The Beekeeper (2024)

See what I get up to when I'm around Alex? He claimed this movie was worse than Breach, which seemed impossible (and upon rewatch he couldn't figure out how he came to such a conclusion,) so we watched it after Bad Boys: We're Getting Old.

Adam (Jason Statham) keeps bees on this nice retired teacher's (Phylicia Rashad) farm. After some guys scam her into giving up access to all her financial accounts and drain them, including the charity she looked after, she kills herself. Her daughter Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman) is an FBI agent, who doesn't hold much hope of finding the ones responsible.

But wait, Adam has mysterious contacts, so he finds the call center and burns it to the ground. The call center is part of a series of such places, owned by some obnoxious trust fund shithead (Josh Hutcherson) who has the former head of the CIA (Jeremy Irons) running security for him as a favor to his mother. Ominous foreshadowing! Irons eventually figures out what Statham was before he kept bees, and at that point, the end is inevitable. Much like the first John Wick, it's just a matter of how many lives are going to be wasted trying to protect the shithead. Frankly, one would have been too many, but Statham kills, wounds or maims a lot more than that.

Statham can play roles that poke fun at his usual (only?) character, but this is not one of those. At least, not intentionally. He might have taken it to the point of parody without meaning to, I'm not sure. Adam's a man of few words, most of those words about bees. Blunt and to the point. When he arrives at the call center, he tells the security guards he's going to burn it down. When the guard tells him to leave and threatens to count to 3, Adam does it for him (though he doesn't immediately move into beating the guy's ass, which seemed like a miss.) When Verona at one point reminds him they have laws, I felt no particular pride in predicting Adam's response - 'And when those laws fail, then you have me' - because, honestly, what else was he going to say?

I guess you could see it as restraint, that Adam knows what he's capable of, so he puts his focus and energy into tending beehives, avoiding any more interaction with people than necessary to minimize the chance he resumes his old work. There could have been something there to contrast with his successor, who is a maniac. She rams his car in the middle of a gas station, and when the fight turns against her, reveals she had a minigun set up in the bed of her truck. A love of overkill, versus a quiet, if showy, efficiency.

Sadly, they killed her two minutes after she appeared. No time for any musing on the kind of people one might assign such a role, or the mental toll it takes, Jason Statham's got more call center creeps to terrorize! Which, you know, that's fine. If I could sic a guy like this on the people responsible for those spam calls urgently requesting I call a bank I've never had an account with, I absolutely would. Hutcherson plays a great conceited, spoiled brat, divorced from any concept of empathy or that there are consequences for his actions. The middleman Adam finds first is a conniving sleazebag, gleefully tricking people out of their money and doing little dances in his ugly suit afterward.

So with Statham being grimly determined, Irons wearily resigned to his futile and unpleasant task, the villains not so much unrepentant as unable to see there's anything to repent for, any emotional heft falls to Raver-Lampman's character. She grieves over her mother, but there's an air of resentment to it, as it seems like Verona's deceased brother was the apple of mom's eye. Like she wants to prove something to a mother she felt didn't appreciate her. Verona wants to bring down the people who scammed her mother, even comes in on her day off to work on the case, but also doggedly chases Adam's string of fires and murders. Caught between following the law and following her own sense of what's just.

I don't think the movie really gives it the time or depth for a proper showing - the movie knows its bread is buttered with Statham kicking ass - but I think Raver-Lampman brings a level of conflict to her performance where you can wonder if she's really trying to stop Adam, or just wants to make sure she's close enough to see him finish it.

What I Bought 9/11/2024 - Part 2

I happened to catch an episode of Columbo over the weekend, and he was making a peanut butter and raisin sandwich. I started eating those periodically back in elementary school, and I can't recall ever seeing anyone else do it. Now I'm wondering if Columbo gave me the notion.

Fantastic Four #25, by Ryan North (writer), Carlos Gomez (artist), Jesus Arbutov (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Uh-oh, a planet of floating islands. Those platforming levels are always tricky.

Dr. Doom's erected a magical dome over Latveria. Naturally, the FF try to poke it and end up on an unfamiliar world full of intelligent, friendly aliens. Gomez draws the aliens as having a bit of the "big head and eyes" grey aliens, but on a long stalk neck, with multiple little noodle limbs and red spines sticking out of their backs (the purpose of which I was not clear on.)

The locals agree to let Reed use some resources to build a rocketship to get home (which looks very old-timey, even moreso than the original rocket Kirby drew them taking into space to get bombarded by cosmic rays.) Meanwhile, Johnny's hit it off with the liason, named (or translated to) Angelica of the Shore.

Everything's proceeding well until the clouds clear enough Reed can calculate their position by the stars. Turns out, they're still on Earth, but an Earth that was never hit by another planetary body, causing the formation of the Moon. Turns out the FF aren't the only ones who poked the dome. Reed can make his rocketship into a time machine and stop Doom's magic trick from doing this, but that means Angelica and her people won't exist, which is not OK with Johnny.

North continues to come up with clever bits of science to use as a basis for stories, but this is undercut by how easily Reed seems to solve these problems. Sure, he can make his rocketship into a time machine, too. Confronted with the problem, Reed builds a thing to solve the problem in about two panels. He's continuing one spiel throughout, so it's not like there's a timejump.

I guess there wasn't supposed to be any doubt they'd figure something out, so the real conflict was Johnny fighting with the others about how they can't get rid of Angelica's world to save their own. Then hie and Angelica having to sacrifice their happiness to make the solution stick. The internal narration boxes for this issue are Angelica's, which probably helps to plant their connection in the foreground and make this more than just another doomed relationship for Johnny Storm.

Vengeance of the Moon Knight #9, by Jed MacKay (writer), Devmalya Premanik (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - I bet moon-fire is cold.

Marc owes Khonshu a favor. Not for bringing him back to life, but for that time he got Marc and Tigra a shortcut so they could save Reese and Soldier from Zodiac. And the favor is to kill the false Moon Knight, the Shroud.

So he does, after a brief fight, albeit with a lot of panels as Premanik and Rosenberg have one page of 16 panels, slanted and staggered, showing the main stretch of the fight, against the backdrop of a, I thought it was a crescent moon, but it's actually two crescent moons, one matching the symbol Shroud Knight wore, the other matching Marc Knight's. One shatters, the other remaining whole. Premanik's Moon Knight feels like more of a physical presence than Cappuccio's. Bigger, body less obscured by the cape, a lot of focus on his fists or legs, his instruments of pain.

Marc's talking in a very stilted manner, calling Shroud "Moon Knight", reminding him he disrespected a god, impressing on him that this is a fight for his life. Didn't impress it on him enough, as Marc brings Shroud Knight's costume to the villain bar and pins it on the wall as a message. Or two messages: a) he's back, b) the other guy is dead. That said, I don't believe for a second the Rhino is scared of Moon Knight. Come on, tell me McKay didn't actually tell Premanik to put him in those pages. The Jester, the Shocker? Sure. The Spot? Guy probably wees himself around Moon Knight. The Rhino takes punches from the Hulk. Same with Piledriver, except replace "Hulk" with "Thor."

Anyway, Shroud's not dead. He was, but you know, Hunter's Moon is a doctor. Hearts stops, hearts restart. Easy-peasy, right? Khonshu's pissed, but Marc makes an argument it's a fitting symbolic sacrifice, and points out Khonshu can't strike at Reese or the others in retaliation, because he owes them for getting him out of Asgard Jail. And that's were the book ends. Khonshu's back, Marc's back, with an uneasy detente at best.

Sunday Splash Page #340

 

"Phantom of the Forest," in Marvel Super-Heroes #2, by Steve Ditko (writer/penciler), Hollis Bright (writer), Mike DeCarlo (inker), Renee Witterstaetter (colorist), Diana Albers (letterer)

Many Months of Marvel is glad to get away from Doug Moench's lousy Star-Lord stories and back to Earth!

