Let It Go, Before It Drags You Under

I don't think I was ever a particularly big fan of Vicious, Spike's old partner from his crime syndicate hitman days, and the closest thing to a final boss Cowboy Bebop has. Spike's never afraid of Vicious, or hesitant to face him. If anything, he's almost psychotic at times about wanting to kill Vicious. And Vicious is usually content to make Spike fight through two or three dozen goons to get at him. Which, while entirely appropriate for a villain, doesn't do a lot to burnish his credentials as a badass.

Yes, you kicked Spike out a window, after he'd been shot three times mowing down your cannon fodder. Bra-vo. *sarcastic golf clap*

Rewatching the series this spring made me, if anything, even less impressed. Vicious spends most of the series steadily taking control of "The Syndicate", until he's basically the Kingpin for the entire Solar System. He's got dozens of guys ready to die for him. Money, power, influence, drugs, weapons, all that stuff at his beck and call. And, upon reaches that pinnacle, Vicious decides he's got to finish Spike off once and for all. Bring the entire syndicate down on him, the proverbial anvil to crush a cockroach.

Meanwhile, Spike is barely managing a subsistence-level existence as a bounty hunter. Living on a beat to hell scow of a spaceship, with a grumpy ex-cop and a woman who's a walking advertisement for those gambling addiction hotline numbers. Given how readily Spike bails to pursue any lead on Julia or to get at Vicious, I don't think he's really happy with that life. Either it's the best he thinks he can get, or the best he deserves, or he just doesn't see the point in trying for anything better without Julia.

Watching the finale, having seen Spike's life over the previous 20+ episodes, all I could think was, "Vicious, sweetie, you won the break-up. Move on."

I'm sure Vicious would argue there's some higher ideal behind his actions. That once you're in, you're in until death. That Spike, by trying to leave for a peaceful life with Julia, betrayed the ideals of The Syndicate as surely as Vicious claimed its leaders did when he staged his coup. If you let one person get away with leaving, The Syndicate looks weak.

So Spike has to be killed as an example, even though the life he's living could serve as a cautionary tale to anyone thinking about bailing. Stick with the Syndicate, at least you'll die in a nice suit, instead of in a second-rate blue suit that makes you look like a broker on a losing streak.

And refusing to let it go gets Vicious killed. He loses everything he got almost as soon as he got it, because he wouldn't let go of an old grudge. Of course, Spike would argue they both were supposed to die years ago, when things first came to a head. This was just both of them finally realizing it. The heart still pumping blood, even if there's no conscious mind to make use of it. So maybe they both got what they wanted, in the end.

Overdue Movie Reviews #15 - Necessary Roughness (1991)

The Texas State Armadillos were national champions of college football. They were also cheating in a variety of ways, including steroid use, paying players under the table, and fixing grades so players could remain academically eligible. So their national championships were nullified - do you remember them winning the national championship? No you don't, according to the NCAA - scholarships revoked, and coaches fired. The program is dead.

The university president (Fred Thompson) decides to rehab the school's rep by hiring Ed "Straight Arrow" Gennero (Hector Elizondo), a retired coach known for not tolerating any sketchy stuff, even if it means kicking a star player off the team. That's why he's retired, boosters don't approve of principles. But this shattered husk of a program has no boosters, so Gennero gets to run the program as he sees fit. He brings in his old defensive coordinator, Wally Rig (Robert Loggia) to help turn a bunch of walk-on students into a football team.

Unfortunately, none of the walk-ons with good enough grades to survive the obnoxious dean's (Larry Miller) attempts to kill the team can play quarterback, so Wally recruits Paul Blake (Scott Bakula), who walked away from football 16 years ago to run the family cattle ranch, to play QB. As a 34-year-old freshman. Who smokes, a lot, and runs like a guy who smokes a lot and spent the last decade-and-a-half wrangling large, stubborn cattle.

Can Blake be the leader Gennero wants? Can he get this group of oddballs to play together and experience victory?

I did, technically, discuss this movie briefly in the opening paragraph of a comic review post back in 2009, but it wasn't really a proper review. Now, does this movie merit a proper review? Well, at least as much as any number of shitty movies I watched on Netflix over the years.

This movie is like Escape to Athena, where it's as much about what a bonkers cast it has as anything the movie itself actually does with that cast. Escape to Athena is better, having the advantage of being a suspenseful adventure set in World War 2. That's a stronger base for a story. Necessary Roughness is ultimately just a sports comedy, but it's full of people where I can stop and go, "Hey, That Guy!"

Besides the people listed above, you have early career Jason Bateman as the spoiled son of a major donor to the university. Sinbad plays a professor that walked away from college football to pursue chemistry. Blake convinces him to use his last year of eligibility to play offensive and defensive line. Rob Schneider is the team's radio announcer (we only ever see him in the broadcast booth, and he never directly interacts with anyone else, which is probably the best way to use Rob Schneider.) Desperate for a field goal kicker, Wally recruits Lucy (Kathy Ireland) from the girl's soccer team. Harley Jane Kozak plays an Intro to Journalism professor that had a crush on Blake when they went to rival high schools, and the two start up a relationship. While she's one of his teachers.

Which, look. In addition to Miller playing a snotty little tin dictator of a bureaucrat as he so often has, the dean is panting after Dr. Carter, and absolutely determined to crush the team by hook or crook. That said, I don't think he's wrong there are ethical concerns about a teacher dating a student, even if they're both in their 30s. Especially when the student's participation in an extra-curricular is contingent on his grades staying up, though the one example of Blake's work we hear in a class assignment demonstrates a thoughtfulness that suggests he's at least trying to be a good student.

(Also, Bakula is 37 when the movie came out, so he's at least close to 34, unlike all the movies and shows where a 28-year-old plays a high schooler.) 

The rest of the roster is filled with various broad characters. Manu, a big Samoan guy that plays center and initially annoys Blake by treating him as an elder to be respected. (Blake's response: 'I'm not that eld.') A bull-riding farm boy. A pair of twins that spend a lot of time fighting each other. An ROTC guy that's way too intense. A white boy really into martial arts that gets nicknamed "Samurai", and is the sole guy who only plays defense (Blake being the one who only plays offense.) A track star turned wideout who can't catch. An Aussie rugby player that doesn't want to wear pads or helmets. The Aussie gets knocked out in practice and Gennero admiringly observes he didn't drop the pass. Sure, only cost him a few thousand brain cells.

The movie has a lot going on. Probably too much. My dad said once it feels like a pilot for a TV show that got turned into a movie instead. Blake and Carter's relationship. Blake trying to figure out what, exactly Gennero is trying to get from him. Rig trying to get at little respect as a coach (his only offer prior to this was to coach football at a girl's school. In England.) Bateman's thing with his dad. The dean's attempts to cut the team off at the knees. Manu and Lucy strike up a relationship almost immediately, Manu trying very hard to be chivalrous. Not that I can blame him, hustling to make time with Kathy Ireland.

There probably could have been something about Lucy trying to prove herself to a team full of guys. When she's showing off her ability to kick (showing really terrible form, she's moving flat-footed), Sinbad opines this is what happened to pro wrestling, women taking over. Yeah, and once we got past the obnoxious bra-panty match shit (and Jerry Lawler's brain-dead drooling over same) it kicked ass. 

As it is, the team sucks so bad they can't afford to turn down any help they can get, though Gennero is still reluctant to even let her on the field to attempt a game-tying field goal. Because he's afraid she'll get hurt. Typically kickers don't get hit much. There are penalties for it and everything. 

There's the sole holdover from last year's team, a walk-on named Charlie Banks, who still can't get on the field for a team that's resorted to having 10 guys play both offense and defense. You think they'd at least try giving those guys the occasional breather, risk playing the few other players they have. Especially when they're losing games 40-6. Apparently Gennero's in the Tom Thibodeau school of coaching that says you aren't trying to win unless you grind your best players into dust by playing them constantly.

So some things get more run than others. Bateman's issues with his dad just buying his way through trouble crops up very briefly near the start of the final third of the movie, but there's really nothing to set it up beyond Gennero telling Rig that the dad's name is on buildings all over campus.

The Gennero and Blake issue surfaces periodically. I can't really figure out what Gennero is looking for any more than Blake can. (Carter at one point suggests simply asking Gennero. Blake responds that a coach can't speak to a player like he's human.) In their first game, Gennero calls the same running play three times in a row, the first two attempts being disasters. When the huddle groans on the third time, Blake changes the play to a deep pass to Featherstone, the track star. It would have been a touchdown, except Featherstone can't catch. Gennero benches Blake for the rest of the game. When Blake tries prostrating himself the next day, promising to just run whatever Gennero calls so long as he can play, promising it's Gennero's team, Gennero says it has to be Blake's team, but won't explain that.

