What I Bought 6/1/2026 - Part 2

Unfortunately, my boss is out on various vacations most of this month. It's good he's taking time off. I shake my head in amazement when he mentions he came in on weekends to take care of stuff, given how often he reminds us not to stress overly about things (I am maybe 50% successful at this.)

However, him being on vacation means I become him in the interim, with all the irritating phone calls, e-mails, and other mind-numbing crap that implies. Will I make it to the end of the month without running screaming to the South Seas?

Fantastic Four #11, by Ryan North (writer), Stan Sakai (writer/artist), Pat Boutin (penciler), Serge LaPointe (inker), Edgar Delgado (colorist), Brittany Peer (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - The FF don't fight enough dinosaurs.

The Four are trying to decide what this new Future Foundation they're going to build with Maria Hill will be. If Hill's involved it'll be. . . a disaster! *rimshot* Reed, Sue and Johnny are all disagreeing, but Ben excuses himself from the discussion, claiming he's just the muscle. As opposed to Johnny? I'm pretty sure only one of the two of you qualified to be an astronaut, unless they've revamped Johnny's origin significantly.

Tempers are still high the next day when they find a mechanical T-Rex robbing a bank, and it seems like the FF can't get on the same page, until Ben realizes the robot's got the device Doom used to incite emotions and make people attack at Reed and Sue's wedding. I figured Psycho-Man was trying something new, but no, it's some guy the FF haven't seen in over 500 issues that bought his gear from some "super-weapons" auction. Then Ben tries writing a mission statement for the Future Foundation, and it's about everybody working to better things instead of just the "elite."

Whatever, it's fine. I was here for them fighting a robot T-Rex, although from the solicitation, I was really hoping Crimeasaurus Rex was actually a sentient Tyrannosaur, committing dino-crimes for dino-reasons. Maybe North would have fun with the FF trying to reason with a lizard intelligence that operates differently from a mammalian one, or something. Given that hope, "robot controlled by total loser," is kind of a letdown.

Then there's the Stan Sakai story, which is a pretty standard old-school FF adventure where a building falls into a big hole, so the team travels underground to confront Mole Man. Except he's not the problem, it's just a big creature that likes to dig. The FF work briefly with Mole Man to confront it, then everybody uses their powers and their current location in a plan to defeat it. Then Mole Man tells them to get lost like he's Namor or something. It's pretty close to the distilled essence of the FF, but mostly it's a chance to see Stan Sakai draw them, if that's of interest to you.

Is Ted OK? #4, by Dave Chisholm (writer/artist/letterer) - They shoulda put that cover behind a content warning tag or something.

The lady in the van that seemed to be waiting for Ted and Sarah is doctor Christina Paganini. She wants to destroy Ayn-Styne, because she knows weird stuff is going on there. Because she used to work there. Further explanation has to wait, because Man-Bun Idiot is after them, in an admittedly cool mech-suit, with a bunch of other robots or mech-suits. He catches up and asks Ted to come over and sign a form for paid time-off, or else. Then he does a countdown. When that doesn't work, he brings out the stray cat Ted likes, and starts the countdown over.

Which made me think of Woody Harrelson asking Sam Rockwell to please "go back to 5," when he was trying to get his gun to work in Seven Psychopaths. Ted agrees to surrender, if the cat is given to Sarah (who is maybe remembering this scene while she leaves another voicemail for whoever she keeps calling, this time about how 35% of our memories are shit our brain makes up to fill in the gaps.) Cat released, Ted starts asking Brody what this is about, Brody behaves like a dick, Ted, loses it and releases a massive burst of energy that fries all the mechs. And Brody! Good.

It's a nifty scene, although I was trying to figure out "PPPPPPPPPP" as a sound effect, until I realized on the previous page, he clapped his hands to demonstrate how quickly he died earlier, and the discharge came from that. So it's the tail end of an extended "CLAP" sound effect. Nice work on the layouts, albeit in a way that doesn't lend itself to scanning. A pair of two-page sequences, the first, with the clap, one panel running across two pages, getting shorter as it moves right, while on the second, it gets larger as it progresses. Under each of them, a bigger, irregular 4-sided panel, one of the machines, outlined in blue, the other of dark brown and green wreckage.

