What I Bought 8/12/2026 - Part 1

In yet another example of my spectacular timing, I managed to schedule a week off during the hottest week of the year. It's been a billion damn degrees out there everyday since Sunday, and will apparently continue for another two days. And when it cools off, I'm back at work, and covering for Bill as he goes on another week-long fishing trip.

In addition to the two books from this week, the local guy had another book on the shelves that wasn't there last week. I guess somebody didn't want to pay for the anniversary issue. Can't say I blame them, really. A decent chunk of the additional pages are pages or covers from notable prior issues of FF (as in, the original pages, whether by Kirby, Byrne, Buscema, etc.), but with Ramos adding in the current bunch watching invisibly. Yes, that is underwhelming.

Fantastic Four #15, by Ryan North (writer), Humberto Ramos (penciler), Victor Olazaba (inker), Edgar Delgado (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - The green monster from the cover of the first issue of FF made the cover. Not Annihilus, Mole Man, Namor, any of the team's various allies and replacements, but that big monster, yes. That's the sort of thing that would really annoy the Wizard.

A scullery maid contemplates the dreary nature of her life, when four strangely dressed people appear out of thin air, asking for her help to keep them from moving backwards in time. Yes, North is doing another FF story centered around time travel. Man's going to wear a footpath through timestream at this rate.

Nicholas Scratch - North has used him twice now, but Diablo can't get any run - has figured out temporal magic and reversed the FF's flow, so they're moving backwards. They need an electrical charge and something really cold to disrupt the effect and get them moving the right way again. Also, I'm not sure how Sue is using her power to induce an encounter with regular time, as Reed puts it. Or why, if they're moving backwards through time, they aren't also speaking backwards from the maid's perspective.

The maid, Clarina Canady, is extremely chill about all this. Especially given one of them is a big rock guy. But she's stoked at the idea a woman can be a natural philosopher, aka a scientist, so she spends 20 years working on something to create a charge, waiting for the FF to pop up earlier, from their perspective, in their journey. Reed's able to give Clarina more info about the cold-producing device, and she works on that for another 20 years. But the FF don't show up, and she somehow figures out that their meeting her in her past is messing up where they appeared in her future.

I don't follow, but let's roll with it, as Clarina spends the last 20 years of her life designing a primitive airship that can hold her and the things she built to help the FF. She does, their time starts flowing the right direction, and her heart gives out. The FF make the aforementioned trip back through a handful of specific moments in their history, confront Scratch again, and Johnny knocks him out by pretending to be the mindless copy Scratch had unleashed to initially lure them in. But to sell it, he had to get rid of his mustache, which has to be just about the clearest sign North's run is wrapping up, if he's putting things back to factory standard.

Also, for some reason the sleeves of their outfits are a different color (black) when she meets them the last time than in her first two encounters (blue.) But then, when they reappear moments after Scratch sent them away, the sleeves are blue, and only the gloves are black.

The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien

This is a collection of short stories O'Brien wrote about his time serving in Vietnam. Sort of. There is a young man named Tim O'Brien in the stories, but he's not necessarily the real Tim. He's Story-Tim. Story-Tim created problems for me. 

"Ambush" is about a man Tim killed when he was on night watch over a road in the jungle. This follows, "The Man I Killed," about another man in Tim's platoon trying to pull him away from staring at the body, while Tim's mind invents an entire life for this corpse. That he was sickly and studious growing up, that he went to college to study mathematics, but returned to his village to do his duty and fight as a Viet Cong, only to get blown apart by a grenade one night.

50 pages later, in "Good Form," O'Brien states he did not actually kill the man in the story. He did see a man die on that trail, and because he was present, he feels guilt. Then he says, 'But listen. Even that story is made up. I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth.'

He spends another 4 paragraphs talking about how what you feel can be a truer representation of what happened than what actually happened, and so he feels he can answer his daughter's question of whether he killed anyone with either "yes" or "no", and it'll be true either way.

