What I Bought 2/18/2026 - Part 1

I was, by process of elimination, thrown into this stupid work group last year, for people who lead without actually being in leadership positions. I have no business being there, no idea what I'm supposed to be bringing to it, or taking from it. Which is not a huge surprise, considering the guy who I'm positive came up with it uses idiotic phrases like, "people leaders." As in, "consult with your unit's people leaders." What is that phrase supposed to convey that just saying "leaders" wouldn't? We don't have any dogs or robots at my job!

I'd do my job a lot better if they'd just leave me to it. 

Fantastic Four #8, by Ryan North (writer), Humberto Ramos (penciler), Victor Olazaba (inker), Edgar Delgado (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Sue is rocking a spiked outfit! Be on alert, but also get some popcorn in case she's finally ready to off Reed.

Most of this issue revolves around the notion that a universe is so vast, that you don't even need parallel universes for the same situations or people to occur more than once. So in another section of the 616-universe, there is another Earth-like planet, with homo sapiens-looking folks, including 4 exposed to cosmic rays who develop familiar powers. I mean, OK, seems a bit much to be that similar, but maybe it'll turn out to be another world of Skrulls convinced they're Earthlings.

But in this world, this Sue twigged to the fact her powers go beyond being invisible much sooner, and Reed encourages her to explore the full potential of what she can manipulate. Which seems to be pretty much anything. Magnetism, gravity, electromagnetic energy all that jazz.

Seems groovy, until this Sue has a nightmare of being besieged by enemies. And the fighting she does in her nightmare, translates to the real world. Her forcefields cut off this sorta-Earth from heat, and kills everyone. Except Johnny. There wasn't anyone else with heat powers on this sorta-Earth? Whatever, Sue hides in her guilt for a while, until she convinces Johnny to let her use his heat to perform a little brain surgery on herself.

Props to Ramos on that image, which will no doubt replace the whale in my nightmares. Now she doesn't feel bad about killing every human! Things went downhill from there, and the FF are about to find out just how downhill as they find a battered Galactus and the so-called "Invincible Woman."

Can you actually disable the portion of your brain that feels guilt or regret, but still feel joy, as this other Sue declares? Or is it just the absence of the pain, after weeks of dealing with it, translated by whatever's left of her brain as joy? And does that really mean she'd start going around, attacking people? Although it's a good beat Galactus tried eating her Earth, in which case the FF should really step aside and let this Sue finish Galactus off. Cosmic consonance, my ass.

The Party that Never Stops Restarting

Alex is headed to Edwards Island for the high-schoolers' annual wild party with her best friend, Ren, and her new step-brother, Jonas. On reaching the beach, they find only two other people: the queen bee, Clarissa, who has issues with Alex, and Clarissa's friend, Nona.

But that's OK! Because Ren really just wants to investigate the spots near a cave that emit strange signals, which is why he had Alex bring a radio. And it does pick up some strange signals. It also makes a strange floating triangle Jonas finds inside the cave vibrate until it forms a big triangle. At which point everything goes to hell. Something got loose, and it's angry and desperate to stay loose. If that means hijacking the bodies of 5 teenagers, that's what it'll do.

Oxenfree's gameplay is; 1) you guiding Alex from one place to another, 2) having her tune in various signals on the radio, and 3) dialogue trees. Characters will say something, and Alex has three possible responses, each mapped to a button based on its location. Something I didn't recognize until the second playthrough, you have the option to say nothing. Dialogue balloons will (usually) fade in a few seconds if you don't say anything. I don't feel like your choices make much difference to how the plot plays out, but they do impact your relationships with the other characters.

How they do that, in terms of which dialogue options prompt what shift, I couldn't tell you. Sometimes when a character says something, their face will appear in a dialogue balloon above another character. Clearly whatever was said caught that character's attention, but in a good way? A bad way? No idea! Until Dawn had a screen you could check that would show how relationships between whichever character you were playing and all the others where trending, but Oxenfree's got nothing similar I could find.

Which is accurate - not like you can be sure how a comment will go over in real life - but frustrating in a game where so much is about talking. I played through 5 times - doesn't take more than a few hours once you know where to go - and when the game tells you how things turned out with everyone at the end, I kept getting basically the same results. Jonas and Alex were always distant, Ren moves across country and Alex rarely hears from him. She has only a vague notion what Nona's up to.