Which I guess is not speaking to him like he's human, but more like some sage or hermit on a mountaintop, talking in riddles. I mean, Blake tried to make it his team, by calling a play that might actually work, and Gennero immediately punished him.

Blake tries joining the team at a bar after another loss, tries keeping them out of a fight with the star linebacker of the #1 team in the nation, the Texas Colts, until said linebacker - appropriately named Flattop - insults Manu. Blake sticks up for his center, by starting a brawl. That's no good either. When they manage a not-loss and Bateman's dad invites the team to a party with champagne and nice jackets, Gennero shows up screeching about boosters and not accepting gifts. Blake (already in a bad mood because the dean caught him making kissy face with Dr. Carter) tells him to back off, and Gennero gets on his ass again.

I think Gennero wants Blake to get the entire team rowing in the same direction, but none of his attempts are apparently acceptable until Blake gets Sinbad to help Bateman actually study to pass his midterms. Which are happening awfully late in the semester to be taking place ahead of their final game, against, naturally, the Texas Colts. This is also the conclusion of Bateman's character's arc. He refuses to give his dad the chance to bail him out, because it would hurt the team if one of the players got their grades paid for.

Loggia gets the best lines. Early on, it's sarcastic asides to things Gennero says. Featherstone drops a pass in practice and Gennero tells him to keep his eyes on the ball. Rig adds, 'Keep your hands on the ball, too.' When Gennero tells him to keep his nose out of Gennero's offense, Rig replies, 'You got a quarterback that can't throw the ball, we're gonna be playing a hell of a lot of defense.'

During the climactic game, where Rig has to be head coach, it's things he shouts. 'Don't throw it to Stone Hands!' is one my dad still quotes, but the best is probably Rig's halftime speech where he stops trying to act like the polite and intellectual coach he thinks people want and starts screaming about how you play winning football. 'You go out there and tear off their fucking heads and shit down their necks! *pause* Now let us pray.'

It's funny neither coach seems very good at the half of the ball they're in charge of. Gennero seems to favor an offense that runs the ball. Wins in the trenches, controls the clock. The team is not built for it. The offensive line can't handle it, and their running backs crash into each other a lot. Plus, for all Blake's limitations in mobility (he gets better as the season progresses), the dude's arm is legit. Bateman and the Australian rugby guy can at least catch the ball if Featherstone can't. So can Charlie Banks. Throw the fucking ball! Go West Coast Offense, short, timed passing game, with Blake zipping it into tight windows and the receivers using their shiftiness to gain additional yards after the catch.

Meanwhile, Rig is a defensive coordinator, but can't recognize what defensive coverage the Colts are using at one point, and has to ask Popke, the back-up QB who thought being asked to show off his arm meant flexing. Late in the game, it's Gennero who figures out what defense to call to stop a Colts' drive and get the Armadillos the ball back.

Like I said several paragraphs ago, it's a sports movie. The team is losing big in the climactic game, then turns it around after Rig's inspiring speech, with trick plays and some other big stuff. I do laugh when, prior to the final play, Manu promises Blake that they'll (meaning the Colts' defense) never touch him. Blake probably wishes you could have managed that any time in the previous 59 minutes and 59 seconds, because he's taking head shots on almost every play. By the end of that game, Blake probably had fewer brain cells left than the rubgy guy.

It doesn't reinvent the wheel in any particular way, and feels both overstuffed and undercooked, but there are some funny lines and it plays the usual beats well enough that I don't mind spending 100 minutes on it. 

What I Bought 8/12/2026 - Part 2

As I begin another no doubt exhausting week as Emergency Unit Chief - I'm 20 minutes into my term as this post goes up, so I'm probably still sifting through last week's e-mails - we look at the two comics from last week. A pair of 7th issues, books that narrowly avoided the ax in July.

D'Orc #7, by Brett Bean (writer/artist), Frank William (colorist), Nate Piekos (letterer) - Dual-wielding a shield and a headless chicken. Bold choice, Cotton, let's see if it works for him.

D'Orc, the shield and the chicken fall into the Boglands. D'Orc's still reeling from the angry dwarf's "I am your father!" reveal last issue, and wanders about until he finds a cabin. Where a polite woman named Mylinda offers him tea, and the door is kicked in by bog monsters. Which are repelled by the tea, just like I would be.

D'Orc seems smitten with Mylinda, so he sticks around to help repair her door, and fend off more bog monsters. Mylinda kicks the chicken and the shield out to find ingredients for more tea, then drugs D'Orc with a candle. Because she's a succubus. Man, no luck at all for this kid. Chicken and shield are approached by the bog monsters, who are what's left of her past victims, including her first love, Charles. Chicken animates his body and guides Mylinda into the water, leaving the trio to press on again. Except now there's an angry golem-woman on their tail.

D'Orc can't find anyone that's not trying to use him. Even those not actively trying to kill or harm him, like the Bone Witch, want him alive to take revenge for them against someone else. There was Barry in issue 4, I suppose. He wasn't out to harm D'orc or get anything from him, but he also wasn't really helping him. Everyone who lends one hand is concealing something in their other. Which is a depressing state of affairs. He can't find anyone that is simply willing to help another person?

I mean, it's not like the shield or the chicken have much choice. One can't move on its own, the other wouldn't get far with a headless body. I don't know what Bean's trying to say with that state of affairs. The people on both sides are too concerned with "good" and "evil" as abstract concepts that are absolute, and miss the spirit of what doing good (or evil) really is? I may have to wait until D'Orc spends a little more time on the dark side of the scar, then compare who he met there versus the light side.

Bean does a good job on Mylinda's initial design, making her look unassuming. Some of it's the big eyes, and the wiggly, uneven line he uses for her mouth. Plus her tendency to make herself look small. Lean on a railing, or hold her arms in close to her body. Makes her look shy or a bit awkward, like she's worried about D'orc taking offense and leaving. Which she was, in a way. Nothing suspicious to see here! She's just oddball who likes living in this swamp, even with the frequent bog monster attacks.

He also mostly draws her and D'orc's interactions in profile up to that point, so that they're on the same level, even if she's taller. But when things shift, Bean either uses her bangs to shade her eyes ominously, or angles the perspective so she's looming over D'Orc. Of course, D'Or's also drugged unconscious by that point, which is ominous enough on its own.

Generation X-23 #7, by Jody Houser (writer), Marco Renna (artist), Erick Arciniega (color artist), Ariana Maher (letterer) - Awwww, look who's front and center on the cover like he's still a sales draw. Who's the angry Canadian that still thinks it's 1993?

Laura and Gabby come home to find Logan bleeding on their floor, though he apparently didn't expect them to still be living there. Nor did he know they'd picked up some new boarders. Logan downplays his lack of a healing factor, because he's a man and that's what we do. Curiously, nobody mentions the set of broken claws. I guess it's obvious the claws wouldn't grow back if there's no healing factor, but you'd think the lack of adamantium would raise questions.

The Generated are listening in, and finally barge in when the conversation turns to them. They want to return to the Facility and explore. Learn more about themselves, and how much of what X-Infinite told them was true. The Snikt Squad reluctantly agree to take them back, where they find a bunch of dead humans, and that some of the Laura-bots have been rebuilt. There's a fight, and in the process, they find the Orphan-Maker. Which means Nanny's around, stealing genetically-altered mutant babies. Because apparently there was an entire nursery ward nobody found the last time.

We get to see the Generated help in the fight, and they seem to have gotten a little more comfortable since last issue. Which is strange, considering it's been one day since then. Maybe fight unliving robots is easier, but Port and Time Bomb combine their powers effectively, and Surprise! (she insists on the exclamation point) doesn't hesitate on what to shift into, and works up a combo with Scout.

Renna illustrates the fight pretty well, although it's funny to see Logan slashing at robots with his busted-ass bone claws. Or was he punching them? On the other hand, Nanny's Mr. Potato-head press-on lips were terrifying. When did that get added to her look? Admittedly, I'm not sure I've read a comic with Nanny in it since Storm got de-aged to a kid back in the Claremont/Jim Lee days, but I do not remember fake lips being part of the package. Does Nanny think they make her more acceptable to children?

Sunday Splash Page #440

"Tremors," in Atomic Robo: The Vengeful Dead #5, by Brian Clevinger (writer), Scott Wegener (artist), DJ Chavis (colorist), Jeff Powell (letterer)

After Dawn of a New Era, Clevinger and Wegener switched from monthly physical comics to a strictly online release. Which has never been my jam, and since the website requires I either subscribe or drop my ad blocker, neither of which are things I'm wont to do, I was at a bit of an impasse. Fortunately, they do release hardback collections of the mini-series. The Vengeful Dead is the only collection they have from after Dawn of a New Era from what I can tell on their website. Since I don't know when there might be another, let's talk about this.

