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.

Escape From Kathmandu - Kim Stanley Robinson

This is 4 novellas, all taking place around Kathmandu and the Himalayan Mountains. They focus mainly on George Fergusson, and George "Freds" Fredericks, a couple of Americans living in Kathmandu, when they aren't making a living guiding people on treks up the mountains.

The two of them meet when George reads a letter addressed to Freds at the hotel where George is staying. A letter from an acquaintance of Freds, another American who fled academia to be a guide, but now needs help rescuing a yeti the research group he guided has captured. The rescue is somewhat complicated by the presence of Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter (and the accompanying horde of Secret Service agents), but they eventually pull it off.

George should serve as a cautionary tale for reading someone else's mail, because now that he's on Freds' radar, the subsequent stories all involve Freds dragging George into one mess or another. Help a reincarnated monk finally stop being considered a disciple by getting him up Everest. Help keep a road from being constructed too close to the valley which holds the fabled city of Shambhala. Keep a project to give Kathmandu an actual sewer system from taking place, because it'll reveal secret tunnels that an underground Nepali government is using to spy on the current Nepali government.

The Nepali government is presented as so massively corrupt, this book made me want to go back and re-read Forget Kathmandu to see how different the perspective of a local was on the government prior to the military coup. Although Robinson published this in 1989, so the situation could have changed quite a bit in the intervening decade.

There's usually some additional element Robinson throws in, though he switches around which is the Chekov's Gun. In the story about climbing, "Mother Goddess of the World," Freds mentions early on that his friend is the disciple to a really strict llama, who imposed a harsh condition to be met before a temple could be rebuilt and the disciple could stop being a disciple. But for much of the story, George and Freds are helping a group of British climbers, who want to stop an expedition searching for Edmund Hillary's remains from potentially finding him and returning his body to England. It's only late in the proceedings that Freds reveals the truth to George.

Which is one of the things I didn't like about the stories: Freds is constantly pulling a bait-and-switch on George. There's always some hidden catch to whatever he asks for help with, and that catch always ends up endangering George's life. "The True Nature of Shangri-La", it falls on George to try and stop this road from being built, and after he exhausts himself trying to navigate the labyrinthine and corrupt corridors of the Nepali government, he gets injured when they end up making the Chinese and Nepali guard outposts near a key pass think they were attacked by each other. And then he nearly dies of dysentery.

And the whole time, he's been catching grief from people for not getting enough done. That's the only one of the 4 stories Robinson writes from Freds' perspective rather than George's, and it doesn't do a lot for my opinion of Freds. He's sort of vaguely concerned for George's deteriorating mental and physical well-being, but in a vague, stoner-beach-bum way. "Oh, George is seeing how things really are in this country and running himself ragged to try and fix things. But he just doesn't get what's really important, maaaaaaaan." You dragged him into this, asshole. It's your problem, but he's the one actually trying to fix it, while you sit around and smoke dope.

It's a bit of a weird disconnect between tone and substance, when I think about it. Even though there is sometimes the threat of death in the stories, the plots are treated as sort of zany. Oops, we've got the Nepali President's personal guard chasing us because George was temporarily insane, let's escape on a mine cart that takes us all the way to a tiger-infested jungle! We helped a yeti escape by dressing him in a Dodgers' baseball cap and teaching him to say, "Namaste"! But, especially in the last two stories, it feels like we're watching George steadily self-destruct, like a jet being flown past its tolerances. Which is not really zany or funny. 

"Germ theory just ain't intuitive, George."

"Neither is religion."

"I'm not so sure of that."

"But why should there be a difference?"

"It may be that the reason for the existence of the universe is a more pressing question for most people than why they get the runs."

What I Bought 8/3/2026 - Part 1

I was on the phone with my dad a couple of weeks ago, detailing all these various headaches from work. A public meeting that would likely go to a hearing. Another public meeting filling in for The Coworker Who Doesn't Understand How Bribes Work, the AI nonsense, some other stuff.

He said, 'Sounds like you've had a rough few weeks.' I replied, 'All that was just on Tuesday.' He laughed. It's OK, that's what I do to keep from going insane.

Is Ted OK? #6, by Dave Chisholm (writer/artist/color artist/letterer) - The smile says good things, but the lightning eyes make me nervous.

