What I Bought 6/28/2024 - Part 2

Wrapping up June's books with the final issue of a mini-series, and the midpoint of another mini-series.

Black Widow and Hawkeye #4, by Stephanie Phillips (writer), Paolo Villanelli (artist), Mattia Iacono (color artist), Joe Sabino (letterer) - Kind of surprised the symbiote doesn't cover Natasha's hair.

In the present, Black Widow shows up to rescue Hawkeye, Damon Dran hits both of them with hypersonics, but Natasha's able to pull through long enough shut it down so Hawkeye can shoot Dran with arrows made of the symbiote. Seems weird that would do anything, since Hawkeye shoots him with an exploding arrow in the Silver Age flashback and Natasha says that won't stop him. Maybe the symbiote's eating the guy from the inside-out.

The flashback ends with Iron Man smashing into the Soviet embassy to arrest Hawkeye and the Black Widow both for treason. So Natasha stabs herself with an arrow to exonerate Hawkeye and makes her escape. In the present, Hawkeye explains he realized during the diplomat's speech that the guy had been poisoned sometime earlier, so it was too late to stop the assassination. All he could do was kill the guy himself so it wouldn't be pinned on the U.S. government and used as a pretext for war.

The point being, rather than Hawkeye following the trend he and Natasha usually do, where one of them sacrifices themselves to protect the other, Clint asks if she'll accompany him back to the U.S. to help him face the consequences.

In theory, I like the idea of them breaking this cycle of alternating martyrdom, but does it really do any good here? Unless Black Widow found proof of Dran's plan we don't know about, there's nothing to exonerate Hawkeye. All he's got is his word, unless someone did an autopsy and found traces of a poison. Without proof of Dran's involvement in the poisoning, that brings about the result Hawkeye's trying to prevent.

Blood and Fire #2, by Aaron Wroblewski (writer), Ezequiel Rubio Lancho (artist), Es Kay (letterer) - Someone is setting up a very strange Valentine's Day surprise. 

The last remaining samurai squares off against four of the new shogun's men. He gets three before the fourth throws snow in his eyes and slashes him across the torso. Which brings us to where the first issue started, him on his knees, looking about to be executed. But as he tells a vision of his wife and daughter he'll see them soon, they become some angry shadowbeast that demands he fight.

So he does. He makes it home, but home is on fire. His wife and daughter are dead. The shadow insists he kill them all. Which he'll get to, once he's made a funeral pyre. More samurai arrive, and promptly start dying. Is it the last holdout doing the killing? The samurai's definitely around, cutting off horses' legs and a man's head, and by that point, Lancho is drawing him mostly as a shadow. Maybe a few places that aren't shaded so heavily to offer a hint of a nose or cheekbone.

But at least one of the enemy sees a small girl at the edge of the forest, who then vanishes. That guy winds up getting dragged into the forest by something we don't see clearly. It's on the edge of one panel, the outline of either long hair or tentacles, and in the last panel we see of him, there are two barely visible dots - probably eyes - above him further in the background.

The Accidental Detective (2015)

Dae-man (Kwon Sang-woo) owns a comic store, but his real passion is blogging about solving crimes. He constantly closes the store early, or leaves his elementary school aged son in charge, so he can visit his friend Joon-Soo at the nearest precinct.

Then Dae-man goes out drinking with another mutual friend, and that friend's wife is dead in the apartment the next morning. Worse, Joon-Soo had helped her purchase a condo without her husband's knowledge, so it looks bad for him. His hope is that Dae-man can prove his innocence, but that's going to require convincing Joon-soo's boss, burnout former top cop Detective Noh, to let him help.

It's a buddy cop movie, the angry veteran cop with an eager rookie. Noh's got a rep as a badass, which Dae-man is at first awed by. There are multiple slow-motion shots of Noh walking with his long trenchcoat blowing around his legs dramatically in the wind. Which results in Dae-man trying to emulate him, to limited success.

What humor doesn't come from Noh insulting Dae-man (or Dae-man's occasional revenge pranks), comes from how much these guys seem to hate being married. Dae-man's wife is on his ass constantly, not without reason, about actually making enough money to support them and their two kids (she's a private tutor, for Detective Noh's kid, but I guess it doesn't pay enough.) Dae is always groveling and promising to do better, when he's not lying that he's busy at work. Noh mocks Dae-man for looking after his infant daughter, but he jumps when his wife cracks the whip just as readily. Her special ringtone on his phone is a blaring red alert alarm, and the picture is of a snarling tiger.