Marvel Super-Heroes was a quarterly, giant-sized collection of stories that ran for a few years in the early '90s. It's probably best known as where Squirrel Girl made her first appearance. Failing that, it's where Marvel published what would have been the last two issues of Carol Danvers' first ongoing. I assume drawn years after the scripts were originally written, because the art is a stark departure from the previous issues.

I don't own the Squirrel Girl issue - it's pricey - and the reprints of the two Ms. Marvel stories I own in the Essential Ms. Marvel collection are in black-and-white. If the Wasp story Amanda Conner drew in the third issue had a splash page, I'd have gone with that, but instead I picked one of the Speedball yarns Ditko did, though those stories a slog to get through. Robbie Baldwin's the most bland character (and I use that word grudgingly) possible, and the villains wouldn't be worth Scooby-Doo's time.

Occasionally there's a story that takes up most of an issue - Christopher Priest gets 50+ pages for a story about Justin Hammer making Stark's life miserable - and there's a Roy and Dann Thomas X-Men story that stretches across three issues. But most comprise a handful of short one-off stories, focused on one character handling some relatively small or personal problem.

The second features Iron Man (dealing with sabotage of an experimental engine by a government agent gone round the bend), Rogue (falling for a robot Mystique commissioned from Machinesmith to lure her daughter home), Speedball (two adults fighting over a toy gun from their childhood), Tigra (seeking an antidote for a disease a crippled rich asshole infected her father with), Red Wolf (stopping some guys threatening to cause a nuclear disaster), Daredevil (a kid mistakes his mother's insulin for, gasp!, drugs) and the Falcon (tries to protect a briefcase nuke, but an innocent bystander dies in the process.) Most of the stories are 8 pages, and a lot of them seem to end on silent panels, usually of a character standing with their head bowed. Maybe that's just this issue, though.

Like a lot of stuff we've looked at lately, it's a mixed bag, but you see some names in the credits who go on to much bigger stuff later. I mentioned Amanda Conner, and Greg Capullo draws a story about a Project PEGASUS-created hero called Blue Shield in the same issue. Kurt Busiek writes a couple of Iron Man stories, including one about a guy who learns the hard way he's not cut out for the job of Tony Stark's bodyguard.

Saturday Splash Page #142

 

"Night Creatures," in Spider-Man and Batman: Disordered Minds, by J.M. DeMatteis (writer), Mark Bagley (penciler), Scott Hanna and Mark Farmer (inker), Electric Crayon (colorist), Richard Starkings and Comicraft (letterer)

The first of two Spider-Man and Batman team-ups in the '90s. DeMatteis uses the hot new villain of the moment, Carnage, as the entry point, as a scientist who feels regular psychiatric treatment is futile with such people swears she's got a chip that can be installed in a person's brain to render them docile and conflict-averse. Cletus Kasady is the first, and the Joker's going to be the second. While it works on the Joker, the doctor neglects to account for the fact that Carnage is a team-up, and her chip doesn't do snot to the symbiote, and Kasady was simply eager to meet the Joker.

The story follows the basic beats. There's a brief initial team-up when things go wrong, but the villains escape. Batman, in his full 90s/2000s jerkass glory, then tells Spider-Man to leave, because Gotham has 'unique dangers', and he doesn't want Spider-Man getting hurt.

'90s Calvin rolled his eyes at the notion Spider-Man was in any danger from Batman's villains. Most of Batsy's enemies are roughly equivalent to Mysterio, and Spidey beats him all the time!

Whatever. Spider-Man doesn't leave, Batman reconsiders, they team-up, find the bad guys and save the day. DeMatteis doesn't try to put over the new guy as being better than the more established villain. He does outline the differences in the Carnage and the Joker. Carnage claims the Joker understands that life is absurd and meaningless, so insanity's the only proper response. From the Joker's, "Oh. . .that joke," I think we're meant to take he's already mentally downgrading his opinion of this guy. Later, Carnage loses patience with some elaborate scheme the Joker's got and starts ranting about how the point is to kill immediately, which the Joker dismisses as lacking style. DeMatteis doesn't pretend the Joker is above killing, only that he insists there be an art to it. It's like the difference between someone who sculpts hedges into animal shapes, and someone just hacking away with a weed-whacker.

DeMatteis' attempts to interject the sort of pop psychology stuff that littered his Spectacular Spider-Man run are intermittently successful. Suggesting Kasady is a serial killer because he's actually afraid of death, and kills in some bizarre hope it will somehow appease death into sparing him feels like a stretch. He presents each villain as becoming like an avatar of what the other hero fights against, starting with dream sequences where the killers of their respective parents shift to mimicking the villains. So Uncle Ben's killer sports a Joker smile, and Joe Chill transforms to Carnage's jagged tooth leer.

(I also randomly note that Bruce Wayne apparently sleeps in the nude, while Peter wears pajama pants.)

I don't know if it works. Maybe Carnage with Batman, as Kasady's whole thing is just to kill randomly, without pattern or meaning beyond the taking of life. That could be the sort of unthinking, unpredictable Crime that Batman fights but can never extinguish. (Having Carnage not particularly care about killing Batman beyond him being another body to stack on the pile is a nice touch.) But the Waynes weren't really killed randomly. It was either a mugging gone wrong or a revenge hit disguised as a mugging gone wrong, depending on which version they're using. But I guess from a child's perspective - and Dematteis was always writing about how childhood trauma infected one's adulthood - it all feels random, without cause or reason.

The Joker for Spider-Man, though, no. You can't spend a few pages having the Joker extol the virtues of elaborate plans and set-ups for his schemes, then compare him to a burglary gone wrong. DeMatteis tries to save it by having the Joker threaten to release a virus that will kill the entire city of Kasady doesn't release Batman, because no one gets to kill him but Joker, as 'the kind of madness, the kind of chaos,' Spider-Man always been fighting to prevent. Except that's not really what he fights. He fights guys who think the world owed them something, so when they get power, they decide to take what they think the deserve. Power without responsibility. Not really the Joker's shtick at all.

Guess with 48 pages, you do what you can.

I think this is Bagley's first time drawing DC characters. We don't see a lot of Gotham, or any established characters besides Batman, Joker and one page with Alfred, but he keeps everybody on-model. Joker's extremely tall and skinny (looks a head taller than Spider-Man), but I know Alan Davis among others drew the clown that way, too, so it's not unusual. He goes with a version of the Batmobile I associate with early Batman stories, with the big Bat face/shield thing over the front, rather than one of the sleek, sports car/jet plane models I thought were more common at the time. Don't know if there was a reason for that.

What I Bought 9/11/2024 - Part 1

My allergies have arrived to make everything unpleasant, as usual. But I started coughing yesterday, so I'm probably close to the "hacking up yellow stuff" phase that signals the end of this trial.

Here's a comic that didn't make me hack up yellow stuff, but is that a good or bad outcome?

Avengers Assemble #1, by Steve Orlando (writer), Cory Smith (penciler), Oren Junior and Elisabetta D'Amico (inkers), Sonia Oback (colorist), Cory Petit (letterer) - I'm sure she's flying, but it'd be funny if Monica was just standing on the leg hidden behind Captain America and pretending to fly. Make "whoosh" noises and everything.

So there's an "Avengers Emergency Response Squad" now. Funny, I thought that was what the Avengers were for. A problem arises, and whoever's available from the cast on the cover rushes off to deal with it. Seems like it wouldn't hurt to wait for reinforcements and/or intel, but OK.

Problem of the day: The Red Skull's daughter found some helmet that makes people angry and then feeds off the anger. Photon, Wasp and Shang-Chi are the only ones who've shown up, so that's who Cap's got. A lot of leaders, and so the helmet plays on that, making them jockey for authority until Shang-Chi numbs some nerve cluster or something. They still aren't getting much of anywhere, but do manage to knock Sin to wherever the helmet hails from.

