What I Bought 7/15/2026

Google sent some notice a few weeks back that they wanted me to approve some thing or the other that would let them use anything I searched for to train their bullshit faux-AI. I, being the contrary sort, said no. So now Google and Google Maps don't recall anything I searched for previously. Which I suppose I have to admire, from a pettiness standpoint if nothing else.

D'Orc #6, by Brett Bean (writer/artist), Frank William (color artist), Nate Piekos (letterer) - The fantasy world equivalent of a Ghostbusters containment unit.

D'Orc travels through some spiritual realm with a talking Super Smash Bros. logo that is apparently Fate. Fate shows D'Orc how he was conceived, but is vague about the identity of his parents, other than his mom was an orc and his dad a dwarf, the last 2 survivors of some big war, who shared one night of probably hate-sex.

Fate's more relevant point is that nothing is destined, because everyone is always making choices, and all those choices have consequences that overlap and react, so how could things be destined? Except Fate also implies it already knows what choice D'Orc is going to make as far as whether to help the bone witches (apparently there's an entire coven) burn the world down. Which sure sounds like something that's destined.

D'Orc escapes the crystal to find the Bone Witch, his shield, and the chicken are fleeing something. The something is the angry dwarf from a few issues ago, now minus part of his face. Which doesn't make sense, because the Witch's potion was actually supposed to trigger D'Orc's berserker fury so he would kill the dwarf, because the Witch hates him for something he did. Possibly sleeping with D'Orc's mom. Possibly never calling the Bone Witch by her name (whatever that is.) Probably something bigger than either of those. Regardless, why would a potion meant for that erase part of someone's face?

There's some fighting, there's some attempts at escaping, D'Orc is falling out of the sky into the dark half of the realm. Maybe? He was just supposed to head for the Scar - isn't that where he started the series? - but I guess he needs to see how the other side lives.

It feels like Bean finally did something beyond, "D'Orc runs into some random people and shit happens." There's some actual momentum towards, well, something. The Bone Witch Coven as someone for D'Orc to seek out. The angry dwarf deciding he's going to raise an army, which I guess locks him into Primary Antagonist role for the near-future. I was waiting to see if the book would actually give me a reason to look forward to the next issue beyond hoping the next issue would give me a reason, and I guess this qualifies. 

Fantastic Four #14, by Ryan North (writer), Ramon Rosanas (artist), Edgar Delgado (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) -  The glitchy effect on the logo made me confused whether there'd been a printing error, or my eyes were just getting really shitty.

Dinner at the Baxter Building is interrupted with Jo and Nikki find the rest of the family staring transfixed at a series of numbers on a screen. Or in Alicia's case, staring blankly as her fingers run over a series of numbers on a touchpad. Nothing can get their attention or pull them away from the numbers.

And people are sharing this string of numbers, which is apparently the furthest out anyone has ever calculated pi, worldwide, causing more and more people to enter this fugue state. And if they lose access to the sequence, say because their phone battery dies, or someone rips open the faceplate of their fancy-schmancy armor, they go crazy.

Yes, like that. Now Tony Stark has another excuse the next time he does something horrible, besides "booze" and "futurism."

The kids figure out this is like that time Reed explained that poison ivy pretty much only bothers humans, and this is not something to improve the odds of survival, just a weird, random development. For some reason, a particular sequence in pi fucks with humans' brains. And since the kids can't change the value of pi, they have to figure something else out.

The answer involves time travel to mess with human evolution, and goddamn does North seem to be going to the time travel well a lot. Mucking with time was a huge part of One World Under Doom, especially the FF issues, where it felt like there were no fewer than 3 different stories that involved time travel. He just sent Reed and Johnny to the Roman era two issues ago. Give the timeline a rest for a minute, man. 

So there's a clue in a particular something that's off in Rosanas' art throughout the issue, up to the point Jo and Nikki explain it. And then when they make their fix, it reverts things to what we would consider normal. Except it's more like they made that the new normal. I'm not sure if I have more trouble with that, or the idea this was supposed to be an entirely random thing, and not a targeted attack. Also, I can't believe that, "Hey, we calculated pi to 8 billion digits!" would get that much traction on social media. Not to mention all the people that would never see it on social media. Like me.

Not to mention all the people on Marvel-Earth who aren't humans or aren't entirely humans, that therefore shouldn't be affected. Carol Danvers is half-Kree now. Beta Ray Bill's apparently Thor now, he ain't a primate. Clea's mother is whatever the heck Umar is, which I doubt is "human," regardless of what she looks like.