Which, OK, fine. Granting I'm coming at this in a world 36 years after the collection was published, I'm not sure I'm up for arguing how what I feel the world is more accurately reflects it than the actual facts. Smacks of "alternative facts." It's not O'Brien's fault I'm making that connection, and this is ultimately fiction, so it doesn't have to be factually true.

But inserting himself - or a version of himself - in the stories, then dancing back and forth about whether it's really him, or a "vibes" version of him, doesn't do the work any favors. Now as I'm reading, I'm wondering if this is about him or someone else. If it happened, if it didn't happen. If it didn't, what point he's trying to make writing like it did. If it did happen, what point he's trying to make actually telling it. Or, if it happened, why, as in the events surrounding "Kiowa's" death described in "Speaking of Courage," he attributed it to another person entirely.

I'm stuck in some awkward, stuttering, meta-aware state where I can't simply read the story and then decide what I thought about it or took from it, because I'm hung up on his approach. I'm interacting with the style and not the text, which is usually a bad sign for me when it comes to books (Tristram Shandy being the prime example of a book that's entire approach just pissed me off to the point I couldn't take anything from the book except how much I hated it.) If he just doesn't use his own name in the stories, changes it like he did all the others, it's a non-issue.

It isn't as though he's trying to make himself look better, unless this is all performative self-disgust. "On the Rainy River" is about Story-Tim receiving his draft notice and briefly fleeing to Minnesota, right near the Canadian border. There he stalls out, for days, at this cluster of fishing cabins that are closed for the season, unable to decide which direction to go. Ultimately, he goes back, out of shame. Because he's too afraid of the scorn he'd face, from people he'd likely never see again, if he became a draft-dodger.

I imagine that informs the sense of collective guilt and responsibility he applies in "The Man I Killed", and "Ambush." He didn't want to go to this war. It wasn't his war, he didn't believe in it. But he didn't have strong enough convictions to run. He let the weight of opinion of people he barely knew make his decision for him. And so, for that cowardice, he is responsible for the dead man.

Now, just that dead man, or all the dead men (and women, and children) in the villages getting burned out or airstriked because one soldier got sniped? Not sure, though he tends to rather relate them calling in napalm or whatever the way you or I might describe watching the path of a mail truck. Guilt only goes so far, I suppose.

That said, O'Brien's a pretty good writer. The obsessive creation of a life in "The Man I Killed," the way he's conjured up this entire idea of who this man was. Especially in terms of the life he conjures, which seems like it mirrors his in certain ways. The studious, reluctant soldier. The killer, projecting himself onto the victim, seeing a possible future for himself.

The periodic lines from Kiowa, increasing in frequency, as he tries to get Tim to stop staring, and later tries to get him to talk about it. He doesn't offer any consolation, because there's nothing to say. The man is dead. That can't change now. Story-Tim threw the grenade, and all this stuff he's fabricating about the dead man doesn't really matter. Whether the man was like what Tim envisions or not, he's not that any longer. And Tim hears it, but it just rolls off him. They're short, discrete sentences that have no connection to what's running through his head.

O'Brien also captures the collective weight of opinion that drives people into doing things they'd rather not, and what that does to their psyche. "The Things They Carried," as a marker of what helped the soldiers cope with the situation they were in. That helped them feel safe, or at least feel like they had some control over a situation they largely did not control. Because they ceded that control to someone else when they, for whatever reason, enlisted or showed up when drafted. And they know it, and they know they may die for it.

So they hold on to whatever they can. Letters from a girl back home that will never love them, or stockings from a girl that loved them, then left them. Or mean-spirited pranks, or religion, or whatever. And sometimes the different approaches grind against each other, the guy who wants silence against the guy who can't stop talking. The guy demanding a moral from how someone died against the one who thinks that notion is ridiculous. 

'They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.'