And then a few panels at the far right on both pages. In the first two-page sequence, it's 3 panels, stacked on top of each other. Brody's "oh shit!" face, Sarah running with the cat, and the doctor looking on in stunned horror. The second two-page sequence, it's 4 panels, and they're all basically focused on Ted's reaction to what he just did.

After that, there's some sort of answers from Christina about what Ted is, at least in the sense this Noah had something to do with it, rather than aliens. Meanwhile, the reporter follows Noah around, trying to ask questions, or at least question Noah's self-aggrandizing bullshit, without much success on either count. And then Noah takes him inside the Dome, where radiation cooks the reporter almost instantly, but Noah is completely fine. I say that, because I assume the ranting about 'meat-suit husks' and 'spaceship Earth' are everyday shit for this guy.

The yellow tone Chisholm uses inside the Dome seems very similar to what was used in Ted's nightmare at the start of issue 3. And Ted's posture as he rants over the reporter is the same as the blood-covered Ted's in the nightmare as he loomed over a terrified version of himself. What that means? I have no idea.

The Obstacle Course - J.F. Freedman

Set in the first six months of 1957, The Obstacle Course follows Roy Poole, ninth-grader in a little Maryland town. Roy's a smart-ass, a liar, a small-time hoodlum, a king in his own mind. In other words, a teenager. Roy plans to get accepted to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and some day become an officer who commands a great warship.

To that end, he often sneaks away to run the obstacle course at the Academy on weekends, hitching rides there and back if he can. His parents don't know, neither do his friends. That's the way Roy keeps his life, compartmentalized. He builds model ships, and only his parents and the guy at the model shop know. He robs washing machines in an apartment complex to get the money for the models, and only his pals Burt and Joe know, because they play lookout. He makes friends with a retired admiral, and no one knows, and what the admiral thinks he knows about Roy, save his interest in the Navy, is lies. Surely, this intricate web of falsehoods can be sustained indefinitely.

This was the last book from the pile I grabbed at the book sale in March. I figured, at a glance from the back cover, that the obstacle course was metaphorical. That this was your typical thriller about a man who learned something he shouldn't, and must run through a gamut of foes and danger.

And in the sense that Roy thinks he's the slickest thing ever, that he can be all different things to different people, and everything will work out his way, it is. He doesn't try in junior high because that wouldn't be cool, but it's fine. He'll just start trying in high school to get his grades up enough to be accepted into the Naval Academy. The admiral thinks his grades are better than they are, and that Roy's dad has a good enough job he can afford to send Roy to a military school that would make it easier for Roy to get into Annapolis. Every day is him trying to only show a certain specific face to each individual person, always with the purpose of tricking them into giving him something or thinking he's something more than he is - smarter, tougher, richer, cooler.

Except he either can't see how he's working at cross-purposes to himself, or doesn't care. Roy won't talk about the academy with his parents, won't stop stealing, won't stop picking fights. He tries wheedling homework answers out of classmates, or breakfast out of midshipmen, but he won't stop needling or embarrassing the kids who help him, or insulting the midshipmen who won't.

Halfway through, the fact everything was going to collapse around him was obvious enough I lost interest, so I flipped to the back and starting reading from the last chapter forward. Got through another quarter of the book that way, right about the time things fell apart with the admiral and, in frustration over that, Roy starts being even more hardheaded, burning all his remaining bridges while insisting none of it matters, he's forging his own course.

Which, judging by the last chapter, may be accurate. Roy's played a particular role so long everyone has pigeonholed him as a certain way, and his attempts to step outside it isolated him to the extent there's no choice but to go it alone. I have no idea how that's going to work, because he still seems determined to get into the Academy, but that's how it ends. Roy, alone, sure that he can just keep pushing ahead and he'll get what he wants. I can't tell if Freedman expects me to be impressed, or pity the kid.