Vengeful Dead finds Tesladyne mourning the apparent death of Bernard, while also trying to render their dimension - or at least their Earth - immune to attacks from the Vampire Dimension. Foley is still trying to get the students - now including ALAN - to learn to work as a team. Jenkins is trying to prepare everyone to fend off an invasion. Robo is trying to fend off Richard Branson's continued grousing about the noise.

(One thing I'll note here, Wegener draws Branson in a way that I found recognizable. I have a general idea of what the guy looks like, noticeable beard, vaguely leathery face, and this version is close enough. In Dawn of a New Era, Vik and Lang thwart Branson's HOA shenanigans by getting the other member, Twitter/SpaceX Boy, to vote in their favor, under threat of not letting him use Tesla's name for his cars. Wegener's version looks nothing like the actual putz. Not sure why.)

The students struggle to focus on both their actual assignment - improve the output of the facility's solar array - and what is mathematically possible for them to achieve. I still struggle keeping their names straight beyond Ben being The Guy, but they're at least developing more distinct personalities. Margot's the overachiever/perfectionist, Ben's easily distracted and sarcastic, Olivia's morally flexible and a little cynical. It's something.

The best bit is the friendship between Jenkins and ALAN. They spend a lot of time monitoring the vampires' attempts to breach the protective barrier around the planet, and Jenkins eventually gives ALAN a codename: Laughing Scorpion. Because he's funny. By Jenkins' standards. It's fun to see Jenkins' hyper-serious, all-go no-quit, attitude played off ALAN's knowledgeable but naive perspective. Because ALAN is either asking honest questions that sound sassy, or clever enough to disguise his sass within those questions:

Jenkins: Did you have an exit strategy for disobeying my orders?

ALAN: Are you asking because you didn't have an exit strategy for obeying them?

Jenkins: That's classified.

The vampires are not only repelled through ridiculous science, they can, I think, safely be written off as a threat going forward. This via an entirely different bit of ridiculous science. Ridiculously awesome science. And don't Neil Degrasse Tyson me about cheapening the word, if someone could actually pull that stunt off, it would be awe-inspiring. An artificially designed ley line field, powered by the Earth's motion around the Sun, hurling a bullet train through a breach in dimensions at nearly the speed of light at a planet full of vampires.

Except if this happened in our world, they'd probably screw up, hit Earth and doom us all. That aside, I especially like the panel where it shows what's happening, with a strikethrough the words "Vampire Earth."

Bernard shows up looking like he escaped one of Jack Kirby's stranger stories. Given the character commanding the vampires was introduced with Bernard (in volume 4, Other Strangeness), it's fitting. How far both of them have come from that point where their paths first, briefly, crossed. ALAN gets to learn some things about living among humans he never expected, or probably wanted, to learn. And, if the final panel is any indication, Tesladyne is set to get a new instructor/headache.

Most of the vampires are an indistinguishable mass, but the only one that really matters is Vampiricus Rex, so that's fine. Wegener draws him as appropriately beefy to look good tossing Robo around like a sassy sack of laundry. The rest are just there as a general threat the others have to fend off until the plan can take effect. The stuff that matters is there in loving detail from Wegener and Chavis, whose colors are a lot brighter than some of the later IDW mini-series were. Colors in those tended towards muted, often muddy tones, that sometimes overwhelmed Wegener's pencils entirely. Maybe he just has more time this way to focus on individual pages, but Wegener's art is pretty strong here. He's refined his style to where it's more efficient, a bit simpler, but still detailed in the places it needs to be.

Saturday Splash Page #242

"Dark of the Moon," in Vengeance of the Moon Knight (vol. 2) #1, by Jed MacKay (writer), Alessandro Cappuccio (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer)

The first volume of Vengeance of the Moon Knight - which I usually forget exists - came out in 2009, after volume 3 of Moon Knight. Which I bought for 11 issues, but retain only 1, which has no splash pages, and therefore did not get a Sunday Splash Page entry. This volume follows on from Jed MacKay's volume of Moon Knight, which I tagged as volume 8, and concluded with Marc Spector getting blown to bits.

With Khonshu imprisoned in Asgard, there's no bringing Marc back. So the rest of the cast - Reese, Soldier, Hunter's Moon, Tigra and 8-Ball - are trying to carry on the work of the Midnight Mission in his stead. Well, Tigra is really more intent on hunting down Black Spectre for killing Marc - though I'm pretty sure Zodiac took care of him - but in theory, they continue to protect those who travel at night and whatnot. Except, who's this guy in the palette-swapped outfit calling himself Moon Knight and beating the crap out of criminals?

The new guy's identity is the mystery of the first few issues. Once he demonstrated his powers in issue 2, I had him figured. I was even right about it, which was nice.

MacKay returns to the approach of inserting flashbacks of events between excerpts of conversations with Marc's psychiatrist, Dr. Sterman. Except it's a different character each issue. Reese in issue 1, Tigra in issue 2, Hunter's Moon in issue 4, and so on. A way to explore not only how each of them is handling Marc's death - Tigra, poorly, the others varying degrees of better - but what he meant to them.

(In the first issue, we see in flashback that, since Marc was Jewish and none of them knew what to do, Reese contacted Ben Grimm for help with the rites. Because Ben, as Mr. Knight mentioned at one point in MacKay's first volume, always sent Marc a card at Hanukkah. So Reese is trying to honor what she can of Marc's heritage. That was a nice little scene that I enjoyed.)

Then the book gets, should I say hijacked? Diverted maybe, into Blood Hunt tie-ins. Which, for those who can't keep track of Marvel's baker's dozen of events a year, was the one where someone hijacked all the Darkforce users' powers to blot out the sun worldwide, and vampires ran amok. Something to that effect. Vampires prey on night travelers, Fists of Khonshu are supposed to protect night travelers, one fist (Hunter's Moon) is apparently not enough, and so, they need Marc back. Which means freeing Khonshu. From Asgard jail. Well, shit, Loki escapes from there all the time. How hard can it be?

Alessandro Cappuccio draws the first 5 issues, and 7 in total. His work, with Rosenberg's colors, is much the same as it was in Moon Knight. Thin, sharp lines. Minimalist on the backgrounds, unless it was a particular setting like Sterman's office. New York City feels like a very sterile, empty place in Cappuccio's world. Rosenberg sticks to solid blocks of color for the surroundings, and leaves the shading for the characters. The world doesn't have much give in it, and the characters deal with that by closed themselves off in certain ways. Focused, in denial, deflecting with humor, diving into anger.

Devmalya Pramanik draws the other two issues, and is trying to find his footing with the characters. The designs are little rougher, proportions wonky at times, though some of that is Pramanik gets more creative with the perspectives and page layouts. But the characters are more detailed, a wider range of expressions that run towards exaggeration but don't go over the line, or at least not far over the line.

End result - and how they bust Khonshu out is clever, in the sense it makes me grin - Marc's alive again, vampires are defeated, and then he has to deal with the imposter. I guess because they're using his title and not Hunter's Moon's. That's where the volume ends, at 9 issues, and the next, which we might reach by year's end, begins. 

What I Bought 8/12/2026 - Part 1

In yet another example of my spectacular timing, I managed to schedule a week off during the hottest week of the year. It's been a billion damn degrees out there everyday since Sunday, and will apparently continue for another two days. And when it cools off, I'm back at work, and covering for Bill as he goes on another week-long fishing trip.

In addition to the two books from this week, the local guy had another book on the shelves that wasn't there last week. I guess somebody didn't want to pay for the anniversary issue. Can't say I blame them, really. A decent chunk of the additional pages are pages or covers from notable prior issues of FF (as in, the original pages, whether by Kirby, Byrne, Buscema, etc.), but with Ramos adding in the current bunch watching invisibly. Yes, that is underwhelming.

Fantastic Four #15, by Ryan North (writer), Humberto Ramos (penciler), Victor Olazaba (inker), Edgar Delgado (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - The green monster from the cover of the first issue of FF made the cover. Not Annihilus, Mole Man, Namor, any of the team's various allies and replacements, but that big monster, yes. That's the sort of thing that would really annoy the Wizard.

A scullery maid contemplates the dreary nature of her life, when four strangely dressed people appear out of thin air, asking for her help to keep them from moving backwards in time. Yes, North is doing another FF story centered around time travel. Man's going to wear a footpath through timestream at this rate.