The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976)

Fed up with the team owner's miserly ways, and inspired by fellow ballplayer Leon Carter's (James Earl Jones) discussion of their needs to seize the means of production, Negro League pitcher Bingo Long (Billy Dee Williams) forms a team of the best players in the league. They travel the country, playing the local teams in whatever towns they reach, the money split evenly between the the players.

In much the same way I watched First Wives Club because it was touted in a post about Diane Keaton after her passing, I found out about this movie in a post discussing James Earl Jones' career. because it's really his and Williams' movie. Richard Pryor is the other big name in the cast, as rightfielder Charlie Snow, but his story is he plans to call himself "Carlos Nevada" and get into the white leagues as a Cuban. 

(There's also a recurring gag of Snow trying to explain how to calculate batting average to Holliday, played by Otis Day, a former player rendered mute by a beanball, and never getting it right.)

But it's mostly about Bingo and Leon, fittingly enough a pitcher and a catcher, albeit on rival teams when the game starts. Bingo's all flash and style, starting each game by facing the first batter with no fielders behind him, why asking the crowd (who chant along with him), 'Who gonna hit my invite pitch?' I have no idea what an "invite pitch" is, for the record. Big smiles, slick talk and charm, and Williams has all three in high supply. Bingo tends to talk before thinking, confident they'll figure things out when they have to, and if not, he'll apologize then. He dreams big, and that's not a bad thing, it's just he's not great at the planning on how to make those dreams reality.

He tends to dodge tough conversations, but he's not without principles. When Holliday gets robbed of their money from a game by their former team owner's goons, Bingo can't exactly bring himself to stand up for Holliday, but he pays everyone out of his own pocket to soothe tempers. though he also gives them Carter's share, without telling Carter until much later.

Carter's more well-read, more thoughtful, as you'd expect from a character played by James Earl Jones. Jones also gets to show a little style and fun. In the first scene, he cracks a home run off Bingo, after telling Bingo he stole his girlfriend. Bingo, of course, tries to play it off like he was tired of her, anyway. Carter's the one, when their former bosses start convincing local ballparks not to let them play, who rides ahead alone on his motorcycle to make sure the next game is still on. He's the one who eventually beats up those goons when they take him prisoner, after escaping inside a coffin.

Although it's Bingo who comes up with the idea of eventually challenging white teams, correctly reasoning the Negro League team owners can't do shit to try and intimidate them. And who convinces the team to showboat and play a bit comical to get the crowd to enjoy themselves more. Maybe white folks won't mind seeing their team lose to black players if they get a good laugh out of it in the process.

I was expecting, given this takes place in the 1930s, that there was going to be more danger as a result of angry white people. Certainly when they arrive for their first barnstorming game and the man who set it up tells them they need to drive down Main Street and put on a show. So you have the entire team, slowly parading down the street past a bunch of sour looking crackers, dancing and strutting and playing music and I was thinking this was about to get real ugly.

(I enjoyed the difference in the pre-game festivities between the black and white games. In the games between the black teams, there's singing and dancing and it's like a party. The white ballparks, there's marching bands playing the national anthem while everyone stands solemnly with their hand over their heart like they're watching a procession for a dead war hero. We crackers can take the fun out of anything.)  

Remarkably, it didn't. The majority of the conflict is from the efforts of the Negro League team owners, specifically the funeral home director - "Sallie Potter" played by Ted Ross - that owns Bingo's old team, to nip this barnstorming, profit-sharing business in the bud. Even though it's his fault, after he told his team he was docking them all a day's pay ($5) to cover the cost of a bus ticket to send Holliday home. Plus docking Bingo an extra $5 for fomenting dissension by pointing out Potter ought to pay for the ticket himself. He pissed off Bingo enough that Bingo listened to Carter, and now he doesn't want to accept the consequences. It's gotta be everyone else's problem. Class issues transcend race. Or race doesn't erase class issues?

