Saturday Splash Page #236

"The Congregation," in Werewolf by Night (2023) #1, by Derek Landy (writer), Fran Galan (artist/colorist), Joe Sabino (letterer)

A one-shot released in the fall of 2023, revolving around Jack Russell, aka the Werewolf by Night, and Elsa Bloodstone, arriving independently at a ominous castle in the mountains of Colorado. Both are seeking Doktor Nekromantik, and a young woman he's abducted to sacrifice to some nefarious purpose.

Landy contrasts the duo's via internal narration through the story. Jack's is overwrought and dramatic, while Elsa's is breezy and flip. Jack makes his way up the mountainside and tears his way through the creations of Nekromantik that bar his path, while Elsa simply skydives out of a plane in which she hitched a ride, that was owned by some vampires she subsequently killed. When the two run into each other in the castle, Jack spends three caption boxes thinking about how people - like him - let Elsa's attitude slide because she's so pretty, and he could have loved her, if he thought he deserved to be happy. Elsa's caption is, 'He smells of dog.'

The situation they find themselves dealing with is more complex than they expected, as Nekromantik is after revenge, but not against either of them. They're far too late to save the young woman, and Jack spends the last page moping how that's another person he failed, and his life is violence, while Elsa's internal narration insists that it would bother her, if she thought about it. But why do that, when life is so hard already? They reach the same endpoint, but draw different conclusions from it.

Other than the last few pages, which take place the following morning, the story is set entirely at night, and Galan goes with a limited and stark color scheme. Everything, save the glowing red eyes of the shadow creatures Nekromantik made, is colored some variation of black, white, or grey. It allows for a sharp, high-contrast look that plays up the shadows.

Except for Elsa, who is Technicolor in a world of black-and-white (the scenes in the jet before she reaches the castle are also in color.) A bit more bronzed than you might expect for someone who spends her time hunting monsters at night, but her clothes, her hair, the flash of red if she uses the Bloodstone, all of that is in color. It sets her apart from everyone and everything else in the story, including Jack. 

Which is something to explore. In terms of color, Jack is treated as the same as Nekromantik, his monsters, and the thing he seeks to summon, while Elsa is not. Why? Simply because she's still human, despite the weird alien rock in her palm she got from her caveman father? Jack is human, at least some of the time. Is it something about purpose, that Jack and Nekromantik were each driven by some stronger motive, duty or revenge, while Elsa at least gives the outward appearance she's just there to make monsters go boom? I don't think it's a matter of the others being driven by baser instincts, because Jack keeps narrating about how he's trying not to lose control and just tear things to shreds, so he's clearly resisting those urges.

What I Bought 6/29/2026 - Part 2

I almost never get $10 bills back in change. Because yes, I buy most things with cash. It's a chemical affliction. Whether it's a automated checkout thing or a good old human cashier, I usually receive two $5s instead. Which seems odd. Why bother with two bills when one will do? Did Trump do away with $10s because Alexander Hamilton's not even a President, not like Ben Franklin?

Babs: The Black Road South #4, by Garth Ennis (writer), Jacen Burrows (artist), Andy Troy (colorist), Rob Steen (letterer) - This feels like the sort of thing Babs will give Izzy grief about endlessly.

Our protagonists survive sledding off a cliff on a frozen barbarian and end up in a great sea of - well, let's not discuss what they're floating in. Babs is still playing cagey about her prior trip, though she's starting to suspect the Samwise stand-in has to be behind all this. Troy washes the whole sequence on the sea in this dull greyish murk that just looks nasty. Like the air would have a tangible texture that clings to you, and it would be awful.

About the time Izzy points out the Orb couldn't have been destroyed, because otherwise all the great evil in Mordynn would typically get sucked into a great hole, they notice Lilith Lazuli isn't dead. Or, she was, but the eldritch properties of the land brought her back. Sort of. She's about as articulate as your typical zombie, but she gets them to shore.

Where they're met by an army of pig-men mercs, working for the angry little hobbit. He hauls them off to some camp, rather than the tower where the great evil is sort of sulking and doing not much of anything. Because the hobbit's working on his own, to get the Orb. Which shouldn't be possible, unless someone had formed a soul bond with said Orb. Someone like Babs.

