Sunday Splash Page #431

"Full Speed Ahead," in All-New X-Factor #1, by Peter David (writer), Carmine Di Giandomenico (artist), Lee Loughridge (colorist), Cory Petit (letterer)

In 2014, Peter David returned to the "X-Factor" concept for a third time. Having previously written a government super-team of dysfunctional personalities, then a detective agency of dysfunctional personalities, this time he took the approach of a team sponsored by a corporation, Serval Industries. Staffed by dysfunctional personalities, of course.

Polaris is team leader, but swings between trying to mediate amongst the others and getting extremely aggressive at the drop of a hat. (Or a scratch from a cat.) David doesn't ever explain what's going on there, just treats it as something everyone knows about. Even Warlock's dad the Magus knows about her mental instability. I don't know if David intended to delve into it later and the book got canceled first (20 issues, not a bad run for Marvel in the last 20 years), or simply considered it sufficient to establish the fact.

Similarly, he references Polaris attacking Quicksilver at some point prior to the book starting without ever explaining that. Despite this, Pietro joins, because if he didn't join teams of people who tried to kill him he'd have to be a hermit. He's there as a mole for Havok (currently leading the Uncanny Avengers), something Gambit, who decides this is a better gig than teaching at Wolverine's school, immediately picks up on.

Gambit's also apparently King of de T'ieves Guild, and one of his guys rips off Serval, which he pulled off by shackling Danger, Xavier's old sentient Danger Room. Once freed, but with her memories in disarray, Danger sticks around. Serval tries to buy out an up-and-coming company that turns out to be run by Magus, posing as a human, and working with Warlock. So the team visits Doug Ramsey, who is planning to commit suicide to avert dreams he has of becoming an awful villain in the future.

Why does Carmine Di Giandomenico (who draws all but two issues of the series) have Doug waking from these dreams with his eyes and mouth glowing? Why is Doug having these dreams in the first place? Why does he have a goatee in the dreams, wearing some mechanical suit with Doc Ock tentacles a bubble helmet that makes him look more like Trevor Fitzroy? Who knows, it's never explained! But he decides to join, with no indication he thinks this will avert the future, seemingly just because. Warlock decides he'd rather hang with his old buddy (and pine after Danger) than work with his dad, so he joins. Eventually the team emancipates a young girl with mutant powers from her wealthy, mutant-hating father. Without really asking her before doing it, but since her dad wants nothing to do with her (being a mutant) and her biological parents appear to die, she sticks around.

It's a haphazard roster of people who weren't happy where they were, and figured they might as well try this. Quicksilver seems to be there out of some desire to be a good brother to Polaris - David devotes a fair amount of pages to Pietro's moral conundrums and past messes - while Danger doesn't even seem to have a reason. She questions why they're a team, why they're doing the things they do. Then why are you there?! Watsonian, because being around people seemed to help her pull herself back together. Doylist, because David needed a character to be inappropriately blunt and it couldn't always be Pietro.

The antagonists are one-offs, dealt with over 1-2 issue stories. An AIM scientist drawing mutant power into himself to become (briefly) a mutant. A guy calling himself Memento Mori, who has a whole evil organization with loads of shell businesses and lots of power, who actually turns out to be sort of an offshoot of a spell gone wrong. An Egyptian death-goddess reborn in a child's body. Those all basically vanish at the end of their respective stories (the scientist ends up locked in Serval's basement, where the CEO makes a job offer, but we don't see him again.) Even Magus, or the technomancer thief that captured Danger, don't show up again.

If there's a unifying theme, it's each is drawing on someone else's life or strength for their goals. The technomancer couldn't get into Serval's systems alone, so he imprisoned Danger, to I guess draw on her computing power and adaptability. Hoffman is stealing power from mutants to make himself a (big, glowy, shouty) god. Memento Mori's a fringe case, because he doesn't know the truth about how he got the powers he has. His wife had, at the time, feared her own powers and pushed them off on him.

