Saturday Splash Page #229

"Another of Iron Man's Drunk Monologues," in What If? (vol. 1) #9, by Don Glut (writer), Alan Kupperberg (breakdowns), Bill Black (finishes/inker), Carl Gafford (colorist), Tom Orzechowski (letterer)

These days, Marvel pumps out What Ifs every few years, usually built around the notion that one of their various Big Events would turn out differently. I didn't want to read those events the first time around, so an alternative version isn't much interest to me.

Before that, there was the '90s volume, that ran for 115 issues and was usually about some event or another going differently. Inferno, Atlantis Attacks, The Evolutionary War. Even back then, and even with the writers making sure to explain what was different, I usually didn't care. The big summer events tended to run through the Annuals, and I usually didn't buy those, so they didn't matter much to me. Most of them could best be described as "rocks fall, everybody dies." Marvel Earth, and sometimes the entire universe, always just one hairsbreath away from total annihilation, apparently. 

The second volume did introduce "Mayday" Parker, aka Spider-Girl, so that's one thing it's got going for it.

Before that, the first volume ran for 47 issues across 7 years. I own two of those; besides the issue above, there's #45, by David Anthony Kraft and Ron Wilson, where the gamma bomb explosion links Rick Jones and Banner's minds, and when Rick dies from the radiation, the Hulk goes berserk. Considering the issue costs us half the Fantastic Four and 40% of the original Avengers line-up, you could probably file it under "rocks fall, everybody dies," too. It's fun to break the toys sometimes.

And then there's this issue, where the notion for Agents of Atlas started, which Iron Man showing off some "dimensional transporter" he built that lets them spy on other timelines and worlds. Yes, 30 years before Civil War, Iron Man was invading your privacy under a flimsy pretext. Basically, Jimmy Woo puts together a team to protect (and rescue, when protecting fails) President Eisenhower from Yellow Claw.

The roster is different from what Parker and Kirk would use. 3-D Man's in there (though Parker would eventually add the current 3-D Man/former Triathlon in the very short-lived Atlas series), and while Namora leads them to M-11 (not given a name here, much chattier), she begs off to search for Namor. Who is, presumably, roaming the streets of New York as a bum, waiting for Johnny Storm to singe his beard off. Marvel Boy convinces Gorilla Man to come along by promising to search for a way to make him human again with Uranian science, because Ken's too afraid to even be on the same continent as his wife. The wife who ridiculed his visions of a gorilla?

Glut (or Roy Thomas, since this was his concept, shocking, I know, that Roy Thomas plumbed the depths of forgotten comics history) tries to draw parallels between the characters chosen and the ones Iron Man invited to his little picture show. Gorilla Man and Beast, M-11 and Vision, Venus and Thor, Marvel Boy and Iron Man, 3-D Man and Captain America. The '50s group even call themselves "Avengers", albeit with the absolutely terrible battlecry, "Go, Avengers, Go." Like, holy shit, I'd be embarrassed to shout that and charge into battle. I'd rather yell "SPOOOOOON!" than "Go, Avengers, Go."

Some of them feel like a stretch - 3-D Man's presented as a cocky asshole who likes to wind up Gorilla Man with comments about his smell, which just screams "Hawkeye" - and I can't decide whether Thomas and Glut picked the '50s cast to conform to a current Avengers roster, and that's why Namora didn't stick around, or those were just the Golden Age characters they wanted to use, and they picked Avengers to match.

Also of note, Woo brings them together, it's his arch-foe that's the mastermind behind the plot, he's the one that tracks the villains after they escape with the President, but he doesn't really get acknowledged as part of the team. There's no one pointed to as his parallel among the Avengers. I think Parker makes him the Captain America of the Agents, the driving force that unites them, with enough courage and skill this disparate bunch will follow his lead.

What I Bought 5/8/2026

For whatever reason, the local shop didn't have any copies of Fantastic Four last week. I had Friday off, and during a trip I was making, stopped at another store and found a copy, along with a couple of other back issue projects I'm currently working on.

Fantastic Four #10, by Ryan North (writer), Humberto Ramos (penciler), Victor Olazaba (inker), Edgar Delgado (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Hey, can you try not blocking traffic while killing everyone? I got places to be!