But the murders are all ultimately about unhappy marriages. Specifically, husbands being angry at their wives, so it's kind of an odd juxtaposition. I guess Dae and Noh still love their wives in spite of the apparent misery of their married lives.

What I Bought 6/28/2024 - Part 1

I had to drive through Illinois over the weekend, always an incredibly boring experience. I forgot that they really want you to know how close you are to road work, but never tell you how far the road work extends. The left lane closes in 3 miles, then 2 miles, then 1, then a half-mile, but nothing about how many miles the left lane is closed, which is what I actually want to know. How long am I stuck at the mercy of the slowest driver?

Blow Away #3, by Zac Thompson (writer), Niccola Izzo (artist), Francesco Segala and Gloria Martinelli (color artists), DC Hopkins (letterer) - Leaving nothing but tracks, shadows, and possibly a dead body or two.

Brynne's fixated on what happened to the mountain climbers. Asking questions, annoying the sheriff, who it feels like Izzo is drawing in the most suspicious ways possible. Face half in shadow, odd smirks or glares. Standing in front of one of Brynne's tables, eyeing a knife while Brynne's back is turned. It's like a blaring siren, to the extent it feels too obvious, though I can't figure the angle, unless it's meant to highlight Brynne's state of mind.

Because Brynne may have handed over copies of all her footage, but she didn't hand over the recorder the climbers had that she found. She's still poring over that, parsing silent looks or the fact Beardo is reading American Psycho, going frame-by-frame through the fight until she determines that when they both went over the side during their fight, one of them either got snagged on something, or was clipped to a safety anchor.

So, even with the sheriff having wanred her of a blizzard, Brynne follows their climb up the mountain (which Izzo does as a 9-panel grid starting in the lower left corner.) She finds some blood frozen on the snow, and a deep crevasse. before she can properly climb in, a rope gets tangled around her foot and she goes in the quick way.

With the one-panel flashbacks we keep getting of some previous project of hers that seems to have blown up, I feel like we're going to learn there was nothing suspicious. But part of that is because we've got basically nothing to go off. Brynne's got some blurry footage from her cameras and a few snippets (at least that's all we've seen) from their camera. None of which points to anything concrete. There's not even a body yet. It's similar to how the sheriff's being illustrated to seem suspicious, while we've got no idea why. The main thing it illustrates now is Brynne has a tendency to draw serious conclusions off little evidence.

All that said, I do at least want to find out what's happening, which is more than I can say for this next book.

Morning Star #3, by David Andry and Tim Daniel (writers), Marco Finnegan (artist), Jason Wordie (colorist), Justin Birch (letterer) - We've gone from gun to ax. Next issue they'll be down to a pointy stick.

Charlie's still missing, but now Marabeth's being chased by a weird version of the park ranger and a bunch of animals that talk in wavy voices balloons with elongated words. Marabeth flees across a river, but finds that weird pile or orange guys her dad and his partner found during the fire in issue 1. 

Meanwhile, Jolene gets briefly menaced by some flaming specter, then a whole bunch of funhouse mirror Charlies appear, also talking in the wavy voice bubbles with elongated words, asking her to help. Help Charlie, help them, help someone else?

This isn't working for me. Maybe the creatures, illusions, constructs, whatever they're meant to be, aren't supposed to be frightening, but it feels like, for how Marabeth flees, and how freaked out it's making Jolene, they should look more terrifying. But Finnegan's art doesn't sell it. The "park ranger", with his face entirely shadowed, and the spots where his glasses would be as white voids almost works. It's at least unsettling, but nothing further.

Maybe these scenes should be taking place at night, maybe it'd be scarier if the colors were darker, I don't know. But the story isn't really helping, either. We know Jolene feels stressed and probably guilty she didn't fight harder to get her husband to stay instead of going to fight this fire, but we still haven't seen much of Marabeth's thoughts, let alone Charlie's (outside the handful of panels in issue 1 that show all these odd things he sees in the world around him.) Does Marabeth resent having to find Charlie, does she envy him, does she worry about losing another member of her family? I feel like any connection or interest I have in the characters is the result of me working really hard to do so, not the result of Andry and Daniel's writing. I don't care much if any of them survive the story, let alone if they figure out what's going on.