Meanwhile, Orlando introduces the rest of the team via poker at the Mansion. They were too late to join the mission, so they're waiting for the next problem and shooting the breeze. It's not a bad approach; reinforces the idea there's going to be someone around as trouble arrives and allows a little back-and-forth to sketch characterization and interpersonal relationships.

I think Smith's art works better for the scenes of people sitting and talking with D'Amico is inking him. At least, I'm assuming those are D'Amico's pages at the end of the book, since she got secondary billing behind Oren Junior. The art's less busy, faces not so cluttered with extra lines that seem to stiffen things. That's less of an issue on the fight portions, because the focus is on the action and everyone's tense anyway, but I don't know if it's really needed there, either.

Anyway, the whole thing with Sin was actually a distraction by the new Serpent Society to gather something that's going to gain them favor with Mephisto? Grant them some of his powers? I'm not clear on that part. Bad news, at any rate. So that's the overarching threat, and I guess the question will be if the "Emergency Response Squad" can draw the connections between the different threats and act in time.

Royalty in Name Only

Something about Dragon Ball Z that amuses me is how, in between getting his ass kicked, Vegeta will keep talking about being 'Prince of all Saiyans.' By the time he's first introduced, two of the other three Saiyans in the universe have just died fighting each other. He's the prince of one full-blooded Saiyan (Nappa), and one half-blood (Gohan.)

The number increases a little bit over time. Goku comes back to life - twice! - Vegeta's got a couple of kids now (I don't know if we can count the time-traveling grown-up version of his son from another timeline as a 3rd kid), Goku's got another son. Gohan's got a kid if we want to count quarter-Saiyans. Broly's apparently in canon now, and maybe Vegeta's got a long-lost brother (Tarble or something like that, not sure if he's in continuity or that was another movie one-off.) Still, Vegeta's not even prince of enough people to fill a small classroom, even before taking into account that once Nappa dies, none of them defer to him as any sort of ruler, leader, or inspirational figure.

But it's not clear Vegeta really sees that as something a prince* does. When he's first introduced, he's just learned about the Dragon Balls via Raditz's communicator. Nappa asks if they'll use them to bring Raditz back, but Vegeta dismisses this as a waste of a wish. We know, from Raditz telling Goku, the Saiyans' homeworld was destroyed, and so the four of them (plus Gohan) are all that's left of their species.

You'd figure maybe Vegeta thinks it makes more sense to wish for the entire planet back. Give him back the subjects he was deprived of ruling. But no, he plans to wish for immortality for himself, and maybe Nappa (though I wouldn't have been surprised if he excluded his lackey.) You could argue he doesn't have any idea if the Dragon Balls can restore an entire planet. All he knows is the guy who killed Raditz (Piccolo), is certain they can resurrect Goku, a single person. That's fair, but he has no reason whatsoever to think they can make him immortal, yet that's his first thought.

It would be one thing if Vegeta was just a shitty ruler, who sees his subjects as objects that exist to serve him, to be terminated if they fail. That's how Frieza operates, killing loyal fighters and technicians if they make the mistake of delivering an update or communication when Frieza's in a bad mood.

But it's more like Vegeta's concept of being a prince doesn't actually require anyone for him to rule or command at all. He doesn't even need other Saiyans to grovel and tell him how awesome he is. He's not interested in bringing Raditz back once he dies. As soon as Nappa's back is broken, Vegeta kills him. He makes multiple attempts to kill Goku and Gohan, when they're all that's left of his people. Frieza took the Saiyans to the brink and now Vegeta's trying to nudge them over the edge into oblivion.

But a lot of his prince talk comes back to his efforts to surpass Goku. Vegeta figures that, as a descendant of a royal bloodline. Goku's a low-level commoner, descended from Saiyans of no particular note. When Goku opens a can of Triple Kaioken Whup-Ass on him, Vegeta's muttering about how he's an 'elite Saiyan warrior,' while Goku's a 'low-ranked fighter,' that shouldn't be able to deal out this kind of damage. When Goku hits Super Saiyan, Vegeta casts aside his belief about the Super Saiyan being a legendary figure that hadn't occurred for 1,000 years. If Goku can do it, so can Vegeta. And his Super Saiyan will be even super-er because of his bloodline.

With the Saiyans being a species whose existence seems to revolve around combat, prince is something closer to a champion. The prince should be the best Saiyan, meaning the strongest. That's why it doesn't matter if all the other Saiyans are dead or not. He doesn't need to rule them to demonstrate his status. His continued existence proves his superiority. He's alive and they aren't because he's stronger.

* I also wonder why he always calls himself a prince. His dad's dead, doesn't that make him king by default? Especially once Frieza's dead and Vegeta's no longer under his thumb.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024)

I tried to talk him out of it, but Alex insisted on paying Amazon $20 to rent this movie so we could watch it. So what did we get?

Mike (Will Smith) is getting married. Not to Rita (Paolo Nunez), the lady cop he clearly had some sparks with in the last movie. No, she's dating the mayor (Ioan Gruffudd), who seems like a supportive boyfriend and nice fellow, so you know he's shady. Mike's marrying his physical therapist, who we'd never seen before. But he's never processed the mental trauma of nearly dying, or dealt with his apparently deep-seeded fears that everyone he cares about dies. Which starts manifesting as panic attacks, which Will Smith demonstrates by making weird breathing noises and rolling his eyes back. Honestly, I thought he was having a heart attack, which would have been kind of grim given other events (see below.) Maybe it's a good representation of panic attacks, I don't know. Pretty sure you don't just get over it by your best friend repeatedly slapping you, though.

The situation is made worse when some cartel guys try to cover their tracks by framing the deceased captain (Joe Pantoliano) as being on the take. Mike's got to get info out of the son he learned he had in the third movie, while dealing with the guilt of never having been there for this kid, who is the one who killed Pantoliano in the first place (the murder now retconned to not be a revenge thing.)

The main villain is a real nothingburger who I remember mostly for wearing stupid ascots and suits that are too tight like he's The Rock or something. Oh, and his dumb hair. I don't know what is with this, "swept back, but raised like a mesa in the middle," look so many guys are sporting now, but it's fucking stupid. He's got a whole crew who can seemingly hack into anything, find anyone, supposed to be really dangerous, but it doesn't come off that way. He keeps going to these elaborate extents to frame Mike and Marcus, instead of just killing them and being done with it, and it makes him seem like an idiot.

As for Marcus (Martin Lawrence got himself in better shape for this one), he nearly dies of a heart attack doing the Wobble at Mike's wedding, and sees Pantoliano, who tells him it's not his time. Now he's convinced he can do whatever he wants and he'll be fine. Also, that he and Mike's souls have been reincarnated several times and keep finding each other. He keeps trying to explain these past lives to Mike, who sits there patiently going "Hmm," and clearly not believing a word of it. But listening to Marcus explain that Mike was once a donkey he owned, and Marcus is sorry for beating him, but Mike was just always so stubborn, just like he is now, was pretty funny.

That's basically where I'm at with these movies. As action movies, they're nothing special. Nothing here you haven't seen in a dozen other cop movies. The current directors don't have Bay's knack (fetish?) for excess. Take that as a positive or negative. Strange to say in a movie with a helicopter and a plane crash, at least 4 separate shootouts and DJ Khaled being hit by a van that will soon be on fire, but there you go. The thing is, it feels like the action is in service to the jokes and one-liners, so that's what sticks with me. Marcus nearly being crushed by a giant replica alligator during the climactic gunfight and screaming, 'It's like a redneck Jurassic Park in here!'

As a comedy, it works great. Alex and I laughed our asses off. From the opening bit, where Marcus has made them late to Mike's wedding, but pleads for Mike to stop so he can buy a ginger ale to settle his stomach, and then that rolls into a whole ridiculous sequence with hot dogs and a hold up. The shootout at John Salley's art gallery, where Marcus is running through a hail of gunfire, shooting two guns and hitting nothing while screaming how he doesn't give a fuck and 'I got this.' Mike's response, 'But you don't, though!' cracked me up.

