Sunday Splash Page #414

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday Splash Page #216

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Bought 2/11/2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Saturday Night Ghost Club - Craig Davidson

Jake doesn't have a lot of friends. If he hangs out with anyone, it's his uncle, who runs a shop dedicated to the occult on what passes for the main drag of 1980s Niagara Falls. When Billy enters the shop, looking for a way to communicate with his recently deceased grandmother and make sure she's alright, dying so far from where she lived most of her life, Calvin offers to help. By sneaking Billy into the local mortuary. And Jake comes along.

For the remainder of the summer the tale spans, the three of them gather at places Calvin says have reports of ghosts. Sometimes Calvin's friend Les comes along, and sometimes Billy's sister, Dove, is around. But there's more going on with these locations and stories than Jake is aware of.

Davidson writes the book from Jake's perspective, looking back on that summer many years after the fact. Jake goes on to study medicine, and becomes a doctor who operates on the brain. So there are chapters that detail things he's seen or experienced in his work, mostly focused on what we don't understand about the connection between the brain as a physical object, and all the information contained inside it. A girl with an inoperable tumor that makes her sleep most of the time, lost in a fantasy world with a robot and druid as protectors. She can no longer recognize anyone in the real world, but when she draws how the robot and druid appear, they're her parents.

So in looking back, Jake views the summer of the ghost club is written as a transformational experience. In one sense, he starts to move past the point where he can believe in stories of haunted rail tunnels or stone angels that crush anyone who spends a night beside the grave. He starts to draw a line under what he believes is possible. But he also makes a couple of friends and, in being willing to stand with them, learns to stand up for himself, begins to become the person he'll grow up to be.

At the same time, Jake sees all the things he didn't understand about people back then - about Dove's shifts in moods, the struggle in his father between a respectable provider and the hellraiser he was, Uncle Calvin's fixations - with more awareness. As a kid, if your mother is cautious with money, or your dad can stand and talk on the doorstep with strangers for hours, you don't really think about why they might be like that. Whether it's childhood experience, or brain chemistry, or some cocktail/battle of the two. You have no frame of reference. That's just, how they are.

If Jake still doesn't, as an adult, understand exactly what's driving the people he cares about, he at least looks back with the knowledge those things were always there.

'Looking back, I wish I'd relished those final instants of childish fear: that saccharine-sweet taste of terror curdling like sour milk in my mouth.' 

The Wrecking Crew (2026)

James (Dave Bautista) is a Navy SEAL in Hawaii with a wife and two kids. His half-brother Jonny (Jason Momoa) is a reservation cop in Oklahoma, whose girlfriend (Morena Baccarin) just broke up with him because of things like lack of communication and forgetting her birthday.

Neither is all that concerned when their private investigator dad is killed in what we see as a pretty obvious intentional hit-and-run, but is being treated as just an accident by the investigating officer (Stephen Root.) But a bunch of Yakuza attack Jonny while he was in the bathroom, looking for some package they think his dad sent? Now Jonny is interested in returning to Hawaii for the first time in 20 years. Mostly so he can beat the shit out of people, and maybe also irritate his big brother.

Momoa plays Jonny as sort of an arrested development, perpetual asshole. He's always looking for a beer, never lets any petty argument drop. When Valentina shows up, Jonny can't help constantly trying to impress her, or get his brother to agree she's hot. (This is not difficult, James is perfectly impressed with her, especially her driving.) Spends a lot of time insulting people by calling them names. One of the Yakuza guys gets called "Naruto" and "Zuko" (because part of his face looks burnt) within a minute, and one the main bad guy's chief goons gets tagged as "Fat John Cena."

Bautista gets the slightly deeper role as the older sibling who can't admit he worries about his younger sibling, so he expresses it through disappointment. Until all the insults Jonny hurls back punctures the "responsible" air and James starts going for the throat. You can even see it in their actual fight. Jonny's swinging and trying to do damage, while James keeps going for holds and grapples. It's either at the point Jonny bites him, or the kick to the nuts, that James starts fighting back for real.

(They fight in the police station parking lot immediately after Jonny gets bailed out for barging into the main bad guy's house and getting tased three times. I envision the cops standing at the windows, just watching and shaking their heads like, "Do we arrest them?")

The fistfight leads to obligatory sharing of feelings, and then to Jonny getting the chance to make things right with Valentina, then an action sequence that makes me think somebody really liked the initial attack on Ajax's convoy from Deadpool. Then big final battle. It's a little odd, because they switch between James' fight with the main Yakuza guy, where James is doing pretty well throughout, and Jonny's fight with the main bad guy, Man Bun McGee (not his true name), where Jonny is mostly getting his ass kicked.