So the Earth's being invaded while the FF are away, and since apparently every other hero on the planet is completely incapable of handling an invasion by some completely non-descript group of purple aliens, the Scarlet Witch, sorry Sorcerer Supreme, has to use Bullseye to aim a spell to bring the FF back from across the universe. Because Bullseye is, apparently, the best marksman on the planet.

Remarkably, this is not the sequence Ryan North is going to write in this issue that most irritates me.

The spell works, the FF are back, with Crazy Other Sue on their heels. The aliens immediately run away, so now it's everyone against Crazy Other Sue. They goad her into trying something while constructing some invisible reflective sphere around her, and Crazy Other Sue is now Comatose Other Sue. OK, fine, kind of anti-climactic that they beat a being that decked Galactus with the old "reflect your attack back at you," play, but sure. Except now, the FF need the Sorcerer Supreme to send them back across the universe. Because they have to save Galactus.

You made me agree with Maria Hill, Ryan North. I may never forgive you for that. But, hey, Crazy Other Sue compressed part of Big G's chest into a singularity, so there's probably nothing the FF can do. Unless Sue tries bending a lot of light into a laser to try and cut it - as in, the singularity - out of Galactus. And unless Galactus, unable to save himself, still has enough power to give her a boost by temporarily Silver Surfer-ing Sue so she can draw in more light. Whatever, point is, Galactus lives. . .to kill entire worlds full of people in the name of, essentially, being too big to fail.

Can you even cut a depression in space-time "out" of something? Shouldn't any attempt to cut a singularity out of someone with light be thwarted by the fact you'd have to cut close enough the gravity would just gobble up all the light you're using? This was not one of North's stronger efforts, and Ramos' art is nowhere near good enough to distract me from that.

Roberto to the Dark Tower Came - Tom Epperson

Roberto is a reporter in an unnamed Latin American country. He gets a phone call informing him that someone is displeased with his recent articles, and if he doesn't leave the country in 10 days, he will be killed. Roberto's received death threats before, but for some reason, this one strikes him as serious. So he decides to leave. He can join his attractive, wealthy girlfriend in St. Lucia.

But an acquaintance of his in the U.S. embassy passes along information that the military is busy carrying out massacres and atrocities against the people in a certain province, to remove any potential obstacles to extracting the hell out of some minerals. Roberto decides he'll pretend to leave, go to Tulcan instead, get evidence, and then write about the whole thing from St. Lucia.

Epperson breaks the book into specific days, each one starting with the title "{insert number} days until the day Roberto is to die." Starts at 10, works down to the day. The story follows Roberto, and only Roberto. We only see the people in his life - his father and (young) stepmother, his college friends, his work colleagues - when they're in his presence.

Epperson does usually dive into their backstories as well as their present situations, most of which revolve around some horrible act committed by one government of the country or another. His grandmother met his grandfather when she had to leave the country for her own safety. A colleague who was abducted by a rebel leader, and later survived a bombing at the newspaper's office. Roberto's photographer friend Daniel, who pretended to believe in Communism to score points with a girl he liked, and spent two weeks imprisoned and tortured by the military. A soldier who was maimed, and is struggling to find something he can do, as well as dealing with the guilt of the atrocities he took part in. 

And most of these people, to varying degrees, have abandoned whatever brought them into trouble initially. The reporter focuses more on fashion and gossip, Daniel now takes photos of celebrities and food. Each of them reached a point, for one reason or another, where they decided it wasn't worth the risk.

I don't know if the point is a shorthand way of explaining why Roberto decides to try and get this story, or highlighting the futility of the attempt. Everyone has been touched by the horrors committed in the country by governments, militias, wealthy landowners, drug cartels. Except perhaps, for Roberto. He's not been arrested and beaten, he's avoided being blown up. Even as the clock ticks towards his death and people all around him die, Roberto remains largely unscathed. So maybe the point was that those people needed someone to tell their stories.

Or maybe the point was it's useless. If all these people have these horrible experiences in their pasts, stretching back decades, if seemingly every piece of ground in the country had some massacre or expression of brutality stain its soil, what good has reporting on any of it actually done? What the military plans is apparently based on something the Sri Lankan government and military did. But people know that happened, the United Nations knows, the famed "international community" knows, and we're told there were no repercussions. No one was prosecuted, no one was made to account. Even if Roberto gets in, gets his story, and escapes to publish it, what good is it going to do?

