Sunday Splash Page #426

"Not First Law Compliant," in Menace #11, by John Romita (artist), Joe Letterese (letterer), writer and colorist unknown

Menace was, as you might guess, a horror title. This is actually from the last issue, although it's not the cover story (that was "Locked In!") The robot has no name in the original story; the name Parker gave it is a reference to being in the 11th issue. In the Agents of Atlas ongoing, he's revealed as the 11th robot in what's called the "Menacer" series, and Suwan has a much more recent model, albeit one that can't compete on its own with all the Uranian science components M-11's gotten from Bob.

The original story is only 5 pages, revolving around a scientist who refuses to release his robot until it's perfect, to the annoyance of his business manager who wants the 5 million bucks they can get for it. The robot obeys commands, but doesn't know when to stop obeying. You tell it to pick up a chair, it picks up one, then another, and keeps going until it's picked up every chair. A flaw the manager isn't aware of when he gets impatient and tells the robot to kill "the man in the room." Which is the end for the scientist, but also the end for the manager, as another man in the room.

In Agents of Atlas, the scientist, realizing the people who commissioned him planned evil things, sacrifices his life force to the machine so it will have emotions and free will. The fun is that, with the '50s sci-fi robot design, M-11 doesn't make facial expressions. So no one, including his teammates, can really tell what's going on in his head. There's no indication Bob can read his mind, or that Venus' emotional abilities have any effect whatsoever.

Sometimes Parker plays that for mystery. Everyone is standing silently in Bob's spaceship, and M-11 suddenly shouts "Archiving!" before going silent again. Sometimes it's for comedy, when Gorilla Man thinks the robot needs a push to get angry to win the fight with M-21 and gets a personality module based on "The Greatest" installed. M-11 spends a few pages talking like Muhammad Ali before Bob reveals the module didn't work at all and M-11's just humoring Ken.

And sometimes M-11 sparks conflict. He's the one that contacts Bob and Ken about Jimmy Woo, and it's only late in the mini-series everyone figures out why. In the ongoing series, Jimmy has just about talked their way out of a fight with the Avengers when M-11 recognizes Wolverine's voice. Because Logan blew him up during a mission in Cuba in the '50s, and M-11, like Michael Jordan, took that personally. But Logan doesn't put the pieces together - so much for House of M giving him his memories back - and M-11 won't explain his actions to anyone. It's just a thing they have to deal with.

Oh well, not like killer robots and X-Men get along all that well anyway.

Saturday Splash Page #228

"Gorilla Mad," in Men's Adventure #26, by Robert Q. Sale (penciler/inker), writer, colorist, letterer unknown

Gorilla Man's first appearance is a horror story, significantly altered and embellished by Parker and probably other writers. In Agents of Atlas, Ken Hale was a big time sportsman and adventurer type, not unlike Rex Mason before he became Metamorpho. Except Hale started to get paranoid about aging and looked for a cure. Leading him to a legend about a gorilla man that never ages, never gets sick or dies. Ken treks into the jungle, gets lost, runs out of food and water, and then comes face-to-face with the gorilla man. He kills it, hand-to-hand because his gun is empty, and becomes it. But he won't age, get sick or injured, or die! Of natural causes, anyway.

In this story, though, Ken Hale just seems to be some guy living the suburban lifestyle with his wife, who starts being tormented by nightmares of two gorilla creatures fighting to the death. Things get bad enough he can hear the howls of the beast even while awake, so he's got to find a solution or go mad. One pipe-smoking guy (who Parker reveals was Mr. Lao, the dragon that's the power behind the throne of the Atlas Organization) gives him a lead to Kenya. Hale can't find any guides who either have any idea where to look, or are willing to take him, so he goes alone. And finds the gorilla man. He drops his gun and fights it, and kills it, and well, you know the rest.