(However, gender issues apparently trump class solidarity, as Potter is consistently a condescending dick to the one woman owner of a team, played by Mabel King, when she's the only one smart enough to suggest they take advantage of the drawing power of Bingo's team by scheduling "extradition" games against them.)

I'm a little surprised a funeral home director can afford two goons, but Potter certainly gets his money's worth. They, at various points, intimidate ticket booth workers, rob Holliday, maim Charlie, and kidnap Carter ahead of the big game between the barnstormers and a Negro league All-Star team. They don't actually show the maiming, though there's no question of what they do, or the cruelty of using the roar of the crowd when Carter hits a big home run to mask Charlie's screams as they do it.

It was definitely not something I was expecting the movie to do, since most of the roadblocks Potter had put in their path up to then, the team found ways to work around. Sent someone out on point to make sure their next game was still on, start playing white teams, and so on. This is more overt, not something Bingo can clever his way out of, and it exposes just how shoestring their operation is. Paying Charlie's hospital bill leaves the team unable to pay the hotel. When their attempt to duck out the back fails, they end up picking potatoes in a field for a day (24 bushels gets you about two-and-a-half bucks), to try and get Bingo's car out of hock.

They fail, the car gets auctioned, and two players decide to go back to their old teams rather than work in a field. And then Bingo steals a different, newer, car from the guy who bought his car and flees the town, to Carter's immense displeasure. This, people getting hurt, stealing cars, is not what he signed on for. It's not what "seizing the means of production," means to him.

Jones plays Carter as angry, but in a sort of sour, weary way. Even when Bingo tries jumping on his back to stop him walking away, Carter can't get angry enough to knock his ass out, only shove him away. He thought he was making a dream come true, but it's all falling apart, and it makes him a little sick. It would almost have been better for it to remain a dream, rather than see the reality of it. Especially when Bingo's still making these half-ass apologies with that big grin that says, "You can't stay mad at me, can you?" For Bingo, it was maybe just a means to an end, nothing more.

What I Bought 8/6/2026

With five books coming out last week, I was hoping for better luck than finding two, but by the time I made it back from a 2-day work trip, I really wasn't that inclined to care, versus just getting home and crashing out. So we got what we got.

Batgirl #22, by Tate Brombal (writer), Stephen Segovia (artist), Jason Paz (inker), Rain Beredo (colorist), Tom Napolitano (letterer) - I've long suspected Batgirl was no mere mortal, but I never would have imagined she was a bunch of flowers.

Cass is still inside her head, confronted by, I'm really not sure what the version of Forget-Me-Not in her head is. Post-hypnotic suggestion hallucination? Anyway, he wants her to recognize she killed his test subject, but when Cass is able to object, she realizes she's not actually the 8-year-old she appears to be. She can speak, which means she can understand words. Including what everybody was saying in those memories.

I mean, I guess? If we assume her memory is that good for things that happened over a decade ago, then I guess maybe she could retroactively piece things together now that she knows spoken language. I'm trying to envision myself as a child, hearing German, then replaying the conversation in my head a decade later with sufficient confidence I remembered words and sounds I didn't know well enough to now understand them.

Anyway, point being, she realizes she and the other girl, Victoria, became friends, despite the best efforts of their respective teachers. Cain couldn't beat empathy out of Cass, and Forget-Me-Not couldn't erase the actual person inside his "doll." Which is what got her killed, she went on a mission and her true self emerged at the wrong time.

Or maybe she didn't die. The body that started all this isn't Victoria, so Cass is holding out hope. And Forget-Me-Notm who was just hanging out in the basement to be confronted by the rest of the supporting cast, let's slip that someone paid him to do this. Is it a mysterious figure in a blue demon mask Jaya is working for? Well, maybe.

So maybe this is Brombal setting things up for the future, or it's their way of letting Cass confront her past and show how far beyond it she's gone. That she's grown to something more than Cain could ever have envisioned. Which ties back to something Bronze Tiger said late in her first ongoing, that Cain made her a weapon, but she made herself a hero. 

