Saturday Splash Page #227

"Heavenly Body," in Venus #1, by George Klein? (penciler), Lin Strater? (inker), writer and letterer unknown

I'm not proud of that title, but I make do with what my brain provides. Also, Jeff Parker says in the HC edition of Agents of Atlas Ken Bald was the artist, or the creator of the character, but the Grand Comics Database has it updated to their best guess being Klein as penciler.

Venus started as more of a romance mag. Venus is the actual goddess of love, and lives on the planet Venus, which, because this came out in 1948, has lush wooded hills and oceans, rather than barren rock, crushing atmospheric pressure and sulfuric acid rain that never reaches the surface. But Venus is bored with all this idyll, and wishes she could go to Earth and meet a guy.

By the magic of plot contrivance, she is somehow whisked to Earth, and deposited in the middle of a street in New York City, where a cop tells her she can't just walk around like she's sleepwalking, because it's 'demoralizing.' Would you rather she walked around staring at her phone all day? A Mister Hammond sees all the commotion, and decides this lady is just the publicity stunt he needs to make his beauty magazine, creatively named "Beauty Magazine", a big hit. Presumably none of the other beauty mags on the stands had thought of using pictures of pretty girls.

Venus feels like a MacGuffin in that stuff happens around her and because of her, but she's not really doing any of it. She lost her powers in the abrupt trip to Earth, so she's a regular lady, except with no actual skills besides looking nice. Mostly it's Hammond doing everything. Hammond decides to run a story that she was discovered on a remote Pacific Island, Hammond fires his magazine editor when the guy refuses to go along with this nonsense. Hammond then names Venus editor, despite her complete lack of experience, and to the annoyance of his secretary, who Venus immediately tags as her enemy. How about making friends instead?

Goddess of love, unless she gives me a side-eye. Then it's on.

Later, the book shifted to more of horror bent, with Venus running into mummies and living skeletons, stuff like that. I'm guessing she got her powers back for that stretch, but I don't know for sure. Parker went with the idea Venus was a siren given human form - made to look like the actual goddess Aphrodite, to said goddess' irritation - by a Sorcerer Supreme that Golden Claw paid to act as security. She spent so running from that past and all the lives she took she forgot it entirely, until the worst possible moment for the team. Jimmy Woo helps her realize she's since used her powers to help people by ending conflicts and getting them to talk or maybe fall in love, and that seems to help.

The Agents of Atlas version is generally bubbly and friendly. Greets everyone with big hugs, changes her hair color to red once Namora's awake because the team can't have two blondes, that kind of thing. Someone that, at a glance, might be dismissed as an airhead, but she's perceptive and empathetic. Some of that is her powers, but she chooses how to use the ability, so some of it has to be down to personality. She chose to travel to the conflict-torn region where Ken Hale became a gorilla to end all the strife there. She's also the one who embraces her power when it's the only way to stop the team tearing itself apart. Jimmy Woo could encourage her, but Venus had to open up and do it.

The ultimate end of Agents of Atlas was Jimmy Woo embracing a destiny he didn't know about, and deciding to turn something used for evil towards good. All the characters are dealing with that to varying degrees, making the best of bad situations. Ken Hale accepting he's a gorilla and just hiding away is no good, Bob accepting he can't go back to Uranus. Venus has to deal with her origin not being at all what she thought, and having some skeletons in her closet as a result, but making the best of it with her friends. If they can make the world better, and she can help by ending fights faster, why not?

Random Back Issues #170 - Agent X #13

The guy in the lower right must be a carousel enthusiast.

Gail Simone's return to Agent X starts on a Portuguese cargo ship, where some of the crew decide to hassle an "unlisted" passenger, identity hidden beneath a cloak (and hidden by my clipping out the top quarter of that panel up there), who won't speak or drink with them. Apparently Portugal is big on being a cordial guest, because things rapidly move to them deciding to kill the passenger and steal his wallet.