Parker's approach works a lot better, since it provides a real reason for Ken Hale to go hunt down the gorilla man beyond "he started having nightmares, for some unexplained reason." Giving Ken the pulp hero-style adventurer backstory lets him fill the "gruff, but lovable" archetype on the team. Can't go wrong having a Ben Grimm on your roster! He can have all kinds of esoteric knowledge and skills he picked up in his travels and adventures, but still have plenty of things he doesn't know that can be explained to him (and us.)

Gorilla Man might be the one that needs the team the most. Yeah, Namora being unfrozen is a definite upgrade for her, but once that was accomplished she could always return to Atlantis. Venus had found a place, Bob was living with the Uranians. Jimmy Woo obviously wasn't satisfied with how his career had gone, but he did still have a job and colleagues who either trusted him enough, or were desperate enough, to follow him down the Atlas rabbit hole (and get incinerated by Mr. Lao.)

Gorilla Man's apparently working for SHIELD - maybe in that monster version of the "Howling Commandos?" - but he didn't even know Woo recommended him for the spot. He doesn't seem to have any particular loyalty to SHIELD. He throws them over to help Jimmy without a second thought, so I doubt he formed any lasting friendships. But the guy who got him to stop hiding away in the jungle? That's the guy he'll go to the wall for, who helps him believe what he's doing matters.

That said, I think he's gotten easily the most use outside Agents of Atlas of any of the characters. He was performing some sort of role for the Avengers when they were based out of a frozen Celestial. May still be doing that, actually. He was on some "Agents of Wakanda" team a few years back. He's a talking gorilla, and like I said, he can be sort of the Ben Grimm on any roster, so naturally people are going to want to use him. 

What I Bought 5/4/2026 - Part 2

I got through Read or Die: The TV Series back in April on my anime rewatch. It was pretty good. I appreciate the silly sibling stuff between the Paper Sisters more than I remember in the past. Then Mr. Joker showed his face around episode 15, and it was ten episodes of me groaning, "Just shoot the fucker, stop listening to his bullshit!" But they never listen.

Generation X-23 #3, by Jody Houser (writer), Jacopo Camagni and Marco Renna (artists), Erick Arciniega (color artist), Ariana Maher (letterer) - So that foul-up where Laura got resurrected during the Krakoa era with a full adamantium skeleton, instead of just her claws, never got undone? Poor quality control.

The whole thing where the previous issue ended with X-Infinite saying Laura must be held responsible for two deaths is not really followed up on. Laura's alone in the infirmary, until some of those weird time shards show up, then vanish. So now Laura's got questions, and X-92's got a lead on answers. Which, predictably, point to X-Infinite, who is experimenting with some of Laura's skin that got scorched off.

As it turns out the kid's attempts to file reports that everything in the facility didn't work as well as they thought, Laura, Infinite and 92, escape. Infinite admits that, once the scientists figured out he was smarter than them, they made him help with their work. So all the other kids having multiple powers is his doing, and it's the old, a "Wolverine's healing factor could save them," bit. Well, at this point it's more like Laura's propensity for stabbing could save them. 

With the apparently abrupt passing of Jacopo Camagni, I don't know if Renna's going to be the regular artist on the book going forward. If so, I don't know if this issue is representative of their work. I would figure they were working under a time crunch, since they probably weren't expecting to draw 13 pages of this particular comic. Here, at least, Renna's style seems a little simpler than Camagni's. Faces and bodies are more basic shapes, fewer little details. Might simply not had enough time for as much shading, because I feel like that's a big difference between the two. There's more gradation and depth to Camagni's pages.

That said, Renna's art works perfectly well. The fight between Laura and X-Infinite is easy enough to follow. I'm not sure why one of the soldiers who attacked the facility is a giant, robotic crab-centipede-person, but it was a pretty impressive reveal. Got me to stop, blink, and wonder where the heck that thing came from.

Touched by a Demon #3, by Kristen Gudsnuk - As the city burns, one man tries to hide his eyes behind some strange wrapping paper.