First off, this final issue is 40 pages, at no additional cost. The 6-issue mini is 170 pages, total, so Chisholm's trying to provide value for the money, that's for sure. Anyway, after getting a massive hole blown in his chest last issue, Ted awakens in the weird tunnel he's seen previously, and briefly meets a woman named Kim. There are what look like tablets or pieces of paper coating the walls, and touching one lets Ted see someone's thoughts, but also gets him revved up again.

Good thing, because he, Sarah, and the doctor are about to crash. Oh, and Brody, but whatever. They make it out alive, landing in front of the Dome, where Noah is floating and crackling and assuring his legion of adoring imbeciles he's going to protect them from shapeshifting aliens.

Noah's actually in one of those Manowars, except the doc says his consciousness is elsewhere. Ted and Noah throw down, which does not go well for Ted, despite at one point slamming Noah into the Moon. The doc goads Noah into turning on his machine, and then Ted kamikazes himself. Not, critically, to destroy Noah, but because when Noah activates all the other people like Ted by turning on the machine, Ted'd back in that tunnel, where each of those little panels or pages connects to those people. So he can disrupt the paranoia and whatever Noah's been feeding them, if he has any hopeful memories to do it with.

And he does, because of Sarah. Because she was the first real friend he ever had. That prompts Sarah to admit she took this job to run from losing her girlfriend back on the other coast. A woman named Kim. Ted reminded her of Kim, which is why she reached out to him. So maybe they helped each other. 

Ted makes his big play, and Chisholm illustrates the pages of Ted reaching the others as this winding path through deep red panels of enraged people. Except each person gets a blue-white shard in their head, the connection to Ted. And as you progress to the next set of pages, the shards get larger, showing Ted's fond memories. The red fades, gradually overtaken by blue as the others stop feeling as angry. They don't necessarily have to be alone and mistrusting of others.

So they swarm Noah and throw him and his Dome into the Sun to protect the world, rather than making it into some sort of hellscape Noah can either rule or "save.". So his consciousness retreats to his back-up, the doc's missing nephew. but without the machine, his consciousness is sort of metabolized by the kid's. Kim is able to speak to Sarah briefly through what's left of Ted's body, and basically tells her it's great she wants to help people, but she shouldn't feel guilty for enjoying herself, or feel like it's a betrayal of Kim's memory. Which seems to convince Sarah to do something else with her life, to move forward. Though now she's leaving long text messages for Ted, who may not be dead.

The whole "strength of connections" theme makes me wonder about the Dome's significance. Because it has a honeycomb design, lots of borders connecting into something larger and stronger than they would be separately. But it was being used to hide Noah's plans, cover up what he did just to try and feel special, keeping everyone else sealed out and away from his special machine. But The Dome is an inanimate object, not people, so maybe its design isn't meant to be significant.

Or it's just an example of how Noah sees connection, as something to be molded to suit his purpose. He doesn't contribute anything to it, just uses it. Uses the doc's love for her nephew to keep her quiet. Uses empathetic people like Sarah to monitor his potentially useful tools. Keep him shielded from any consequences, by keeping everyone focused on being angry or afraid in other directions.

Thrash (2026)

A hurricane causes enough of a rise in the sea levels to bust the levees and flood a town. This unleashes a horde of bull sharks (plus one pregnant great white) upon whichever townspeople didn't get the hell out of Dodge.

Among those townspeople: Lisa (Phoebe Dynevor), a pregnant woman whose baby daddy bailed on her. Dakota (Whitney Peak), a young woman struck with agoraphobia after the recent death of her mother. Dee, Ron, and Will, (Alyla Browne, Stacy Clausen, Dante Ubaldi) three foster kids and their shitty foster parents. Dakota's uncle (Djimon Hounsou) is determined to get to her, but that's a little tricky when the seas are insane and the roads impassable. Unless you've got a boat, and something to haul it with. 

Are we in the year 2021? Because, if so, I could be spending this time on a lot better stuff than watching Netflix movies of questionable quality. This movie sticks to 2 threads: Dakota/Lisa, as the Lisa's car gets impaled on a tree in front of Dakota's house, and the kids, mostly trapped on the living room table in their increasingly flooded house. The film occasionally checks in on Hounsou and the weather reporter guy he bums a ride from, but it's really just to remind us yes, he's still on his way.