'They're my best friends, Burt and Joe, but I'm not going to tell them everything about me. I never once mentioned the admiral or any of that, that's a secret I'll take with me to the grave. What they don't know can't hurt them.

Can't hurt me.' 

What I Bought 6/1/2026 - Part 1

As we begin June, I now have the last four comics from May I was looking for. Busy couple of weeks, comicswise, for me. Four books out last week, and potentially six(!) this week. And then just 1 over the next two weeks combined. Having big weeks and empty weeks isn't weird, but May was pretty even throughout. 3-2-2-4 comics from the first week through the last.

So it goes. For today, a last issue and a first issue.

Spirit of the Shadows #5, by Nick Cagnetti (writer/artist/colorist), Daniel Ziegler (writer), Ferran Delgado (letterer) - The one Kirby monster is drooling all over poor Erik's leg. Gross man, he doesn't need marinating, just eat him!

Helena's about to kill Erik for good, per his wishes, but the spell that brought out all these ghosts brought back her sister. I note that while Elizabeth has a monster-hand in the Spirit Realm, as she's been there too long and was starting to turn, her ghost has regular human hands. She only remembers she had a sister, nothing about her, but is still horrified by what Helena is doing. So Helena relents, the spell ends, the ghosts go back where they were and Erik follows.

Which puts him in position to save Elizabeth from the angry father that had him killed in the first place, now basically a red, 4-legged monster, with an Arnim Zola face. Erik figures he'll be that way soon, too, but Elizabeth finds the last pages of his book and insists they take the carriage to the Judgement Hall. The last pages also reveal how Erik died at the start of the series. Katrina's ghost reached out to him, via some weird scepter and begged him to stop trying to bring her back. So he had the doc work out something to kill him for real.

So, the Realmkeepers, a couple of giants in robes and opera masks with their colors swapped. They also have lizard-looking guys dressed like the Nutcracker, but with no legs, for doormen/guards. Neat design choice by Cagnetti, he really let himself get bizarre with some of the creatures in this mini-series. The Realmkeepers start to review Erik's case, and he tells them to skip it. He's guilty, but Elizabeth's a good person, please let her into the Sacred Realm. This causes them to ponder their system of judgement, they let her in, and Erik gets a role as someone who roams the Spirit Realm, seeking others who might have been misjudged. He does get to accompany Elizabeth long enough to speak with Katrina, and then it's off to work. First person we see him protect - and it's strange Erik talked about remembering having powers in life, but we only see him use them in the Spirit Realm - the doctor that resurrected him in the first place.

So Erik accepts his loss and tries to make amends. I'm not really clear on why Elizabeth was sent to the Spirit Realm in the first place, and since her book is gone, presumably she doesn't know either (though she claims her memories are coming back.) The story ends with her ghost visiting Helena (now setting up shop in the mansion where Erik and the doc lived) and admitting she doesn't even remember this argument she had with Helena, which Helena blames for driving Elizabeth into the night.

Which is a little bit of an odd way to end. Not the idea that the disagreements we think are so important in life really aren't. But Cagnetti and Ziegler have Katrina says she wasn't even aware of it. I guess the point is it doesn't matter what they disagreed about, it wasn't what killed Katrina, and it didn't mean Helena needed to go around killing people and seeking vengeance. But something about framing that way is sticking in my craw. Maybe that it leaves open the possibility Katrina regains the memory later and changes her mind.

The Matron #1, by David Bowles and Drew Edwards (writers), Monica Gallagher (artist), Hary Saxon (color artist), Stephen Kok (letterer) - Great, now she's tracked blood all through John Byrne's Alpha Flight blizzard fight issue.

The issue shifts between February of 1975, and February of 2021. In 1975, Rozina Krenek was apparently a cannibalistic serial killer called The Matron, who killed people. Possibly only criminals, possibly only men. That's just going off what we've seen so far, plus a "FBI file" on a murder from the 1950s as some extra material.) One potential victim, who hadn't really been on board with robbery anyway, escaped and told the sheriff. Who Rozina seemed confident would look the other way, being a relative.