Having concluded demons giving humans advice is not helpful, Frons takes the priest's recommendation of providing tools literally. So this week's client, Max, was given a chimp's paw, granting 5 wishes. Not a monkey's paw, mind you. No ironic comeuppance! But do I get a free frogurt with it? If you wish for one, I guess.

So after wishing for $10 million in an offshore account (the password to which he forgot), and an endless bag of weed and Adderall (which might have something to do with forgetting the password), Max starts messing around with people's free will. Making the girl he likes love him, making her kinks conform to his, for him to feel fulfilled. Stuff like that. But, as long as he doesn't try to make a sixth wish, he's fine.

Then he casually wished for them to not have to go into work and an earthquake knocked their office building - among other structures - down. I feel like Gudsnuk missed an easy joke there. When Max makes that wish, one of the chimp's fingers uncurls, and it isn't the middle one.

Despondent over another failure, Frons comes to the priest's church to aid in their relief efforts with a big sack of cash he. . .summoned from Hell, I think. Then he confronts Father Angelo, who he blames for giving him bad advice. Angelo either hasn't twigged to Frons being a demon, or is just jerking him around, but he claims to have found something that suggested fallen angels could be redeemed, and seems to be semi-related to Frons' idea of shattering souls to create something of pure evil. Except, you know, the flip side. Frankly, the idea of the soul as something you can chip pieces off of like some oversized ice cream cookie cake is maybe the part I'm having the most trouble with.

Oh, and the cop showed up at their office, looking into the disappearance of Wendy's family. And right as Frons' boss (Mammon) shows up. If somebody burned a roast I'm going to think I fell into an '80s sitcom. But no, in all seriousness, I'm really interested to see how Gudsnuk pulls this together with one issue to go. Interested and worried, since I actually like all these goofballs and I'm worried it's going to end badly for them. Especially Wendy, who did, you know, kill her asshole parents and her perpetually terminally ill older sister.

1222 - Anne Holt

A train crashes during a terrible winter storm in an isolated village in Norway. There's only one fatality - the man driving the train - and a hotel nearby offers shelter and food to everyone until the storm passes and they can be rescued.

Too bad people start dying. A well-known member of the clergy, then another member of the clergy who seemed to know something about what happened to his colleague. And there's a mysterious group that was traveling in a special carriage, who are sequestered with an entire floor to themselves. Nobody knows exactly who is up there, or what they're doing.

Trying to pull apart the puzzle is Hanne Wilhelmsen, a former cop, now in a wheelchair after getting shot a couple of times. Hanne really doesn't want any part of the mess, but figures they ought to at least attempt to gather some information for when the police can actually get there. She's aided by the person who runs the hotel, a lawyer who lives in the area, and a doctor that was on his way to a conference.

Hanne is an interesting choice for a protagonist. She's so reluctant, not just in her hesitance to get involved in the case, but about everything. She was traveling to meet with a specialist about certain quality of life issues she was dealing with, but doesn't seem like she really wanted to make the trip. She doesn't like to deal with people, explaining at one point that while they interest her, she prefers observing them through fiction. While her injury may have contributed to this attitude, the impression we get is she was already like that, and had been for a very long time.

She says she finds herself liking the doctor, but balks on the cusp of inviting him to dinner. He asks her to call him sometime, and she can come to dinner at his home. She says she will. Then she says she never did. I'm not sure someone's whose personality is so close to mine is really cut out for the lead role in a series of mysteries. It feels like Holt will really have to work to contrive circumstances for Hanne to get involved in mysteries if her instinctive reaction is, "Oh God, I have to be around people?"

It makes the fact she takes an interest in a teenage boy who seems to be traveling alone all the more inexplicable. Holt doesn't delve into Adrian's backstory, though if he's going to become a recurring character, I assume she will at some point. But I couldn't decipher why Hanne locked in on him to begin with, even before the murders started. He was pretty hostile towards both victims, but it never feels like the story is pointing to him as the killer.