Granted, the Magus doesn't really fit. He willingly changed his approach, to keep the Technarch from extinction. He even employs humans at his company, embracing Warlock's ideas. When Warlock decides to leave, Magus lets him go. (It is really annoying Marvel has two different pairs of characters named Magus and Warlock.)

My guess is, the antagonists were to give the team something to deal with in standard superheroic style, while things were moving in the background with the CEO. Except the book ran out of time. Maybe if they hadn't wasted 3 issues on AXIS tie-ins. Shouldn't have taken half that. Longshot's powers shouldn't even work if he's now constantly using them for selfish ends because he got "inverted" or whatever it was called. Anyway, David reveals at the very end the CEO is connected to Miguel O'Hara/Spider-Man 2099 (also running around in the present at the time, also in a book written by David.)

As mentioned, Carmine Di Giandomenico is artist for all but two of the issues. I appreciate the level of detail in the surroundings, the depictions of Danger and Warlock's malleable forms. Individual cables or external plates are visible, and they shift in different ways as well. Danger largely sticks to turning limbs into cannons, while Warlock opts for more variety, turning into high-tech motorcycles or armor for Doug. One all-business and individualistic, the other whimsical and more cooperative.

I don't feel like there's great flow from panel-to-panel during fights, but the action within each panel is usually well-rendered. Di Giandomenico shows off Gambit's agility with a variety of flips and dodges, while Quicksilver's speed is sometimes depicted by having the movement handled off-panel (he beats Havok in a game of pool in the span of two panels, and we don't see a single shot) or with the light from the uniforms leaving trails in his wake. Quite why the costumes have glow-up parts on the ribs and back of the hands, I don't know.

Not a huge fan of the costumes, really. The color scheme is OK - yellow and grey is an unusual choice, at least - but I don't like the odd lenses Polaris, Gambit and later Cypher wear over their eyes. I guess the right angle lines are meant to simulate a business suit or something, or maybe a vest with the flap you can leave open like some British admiral, but it's kind of an odd choice for a team uniform.

I don't know if David ever played out the things he hinted at after this book ended. I'm guessing not, since it was about some amorphous future for Marvel, and I doubt Peter David had the clout at the time to set the tone for something like that at Marvel. That gets saved for someone's Big Summer Event Comic. Future Tensed. Forced Future. Something short and punchy like that. Plus, Hickman's Secret Wars was lurking in the wings to (briefly) upend the apple cart. 

Saturday Splash Page #233

"New Coke X-51," in X-51 #1, by Mike Higgins and Karl Bollers (writers), Joe Bennett (penciler), Slick (inker), Mark McNabb (colorists), Benchmark (letterer)

One of my back issue projects last year was the brief "Marvel Tech" line, consisting of a grand total of three series, all kick-started by events in various X-Annuals in '99, none surviving past a year. The Simonson/Ferry Warlock we'll see before the end of summer, and the Casey/Manco Deathlok next year. Today, it's Machine Man/Aaron Stack's first book since that mid-80s mini-series set in 2020. Michael Higgins and Karl Bollers wrote this book together for 4 issues, and then it's just Bollers. Bennett pencils all 12 issues, with Bob Wiacek as inker in most of the later issues.

So, Machine Man helped the X-Men keep the Red Skull from taking control of a Helicarrier. Yeah, I dunno. Machine Man appeared to die in the process of keeping the Helicarrier afloat to be evacuated. Nothing left but a head, he uploaded his consciousness into a blank LMD and, thinking itself "Special Agent Jack Kubrick", it set out to find what was left of his body. The head eventually gets attached to the LMD, and you get what you see up there.

Good news, Machine Man's body is now made of nanites, so he can rebuild and improve himself. Bad news, that's because at some point - I assume during Operation Zero Tolerance - he got captured by Master Mold, and Bastion's consciousness was implanted in his brain. So someone who gave his life working with mutants to save lives, is now overcome by the desire to kill mutants whenever he sees them.