Other People's Unfinished Business

Love yourself, and you'll never be lonely a day in your life. Wait, that's not right. . .

The Unfinished Swan finds Monroe adjusting to the death of his mother, who made many paintings of animals, but never finished any of them. Monroe could only keep one, a swan whose neck wasn't complete, but one night, the swan leaps off the canvas, and Monroe sets out in pursuit.

The chase leads him through a fairy tale world of castles and giants, towers and ships carried through the skies on balloons. Though some of the views are staggering, the world is frequently monochrome, save the swan's gold-yellow footprints. However, Monroe can chuck paint around to bring some color to his surroundings.

The paint helps him in pursuit of the swan, though the ways it helps varies. In earlier levels, it distinguishes the path. In a world where everything is white, how could you tell the wall from the hallway, or a wooden slat bridge from the pond it crosses? Well, by throwing paint around until the differences becomes clear.

Later, when the paint color shifts to a light blue, it acts like water. Plant life will grow towards it, providing vines Monroe can use as handholds to get from one place to the next. Still later, you enter worlds like blueprints through picture frames. There you use paint around to mark the dimensions of boxes or blocks, which appear in those spots in the real world once you return. I didn't enjoy that part; I'm not much for that sort of spatial puzzle. Never a big Lego or building blocks guy. My junior high computer lab had some game where you tried to construct a bridge across a waterway, and once you were done, the game would send a truck across to see if you did a good job. I never once managed to build a bridge that actually stayed up.

So gameplay where I need to create a series of stair steps, high enough to get me where I need to go, but not so high I can't jump onto them, but also extending across chasms, but not extending so far they block the next thing I need to build, was not enjoyable.

Not that there's any massive penalty for failure; if Monroe falls to his doom, he simply re-spawns at the beginning of that particular room. There are a few places where giant spiders lurk in the shadows, and they can bite Monroe, but other than making me feel bad I let this kid get hurt, there's no downside. There's no damage meter; there is one point where you need to climb before the water level rises (though again, you just re-spawn if you don't), but otherwise you're not working against a clock or anything.

It all feels like a dream that also somehow explains to Monroe his parents' lives, though it's hard to tell what's a metaphor and what's meant to be the real. There are gold letters stamped here and there, and if Monroe hits them with paint, they become a page in a story of a selfish king. The king made kingdoms for himself, but resented when his subjects demanded he add shadows so they weren't bumping into things. He eventually made himself a queen, who was uninterested in any of the gifts the king showered her with, except a paintbrush she used to paint animals she never finished. She left without warning, and the king, with no subjects or loved ones, started a monument to himself - Bender would be proud - until his magic paint powers faded.

Monroe meets the king, who refers to himself as Monroe's father, at the very end, as the king describes a dream he had - which you play through - where all the things he built were being covered in paint some boy was hurling about. The king gives Monroe his magic brush and says he needs to go home, and once there, Monroe paints a complete picture of a swan with two babies.

What does all that mean? Was his dad actually a king, or just some guy who was really creative, but only created for his own benefit? Who thought of everything as his, and that's why Monroe's mother bailed? And she loved painting, but the whole experience left her too soured on art to ever finish anything? Or she just painted for the fun of it, so it didn't matter that she finished? But the game says, after Monroe finishes his painting, that he knows him painting would make her happy.

Also, at one point prior to Monroe meeting the king, during the mess with me trying to make platforms, Monroe reaches a telescope in a tower that lets you peer back into the "real" world at a moon or planet in the night sky. We see two people holding hands. His parents reunited, even though the king is still inside the head of his own monument at that time?

Overdue Movie Reviews #14 - Mad Max (1979)

A lunatic calling himself the Nightrider - sorry, the Night. . .RIDER! - steals a police cruiser, then dies while being pursued by the Mobile Police Force. The rest of his biker gang aren't too pleased, but nothing much comes of it until a different member of their group, the drugged out, spineless Johnny the Baby (Tim Burns), gets arrested, then released because there's no witness who will testify. The arresting officer, who everyone calls Goose (Steve Bisley), punches Johnny repeatedly on the way out the door, and is ultimately killed.

Between this and Top Gun, not a great stretch of years for guys called "Goose."

Goose's being burned alive prompts his buddy Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) to retire to live in the countryside with his wife, Jessie (Joanne Samuel) and their baby. Obviously that's not going to last. The movie's called "Mad Max," not "Mellow Max."