I think the thing that surprises me is that she'd actually think she could get away with selling it. Just seems like the sort of thing where any person eager to get their hands on it, is also the sort of person you couldn't trust to honor the terms of whatever deal you made with them. Hmm, maybe she'd been drinking when she made the arrangement. 

Is Ted OK? #4, by Dave Chisholm (writer/artist/letterer) - See? The doc agrees with me, last month's cover was nausea-inducing.

Dr. Paganini explains what's going on with Ted. She had a theory that human consciousness is stored somewhere other than inside your brain, but a place our brains access. A place with enormous storage capacity, and enormous energy potential. And Noah thought that could be a way to create true artificial intelligence. "Artificial intelligence", in the sense that he created a human body artificially, with no animating mind or spirit, and needed something to make it go.

They tried somehow linking the bodies to people who were dreaming, allowing access to what she called "Soul Space" through a shared doorway. It worked, and didn't require ten simultaneous nukes going off, which was the other notion she had for how to open a doorway into that space.

Except the further along things got, the more she sees that Noah's not after whatever she and the other scientists think he is. He wants to have an artificial human, but it needs to be able to use that Soul Space energy to do cool stuff. Like a lightning punch! Well sure, if I built an artificial person, I'd want them to be able to do cool shit. She figures out he's trying to build a video game character. Literally. The character in the game Ted plays before going to sleep each night. Who dies and is reborn with a different cool power.

But when things aren't going the way he'd like, Noah shifts to the nuke option. Being rich enough to have your thumb on the scale of several militaries helps. And that explains the Dome, if not how Noah was able to stand in a radioactive nightmare without issue. Unless he's given himself an artificial body and is drawing off that space as well.

The further into the story the Doc gets, the more Chisholm shifts how Noah is presented visually. He starts out positioned on the ends of panels, usually at the same level and size from our perspective as Dr. Paganini. He's sitting a lot, he's smiling, the colors are soft. Once the work begins, the colors shift to colder tones, like flourescent lights in a hospital. Noah tends to stand, and more than that, he tends to stand in the middle of things. Often stepping between our view of him and Dr. Paganini, making her smaller, pushing her to the edge of the panel, into the gutters. He's not asking about her work with interest, or promising that money won't be a problem. He demands she fix things, or insults "Soul Space" as a stupid name.

Having learned he was intended to be some next-gen human war machine, that his love for cats and paranoia are the result of Noah's capricious whims in how the "manowars" were programmed, Ted is ready to pack it in. He should just be destroyed. Sarah objects, making a whole spiel about Ted and who she thinks he is and that he doesn't get to give up. Ted comes around, decides it's time to stand up and be counted, and that doesn't go well.

I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop with Sarah. I'm not sure what that shoe will be. The person she keeps leaving voicemails for was someone Noah killed along the way? One of the dreamers, one of the mercs. That she's a dreamer, and all this is her and Ted sharing a consciousness? I can't quite buy that she's faking all this and is secretly loyal to Noah, because I don't think weren't meant to believe her internal narration is lies, even if it's remained vague who she's talking to. She's definitely projecting something about that person onto Ted, which he could end up seeing as a betrayal, if it's never really been about helping him, so much as him being a proxy for someone else she wished she could help. 

If These Walls Could Talk - Stan McNeal

This is a collection of stories revolving around the 4 consecutive seasons the St. Louis Cardinals made it to at least the National League Championship Series in 2011 through 2014. Sort of. Because it also includes a section on the 2022 season, when Albert Pujols came back for his last year and became only the 4th player to reach 700 home runs.

It more or less ignores the all the seasons in-between, minus some of the sections that discuss Adam Wainwright, since he was on the team throughout. Granted, the Cardinals didn't experience a ton of postseason success in the 2015-2021 years, but they did win 100 games in 2015, and they did make it to the NLCS in 2019, and they won 17 games in a row during the 2021 season to make the playoffs. And it isn't like the 2022 team was in the postseason for long, either. They lost a best-of-three series to the Phillies, in two games.