I think that works to its advantage, compared to Deep Water, where the movie was dancing between like 9 characters, scattered between three or four locations for a lengthy stretch of the movie. The film can focus on just a couple of situations, and really show how those circumstances are getting steadily worse. When Dakota forces herself to climb out the window to rescue Lisa, then slips on the eaves, she falls several feet before hitting water. By the time she climbs out the window to try and retrieve a rowboat, the water is already halfway to her knees, and she and Lisa are taking refuge on the second floor of the house.

The kids' it's a little less about the water, and more about the fact their lousy foster dad doesn't die as soon as they - and the audience - would hope. So right when they're thinking they're at least free of him and can start making their own plans, here he is, hauling himself on the table and ordering them into the water under the "logic" that sharks don't attack kids because they don't like the taste. Like how dogs don't eat their own shit. Which is both factually inaccurate and not a proper analogy.

That's a thing this movie does periodically, add a little humor among people try to either swim away from sharks or stay very still as sharks swim around them. Lisa triggering her perfect pregnancy playlist as the floodwaters start to float the bed and the house tries to collapse. The kids enthusiastically shouting "fuck you!" to the foster dad they think is dead, only for him to come bursting out of the water, still alive. Hounsou's saying, 'We lived in Mozambique, not The Jungle Book,' in response to the reporter's idiot question. It's a little strange, given how much the movie focuses on people getting swarmed and torn apart by bull sharks in the early going, but the situation is so bizarre a little absurdity doesn't feel entirely out of place.

I did expect the great white was going to be a bigger part of the movie than it was, but they played it as Chekov's Shark. Make you aware of it, then wait to use it for maximum (ridiculous) effect. The pacing got a little wonky about the time Dakota reached the rowboat. It's just down the street from her house, she makes it to the boat while it's still dark, and then the sun is well up in the sky and she still hasn't gotten back to her house. Like, what's she doing? She went for the boat to get the pregnant lady to safety. She gets the boat and then just, doesn't go back to the house. 

Let's Do the Time Hole Crawl

And that's why they call the town "Tackleford." 

Volume 7 of Bad Machinery, The Case of the Forked Road, finds our cast in their third, and I presume final, year of schooling. Things don't seem great. Mildred's on the outs with Charlotte and Shauna because they wouldn't join the Drama Club with her, while Sonny, Linton, and Jack each fall under the terrible curse of Puberty.

These things happen quickly. Charlotte and Mildred are at each other's throats on Page 9, and BFFs again by Page 10. On Page 14, Sonny is worried about being surrounded by unknown psychopaths and needing to learn about them. Page 30, he's slump shouldered, surly, and smelly, wandering out of his room long enough to spray on some deodorant before shuffling back to his room to play video games in his undies.

To be fair, that is how I remember most of my teenage years, other than I used stick deodorant. Hey, Star Fox didn't judge me when I was helping him defeat Andross! But he was already relying on Slippy Toad, so I suppose he couldn't afford to be picky about hygiene.

Point being, the boys are largely irrelevant in this story, as they've devolved to cavemen. Or a lower form of life. Like frat boys. I assume cavemen were able to start fires some way other than lighting their own farts, not a feat I'd expect frats to manage. 

Which leaves it to the girls - in between practicing for the Drama Club's performance of Glengarry Glen Ross, quite possibly a weirder choice than Allison having Ed Gemmell as the lead in a school play version of Twin Peaks - to tease out what's going on with the odd schoolchild named Calvin (no relation), and his connection to the science teacher. Who Charlotte mostly calls "Grumpaw", so that's what I'm calling him.

This leads to a time hole in a fume cabinet, taking the girls back to 1960. Except when they return to their time, things are different. Their favorite teacher, Mr. Beckwith, is a useless drunk. His wife, antiquities expert Amy, is neither an antiquities expert or his wife. What have they done by buying too much opium-laced '60s candy?

As it turns out, the problem is actually three boys who also found the time hole and got up to no good. Their leader has straight up anime hair, much more so than Charlotte, who is one pointed described as having "manga hair," which I didn't get at all. Ollie's particular version of the curse of Puberty has led to embracing nihilism. Nothing matters, so do whatever you want. As Professor Farnsworth would say, to hell with causality!

So the girls have to try and stop Ollie and his lackeys, before they forget what the timeline they're trying to restore was even like. There's a sad bit in there about Shauna, who didn't make the initial time trip, having a boyfriend named Keith in the new timeline, who she's reluctant to lose. There's a sadder bit about why Grumpaw kept grabbing the boy from the past and enlisting him with a 'secret mission.' 