Yes, I used a variation on that bit when I reviewed the Mad Max video game. It amuses me, I'm using it again.

I guess because it had been a couple of years, I had the details of the plot messed up. I thought Toecutter and his bunch declared war against the MPF for Nightrider's death, and Goose's death was part of a larger war of attrition. Max retired and they hunted him down.

That's probably the way most '80s American action movies would have done it, but that's not the way George Miller plays it here. Toecutter indulges Johnny's desire for revenge - in the stupidest, most overly complicated way this gang of intelligence-deficient biker trash could manage, we'll come back to that - on Goose, and Max leaves. Then Jessie just so happens to encounter Toecutter and the gang on the way to the family farm "up north," and doesn't take kindly to his being a creep. So they take revenge for the slight to their pride. There's no indication those likely radiation-addled crank jockeys have any clue they're up against the guy that killed their pal. Hell, I'm not sure they even know he's after them for killing his baby and running over his wife. I'm not sure they ever even saw Max up at the farm. Johnny doesn't recognize him at the end, since he's convinced Max is executing him for stealing a dead man's boots.

And while Goose's death is the impetus for Max's decision, according to Max, what he's afraid of isn't death, but going round the bend. Ending up just like Toecutter and his bunch, roaming the highways, leaving wreckage and ruin behind him, the only difference being he's got a badge to excuse it all. Got some bad news for you there. . .

Of course, maybe it makes sense the story doesn't work like an action flick. Miller shoots certain scenes more like a horror movie. The extreme close-ups on the bugged-out eyes of a character right before they pancake against the grill of a big rig, wouldn't have looked out of place in a few years in Evil Dead or something similar. The scene for Jessie in the woods, the voices coming from everywhere, the mutilated dog hanging from a chain. The blue lighting as Max slowly ventures into Goose's hospital room, where you can only see an arm outlined against the sheet over top of him. As the arm drops off the side of the bed into view and Max can only stare horrified, the image seems to waver, like he passed through a translucent curtain or veil.

A threshold's been passed, whether Max knew it or not. One way or the other, he wasn't a cop any longer. He tried to run away from it all, and when that fails, takes the V-8 Interceptor meant to be the shiny toy that kept him there. And he follows the captain's order to do whatever he likes on the road. But he's not worried about paperwork being clean, any more than he's worried about being the hero his captain thinks the people need. He's something else entirely now.

Then, in other ways, it very much is an action movie. The high speed chases with so many moving parts. The spectacular car wrecks, where vehicles go flying like they were punched by the Hulk in a comic drawn by Sal Buscema. (That one poor stuntman who wipes out on the bridge and his bike cracks him in the back of the helmet as they both skip across the pavement.) The camera shots from right in front of the bumper of a speeding car, or taken to suggest the viewer is barreling right towards something. A baby, an oncoming truck. Once Max sets out for revenge, he's apparently relentless, hounding Toecutter and his guys for days at a time, ignoring a bullet wound to the leg and his arm getting run over.

Which could be that horror vibe, Max becoming something different. Especially the bit where Toecutter leaves the mechanic's shop and finds the photos of Jessie and Goose in his helmet, with no sign of who left them. That's some vengeful spirit stuff right there, but action heroes tend to be almost superhuman, so there's not a huge divide from that to a supernatural terror, especially depending on whose point of view you're watching from.

OK, the revenge on Goose. The thing about the attack on Goose is not that they kept him busy with the cabaret singer so Johnny could tamper with his bike. It's that, having caused him to wreck in the middle of nowhere, all alone, they wait until the mechanic drives out and loans him his truck to haul his motorcycle back. Then they throw something through the windshield to cause him to wreck, then ignite the gas. That's more steps than was really necessary.

Was that for plausible deniability purposes? Because I can't see these guys caring about that, and even if they did, if you run him over on an isolated strip of road while he's all alone, you don't have to worry about plausible deniability then, either.

Maybe it was just to set up what Max does to Johnny at the end. Poetic justice, ironic punishment, that sort of thing. Which, I will admit I did appreciate. Of all the bikers, Johnny's the one I dislike the most. Nightrider's a loon, and I'm not sure his brain is even on the same planet as his body. Toecutter sees himself as some leader of a wayward flock, and makes a big show of himself, but also makes certain gestures that demonstrate he feels some loyalty to his guys. Presumably he made the arrangements to pick up Nightrider's body, and they give it an entire procession, carried in the back of the pick-up with Toecutter as he sits on his lawn chair throne.