The 5th time, I got it where Jonas and I are tight-knit siblings, and Ren and Nona are dating. I have some idea what I did for the latter, but no idea what prompted the change in outcomes for Jonas and Alex. If anything, I thought I was doing worse than usual with him. Now I did somehow create distance between Alex and Ren, so I'd figure that was enough, except it didn't change anything vis-a-vis Jonas when I did the same thing on playthrough #4.

Maybe that's just down to me. I tried to pick different responses, or make different choices. There's a point you decide to check if the museum on the island might have any clues, and one of Ren, Jonas or Nona is coming with you. I usually pick Ren, since it's his idea, and between he and Jonas, "best friend" wins over "step-brother of 5 minutes." But one time their arguing was so irritating I picked Nona. It didn't seem to change anything, but everyone's incredulous reactions were funny.

Still, certain situations I always responded to roughly the same. Sometimes I couldn't remember what I picked the time before. Or I didn't like the other options. Too cruel, maybe. The last 3 playthroughs, I told myself going in that I'd take the spirits up on the offer to let them have Clarissa in return for letting the rest of us go.

And, without fail, when the spirits made the offer, I'd refuse. The first time I chalked up to a sense maybe their hold on us wasn't as secure as they claimed if they were bargaining. After that? It was just stubbornness. Or else a feeling that, even if Clarissa was cruel to Alex, she didn't deserve that.

I don't understand the time travel - time displacement - aspects of the story. How characters vanish and appear somewhere else. Yes, sometimes the spirits possess you, and so you lose time, but you wake up in the same place. I can sort of square the notion that this throws Alex back into memories of her and her deceased brother, maybe because the spirits are trying to distract her (although you can apparently alter past events, at least according to subsequent flashback trips.) Doesn't explain people appearing or disappearing or dying in front of you, then turning up fine later. I also don't understand how winding antiquated tape players gets you out of smaller time loops.

Part of the reason I kept playing was to see if I could get them free entirely. First time, I tried closing the doorway from the other side, consigning Alex to a horrible fate. Didn't work. We've already discussed my reluctance to give them Clarissa. At a certain point, you can find letters around the island that tell what happened to the spirits. I was banking on that info to help Alex reach the spirits' humanity, convince them to let go and move on, if I could just find the right thing for Alex to say. No dice, and a cursory search online suggests I can't get this group out, only maybe save a different Alex from falling into the same fate.

Which is not an ending that puts a guy in the mindset of having accomplished anything by finishing the game.

Overdue Movie Reviews #9 - The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)

Sure, I've written about this film before, but never what I'd consider a real review of the entire thing. And this might very well be my favorite movie of all time, so 1-2-3, let's jam.

A bandit (Eli Wallach) with a price on his head. A bounty hunter (Clint Eastwood) with a scheme to make some dough. A hired gun (Lee van Cleef) trying to track down a man who knows the location of $200,000 in gold coins. Tuco learns the name of the cemetery where the gold is hidden, Blondie, the name of the grave. And the race to the money is on.

In the barest bones of the plot, there's not a lot there, yet the movie is nearly 3 hours long. Leone takes his time, right from the start, the slow build of the three men marching towards each other down an empty street, only for all three to charge into a saloon and gunfire to erupt. It's 20 minutes before Eastwood shows up, around a half-hour before "the good" appears on screen beside him, in what is more than a little tongue-in-cheek, given he's in the middle of betraying Tuco and stranding him in the desert.

But Leone fills the film with smaller set pieces and odd characters. The scam Tuco and Blondie run, Tuco constructing himself a new pistol. Tuco's painful reunion with his brother the priest. The prisoner of war camp, although this does serve to bring Angel Eyes into the chase more directly. The drunken captain commanding the Union forces trying to take the bridge.

The build-up to violence is long, the violence itself brief. Nobody gets shot, only to stagger back to their feet and keep shooting. No running gunfights where characters dive for cover. People draw their guns, someone fires first, the other person dies. Even in the Civil War battle scene, there's Tuco and Blondie's conversation about their respective pieces of information while rigging explosives. Then the bridge explodes, and a few seconds of cannon fire, impactful as two kids hurling insults at each other, and it's done.