That's the push-and-pull of the first 8 issues. X-51 sees Sebastian Shaw (hoping to prevent there being a Sentinel more powerful than the ones he sells) standing next to Gyrich (still unaware Shaw is a mutant)? He tries to kill him. (Gyrich, naturally, doesn't put it together. I like to think, when Krakoa happened and Shaw became an open mutant, Gyrich punched himself in the dick for being an idiot.) X-51 goes to the Avengers for help, and is greeted by Justice and Firestar? He tries to kill them. Shaw's Sentinels attack him and the X-Men try to help? He attacks them.

It's a constant, and frankly tedious, pattern. Especially since X-51 is now apparently so strong none of them can stand against him. The X-Men get trounced. Even when Vision shows up to help his teammates, X-51 is too much for him. A Brotherhood of Evil Mutants get rolled. The only things that slow him down are things related to him. Namely the apparent precursor to the X-Series, a big computer brain called X.E.R.O. It's mostly angry it was abandoned and forgotten for decades, until Gyrich woke it up to kill X-51. It failed, then took over AIM, easily overwhelming MODOK (off-panel), in an attempt to finish the job. I mean, I seem to recall Bastion lost to just Iceman, so I don't see why X-51 is suddenly such an unstoppable dude.

There's an issue inside Aaron's mind, a final battle between Aaron and what his father, Abel, taught him, and the piece of Bastion inside him. Aaron wins by erasing everything from his past (except, somehow, his memories of Abel.) So he's evolved beyond the hatred, but at the cost of all the memories of his friends and his past life. Earthly attachments discarded?

Except then we get two issues of Aaron trying to keep a young biker from destroying himself in a quest to avenge his buddies, who were killed by a rival gang. The rival gang get transformed into some weird techno-organic things that keep growing as they merge with other machines including, eventually Aaron. (Bennett makes them look appropriately awkward and clunky for how uncontrolled the process is, but otherwise, the designs are nothing to write home about.) Now combined, the lot fall through the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but only Aaron emerges, with stars in his face.

The 12th and final issue is more visual novel than comic. One big image per page with a column of text on the outer edge. Most of that is wasted on a recap of Aaron's backstory - not like they hadn't done that already - and then he fights XERO with the aid of his buddy's biker gang (now wearing hideous mech suits like refugees from some '80s toy line cartoon) to avert a future apocalypse brought about by machine intelligence. Then he goes back through the Monolith to join the Celestials, the final page implying he'll become a Celestial one day. Less "God in the machine," and more "God is a machine." Either way, my eyes about rolled out of my head.

In line with the notion of Aaron Stack evolving, Bennett shifts his look over time. Ditches those weird straps in issue 6, when a killer Shaw hires tears them off and lashes Aaron with them. After deleting (most of) his memories, Aaron goes back to the look where the purple extends up the side of his head and over the top like a skullcap. In general, the design simplifies as the series progresses. Fewer visible gears and weird external struts, maybe Bennett trying to do Kirby-style. Then the "star field" look on his face at the very end.

OK, fine, the look changes as he goes through trials. I'm less sure about all the personality and mentality shifts. A demon in his mind, urging him to hate and destroy mutants for being different? Baser instincts he has to rise above. Aaron tries to hide (in the satellite X.E.R.O. initially used against him), running from the problem rather than facing it. When a friend from his old supporting cast is endangered, he reemerges. That lets Shaw's Sentinels (and the X-Men) find him. So he abandons his past, presumably to move beyond such connections that could be used against him.

Except not his memories of his father? And then he helps some random biker, trying to keep the guy from wasting his life on vengeance. Isn't he forming new connections that would make him a target all over again? Won't him flying around in broad daylight fighting techno-organic bikers get him targeted by Sentinels again? I guess he ascends before it matters, but it doesn't demonstrate much of a shift in his thinking.

Thankfully, NextWave established the Celestials found Aaron to be a complete loser and sent his ass back to Earth. Although I guess someone retconned that NextWave Aaron isn't the original Machine Man, but after all the destroying, rebuilding, memory wiping that goes on here, what would even qualify as the original at this point?