Epperson dedicated the book to journalists who lost their lives pursuing the truth, so I don't think he was making an "it's pointless" argument, but it sure feels like it. I definitely thought Roberto was an idiot. Well-meaning, but an idiot nonetheless.

The book is tense, Epperson keeping you guessing whether Roberto really will die or not right up to the end. It's less the ticking clock the chapters mark and more because it's hard to tell which direction the threat will come from. There are enough stories in here of people being betrayed by comrades or long-trusted friends, of soldiers dressing up as paramilitary groups to divert suspicion, that it seemed like the danger could come from anywhere. The book does point strongly in one direction, but I kept myself keyed to the possibility that was another misdirection. Roberto is dealing with a lot of people where he only has their word they are who and what they claim to be. And since we're tagging along inside his mind, we don't know any more than he does.

'She's surrounded by religious bric-a-brac. His eye is caught as always by a porcelain figurine of Christ. It's a particularly macabre representation of the crucifixion, blood spilling down Jesus' face from his crown of thorns, his eyes bugging out and his mouth agape as if to say, "Hey, I don't care if I am the son of God, it's no fucking joke being crucified!"'

What I Bought 5/6/2026

Well, we've finished April books, so it's on to selections from May! I was able to get all three comics from last week I wanted, although it took looking in a different shop in another town I happened to be passing through on other business Friday to get the third.

Batgirl #19, by Tate Brombal (writer), Takeshi Miyazawa (penciler/inker), Juan Castro (inker), Mike Spicer (colorist), Tom Napolitano (letterer) - Looking at Batgirl charging into battle with a bunch of weapons made from her blood-shadows, all I can think is this power is a lot like having a symbiote, and my distaste for the whole concept becomes clear.

Cassandra fights her way up this big tower, from the inside and the outside, with the help of Tenji, Jaya, and Wu Lin She embraces the power at one point when it looks like her family is about to fall, but Miyazawa really draws it more like Cass just cut loose with her fighting abilities and that blood-shadow sword. She throws some regular old Batarangs, but I can't tell that she's making throwing stars or spears out of the blood.

Whatever, they make it to the top, she summons this Midnight Eye - basically a cloak, one of those broad rice-picking hats (festooned with streamers) and some glowing orange eyes - being her ancestor made the deal with. Even though he agrees she was cursed with this power being active without asking for or agreeing to it, he won't undo the situation. Because rules is rules and deals is deals and really, he's just a lazy bureaucrat.

Which is when Wu Lin makes his pitch, offering himself as a servant to handle things her and in the mortal realm, as well as offering up three living souls (Cass, Tenji, Jaya), in exchange for power. That, of course, is a deal the Midnight Eye is all about, so it looks like Cass and the other two got boned. Cass makes a speech that's half-apology to Tenji and Jaya, half her saying screw it to all this "family" that never did anything for her but place burdens on her.

Wu Lin returns, having dealt with the people that betrayed him in the mortal realm and declaring he's got to let these 3 living souls go, because otherwise things are out of balance. Sure, he's the one who offered them, but that was like 5 minutes ago! He's got an entirely different job now! I can at least appreciate the hustle there. And Midnight Eye agrees to remove the curse - as long as Batgirl agrees that someday she's going to work for him, or she gets cursed again. They return to Gotham, Cass introduces them all to her Bat-family, and that's that.

Does the fact Cassandra said family is what you make of it, which I've been yelling in these review posts for months, and that she chooses not to carry the burdens of this "family" that were never around or never accepted her mean she's going to let the Shiva issue go? Will Tenji stop bugging her about it? Their whole argument over whether to see if Shiva's soul was in the Spirit World and could be nudged into resurrection never really got finished. They just got busy with other stuff.

That's not even getting into the question of how rebirth works in this case. Presumably Shiva would be reborn as an infant, so it'd be years before she could even talk coherently with them. And is she going to have her past memories, or is she an entirely new person? If the latter, does it even matter? She's not Shiva at that point. Never been a fan of reincarnation, frankly. Feels like, with the way people want to play it that you have past memories and you're the same person, just in a new body, you probably stole that life away from someone new that could exist. Instead, it's just you, fucking things up a second time like you did the first time.