Meanwhile, Johnny's just an annoying little shit. As soon as he's got someone to hide behind here comes the tough talk, but at any other point, he's a sniveling coward, full of excuses for why nothing that happens is his fault. Quite why Toecutter wastes time and energy on protecting him I don't know. I guess because he regards Johnny as one of "his", and therefore only he has the right to punish him.

The movie says it takes place 'a few years from now,' and civilization, though mostly recognizable, is clearly on a downward swing. All the towns we see look mostly deserted, the locals worn and weary. The kind of people you'd see in the beleaguered town of a spaghetti western, where they wear every year they've lived on their faces. The mechanic tells Jessie the ice cream shop will be glad for the business. Of two people, one of them a baby, buying at best one cone apiece. That's pretty dire. The roads are empty, save the cops, the bikers and the occasional fuel tanker.

MPF headquarters look like a building that ought to be condemned. Broken windows and rot in the walls. I've seen better maintained police buildings in movies where a zombie apocalypse is in full swing. A V-8 engine is treated as some rare treasure, a miracle anyone could find one and get it running. But the MPF patrol on the edge, where things fall apart first. It was once a frontier, and it's becoming one again. We never get a good look at a big city, the most populated place is either the cabaret or that roadside diner Goose is at, where the tow trucks are faster on the ball than he is. Their trucks are in pretty good shape, shinier and newer-looking than the MPF's cars. The only business still doing well is one dedicated to salvaging the remains of tragedies.

The Team Needs an Exorcism

Another example of "you're not the boss of me," ending badly. 

The Case of the Team Spirit is the first collection of John Allison's Bad Machinery, released through Oni Press. The core cast - Shauna, Charlotte, Mildred, Sonny, Linton and Jack - are all starting the upper level of public school. There's a helpful glossary in the back, provided by Charlotte (which makes the accuracy questionable, but I won't know any better), that explains to a dastardly rebel descendant such as myself that UK schools are 4 through 11 and 11 through 16 (or 18), so I assume this is the latter.

This means new teachers, new uniforms - man am I glad my schools never had uniforms, so that I was only constrained by my mother's insistence I wear shirts with buttons to junior and high school, rather than t-shirts* - and new problems. Charlotte's tendency to chatter gets Shauna in trouble. Jack and Sonny find themselves hoodwinked in a football card swaps by the devious Bobby Swaps. As always, never engage in an activity with a person whose last name is a word for said activity.

While Linton, and to a lesser extent Jack and Sonny, try to figure out why the Russian oligarch who now owns the local football club seems to be having so much bad luck, Shauna and Charlotte, with the eventual assist from Mildred, try to help an elderly Russian woman who refuses to leave her home so the aforementioned oligarch can level a neighborhood and build a new stadium.

Wait, he's going to pay for the stadium himself, rather than demanding the local government fork over hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars? We need more Russian oligarchs owning sports teams here in the U.S., pronto.

It takes about a third of the book for anything truly supernatural or paranormal - which I gather are regular occurrences for this bunch - to show up. Then it shifts to Linton and the other boys trying in their half-assed way to investigate curses, while the girls are more focused on helping Shauna retrieve her nice birthday jacket from a bully from her old neighborhood. Which does result in Mildred more fully entering the fold as the third girl in the crew.

I'm guessing the competition between the boys and the girls to solve these mysteries - which Jack and Shauna appear to be keeping record of in secret - is a holdover from some earlier series of Allison's. I got that feeling a lot, that these characters have mucho past history I'm only dimly aware of, and not just the boys repeated mentions of their case involving Mad Terry, which they were not supposed to speak of.

Which makes sense. Charlotte mentions their history teacher dated her older sister in uni, which, since said older sister was friends with Esther de Groot, means said dating would have taken place concurrent with events in Giant Days. And Charlotte dragged Esther along to steal holy water from a church in that book, so she's clearly been at this sort of thing for a while.

Where were we? Allison jumps the focus between the characters, letting one or the other drive events at different times. So it's Shauna's friendship with Mrs. Biscuits, and Linton's diehard Tackleford FC fandom that start things off, Shauna gets isolated for a time as Charlotte's burgeoning friendship with Mildred gets Shauna in trouble and leads to the jacket theft. Meanwhile, Jack's the one getting roped into potential crimes so a friend of his older sister's will get the boys a tour of the stadium, so they can search for hints of curses.