They're interrupted by another guy wearing a (nicer) cloak and carrying a katana, who chops off one of the crew member's left toes and right fingers. He remarks he should have killed them, but seems to have developed an inconvenient conscience, as he removes his cloak and reveals. . .some guy you'd only recognize if you read Simone's extremely brief Deadpool run! We'll get to it.

Meanwhile, the star of the book, Alex Hayden, is moping in what remains of the amusement park he called home, after a bunch of guys tried and failed to kill him. One guy is left, the crier in the panel up there, and Hayden lays out all his recent screw-ups - sleeping with a best friend (Sandi), probably wrecking things with two women (Sandi and Outlaw), sleeping on a puke-stained Tilt-o-Whirl, the usual - before sparing the guy and remarking how inconvenient it is to develop a conscience. Lot of that going around, which is how you know this comic came out over 20 years ago.

Taskmaster showed up at some point with a job offer Sandi got them, and declines to discuss how he feels about Hayden sleeping with Sandi. The job involves playing chauffeur/bodyguard for Higashi, one of the leaders of the Four Winds, a mob that's had beef with Alex. Higashi also clearly has designs on Sandi, probably involving the bizarre trailer hitch he wears around his neck, and invited her along as a power play/dick move. Alex's attempt to pitch "smell novels for dogs," is interrupted by two girls on motorcycles trying to kill them and talking in, I guess broken English. Lots of, "am very happy to be killing you, tee hee," talk.

Alex loses a hand getting rid of an explosive-stuffed Hello Puppy, then gets kicked in the jaw and starts getting dragged alongside the limo, while Taskmaster tries to drive them to safety. Until Tasky gets shot in the arm and decides fleeing is for losers and slams on the brakes. Brief fight, they get Higashi to the big meeting, where he immediately accuses some guy with a man bun of sending the assassins and declares things settled between the Four Winds and Agency X.

Hayden's brief attempt to be the bigger man and not be jealous of Sandi possibly liking Higashi is rendered moot when she points out she wore a dress in Alex's favorite color. Good thing he didn't talk about this earlier, or he couldn't have complained about Higashi's hand placement so much while getting his ass kicked by giggling girls with pink Uzis!

After the party/conference, Sandi brought both Hayden and Taskmaster to her apartment to discuss being professional. What might be a good time for Hayden to mention he's shuttering the company is temporarily parked when Taskmaster notices the door's been tampered with. By the guy with the katana. Who turns out to be Black Swan, the telepathic assassin that was believed blown up with Deadpool! Except the non-responsive guy in the cloak is. . .Deadpool.

Who Alex immediately shoots in the forehead. To be fair, a commen response people have to seeing Deadpool.

{1st longbox, 20th comic. Agent X #13, by Gail Simone (writer), Alvin Lee and Udon (artists), Cory Petit (letterer)}

Tracking Gobi Grizzlies - Douglas Chadwick

There is a sub-species of the brown, or grizzly, bear that lives in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. However, given that the confirmed population at the time this book was released (2017), was less than 3 dozen, they may not be around much longer.

Chadwick was the writer portion of a writer-photographer team sent to Mongolia for a piece about the Gobi grizzlies for National Geographic in 2011. Then he came back to help for another 4 field seasons. Similar to Imperial Dreams, the book spends a fair amount of pages describing the landscape and the culture of the area. That the Gobi is a desert, but it's a seasonally cold, almost constantly windswept region. In addition to getting very little rain - 4 inches is considered a normal annual precipitation, and there was a 15 year stretch prior from 1993 to 2007 where it averaged half that - this is not a desert of sand dunes, but of rock. Tough granite the wind gradually breaks into grit that gets into everything, including Chadwick's eye, as he gets eye infections two years running.

Still, Chadwick seems to love his time there, for how different it is from anything else he knows. He describes the size of it, the seemingly endless expanse, is almost disorienting at first, but he comes to feel more at home the more time he spends roaming in his down time.