Nicholas Scratch - North has used him twice now, but Diablo can't get any run - has figured out temporal magic and reversed the FF's flow, so they're moving backwards. They need an electrical charge and something really cold to disrupt the effect and get them moving the right way again. Also, I'm not sure how Sue is using her power to induce an encounter with regular time, as Reed puts it. Or why, if they're moving backwards through time, they aren't also speaking backwards from the maid's perspective.

The maid, Clarina Canady, is extremely chill about all this. Especially given one of them is a big rock guy. But she's stoked at the idea a woman can be a natural philosopher, aka a scientist, so she spends 20 years working on something to create a charge, waiting for the FF to pop up earlier, from their perspective, in their journey. Reed's able to give Clarina more info about the cold-producing device, and she works on that for another 20 years. But the FF don't show up, and she somehow figures out that their meeting her in her past is messing up where they appeared in her future.

I don't follow, but let's roll with it, as Clarina spends the last 20 years of her life designing a primitive airship that can hold her and the things she built to help the FF. She does, their time starts flowing the right direction, and her heart gives out. The FF make the aforementioned trip back through a handful of specific moments in their history, confront Scratch again, and Johnny knocks him out by pretending to be the mindless copy Scratch had unleashed to initially lure them in. But to sell it, he had to get rid of his mustache, which has to be just about the clearest sign North's run is wrapping up, if he's putting things back to factory standard.

Also, for some reason the sleeves of their outfits are a different color (black) when she meets them the last time than in her first two encounters (blue.) But then, when they reappear moments after Scratch sent them away, the sleeves are blue, and only the gloves are black.

The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien

This is a collection of short stories O'Brien wrote about his time serving in Vietnam. Sort of. There is a young man named Tim O'Brien in the stories, but he's not necessarily the real Tim. He's Story-Tim. Story-Tim created problems for me. 

"Ambush" is about a man Tim killed when he was on night watch over a road in the jungle. This follows, "The Man I Killed," about another man in Tim's platoon trying to pull him away from staring at the body, while Tim's mind invents an entire life for this corpse. That he was sickly and studious growing up, that he went to college to study mathematics, but returned to his village to do his duty and fight as a Viet Cong, only to get blown apart by a grenade one night.

50 pages later, in "Good Form," O'Brien states he did not actually kill the man in the story. He did see a man die on that trail, and because he was present, he feels guilt. Then he says, 'But listen. Even that story is made up. I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth.'

He spends another 4 paragraphs talking about how what you feel can be a truer representation of what happened than what actually happened, and so he feels he can answer his daughter's question of whether he killed anyone with either "yes" or "no", and it'll be true either way.

Which, OK, fine. Granting I'm coming at this in a world 36 years after the collection was published, I'm not sure I'm up for arguing how what I feel the world is more accurately reflects it than the actual facts. Smacks of "alternative facts." It's not O'Brien's fault I'm making that connection, and this is ultimately fiction, so it doesn't have to be factually true.

But inserting himself - or a version of himself - in the stories, then dancing back and forth about whether it's really him, or a "vibes" version of him, doesn't do the work any favors. Now as I'm reading, I'm wondering if this is about him or someone else. If it happened, if it didn't happen. If it didn't, what point he's trying to make writing like it did. If it did happen, what point he's trying to make actually telling it. Or, if it happened, why, as in the events surrounding "Kiowa's" death described in "Speaking of Courage," he attributed it to another person entirely.

I'm stuck in some awkward, stuttering, meta-aware state where I can't simply read the story and then decide what I thought about it or took from it, because I'm hung up on his approach. I'm interacting with the style and not the text, which is usually a bad sign for me when it comes to books (Tristram Shandy being the prime example of a book that's entire approach just pissed me off to the point I couldn't take anything from the book except how much I hated it.) If he just doesn't use his own name in the stories, changes it like he did all the others, it's a non-issue.

It isn't as though he's trying to make himself look better, unless this is all performative self-disgust. "On the Rainy River" is about Story-Tim receiving his draft notice and briefly fleeing to Minnesota, right near the Canadian border. There he stalls out, for days, at this cluster of fishing cabins that are closed for the season, unable to decide which direction to go. Ultimately, he goes back, out of shame. Because he's too afraid of the scorn he'd face, from people he'd likely never see again, if he became a draft-dodger.

I imagine that informs the sense of collective guilt and responsibility he applies in "The Man I Killed", and "Ambush." He didn't want to go to this war. It wasn't his war, he didn't believe in it. But he didn't have strong enough convictions to run. He let the weight of opinion of people he barely knew make his decision for him. And so, for that cowardice, he is responsible for the dead man.

Now, just that dead man, or all the dead men (and women, and children) in the villages getting burned out or airstriked because one soldier got sniped? Not sure, though he tends to rather relate them calling in napalm or whatever the way you or I might describe watching the path of a mail truck. Guilt only goes so far, I suppose.

That said, O'Brien's a pretty good writer. The obsessive creation of a life in "The Man I Killed," the way he's conjured up this entire idea of who this man was. Especially in terms of the life he conjures, which seems like it mirrors his in certain ways. The studious, reluctant soldier. The killer, projecting himself onto the victim, seeing a possible future for himself.

The periodic lines from Kiowa, increasing in frequency, as he tries to get Tim to stop staring, and later tries to get him to talk about it. He doesn't offer any consolation, because there's nothing to say. The man is dead. That can't change now. Story-Tim threw the grenade, and all this stuff he's fabricating about the dead man doesn't really matter. Whether the man was like what Tim envisions or not, he's not that any longer. And Tim hears it, but it just rolls off him. They're short, discrete sentences that have no connection to what's running through his head.

O'Brien also captures the collective weight of opinion that drives people into doing things they'd rather not, and what that does to their psyche. "The Things They Carried," as a marker of what helped the soldiers cope with the situation they were in. That helped them feel safe, or at least feel like they had some control over a situation they largely did not control. Because they ceded that control to someone else when they, for whatever reason, enlisted or showed up when drafted. And they know it, and they know they may die for it.

So they hold on to whatever they can. Letters from a girl back home that will never love them, or stockings from a girl that loved them, then left them. Or mean-spirited pranks, or religion, or whatever. And sometimes the different approaches grind against each other, the guy who wants silence against the guy who can't stop talking. The guy demanding a moral from how someone died against the one who thinks that notion is ridiculous. 

'They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.'

The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976)

Fed up with the team owner's miserly ways, and inspired by fellow ballplayer Leon Carter's (James Earl Jones) discussion of their needs to seize the means of production, Negro League pitcher Bingo Long (Billy Dee Williams) forms a team of the best players in the league. They travel the country, playing the local teams in whatever towns they reach, the money split evenly between the the players.

In much the same way I watched First Wives Club because it was touted in a post about Diane Keaton after her passing, I found out about this movie in a post discussing James Earl Jones' career. because it's really his and Williams' movie. Richard Pryor is the other big name in the cast, as rightfielder Charlie Snow, but his story is he plans to call himself "Carlos Nevada" and get into the white leagues as a Cuban. 

(There's also a recurring gag of Snow trying to explain how to calculate batting average to Holliday, played by Otis Day, a former player rendered mute by a beanball, and never getting it right.)

But it's mostly about Bingo and Leon, fittingly enough a pitcher and a catcher, albeit on rival teams when the game starts. Bingo's all flash and style, starting each game by facing the first batter with no fielders behind him, why asking the crowd (who chant along with him), 'Who gonna hit my invite pitch?' I have no idea what an "invite pitch" is, for the record. Big smiles, slick talk and charm, and Williams has all three in high supply. Bingo tends to talk before thinking, confident they'll figure things out when they have to, and if not, he'll apologize then. He dreams big, and that's not a bad thing, it's just he's not great at the planning on how to make those dreams reality.

He tends to dodge tough conversations, but he's not without principles. When Holliday gets robbed of their money from a game by their former team owner's goons, Bingo can't exactly bring himself to stand up for Holliday, but he pays everyone out of his own pocket to soothe tempers. though he also gives them Carter's share, without telling Carter until much later.

Carter's more well-read, more thoughtful, as you'd expect from a character played by James Earl Jones. Jones also gets to show a little style and fun. In the first scene, he cracks a home run off Bingo, after telling Bingo he stole his girlfriend. Bingo, of course, tries to play it off like he was tired of her, anyway. Carter's the one, when their former bosses start convincing local ballparks not to let them play, who rides ahead alone on his motorcycle to make sure the next game is still on. He's the one who eventually beats up those goons when they take him prisoner, after escaping inside a coffin.