I feel pretty bad for Jack, who is a neurotic mess even by the standards of teenage boys. He seems very popular with his sister's friends, but clearly has no idea what to do with that or how to respond. So his mind spirals off into flights of fancy (such as his misunderstanding of what a "military-industrial complex" is) or increasing panic (see above.) 

Much of the humor is one kid saying something unexpected or bizarre. Or hurtful. Allison's pretty good at remembering teenagers will go for the jugular if the opportunity presents itself. Some of the insults in here, I wouldn't have come out of my room for a year. There's also a lot of good timing. Near the end, Shauna asks the oligarch an obviously rhetorical question, and in the next two panels, as Charlotte and Shauna debate whether Charlotte is, in fact, 'reversing his psychology,' you see Mildred thinking about something. And then in the third panel, she answers the rhetorical question, to everyone's annoyance, and my amusement.

That said, I laughed hardest at the parts involving the Russians, both Mrs. Biscuits and the oligarch. Because I read their dialogue aloud in my best Boris Badenov accent? Or maybe because a man describing, in a real effort at inspiration, how he started his fortune mining lithium with his bare hands, then upgraded to a spoon, and would just eat a little lithium whenever he felt sad, is simply hilarious to me.

* This, not coincidentally, is why I hate polo shirts and have not worn one in over two decades. I had lots of fun t-shirts, and wasn't allowed to wear a single one to school. I was never going to be cool, but dressing like a preppy dweeb when my actual approach to school was clearly apathetic slacker didn't help.

Sunday Splash Page #435

"Norse God of Annihilation," in Ant-Man (2022) #3, by Al Ewing (writer), Tom Reilly (artist), Jordie Bellaire (colorist), Cory Petit (letterer)

Released in 2022, this 4-issue mini-series centered around a mysterious future Ant-Man, who kept traveling back in time and briefly interacting with the previous holders of that title. His purpose, other than it has something to do with the ants they control, is kept a mystery until the final issue. By which time there are really much bigger problems to worry about (see above.)

Pym's story is set either prior to the formation of the Avengers, or very close to it, and involves him being targeted by a group of enemies from his solo book. No, the Scarlet Beetle wasn't invited. It also involves Pym and Jan's date at the movies being interrupted by a young Eric O'Grady, who throws popcorn at Pym. So Pym follows him into the lobby and sets ants on him. When Pym is captured, the Wasp finds him because Scott Lang is trying to break into the apartment and opens the soundproof window, letting out Pym's agonized screams.

Lang's presence is apparently to set up Jan letting him use Hank's old Manhattan lab whenever he wants as a favor, though Scott has no idea what she's talking about. How, exactly, he forgot meeting a diminutive flying woman while trying to break into an apartment, the occurrence of which apparently convinced him to move back to Florida, I don't know, but it certainly makes the whole thing feel needlessly convoluted.

Reilly and Bellaire try to modify their styles or approaches to mimic the eras the stories are set in. In this case, Bellaire uses mostly solid, basic colors, what would be bright colors, but the shades give the impression of being a little faded, or maybe yellowed? Reilly, meanwhile, has a sort of stiff, solid line to his figures - although his O'Grady has a wicked smirk straight out of Ditko's style - and straightforward layouts of 5-6 panels per page.

O'Grady gets the second issue, shortly after he stole the experimental suit, as he doesn't know it can generate Pym Particles (thanks to Skrull tech Skrull-Pym built into it), so he tries digging up Scott Lang's Avengers Disassembled-corpse. Because he's an idiot. Lang's is set in roughly the present day, and involves he and his daughter trying to shrink Ultron (at this point partially Hank Pym) into the Microverse inside some Asgardian-rune inscribed Vibranium coffin.

In the second issue, Reilly and Bellaire try to mimic Irredeemable Ant-Man. Reilly does a pretty good Phil Hester impression, with more heavy blacks and a stronger, more squared-off look to the characters. Some occasional pages of characters just sitting in one place for a bunch of panels in the same position, thinking over things. Bellaire uses a lot of a muddy orange-red that I definitely feel I saw regularly in Marvel comics of the mid-2000s. It's giving me New Avengers flashbacks, and I don't like it!

Third issue is closer to what I think of as Reilly's art style, at least based on Walter Mosley's The Thing mini-series. Much lighter line than Hester, busier than the Pym story, and Bellaire uses more variety in the shading here than the prior two issues. Softer shades if Cassie is a little embarrassed by her dad, or bright, sharp shades for explosions or lightning. The layouts are more dynamic and varied in panel count, there are more elements that jump across the page or through panels.