What I Bought 6/5/2026

The week is over. Finally. Blessedly. I've been ready for it to be over since at least Tuesday. Next week, I get to return to just caring about my usual responsibilities, and Bill can spend two days trying to get through all his e-mails. I picked this last book up while on the road last week.

It's Jeff! Brand New Week #1, by Kelly Thompson (writer), Gurihiru (artists/color artists), Goodman Yamada, Jim Campbell (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - I actually ended up with the Todd Nauck variant. He gives Jeff fingers and toes instead of flippers that can fold or bend in such a way as to form fingers. It's very disturbing.

The material that's actually new to me is a single story where Jeff visits a boardwalk amusement park and uses some magic rock that gives him a bunch of tentacles so he can earn enough tickets at whack-a-mole to win a gigantic lollipop. But once he wins, he finds a fuzzy pink octopus stuck to the lolly, and he can't get it to go away. Gwenpool seems to recognize it, or at least calls it "Ken", but otherwise takes no action.

Jeff and Ken roam around, get captured and thrown in a glass case by someone, all we ever see are their shoes and pants legs. But Ken, who had been grabbing stuff earlier, turns out to be a lot like Captain Marvel's cat, in that it can apparently store a bunch of stuff inside itself. Including a blowtorch, which Jeff uses to help them escape. Jeff notes Ken is starting to dry out being away from the water so long, but Ken refuses to leave his new pal, so Jeff steals a bunch of stuff from various stands to construct a mobile fish tank for Ken to ride in.

The rest of the pages are devoted to Ken's introductions to Elsa Bloodstone and Deadpool, but where I expected these to be humorous new encounters by Thompson and Gurihiru, they're actually reprints of earlier stories. The Bloodstone meeting is a single page from Marvel Comics #1000, and the Deadpool meeting is from the Deadpool series Thompson wrote and Chris Bachalo (briefly) drew. So those were kind of duds.

The art on the story with Ken switches over from Gurihiru to Yamada about the time Jeff finds that fleeing into the Ferris wheel didn't get him away from Ken. Yamada's art is very expressive, in a similar simplified vein to Gurihiru, though I notice Ken is less fuzzy and the red spots far more prominent in his version than theirs. Also, his Jeff is a lot chunkier. Looks about like he did after he ate that entire wheel of cheese in the previous one of these It's Jeff! books. Yeah, it's hell when the metabolism slows down, and you can't just eat whatever you want without repercussions. . .

The Hunter's Tale

A medieval kingdom is under siege by seemingly every force of darkness in the world. Which is probably very relaxing for the rest of the world. But it's all hands on deck for the Hunter's Guild to try and deal with the problem, and that includes Victor Vran, a Hunter with a little demon heritage in him, about which he is naturally broody and dour. You think he'd be happy he could create a bubble around him that slows his opponents, or shoots beams of pure sunlight from his hand, but nooooooooooo, not our boy.

In terms of gameplay, Victor Vran is much like the Diablo games. That isometric perspective as you run through halls and streets and sewers. Hordes of enemies swarm you, and you kill them with weapons or special attacks. The weapons also have various attacks, but there's a recharge time between uses. What seems like an excruciatingly long recharge time in some cases. There's also a recharge time on support items, like health potions, which is a really stupid game mechanic. If Victor has 50 health potions, and he needs one, why would he not use it, just because he used one not long ago? You can't take them with you when you die! (Although maybe you could if you died and were reborn as a vampire, but that's not what happens in the game.)

There are a variety of weapons, ranged and melee, and seemingly endless varieties of each one, all with different stats or special perks. This one has better armor piercing, or a higher chance of critical hit. This one causes frost damage with a crit, or gives you health back for a kill, or boosts your Overkill meter (which is the yellow bar, that lets Victor use his Demon powers.) You can switch between weapons and Demon powers and these little Tarot cards you pick up, that provide different boosts, when you return to the castle. Which usually happens whenever you complete a specific mission, but if things are going badly, you can always just call it a day and go back when you want.