It's an especially odd reading experience because I guess, this being a revised edition, McNeal put the most recent stuff at the beginning. So you get the section on 2022, and then you jump backwards most of a decade, and keep working back from there. Each year is broken up into shorter pieces focused on a specific player or coach.

So in 2011, you've got a few pages on Matt Holliday and his injury issues, another few pages on Albert Pujols coming back from a broken bone in his wrist in 17 days (I forgot just how fast that dude recovered from injuries), Colby Rasmus getting traded for pitching, Chris Carpenter carrying the pitching staff (and behaving like an asshole on the field), David Freese's postseason heroics, Allen Craig's less-heralded postseason heroics, Lance Berkman's comeback year, Tony LaRussa's last season before (briefly) retiring, and Pujols signing with the Angels in free agency.

(McNeal titles that last one, "Pujols Takes the Money and Runs", which is certainly one way to describe Pujols exercising his right as a free agent to sign the contract he believes pays him the full value he's worth, after years of playing on one that paid him far less than his production merited because the collective bargaining agreement grants the Cardinals all the leverage in negotiations for the first 6 years of his career.)

But even within that style, McNeal usually doesn't confine a piece to strictly what the player did that season. The parts where he dips into the past - Holliday failing to catch a fly ball in the 2009 NLDS, David Freese not playing baseball at all for a year after he graduated high school - make sense, as part of the journey to whatever McNeal's really driving at. But he also discusses the player's later seasons and career trajectory, like Freese's continued injury problems after 2011 and how he was eventually traded.

A lot of the stories are ones I already knew from following the team, although there are details in there I wasn't always aware of. Shelby Miller and Joe Kelly being the best man for each other's weddings, and having a bet over whether either could get a hit off the other the first time they faced off after Kelly was traded to Boston (Kelly won that bet.) I'd forgotten about Holliday having to leave a game because a moth flew in his ear and he couldn't dig it out with his finger (and apparently attempts to sit in dark room, with just a little light coming through a crack in the door failed to entice the moth, because its head was too far in to see the light.)

It feels like there's a narrow sweet spot for this. You have to care about the Cardinals to begin with, but not in such a way where you were consuming enough writing about them at the time these events were taking place. Otherwise you know most of what you're reading already. Unless the reader is looking for the nostalgia fix, which is an impulse I can understand. 

'Matt Holliday went for $100 in 2011 but had dropped to $75 by 2014. Michael Wacha, on the other hand, jumped from $5 in 2013 to $70 in the 2014 Winter Warm-Up, following his breakout October. David Freese had an even greater one-year increase, going from $5 to $75 following his dream postseason. Matt Carpenter cost $40 in 2014 just two years after being free. Jon Jay, meanwhile, had been a model of consistency. In 2014 his autograph was priced at $20 for the third straight year.'

What I Bought 6/29/2026 - Part 1

The weather has turned miserable here in the last few days, in the usual manner of being hot, with a humidity that is nearly suffocating. At least it waited until the end of June to start. Really couldn't hope for better than that. Definitely will miss actually wanting to be outside for the next couple of months. Suppose that leaves me more time for comics, so let's get into the last few holdouts from June, starting with a first issue.

Junk Punch #1, by Paul Tobin (writer), Javier Olivares (artist), Francesca Vivaldi (colorist), Taylor Esposito (letterer), Colleen Coover (artist/inker/colorist/letterer) - Something about the color of her outfit, combined with the big smile makes me keep thinking I'm looking at Squirrel Girl. Maybe it's that the guy in the spacesuit near her butt resembles a big, fluffy tail?

Clara Castanelle has, as she explains to one of her victims on page 2, a chemical affliction that makes her compulsively punch people in the junk. When she's not doing that, she's getting drunk, feeding peanut butter to pigeons so bug-eyed I think they were crossbred with pugs, having orgies, and maybe, possibly, helping people with problems. If a fortune cookie tells her to.

The problem of the moment is someone stealing goals. Not life goals, but goals in soccer games. As in, the ball is flying towards the net, then swerves off into the sky for no apparent reason. Information gathered by a couple of her allies - a fortune teller named "Medium Cotton", who walks around in cowboy boots, underwear and a turban, is prominently involved - think a crime lord named Silverhand is behind all this. But, Silverhand's knows Clara's investigating and has upped the apparently preexisting bounty on her head so that she's the #1 target in the city, instead of #7.