Although it's Bingo who comes up with the idea of eventually challenging white teams, correctly reasoning the Negro League team owners can't do shit to try and intimidate them. And who convinces the team to showboat and play a bit comical to get the crowd to enjoy themselves more. Maybe white folks won't mind seeing their team lose to black players if they get a good laugh out of it in the process.

I was expecting, given this takes place in the 1930s, that there was going to be more danger as a result of angry white people. Certainly when they arrive for their first barnstorming game and the man who set it up tells them they need to drive down Main Street and put on a show. So you have the entire team, slowly parading down the street past a bunch of sour looking crackers, dancing and strutting and playing music and I was thinking this was about to get real ugly.

(I enjoyed the difference in the pre-game festivities between the black and white games. In the games between the black teams, there's singing and dancing and it's like a party. The white ballparks, there's marching bands playing the national anthem while everyone stands solemnly with their hand over their heart like they're watching a procession for a dead war hero. We crackers can take the fun out of anything.)  

Remarkably, it didn't. The majority of the conflict is from the efforts of the Negro League team owners, specifically the funeral home director - "Sallie Potter" played by Ted Ross - that owns Bingo's old team, to nip this barnstorming, profit-sharing business in the bud. Even though it's his fault, after he told his team he was docking them all a day's pay ($5) to cover the cost of a bus ticket to send Holliday home. Plus docking Bingo an extra $5 for fomenting dissension by pointing out Potter ought to pay for the ticket himself. He pissed off Bingo enough that Bingo listened to Carter, and now he doesn't want to accept the consequences. It's gotta be everyone else's problem. Class issues transcend race. Or race doesn't erase class issues?

(However, gender issues apparently trump class solidarity, as Potter is consistently a condescending dick to the one woman owner of a team, played by Mabel King, when she's the only one smart enough to suggest they take advantage of the drawing power of Bingo's team by scheduling "extradition" games against them.)

I'm a little surprised a funeral home director can afford two goons, but Potter certainly gets his money's worth. They, at various points, intimidate ticket booth workers, rob Holliday, maim Charlie, and kidnap Carter ahead of the big game between the barnstormers and a Negro league All-Star team. They don't actually show the maiming, though there's no question of what they do, or the cruelty of using the roar of the crowd when Carter hits a big home run to mask Charlie's screams as they do it.

It was definitely not something I was expecting the movie to do, since most of the roadblocks Potter had put in their path up to then, the team found ways to work around. Sent someone out on point to make sure their next game was still on, start playing white teams, and so on. This is more overt, not something Bingo can clever his way out of, and it exposes just how shoestring their operation is. Paying Charlie's hospital bill leaves the team unable to pay the hotel. When their attempt to duck out the back fails, they end up picking potatoes in a field for a day (24 bushels gets you about two-and-a-half bucks), to try and get Bingo's car out of hock.

They fail, the car gets auctioned, and two players decide to go back to their old teams rather than work in a field. And then Bingo steals a different, newer, car from the guy who bought his car and flees the town, to Carter's immense displeasure. This, people getting hurt, stealing cars, is not what he signed on for. It's not what "seizing the means of production," means to him.

Jones plays Carter as angry, but in a sort of sour, weary way. Even when Bingo tries jumping on his back to stop him walking away, Carter can't get angry enough to knock his ass out, only shove him away. He thought he was making a dream come true, but it's all falling apart, and it makes him a little sick. It would almost have been better for it to remain a dream, rather than see the reality of it. Especially when Bingo's still making these half-ass apologies with that big grin that says, "You can't stay mad at me, can you?" For Bingo, it was maybe just a means to an end, nothing more.

What I Bought 8/6/2026

With five books coming out last week, I was hoping for better luck than finding two, but by the time I made it back from a 2-day work trip, I really wasn't that inclined to care, versus just getting home and crashing out. So we got what we got.

Batgirl #22, by Tate Brombal (writer), Stephen Segovia (artist), Jason Paz (inker), Rain Beredo (colorist), Tom Napolitano (letterer) - I've long suspected Batgirl was no mere mortal, but I never would have imagined she was a bunch of flowers.

Cass is still inside her head, confronted by, I'm really not sure what the version of Forget-Me-Not in her head is. Post-hypnotic suggestion hallucination? Anyway, he wants her to recognize she killed his test subject, but when Cass is able to object, she realizes she's not actually the 8-year-old she appears to be. She can speak, which means she can understand words. Including what everybody was saying in those memories.

I mean, I guess? If we assume her memory is that good for things that happened over a decade ago, then I guess maybe she could retroactively piece things together now that she knows spoken language. I'm trying to envision myself as a child, hearing German, then replaying the conversation in my head a decade later with sufficient confidence I remembered words and sounds I didn't know well enough to now understand them.

Anyway, point being, she realizes she and the other girl, Victoria, became friends, despite the best efforts of their respective teachers. Cain couldn't beat empathy out of Cass, and Forget-Me-Not couldn't erase the actual person inside his "doll." Which is what got her killed, she went on a mission and her true self emerged at the wrong time.

Or maybe she didn't die. The body that started all this isn't Victoria, so Cass is holding out hope. And Forget-Me-Notm who was just hanging out in the basement to be confronted by the rest of the supporting cast, let's slip that someone paid him to do this. Is it a mysterious figure in a blue demon mask Jaya is working for? Well, maybe.

So maybe this is Brombal setting things up for the future, or it's their way of letting Cass confront her past and show how far beyond it she's gone. That she's grown to something more than Cain could ever have envisioned. Which ties back to something Bronze Tiger said late in her first ongoing, that Cain made her a weapon, but she made herself a hero. 

Marc Spector: Moon Knight #7, by Jed MacKay (writer), Devmalya Pramanik (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) -  I hope Marc doing a Wolverine pose doesn't mean we're going back to that stretch where he thought he was Wolverine, Spider-Man, or Captain America.

The Midnight Suns bust into the Mansion Ravenous and quickly come under attack from the dragon Ginnaar, now with a body made from the Mansion itself. Which means Blade's chainsaw is insufficient, despite his claim that everything he does is cool. Sounds like someone's buying into his own hype too much. Robbie driving his giant, burning muscle car through its chest doesn't work much better.

Stall tactics aren't going to get it done, so the drastic measure is - Daredevil?! Yes, with his radar sense and agility, the Man With No Fear dives in, avoiding the dragon's fire. Which is nails, because it's made from a house, so I guess fire would be counterproductive. Seriously though, I like that as a nod to Ginnaar's peculiar nature at the moment. Also, Pramanik and Rosenberg bust out the black-and-white line radar vision look for DD's dive, in panels radiating out from a red outline of DD's head. 

Anyway, Daredevil gets in close and wrenches out the sword that apparently still holds the dragon's sword. Which is a little odd to me. The Mansion couldn't release Ginnaar's soul from the sword? Or maybe it chose not to, to keep it in check. Follow orders, or lose access to a physical form. Whatever, dragon defeated, the Mansion emerges in Fairchild's body and Moon Knight - sells out the others. Offering them up to the mansion as pawns in exchange for his bunch. Not Clea, mind you, the man's not a complete imbecile. But Blade, DD, and Ghost Rider appear to be screwed.

The solicits for upcoming issues kind of ruined the surprise, but it's hard to see how this is a smart play, even if Marc is only pretending to be a backstabber. Which I'm not sure it is. If this is the end of Mackay's stint with the character, he could be setting him back to the guy none of the other cape community trust, albeit because he betrayed some of them to save his crew, rather than because he helped Khonshu conquer the world.

Sunday Splash Page #439

"Hero's (Underground) Journey," in Atomic Robo: Dawn of a New Era #4, by Brian Clevinger (writer), Scott Wegener (artist), Shannon Murphy (color artist), Jeff Powell (letterer)

Been a hot minute since we talked about Atomic Robo, huh? Well, more like 8 years. We left off with Savage Sword of Dr. Dinosaur, the penultimate Robo story released through Red 5. Dawn of a New Era is the last story released through IDW. There were several mini-series in between, none of which had a splash page. Which wouldn't necessarily stop me now, but back then, when I was more rigid about the "splash page" thing, and after I'd spent several weeks on Robo already, was a good excuse to move on.

So what happened in the 5 years between those 2 mini-series? Briefly:

Knights of the Golden Circle: Dr. Dinosaur's "time bomb" (5 nukes he stole, tied together in the shape of a dinosaur) threw Robo back to the 1860s. 20 years on, he teams up with Bass Reeves and Doc Holliday to stop Helsingard from conquering the United States, before Robo's reactor runs out of power.