I tended to stick with the scythe and the shotgun. I started with the rapier, because I think one-handed swords are cool, but the scythe had a certain stylistic appeal. I also tried the lightning gun for the ranged weapon, but just didn't like how it was working (or not, as the case may be.) Back to the boomstick it was! If it's good enough for Ash Williams, it's good enough for Victor Vran. 

There are a lot of levels in and around (and under) the city. Caves, sewers, marketplaces, farms, even a circus. Oh, and tombs. Lots of tombs, actually, which I guess isn't too surprising, but given the size and number of cemeteries, it feels like one of the Old West towns where the undertaker is the only one with any business. Only some of these levels have to be visited for plot purposes, but when you access the map from the castle, you can pick basically whichever level you want to explore. A few do have level restrictions, where they won't open until you reach Level 10 or whatever (I think you max out at 30.)

There are usually hidden chests and a handful of challenges to try and complete. Kill x number of spiders in a certain amount of time. Kill this many enemies without potions or shrines in a certain amount of time. There are also certain runes or something like that you can apply to Victor which make things harder, and are required for certain challenges. I didn't mess with that. I wasn't here to try and set some world record, I'm just trying to beat the game and save the city.

Plus, once I got into the later levels, I started dying a lot. Maybe because I wasn't switching to new, better weapons or being smarter about using Demon powers, I don't know. I just kept using the same scythe and shotgun for like 15 levels, and most of the time I didn't even think about the Demon powers. Honestly, the powers didn't seem that great. The special attacks usually require you to stand in one place, and simply weren't killing fast enough for that to seem like a good tradeoff, given the amount of damage I was taking. Again, maybe I just wasn't using them properly. There was some sort of Transmogrification machine in the castle to combine items to upgrade your stuff, but I couldn't figure it out enough to bother.

Perhaps recognizing Victor's near-whispered internal monologues would get depressing to listen to, God (or the game designers) abruptly add another voice inside his head. A cheerful, mocking one, that encourages Victor to get a better hat, or taunts him when one of his oldest friends and allies has become a vampire (that Victor must kill.)

It's the same voice actor as the Narrator in The Stanley Parable, which adds a whimsical touch. Really brightens up the endless slaughtering of the hordes of the night. One level is set around pumpkin farms, where you, of course, have the option of destroying the pumpkins. Which I did. Those pumpkins might have had gold or health potions stored inside, just like the crates, barrels, bookcases, desks, chairs, wagons and tombstones did.

Later on, we're in another subterranean level, and the voice tells Victor, if he find all the secret chests, they'll make him some of their special, scrumptious pumpkin pie. Intrigued as to how a disembodied voice is going to make a pie, I made sure to find every last hidden chest, the voice at one point remarking I must really want that pie.

When I found the last chest, it asked if I was ready to have some of that pie - before telling me, too bad, there's not going to be any pie. Someone destroyed all the pumpkins. It was a cheap gag, but I got a good laugh out of it.

What I Bought 6/3/2026 - Part 2

My coworkers are having a good laugh at my misery as Emergency Unit Chief (or "yuc" as my mom put it.) To be fair, I'm also laughing. If I didn't, I'd be miserable. So I vowed to lead with apathy and cruelty, and feigned disappointment when I got off a lengthy phone conversation and found everybody had left for lunch.

Although when one of my coworkers said it was a mutiny, I pointed out a mutiny is supposed to involve them throwing me out and taking command for themselves. What they did was just desertion.

Marc Spector: Moon Knight #5, by Jed MacKay (writer), Devmalya Pramanik (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - The House has decided it will be the one bringing it down tonight.

Marc charges into the people-eating house with his dragon-sword. The house creates all kinds of greenish, half-formed ghosts or constructs or something. None of which have souls, to the sword's displeasure. All of which are capable of hurting Marc, to Marc's displeasure. Ginnaar swears if Marc gets him to the house's heart, it will drink up its soul, so Marc keeps going. And he finds the heart.