The exception would be Tuco's beating at Wallace's hands in the POW camp. But it's non-lethal violence, a rarity in the film. Plus, Leone seems to have some fascination with main character(s) getting the crap beat out of them, as he used it in A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More, though those beatings are administered by a gang, not an individual. And this one seems more brutal, maybe because Leone focuses more on Tuco's increasing distress. The choking noises he makes, the futile attempts to grapple with the bigger man, while one arm is shackled to the chair. Fistful might show Eastwood's battered face after the fact, but during, it's him staggering about, getting punched by whoever is closest. Or maybe it's that, in the other movies, those administering the beating are having fun. They're usually laughing, but Wallace isn't. I imagine he enjoys it, but it's also work, and he's got a specific purpose in mind: hurt this man until he talks. 

It was Roger Ebert's entry on his Great Movies list that clued me in to one quirk Leone maintains in this film: If the audience can't see something (because it isn't in the shot), neither can the characters. Right from the first seconds of the film, when a long shot of a distant ridge seamlessly becomes a close-up when a bounty hunter Tuco steps into view from off-screen, that's how things work. The world outside the camera is invisible to those within.

This plays out repeatedly. Tuco and Blondie ride up on the massive Union encampment at the bridge - where two battles take place a day - without knowing it until they're surrounded. In the cemetery, as Tuco claws at the dirt on Arch Stanton's grave, Blondie catches him by surprise, only for them both to be surprised by the arrival of Angel Eyes. Blondie's first appearance in the movie is him somehow walking up on Tuco and 3 other bounty hunters without any of them noticing until he speaks. While Blondie's distracted in the hotel by the men Tuco brought, Tuco was clearly sitting on the windowsill for several moments before announcing his presence. It's a curious approach, though it allows Leone to have repeated dramatic reveals and arrivals, and it may speak to these men's blinkered approaches to life. They're locked in on their desires, and when they sense it close to fruition, become blind to everything else.

Tuco would be easy to reduce to a comic relief character. His grandiose expressions and threats, the bluster. Hands tied and still creaming threats at Blondie. But Leone takes the time to list Tuco's crimes at both occasions of his hanging, many of which imply not just cruelty, but a level of planning, notably the one about getting paid in advance to lead a wagon train, then abandoning said wagon train on the Sioux hunting grounds. (Also, he's charged specifically with arson in a prison, which makes me wonder if it was part of an escape plan, or he just did it for kicks.)

And Eli Wallach gives Tuco enough cunning and sheer determination that he remains a threat. Sure, it seems unwise for Tuco to keep running his yap at Wallace, but he eventually gets the man's guard down and throws him off a train, then bashes his head against a rock to make sure he's dead. Tuco keeps his gun on him when he bathes, keeps it hidden until needed.

Tuco may appear the butt of the joke in the final showdown, unaware Blondie emptied his gun, but it speaks to how much of a threat Blondie considers Tuco. Initially, he had so little regard for Tuco he figured it was enough to leave him in the desert and ride off with the money. After only escaping death in the hotel via dumb luck, and nearly dying in the desert because Tuco wouldn't stop hunting him, Blondie knows better. He surely knows, as they near the cemetery, that Angel Eyes is out there, somewhere.

I doubt Blondie had the whole thing with the name on the rock planned, since the most planning we see from him is the scam he ran with Tuco, then "Shorty," but he must have figured there was a point it would come to shooting. And while Blondie seems confident he can handle Angel Eyes, he does not want Tuco in the mix. Whether because he can't trust Tuco choosing him over Angel Eyes, or he just isn't certain he can kill both of them, Blondie hedges his bets.

(He also decides Tuco's presence evens things enough he can go against Angel Eyes and his gang in the town being shelled. 6-on-1 was a no-go, but 6-on-2, where the 2 are Blondie and Tuco? Those are odds Blondie likes.)

And Tuco is the one who drives the story. It's his bounty that brings he and Blondie together, that leads to the betrayal, and ultimately the death-march. Which is how they meet "Bill Carson" in the desert and learn about the money. Minus Tuco, Blondie would have continued with his penny-ante scam of turning in criminals, then freeing them. Angel Eyes' plan to join the Union Army and scour prisoner of war camps would come to nothing, because Carson and everyone else who knew about the gold was a corpse in the desert. Tuco's also the only of the three we get any backstory for. He had wives - more than one if his remark to his brother is to be believed - and a brother, and two parents.