Most of Chadwick's time is spent in a particular protected section of Mongolia, the Greater Gobi A Strictly Protected Area, as that's the only confirmed range the bears occupy. He discusses the lives of the local rangers and biologists, who protect and study the "GGSPA", the challenges they face in getting funding, the issues with demands to utilize the resources for other things.

This is not like a national park in the U.S., where people can drive in and gawk at the critters. Access is restricted, so it's not paying for itself in tourism dollars. Mongolia has a strong pastoral culture, so livestock herders are allowed to bring their animals into certain sections of the GGSPA in the winter months to graze. This at least keeps them from competing with the bears for food (the bears are hibernating), but it's probably more grazing pressure than the plant life can tolerate.

Also, the Gobi Desert is rich in minerals, and a lot of Mongolia's economy was based on mineral extraction. So there are companies trying to get the government to open the area up so they can tear it apart. And there are the "ninja miners", people who take advantage of the desert's size and isolation to sneak in and run covert, small-scale mining operations. If caught by the rangers, they might get a fine, and their equipment taken away. Even if they shoot the rangers, they may not face harsher penalties, if they know the right people. So Chadwick also discusses the push-and-pull of trying to get government officials on the side of protecting this place and its wildlife - apparently it also has the only population of wild Bactrian camels - and how quickly the level of support can shift with changes in the administration.

All that said, what this book has Imperial Dreams didn't is they actually find the bears. Not a ton of them; in an average field season maybe 2 bears get radio-collared after they end up in one of the feeder traps, though there are cameras set up around the feeders that capture images of many more. But enough Chadwick gets to see these animals up close, not just hear about them based on recollections of someone pulling up memories from half a century ago. They seem fascinating, if only for how different they are from what I picture when someone says "grizzly bear."

They're closer to the black bears we have in Missouri in size - the largest captured is slightly over 300 pounds, and there are a couple of young adult females that barely top 120 - and live mostly on plants. There's a stretch of a couple of pages where Chadwick describes trying to learn from one of the local biologists just what the heck these bears find to live on in this place, and since there's a language barrier, it comes to him pointing at various plants and miming like he's shoveling it into his mouth. (Apparently, one thing the bears eat in abundance is the tuber the local wild rhubarb have underground, but also the flowers of certain species.)

The nice thing with Chadwick coming back for several field seasons is you can see how the research group are trying to incorporate new ideas into their work, as they gain fresh information, and how well that does and doesn't work. The feeders are mostly grain pellets, but at one point, they try adding dog food to the mix to provide more protein, because the bears do eat flightless grasshoppers, gerbils, and small lizards. The bears ignore the dog food. Why? Unclear at that time, just like it's unclear why sometimes the bears will chew on a camel carcass (based on their poop), but other times they won't. However, adding additional feeders at the same oasis, but further away, so one bear can't monopolize the food source, seemed to give females with cubs more opportunities to get some extra calories they might not ordinarily have.

I also want to mention, this book has some outstanding photographs. Of the bears, and the people involved in the work, but also some double-page spreads of the actual terrain. I might not think so if I was actually wandering around out there, but it looks gorgeous, in a stark, austere kind of way. So maybe I would like it. I like open spaces; I'm the only person I know who likes traveling through western Kansas. 

'Trust me: semi-fresh grizzly shit full of partially fermented wild onion sprouts is definitely not a hoax.'

Summer Stalemate, Maybe

There was not much in the solicits for July that caught my attention. In the meantime, things I'm buying continue to wrap up, which means the list continues to shrink.

What's new? Can we just, fucking stop, with all the Godzilla crossovers? Marvel's been at it for a solid year, DC's on at least their second Godzilla and Kong meet the Justice League mini-series, and now IDW is going to have Godzilla rampage through Sonic the Hedgehog's world. I know we all long for a giant reptile to arrive and offer oblivion via the warm embrace of atomic fire, but enough already!!!!!