It's Achilles Fairchild, the Asgardian farmboy turned drug lord. Or, it's his body, being controlled by the house. Which explains the door he vanished through in the previous volume. It, and it says its name in The Mansion Ravenous, heard the Midnight Mission's death cries and came looking for the one responsible. Because they're of the same kind, but the Mission is just a child, and the Mansion's a full-grown adult.

Still, the monologuing lets Marc stab it in the heart. To no avail. Ginnaar decides the Mansion would be a better boss, because it can give it back its old form within those walls. It's a lovely image. The dragon, but its form is only partially real. So there are details - the teeth, the claws, some of the scales, but other parts are a swirl of this dull orange that just imposes itself on the page. Marc becomes this tiny white outline in the corner.

So, yeah, Marc's royally fucked, but they let him escape. Because he'll have to come back. With help. That they can also devour. He goes to Clea (since Strange is stuck in Asgard), and she's going to assemble a Midnight Sons, which Marc doesn't remember being a part of. I don't blame him, if Clea's referring to Damnation. I got hold of the complete collection last year. What a pile of shit. The Ewing-written stuff was OK, but the Donny Cates-written stuff was as bad as I'd expect. He wrote Moon Knight (in his "Mr. Knight" persona) as basically Deadpool. I'd blot that experience from my memory, too.

Fantastic Four #12, by Ryan North (writer), Pat Boutin (penciler), Serge LaPointe (inker), Edgar Delgado (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Well, it's happened. Reed's finally acknowledged what an egotistical prick he is and declared himself Emperor.

The aliens that attacked while the FF were in space a few issues ago decide to take a different approach and conquer the planet in the past. The team tries traveling to the point of the change, but only Reed and Johnny are sent back before the others get erased. So it's the two of them, posing as Gauls, helping some Roman legions fight an alien spaceship.

Also, because the attack was sudden, everybody was in bed when the warning came. Which is how we learn Reed Richards wears pajamas that say "Mr. Fantastic" on them. I'm sure this comes as a great shock to all of you, Reed being such a modest guy. 

The aliens also have a superweapon charging that could wipe out all life on the planet if they decide that's the best remaining option. Reed and Johnny must beat the aliens, but not badly enough they opt to go scorched Earth. At least until figuring out a way to neutralize the weapon. Against an alien force that all the non-Fantastic Four heroes in New York apparently couldn't drive back.

But they manage all this by, OK, you've maybe seen articles about those weird metal dodecahedrons that are dated back to Roman history, and nobody's sure what they were for? Reed invented them, because a whole bunch of them intercepting the superweapon refracts its energy into some less harmful wavelength. I have no idea which wavelength. Maybe all the legionnaires got really tan that day. Or got skin cancer. Presumably they didn't become Hulks, or the U-Foes.

To minimize effects on the timeline, Johnny suggests the Romans not tell anybody how they needed 'two weirdos' to save them from strange invaders, because it would make the Empire look bad, and the general vows to crucify any of his men who talk about it. Which, and I agree with Johnny here, was not an idle threat. Johnny is, apparently, less successful getting them to melt down all the "prismatic refractors", but to be fair, nobody talked about them. Except now Sue has to explain to the Archaeological Society that the answer to yet another long-standing mystery is, "The FF did some shit while time traveling."

I kind of groaned when Reed showed the Legion what he needed them to build, because I could see the punchline, but Sue's exasperation made it work. Even if it does sort of fall under the same notion as aliens building the pyramids. Although aliens totally, definitely exist in the Marvel Universe, and have done a lot more mucking around on Earth than building pyramids, so maybe that's not a big deal.  

Black Moon Rising (1986)

Quint (Tommy Lee Jones) steals a cassette tape from a company the feds are about to prosecute for something. Tax-related, probably. It's not a quiet theft, so he hides the tape in an experimental, hydrogen-fueled car that's being hauled to L.A. Except the car gets hijacked by a top-notch car thief (Linda Hamilton), working for a sleazebag (Robert Vaughn) who doesn't respect her skills.