Ring of Fire: A group called ULTRA has seized control of every super-science organization on Earth, including Tesladyne, under the auspices of saving the world from the Biomega threat. What's left of Tesladyne have to find what's left of Robo, build him a body, and find a way to stop an entire living island without causing nuclear winter.

Temple of Od: Set in the 1930s, Robo's on a mission in Manchuria for the U.S. government, working with Chinese resistance (including old acquaintance Helen McCallister from Deadly Art of Science) to rescue a Chinese quantum mechanics expert the Japanese captured because he figured out how to harness zero-point energy, what Edison called the Odic Force, and which a Japanese physicist has turned into a weapon.

Spectre of Tomorrow: Robo has the new Tesladyne open, which is going to focus on science and not saving the world from random weird shit. Seriously, you guys. Robo means it! To prove it, he's spending all his time holed up in his lab, while Vik and Lang try to deal with Richard Branson's annoying Homeowner's Association Complaints. Then unknown cyborgs start breaking down all over the world, and that leads back to Hashima Island (from The Ghost of Station X) and ALAN.

Which brings us here. One of two big developments is gung-ho badass Jenkins appears for the first time since Savage Sword of Dr. Dinosaur, looking a lot like Cable, with the cybernetic eye and hand. He's taking a break from waging his one-man shadow war against the forces that destroyed Tesladyne because he's worried about an invasion from the Vampire Dimension. He needs Tesladyne to help kick those bloodsuckers in the keister.

The Tesladyne Institute he finds is more of a school, with 3 students - Margo, Ben, and Olivia. Who immediately set to sneaking around the facility and trying to listen in on faculty meetings. As good, curious action scientists-to-be should. More troubling for Jenkins, Tesladyne has just 4 mentors. Great, in theory, ratio for teaching. Not so great for stopping an invasion from an entire planet of vampires.

In practice, it's not so great for the teaching either. Bernard, never entirely over losing the connection he had during the adventure in Hollow Earth (though at least he's past his apathy), is using mapping an extinct volcano as a test for a potential mobile robot assistant for future exoplanet exploration. Then he disappears (as far as everyone on the surface knows.) Vik and Lang (the latter rocking a white beard, making it look like he's aged dramatically since Spectre of Tomorrow) are supposed to be on vacation, but find an incursion from the Vampire Dimension at the particle accelerator. Jenkins? Jenkins is not suitable for young children. Or college-age students. Or anyone, actually.

Clevinger gives Robo a good line when Foley asks, in regards to what Jenkins might be able to teach, what the man does in his off-time. Robo's response? 'Intensifying isn't really an answer, is it?' 

Which leaves Foley, the youngest mentor, to do the teaching. Here, that's mostly about getting them to understand the difference between practical and impractical science. Being asked to design a paper airplane and coming up with a design that requires warp drive and hypothetical materials one Planck width thick is certainly creative, but not useful for getting you an actual paper airplane.

The other big development is the emergence of ALAN 2.0. Robo shot the computer that housed ALAN's brain with, as he put it, a lot of bullets, at the end of Ghost of Station X. But they needed its computing power and manufacturing capabilities to build Robo a new reactor power source in Ring of Fire, and that activated enough sentience for it to upload into some little drones Robo built during Spectre of Tomorrow that helped him keep Helsingard from taking control of ALAN's resources.

The rest of the staff are understandably pissed once they find out, given ALAN was going to use the Earth for fuel and irradiate the rest when he blasted off into space with the power of the hundreds of nukes he stole (and framed Robo for that theft, putting them on the run.) Robo argues this is the original version of ALAN Dr. Turing created, before decades alone in the dark. They can raise him to respect humanity, rather than regard them as a resource to expend if other things appear to take priority.

Lang's extremely hostile reaction is strong evidence Robo might have been right keeping ALAN hidden in his lab while he built him a body and taught him how to control it. When Lang comments it isn't reassuring to have one artificial intelligence vouching for another, everyone else looks either horrified or vaguely embarrassed at such a robo-ist comment. Even Jenkins is standing there with a frown like, "Yeah, that was over the line."

At least this version of ALAN can run if they decide to kill him. Initially he's just a box on a table, looking about like a Playstation 4 with one of those vertical stands. Wegener gives ALAN a much less formidable body than Robo's. Human-shaped, bilateral symmetry, opposable thumbs and all, but wiry (taller, too.) Which may not mean much when you're talking limbs constructed of who knows what metal, but it doesn't hurt. Robo outright says he gave ALAN a body like humans to make them at least somewhat more inclined to accept him, the same reason Tesla did that for him.

Wegener also gives ALAN a video-screen for a face, which can project various symbols. Smiley faces, question marks, things like that. Which is both more and less expressive than Robo's own face. Sometimes it's just a blank screen, which would be unnerving to look at, but Robo can really only show emotion through his eyes and body language. ALAN at least can project basic emotions.

By the end of the mini-series, nothing has been resolved as far as the vampires, or Jenkins' concerns regarding the lack of preparation, but ALAN is the newest student of the Institute, and his classmates seem to take well to him. And this makes Foley a good choice for the mentor, since she seemed the most in alignment with Robo's idea that helping ALAN feel like part of society would make him less inclined to see humanity as expendable.

Whether that's going to work out? Well. . . 

Saturday Splash Page #241

"God's Mistake," in "Future Present from God", in Wanted!, by Eiichiro Oda

I reviewed this 5 months ago, so we won't belabor the point. Wanted! is the collection of Oda's work prior to starting One Piece. It consists of 5 stories, including Romance Dawn, a kind of first draft for One Piece, as it stars a rubber boy with a straw hat named Luffy, who wants to be a pirate, but ends up fighting more dishonest pirates.

Most of the stories revolve around twist endings, and the protagonist, up to that point portrayed as a goofball or not someone to take seriously, turns out to be a badass. Gill Bastar, star of Wanted! spends most of the story either avoiding the many bounty hunters after him for the price on his head, or defeating them through trickery like, "Look over there!" It's only at the very end he turns out to be such a great marksman the ghost of a bounty hunter he killed with trickery moves on to the other side, having realized (if unwilling to admit it) he'll never find someone skilled enough to take revenge for him.

Describing him like that, Gill sounds like Vash the Stampede if he really did turn murderous once pushed far enough.

You get stories with a swordsman whose fixation on disrespect appears to doom a town to destruction via dragon, who in the end exposes a couple of frauds, and kills the dragon in one swing. Or a monk who spends most of the story running in terror from an evil spirit haunting a forest, only to immediately overpower the spirit once he learns it killed and ate his master. Maybe Oda wanted to do the comedy, but still have the cool finish. I'm not sure it really works, as I don't find much of it funny. 

You see his artwork evolve, especially as he gives himself more room on the page by decreasing panels. His lines tighten up and grow thicker, the characters look less sketched and more sturdy and defined. It doesn't hurt his ability to exaggerate expressions, and I think the additional space helps his action sequences.

What I Bought 8/3/2026 - Part 2

I guess Sony honked some people off when they announced they'd cease producing physical copies of their games in the next couple of years. Because Sony has a past record of removing stuff people bought off the electronic store if they happen to lose the rights to it. Which tells me I need to hurry up and buy whatever games I plan to get electronically, then never connect my PS4 to the Internet again. Won't be difficult; I only connect now when I want to see if the most recent sale put anything I want at a price point I'll pay.

The Matron #2, by David Bowles and Drew Edwards (writers), Monica Gallagher (artist), Harry Saxon (color artist), Stephen Kok (letterer) - Somebody needed to ask for help with their markings ahead of the Big Homecoming Game.

Like this first issue, this is split between two threads. Unlike the first issue, the threads take place concurrently, rather than a half-century apart. College students Roz and Samantha leave their classes on a quest for food, followed by a trip back to Sam's dorm room. The two are apparently girlfriends, or at least moving that direction, though Sam has misgivings. Partially because they, as Roz puts it, share two ancestors, six generations ago, but mostly because of the ill will Roz's grandmother bears anyone with the last name Maldonado, including Sam.

This is a valid concern, as we see in the other thread, which focuses on Zina and her diner job. Or her former diner job, as her boss has sold the diner to some gentrifiers who plan to turn the it into a 'gourmet taqueria.' So Zina's fired, but she got 10 months pay as severance, so it's all good, right?

Well, not really. Zina felt like she was family with these folks, but apparently not. And like Michael Jordan, she took that personally. Maybe they shouldn't have asked her to put patties in the freezer right after letting her go. She hears a voice, speaking in a language which Google Translate says is Russian, frost briefly grows around her eyes, and she picks up a meat cleaver. Or the Matron picks up the cleaver, as the font in Zina's voice balloons shifts.