Escape Company Events Via Space Travel

In any other fictional universe, that might seem strange.

Cannonball Run is the volume collecting the second half of Al Ewing's U.S.Avengers, where Sunspot agrees to make A.I.M. an officially sanctioned entity for the government.

Unfortunately, the first 3 issues of the tpb are Secret Empire tie-ins, as the group is brought down from within as HYDRA Cap uses all the intel Sunspot so helpfully provided to take the team down. The current Red Hulk - a deliberate dollar store version of Thunderbolt Ross - is being controlled by nanites injected under the promise they'd help him use his "Hulk plug-in" for more than an hour at a pop. The current Iron Patriot - Dr. Toni Ho, genius daughter of the doctor who saved Stark's life all those years ago - ends up in a holding cell with Sunspot, who's barely coherent after being shot in the head. Turns out people who work for AIM don't want to work for the government. Go figure. He activated his mutant power to survive, but he's got that "M-pox" from the Terrigen cloud, so using his powers is killing him.

Those three issues are split between Toni's attempts to MacGuyver a way to get herself and Sunspot out of prison, and Squirrel Girl and Enigma working with a hodgepodge of other heroes in Paris to fight the HYDRA forces stationed there. It puts a spotlight on Toni's reasons for what she does and why, and her deciding that making weaponry, even non-lethal weaponry, isn't a good use of her talents, or a healthy one.

The Squirrel Girl and Enigma thread is the pretty standard, "fascists aren't as strong as they think, their efforts to crush resistance only breeds more, and when push comes to shove, they're gutless cowards." Which is fine, Ewing and Paco Medina bring in a hodgepodge of Euro-heroes - actually, they may have created a few of these, I'm not sure about Outlaw, the non-lethal Punisher, or Guillotine, the lady with a bloodthirsty cursed sword - but there's nothing to it that says much of significance about the core cast members.

Medina's work is pretty much how I remember it from Daniel Way's Deadpool run, allowing for some honing of his style over the subsequent 6+ years. The lines are steadier, and everything's less busy. He toned down some of the excess in character proportions, but to be fair, he was drawing a Deadpool book. Unrealistic proportions were to be expected, especially when factoring in the "hallucination" shtick Way used. That's not an issue here, so Medina keeps it straightforward and easy to follow.

The other three issues - drawn by Paco Diaz - see the team dealing with the fallout from Secret Empire, but mostly rescuing Cannonball, who ended up floating in space at some point. He was sold into slavery, and ended up on that Skrull planet from the Lee/Kirby FF where everyone looked and talked like gangsters. Except now they all mimic "Richie Redwood" and his pals. Meaning Sam Guthrie's hanging out with a bunch of Archie cosplayers.

The HYDRA prison sounds preferable.

This whole thing really seems to be Ewing talking about the people whose concept of being a fan of something locks it into a particular state, and only that state, forever. The Skrull playing Richie only wants to act out the status quo of the earliest transmissions they received. When his brother (playing the Jughead knockoff, Bugface Brown) came back from an outer space jaunt with decades of new stuff, introducing all sorts of new characters and updated ideas, Richie threw everyone in favor of that into prison.

The sheer goofiness of the whole thing is almost enough to carry it, but issue 10 also has a conversation between Sunspot and a senator who says he'll be the new liaison for Roberto's group. The Senator insists Sunspot throw out all the people he currently has as being not good enough or "diversity hires." OK, yeah, we get it, thank you. The time for beating horses to death was when half the team was in France, where they might serve as sustenance.

Diaz, like Medina, is a pretty solid artist. Able to draw make-believe Americana, alien super-tech and gangsters and make it all look like it belongs on the same page. He makes all the Archie knock-offs similar enough you can tell who they're meant to be (assuming you know Archie characters), but different enough to not just be palette swaps.

He does, however, have a little trouble with faces. Not so much if they're glaring or neutral, but shock or surprised characters kind of fall in the uncanny valley. Toni's face looks more like someone badly playacting at surprise than actual surprise, and I'm pretty sure that wasn't the intent. It seemed more noticeable with Tony, Squirrel Girl or Enigma, but I'm not sure why. The shape of their faces, maybe.

Sunday Splash Page #339

 

"The Wizard of Stars," in Marvel Spotlight (vol. 2) #6, by Doug Moench (writer), Tom Sutton (artist), Ben Sean (colorist), John Costanza (letterer)

The first volume of Marvel Spotlight ran for 30+ issues in the early-70s, and seems to have been mostly focused on horror-themed characters. Werewolf by Night, Ghost Rider, Son of Satan, before broadening out to a wider variety of characters in the last half-dozen issues. The second volume only lasted about a year, and seems more focused on space-based characters. Mar-Vell, Captain Universe for the last few issues, and for two issues in the middle, Star-Lord.

The second issue is about some world where everyone must pay forward any good deeds done for them. So when Star-Lord shows mercy on a lady who tries to kill him for saving someone they threw to his death, she repays this by taking her own life. But then Quill has to repay that favor by seeing to her burial, and when he can't cry over the grave of the woman who tried to kill him, the guy he saved sacrifices himself. Quite what would have happened if Quill didn't cry over that death, I'm not clear. 

Whatever, the first issue revisits the Master of the Sun, who made Quill into Star-Lord, complete with surprise reveal. The Master is no mysterious sage or soul of stars or whatever Englehart might have intended. No, he's actually a member of the same species of lizard-people that killed Quill's mother. Where Gan and Byrne drew them as at least as tall as Star-Lord, Sutton draws them as barely reaching his waist. I'm not sure why. To make them seem less threatening, so it seems less of a bad thing that they're here to arrest the Master of the Sun (or Ragnar) because he focused on creating Star-Lord and neglected other duties and innocent beings suffered? Maybe there just wasn't enough room in the panels for big lizard aliens.

We aren't told what duties Ragnar shirked, though the others say he interfered in their war. Ragnar makes it sound as if Quill was to be the first of many Star-Lords, and ended up more like Steve Rogers. Quill fights, but ultimately stands down in accordance with Ragnar's wishes, and lets Ragnar be taken off to his death.

Claremont had established Ship was the remnants of a living, conscious star, one forced to supernova by a race determined to wipe out their enemies by destroying the entire star system. The Master of the Sun appears too late, but the fact he sensed her distress and could somehow salvage her into a spaceship would seem to make him more than any sort of mortal being. But Moench seemed determined to strip away any of that sort of stuff from the Star-Lord concept, and just make him another Earthman running around space with a fancy raygun.

Saturday Splash Page #141

 

"Back in Black," in Spider-Man and the Black Cat #1, by Kevin Smith (writer), Terry Dodson (penciler), Rachel Dodson (inker/colorist), Richard Starkings and Comicraft (letterers)

Hoo boy, this book. A six-issue mini-series that took almost 4 years to complete. In its defense, the first three issues did come out in three consecutive months, and so did the last three issues. Just, you know, 40 months late.

In 2002, it had been over three years since the Black Cat had even shown up in a Spider-Man book (very early in the Howard Mackie/John Byrne, post-The Final Chapter, reboot) Even longer since she'd been any sort of regular presence in Spider-Man's supporting cast. So at the time, I was pretty stoked she was getting a mini-series devoted to her and Spider-Man.

And the first two issues (which are all I still own) weren't a bad start. Felicia travels to New York to look for a missing actress friend of a friend, who it turns out died of an overdose. Peter, meanwhile, is looking into the death of one of his students, also from an overdose. Both paths lead to the same actor, and eventually to the mysterious "Mr. Brownstone," a mutant with the ability to teleport small amounts of liquid (so he 'ports the drug directly into your body), who is some bigshot businessman/philanthropist.