When the back of the DVD case described a futuristic car, I thought this was going to be sort of a cyber-noir thing. Low-budget Blade Runner or something. In my defense, the case made it look like the car was flying. It's actually just smashing through a window. From several stories up, and crashes through the window of a different building, also several stories up. Quint jumped so Dominic Toretto could fly.

Anyway, Black Moon Rising is a heist flick, with several moving parts only vaguely aware of each other. You've got Hamilton, growing dissatisfied with Vaughn's presumption that she owes him and looking for an exit. You've got the cars designers, who rebuff Quint's initial offer to team-up and try breaking in themselves. It ends in vehicular manslaughter and a reassessment of options. Neither of those parties are aware of the other, so Hamilton ends up being the ace in the hole that doesn't even know that's she is.

There's also a rival or competitor of Quint's, played by Lee Ving, who was security for the company Quint robbed and wants the tape back. He pops up maybe every 25-30 minutes to cause trouble for Quint. Mostly in the form of beatings or attempted murder. He's basically an element you're meant to worry about when things are going well. Is Marvin going to show up right now, when things are going well?

This is young Tommy Lee Jones, although I'm not sure he ever looked young, exactly. But that means he's not playing a crochety old man, but a, I hesitate to use "dashing", but charming? Yeah, charming thief. He has an easy smile, and Hamilton is playing Nina as someone frustrated by the lack of respect by her boss (Vaughn plays Ryland as someone who is probably charming, but has gotten so cocky the charm curdled into condescension), so you can see it as stress relief.

Hamilton's playing Nina as intelligent, skilled and professional. She's the one who actually steals the experimental car and out-drives Jones. She figures out the engine extracts hydrogen from water when the mechanics can't. One thing the movie doesn't explicitly state that I think is implied is that Ryland is getting complaints from his buyers about the cars they're receiving. The complaint focuses around damage to the cars, but I think there's an issue that they aren't getting any cars they couldn't get somewhere else. Nina steals a car that's literally one of a kind, and Ryland is annoyed because he can't see any value in it.

That wasn't really the point I was initially driving at. The point was, Nina doesn't abandon those traits once she tumbles into bed with Quint. As soon as she thinks he's asleep, she goes through his wallet, finding out how many i.d.s he has. She remembers he was at the bar where she stole the car, and she knows someone chased her, and Ryland told her someone found their hidden garage, so she's suspicious.

What I Bought 6/3/2026 - Part 1

While in a meeting for something at work I have no interest being part of, we were told they were going to introduce some AI stuff. This after they tested 10 scenarios, and found one 1 where AI actually helped. I asked if we were required to use it, and they said no, if we didn't want to sign the agreement, we wouldn't be able to. Easy enough call for me. Toss that agreement in the trash.

Told my dad this, he suggested I buy in from the start, so I'd be familiar with AI, rather than having to learn it in a rush if they make it mandatory at some point. I have to wonder if he understands me at all. When have I ever shown an inclination to be early adopter of the flashy new bullshit tech thing? Never. Look at me, running a blog on fucking Blogger in the year 2026. I don't need AI to do my work, I wouldn't trust its results, so why use it? To kiss somebody's ass?

The Deadman #1, by W. Maxwell Prince (writer), Martin Morazzo (artist), Chris O'Halloran (colorist), Good Old Neon (letterer) - So is it that Deadman is protecting all those souls by containing them, or that he keeps a little piece of every person he possess or touches?

Deadman's working off his karma or whatever for Rama Kushna by acting as a, otherwordly doorman? Docent of the Afterlife? He's hanging out in a hospice, greeting people as they die or, in one case, keeping a person from dying too soon by, I don't know. One of the nurses passed through him, and he caught a glimpse of a memory of her making rice pudding (with saffron) with her long deceased grandma, and later he held up some "floral-energy chimera" of saffron and a girl's soul went back in her body and her cancer went into remission.