Which is not so weird by itself, except the moments at which they switch feel like there's a thematic significance to it. Like, there's a similarity between the moment where Jonny gets a gaff hook jammed in his shoulder and James has the Yakuza's sword arm in a lock where he could clearly do a lot of damage, but he hasn't yet? I don't know, maybe that James has been denying any emotional fallout from his father's death (and various poor life choices prior to that), and trying to stay under control, disciplined, all that. But really, he's angry too, angry enough to make that arm bend a direction it shouldn't and bury the sword in the guy's face.

Not sure exactly how that maps to Jonny's situation, where his anger doesn't seem to be doing him much good. So maybe it's that James cares about his brother and senses he's in trouble, so there's no more time for restraint.

Grappling with a Host of Issues

Probably not what anyone wants to hear. 

Total Suplex of the Heart is focused on Georgie, a young woman writing for a web site that gets an idea to do an article on a local hardcore wrestling promotion. But once hired, to act as a valet, or less charitably, eye candy, Georgie finds she really loves wrestling. The storytelling and the characters as much or more than the physicality.

For the remainder of the story, Georgie is around or involved in wrestling to some extent, but writer Joanne Starer tends to focus on how those things intersect with various issues Georgie has (which are drawn from Starer's own life, including starting her own women's wrestling promotion in the early-2000s.) Georgie has body image issues and anorexia, neither of which is helped by her valet character often being dressed up in skimpy outfits designed to titillate the male audience.

So there's a scene where a friend she's made through wrestling is trying to help her find new clothes for her costume, and artist Ornella Greco draws two panels side-by-side: one is how Georgie actually looks in the outfit, and the other is what Georgie sees in the mirror, with a more noticeable belly, and some hair on her legs, bags under her eyes. Basically that she's fixating, or imagining, on perceived imperfections. Or Georgie narrates her cycle of binging, and justifies it by assuring that she tries to eat healthy foods. Except binging on raisin bran has negative consequences.

There's also her tendency to gravitate towards guys for affirmation, and those guys are often completely self-absorbed. Even the guy who seems "nice", is really trying to have the relationship entirely on his terms. They're working together on a show for the wrestling school Georgie helped him start and run, but it's all for him. Everything is on his schedule, according to his needs. The guy who points this out, seems to be doing so more to convince Georgie to sleep with him, than out of any real concern for her.

Greco draws most of those guys as physical specimens, though I'm not sure if that's meant to be how they really look, or how Georgie perceives them. Meaning as an the inverse of her self-image. That she sees them as these perfect guys, and she's lucky they like her (because she sees herself as such a mess), so she needs to make sure they keep liking her. By being the fun one, or the supportive one, or the flirty one.

 

But amid all that, Starer does emphasize that Georgie makes a lot of friends through wrestling. Actual friends, who not only support her or encourage her to figure out what she wants, but also will call her on her self-destructive behavior. Starer ends the story on an up note, one she admits in the afterword doesn't mirror the reality of her situation at that time in her life. She's likely right that it's important to note toxic relationships or body issues don't just magically fix themselves, but I appreciate she let the comic end on a more positive trend. I often found myself occasionally groaning at Georgie's latest bad decision, so having her step away from that was fairly carthartic. Though Starer usually has Georgie groaning at herself along with us, per her narration boxes. But it's an illustration of the cycles people get caught in, making the same mistakes over and over, even knowing they're doing it.

Sunday Splash Page #413

"Pipe Organ from Hell," in Power Girl (vol. 2) #3, by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti (writers), Amanda Conner (artist), Paul Mounts (colorist), John J. Hill (letterer)

Power Girl had a 4-issue mini-series in the late-80s, then bounced between team books - not to mention origins and powersets - for almost 20 years. Infinite Crisis bringing back the multiverse meant it was OK for her to be a Kryptonian from a different, now-deceased, universe, which at least settled the origin and powerset. Still, now that her past was concrete - as concrete as anything gets in a Big 2 superhero universe - what to do with her present?

Amanda Conner, Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti started with trying to get her a civilian life again. In the arc in JSA Classified that led into Infinite Crisis, Geoff Johns established that while Power Girl had an apartment, she was hardly ever there. Dust on everything, she couldn't keep track of where her key was (Conner drew a pile of doorknobs just inside the apartment from Peej breaking them to get in each time she actually came by.) Not even bothering with a disguise or secret identity, just walking to the door in her costume.