There's still a couple of homophobic jokes that I notice more now than I did in 2002, and Smith somehow wants Spidey to both make pop culture references (dated references, but still) while apparently never having even heard of Pulp Fiction. Not, "hasn't seen it," but rather, "has no idea what it is." And while Felicia keeps insisting that as much as she might want to get back together with Peter, now that she can appreciate the guy under the mask too, she won't because he's married, she sure is climbing all over him as they swing across the city, and apparently trying to French kiss him through the mask after he saves her. The book's giving off mixed signals in all sorts of directions, is what I'm saying.

But what was the point I was trying to make? Oh right, at least the basic concept behind getting the two characters together, while having them trying to navigate their messy history at different points in their lives, isn't a bad one. Felicia's matured and sees things differently now. Peter still feels the connection, but he's also married, albeit this started during JMS' first year on Amazing Spider-Man, so Mary Jane is living on her on own on the West Coast. So he's trying to find that equilibrium of being friends with an ex he hasn't seen in a while. 

Anyway, the book goes off the rails once Spidey thinks he knows who Mr. Brownstone is based on hearing his voice over the phone and then in person (when they save the guy from an attack by a rival cartel.) Felicia charges in rather than find evidence that could actually stand up in court. She gets dosed, it looks like she's going to be sexually assaulted, and she wakes up the next morning beside the guy's corpse. Daredevil gets involved, Nightcrawler shows up to give everyone a lecture on mutant history, it turns out the guy's brother actually killed him.

Felicia then talks that guy down by either a) admitting that she became a thief after her attempt to take revenge on a frat boy who assaulted her while drunk was thwarted by him getting in a car wreck, or b) she makes that whole story up to get the guy to drop his guard because he thinks he's speaking to a kindred soul. It's not great either way you want to read it, and thankfully no one seems to have paid any attention to it as a retcon for her origin.

The Dodsons revamp her look, in that besides minimizing the white fur fringe stuff, her outfit now seems to be skintight leather or some sort of plastic, whereas it was previously given a fabric texture (even if it was still highly impractical as an outfit.) That stuck for at least a few years, although I think by Brand New Day the artists mostly shifted back to variations on the classic look, which has subsequently maintained its hold (that brief, idiotic "Queenpin" phase where she had the Kraven the Hunter-style cat face across the chest, aside.)

Random Back Issues #136 - GLA #4

Yep, we're starting with Identity Crisis jokes. Or, maybe "jokes" is more accurate. But that's the recap page, and Cable/Deadpool taught me that's not in continuity, so everything's fine!

Anyway, in the Quinjetta, Flatman is pretty sure if Maelstrom combines the chronal accelerator he stole with an atomic inverter, he could push the universe to the point of cosmic implosion. Doorman dismisses the notion the GLA could ever get mixed up in something so big, until they find Dr. Doom trapped beneath Bertha inside their HQ! Wait, no, it's not Doom, it's past team member (at some point), Gene Lorrene, aka Leather Boy. Angry at not being invited to rejoin during the membership drive that netted them Squirrel Girl, he killed Mr. Immortal (it didn't take, any more than Craig's attempts to get alcohol poisoning will), and, uh, oh, did something awful to Monkey Joe.

While Flatman and Doorman debate whether wearing leather makes a person homosexual, resulting in Flatman coming out of the closet, Deathurge shows up for Monkey Joe's soul. He's been hanging around Mr. Immortal all his life, but now he's in squirrel form, so Craig can beat him up for some answers about why. And the answer is. . .?

Yes, it's Craig's destiny to be the last thing alive in the universe - until Al Ewing insists he can be killed in Immortal Hulk, but that's 15 years away - and Deathurge has been preparing him for that. Why? If Craig can't die, there's nothing he can do except sit and wait for a lot of years to pass. Or is it no good if the grief and isolation drive him mad? Whatever, if Maelstrom succeeds in his plan, there's no cosmic destiny, because the universe will be gone.

Wouldn't Craig still be alive in whatever it is universes exist in? The gaps between the different realities or something? Whatever. Craig, as a one-man species, Homo supreme, has to stop Maelstrom. Does the comic then make a joke about the word "homo"? You know it.

The GLA arrive at Maelstrom's base, but he's got Batroc's Brigade to keep them busy, Batroc being unaware Maelstrom plans to end all existence. Mr. Immortal leaves that fight to the others, so it's fortunate Squirrel Girl brought the squirrel army. Zaran the Weapons Master's gonna have a hard time living this down next time he goes after Shang-Chi. Maelstrom activates the machine, but Mr. I's sure he could stop him if he could just get through the, 'impregnable dome of proto-natural force!' So Doorman throws himself against the barrier to allow Craig to pass through via his very-limited teleportation powers. And that's the third member of the team killed in 4 issues. 4, if you count Monkey Joe.

As the universe collapses in on itself and Batroc realizes he's not gonna get paid, Doorman arrives in Oblivion, finding a poker game held by his former teammates. Including Monkey Joe, so I guess he counts. Hawkeye's the exception, because the Internet says he's the Swordsman. I do not remember that rumor, but I wasn't in the comics blogosphere back then. Back in the waning moments of the universe, Craig talks it out with Maelstrom, who admits to feeling terribly alone as a unique being, a mutant and an Eternal. Mr. Immortal points out if Maelstrom destroys the entire universe save himself, he'll have nothing but his loneliness. Having not considered this, Maelstrom pleads for a solution to this self-created dilemma, which Mr. Immortal offers in the form of. . .shooting himself in the head. There's no way Maelstrom could be that stupid.

I bet Quasar will really feel like a loser when he finds out that's all it takes to stop this guy. Mr. Immortal gets back up, obviously, and deactivates the machine. But it was too late for many of the squirrels, save one plucky gal Doreen decides to name Tippy-Toe, not to mention Flat - oh, no, never mind, he's alive, just standing at an angle because his costume got sucked off. Before Mr. Immortal can explain Doorman died, Doorman returns! On skis. With a cape. 'Cause he's the new Swordsman. I mean, Deathurge.

The mini-series concludes with no mention of the GLA saving existence, and the team being sued by the Maria Stark Foundation to stop calling themselves Avengers. But hey, Mr. Immortal mentioned being some sort of mutant earlier! Squirrel Girl's a mutant - or not, per her own series, but that retcon's over 10 years away. So are Flatman, Bertha, and Doorman. So it's the Great Lakes X-Men now!

(The X-Men would subsequently use mind control to make them stop during the last issue of Dan Slott's The Thing series. Because the X-Men are gatekeeping assholes. But Mr. Immortal would win the name "Champions" in a poker tournament later that issue, much to Hercules' displeasure.)

{4th longbox, 209th comic. GLA #4, by Dan Slott (writer), Paul Pelletier (penciler), Rick Magyar (inker), Wil Quintana (colorist), Dave Lanphear (letterer)}

Get Mad. No, Madder Than That

Set sometime before the start of Fury Road, Mad Max starts with Max being pursued by Scabrous Scrotus, one of Immortan Joe's kids. Who the hell names their kid something like that? Though Max puts a chainsaw into Scrotus' skull (shown in a cut scene, the start of annoying trend the game has of relegating the best beats to moments you're left passively watching), he's knocked off the War Rig, and watches his car get hauled away.

In dire straits, Max stumbles across first a dog and then a hunchbacked former mechanic from Gastown named Chumbucket. Chum believes he's been touched by the "Angel Combustion" to create a great vessel, the Magnum Opus. Having seen Max's driving earlier, thinks he's the one meant to control that chariot. Max just wants a ride that can carry him to the "Plains of Silence", a place his severely damaged mind has convinced him exists, where he'll be free of the fragmented memories that torment him.

What's that line, some men will do anything to avoid going to therapy? The only one playing with a full deck is the dog.

The broad arc is Max gathering the pieces Chumbucket needs to complete the Magnum Opus. Inevitably, the equipment or parts reside in the strongholds of various local muckety-mucks, none of whom are willing to give anything away for free. Favor for a favor. The favors are either to go someplace and retrieve something, or go someplace and kill someone. Good thing those are what Mad Maxes do the best!