(Leone creates this trio, but tends to focus on duos. Tuco and Blondie as allies, then enemies, then allies again. Tuco and Angel Eyes briefly in the POW camp. Angel Eyes and Blondie as uneasy partners. When it looks as though it'll be Tuco and Blondie vs. Angel Eyes, the latter withdraws, leaving it a duo. And in the final gunfight, Tuco being unarmed means it's really just Blondie vs. Angel Eyes.)

One of my dad's complaints about Leone's films is there's no one who's good. Everyone is a scumbag, he says. While applying "the good" to Blondie seems sarcastic, and there's definitely a joke to the heavenly choir music that plays when Angel Eyes spots him at Tuco's second hanging and opines that a 'golden-haired angel' watches over Tuco, there are hints that Blondie has humanity or capacity for empathy the other two lack. The comfort he offers to the dying soldier in the burned out church, just prior to the final showdown. Covering the boy with his coat and offering a cigarette isn't much, but at least the kid doesn't die alone. The fact he asks Tuco whether he can save Shorty from being hanged, and apologizes softly to Shorty when Tuco says no.

Heck, it would have been simpler for Blondie to let Tuco hang, if he really thought their partnership had reached its logical endpoint. But he saved him, though we can question how seriously he meant it when he said he thought Tuco could make the 70-mile hike back to town. And he did leave Tuco half the gold, which Angel Eyes certainly wouldn't have (and I have my doubts about Tuco doing the same for Blondie, were their circumstances reversed.)

Leone sets the movie in the Civil War, yet the war is, at best, an impediment. None of the three characters have any investment in the outcome. Blondie regards it as a waste of lives. Angel Eyes uses it as cover to search for Carson, while lining his pockets by robbing the prisoners. Tuco puts on Carson's uniform because it makes it easier to demand treatment for Blondie. If he had recognized the soldiers riding towards them as dusty Union soldiers, he'd have thrown the Confederate uniforms away in a second, because their only use is as something to clear paths. They blow up the bridge simply so both sides won't have it to fight over, and will get out of their way. That those soldiers will be sent to fight and die elsewhere is not their problem. They don't notice the Union Army until they're captured because it wasn't in the shot with them, and it wasn't in the shot with them because they weren't giving any thought to it. All that mattered was crossing the river to get closer to the gold. 

It's not clear anyone else cares either. Carson enlisted to try and hide until it was safe to dig up the gold. Carson's the girlfriend, the 'fresh young whore,' as she's described by the legless soldier, is introduced as a wagon of drunk soldiers throw her into the street after having their fun. The hotel manager shouts support for Dixie, while muttering under his breath about the Confederates being cowards, and how he can't wait until they leave, so he can make money off the Yankees. Wallace is a goon, lording his strength over prisoners who can't fight back, rather than actual combat. Ditto for the Union guard who makes the prisoners play music while Tuco is beaten. The soldier Tuco taunts, who probably didn't get a penny for the arm he lost. The half-soldier sells any information he can, even if it relates to someone ostensibly on the same side as him. The captain of the Union forces at the bridge is a drunken wreck, hating his orders but unwilling to defy them. Just waiting for death, or someone who will do what he can only dream of.

The one guy who seems like a believer is the commandant of the prisoner camp, who believes prisoners should be treated with respect, and hopes to get Angel Eyes court-martialed. But he's dying of gangrene, making these vows sprawled on his back, while Angel Eyes smirks at him in unconcealed contempt. He knows he'll be long gone before this man could ever hope to prove anything. Of course, Angel Eyes expects to be rich, and instead ends up in Hell.

You really can't discuss The Good, the Bad and the Ugly without talking about Ennio Morricone's score. Unfortunately I'm not much good at discussing music, but the music is indelibly linked with the film in my head. (Also, fortunately, this Youtube video knows how to discuss music.) Morricone had some of the pieces ready before filming even began, and it's neat to watch how the music and the shots are interwoven. Tuco running among the graves, the names blurring as the music accelerates to match his pace, more instruments joining in as he darts from one row to another. The music is hopeful, Tuco thinking he's on the precipice of everything he wants, but also chaotic, the sheer enormity of the task of finding one grave among 5000.