Marc Spector: Moon Knight #7, by Jed MacKay (writer), Devmalya Pramanik (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) -  I hope Marc doing a Wolverine pose doesn't mean we're going back to that stretch where he thought he was Wolverine, Spider-Man, or Captain America.

The Midnight Suns bust into the Mansion Ravenous and quickly come under attack from the dragon Ginnaar, now with a body made from the Mansion itself. Which means Blade's chainsaw is insufficient, despite his claim that everything he does is cool. Sounds like someone's buying into his own hype too much. Robbie driving his giant, burning muscle car through its chest doesn't work much better.

Stall tactics aren't going to get it done, so the drastic measure is - Daredevil?! Yes, with his radar sense and agility, the Man With No Fear dives in, avoiding the dragon's fire. Which is nails, because it's made from a house, so I guess fire would be counterproductive. Seriously though, I like that as a nod to Ginnaar's peculiar nature at the moment. Also, Pramanik and Rosenberg bust out the black-and-white line radar vision look for DD's dive, in panels radiating out from a red outline of DD's head. 

Anyway, Daredevil gets in close and wrenches out the sword that apparently still holds the dragon's sword. Which is a little odd to me. The Mansion couldn't release Ginnaar's soul from the sword? Or maybe it chose not to, to keep it in check. Follow orders, or lose access to a physical form. Whatever, dragon defeated, the Mansion emerges in Fairchild's body and Moon Knight - sells out the others. Offering them up to the mansion as pawns in exchange for his bunch. Not Clea, mind you, the man's not a complete imbecile. But Blade, DD, and Ghost Rider appear to be screwed.

The solicits for upcoming issues kind of ruined the surprise, but it's hard to see how this is a smart play, even if Marc is only pretending to be a backstabber. Which I'm not sure it is. If this is the end of Mackay's stint with the character, he could be setting him back to the guy none of the other cape community trust, albeit because he betrayed some of them to save his crew, rather than because he helped Khonshu conquer the world.

Sunday Splash Page #439

"Hero's (Underground) Journey," in Atomic Robo: Dawn of a New Era #4, by Brian Clevinger (writer), Scott Wegener (artist), Shannon Murphy (color artist), Jeff Powell (letterer)

Been a hot minute since we talked about Atomic Robo, huh? Well, more like 8 years. We left off with Savage Sword of Dr. Dinosaur, the penultimate Robo story released through Red 5. Dawn of a New Era is the last story released through IDW. There were several mini-series in between, none of which had a splash page. Which wouldn't necessarily stop me now, but back then, when I was more rigid about the "splash page" thing, and after I'd spent several weeks on Robo already, was a good excuse to move on.

So what happened in the 5 years between those 2 mini-series? Briefly:

Knights of the Golden Circle: Dr. Dinosaur's "time bomb" (5 nukes he stole, tied together in the shape of a dinosaur) threw Robo back to the 1860s. 20 years on, he teams up with Bass Reeves and Doc Holliday to stop Helsingard from conquering the United States, before Robo's reactor runs out of power.

Ring of Fire: A group called ULTRA has seized control of every super-science organization on Earth, including Tesladyne, under the auspices of saving the world from the Biomega threat. What's left of Tesladyne have to find what's left of Robo, build him a body, and find a way to stop an entire living island without causing nuclear winter.

Temple of Od: Set in the 1930s, Robo's on a mission in Manchuria for the U.S. government, working with Chinese resistance (including old acquaintance Helen McCallister from Deadly Art of Science) to rescue a Chinese quantum mechanics expert the Japanese captured because he figured out how to harness zero-point energy, what Edison called the Odic Force, and which a Japanese physicist has turned into a weapon.