The actual killing is presented by Gallagher as methodical and calm. A single chop to the chest for the guy, then another to the neck for the woman. There's no frantic hacking or slashing. She does respond to Sally's plea to stop, but only to tell her Zina is gone. There is one extreme close-up panel of Zina's eyes, colored in red, but she isn't getting wild. Just stating a fact.

Worth noting that Sam and Roz don't view the change in downtown as negatively as Zina, though Sam had some misgivings about her father's involvement. I imagine the sushi place they have dinner at is probably part of the revamping. Roz is hoping to move forward, that maybe they can leave the mess of the past behind. Zina, even if she's focused on caring for family, is still fixated on that past. The Maldonados are enemies, full stop. So that's bound to be an issue.

Vampyrates! #1, by Fred van Lente (writer), Luca Pizzari (artist), Adam Guzowski (color artist), Jodie Troutman (letterer) -  The exclamation point appears to be part of the official title, so I'm leaving it in.

In this world, vampires rule, and humans are an underclass. And if vampires rule, then they're going to fight over which of them specifically, gets to rule. But whatever war was going on, ended without anyone telling Captain Akeyo to stop attacking what she thought were enemy ships, which are now allied. So she's considered a pirate now.

As it turns out, the war is ending via arranged marriage. The Empress Nira isn't happy about it, but you gotta do what you gotta do. And what her cousin the Duchess thinks she's gotta do is stage a violent coup. Which at least results in the death of Nira's betrothed, but also the deaths of all her guards. I'm not sure who the robed guys that serve the Duchess are, but they're apparently big and tough enough Nira's guards go down like Hand ninjas against Wolverine.

It is a little weird that in one panel, Nira is calling for her guards while wielding two clean swords, but in the next panel, her guards are being slaughtered, and both her swords have blood running down them.

Nira flees, gets wounded with an elaborate crossbow that fires jagged bolts, and only escapes because she lands in the red light district, and all the ladies of the evening are wearing versions of her dress, confusing those hunting her. But they're not the only ones confused. Nira had a human lover (taboo!), a man named Davin who wants to explore some uncharted region of the world. They had a bit of an argument, but he made an offer for her to board his ship and flee. Nira tries for it, but winds up on Akeyo's ship instead, and gets K.O.'ed. Someone wasn't paying enough attention to directions!

 

I am confused why Akeyo would be anchored at the harbor of the kingdom that just declared her a pirate and put a bounty on her head. I guess you don't survive as a captain who actually attacks other ships without being a little bold. Or a bit of a gambler, and Akeyo recognizes Nira from her image on the nation's coins.

Pizzari's art has a but of an Adam Kubert vibe to it, in the squared off jaws, the art that kind of straddles the line between angular and blocky, and the shading. I was a little confused during the fight because it seemed like Nira was using two swords, then one, then two again once she grabbed one of the robed guy's swords. Turns out the sword the Duchess offered her was still sheathed, so the initial second sword was actually just the scabbard. Does raise another question of why the Duchess did that. Attacking from behind during a wedding doesn't seem like the act of someone concerned with a fair fight, but giving Nira a weapon does.

I'll say this, Pizzari definitely draws some stylish pirates. All of Akeyo's crew that we actually see have distinct, often wildly different looks. One of them appears to have a beard that's on fire. Seems like the sort of thing to get looked at, if only so the captain doesn't have to smell burning hair all the time.

Anyway, it's a promising enough start. A pirate with a possible grudge and uncertain motives. An empress on the run with a possible ally if she can find Davin. And there's the mystery of that unexplored region, which van Lente could use in any number of ways. Hideout, source of allies, or possibly a reveal that things are very different in the rest of the world than what Nira or her people imagine.

Escape From Kathmandu - Kim Stanley Robinson

This is 4 novellas, all taking place around Kathmandu and the Himalayan Mountains. They focus mainly on George Fergusson, and George "Freds" Fredericks, a couple of Americans living in Kathmandu, when they aren't making a living guiding people on treks up the mountains.

The two of them meet when George reads a letter addressed to Freds at the hotel where George is staying. A letter from an acquaintance of Freds, another American who fled academia to be a guide, but now needs help rescuing a yeti the research group he guided has captured. The rescue is somewhat complicated by the presence of Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter (and the accompanying horde of Secret Service agents), but they eventually pull it off.

George should serve as a cautionary tale for reading someone else's mail, because now that he's on Freds' radar, the subsequent stories all involve Freds dragging George into one mess or another. Help a reincarnated monk finally stop being considered a disciple by getting him up Everest. Help keep a road from being constructed too close to the valley which holds the fabled city of Shambhala. Keep a project to give Kathmandu an actual sewer system from taking place, because it'll reveal secret tunnels that an underground Nepali government is using to spy on the current Nepali government.

The Nepali government is presented as so massively corrupt, this book made me want to go back and re-read Forget Kathmandu to see how different the perspective of a local was on the government prior to the military coup. Although Robinson published this in 1989, so the situation could have changed quite a bit in the intervening decade.

There's usually some additional element Robinson throws in, though he switches around which is the Chekov's Gun. In the story about climbing, "Mother Goddess of the World," Freds mentions early on that his friend is the disciple to a really strict llama, who imposed a harsh condition to be met before a temple could be rebuilt and the disciple could stop being a disciple. But for much of the story, George and Freds are helping a group of British climbers, who want to stop an expedition searching for Edmund Hillary's remains from potentially finding him and returning his body to England. It's only late in the proceedings that Freds reveals the truth to George.

Which is one of the things I didn't like about the stories: Freds is constantly pulling a bait-and-switch on George. There's always some hidden catch to whatever he asks for help with, and that catch always ends up endangering George's life. "The True Nature of Shangri-La", it falls on George to try and stop this road from being built, and after he exhausts himself trying to navigate the labyrinthine and corrupt corridors of the Nepali government, he gets injured when they end up making the Chinese and Nepali guard outposts near a key pass think they were attacked by each other. And then he nearly dies of dysentery.

And the whole time, he's been catching grief from people for not getting enough done. That's the only one of the 4 stories Robinson writes from Freds' perspective rather than George's, and it doesn't do a lot for my opinion of Freds. He's sort of vaguely concerned for George's deteriorating mental and physical well-being, but in a vague, stoner-beach-bum way. "Oh, George is seeing how things really are in this country and running himself ragged to try and fix things. But he just doesn't get what's really important, maaaaaaaan." You dragged him into this, asshole. It's your problem, but he's the one actually trying to fix it, while you sit around and smoke dope.

It's a bit of a weird disconnect between tone and substance, when I think about it. Even though there is sometimes the threat of death in the stories, the plots are treated as sort of zany. Oops, we've got the Nepali President's personal guard chasing us because George was temporarily insane, let's escape on a mine cart that takes us all the way to a tiger-infested jungle! We helped a yeti escape by dressing him in a Dodgers' baseball cap and teaching him to say, "Namaste"! But, especially in the last two stories, it feels like we're watching George steadily self-destruct, like a jet being flown past its tolerances. Which is not really zany or funny. 

"Germ theory just ain't intuitive, George."

"Neither is religion."

"I'm not so sure of that."

"But why should there be a difference?"

"It may be that the reason for the existence of the universe is a more pressing question for most people than why they get the runs."

What I Bought 8/3/2026 - Part 1

I was on the phone with my dad a couple of weeks ago, detailing all these various headaches from work. A public meeting that would likely go to a hearing. Another public meeting filling in for The Coworker Who Doesn't Understand How Bribes Work, the AI nonsense, some other stuff.

He said, 'Sounds like you've had a rough few weeks.' I replied, 'All that was just on Tuesday.' He laughed. It's OK, that's what I do to keep from going insane.

Is Ted OK? #6, by Dave Chisholm (writer/artist/color artist/letterer) - The smile says good things, but the lightning eyes make me nervous.

First off, this final issue is 40 pages, at no additional cost. The 6-issue mini is 170 pages, total, so Chisholm's trying to provide value for the money, that's for sure. Anyway, after getting a massive hole blown in his chest last issue, Ted awakens in the weird tunnel he's seen previously, and briefly meets a woman named Kim. There are what look like tablets or pieces of paper coating the walls, and touching one lets Ted see someone's thoughts, but also gets him revved up again.

Good thing, because he, Sarah, and the doctor are about to crash. Oh, and Brody, but whatever. They make it out alive, landing in front of the Dome, where Noah is floating and crackling and assuring his legion of adoring imbeciles he's going to protect them from shapeshifting aliens.