Marc Spector: Fist of Khonshu #4, by Jed MacKay (writer), Devamalya Pramanik (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - The first glance I got at this cover, I thought the moon was actually some new design for Marc's hood, or it was billowing in a way that made it look really big and I was not a fan. Then I took a closer look.

This issue is Marc learning from Dr. Sterman about what the rest of the cast got up to when he went missing two weeks ago. In short, they beat up a bunch of villains for answers. That didn't work. Hunter's Moon communed with Khonshu to look for Marc. That didn't work, either. MacKay provides no explanation for that.

Then 8-Ball rushes in, pointing that several buildings are being slowly swallowed by darkness, and nobody other than their crew notices. And the people who lived in those buildings are vanishing, too. The others are skeptical it has anything to do with Marc's disappearance, but this is happening on his turf, so they need to handle for him.

They never came back out, so Marc's going in after them. Bringing along his big, soul-stealing dragon sword. Pramanik and Rosenberg are stretching Marc's cape to Breyfogle Batman and/or Spawn levels of size. On one page, as Marc ventures into the Midnight Mission's basement to retrieve the sword, it's a spiraling staircase - both comics in this post feature that, one going up, the other going down - and the cape trails behind him, making a spiral panel border.

On the last page, as he ventures into this new, haunted building, the cape actually has some threads that seem to be fluttering loose of the cape. Which could either read as the cape is, as part of a holy uniform, more than just fabric and has paranormal properties, or that Marc is, as Sterman suggests, making a mistake marching in there when he's wounded. Coming apart at the seams, so to speak.

Chick Fight (2020)

Anna's (Malin Ackerman) life is in a funk. Her car was repossessed, her coffee shop was losing money before it burned down, she's on 'self-imposed abstinence', and still processing her mother's death, and not nearly as far along as her dad (Kevin Nash), who's got himself a boyfriend and a spray tan.

So her friend Charleen (Dulce Sloan) brings her to a fight club, where Anna quickly finds herself on the wrong side of Olivia (Bella Thorne), a very aggressive woman determined to make the place fit her notion of it. Which is less a supportive environment where people can release some aggression, and more an "only the strong survive!" combat sports place. Anna has to get some training, and ends up with a drunk guy (Alec Baldwin) who supposedly trained Sugar Ray.

It's a little oddly paced, or maybe oddly put together. There's a reveal about the origin of the club that feels like the sort of surprise usually saved for late in the movie. The sort of thing that you'd expect to motivate her to win her big showdown with Olivia. It's instead brought out after Anna's first fight, to motivate her to come back, and possibly drive her to run her mouth at Olivia and set up their big fight. Anna quits, or vows to quit, the whole thing no less than 3 times in a 100 minute movie, being alternately talked out of it by Charleen, Olivia (in a mean girl way) and Alec Baldwin's character.

There's also a sort of awkward romance between her and the brother of one of the women who runs the club, the brother acting as sort of a ring doctor. Since Anna gets one-shot KO'ed a lot early on, they see a fair bit of each other. Or he sees a fair bit of her, since she's spending part of that time unconscious. It's complicated by the fact he goes on a date with Thorne's character at one point, so there's avoidance and denial of feelings and all that jazz.

The movie does avoid the development that as Anna starts to have success in the ring, this automatically translates to success in the rest of her life. Even as she wins fights - though her face is remarkably unbruised during the daytime, she must be great disguising it - she's still avoiding the doctor, still can't get a new job, and is evicted from her apartment. Things don't start to turn around on that score until she tries something new in the rest of her life. Even if the fighting thing is new, she's still in the same patterns for everything else. Avoidance and taking the safe path. She ultimately finds success when she says to heck with it and tries something different from what she's been doing.

Ackerman plays Anna as awkward and uncertain most of the time. Never at a loss for the worst way to put things. That doesn't exactly fade as she gets more comfortable in the ring, so at least it's a consistent part of her personality. She only has so much in the tank for clever conversation. Sloan's the outspoken beset friend, always trying to draw a laugh from Anna or push her to get outside her comfort zone. Which means she gets a lot of the best lines, whether it's in reference to her sexual prowess or how badly she's going to beat someone up, and Sloan sells those pretty well. It doesn't feel like Charleen's acting, so much as she's fully this confident. Conversely, Baldwin's coasting on acerbic drunk. This is not a role requiring any great effort from him.