He didn't look the other way this time, for reasons presently unclear. There was a shootout, Rozina got lit on fire, she died, although she killed two or three cops first. The rest of the family except her granddaughter died too. The granddaughter works in a diner and still carried a grudge. Her granddaughter Roz is attending college and is friends with the great-granddaughter of the sheriff, to the displeasure of said grudge-holding grandma.

That's where we're at. There may be a supernatural element. The Matron's axe has some runes on it, and when she captures the reluctant robber a storm seems to have started from nowhere. When he escapes, she yells something at the sky that Kok puts in much larger, bolder letters, and the rain turns to snow. 

During the shootout, Rozina is still standing while on fire, only falling after the sheriff's last bullet bounces off the mask. Doesn't penetrate it, doesn't crack it break it, nothing like that. But if comes loose, and Rozina falls in a creek. Or maybe it's a moat. It seems very straight and very deep for as narrow as it appears.

Gallagher depicts Rozina's strength casually. She hauls the reluctant guy - old enough to have gone to 'Nam and returned, so we're not talking about a child here - out through the window of his truck with one hand. She cuts through both of a cop's legs with one swing. She's as tall or taller than anyone else and tends to dominate panels she's in, either taking up the foreground or looming over other characters. Roz is similarly tall, and has the same hair and facial structure, so that's either foreshadowing or just making clear the familial bloodline.

The Devil's Own (1997)

Rory (Brad Pitt) is an IRA soldier that travels to New York City to try and buy some Stinger missiles to deal with the British Army's helicopters. A friendly judge sets him up to stay at the home of Tom O'Meara (Harrison Ford), a New York cop.

While Rory is pretending to work construction and cleaning up the boat that'll be used to haul the missiles he's going to buy from a sleazy arms dealer (Treat Williams), O'Meara is doing the family man thing, going to work, trying to get his teenage daughter (early career Julia Stiles) off the phone, or score a little alone time with the wife, Sheila (Margaret Colin.)

We also see how Tom does things as a cop, where he tries to use minimal force, tells a guy stealing radios from cars to throw his gun away so he (meaning the thief) won't get shot. Except Tom stops to collect the gun, and his partner catches up to the guy and shoots him in the back. Tom doesn't agree, but ultimately lets his partner drop the gun next to the guy he shot.

(As there are several scenes where Tom runs, I was able to tell my dad my observation on how strangely Harrison Ford runs. I thought I mentioned it in one of my reviews of the later Indiana Jones movies last year, but apparently not. Point being, Harrison Ford runs weird, like he's trying to run without fully committing to it, or he's got bad plantar fasciatis. My dad's contention is it's not strange, Ford just runs flat-footed, and also never wears sneakers or other athletic shoes. He's always in boots or what I'd call dress shoes but my dad calls "proper" shoes.) 

All that's meant to contrast with what we see of Rory's life. Rory's father was shot at the dinner table by a masked man when Rory was a kid, just for having rumored Republican sympathies. When a team of plain-clothesed guys in cars can't catch Rory, the British military rolls in the armored vehicles and soldiers. One of his comrades is already dying of a gunshot, and when he won't give up Rory's location, an British Intelligence officer shoots him again, just because, basically. 

In Rory's life, being unarmed offers no protection. Relying on the honor of the people against you is a fool's bet. Even keeping a simple photo a friend took of Rory dancing with the sympathetic daughter of the judge that helped him ends up being a mistake, helping Tom pick up his trail. The only choice is to arm yourself and hit back.

And Tom, for all that the movie gestures at the potential for a surrogate father role towards Rory, doesn't get that. He decides to retire over covering for his partner murdering that guy, feeling dirty and unsuited to what he thinks being a cop is supposed to be. Rory's the one who has to retrieve Tom from the bar, and they talk a bit, but you can see Rory doesn't entirely get why Tom is so bothered. Tom's ancestors might hail from Ireland, but he's taken very different pieces from it. The beer, the food, the religion. Things you can take with you across an ocean, keep alive from a distance. For Rory, it's a place to fight for until its free, or die trying.