So, get her an apartment. Have her try to maintain, with limited success, a secret identity as Karen Starr. Get her a cat, which allows Conner to draw all sorts of interesting or funny stuff in the background when Power Girl's at home. Continue building the friendship with the current Terra (as started in the Terra mini-series from this creative team the year before), but make sure they interact outside superheroics. Doing stuff like going to the movies together. Get Peej back in charge of her old company, Starrware (I don't know how many reboots of the character ago that was), with a focus on technological solutions for environmental and ecological problems. That provides the opportunity for supporting cast members who aren't costumed adventurers, while also offering a setting which can provide both conflicts and solutions to conflicts that don't strictly involve a Kryptonian punching stuff (fun as that can be to read.)

Then throw her up against a wide variety of foes. The arch-villain of this creative team's run was the Ultra-Humanite, himself a refuge from Earth-2 like Power Girl, though I'm unclear how he's still around. U-H has a superiority complex related to his intellect, and a chip on his shoulder because his body let him down, resulting in his brain being implanted in an albino gorilla. He initially plans to move his brain into her body, which is an inversion of the typical focus on Power Girl's appearance. Where often it's the male gaze about her physical appearance, for U-H, it's about the power inside that body, and what he thinks he could do with it, rather than the usual lust motivation. He's still reducing her to a body for him to use, but in a different way. Not that it ends any better for him.

And there's plenty of the other kind of reduction dealt with in the book. Lots of brief scenes of people talking down to Power Girl or otherwise behaving inappropriately, which she then shuts down in some way. An egotistical scientist interviews for a position at her company and dismisses her concerns about his plans to bio-engineer psychological change into people to match what he thinks is "healthy"? That dude is shown the door. Some bum tries to flash Power Girl? Freeze breath on his junk. The 2-part story where Vartox shows up, having decided Power Girl is the ideal woman to help kickstart a population boom on his planet, is one long exercise in her dealing with an annoying dickhead with no respect for her (or boundaries.) There's a lot of yelling, followed by punching.

I'd like to solve more of my problems with yelling followed by punching. Maybe skip straight to the punching.

Beyond that, there's a teenage girl who tries to use a magic book to destroy aspects of industrialization in an effort to protect the planet, and a trio of wild alien ladies looking for a planet to have a party. And there's Satanna, looking for revenge after Power Girl's initial defeat of the Ultra-Humanite. Except this was at the same time the Humanite had gotten his brain transferred into Terra, so that played out strangely. Satanna went to the trouble of getting weapons from Dr. Sivana to kill Power Girl, only for the Humanite, in Terra's body, to destroy the weapons. Satanna helped with the brain transfer, so why are they working at cross-purposes?

Conner fills the pages with all sorts of background details and foreground action. Wherever Power Girl goes, in costume or civilian clothes, we see people passing by take notice. (Sometimes she comments, sometimes she doesn't.) Two people may be talking while one of Karen's employees is chasing her cat in the background. Colorist Phil Mounts uses vivid colors, nothing muddy or restrained. The Ultra-Humanite's weapons fire bright-green beams, Satanna's armor she got from Sivana has a gaudy leopard-print design. The subterranean land Terra comes from has clothing that changes into dayglo colors in response to the wearer's emotions. Even if things get ugly at times, these are still bright, exciting adventures for the most part. Weird science stuff, magic, aliens! Satanna's chief henchman is an angry badger scientist, a detail I really loved.

Conner makes Power Girl a big presence. Taller than most of the guys at her company, so she often has a noticeable height advantage in the profile shots of two characters conversing. She shifts easily from amusement to exasperation to anger as the situation changes. Not that she can't play diplomatic, but this is not a character who is going to bite their tongue and play nice to avoid stepping on some jerk's feelings, or worry about being called a bitch for it. They play up the "power" in her name, too. She swings cars like she's waving a paper fan. A panel full of Bioshock-looking machines is followed by a panel full of shattered junk. Or she survives an explosion that vaporizes an alien spaceship with nothing more than some scorch marks on her skin and mild disorientation.

Unfortunately, the creative team left after 12 issues, replaced by Judd Winick and Sami Basri. Winick proceeded to tear down Starrware and embroil Power Girl in Justice League: Generation Lost-related plots, and Basri's Power Girl seemed like a much more reserved and remote character than Conner's. A lot of narrowed eyes and harsh glares. I gave that 5 issues and then bailed out hard.