Spectre of Tomorrow: Robo has the new Tesladyne open, which is going to focus on science and not saving the world from random weird shit. Seriously, you guys. Robo means it! To prove it, he's spending all his time holed up in his lab, while Vik and Lang try to deal with Richard Branson's annoying Homeowner's Association Complaints. Then unknown cyborgs start breaking down all over the world, and that leads back to Hashima Island (from The Ghost of Station X) and ALAN.

Which brings us here. One of two big developments is gung-ho badass Jenkins appears for the first time since Savage Sword of Dr. Dinosaur, looking a lot like Cable, with the cybernetic eye and hand. He's taking a break from waging his one-man shadow war against the forces that destroyed Tesladyne because he's worried about an invasion from the Vampire Dimension. He needs Tesladyne to help kick those bloodsuckers in the keister.

The Tesladyne Institute he finds is more of a school, with 3 students - Margo, Ben, and Olivia. Who immediately set to sneaking around the facility and trying to listen in on faculty meetings. As good, curious action scientists-to-be should. More troubling for Jenkins, Tesladyne has just 4 mentors. Great, in theory, ratio for teaching. Not so great for stopping an invasion from an entire planet of vampires.

In practice, it's not so great for the teaching either. Bernard, never entirely over losing the connection he had during the adventure in Hollow Earth (though at least he's past his apathy), is using mapping an extinct volcano as a test for a potential mobile robot assistant for future exoplanet exploration. Then he disappears (as far as everyone on the surface knows.) Vik and Lang (the latter rocking a white beard, making it look like he's aged dramatically since Spectre of Tomorrow) are supposed to be on vacation, but find an incursion from the Vampire Dimension at the particle accelerator. Jenkins? Jenkins is not suitable for young children. Or college-age students. Or anyone, actually.

Clevinger gives Robo a good line when Foley asks, in regards to what Jenkins might be able to teach, what the man does in his off-time. Robo's response? 'Intensifying isn't really an answer, is it?' 

Which leaves Foley, the youngest mentor, to do the teaching. Here, that's mostly about getting them to understand the difference between practical and impractical science. Being asked to design a paper airplane and coming up with a design that requires warp drive and hypothetical materials one Planck width thick is certainly creative, but not useful for getting you an actual paper airplane.

The other big development is the emergence of ALAN 2.0. Robo shot the computer that housed ALAN's brain with, as he put it, a lot of bullets, at the end of Ghost of Station X. But they needed its computing power and manufacturing capabilities to build Robo a new reactor power source in Ring of Fire, and that activated enough sentience for it to upload into some little drones Robo built during Spectre of Tomorrow that helped him keep Helsingard from taking control of ALAN's resources.

The rest of the staff are understandably pissed once they find out, given ALAN was going to use the Earth for fuel and irradiate the rest when he blasted off into space with the power of the hundreds of nukes he stole (and framed Robo for that theft, putting them on the run.) Robo argues this is the original version of ALAN Dr. Turing created, before decades alone in the dark. They can raise him to respect humanity, rather than regard them as a resource to expend if other things appear to take priority.

Lang's extremely hostile reaction is strong evidence Robo might have been right keeping ALAN hidden in his lab while he built him a body and taught him how to control it. When Lang comments it isn't reassuring to have one artificial intelligence vouching for another, everyone else looks either horrified or vaguely embarrassed at such a robo-ist comment. Even Jenkins is standing there with a frown like, "Yeah, that was over the line."

At least this version of ALAN can run if they decide to kill him. Initially he's just a box on a table, looking about like a Playstation 4 with one of those vertical stands. Wegener gives ALAN a much less formidable body than Robo's. Human-shaped, bilateral symmetry, opposable thumbs and all, but wiry (taller, too.) Which may not mean much when you're talking limbs constructed of who knows what metal, but it doesn't hurt. Robo outright says he gave ALAN a body like humans to make them at least somewhat more inclined to accept him, the same reason Tesla did that for him.