(I finally thought to take advantage of the ability to screen shot while playing, rather than relying on the increasingly useless Google Images, so all images in today's post are courtesy of my playthrough.)

There are also optional projects you can complete to improve the strongholds. Since it would be strange for Max to do this out of the good of his heart, it's set so you benefit from the improvements. Build the Oil Well project, and your car will automatically get a full tank whenever you visit. Complete the Water Well, your canteen gets filled. The Survey Crew marks all the places in that muckety-muck's domain that have scrap to scavenge, along with how much there is.

While some upgrades for either the car or Max are unlocked by completing particular missions, others simply require a certain amount of scrap to buy. To that end, there are dozens and dozens of little sidequests and locations to scavenge. Visiting all the locations the survey crews marked. Attacking Oil Well or Fuel Transfer Camps in the region, and eliminating the legions of oddly painted fighters that serve under Scrotus' second, Stank Gum (love the names.) There are convoy routes to clear, and subterranean lairs of scavenger gangs called Buzzards to clear out. This also lowers the "threat level" in a territory, which didn't make a lot of difference from my perspective (other than killing snipers, those guys are a pain in the ass), but I was going to do it for the scrap anyway, might as well get some appreciation.

The War Boys and Roadkill factions blurred together, but the Buzzards were always easy to recognize, since they cover everything with metal spikes. Really ought to be called Porcupines, or I guess Echidnas would be more geographically appropriate. Either way, they're all trying to kill you, so the differences are largely academic.

While your cars can go places no vehicle ought to be able, they can't go everywhere. Once you reach a location, Max has to spend at least part of the time on foot. Which means a lot of fighting. The combat reminds me of Arkham City, in that you're often surrounded by enemies, and the Counter button is critical. One nice thing, outside of snipers, no enemies carry guns. Some of them do carry explosive spears - called Thunderpoons, dumb name - but it's mostly hand-to-hand. Which gives you the chance to get some distance and thin them out with your shotgun, if you've got ammo. If you do enough hitting, you fill a Fury meter and can just start tearing into people, picking them up and pile-driving them or punching clean through their guard.

There are boss fights, but except for the Stank Gum fight, they're all the same. The boss - they all look alike, just palette-swapped - carries a mace or some other weapon with a jagged blade welded around a steel ball at the end of a pole. You wait for him to charge, roll to the side, then rush up and punch him. Maybe shank him when he's stunned. Eventually his health is low enough you push the "X" button and Max smashes the guy's face in with the butt of his shotgun, then stomps on his head.

The game does its best to explore how much variety you can find in "desolate wasteland." There are no green spaces, any vegetation is brittle and dying. Some parts remind me of Monument Valley, from old Westerns. Others are vast salt flats or the huge sand dunes that might come to mind when you hear "desert." There's areas that used to be the ocean, where the roads run between the bleached remains of corals. What's not sand and rock is remnants of civilization. Crumbling stone walls, lighthouses missing their tops, the cooling tower of an old nuclear plant. The Dunes region has a mostly buried airport you can drive around inside, if you don't mind the Buzzards. There are a few strips of actual pavement here and there, but you're more likely to be on sand. Still, there are places where roads run straight enough to really pick up some speed and see what your ride can do.

There are specific combinations of gear that create certain cars Chum calls "Archangels."  In theory, it's a way to sort of test the waters and figure out what works for you in a vehicle, which you then create as the Magnum Opus. In practice, I just stuck with the Opus and modded to meet the necessities of certain missions.

When you're driving, car-to-car combat is an inevitability. If you take too much damage (the car has its own health meter separate yours), a warning on screen gives you 5 seconds to get out. If you do, you just gotta stay alive on foot until Chum can repair your ride. The guys attacking will ignore him in favor of you, and if you dodge long enough, they'll get frustrated and fight hand-to-hand. If you don't get out of the car, it explodes and you die.

As far as fighting back, you've got your shotgun, eventually a harpoon and Thunderpoon launcher (rocket launcher), and you can add flame jets, but they use up gas. Or you can just hit the boost and ram them. It took me a long time to get comfortable at any of it. The game goes into slow-motion for a few seconds when you go to use a weapon, but I seemed to struggle figuring out what to shoot. Plus, your weapons aren't always strong enough to be effective. The Harpoon has to be at least Level 3 or 4 before you can pull tires off vehicles, so until you manage that, it's basically only good for shooting people.

Problem is, there's a lot of things to upgrade, so you're constantly balancing what you think needs the most urgent attention against how much scrap you've got. Maybe you'd like to upgrade the Harpoon, but the car gets busted up too easy when you attack convoys, so you have to improve the armor. Or it takes too long punching guys to death, so you need better brass knucks (Frankensteined out of spark plugs and wrenches) or to unlock finishing moves for when they're stunned. This is where clearing out those camps comes in handy, because the (presumably more peaceful) people who take them over will give you scrap regularly from then on. You get it automatically, you don't have to drive to each camp to pick it up. Either way, as Alex noted, the game involves a lot of grinding.

Completing certain tasks grants you Griffa tokens. What's that? Well, Griffa is some weird guy with a shade frame on his back, who hangs out in particular places in the desert. If you have tokens, you can visit him, he'll make some cryptic remarks about you and your life, blow some dust in your face, and you can upgrade certain attributes with the tokens. How long the Rage Meter lasts, how much water you get when you refill the canteen. You can get additional scrap when you scavenge, or make your gas last longer.

But Griffa's mostly of interest for what his interactions say about Max. The whole game is the world trying to make Max rejoin it, while Max resists. Stop endlessly drifting and plant roots, form connections. There's Chumbucket and the dog, but if you help the strongholds out enough, the people inside greet you or congratulate you on your accomplishments. Max keeps everything transactional, simply another step to getting the car that will take him to the Plains of Silence.

Griffa taunts Max with the knowledge of himself Griffa somehow has and that Max has suppressed. Jabbing at him to stop denying the man he was in favor of the husk he is. To further the conflict, the game introduces a woman with the jarringly unsubtle name of Hope, who has a daughter, even more jarringly named Glory. You do Hope a small favor once, she saves your butt a couple of times later. So Max tracks down Glory for her, and that is exhausting because Max walks incredibly slowly while carrying Glory, even though we're in the middle of Buzzard turf. I kept screaming at him to move with some alacrity, but no dice.

Hope tries to get Max to make a little family with them, and I was groaning at the thought the game would go that way. I was in this to drive a kickass car and explore the wastelands, not play Happy Homemaker. The man's got a head full of broken glass, lady, he's bad news all day, every day.

(There's also Tenderloin, a fighter that rides with Max when he wins the race for the V-8 engine. She got herself off whatever she was huffing to help him win, then they had to Thunderdome. You kill her, but she never gets mentioned as another person that dies because of Max. It's a little odd, given everything the game hammers on about.)

To my relief, Max keeps his eye on the prize. Chum bailed during the rescue mission, with the Magnum Opus. To be fair, Max was finally clear that he was taking the car, alone, and leaving Chum behind. So Max leaves Hope and Glory behind. Chum gets caught first, talks to a not-dead Scrotus (credit to Alex, who correctly predicted how the guy survived a chainsaw to the skull without having ever heard of this game until I mentioned it), who then kills the happy little family Max was decidedly not forming.

Throughout the game, there are these things called History Relics, which Max can collect. Usually a photograph with something written on the back, or a sign someone made. The photo itself may be innocuous enough, but what's written on the back always reflects the either imminent or already completed collapse of society.

When one opines that beauty will exist so long as life dies, Max remarks, 'Did we kill that, too? Beauty?' On a photo of a playground, the writer hopes the kid pictured survived, as the bombs fell just minutes later. Max's thoughts? 'I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Survival.' It became one of my favorite things to do, finding the history relics, so I could hear the next bit of commentary, even as I would mutter, "They call you Mad Max, not Emo Max."