And then there's Williams' sleazy weapons dealer. Always smug, always trying some line on Rory, who he clearly sees as some dumb hick kid. Rory's got a cause and his anger. Tom's got his family and his own values. Williams just loves money. Tom doesn't want Rory to kill more people, doesn't want to kill Rory. Williams doesn't give a shit. He'd just like to get paid for the missiles more than once, if possible. If killing Rory makes that happen, then kill him. Violence has no meaning beyond getting him what he wants. 

I was a little surprised the movie didn't do more of Rory interacting with Tom's family, but I think it really wanted to keep the focus on Rory and Tom, their differing outlooks on life and violence and what's acceptable as shown through how they spend their time. We mostly see Tom's life during the day, and Rory's at night, though it seems significant the two almost always interact at night. They're traveling in Rory's world, whether Tom knows it or not.

The Terms of the Engagement

Somei Yoshino: Mom Friend, or Probation Officer Friend? 

Volume 6 of Yakuza Fiance starts with Kirishima going to great lengths to start a fight with Shouma. He steals Shouma's lighter - a gift from Yoshino, that says "Stop Smoking" on it - then announces he and Yoshino are dating, so Shouma's place in her life belongs to him now. Then mocks Shouma for refusing to fight him. Just really acting like a dick.

Yoshino has an idea something's up, and Shouma hasn't returned the GPS tracker she put in the stuffed animal keychain she gave Kirishima, so she hunts them down and starts swinging a bat. And missing. The whole sequence is kind of confusing.

Kirishima supposedly picked the fight to try and disguise the fact Yoshino's grandfather kicked the crap out of him (and Shouma) last volume for endangering Yoshino. Setting aside the fact Renji is the reason Kirishima is in Yoshino's life to the point he can endanger her, why bring knives to what only needed to be a fistfight? (Plus, Yoshino knows her Gramps beat them up, so it's a futile effort.)

Then you've got the fact Kirishima supposedly likes getting beat up, but dodges all Yoshino's swings. I get he won't answer her questions about why he did this because he likes her yelling at him, although it runs against his claims of how important she is to him, and how devoted he is. Maybe the masochism even explains why he refuses her order to fix Shouma's torn shirt (Shouma also refuses, so Konishi undermines the notion Yoshino has much control over either of them.) But she was willing to yell and physically injure him, which is apparently arousing to Kirishima, so why dodge?

Konishi does subsequently give Yoshino the upper hand. She knocks Kirishima on his heels by explaining she agreed to be his boyfriend so he'd stop picking fights with Shouma out of some insecurity about his position in her life, relative to her lifelong friend. In her words, 'Shouma's the reason you're my boyfriend. never forget that.'

The real power move comes once they return to Tokyo, when she employs *ominous drums* The Silent Treatment. For three days, she pretends as though Kirishima doesn't exist. It's funny, watching them walk home from school, Kirishima at her heels jabbering the whole way, Yoshino acting as though she's alone. Kirishima soon resorts to desperation baking in an attempt to get her attention. Because, see, this version of punishment isn't fun for him. Which again raises the question in my mind of why he didn't take the hits with the bat.

Once the three days are up and Kirishima understands the land mines that now surround him, they have a conversation about their new relationship. OK, that's a reasonable thing to do. Kirishima asks if they can hold hands, which seems benign. Yoshino even expresses concern about a scar on his hand from an old wound he didn't get looked at. That's sort of sweet. She offers some lotion for his hands, wearing a bizarre facial expression. I can't even guess what Konishi was going for there.

Kirishima proceeds to dump the lotion in Yoshino's palms and licks it. And then she headbutts him, which he takes without blinking. Oh, so now he wants to get hit? It's just another weird sequence all around, even allowing for how fucked in the head I think Kirishima is.

After a brief chapter hinting at infighting within the Kirigaya family (the group Renji's part of), and some hints about creepy scar-face bastard Azami's next plan, there's a school culture fest! Great, I loved the culture fest episodes of Azumanga Daioh! But it's really more about Shouma showing up as an escort for Yoshino's heretofore unseen mother, Hitomi. Hitomi seems like a spacecase and a klutz, but we're told she had a nervous breakdown when Yoshino's dad died and her mental health has waxed and waned ever since, especially if she gets stressed caring for Yoshino. Hence, Yoshino living with her grandfather.