(My money was on the doctor, especially once he made a comment that, as a dwarf, people weren't bothered by his condition because they didn't regard him as a threat. Plus, he's the one who suggests the second victim was stabbed with an icicle.)

Holt throws in several threads that end up being unrelated to the mystery, and I can't tell if these are things she's putting in place for future stories, people that Hanne will encounter again in other contexts, or if they were simply red herrings for the readers. There are also several references to earlier events in her life, like the President of the United States shooting an FBI agent in Hanne's living room, that I suspect would be expanded upon later. Maybe Holt was going to work backwards?

'If the perpetrator had actually been in the lobby when Cato Hammer's death was announced, we could only hope that he or she accepted the incorrect cause of death as a temporary declaration of peace from the hotel management.

People must be kept calm at all costs.

Including the perpetrator.' 

What I Bought 5/4/2026 - Part 1

Last week, things started going haywire with my computer protection whenever I got on the internet. I was getting concerned, but whatever was going on seems to have resolved itself on Monday. I know I'll have to get a new computer eventually, but not yet.

Originally, the stuff I ordered from April weren't projected to arrive until today, but it showed up on Monday afternoon instead, so we can dive in.

Dust to Dust #8, by JG Jones (writer/artist), Phil Bram (writer), Jackie Marzan (letterer) - I think he needed to make the "O" bigger, because it looks like the sign says "NOV" instead of "NO."

Things come to a head. The rainmaker's foul-up starts a fire that burns down the church, revealing the corpse of the baseball player and the preacher's daughter. The sheriff went to confront the moonshiners, except they've been dead for like three issues. Sarah the reporter tries calling the feds, who are slowly making their way to town, but get waylaid by the dangling corpse of the rainmaker and a sudden artillery barrage that makes them crash in front of the lunatic in the gas mask.

Meanwhile, the mayor's losing his grip, as he starts trying to kill his daughter when she says she's leaving, with Sarah and the sheriff making the last-second save. The fight is a lot of small panels of discrete actions. A punch, someone screaming, a hand near a safe. You can figure out what's going on, but there's not a lot of flow to it. Anyway, the mayor enters full "kill everyone and blame it on the sheriff" mode. Which does not pan out.

So, I'd been hemming and hawing over whether the mayor or his PTSD-afflicted brother was the guy in the gas mask killing people. Turns out it's sort of a two-man operation, the mayor picking the targets and the brother killing them. Also, the mayor stole his brother's girl while the guy was off at war, and so it was actually Van's daughter that was going to marry the now-deceased baseball player.

I feel like it's way too late in the game to be revealing secret parents, but this whole thing is paced weird. The rainmaker makes sense in the broader drought-afflicted aspect of the story, but he really just feels like an excuse for one more body on the pile. The firebrand preacher is just kind of there, I guess to have a daughter to fool around with the baseball player and a convenient church to burn down. The sheriff sort of gets his act together at the end, but he doesn't really do much. Sarah is as responsible for saving Jenny as he is, and Van is the one who kills the mayor.

Spirit of the Shadows #4, by Daniel Ziegler (writer), Nick Cagnetti (writer/artist/colorist), Ferran Delgado (letterer) - Problem with the blue guy wearing a Darkseif skirt, you get a bad view when looking.

Still moving between flashbacks and the present, though we're getting flashbacks as told by Erik and by Elizabeth finding pages of the book. The doc that brought Erik back to life is the one who killed him, on the orders of Katrina's dad. The dad wanted his wife back, and considered Erik an acceptable guinea pig for trying to bring someone back. Then Erik killed the dad by burning the house down, Katrina had followed him there and died as well, with no body to try to resurrect. So Erik started abducting women - like Elizabeth - to try and use as hosts for Katrina's soul.