And then the final showdown, with the guitar strumming signaling the beginning as Blondie sets down the rock. The castanets, and then the trumpets as the three slowly take their places in a long shot. A few shots of ambient noise before the music begins again, and Leone starts moving the camera closer, focusing on the expressions and twitches. Blondie giving Tuco a small smile and a nod, camera cutting between them like a signal. 'Hey, the two of us are a team, right?' Followed by a shot of Angel Eyes glance darting towards Tuco, reassessing his situation. The way Angel Eyes' hand starts towards his gun, then withdraws at a glance from Blondie. Tuco's fingers twitching, and Blondie's hand, perfectly still the whole time, even when everything else is speeding up. The cuts are coming faster, the music is building up, everyone's hands are starting to move, eyes are widening. But Blondie's impassive, just waiting for a conclusion that's foregone. 

Digging for Answers

Huh, explaining the joke does make it funnier. The future is a marvelous place. 

Star Power and the Mystery of the Zel Gux Dynasty is the 3rd story arc in Michael Terracciano and Garth Graham's Star Power series. The second arc ended with Dancia's powers back in working order and mercenary scumbag Black Hole Bill being sent off to what will apparently be a very unpleasant imprisonment. In the process of rebooting their powers (flying through a solar flare) the artificial intelligence that comes with the Star Power - which Danica named "Mitch" - sensed a signal from another Star-Powered Sentinel in the vast network meant to connect all of them, the first and only one he'd detected so far.

This story starts with the signal going silent, but Mitch tracing it to a star system where a mysterious group known as the "Zel Gux Dynasty" traveled from world to world, sharing knowledge with the inhabitants. The Zel Gux themselves are long gone, but their ruins are considered significant, so it has to be treated as an archaeological expedition (which Graham highlights with the cover to the first chapter, where Danica is rocking an Indiana Jones look.)

Each world turns out to have a different puzzle or challenge, each requiring certain things from Danica, though not her love of puns. That's a bonus reserved for her friends and coworkers. In addition, the variety of worlds give Graham opportunities to draw different aliens and civilizations. One group may be rock-people (who have commercialized their ruins to their maximum extent), another look like red pandas and live in homes built in the trees.

Danica brings along the same 3 members of the security team that became her friends in earlier volumes, plus her supervisor, Dr. Brightman. They take a backseat here, acting mainly as sources of levity in between the adventure sequences. Instead, Terracciano focuses on Beena, thus far an ancillary character, albeit one very excited to interact with Danica at any opportunity. Beena's an archaeologist, and an expert on the worlds in the Zel Gux Dynasty, so she's assigned to assist. Except as Danica solves the challenges without her, Beena starts working even harder to figure things out first. She means to show she's useful, but comes off as egocentric, especially to Danica. So that has to be addressed.

Terracciano also brings back the 3 Void Angel pilots that tried and failed to kill Danica as soon as she got the Star Power. Despite the Void Angels being gone, the Countess who hired them locked up, and the three of them being on their own, one is still hellbent on finishing the job. One seems willing to go with it, just follow whoever makes the most forceful argument, and the other Burke, seems increasingly hesitant to pursue this.

The story also jumps periodically to an extended conversation between the Countess and a member of Psychological Ops (a "psi-cop" in popular parlance.) It highlights circumstances outside the Millennium Federation (which the book delves into further in volume 4), as well as the Countess' mindset, but also teases out the history of the Star-Powered Sentinels while Danica and her friends track down these clues. I think the Psi-Cop is a little too confident about the Federation's stability, given the universe's trends towards entropy, but the series in general emphasizes hope and the value and strength of cooperation, so it's understandable.

I think this might be my favorite Star Power storyline. Maybe because it's more of a straightforward adventure. While it reveals some backstory, we're past the origin story. It's not as much a body horror deal as volume 5. The Void Angel Trio are a threat, but don't dominate the story, and neither does the subplot about Beena's need to impress people with how smart and useful she is. It feels like lower stakes, but that makes a change of pace from most of the other volumes, that have long stretches of life-or-death situations. It takes advantage of its setting in a futuristic interplanetary to offer differing settings, architecture, aliens and cultures. Casual worldbuilding, which lets the story focus on the puzzles, which are their own kind of clue to the backstory of the Sentinels.