Mostly this serves two purposes. One, showing Kirishima will behave himself around Shouma now, suggesting he's possibly actually listening to Yoshino. Two, offering another hint towards the circumstances surrounding Yoshino's father's death, as Kirishima privately mentions to Hitomi he knows how horrible she must find it, Yoshino staying with the Miyama family. Which makes me think Gaku killed Yoshino's dad in a botched attempt to kill Renji, and that's the thing he thinks he owes Renji for (which comes up in volume 8, whenever we get there.) 

Sunday Splash Page #429

"Mid-Air Collision," in "Mad-Matic" from Akira Toriyama Manga Theater, by Akira Toriyama

In contrast to yesterday's entry, it feels like I bought this more recently than 3 years ago, but the blog posts don't lie. This is an omnibus collection of what was originally a 3-volume release of assorted shorter works Dragon Ball Z and Dr. Slump creator Akira Toriyama did over the years, going back to the late-1970s.

It's fun to see the evolution of Toriyama's style, alongside his difficulties finding a story idea or concept the fans like. His first two strips, Wonder Island and Wonder Island 2, have a MAD magazine feel to them in the short, squat figures and reliance on either pop culture references - the protagonist of the second story is "Dirty Herring" - or what seems like entirely random, absurdist humor. There are two suns in the sky. But one's an egg, with a 3-headed dragon inside, but all their necks are tangled. That kind of thing.

By the 4th entry, Pola & Roid, Toriyama starts to find the groove he'd adopt for early Dragon Ball. Desert settings with lots of rocky spires and plateaus. Plucky but somewhat boy-crazy heroines in swimsuit battle armors and legs that seem long relative to their upper bodies. Dimwitted but (mostly) decent guys who don't know how to behave around a girl that's flirting with them. Joke villains that are either pathetically weak or just kind of stupid. It's mostly comedy, where even the shifts towards action are played as gags. A giant lizard just reading his dialogue without inflection and defeated with a squeaky hammer. A giant fiddler crab challenges the hero - an interstellar cab driver - to rock-paper-scissors. The evil emperor's secret weapon is a rubber band.

One of the bits that's interesting, at least in volume 1, where Toriyama talks about the process for making some of the strips, is how often his work ended up being unpopular. Even after he shifts away from the style of the Wonder Island strips (both duds with the readers), his two Chobits adventures - an inept hick cop who looks a lot like adult Goku meets essentially an alien genie in a flying teapot - in his words, 'failed to garner any fans.'

By volume 2, as he adds a bit more action, though still with a heavy lean towards comedy, you start to see more of his aesthetic in machinery. The hover bikes, the spacecraft or aircraft with the vertical surfaces at the ends of the wings, attached to egg-shaped central cockpits. The idea of "capsule houses" shows up in Tongpoo - a young cyborg crash lands on an alien world while trying to learn the fate of an earlier space exploration mission, and the sole survivor is a ditzy girl - and The Elder is a long chase between a secret agent in a car full of James Bond gadgets and some perverted old sheriff in a jeep drawn in the "squashed nose-to-tail" shape Toriyama uses for so many cars.

The Elder is also where Toriyama starts in with the "creepy old man groping women" stuff, which is, not great. Up to then, he was mostly restricting the pervert humor to young guys accidentally (key word there, accidentally, the hick cop in Chobits being the exception) stumbling on a lady in undress. In those cases, most of the characters are either confused or apologetic.

He flips things a bit in the final entry in the collection, Go Go Ackman, where the demon title character is actively repelled by any hint of female sexuality. He's supposed to be killing people to collect their souls and a convenient gust of wind reveals the lady he'd targeted is wearing a thong? Nope, he's outta there. It's not like Sand Land, where the "demon" characters are far less evil and cruel than the humans. Ackman really does seem to want to kill people, but I guess he's supposed to be young enough - by devil standards - that sort of thing is still icky to him. Or Toriyama just want to draw women in underwear without having them get murdered, in a story ostensibly starring a devil kid out to murder people.