In the present, the witch and the ghost of Katrina's dad are trying to make Erik extra-super-duper-dodecatuple-dead. No afterlife at all, no resurrection, because your soul's just destroyed. Which can apparently done by a spell, if the person asks for it. So they make Erik think he's got no chance whatsoever of being reunited with Katrina which, based on what I've seen through 4 issues, yeah, he shouldn't. The doctor makes some pitch to Elizabeth that maybe by saving her back in issue 1, he started to save himself, but, come on. She was dead and in that situation because of him. Give me a fucking break. 

So what we've got is an endless string of people who can't accept losing someone and just pass the pain on to someone else. Laemmle wanted his wife back, but she was already beyond his reach and all he ended up doing was killing someone he resented for trying to take something else he deemed his. Erik couldn't let that pass, and his revenge cost him Katrina, except he couldn't accept that and killed Elizabeth and a lot of other women. And now Elizabeth's sister is out for Erik's head because she thinks he's cost her the chance to bring her sister back.

But Elizabeth's a more forgiving type, so she's going to try and save Erik, which requires her to confront a sister she doesn't seem to recognize. So we'll see if someone finally breaks the chain. It won't be Laemmle, considering he's animating a suit of armor and ran the doctor through at the issue's end. Oh well, the doc was pretty smug for someone complicit in the deaths of a lot of people at the hands of these grief-afflicted dopes.

Hangmen Also Die! (1943)

Set in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, a doctor who is part of the resistance manages to assassinate the "Reich Protector", aka the Nazi currently running the country. Who was nicknamed "The Hangman", so you know he was a friendly guy.

Dr. Svoboda's (Brian Donlevy) getaway driver got hauled away before they could, er, get away, so the doc fled on foot, and Mascha (Anna Lee) helped by sending the Gestapo the wrong way. Later, when he can't find a place to hide from patrols, he spends the evening with her family in their apartment. Where he claims to be an architect who met Mascha at an event, but then shows a surprising amount of medical knowledge.

Must be nice, going to college when it was cheap enough you could switch majors that casually.

The Nazis, as they like to do, gather up hundreds of citizens and stick them in a camp, promising to execute some each day until the assassin is handed over. This includes Mascha's father, a professor played by Walter Brennan.

There's really two key threads in this film, both revolving around the assassination, tied together by Gestapo Inspector Gruber. One is whether Svoboda should surrender himself, the other about a member of the underground who is actually working for the Gestapo, his point of contact being Gruber. In the latter, there's focus on a debate among the underground about what to do, growing suspicion of Mr. Czaka (Gene Lockhart), and his eventual exposure.

In the former, you have Svoboda struggling with guilt over innocent people dying because of him, and Mascha, torn between wanting to save her father and not wanting to help the Nazis. There's an element of peer pressure in both. A resistance member convinces Svoboda not to turn himself in, even after the doctor explains his intent to write a confession and then kill himself with the gun he used. At one point the resistance tries to redirect Mascha's carriage to convince her not to talk, and when she panics about being abducted and makes a scene, everyone on the street starts harassing her about why she wants to speak to the Gestapo if they haven't summoned her.

The film also checks in on Brennan and the other prisoners periodically, as they have their own debates about whether the assassin should give himself up to save them, or whether they'll agree to speak over the radio to the public. Of course, the Nazis have already prepared their speeches, which is the point the film really hammers again and again. Collaboration is a sucker bet. The Nazis will not honor the terms. They'll make promises, but once they have what they need, there's no reason to keep them. They aren't your friends, they won't protect you when the ax is about to fall, as Czaka finds out.

The last third of the movie is almost like a heist or con film, as many people band together to keep Svoboda's name clear, by pinning the assassination on Czaka. It's clever enough, and Lockhart really sells Czaka's bluster as a cover for how panicked he is as he realizes his fellow Czechoslovakians are turning against him, and the Nazis are only too willing to swallow the lie. Plus, it follows the theme of everyone being in this together, because the resistance manages to pull together "witnesses" to implicate Czaka where the Gestapo can find no links between them to suggest it's a frame-up. They managed to get everyone on board with this plan, in a short amount of time, leaving the traitor alone, with no one to speak for him but himself.