Wegener also gives ALAN a video-screen for a face, which can project various symbols. Smiley faces, question marks, things like that. Which is both more and less expressive than Robo's own face. Sometimes it's just a blank screen, which would be unnerving to look at, but Robo can really only show emotion through his eyes and body language. ALAN at least can project basic emotions.

By the end of the mini-series, nothing has been resolved as far as the vampires, or Jenkins' concerns regarding the lack of preparation, but ALAN is the newest student of the Institute, and his classmates seem to take well to him. And this makes Foley a good choice for the mentor, since she seemed the most in alignment with Robo's idea that helping ALAN feel like part of society would make him less inclined to see humanity as expendable.

Whether that's going to work out? Well. . . 

Saturday Splash Page #241

"God's Mistake," in "Future Present from God", in Wanted!, by Eiichiro Oda

I reviewed this 5 months ago, so we won't belabor the point. Wanted! is the collection of Oda's work prior to starting One Piece. It consists of 5 stories, including Romance Dawn, a kind of first draft for One Piece, as it stars a rubber boy with a straw hat named Luffy, who wants to be a pirate, but ends up fighting more dishonest pirates.

Most of the stories revolve around twist endings, and the protagonist, up to that point portrayed as a goofball or not someone to take seriously, turns out to be a badass. Gill Bastar, star of Wanted! spends most of the story either avoiding the many bounty hunters after him for the price on his head, or defeating them through trickery like, "Look over there!" It's only at the very end he turns out to be such a great marksman the ghost of a bounty hunter he killed with trickery moves on to the other side, having realized (if unwilling to admit it) he'll never find someone skilled enough to take revenge for him.

Describing him like that, Gill sounds like Vash the Stampede if he really did turn murderous once pushed far enough.

You get stories with a swordsman whose fixation on disrespect appears to doom a town to destruction via dragon, who in the end exposes a couple of frauds, and kills the dragon in one swing. Or a monk who spends most of the story running in terror from an evil spirit haunting a forest, only to immediately overpower the spirit once he learns it killed and ate his master. Maybe Oda wanted to do the comedy, but still have the cool finish. I'm not sure it really works, as I don't find much of it funny. 

You see his artwork evolve, especially as he gives himself more room on the page by decreasing panels. His lines tighten up and grow thicker, the characters look less sketched and more sturdy and defined. It doesn't hurt his ability to exaggerate expressions, and I think the additional space helps his action sequences.

What I Bought 8/3/2026 - Part 2

I guess Sony honked some people off when they announced they'd cease producing physical copies of their games in the next couple of years. Because Sony has a past record of removing stuff people bought off the electronic store if they happen to lose the rights to it. Which tells me I need to hurry up and buy whatever games I plan to get electronically, then never connect my PS4 to the Internet again. Won't be difficult; I only connect now when I want to see if the most recent sale put anything I want at a price point I'll pay.

The Matron #2, by David Bowles and Drew Edwards (writers), Monica Gallagher (artist), Harry Saxon (color artist), Stephen Kok (letterer) - Somebody needed to ask for help with their markings ahead of the Big Homecoming Game.

Like this first issue, this is split between two threads. Unlike the first issue, the threads take place concurrently, rather than a half-century apart. College students Roz and Samantha leave their classes on a quest for food, followed by a trip back to Sam's dorm room. The two are apparently girlfriends, or at least moving that direction, though Sam has misgivings. Partially because they, as Roz puts it, share two ancestors, six generations ago, but mostly because of the ill will Roz's grandmother bears anyone with the last name Maldonado, including Sam.

This is a valid concern, as we see in the other thread, which focuses on Zina and her diner job. Or her former diner job, as her boss has sold the diner to some gentrifiers who plan to turn the it into a 'gourmet taqueria.' So Zina's fired, but she got 10 months pay as severance, so it's all good, right?