My main takeaway from the first issue, is I may not be on the right wavelength for this book. Tobin and Olivares are clearly going for absurd, but it's not hitting with me for some reason. A guy named "Joey Bagoducks", who ends up with one of his ducks trying to assassinate Clara, only to turn out to be a dude in a duck suit after she punches him in the junk, that's absurd. Obviously. And people who try to assassinate her shout "ASSASSIN!" in a very different font (though Esposito uses that for several different words or phrases during the issue.)

But I spent most of the issue metaphorically scratching my head and wondering what I was looking at, instead of laughing. Maybe it's that things are too random, or maybe it's just Clara that's too random. She's goes from agreeing to help find the stolen goals, to forgetting what she was doing a page later, to flipping a coin to decide whether to enter a bar, then entering before the coin hits the ground, to having an orgy two pages later. The junk punching thing feels less like a chemical affliction, and more like something she does just whenever it catches her fancy. Which is true of everything else in her life.

Olivares and Vivaldi making Billowing City a cramped, dingy-looking place. Buildings stretches high above and almost obscure the sky entirely, but they aren't gleaming or impressive feats of architecture. Mostly lots of cheap neon lights and dirty streets, but lots of people. Wide variety of colors and outfits, but nothing garishly bright. Like everybody is so fully flying their freak flag they all kind of cancel each other out. 

Something Big (1971)

Colonel Miller (Brian Keith) is a cavalry officer about to retire, and his wife Mary Anna (Honor Blackman) is on her way to the fort to make sure of it. Unfortunately, there's Joe Baker (Dean Martin) to contend with. He's a dude from Pennsylvania that came out West to do "something big," which really means he's been having fun playing outlaw. But the woman he's supposed to marry (Carol White) is tired of waiting and on her way.

So it's now or never for the something big, which involves robbing the treasure hoard of Mexico's most famous bandit. For that, he wants to acquire a Gatling gun. The guy who has the Gatling gun (or will have it) wants a woman. You see where this is going. Baker is holding up stagecoaches, looking for a woman he feels would be appropriate according to the Scriptures, and eventually meets Mary Anna. I'm not aware of the Bible speaking of trading a person for a Gatling gun, but maybe it's a different edition. The Sleazy Bastard Edition. Meanwhile, Miller and his chief scout (Ben Johnson) try unsuccessfully to figure out what it is Baker's planning, beyond "something big."

My dad had autotuned his TV to turn to this because he'd never heard of it. He was not impressed, with any of it. It's more comedy than action movie - the first real action is over an hour in, when Miller catches up to Baker and beats the crap out of him for abducting Mary Anna - but it's not funny. There are some odd characters, but the movie is content to coast on the existence of their quirks, rather than have anyone do something that might prompt laughter. Here's a two-woman gold mine operation, and they're really horny! Baker's future brother-in-law walks around playing bagpipes and dressing like a Scotsman (while his sister speaks with what sounds like an Irish accent)!

The movie starts with a, I think bounty hunter, complaining to Miller that Baker killed his partner (for kicking Baker's dog.) When Miller makes it clear he doesn't care and won't do anything, the cranky guy vows to find someone with a 'fine, delicate hand', to write him a letter to Washington D.C. about this. The guy reappears only at the very end of the movie, still vowing to write the letter. He doesn't try to hunt down Baker, he doesn't try to hamstring Miller, nothing.

Baker has this whole convoluted plan about getting the gun, but he's also hijacking whiskey as a bribe to a local tribe to join his attacking force. Then he rides into town in broad daylight, the brother-in-law playing the bagpipes the whole time. But, having tossed the element of surprise (which it turns out he didn't have to begin with) in the garbage, he keeps the Gatling gun under cover, and half his guys are dead before he gets it into action. Fortunately, none of the bandit's men know how to duck.