Noah's actually in one of those Manowars, except the doc says his consciousness is elsewhere. Ted and Noah throw down, which does not go well for Ted, despite at one point slamming Noah into the Moon. The doc goads Noah into turning on his machine, and then Ted kamikazes himself. Not, critically, to destroy Noah, but because when Noah activates all the other people like Ted by turning on the machine, Ted'd back in that tunnel, where each of those little panels or pages connects to those people. So he can disrupt the paranoia and whatever Noah's been feeding them, if he has any hopeful memories to do it with.

And he does, because of Sarah. Because she was the first real friend he ever had. That prompts Sarah to admit she took this job to run from losing her girlfriend back on the other coast. A woman named Kim. Ted reminded her of Kim, which is why she reached out to him. So maybe they helped each other. 

Ted makes his big play, and Chisholm illustrates the pages of Ted reaching the others as this winding path through deep red panels of enraged people. Except each person gets a blue-white shard in their head, the connection to Ted. And as you progress to the next set of pages, the shards get larger, showing Ted's fond memories. The red fades, gradually overtaken by blue as the others stop feeling as angry. They don't necessarily have to be alone and mistrusting of others.

So they swarm Noah and throw him and his Dome into the Sun to protect the world, rather than making it into some sort of hellscape Noah can either rule or "save.". So his consciousness retreats to his back-up, the doc's missing nephew. but without the machine, his consciousness is sort of metabolized by the kid's. Kim is able to speak to Sarah briefly through what's left of Ted's body, and basically tells her it's great she wants to help people, but she shouldn't feel guilty for enjoying herself, or feel like it's a betrayal of Kim's memory. Which seems to convince Sarah to do something else with her life, to move forward. Though now she's leaving long text messages for Ted, who may not be dead.

The whole "strength of connections" theme makes me wonder about the Dome's significance. Because it has a honeycomb design, lots of borders connecting into something larger and stronger than they would be separately. But it was being used to hide Noah's plans, cover up what he did just to try and feel special, keeping everyone else sealed out and away from his special machine. But The Dome is an inanimate object, not people, so maybe its design isn't meant to be significant.

Or it's just an example of how Noah sees connection, as something to be molded to suit his purpose. He doesn't contribute anything to it, just uses it. Uses the doc's love for her nephew to keep her quiet. Uses empathetic people like Sarah to monitor his potentially useful tools. Keep him shielded from any consequences, by keeping everyone focused on being angry or afraid in other directions.

Thrash (2026)

A hurricane causes enough of a rise in the sea levels to bust the levees and flood a town. This unleashes a horde of bull sharks (plus one pregnant great white) upon whichever townspeople didn't get the hell out of Dodge.

Among those townspeople: Lisa (Phoebe Dynevor), a pregnant woman whose baby daddy bailed on her. Dakota (Whitney Peak), a young woman struck with agoraphobia after the recent death of her mother. Dee, Ron, and Will, (Alyla Browne, Stacy Clausen, Dante Ubaldi) three foster kids and their shitty foster parents. Dakota's uncle (Djimon Hounsou) is determined to get to her, but that's a little tricky when the seas are insane and the roads impassable. Unless you've got a boat, and something to haul it with. 

Are we in the year 2021? Because, if so, I could be spending this time on a lot better stuff than watching Netflix movies of questionable quality. This movie sticks to 2 threads: Dakota/Lisa, as the Lisa's car gets impaled on a tree in front of Dakota's house, and the kids, mostly trapped on the living room table in their increasingly flooded house. The film occasionally checks in on Hounsou and the weather reporter guy he bums a ride from, but it's really just to remind us yes, he's still on his way.

I think that works to its advantage, compared to Deep Water, where the movie was dancing between like 9 characters, scattered between three or four locations for a lengthy stretch of the movie. The film can focus on just a couple of situations, and really show how those circumstances are getting steadily worse. When Dakota forces herself to climb out the window to rescue Lisa, then slips on the eaves, she falls several feet before hitting water. By the time she climbs out the window to try and retrieve a rowboat, the water is already halfway to her knees, and she and Lisa are taking refuge on the second floor of the house.

The kids' it's a little less about the water, and more about the fact their lousy foster dad doesn't die as soon as they - and the audience - would hope. So right when they're thinking they're at least free of him and can start making their own plans, here he is, hauling himself on the table and ordering them into the water under the "logic" that sharks don't attack kids because they don't like the taste. Like how dogs don't eat their own shit. Which is both factually inaccurate and not a proper analogy.

That's a thing this movie does periodically, add a little humor among people try to either swim away from sharks or stay very still as sharks swim around them. Lisa triggering her perfect pregnancy playlist as the floodwaters start to float the bed and the house tries to collapse. The kids enthusiastically shouting "fuck you!" to the foster dad they think is dead, only for him to come bursting out of the water, still alive. Hounsou's saying, 'We lived in Mozambique, not The Jungle Book,' in response to the reporter's idiot question. It's a little strange, given how much the movie focuses on people getting swarmed and torn apart by bull sharks in the early going, but the situation is so bizarre a little absurdity doesn't feel entirely out of place.

I did expect the great white was going to be a bigger part of the movie than it was, but they played it as Chekov's Shark. Make you aware of it, then wait to use it for maximum (ridiculous) effect. The pacing got a little wonky about the time Dakota reached the rowboat. It's just down the street from her house, she makes it to the boat while it's still dark, and then the sun is well up in the sky and she still hasn't gotten back to her house. Like, what's she doing? She went for the boat to get the pregnant lady to safety. She gets the boat and then just, doesn't go back to the house. 

Let's Do the Time Hole Crawl

And that's why they call the town "Tackleford." 

Volume 7 of Bad Machinery, The Case of the Forked Road, finds our cast in their third, and I presume final, year of schooling. Things don't seem great. Mildred's on the outs with Charlotte and Shauna because they wouldn't join the Drama Club with her, while Sonny, Linton, and Jack each fall under the terrible curse of Puberty.

These things happen quickly. Charlotte and Mildred are at each other's throats on Page 9, and BFFs again by Page 10. On Page 14, Sonny is worried about being surrounded by unknown psychopaths and needing to learn about them. Page 30, he's slump shouldered, surly, and smelly, wandering out of his room long enough to spray on some deodorant before shuffling back to his room to play video games in his undies.

To be fair, that is how I remember most of my teenage years, other than I used stick deodorant. Hey, Star Fox didn't judge me when I was helping him defeat Andross! But he was already relying on Slippy Toad, so I suppose he couldn't afford to be picky about hygiene.

Point being, the boys are largely irrelevant in this story, as they've devolved to cavemen. Or a lower form of life. Like frat boys. I assume cavemen were able to start fires some way other than lighting their own farts, not a feat I'd expect frats to manage. 

Which leaves it to the girls - in between practicing for the Drama Club's performance of Glengarry Glen Ross, quite possibly a weirder choice than Allison having Ed Gemmell as the lead in a school play version of Twin Peaks - to tease out what's going on with the odd schoolchild named Calvin (no relation), and his connection to the science teacher. Who Charlotte mostly calls "Grumpaw", so that's what I'm calling him.

This leads to a time hole in a fume cabinet, taking the girls back to 1960. Except when they return to their time, things are different. Their favorite teacher, Mr. Beckwith, is a useless drunk. His wife, antiquities expert Amy, is neither an antiquities expert or his wife. What have they done by buying too much opium-laced '60s candy?

As it turns out, the problem is actually three boys who also found the time hole and got up to no good. Their leader has straight up anime hair, much more so than Charlotte, who is one pointed described as having "manga hair," which I didn't get at all. Ollie's particular version of the curse of Puberty has led to embracing nihilism. Nothing matters, so do whatever you want. As Professor Farnsworth would say, to hell with causality!

So the girls have to try and stop Ollie and his lackeys, before they forget what the timeline they're trying to restore was even like. There's a sad bit in there about Shauna, who didn't make the initial time trip, having a boyfriend named Keith in the new timeline, who she's reluctant to lose. There's a sadder bit about why Grumpaw kept grabbing the boy from the past and enlisting him with a 'secret mission.' 

A mission that's doomed to fail. Allison's version of time travel and the ripple effects is a bit like Marvel's used to be. You can't change the past, unless you make a really BIG change. Although here it doesn't create a new timeline so much as overwrite the existing one. Then the timeline actively resists efforts to change it back.

Which unfortunately prevents the girls from simply beating Ollie and his cronies up. Too bad. I'd like to have seen if Charlotte could actually back up all her tough talk. But violence is rarely the answer in Allison's stories. Certainly not to any real problems. So that was never likely to work. Ah well. Her performance in the Alex Baldwin role in Glengarry was excellent. I think. I've never actually watched the movie. But how hard can it be to out-act Alec Baldwin?