This is still the era of Lang being regarded a joke by most other heroes, so Stark and Thor are pretty disrespectful. No surprise from Stark, but I'm disappointed with Thor. Where's your humility, hammer-boy? Did you trade it to get back your arm? At least Cassie tells her dad to stop sucking up to them, and references Scott saving the world in World Hive, though he shares credit with her. Because he's a good dad.

They get interrupted by Black Ant (the robot duplicate of O'Grady from Remender's Secret Avengers) and the coffin gets flung somewhere in time. Ewing ties things into Age of Ultron, which I could do without remembering exists, but I can't tell what parts of the explanation were actually from that, and what are things Ewing bolts on for his own purposes. Either way, the four Ant-Men deal with an Ultron hopped up on Odin-sauce, and that's that.

This time around, Bellaire's color work really dominates. It's a lot of solid blocks of color, bright blocks, and Reilly's lines almost vanish under it. Which might be something about the mythic nature the heroes of the past have achieved in the future, that leaves them blurrily defined because there's so much that got lost over the centuries. (Future Ant-Man definitely wasn't expecting O'Grady to be like he was.) 

But what, exactly is Ewing driving at? There's a bit at the end, as they get ready to try their plan to stop Ultron, where Pym says all the World's Smallest Hero can do is 'think big.' The Ant-Man of 2549 found his "nano-swarm" couldn't fix an ecologically devastated Earth, so he cloned a bunch of extinct ant species. They lacked any natural instincts. So he fucked around in the timestream to measure how past Ant-Men controlled insects as part of some plan to install the instincts. His time traveling provided a guide for Ultron to find his way back into the timestream. Big plan, big fuck-up, big problem. Pym's own examples of overreaching are well-known, but after that, it feels stretched.

O'Grady is just trying to stay alive, and going about it in the dumbest way possible. Maybe the over-reaching is that the suit exists. Skrull Pym internal monologues that it was only Pym's need to prove himself that made the Skrull build such a suit (which contains Skrull technology that might give him away) in the first place. Lang, though, is trying to be careful. The Avengers don't like that he's bringing the coffin to New York, but he argues it's got the most precise equipment, and this is the sort of thing - shrinking a hybrid of a genocidal artificial intelligence and its creator into a micro-universe - you want to be precise about. As it turns out, Ultron-Pym figured out how to communicate on the ant-helmet's frequency and was subtly guiding Scott there, but it still doesn't feel like taking unjustifiable risks for uncertain gain.

So is it the inferiority complex thing? Pym, well, again, the history of his attempts to prove himself that end disastrously are well-established. I don't feel like Ewing accounts for '60s Pym meeting both an endpoint of an artificial intelligence he created and seeing what happened to himself. Although maybe '60s Pym's bold statement that if he ever does create and AI, it'll be a lot better, is the over-reaching thing again. Lang is constantly scrabbling for respect and to try and look cool so his daughter will look up to him. Zayn Asghar apparently wasn't content with a "nano-swarm" that could at least rebuild homes and stuff. No, he has to bring back ants to fix the planet's ecosystem, by himself.

But then there's O'Grady. A petty, selfish, small-minded, dim-witted putz. He's entirely realistic about just how likely he is to survive if he can't shrink to escape danger. It's not an inferiority complex if you are, in fact, inferior. He doesn't care enough about anyone but himself to bother trying to do something big to prove himself. There's Black Ant, who is planning on being a henchman for Ultron, and really wants to do a good job on this escape attempt, but still kind of half-asses it. He's boasting Lang won't be able to call ants for help because he bribed them with really good sugar, for Pete's sake. This is not a serious person.

Saturday Splash Page #237

"Truant Officers," in The Web #5, by Len Strazewski (writer), Tom Artis (penciler), Bill Wray (inker), Eric Kachelhofer (colorist), Vickie Williams (letterer)

The Web was a bit of a rarity in the Impact Comics line as an ensemble book (Black Hood had a revolving cast, in a sense, which we'll get to when Sunday Splash Page gets there.) Where the other books revolved around solo heroes, "The Web" was an entire government organization. It had existed since the late '60s, with a broad mandate to investigate the unusual, but seemingly really created to investigate the disappearance of that generation's superheroes, the American Crusaders. Without success.