Sunday Splash Page #414

"Ride the Jade Tiger," in Power Man and Iron Fist #75, by Mary Jo Duffy (writer), Kerry Gammill (penciler), Ricardo Villamonte (inker), Christie Scheele (colorist), Jim Novak (letterer)

Danny Rand's run as a solo hero lasted 15 issues. 26 if you count the stint headlining Marvel Premiere. Luke Cage did better. His solo run went 49 issues, first as Luke Cage Hero-for-Hire, then as Luke Cage: Power Man. At the end of the day, neither was apparently doing well enough on their own. So somebody got the idea to do a team-up book between the naive kung fu white boy and the street savvy black guy with bulletproof skin.

Power Man and Iron Fist took over Luke's book's numbering at issue 50, and ran to issue 125, at which point, Danny got killed. (John Byrne later reversed this in his Namor run, of all things.) I bought 21 issues a few years back, whichever sounded interesting to me. Most are written by either Mary Jo Duffy (from around issue 58 to 80), or Jim Owsley (from the last year of the book). Mark Bright drew all the Owsley issues I've got, while Duffy's are drawn by, variously, Trevor von Eeden, Marie Severin (with Steve Leialoha), Kerry Gammill, or Denys Cowan. There's also a 4 issue story by Kurt Busiek and Ernie Chan in the mix that concludes at #100.

Maybe it's just the issues I picked, but it feels like the book makes more use of Danny's supporting cast than Luke's. Colleen Wing and Misty Knight are around a lot, either hanging out with Danny or on jobs of their own (which inevitably dovetail with whatever Luke and Danny are doing.) Danny's corporate associate Jeryn Hogarth sometimes gets the boys jobs.

They do operate out of Luke's set-up in an old theater, so his pal D.W. is around a lot, and there's some time spent on Luke's various romantic entanglements. Plus, the book is using Luke's "hero for hire" storytelling engine. Maybe incorporating more of Danny's cast and villains was a way of balancing things. Plus, you can get some mileage out of throwing Luke Cage into mystic cities, fighting spectral ninja assassins and sentient, angry plant-people.

And it's in a different way from putting Danny in a world Luke is accustomed to. Danny's utility in those stories is his naivete (and probably the fact he doesn't look intimidating at first glance.) Like when Danny is hired by a woman to protect her from a stalker that turns out to be Whirlwind. Even though the man is a costumed criminal, no one in the neighborhood will help Danny actually find him. Because Whirlwind is from there, and Danny's not, and he can't navigate the idea that matters more than the man being a crook.

With Luke in K'un-Lun, it's not him being naive, but him seeing things with fresh eyes. Danny, even if he doesn't agree with all of it, is used to how things work. He doesn't object when women are treated as irrelevant, and leads the charge to try and exterminate the Hylthri. When Luke questions him about it, Danny says that's just the way things are here. Luke gets to act as the one who cuts through the pomp and the bullshit and get things moving. Plus, Luke and Lei Kung the Thunderer make an interesting duo, mutual (grudging) respect masked by irritation on Luke's end and condescension on Lei Kung's.

In between stories about power struggles over an other-dimensional city, or assassins trying and start a nuclear war, there are more lighthearted stories. All the writers get mileage from Luke and Danny taking jobs they find distasteful and demeaning, or simply being caught up in bizarre circumstances. One time, Luke may come into possession of a quarter that's actually a device that disrupts electronic circuitry, and gets hounded by some crazy mountain climber whose associates look like Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Humphrey Bogart. Or they take a job to check on some vault in the Alaskan tundra, which turns out to be empty for some reason, and the security guard, already loopy from the isolation, goes completely round the bend.

Saturday Splash Page #216

"What, This Again?" in Red Robin #10, by Christopher Yost (writer), Marcus To (penciler), Ray McCarthy (inker), Guy Major (colorist), Sal Cipriano (letterer)

In addition to the misery-fest DC made Tim Drake's life in the mid-2000s, wiping out basically any supporting cast he had, the character also had to deal with being squeezed out of any real niche. On the one hand, there's always a writer eager to introduce a new character to a hero's supporting cast of sidekicks. At the same time, the ones who came before never go away, so the roles they filled in the fictional universe never become vacant.