Dean Martin expends no particular effort, all lazy charm, easily punctured. Keith seems to be trying to talk without moving his lips for some reason. Honor Blackman's carrying a high-class sensibility and ego, but is somehow taken by Martin's bullshit enough to encourage her husband to let him take the Gatling gun and try his stupid plan. That didn't make any sense whatsoever. He's been exhibiting the same sleazy, Gambit-esque "charm" since he held up her stagecoach, and she wasn't impressed then. And Keith agrees, but not because he's got some plan to recover the gun, arrest Dean Martin and the bandit all at once, just because she asked, I guess.

I'm legitimately disappointed. There were enough elements for either a good comedy Western, or a good action Western. The potential was there, I think the actors had it in them, but what they were given to work with was just kind of trash, and they didn't or couldn't elevate it. 

A Challenging Coursework

As Zuko is the brooding, morally conflicted bad boy of the series, the answer to that question is apparently, "90% of the fandom."

Avatar the Last Airbender: Ashes of the Academy centers around the difficulty in changing a people's culture and beliefs, especially about themselves and their nation, and how that starts with what you teach your kids. In this case, Zuko's half-sister is about to attend the prestigious the Royal Fire Academy. Given how Azula turned out, Ursa's got understandable concerns about risking a second daughter here, but Zuko's used Fire Lord Authority to devise a new curriculum, so everything will probably be fine.

It quickly becomes apparent the headmistress is not on board with the changes, and is still pushing nationalist, imperialist, classist doctrines. So Zuko, again via Fire Lord Authority, hires a new instructor. His ex-girlfriend, Mai. Without first asking Mai if she would do it. After she broke up with him, in part, because he treated her less like a partner in their relationship, and more like an accessory to escape from the responsibilities of leadership. Leading to him withholding important aspects of his life - like assassination attempts, or his asking his genocidal, abusive dickbag of a father for advice on governing - from her out of some misguided notion she needed "protecting."

I know the series' creators stated Zuko and Mai stay broken up for 3 years before getting back together. I don't know how far along they are in that break-up here, but Zuko clearly hasn't learned shit from his past fuck-ups yet (though he makes a halting step in the right direction in the last 15 pages.)

Mai takes the job, despite her own bad experiences at the Academy. Faith Erin Hicks (writer), with Peter Wartman (artist), and Adele Matera (color artist), give us several brief, sepia-toned, flashbacks to Mai's early days at the Academy as a student. Where her father encouraged her to befriend Azula because it would help her get ahead, and that it was better to be the powerful person (or friends with the powerful person) who does the trampling, rather than be the one getting trampled.

(Hicks puts all this social-climbing pressure at the feet of Mai's father, which I think is letting her mother off too lightly. From the bits and pieces we see of Michi in the cartoon, she was just as hard on Mai about behaving like a proper young woman and blah blah blah, think of your father's career, think of our status. Maybe the OGNs Gene Luen Yang wrote established it wasn't like that, or Hicks is making a comment on how Mai's improved relationship with her mother has led her to reduce Michi's culpability in the worse aspects of Mai's upbringing.)

We don't really see Zuko's curriculum, at least not in Mai's teaching. It's mostly when, on her first day, Kiyi keeps correcting one of her other teachers, who's reluctant to read the new, more accurate history of the Hundred Years War. Instead, Mai eschews having them read books in favor of going outside to dig in the dirt and learn about cicada-beetles or learning to walk a tightrope.

I didn't really picture Mai as being interested in insects, let alone digging in the dirt, but the point seems to be to show curiosity about the world around them (and Mai is well-established as hating being bored, which implies a certain level of curiosity), and not react to other people or creatures as threats to be destroyed. Which is contrary to what students were taught when Mai attended, a fact we see in flashbacks that the teachers encouraged - any slight against honor must be addressed in an Agni Kai - and Azula ruthlessly exploited, pitting friends against each other for seemingly no reason than she can. And that thinking has carried over to Kiyi's generation, like it carried from the generation prior, as one of her classmates says her parents warned anyone acting like her friend was secretly plotting to destroy her.

That's what Mai's facing, and in that sense, activities encouraging the students to work on projects together and treat learning as fun, rather than some zero-sum contest where they have to learn the most and apply it most ruthlessly against the other students, make a lot of sense. I do hope she's still taking time to teach them math. It can be used for things other than war and politics!