Well, after that little atrocity, he's mad in both senses of the term. Besides hearing voices, not only Hope and Glory's, but his long-dead wife, Max starts hallucinating. Thankfully not while you're driving or fighting, but a few times I stopped to talk with people in the Wasteland (I was trying to pull together enough scrap to buy the last two upgrades to the V-8 engine before the final showdown). Instead of whatever they were probably saying, Max would hear them say he was a killer, and was the blood on his hands enemies, or his family's? Or he'd see Hope, or the grave of his daughter, calling him a killer of everyone.

Which makes the final showdown a disappointment. I was already kind of annoyed the deathblow to Stank Gum was a cut scene. The fight with Scrotus starts by taking out his war rig, which, after all the convoys I wiped out, was cake. His rig is teetering on a cliff edge and the Opus could ram it over. But Chum objects that will destroy it! Even though I've rammed dozens of vehicles by now. Max rams anyway, while Chum's on the hood, refusing to abandon his masterpiece. The Opus catches fire, it blows up. So does Chumbucket. So does the War Rig, but Scrotus Dukes-of-Hazzards out the back in Max's old car. So you have to grab Thunderpoons that fell off the rig and wait for them to try and run you over. Then you chuck 'em and roll clear.

The deathblow is, again, a damn cut scene. I've had to go through all these other missions to get to this point, I finally get the awesome car, only to blow it up to trying kill this guy, only for him to try and kill me with my first car. Let me actually finish him off myself! There's already one hand-to-hand fight with Scrotus partway through, and it was a lot like all those other boss fights, except for it kept getting interrupted and interfered with. Maybe they worried it would be too repetitive to end that way, but the end result was a letdown.

What I Bought 8/31/2024 - Part 2

Wrapping up the last of August's stuff with a pair of first issues. Did either of them light my world on fire? Spoiler alert, not really. Did either of them do enough for me to buy issue 2? Let's find out.

The Pedestrian #2, by Joey Esposito (writer), Sean von Gorman (artist), Josh Jensen (colorist), Shawn Lee (letterer) - And then he gets run over because he wandered into GTA Online.

The book appears to be trying to establish Summer City as a place with larger forces, unseen but felt, at work. Four different characters make reference to the city being cursed, or doomed, or a place you need to escape from. Only one of them, a cop, seems to think that can be changed at all. The others feel resigned to the notion their lives are failures. They're all drawn with slumped shoulders and awkward expressions, rumpled clothes. People just dragging through life, definitely not winning. von Gorman makes lips very prominent somehow without making them the focus, oddly pursed or almost blow-up doll lips. It's kind of distracting.

The Pedestrian (though he's never called that) is a silent, inscrutable figure. He shows up to help a potential mugging victim, to help a pizza delivery person parallel park, and saves a kid from getting run over by a drunk (or possessed) teacher. Esposito never has him talk, and von Gorman keeps him expressionless. Most of the time he seems to be looking over the other characters' heads (and his eyes are hidden behind goggles, before he speedwalks away. He does have a home, but what we see is sparsely furnished.

He returns the mugger's wallet to him, but also tipped off the cops that the guy was the mugger. We don't see the end result of the officer's visit to the man's apartment, though the mugger certainly thinks he's screwed. There's also another figure, who wears a mask with a big red hand (the Don't Walk symbol) over it, who appears briefly, and is somehow connected to what that teacher did.

Other than the cop, I'm not sure if any of the non-costumed characters are significant. The delivery girl dropped out of pre-med, the schoolkids are new in town and struggling to fit in. The almost-mugger and his almost-victim are both lifelong residents that couldn't get out. Are they our windows into a struggle for the city's soul, or were they just one-offs to demonstrate how The Pedestrian works? It's all a big mystery, though I wonder if it wasn't played as too vague in an attempt to be mysterious.

Werewolf by Night #1, by Jason Loo (writer), Sergio Davila (penciler), Jay Leisten, JP Mayer, and Craig Yeung (inkers), Alex Sinclair (colorist), Joe Sabino (letterer) - I bought the Saturday Morning Cartoon variant by Sean Galloway. It was the same price as the regular cover, why not?

Jack Russell set up shop in the castle that appeared in the Rocky Mountains in the Werewolf by Night one-shot from last year. He's got a little life building there, working as ferry captain, contributing to poetry slams in town. Too bad all the Blood Hunt stuff, and the emergence of the Moon at some point, seems to have driven him mad and made him kill a couple of locals. By the time Elsa Bloodstone shows up, investigating reports of a murderous beastie, Jack's shackled himself up in the basement, waiting to starve to death.

Unfortunately, Elsa's Bloodstone, which is colored glowing purple instead of red, somehow triggers another transformation. The two of them fight a bit, Elsa being much more restrained than I'd expect, even allowing that she doesn't want to kill him, kick him in the face a few times. She does subdue him, and now they'll try to figure out what's going on, because Jack admits the scent at the scene was off from his own.

In other plot threads, some group of loser mages are trying to figure out a new plan after the Blood Hunt thing went sour, when who should walk in but '90s Ghost Rider reject villain Deathwatch. Loo is nice enough to offer a little expository dialogue explaining this guy's powers. And he's working with, oh geez, The Hood? *drops head on table in defeat*

Jed MacKay did us all a favor when he killed the guy, and then Benjamin Percy just had to bring him back as a damn Spirit of Vengeance. Loo references the latter storyline, though not why Parker Robbins head isn't currently on fire. But at least he's trying to explain how these characters are in their respective positions and relationships, rather than trusting everyone's read everything these folks have appeared in recently. Anyway, Hood's got a couple of magic trinkets to empower the losers so they'll follow he and Deathwatch, and help them collect the pages of the Darkhold.

I don't know why this needed the "Red Band" label. There's no violence here that's even on par with what I've seen in various Deadpool comics. It wouldn't even reach the level of the Ennis and Steve Dillon Marvel Knights Punisher stuff, let alone the MAX imprint. We don't see Jack's two friends attacked, only the aftermath, and while there's some ribs visible, Davila and Sinclair mostly make the insides look like spaghetti with too much sauce.

Also, Davila draws Jack's wolf form with more of a gorilla face than a wolf-face, which I don't like. The nose is not prominent, the snout non-existent. Werewolves should have canine heads, like on the cover!

The Cooler (2003)

Bernie (William H. Macy) works in a casino run by Shelly (Alec Baldwin) as a "cooler." He gets near someone winning too much and their luck immediately goes south. He wears drab suits, has a pronounced limp and not so much a hangdog expression as one where the weariness has etched itself in like water wearing away rock.

He's sweet on Natalie (Maria Bello), one of the waitresses, and after he gets her assigned to the big money tables one night, she asks if he wants to get something to eat after work. The return to his crappy hotel room home. They spend more time together. Bernie starts wearing brighter colors. The limp is less noticeable. There's still cream available for his coffee.

The problem is, as Bernie grows happier, he becomes the opposite of a cooler. The people near him start winning like crazy. Which is bad news for Shelly, who is trying to stop the casino being renovated to a more modern look by a Harvard guy (Ron Livingston) Shelly's bosses brought in with a lot of ideas. So Shelly moves to protect his turf.

In the early going, I figured Larry (Harvard boy) was the villain. He wants to redesign the casino to be flashy, ditch the Sinatra-esque lounge singer (Paul Sorvino) for a flashy new guy (played by Joey Fatone.) Muted color schemes, and music with a 'subsonic mantra' of "lose, lose, lose." Or as Shelly puts it, he wants the place Disney-fied.