There were multiple agents, with different areas of operation, varying levels of public visibility, and different approaches. They eventually got powered armor, although the power was transmitted from some central station, and required authorization to use, even before Web fell on hard times as the years passed and budgets shrank. Eventually they were roaming swamps in business suits, chasing reports of UFOs.

With the emergence of new superheroes they're back in business. More money (but also more oversight), and more staff. That's where Strazewski makes his mistake, the cast is simply too large. From top-down, you've got Powell Jennings, who is some dipshit prep-school goober appointed as head of the agency. Of the field staff that are holdovers from the earlier years, there's Bill O'Grady, in charge on-site (that's him in the flak jacket), "Big Daddy" Rothco (the bearded guy), the Sunshine Kid (a spiritualist/hippie type), St. James who gets brought in to run tactics, "Jump" Kennedy, a pilot whose girlfriend was abducted by aliens a decade ago, and Gunny Beaupre. There's another guy, who calls himself "Troy" but is referred to by others as "Brew", who shows up in another issue.

Among the new generation, there's "Win" Winfield, whose older brother is part of the same prep-school dipshits as Jennings, Rad Stiles, the aggressive dickhead of the cast, Buster Thomas, the scientist who devised the updated version of the armor, where the power boost circuitry is actually wired under their skin, and Saleh/Silver, a former DEA agent and St. James' estranged daughter. Plus, the three kids up there (from left to right, Jamal, Alyce and Kevin, although Jamal is sometimes white and sometimes black, depending on the issue), who found an old Web base when Big Daddy used it after stopping a theft in the first issue.

That's too many characters! Especially when we're told, in issue #2, only one of them was intended to be the actual "Web" that was out in the field, in public. Double-especially when they're crossing over with the other titles, or devoting pages to guest-stars. Buster teams up with The Fly in issue 5, the (3rd) Shield guest-stars in issue 12, and The Fly, the Comet, and a third hero get suckered into attacking Web in issue 9. Plus, the last two issues are written by Paul Kupperberg, listed as "guest writer," so he brought in yet another old agent (up to then unmentioned) for his own story.

As a result, the book feels overstuffed and directionless. Plots or character arcs make little progress. Some characters get basically nothing. Issue 8 implies Winfield's desperate to prove himself after being compared unfavorably to his brother all these years. That doesn't jibe with his behavior up to then, where he seemed content to stand back and let others lead. Nothing's ever done with the tension between Silver and her father, beyond the initial argument that shows it exists. "Jump" has one run-in with a UFO, this time with working armor, but it ends inconclusively and he doesn't tell anyone about it or try to get any help. I couldn't tell you a thing about Rad or Gunny. Not likes, dislikes, motivations. Nothing.

The kids - who insist on being called "the Posse" - get one back-up story where Big Daddy tries to teach them how to drive some vehicles. While they don't crash, they're reckless enough he yells at them to stop after two pages. Also, O'Grady talks about maybe using them for undercover or intelligence gathering, but putting them in bright yellow armor on loud vehicles, while likely to increase their life expectancy (at least the armor part) doesn't seem great for that purpose. At least the kids negotiated themselves $25/month in pay, which is $25 more than they were initially being offered.

Generally, the focus is on O'Grady, Sunshine, Big Daddy, and Buster. O'Grady struggling with an administrative role and chomping at the bit to do fieldwork instead. He never really sorts that out, never gets better at handling Jennings' particularly irritating brand of making unreasonable demands, then blaming O'Grady when they backfire. Sunshine spends a lot of time making remarks that are supposed to be sage or clever and pretending to kind of be above the fray, but it's Kupperberg who comes closest to addressing the flaws in that, as the laidback attitude lets a former agent who built his rep on a lie get put in charge of peoples' lives. There could have been something for Big Daddy, training the kids, but again, that got almost no page time. Thomas is a scientist by trade, who submitted to the procedure she developed after early attempts went badly. She isn't supposed to feel very confident using the armor, but that only crops up intermittently.

Maybe the plan was always for the "1 agent" bit to get thrown out by circumstances, but that could have been something to make better use of such a bloated cast. Have a real sense the characters are competing with each other to be that "1 agent", and the negative impact that has. Maybe Buster shifts towards tech support, coming up with new gadgets for the armor, or Sunshine sticks strictly with training. Some characters wash out, or maybe "Jump" vanishes pursuing his vendetta against the aliens.