Grant Morrison brought in Damian Wayne, and the kid got to be Robin, despite pulling all manner of shit - decapitating a criminal, illegally imprisoning other criminals beneath Titans Tower - that would have gotten most of the previous sidekicks shitcanned. Let's hear it for nepotism!

But even when Bruce Wayne goes away, there's still Dick Grayson already standing in line to be Batman. Damian's Robin, Jason Todd's the designated black sheep. What's left for Tim Drake that differentiates him from all the rest? They gave him the codename Red Robin, which Jason actually brought back from his multiverse jaunt in the much-derided Countdown to Final Crisis.

This is the only issue of this series I bought, as it crossed over with Bryan Q. Miller's Batgirl, but there are so many threads I'm not really sure what the deal was. Tim seems to be opposing Ra's al Ghul, but maybe also dealing with the fact Hush is impersonating Bruce Wayne (currently lost in time thanks to Darkseid.) Vicki Vale is looking for Tim, for reasons I'm entirely unclear on. Tim is maybe involved with Lucius Fox's daughter? It seems like Yost was teasing Tim drifting into Paranoid Loner Asshole Batman territory - since Grayson is being Cheerful, Approachable Batman - but recognize this and pull back before it was too late.

This problem of what to do with Tim hasn't gotten any less pronounced in the 15 years since this series concluded. There's more Bat-adjacent characters than ever. They tried giving him an ongoing, that seemed to die fast. They gave him a boyfriend, albeit one with the name of one of his old private school roommates (but looking nothing like the character did when Pete Woods drew him.) No idea if that's still the case. I think the problem is, Tim's situated as the Detective Robin, but he works for Batman. Batman's already the detective (in theory, depending on the writer) in the Bat-family.

What I Bought 2/11/2026

Not satisfied with simply restricting access to certain channels, Pluto TV now requires me to register an account if I want to use it at all. Which, if it would spare me the commercials, I might consider a fair trade. But since I know that ain't happening, the prospect of giving them another avenue to annoy me is not worth it.

Plus, I'm the contrary sort who resents their trying to force me to play their game.

Marc Spector: Moon Knight #1, by Jed MacKay (writer), Devmalya Pramanik (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - Dr. Sterman should probably talk to Marc about sleeping with weapons.

Marc's kidnappers have him in a giant sound stage, Mr. Fear (looking like he stole Taskmaster's Udon Studios design mask, and one of Dr. Doom's cloaks) pumping him full of fear toxins while some large black man I don't recognize tries to break him down for Agence Byzantine. The big guy is going by "Mr. Smith," pretending to be Marc's boss at the company where Marc is mailroom guy, but that doesn't really help me i.d. him. He also seems like he's really enjoying humiliating Marc whether he's playing the scowling boss, or sitting in his control room full of monitors that wash everything in blue-white.

Marc delivers meaningless letters to members of the Agence, still wearing their read outfits, but with business suits over them, which Pramanik details in repetitive 9-panel grids. Rosenberg colors these pages a sort of dull, washed out yellow. has a room, where he eats dog food like cereal and stares at a non-functioning TV. But Marc sees a Moon Knight cartoon, with a broad-chested, smiling Moon Knight. He even sings a theme song as he goes about his day.

This isn't getting anyone anywhere, even as Mr. Fear ups the doses to dangerous levels, but then Zodiac breaks in to push Marc to find himself. Even brings him his mask and cloak (which Rosenberg colors as glowing) in a gift box. There's a nice page of interlocked crescents - claws? - of "Moon Knight" telling Marc what he needs to do, growing more terrifying in each panel, while the other side shows the Agence Byzantine guys rushing towards the room they're in. So it's Moon Knight (sorta) and Zodiac, teaming up to bust Marc out. Or just kill a bunch of guys.

At times like this, I wonder about Steven and Jake. Is the fear toxin keeping them incapacitated, too, or creating some kind of barrier where they can't supplant Marc as the part of the system in control? I would figure they'd be what's helping Marc resist, but I don't think that's what MacKay's going for, since he so rarely uses either of them.