Sunday Splash Page #433

"Crystallized," in Amethyst (vol. 4) #2, by Amy Reeder (writer/artist/colorist), Gabriela Downie (letterer)

Released in 2020, Amy Reeder's Amethyst mini-series was about, I'm not sure. Not to believe in fairy tales, because things are rarely that simple? "Lies my parents told me?" Everybody loves to see a winner fall?

Given the sheer number of reboots, resets, re-brandings, whatever, I have no idea the specifics of Amethyst's situation in 2020. Reeder seems to incorporate the original Princess of Gemworld mini-series, but maybe nothing after that. Certainly nothing about Amethyst being a Lord of Order, which is one good thing. On the other hand, maybe there was some stuff from Bendis' Young Justice book reflected here? There's no explanation, for example, about why Amy's a blonde in all the flashbacks, but sports lavender hair here. But I sure wasn't reading a Bendis-written team book in the late 2010s, so I don't what, if anything, made carried over.

What we've got is, Amy's Earth parents are alive and aware she's a princess from another world. They're proud of her, even if Amy finds it embarrassing and can't wait to return to Gemworld. Where she finds her kingdom destroyed, and all her people missing. Worse, all the people she thought were her friends turn their backs on her requests for help, throwing in a lot claims about how they always suffer in Amethyst's battles, and then she just flies off on her horse, and they have their own problems. Basically behaving like a bunch of citizens of Marvel Universe's Earth.

Reeder increases the variety between the kingdoms. The citizens of Turquoise have four arms now, Aquamarine is much more of an undersea kingdom, the people sporting smooth blue skin. Sapphire is more of a Blade Runner look, with towers and neon lights and tubes that can transport you places (sometimes against your will.) 

Amy manages two allies: a young woman from Turquoise named Phoss (with a giant caterpillar named Stan, because Phoss' girlfriend thinks Earth is fascinating), and the alleged prince of Aquamarine, Maxixe, who rides on a narwhal. The further things go, the more Amy learns all those stories she was told about House Amethyst being the beloved protectors of Gemworld were lies. Not that Dark Opal wasn't a threat, more her parents weren't fending him off from the goodness of their hearts. 

And yet, in the '80s Amethyst books, everyone is always expecting Amy to handle everything. Yeah, she asks for help, but she's also always on the front lines, trying to deal with the problem, whether it was Dark Opal, or Fire Jade, or that creepy little Chaos kid. And it cost her plenty, even if some of that is no longer in continuity. But the Gemworld motto is, "like parents, like child," and so they all assume she's like her parents and expecting them to bow and scrape.

Reeder does write Amy as more than a little conceited, prone to making demands or ignoring suggestions from other people. So it won't surprise you that she's terrible at diplomacy. Again, these people she's asking for help have been expecting her to bail their asses out since she was 13, and even if she's older, she's not that much older. Reeder draws her as still a little gangly and awkward, all her expressions are big ones because she's not used to moderating her emotions. She never had to, other people handled the calm stuff, she handled the hitting stuff. So it's hard for me to judge her for being hurt they all tell her to hit the road.

(Also, somehow, the initial outfit Reeder gives her, while more successfully evoking "magic princess" than the '80s look, is somehow less practical for someone leaping around swinging a sword. High heels, a big flowy dress she has to hike up to try and run. I guess she was planning on a fancy party. Eventually she switches to something with actual boots and leggings, maintaining the shades of purple color aesthetic, but making it less eye-searingly bright.)

But hitting the road, rather than flying over it, exposes Amy to more of the "true" Gemworld, which is important for her to grow as a person. Apparently Gemworld, like me with my Skittles, segregates their different gems. Except for one ostracized community, called The Banned, who use all different types of gems and are generally being run out of one kingdom or the other.

End game, Amethyst saves her people, defeats Dark Opal, gets no help from most of the kingdoms that used to be her friends, learns her birth parents are dicks, but finds a new community of people who want her to lead them. Although I would have liked some explanation from the person from Emerald who said Amy was a natural at being a king. Because she fought? Because she tried to protect people who couldn't protect themselves? There are certainly worse qualities. Either way, Amy accepts and messy, happy-cries about it.