Then Deadman takes the bus home, spies on his widow who lives in a suburb where lots of lost souls turn up, until he has to go greet some biker about to turn into street pizza because of a deer. Except a four-armed, winged demon that seems maybe Hinduism-related given the helmet/crown thing eats part of the soul. Deadman dispatches it - by tearing off its wings after a smaller version of himself crawls out of his mouth and speaks in a different font - but he finds this unacceptable.

So Rama Kushna, who appears as a child of sorts, tells him this is a new job, and he gets a different costume. It's like when David Aja ditched the high collar and plunging neckline on Iron Fist and replaced it with more of a green turtleneck. Except it's red, and Morazzo doesn't give Deadman any sort of mask. I don't dig the look, frankly. It's a little dull for a guy who was a showoff when he was alive.

As first issues go, it's, intriguing, I guess. I don't know that I love it, but I can't say Prince, Morazzo, O'Halloran and Neon didn't do their best to give me my money's worth. It's funny in places, or trying, anyway. Between the 4th wall breaking as Deadman explains stuff, and the spoof of the 4-panel character summary from All-Star Superman. But I feel as though there's going to be a lot of metaphysical or religious stuff that'll fly right past me. Like the thing with the flower, or Deadman with a little Deadman crawling out his mouth (that was really damn weird.) Am I on the right wavelength for this book?

The colors are kind of subdued tones, moreso for the living, but even the spirits don't exactly burst off the page. Morazzo draws Deadman as more gangly than the brief glimpses we get of Boston Brand. Makes him a bit more skeletal, maybe playing up the "dead" aspect over the "man."

Batgirl #20, by Tate Brombal (writer), Stephen Segovia (penciler), Jason Paz (inker), Rain Beredo (colorist), Tom Napolitano (letterer) - The chalk outline implies Batgirl has a lamprey mouth. Disturbing, if true.

Someone left a child's body in a warehouse with a note to Batgirl. The ink is from a fungus, the initials of the scientific name are "C.C.", so it's for Cass. And the corpse is in the dress she wore when she killed that one guy for her dad. Which starts triggering memories of a flower swinging back and forth on a chain. Like the flowers they find around the body. Forget-me-nots.

At which point Cass has a seizure and starts remembering some time where her dad had her spar with Bronze Tiger, and things got out of control. Or rather, the Tiger got out of control, to the point Cain tased him to save Cass. Which does not match my recollection of how David Cain - the man who shot his daughter when her guard was down - trained her, but OK. I mean, he apparently let her eat multiple bowls of ice cream, so he must be a good guy!

I felt like Segovia was drawing Bronze Tiger as too much of a tiger-man, in terms of the mask he wore looking more like his actual head, and the huge, clawed hands. But maybe the gloves disguise claws on brass knuckles wrapped around his fingers. Except the gloves have five digits and there's only three claws, so that doesn't make sense. Maybe that's how he was pre-Suicide Squad, but I don't think so.

Tenji tries calling his dad for help, and he just so happens to be in Gotham. As soon as Tenji mentions "Forget-me-nots", Bronze Tiger starts having a seizure, too. Meanwhile, the cops show up - the Bat-family is apparently persona non grata with Gotham cops these days, because Vandal Savage is police commissioner, which is, OK, sure, let's take a Silver Age plot and treat it seriously, the immortal caveman crook is police commissioner, whatever - and Cass is still in her own head, talking to some guy swinging the flower on a chain and with more of them covering his face. Which would be kind of stupid-looking, but I'll give Segovia credit for making the guy's almost-rictus grin terrifying enough to make it work.

There's also a panel where Cass wakes up to Batman standing over her, and another in the dream/memory where it's David Cain. Their postures and our perspective are similar, but she reads entirely different things from their bodies, which was a nice touch. And I guess the things she reads are meant to be contemporary with the time of the memory, because she thinks of Cain as "father", and I'm not sure she's applied that title to him for a long time. But if she's accepting Shiva's her mother, then it wouldn't make sense to deny Cain the same, considering he was actually part of her life for a long-ass time.