A mission that's doomed to fail. Allison's version of time travel and the ripple effects is a bit like Marvel's used to be. You can't change the past, unless you make a really BIG change. Although here it doesn't create a new timeline so much as overwrite the existing one. Then the timeline actively resists efforts to change it back.

Which unfortunately prevents the girls from simply beating Ollie and his cronies up. Too bad. I'd like to have seen if Charlotte could actually back up all her tough talk. But violence is rarely the answer in Allison's stories. Certainly not to any real problems. So that was never likely to work. Ah well. Her performance in the Alex Baldwin role in Glengarry was excellent. I think. I've never actually watched the movie. But how hard can it be to out-act Alec Baldwin?

Sunday Splash Page #438

"Monster Mashed," in Atlantis Wasn't Built for Tourists #1, by Eric Palicki (writer), Wendell Cavalcanti (artist), Mark Dale (colorist), Shawn Lee (letterer)

Lucas Lewis is hiking from Cleveland to Seattle, and nearly gets hit by a dunk driver. He carries the drunk driver to the nearest town, a little burg called Atlantis. Since the driver is the sheriff's niece, the sheriff agrees to let Lewis bunk in his office for the night. Can't have him out wandering the streets, Atlantis has a curfew.

Atlantis also has a vampire problem, as several of them barge into the sheriff's office that night to feed on the poor sap in the drunk tank. Lucas has some supernatural heritage of his own, and after establishing his bonafides (see above), joins the group. Sort of.

Atlantis Wasn't Built for Tourists came out in 2020. To some extent, my buying it was due to circumstance. I didn't know either Palicki or Cavalcanti's work (and I don't know what either has done since this mini-series), and the general concept - stranger finds himself in an odd little town - is not exactly a novel one. But lots of things were a mess in 2020, including comic shipping and distribution, so I wasn't necessarily overflowing with options. Here was this mini-series, the title is at least eye-catching, the concept, if not familiar, might at least have a unique spin, so sure, why the hell not?

Palicki adds a few twists and turns. Lucas is traveling cross-country to confront his father before embracing what he sees as a grim fate he can't escape. The grim fate makes more sense to me now, having played The Sinking City, than it did then. Lewis' mother being from Innsmouth didn't mean a thing to me in 2020. The situation between the vamps and the sheriff is not as Lucas suspects, and the drunk niece isn't what she appears at first introduction, either.

They aren't "gotcha!" surprises, where it feels like they come from nowhere. Even with only 4 issues to work with, there's at least a sense of some sort of build and logical reason for things to happen as they do, which is nice. The main reason for the surprises is people believe what they want to believe. The sheriff looked at a vampire wearing his brother's face, and believed it was still his brother. Lucas didn't catch on to that, because he doesn't see it that way. He knows what a vampire is, and what it isn't, the same way he knows what he's ultimately going to become (though I wonder if that's as inevitable as he believes it to be.) The sheriff looks at Lauren, the drunk niece, and just sees a young girl acting out and flouting the rules.

Cavalcanti's art keeps the story grounded. The vampires are just humans with longer nails and incisors. The most notable feature is probably the eyes being dark voids. What you see with Lucas up there is as strange as he gets, though he can bring the features out at will. For the most part, everyone looks like regular people. Maybe a little too neat - Lucas is one of the few sporting stubble - but the real problem in the town isn't the obvious monsters (though they are a problem.) It's the humans who chose to make deals with them, sacrificing others' lives in exchange for their own safety.

It doesn't feel like a coincidence that shadows are more prevalent around people than places. Large parts of the story take place during the day, but even the night scenes aren't colored or shaded too dark. Dale has no problem going to backgrounds of a solid, daylight color during action scenes, and letting the whole thing be clear and easy to see. Because there's nothing wrong with the town, just the people running it.

The concept feels set-up for future installments. Lucas is waylaid by one of the deputies on his way out of town. She wanted to be turned, live forever, and Lucas ruined that. She figures he owes her, and he can either help, or pay by getting shot. Plus she'll kill everyone in town. So there's the potential for the two of them to travel and encounter more problems and maybe help each other. Because Palicki also nods to there being a lot of different supernatural stuff out there, including a different deputy whose parentage might be as messed up as Lucas'. As far as I know, though, there hasn't been a follow-up.