OK, OK, something I might be interested in. Boom! has Vampyrates, by Fred van Lente and Luca Pizzari, about a world ruled by vampires, and an overthrown queen who has to climb the ranks of a pirate crew. Feels like something I might wait for a trade on, but, if some of the other things I'm considering buying don't pan out, maybe this can take their spot.

Cosmic Lion, which seems to be one of several smaller publishers now operating under some larger heading, has a solicit for Side Quests to World Domination, which seems like a villainess and her lackey awakening in the present day and deciding they could get used to a world without magic? I don't know; I probably won't get it, but the pickings on new things were real damn slim.

Ablaze re-solicited the collection for Mark Russell and Roberto Meli's Traveling to Mars, about the first person sent to Mars being a pet store manager chosen because he was going to die of a terminal illness soon anyway. Russell's more "miss" than "hit" with me, but maybe if he doesn't lean so hard into his attempts at "clever" satirical commentary it could be interesting? Or I could just track down the back issues.

What's ending? Is Ted OK? wraps up, and I thought Moonstar was only a five issue mini-series, but the solicit for issue 5 says the final battle "begins." Is Marvel going back to doing everything in multiples of 6 instead of 5? At any rate, until I hear otherwise, I'm not ruling out that it's ending here.

Though it won't be out until August, Seven Seas Entertainment listed the 13th volume of Precarious Woman Executive Miss Black General. And it appears Jin was able to resolve everything in this volume, so that'll be it for that series. How well he managed to resolve everything, I guess I'll find out later this year. 

And the rest: Fantastic Four is shipping twice, each issue by a different artist, and apparently the artist for issue 13, Sorrentino, uses AI to help with their art. I probably shouldn't buy that, since I tend to think "AI" is a sham, and people who use it are hacks. Too bad; Johnny asking Sue to make his skin invisible so people would think he was Ghost Rider sounded like a fun plot idea.

Also not loving Marvel going back to shipping titles twice a month like it's the late-2000s. Desperation pouring off them like Axe body spray off some douchey guy with a popped collar.

Batgirl is still trying to solve a murder that revolves around memories she's missing. In the realm of books Vampyrates might supplant, The Deadman's got to deal with some soul-eating alien demon, and I still don't know if that title is going to be up my alley. Oh well, another month of solicits to parse before the first issue arrives. Ditto Junk Punch, also on its second issue, as is The Matron, where one of the characters loses their job when the owners sell their restaurant. At least there's no shortage of sources of resentment to fuel a murderous spree.

Generation X-23 has Laura trying to lead whichever members of the X-series are still alive by issue 6, and Moon Knight is teaming up with Blade to kill an evil building. D'Orc's trapped in a crystal and the solicit is promising a guest star, which worries me. I don't need this book tying into some other title I've got no interest in buying. If Marvel can't pull that stunt off successfully with me, Image hasn't got a prayer.

Balls Up (2026)

Brad (Mark Wahlberg), and Elijah (Paul Walter Hauser) work for a condom company. Elijah has ideas, but is incredibly socially awkward, while Brad is good at a slick sales pitch, but is, as Elijah tells him, an 'empty suit.' Their attempt to get their company named the official condom sponsor of the World Cup falls apart when Brad puts too much peer pressure on Brazil's representative (Benjamin Bratt), causing the man to throw aside 9 years of sobriety in a coke and nudity-filled bacchanal.

They get fired, but Santos' promise to get them a first-class trip to the World Cup went through before his career and life were destroyed by Brad's frat house jackassery. So they attend the final between Brazil and Argentina, Elijah gets hammered, decides the Brazilian sausage mascot is actually a plant by the rival company that got named the condom sponsor and is taunting him, and charges onto the field. Brad, the empty suit, rather than sitting back and letting it happen, gives chases and ends up blocking what would have been a game-tying goal for Brazil, making the 2 "es Stupidos" public enemies #1a and 1b in Brazil.

