Wednesday, December 13, 2023

What I Bought 12/8/2023

So, because I met Alex to help with one of his gigs (and keep him company while he got his new stomach tat shaded), I had time to swing by the comic place in the next town over. Which had not only the one book from last week, but the remaining book from last month I hadn't found yet. Huzzah!

Fantastic Four #14, by Ryan North (writer), Ivan Fiorelli (artist), Brian Reber (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Reed Richards is so awful, even the Sinister Six want in on kicking his ass.

The FF have returned to New York, to await the return of their home and their kids. But someone's building a receiver dish (out of wood?) in the middle of the lot. Worse, none of the people doing it know why. They're just doing things a phone app game tells them to in return for rewards. Not like, cash, rewards in the game.

This includes the Lady Sinister Six, Sinister Syndicate, whatever that group from Nick Spencer's run called themselves. Who the FF beat in 2 pages? Oh come on, I've seen the FF struggle with teams led by the frickin' Wizard for multiple issues.

Anyway, this is all the work of some tech billionaire dipshit who is using the app as some form of Asimov's psychohistory, getting people to do little things to create a future he wants. Little things, like giving a guy an extra day's vacation, which results in a supply chain shortage somewhere else. Except, billionaire guy doesn't know anything about any construction at the site of the FF's home. Someone else is using his app for their own ends. I suspect the app itself. It's one step towards the singularity, or the Dominion, or whatever goofy-ass thing is supposed to be waiting in the future according to the X-books.

Reed takes the plea to help as a chance to delete the app and all the data, then Johnny torches the servers. Problem solved! Except for the part where Reed mentions he might try making a 'simpler' instance. Just to predict when another app like this might appear. And to predict when he needs to start building another Negative Zone prison, probably. For the second time this week I ask, are we just forgetting Civil War happened now? I'm pretty OK with that, but less so when it lets Richards off the hook.

Oh, and their home didn't appear like it was supposed to. Guess somebody forgot to carry the one.

Space Outlaws #2, by Marco Fontanili - Guys with mustaches, oversized guns, a frightened horse. It's either a western or a '70s film you shouldn't let children watch. Which describes a lot of Westerns, now that I think about it.

F-24K spends most of the issue being chased by Texas Rangers, as it's spent it's limited time on Earth killing, robbing, and generally having a grand old time. One of the rangers manages to shoot it, and F-24K wakes up tied to a table, about to be chopped up and, possibly eaten?

The alien just tears its way out of the body its wearing and kills the lot of them with a lot of severing of limbs and heads and bisecting bodies and whatnot. When there's only one guy left, he prays for deliverance. Instead he gets some super-science bomb chucked into the cabin by the kill-bot chasing F-24K. It kills the man but not the alien, so next issue will be the big showdown.

Yeah, not a lot of plot. Fontanili switches from the magenta he used as his primary color in the first issue to more of a luminous, golden-yellow. It seems to mirror the sky with the setting sun behind the chase on pages 2 and 3. After that, the usage varies. Sometimes Fontanili still uses it for backdrops. Other times he colors in the entire character (except the white of their eyes) and leaves the background in a greyish-blue or black. Sometimes everything is in the golden-yellow. I can't peg a pattern to it. The flashback to F-24K's activities since hitting earth is all in heavy blacks and greys. Like the acts already lost their luster and it's on to the next hit of excitement.

2 comments:

thekelvingreen said...

If it was up to me, any time a character ran into Reed, they would remind him of his Civil War antics. And probably slap him.

CalvinPitt said...

He pretty much ducked all the beatings that Iron Man (rightfully) took for a couple of years after Civil War. So once you factor in interest, Reed's probably got at least a solid 7 years of the same treatment due.