The movie blessedly avoids a romance subplot between Svoboda and Mascha, though they have to put on appearances a couple of times. That introduces an additional element of tension since Mascha is engaged, and it doesn't appear her fiance knows what's going on. When Gruber starts buddying up to him, there's real concern this is where everything will fall apart.Mascha is torn between fear for her father and anger at both the Nazis and Svoboda, with Lee depicting her as almost whipsawing between emotions at times, then scrambling to undo the damage one hasty decision made, with another hasty decision. Donlevy spends the entire movie walking like he's wearing cement boots, the guilt just weighing him down.

A Poisoned Heart

That's your excuse for all your bad habits. The smoking, the excessive consumption of sleeping pills, making people drag you around in a coffin. . .

In the seventh volume of No Longer Allowed in Another World, Annette, Tama and Nir have learned it's Archibishop Elton running a secret prison beneath the castle that holds Otherworlder children and sends them out on missions. But Elton is a dear friend of Annette's, can she find the strength to confront him?

Well she better, because he's beaten up Sensei and thrown him in a cell, and dispatches Yamada's crew of do-gooders with ease. Sensei at least has the fairy whistle he was gifted, so he can call on Solulu - stress-eating after dealing with him a couple of times - to free him, but in typical fashion, he's more interested in what's going on inside Elton than actually stopping the guy.

Annette does get it together, but her big plan of using light magic against a goblin doesn't work, because the holy robes Elton wears negate the effect. She's still able to protect Itsuki, an Otherworlder she mentored when he first arrived, though it leaves her badly injured. And that's when Sensei shows up. It's a little strange because writer Hiroshi Nota has Sensei praise Annette for her convictions, then tell Elton that he's 'furious.' But all that results is him trying to dig into Elton's motivations.

I'm not expecting Sensei to start throwing punches, but at least exhale some cigarette smoke in the Elton's face if you're really that angry. It feels like something that was set up for the splash page as a big "oooooh" moment, but there's no pay off. Sensei's always demanding people tell him their life stories and motivations, being furious has nothing to do with it.

At any rate, the backstory is that when Elton was first assigned as a representative of the Church to Blau Kingdom, people didn't want a goblin around. Except Queen Saphira, a child then, who believed all races could be friends if humans just opened their hearts to others. Elton tried to make it a reality, even reaching out to an Otherworlder named Kaoru, who got sent here without any special skill and embraced apathy and cynicism. Which are very cool attributes, but not helpful for surviving a medieval fantasy kingdom. Elton eventually got through, and after being intensively trained, Kaoru was assigned to Saphira's guard.

And then Kaoru and Saphira caught feelings, a bitter pill for Elton, who loved Saphira for her kindess and acceptance. So he sent Kaoru off in an attack against the Dark Lord and decided all Otherworlders were good for was attack dogs. Elton, understandably, gets pissed at Sensei pulling out all his hidden pain and crimes, but his freak out leaves him vulnerable to a combo attack from Annette and Nir. Even that doesn't quite end things, as there's one last reveal that paints Elton and Annette's boss, His Holiness, in a ominous light.

So Annette stands on her own, even when Sensei isn't backing her up. Nir continues to grow in bravery and skill. Tama, doesn't get much of anything (and trend that will continue into the next volume.) There's possibly something put in play with one of the Fallen Angels, who makes a last second save and was someone Saphira and Elton know. Maybe he'll get involved again later, assuming the apathy and cynicism haven't overtaken his heart once more.

Sensei does actually finish the story he writes based on Elton's pain, but the people of the kingdom have developed their own idea about Elton and who he his. Sensei bows to popular opinion, so it's another unpublished work.