Watching this was not my choice. I have an aversion to Wahlbergs. Some would call it pathological, others would call it common sense. Anyway, Alex's friend Mike threw it on during the Chicago visit two weekends ago. I feel as though, if it wrapped after their escape from the drug lord's compound, it would have been fine. Not great, but about as good as could be expected under the circumstances. It would still run certain jokes into the ground - the guys trying to swallow their prototypes condoms full of cocaine drags on too long - but there were a few funny parts. If the bit with the caiman was the final splash of absurdist humor, that would have been a relative high point.

But there's a whole bit after that with a bunch of eco-warriors in the jungle that, again, drags for how few laughs it produces. Eric Andre and the other guy whining to each other about not getting any from the girl they both joined hoping to impress is just sad.

The phone translator gag isn't bad, the karaoke scene's worth a chuckle, maybe, although Wahlberg's singing voice was, I assume intentionally, horrific. Alex sang along to some lyrics during his gig that weekend, and I compared it to a cat being strangled while imitating AC/DC's lead singer. That's about what Wahlberg's voice was. The payoff to the initial meeting with their rookie public defender was, if not something that made me laugh, at least clever.

Wahlberg and Hauser do a decent job playing characters who don't have much in common other than they need someone to cover for their weaknesses. It so happens they each meet the qualifications for the other on that score, but they're bad at accepting that when there's anything of real importance on the line. Which felt like the point of the karaoke. With something that ultimately doesn't matter, they work together great, no friction. Once there's pressure, each of them start trying to prove something and they mess up.

Still, it feels strange at times that Brad actually cares about or tries to help Elijah, if he's such a self-absorbed guy with no values. I guess the idea is he's not a psychopath, incapable of caring for others, and playing the empty suit that says whatever will get him what he wants. It's that he's afraid to express anything deeper. I'm not sure there is anything deeper, though.  

Oh well, Track of the Cat could use some competition for worst movie in next January's Year in Review posts. 

Hard Work Means No Play

Injae got the first win of his boxing career over the awesomely named Rock Kang. Unfortunately, now he must face Kang's big brother, Boulder Kodos!

OK, that's a lie, he's just shadowboxing with his memories of Bakesan (currently on his way to prison for 6 years.) The fifth volume of The Boxer shifts focus back to Yu's career. Now the lightweight champion, he's being aimed directly at the junior welterweight champion, Yuto Takeda. Most of the volume is focused on Takeda, emphasizing his contrast to Yu.

Where Yu's the epitome of natural talent, Takeda is described, even by his coach, as almost entirely lacking in talent. The epitome of hard work. What's more, he fully buys into the idea that if you just keep trying, you can overcome any challenge. He feels like he should protect and inspire others, give them hope they can persevere and triumph as well. This as compared to Yu, who gives zero shits about anything other than his cat.

Yuto's backstory is that he looks up to his father, who was a silver medalist in judo and became a cop. Misaki, who was a gold medalist boxer before opening her own gym, was childhood friends with Yuto's mother and father. When Dad dies rescuing a woman from some muggers, and Mom is claimed by a lifelong illness weeks later, Misaki's left with in charge of a child she has no idea how to raise.Yuto wants to protect people like his dad, so he's got to be strong, so boxing.

Except he has no talent. It's actually kind of a neat contrast with Jean-Pierre. We were told the lightweight champ would slowly go through the motion of throwing a punch, making himself aware of every bit of what his body was doing and what it should be doing, in pursuit of perfection. Takeda has to go through every motion, every piece of action that goes into throwing a single jab and memorize it to then cram each piece together, because otherwise he can't do it at all.

There's some ups and downs in Takeda's story. A classmate he tries to help, who ends up running away and looks on the verge of committing suicide. A gifted fighter that abuses his skills as hired muscle, that beats Takeda again and again and again (and again and again, and so on), until Takeda starts making abrupt leaps in skill.

I'm not sure what JH's is going for with the strange growth curve. Setting up a certain development in the title fight with Yu for one, but otherwise, I'm not sure what it's meant to represent, if Takeda is supposed to lack in athletic talent. Can you brute force talent into existence?