Tom Artis draws the first six issues, then guest pencilers for three issues, then Hoang Nguyen for three issues, and Barry Horne draws Kupperberg's two-parter. I'm not sure Artis' art was suited to such a crowded book. His art looks alright in the larger panels, but once he has to cram more characters in, or the panel space shrinks, things get messy and disorganized. His art always looks very busy to me, a lot of small lines and hatch marks on faces and clothes, though I guess that could be Wray's inks. With room to operate, like a full-page splash, it's fine. In the 5th panel of a 6-panel page, with 4 characters involved, not so much. The coloring also overwhelms the linework at times, rendering characters indistinct blobs.

Nguyen fares better, at least once Mike DeCarlo starts inking in issue 11. The previous issue, the linework alternates between almost disappearing and giving characters oddly exaggerated mouths. DeCarlo seems to use a thinner line, but it's a stronger one. The characters are solid, distinct. The action is clear and easy to follow. Just in general, it's less busy-looking, but it's also an issue that focuses heavily on just Silver and how she ended up with Web, so there's not as many people in mass-produced armor running around at one time.

The book's also plagued by miscommunication between writer and art team. Panels that don't show what the dialogue implies is there. In several of those cases, it's like there's a one-panel delay between dialogue and art, the latter running behind the former. It's worst in the guest penciler issues from 7 through 9, so maybe it was a time crunch thing. There's a page of a fight in issue 8, a 9-panel grid, that's a complete mess of dialogue that doesn't seem to match the action. There's no flow to anything, to the point I'm not sure if you're supposed to read down the columns or across the rows, because it doesn't really work either way.

Taken as a whole, it's by far the weakest of the core six titles.

Random Back Issues #172 - The Spectre #57

This is the 8th issue of The Spectre to appear in Random Back Issues. God's loaded my dice.

Or maybe not, as the issue begins with Spectre finding the Pearly Gates busted open, and nothing behind them! No angels, no souls, no God. The Spectre and Jim Corrigan have been having their differences recently, but they both want to get to the bottom of this.

Corrigan suggests pounding the pavement, question some suspects. First to Limbo, where an extremely skeletal Deadman is hanging around, watching a bunch of shadows traverse a foggy canyon. Spectre explains God's missing, and Deadman busts a gut, to Spectre's displeasure. Deadman says his god, Rama Kushna, is still around, and he doesn't know the Spectre's God 'from spit,' but it ain't here.

Next stop, Hell. Two angels, Remiel and Duma, are running things, because Lucifer abdicated. Remiel is trying to reform Hell, make it a place souls are redeemed through torment. It's not going great. 'Whip them with love,' apparently being a difficult concept to get across. Duma is zoned out, ignoring Remiel to the point the latter considers murdering the former. 

Spectre kicks in the doors, wishing to speak with the Lord of Hell. Duma, finally showing some life, kneels before him and offers the Key to Hell. The Spectre barely resists, claiming he's no creature of Hell, which Remiel thinks is crazy talk. The Spectre can freely enter Hell, but not Heaven. Michael forced his compliance, and Spectre was given a Sisyphean task to complete, walk the Earth until evil is no more. Well, when you put it that way. . . God sounds like kind of a dick. Maybe it's good he's missing.

Or maybe not. When Spectre delivers the news, the demons go into a frenzy, calling him a liar and attacking him. Which does not go well, and makes the Spectre suspect Hell is behind it, until Remiel points out the demons are afraid. They exist in opposition to God, so if God's gone, will they cease to be? Oblivion terrifies even a demon. I guess Remiel never talked to Jason Lee's character in Dogma, since that guy preferred non-existence to Hell.

At a dead end, the Spectre departs, leaving Duma to cry over Michael's disappearance (I guess Duma loved Michael?), the demons to sulk back to their various fiery pits, and Remiel to remark that for the first time, he feels like he's truly in Hell.

Lucifer's enjoying retirement on a beach in Australia, watching the sunset. Must be nice to have a job that offered retirement benefits. He's unperturbed at Spectre's claim of God's absence, so Spectre sets out to question the pantheons of "lesser" gods. This will involve him barging into places he's not welcome and throwing his weight around like an asshole. Which could either be representative of Corrigan's style of police investigation, or the behavior of Christians throughout human history. Meanwhile, Lucifer sits on the beach, remarking the Spectre should have stayed and watched the sunset. 

{10th longbox, 70th comic. The Spectre #57, by John Ostrander (writer), Tom Mandrake (artist), Carla Feeny and Digital Chamelon (color artists), Todd Klein (letterer)}