The further the film goes, the more clear it is Shelly's the villain. From Bernie explaining his limp was Shelly breaking his leg so he'd have a reminder not to gamble, to his sneering, incredulous condescension towards any of Larry's ideas, to breaking the legs of Bernie's loser son, after Bernie promised to pay off what the kid cheated to win (even though the kid didn't get away with the money.) To his efforts to remove Natalie. Shelly's a piece of shit, clutching to his fiefdom in the face of things that are changing. Bernie can't be allowed to be leave, because that would change things. He also can't be allowed to be happy if he stays, because that changes thing.

(For the record, Livingston's character isn't a good person, he's just the bloodless, insincere type who looks at everything as a spreadsheet. What's the approach best for the bottom line, to have the person barred or have them beaten to shit?)

It's a good role for Baldwin, playing an abusive control freak who pretends he's doing it all in your best interests. Never have him play characters with integrity, unless it's just a lie they've bought in on. Macy and Bello play well of each other, as you can see Bernie struggling at first to enjoy the moments together, to not worry about how it's all going to go wrong. And gradually it gets easier, until things do go wrong. Bello's alternately playful, supportive, vulnerable and desperate as the situation escalates. Trying not to spook Bernie, then gradually feeling comfortable opening up to him, with her own dread about how it's all going to go wrong.

One thing I noticed the movie never seems to address is, when Bernie tells Natalie things always go wrong for him because he's a loser, she calls it a self-fulfilling prophecy. But she apparently believes in astrology, predicting outcomes based on the stars. Which also feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Oh, the relationship won't work because Mars is in retrograde, and look, it didn't work out! But maybe I'm taking her interest at face value more than I should.

The ending felt too cute at first impression, but the more I think on it, it fits. The film has established that for whatever reason, the course of things swing on Bernie's mood. When he's happy, things are good for those around him (except Shelly, but he's an ass so who cares.) When he's down, they aren't. In that climactic moment, he focuses on the good thing he has right there, that second, not on how horribly it looks like it's about to end. And his luck turns to the better, improbably so.

What I Bought 8/31/2024 - Part 1

I have today off for Labor Day, but the rest of the week intends to make me play for it. Another public meeting, oh joy. At least the weather has improved from last week's "sauna towel" experience.

Blow Away #5, by Zac Thompson (writer), Niccola Izzo (artist), Francesco Segala (colorist), DC Hopkins (letterer) - There was retailer incentive cover for 20 cents less, so I grabbed it. Looks basically the same, except it's like looking at the image through a grainy video camera.

Set a month after issue 4, Brynne's back in Toronto, using a crutch and still chewing over the experience on the mountain. Her boss announces a new documentary series about Nick's near-death experience, and Brynne will get credited because they're using some of her footage. Brynne learns there's two versions of footage on the server, because there were two cameras up there, one of them that wasn't hers.

And we're back to her poring over pixelated images frame-by-frame. As usual, it seems impossible to say anything for certain from the way they're presented by the art, but the story acknowledges that Brynne might just be seeing what she wants to, chasing ghosts. She talks her way into an interview with Nick and hides an extra camera in his office while his back is turned, then gets him to slip up and mention Andrew was sick with some terminal illness. Brynne gets footage of Nick and her boss discussing all this and how they can frame her, then leaks it online before confronting her boss, blowing up his plan to bribe her with fame.

I was a little confused that Matt, clearly aware that Brynne copied the camera files, and having received no confirmation she deleted them as he demanded, didn't warn Nick about her. But he seems perfectly willing to throw Nick under the bus when she confronts him at the end, so maybe the point was he didn't care. Nick may or may not have been helping Andrew with a mercy kill after one last climb (and Andrew may or may not have had second thoughts too late), but for Matt, it was only ever content. Get clicks, get eyes, get likes, so on. He clearly thinks he's clever and intimidating, but he misreads Brynne at every turn. She had a guy whose crimes she exposed shove a gun in her face before killing himself, Matt was never going to be intimidating with threats of lawyers, or even a hammer.

Rogues #2, by El Torres and Pablo M. Collar (creators), Monkey Typers (lettering) - This is actually just the cover to the first issue, but I didn't feel like tracking down the actual cover image.

The framing sequence for the issue is a guy in his library or writing room, feverishly scribbling down dire portents about horrors from beyond the veil preparing to attack and destroy the world. All of which is Bram and Weasel's fault, as we learn over the course of the rest of the issue. They got bored after a successful job left them comfortably well off and went for a walk. They returned a year later, sniping at each other and carrying a bag with an eye inside.

An eye which "voorps" them to the realm of Yog-Sothoth, who warns them they have opened a door that can't be closed, blah blah back to their world. Weasel talks Bram out of chopping the eye up with an axe, but fortunately demon dogs emerge from the fireplace, so the axe doesn't go unused. A subsequent flashback - within the original flashback? - shows they met a holy man in the north, who promised them ruins shown on no map, but full of treasures. Yeah, it was a trap, but they kill the Outer God he summoned and kept his eye, which they sell to the guy telling us the story. And then it starts raining frogs.

I can't tell if the writer, called Echpiel the Scholar, is eager to use the eye, or if he's just academically curious (in a slightly unhinged way) about seeing the emergence of these beings. Bram and Weasel are only starting to grasp this really could be something bad at the end, but I expect their response will still just be to try and stab whatever shows up while arguing with each other. Or maybe take a break from the arguing, which seems to be their default state, long enough to stab it, whichever.

The monsters, as drawn by Collar, don't really convey mind-shattering horror. They're large, there's usually a lot of tentacles, and there's liberal use of shadows to disguise things, but it is tricky to manage, I guess. It's easy to draw something disgusting or frightening in a body horror vein, but I'm not sure how you draw something and imply its presence drives you mad. Maybe you have to distort the image, or take a mosaic approach that suggests the viewer is losing their grip as they try to take in what they're looking at

In any event, it's probably moot since Bram and Weasel are the ones describing the encounters. They're clearly don't see the creatures as anything particularly horrific. Weasel dismissed Byatis, whose eye they took, as basically like a chimera. No big deal. Perhaps they're like the Tick, and you can't shatter a mind that doesn't exist?

Sunday Splash Page #338

 

"Widescreen. No, Wider," in Marvel Super Special #10, by Doug Moench (writer), Gene Colan (penciler), Tom Palmer (inker/colorist), John Costanza (letterer)

Marvel Super Special was one of Marvel's big magazines of the late-70s/early-80s. It seems to be have been mostly devoted to adaptations of various films of the time. Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Last Starfighter, Conan the Barbarian. The last issue was the Howard the Duck movie.

The only story I have is the lone Star-Lord appearance in issue 10, where Peter Quill and Ship come under attack by some mysterious beam emanating from a black hole, which pulls Quill and (separately) Ship through the other end, where they encounter the enormous civilization-ship pictured above. The people on-board are gracious, hospitable and look much like Earthlings.

They are also, of course, hiding ulterior motives. Star-Lord ends up in the middle of a civil war between the part of the population that want to continue life on their ship, and those who want to settle on an actual planet (like, say, Earth.) In a precursor to his story in Marvel Preview, Moench has Star-Lord try to insist of reasoning with the conqueror side, only to conclude it's futile. Quote, 'He rejects the pacifism which will not work. He scorns the non-violence which brings nothing but death. HE FIGHTS!'

Moench seems to conflate not killing with non-violence, which is kind of asinine for a guy who wrote comics about people in costumes punching criminals. Bushmaster probably didn't consider Moon Knight "non-violent," even before Spector cut his face off. I feel it's worth mentioning that in the last Claremont/Infantino Star-Lord story, Quill is able to defeat a civilization-battleship that is destroying inhabited worlds under the notion it's better to kill them before they could potentially become a threat. He does this without killing anyone, but fights his way through security when he has to. Non-lethal, not non-violent.

But as mentioned last week, Moench's Star-Lord is a dim bulb. Everything that's happening has to be explained to him. He doesn't figure out any of the deception on his own. The story starts with him having a dream of people first hailing him as a savior, then cursing him, but he's less a savior to the side he helps than a blunt weapon they use to overcome the militaristic faction's firepower advantage.