Either way, it's the brute force he and Misaki are counting on to defeat Yu, as the strategy is simply to keep the pressure on Yu, give him no room to breathe, take every hit without stopping, until Yu gives out from exhaustion. Will that work? Ehhhhh, no.

Sunday Splash Page #424

"Blinded by the Bling," in Marvel Boy #1, by Russ Heath (artist), writer, colorist, letterer unknown

I'm just going through these alphabetically, but it's a little funny I picked the two titles that lasted the least amount of time, as, per Grand Comics Database, Marvel Boy's book only lasted two issues. Gotta love the cover, though, where the blurb declares him the 'newest, most amazing,' in line 1, then finishes with, 'finally in his own magazine!' on line 5. How can it be "finally" if he just got created?

Friction between grammar and hype aside, Bob Grayson's scientist father decided to live on the Moon with his infant son after his wife was killed by Nazis in the 1930s. Except their rocket got redirected and landed on the uranium crust of Uranus' surface. Ah, 1950s astronomy, gotta love it. Now 17, Bob's developed some level of telepathy - presumably from all that radiation in the planet's crust - and his dad's sending him back to Earth to try and prevent the outbreak of violence over a new continent rising from the sea. Bob gets a costume, a big red flying saucer, and wristbands that temporarily blind people with 'atomic radiance.' But no killing, Bob's got to handle things the old-fashioned way: punching.

Then he fights pirates who happened to get beached on the continent as it emerged from the sea and thought they'd declare themselves kings, tries and fails to convince the actual inhabitants that surface dwellers aren't all like those guys, and watches the island sink back beneath the waves.

By the time Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk were creating Agents of Atlas, there was a slight problem. Someone brought Marvel Boy back in the pages of Fantastic Four, as "The Crusader." He behaved erratically, attacking banks that wouldn't give him loans for medical supplies to take back to Uranus, and eventually was destroyed by his much more powerful wristbands (which later became Quasar's quantum bands.)

So Parker changed Bob's backstory. Not the part about him being from Earth originally, or his scientist dad wanting to escape the violence. But the people living on the surface of Uranus weren't true Uranians, who are an amoeba-like collective living deeper within the planet, but Eternals who tried to conquer Earth thousands of years earlier and were exiled. They were allowed to stay on Uranus by the true inhabitants on the condition they don't leave, their byproducts being useful to the collective. Bob's exploits as Marvel Boy were supposed to make him an ambassador of sorts, so Earth would invite them back, which is totally different from leaving, totally. As Bob puts it, 'the Uranians do not consider such fine points of detail.'

The Crusader was the child of the exiles, modified to resemble Bob, but brainwashed to be blindly loyal, who got hatched before he was ready when the Uranians figured out what the exiles were up to and destroyed them. Bob ends up stuck in a dying colony, until he's offered a place in the Uranian collective, where he lived for decades, leaving to help save Jimmy Woo. Which also means he left the collective forever. No going back.

So Parker and Kirk go away from the superhero aesthetic, leaning on the '50s sci-fi vibe. He's still got a flying saucer - silver-grey instead of red - and the sort of vaguely rubber spacesuit look you might see in The Day the Earth Stood Still or something similar. No more wristbands and fisticuffs; Bob leans on his technology and his telepathy, which has advanced from some low-level mind-reading to linking thoughts and creating illusions/altering perceptions.

Decades as part of a collective of a species very different from humans has changed him. In the early issues of the mini-series, he keeps speaking in an alien language and admits human minds are difficult to fool, because they're so strange to him now. His reactions and emotions seem muted; Venus observes that he used to blush around her, but now he barely reacts. Even as he settles in with his old friends, he maintains a detached air, with some occasional dry humor, mostly at M-11 and Gorilla Man's friendship.

I'm a little surprised having been part of a collective for so long, that Bob isn't more tactile with his teammates. Instead, he tends to stand apart, hands folded behind his back. But he also extends his esophagus to eat, and his helmet produces a Uranian atmosphere, so maybe it's a safety issue.