Well, not really. Zina felt like she was family with these folks, but apparently not. And like Michael Jordan, she took that personally. Maybe they shouldn't have asked her to put patties in the freezer right after letting her go. She hears a voice, speaking in a language which Google Translate says is Russian, frost briefly grows around her eyes, and she picks up a meat cleaver. Or the Matron picks up the cleaver, as the font in Zina's voice balloons shifts.

The actual killing is presented by Gallagher as methodical and calm. A single chop to the chest for the guy, then another to the neck for the woman. There's no frantic hacking or slashing. She does respond to Sally's plea to stop, but only to tell her Zina is gone. There is one extreme close-up panel of Zina's eyes, colored in red, but she isn't getting wild. Just stating a fact.

Worth noting that Sam and Roz don't view the change in downtown as negatively as Zina, though Sam had some misgivings about her father's involvement. I imagine the sushi place they have dinner at is probably part of the revamping. Roz is hoping to move forward, that maybe they can leave the mess of the past behind. Zina, even if she's focused on caring for family, is still fixated on that past. The Maldonados are enemies, full stop. So that's bound to be an issue.

Vampyrates! #1, by Fred van Lente (writer), Luca Pizzari (artist), Adam Guzowski (color artist), Jodie Troutman (letterer) -  The exclamation point appears to be part of the official title, so I'm leaving it in.

In this world, vampires rule, and humans are an underclass. And if vampires rule, then they're going to fight over which of them specifically, gets to rule. But whatever war was going on, ended without anyone telling Captain Akeyo to stop attacking what she thought were enemy ships, which are now allied. So she's considered a pirate now.

As it turns out, the war is ending via arranged marriage. The Empress Nira isn't happy about it, but you gotta do what you gotta do. And what her cousin the Duchess thinks she's gotta do is stage a violent coup. Which at least results in the death of Nira's betrothed, but also the deaths of all her guards. I'm not sure who the robed guys that serve the Duchess are, but they're apparently big and tough enough Nira's guards go down like Hand ninjas against Wolverine.

It is a little weird that in one panel, Nira is calling for her guards while wielding two clean swords, but in the next panel, her guards are being slaughtered, and both her swords have blood running down them.

Nira flees, gets wounded with an elaborate crossbow that fires jagged bolts, and only escapes because she lands in the red light district, and all the ladies of the evening are wearing versions of her dress, confusing those hunting her. But they're not the only ones confused. Nira had a human lover (taboo!), a man named Davin who wants to explore some uncharted region of the world. They had a bit of an argument, but he made an offer for her to board his ship and flee. Nira tries for it, but winds up on Akeyo's ship instead, and gets K.O.'ed. Someone wasn't paying enough attention to directions!

 

I am confused why Akeyo would be anchored at the harbor of the kingdom that just declared her a pirate and put a bounty on her head. I guess you don't survive as a captain who actually attacks other ships without being a little bold. Or a bit of a gambler, and Akeyo recognizes Nira from her image on the nation's coins.

Pizzari's art has a but of an Adam Kubert vibe to it, in the squared off jaws, the art that kind of straddles the line between angular and blocky, and the shading. I was a little confused during the fight because it seemed like Nira was using two swords, then one, then two again once she grabbed one of the robed guy's swords. Turns out the sword the Duchess offered her was still sheathed, so the initial second sword was actually just the scabbard. Does raise another question of why the Duchess did that. Attacking from behind during a wedding doesn't seem like the act of someone concerned with a fair fight, but giving Nira a weapon does.

I'll say this, Pizzari definitely draws some stylish pirates. All of Akeyo's crew that we actually see have distinct, often wildly different looks. One of them appears to have a beard that's on fire. Seems like the sort of thing to get looked at, if only so the captain doesn't have to smell burning hair all the time.

Anyway, it's a promising enough start. A pirate with a possible grudge and uncertain motives. An empress on the run with a possible ally if she can find Davin. And there's the mystery of that unexplored region, which van Lente could use in any number of ways. Hideout, source of allies, or possibly a reveal that things are very different in the rest of the world than what Nira or her people imagine.