Anyway, some of the entries are stronger than others, but it's fun to see what elements and themes recur and how he mixed and matched them in different ways over time.

Saturday Splash Page #231

"Working Girl," in Zaya, by J.D Morvan (writer), Huang-Jia Wei (artist), Neurobellum Productions (letterer)

Zaya is a retired former agent of a covert group known as Spiral, now living out her days as an artist and mother to twin daughters. But you know how it goes, you're never all the way out. There's always one last job. Zaya gets dragged back in to help stop a killer that used to work for Spiral, and is now targeting them. The operation runs into dual problems of the police raiding the ship, and the killer being more resilient than Spiral expected. Zaya ends up killing him inside her own (sentient) ship, while trying to escape from the cops via hyperspace.

Except when she exits hyperspace, everything is wrong. Her kids are now her sister's, and her sister claims to have no sister. No one in Spiral knows her, or how she can find her way through their secret passages and back doors. The killer is married to Zaya's sister, and starts hunting her down. It's one of those stories where the expert brought out of retirement is betrayed, except Zaya wasn't actually betrayed, she just stumbled into a parallel universe. Which leads to a bizarre bit where she's being hunted by a guy while the same guy's corpse in rotting in her ship. Nothing really ends well.

It feels a lot longer than 4 years ago I reviewed this graphic novel, but the first time I mentioned it in one of my solicits posts was in 2020. Maybe that's why. It sat on my "to buy" list for a while before I found a copy cheap enough I'd go for it. But I also thought Zaya was about a former secret agent learning things about their past, and it's not that at all. Would I have bought it if I better understood what Morvan and Huang-Jia were working towards?

It almost feels like two stories crammed together. You have the hunt for the killer in his bizarrely puffy-looking power suit - it's like he's wearing a giant airbag that's already deployed - and people with cybernetic enhancements and the ability to connect themselves to computer systems via wires plugging in at the base of their skulls. Very Ghost in the Shell.

Zaya reprograms the mind of the ship she's provided, granting it free will in the hopes it'll choose to help and not report anything to the authorities. We're told this act essentially constitutes murder with regards to the initial ship mind, but the new version is totally OK with what Zaya did. No concerns, just happy to be free! Huang-Jia marks the difference by depicting the ship's initial projection of its mind as a rigid black rectangle, a miniature version of the doorway in 2001: A Space Odyssey. After, "Lia" (the name Zaya gives the ship) looks more like a floating mass of translucent tentacles.

(Between the highly organic look Lia's mind gets, and the streamlined and sculpted design of the spaceships, the bulky design of Siegram's power suit is all the stranger. You'd almost think he stumbled in from another universe that had a whole different design aesthetic.)

Then you get the whole parallel universe thing where Zaya can't figure out what's going on, and nobody can figure her out, either. Where you see how universes apparently repeat certain patterns, just with different players involved. Zaya didn't exist, but her twins still do, via her sister and the killer guy, Siegram, who in this world apparently got Zaya's life. Recruited off the streets, trusted bodyguard, partially retired when he becomes a parent. As for the twins existing in both universes, that's because Siegram is apparently the father in both universes, it's just that in Zaya's case, Crazy Killer Siegram assaulted her in a cloakroom, while Retired Bodyguard Siegram wooed and married Carmen.

(The bit about Zaya getting assaulted is a sudden flashbulb she gets in the middle of a fistfight with Retired Bodyguard Siegram. Doesn't get much weight, more like Movran figured out late in the story he needed something to explain the twins existing in both universes despite different mothers, and that was the best he could manage.)

Also, kind of strange Lia was so excited about being free, but agrees to help Siegram take Zaya to a government agency that wants to use people who drifted in from other universes to try and explore the phenomenon. So the government can exploit it, naturally. It's a life of indentured servitude, for both of them. When Lia had interior guns that could absolutely kill Siegram. Then dump his body (and the first corpse) and just run for it. Instead, we got a distinctly unsatisfying ending.