitting the Snooze Button

Typically I listen to part of a Youtube music playlist while I scan through the solicitations. So I can sort of judge how interesting a month it is by how many songs it takes to make it through. It was only 8 for January's solicits. Granted, one of those was a 9-minute Deadmau5 track, but still, not a lot to make me stop and go, "Hmmmmmm, maybe. . ."

What's new that's coming out? Denpa Books has Short Game, which looks like a collection of Mitsuru Adachi's (Cross Game) shorter manga works. So maybe a bit like the Akira Toriyama Magna Theater I picked up two years ago.

Other than that? Ummmmm, I briefly entertained buying New Gods, but I think that was strictly a reaction to the Walt Simonson variant cover.

What's wrapping up? Avengers Assemble, and it sounds like it's Captain America's turn to become a snake-person. Ha, see how you like being responsible for the next 40 years' worth of America's downward spiral, Rogers!

And the rest: Let's see, we've got Metamorpho, Laura Kinney: Wolverine, Dust to Dust and The Surgeon (now listed as a 6-issue mini-series), all on their second issues. They're dealing with a rival to Sapphire Stagg, Elektra-Daredevil (is there some cutesy shortened name for that?), ecological disaster and, whatever 'the Hot Animal Machines' are, respectively. I'm guessing the Transformers from Beast Wars, filtered through one of those AI art things. Terrifying.

Batgirl, and Calvera PI are on their third issues, while Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu's up to issue 4. It's mommy issues, drug trade, and an imminent return to the grave to plague that group.

Beyond that, Body Trade is up to its penultimate issue (assuming I'm still buying it), Reed Richards is going to attempt to time travel to understand magic in Fantastic Four, and Deadpool's not dead any longer. Whether or not he's pool remains to be determined. On the manga front, volume 9 of Yakuza Fiance, so I better get back to trying to close the gap.

And that's it. Red Before Black was absent (and issue 3 didn't ship this month, either.) The Pedestrian's not back (assuming it will be at all.) Scout didn't even bother listing Rogues or Loop. I didn't realize Dark Harbor might just be another sub-imprint of Scout, but now Loop's absence makes perfect sense. Still, I guess 11 books isn't too shabby, assuming I'm actually buying all of them.