Thorne's mostly just aggressive and in everyone's face, but does get to show a more clever side in the scene where Anna unwittingly applies for a job at a coffee place Olivia owns. Anna tries to backpedal off some of her (weak) shit talking, Olivia plays friendly, discussing the paintings on the wall and her gym in the coffee place, and then cuts Anna's knees out from under her in a couple of sentences.

What I Bought 5/4/2026 - Part 3

I finished rewatching Soul Eater last week. It's funny that it takes about half the anime to get through maybe a quarter of the manga. If I ever actually get all those "perfect editions" of the manga, I guess I can expect a very different story. Hopefully one without chapters devoted to Excalibur, because that joke got old fast.

Is Ted OK? #1 and 3, by Dave Chisholm (writer/artist/letterer) - If "Ted" is another of Johnny Storm's bad aliases, then yeah, he's probably OK. Otherwise, no.

So, starting from the beginning: Sarah's job for Ayn-Styne is to monitor three employees in the marketing division for suicidal or homicidal tendencies, though she suspects only the latter is really important to the company. One of the three Sarah watches - as much as possible, no matter where the employee is - is Ted Green, who comes up with ads designed to play on people's fears. Ted doesn't talk to anyone, except a stray cat he visits on his way home. Sarah's concerned, but her boss can barely pronounce Ted's name, and Brody - the man-bun wearing macho idiot, doesn't think there's anything to worry about. So Sarah followed Ted, lost him, then drove her scooter right in front of him causing him to crash and his car to burn. But Ted was fine by the start of issue 2.

By issue 3, Ted's having nightmares where a blood (and mascot chicken head) covered version of himself spouts dire portents at him. Sarah's hanging out with Ted outside work, in an effort to help him, but in violation of the company's ethics code about fraternizing with co-workers (not that Ted knows that they're co-workers.) But Brody doesn't much worry about that when he pressures her into a date, because his department handles violations of the ethics code.

At a big presentation where their company head, Noah, announces he's running for President, and his employees are now his campaign team, Ted learns Sarah works for Ayn-Styne, freaks out and accuses his coworkers of being aliens, gets shot in the head by Brody, and then flies away, with Sarah. Meanwhile, the reporter from the second issue has revealed Noah's companies control all the militaries that are about to start a war over whatever's locked in that Dome.

One thing I'm curious about, Sarah is narrating all this in voicemails she's leaving for someone. Someone she hasn't named, but left behind when this job required her to move cross-country. Someone she says Ted reminds her of. My guess is the person is dead, and she's trying to save Ted as some proxy, but I don't know.

I'm also curious about the color schemes Chisholm is using. Ted's office space is this blue-white I assume is replicating fluorescent lighting. It's cold and almost unpleasant to look at. Kind of washes everything out. He kind of leaves behind a similar color as an energy trail when he flies. His apartment is mostly a darker, duller blue of his TV, which he uses for playing video games. Except when he wakes from nightmares, at which point Chisholm drenches the panel in a dark red. The same color returns, maybe a little brighter, during the whole crazy scene in the elevator with Sarah and Brody. Awakening from nightmares is like a rebirth?

Meanwhile, Sarah's office/apartment is a sort of bland tan-yellow. I guess it could be considered soothing, or at least not unpleasant. Also, no one has anything on the walls in their offices or apartments. There are shelves and coat hangers, but no posters, no paintings, no photo collages. I don't know if that's significant or not. Things seems a little more technologically advanced than we are. Motorcyles and airplanes leave lines of glowy rings as trails behind them rather than exhaust or anything. There are holographic ads that project off the billboards. So maybe everyone's abandoned tactile, analog representations of art? Although people still have phones, and Ted's using a console with a controller, but it looks about 8-bit in the graphics, if that, so it may be a deliberately archaic choice by him.

One other thing in issue 3 that Chisholm does three times - once on a single page, twice on double page - is almost do a splash page, but then have a single, rectangular panel in the far right corner. The last thing before you'd go to the next page. He didn't use that in issue 1 or issue 2, so I wonder why he brought it out 3 times here. There are other pages where the lower right corner panel is a square and the panels above and to the left give the impression of boxing it in, so maybe it's a sign someone's options are being closed off? Ted's, or Sarah's? Or both? 

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.