The temperature is climbing, but I refuse to turn on my AC! For now. Hold off on letting my electric bill take a hatchet to my wallet as long as possible. After all, it's the job of comic books to deplete my finances.
The mirror dimension algae is on the loose. The FF purify a lake in under 3 minutes, but given the extent of spread already, that's not good enough. Johnny, remembering Reed mentioned the algae just needs light and air to make food, gets the idea of having Sue make the Sun invisible until the algae starves to death. But only for 16 hours a day for three consecutive days, and only over a few states.
So Johnny keeps her company in the upper atmosphere while she does that, and Reed, Ben and Alicia try to keep people from freaking out, and beat up Dr. Octopus. They fail (at keeping people calm, not beating Doc Ock, they haven't fallen that far), but the mobs wait until Day 3 to combine torches with pitchforks, so it doesn't get too out of hand. Then Maria Hill shows up.
I trust that sentence speaks for itself.
This seems like an attempt to give Sue more focus, and at least as far as her interactions with Johnny, it sort of works. North lets Sue be less of a "mom" to Johnny, and more like close friends. She can needle him about stuff, but not in an exasperated "why won't you grow up?" way. When he pauses in reading Jane Eyre to her and she comments her audiobook narrator has mysteriously stopped.
Beyond that, North's Sue is empathetic and observant, in that she recognizes that Reed stresses himself with how often they've beaten the odds saving the world, and how close some of those successes have been. And so she actually relishes this year away from that - recent adventures notwithstanding - because it lets them all decompress. But that's really more a matter of luck, isn't it? If the world were in danger, from say, mirror dimension algae, they would be back into the world saving business, It's just happened to take this long for such a situation to arise.
North's mostly moved away from the approach he had in Unbeatable Squirrel Girl and the first issue of this book of ending pages on some sort of joke or gag, but not entirely. I don't think the artists' styles really suit that approach. Neither Fiorelli or Coello's work leans towards humor. The body language and expressions don't exaggerate enough to really sell the moments. North might need to move away from that sort of thing even further.
Marc's old enemy Midnight Man is on the loose, committing robberies, but Marc shows little interest in pursuing him. So Tigra decides to handle it herself. Talks to Moonie's old cop buddy Flint, investigates the victims for connections, randomly talks with Hawkeye, and figures out the next target. Catches the bad guy, who is someone she knows, and we know. Who needs money, because he made a big show of not caring when Zodiac stole all his cash 15 some-odd issues ago.
There's a big argument and, well, of note here is MacKay brings up the fact that Tigra's son is the product of her sleeping with a Skrull who thought they were Hank Pym, and who Tigra thought was Pym, but was not, in fact, Hank Pym.
Which I don't remember anyone ever addressing beyond (I think) Christos Gage in Avengers Academy having Tigra worried her son would manifest Skrull traits. I'm not sure Tigra really needs her son being the product of sexual assault added to her backstory, on top of the crap Bendis did, on top of the crap Englehart did with having her want to jump everything with a dick (because cats are apparently always horny in Steve Englehart's world), on top of when Byrne had her go feral and then Pym shrunk her down to pet cat size, and. . .goddamn Tigra's gotten a shit hand from writers.
Over the course of the issue, MacKay's weaving Tigra's investigation in with her life as a single mother who apparently has no paying job. She describes herself as living on a partial Avengers pension, as using her old Avengers login to steal Stark's wi-fi so she can upload photos of her son for her parents. She's not going to get her security deposit back, because her and William's claws have done a number on the floors (and Cappuccio makes sure when we see the floors in the next panel, there are lots of scratches. He also shows William playing with his mom's hair while she's sitting and thinking, like when you see lion kittens chewing on the parents' ears or whatever.)
And so far as William knows, Hank Pym is his dad. He doesn't know about the Skrull or anything like that and she intends to keep it that way. So that's a thing she has to carry, because she doesn't want the circumstances of his birth to burden him. It's a rough emotional situation for her. Cappuccio has her body language all over the place. She's in Marc's face, teeth bared, but sometimes she's crying. Or she's turned away and she shifts from sad to furious in the span of one panel. Arms spread wide or with a finger jabbed aggressively at Marc, or pulled in close, practically hugging herself. She's letting a lot of stuff out all at once, I'm guessing because she's got no one else to tell if she's telling friggin' Moon Knight. That's maybe one step up from discussing emotional trauma with Frank Castle.
I mean, who are Tigra's friends in the superhero community? Mockingbird? Times like this, I wish writers hadn't cast aside the friendship Tigra started to develop with Jessica Drew in Spider-Woman so Carol Danvers could be Spider-Woman's Only Lady Friend Who's a Superhero.
No comments:
Post a Comment