What I Bought 5/20/2026

As I glide into a long weekend (followed by a short work week), let's look at one comic from last week, and one from this week. The local store didn't have Fantastic Four again, so I don't know if he's getting shorted on it, or my buying a copy every month wasn't enough for him to keep ordering it.

D'orc #4, by Brett Bean (writer/artist), Jean-Francois Beaulieu (colorist), Nate Piekos (letterer) - Damn, that thing is too ugly to live. But enough about D'orc!

D'orc comes under attack from a Thrawg, which I guess is "Cerebus, but a pug." D'Orc avoids being eaten, though he learns Thrawg's have flammable saliva in the process. This is what's known as "Chekov's Gastric Fluids."

D'Orc then has a soliloquy about how tired he is of everyone trying to kill him, and frustrated it makes him, and that frightens him, because he's afraid if he gets angry enough he'll lose control and kill someone like he did the chicken. The talking shield gives him some reassurance that he's doing good and providing hope. And in the morning, D'Orc wakes up to a bunch of goblins accusing him of working with a different group of goblins, led by the leader's brother.

The shield was supposed to keep watch, but explains they snuck up on him and he can't hear. So how does he know what D'Orc's saying all those times D'Orc has the shield on his arm with the eye facing out?

The brother goblin shows up, and the two sides start to squabbling about which side gets to kill the Thrawg that destroyed their villages. Then the Thrawg shows up and eats all of them. Once it eats Barry the goblin, who was looking forward to going home and rebuilding their villages, D'Orc gets angry and dives inside the Thrawg's stomach, where he uses two stones to make a spark and ignite the drool. So, the Thrawg's stomach acid is also flammable, or are we just assuming it swallows a lot of its own drool? Barry was swallowed whole, and survives the explosion, so he can point D'Orc towards the Silver Witch, and that's that.

Outside of saving Barry, I'm not sure what D'Orc accomplished. And maybe that's enough, if there are other goblins that weren't part of the hunting party that will listen to Barry and get the villages working cooperatively. Otherwise, D'Orc saved one goblin, who is going to rebuild two villages to live in, alone. 

Moonstar #3, by Ashley Allen (writer), Edoardo Audino (artist), Arthur Hesli (color artist), Clayton Cowles (letterer) - No no no, you're supposed to attack with the focused totality of your mind, Dani. This is much too scattered.

Dani is inside her own mind, courtesy of the cursed sword. it's sifting through her memories, moving backwards from Krakoa, to her time as a Valkyrie, to her days as a New Mutant. The sword takes the appearance of Hildr (more of less, she's got chalk-white skin and red eyes where the skin around them looks burned), the woman trapped within the sword, and spends a lot of time attack Dani and critiquing her for being weak. Oh, you have to rely on spells to avoid my attack. Oh, you're getting help from the memories of your friends.

It does show how what the sword's told Kyron is a lie. Kyron thinks he's sparing people the pain of losing others to death, by keeping everyone inside the sword. But the sword clearly sees relying on others, or really anything beyond your own strength and speed, as a weakness. Unless this is just meant to dig at Dani, that she isn't capable enough to actually do anything on her own, so she'll give up.

But I don't think that's it, because the sword's been rifling through Dani's memories looking for someone whose soul it can take, if not Dani's. Or someones, more accurately, and it hits paydirt with Dani's parents. Dani gets into the sword's mind enough to see a little of Hildr's true past and what the sword needs for its plan, but the sword's already sent the location of Dani's parents to Kyron. It's a nicely done page by Audino and Hesli. Dani is seeing through Kyron's eyes, so we are as well. And we see things in the reflection of his sword. First Dani, then Kyron (with a similar complexion to the one Hildr is sporting inside Dani's mind) and then the Moonstar family ranch.

And the sword dominates more and more of each panel, as it gets closer to what it wants. Either outcome, because Dani can either go after her parents, or go after the tablet Kyron needs, but not both. I would say, if he hasn't killed them already, simply taken them somewhere, she should just go get the tablet, and make him come to her, with her parents. But it's easy for me to say, not my parents in danger of having their souls sucked up by a sword. 

Wandering Star - Steven Yount

Set in the Texas Panhandle in 1910, Wandering Star shows us a town descending into lunacy over the approach of Halley's Comet, through the eyes of Tom Greer, a young boy in town.

The story actually starts with Tom going to meet Sam and Rebekah Adams, a young couple from Kansas who've come to High Plains (formerly Blind Mule) to re-open a weekly newspaper for a lawyer in town. Another passenger on the train is an emaciated, intense man named Nicholas, who jumps into the referendum on alcohol with both feet, but quickly pivots to proclaiming that the Comet will bring about the end of the world.

Sam tries to act as a voice of reason, but gets branded ungodly as more people decide they'd better hedge their bets. It's only a few weeks of being pious, in much the same way there are plenty of people in town who go to the church meetings about the evils of alcohol, who then turn around and vote against prohibition. Plus, Sam can't even keep his own house in order, as Rebekah grows increasingly depressed living in this rundown shithole of town, putting in long hours running a paper at a loss.

All of this is filtered through Tom's perspective, albeit when he's looking back from some point years down the line. Yount puts Tom at that age where he's both eager to learn, from just about anyone, but also steadfast in his certainty he knows what's what. Sam opens his eyes to new perspectives, especially on all the legends of the West that he's been taught in school. But then there's Tom's mother, prone to jumping onto any new organization or group with great intensity. Which, unfortunately, includes Brother Nicholas' hooey.

So Tom's caught between a man he respects and his mother, and I think Yount does a pretty good job describing the strain this puts on Tom, not aided by all the mental gymnastics Tom performs to both obey his mother's wishes, but not abandon his friend. It's fun watching Tom convince himself that if he talks about all this doomsday stuff with Sam, it could be construed as trying to convert the man, which Nicholas calls on them to do, and that means he's buying in like his mother wants, to try and save his soul.

There are other plot threads that don't really develop into much of anything. Sam's brief return to baseball, which might have been meant as another wedge between he and Rebekah, but I think there were enough wedges, or the Gem Scott murder. I think those are meant to a) provide a bit of additional detail to the world Tom inhabits, and b) to represent part of Tom's transition into adulthood (much like his crush on Rebekah) where things aren't always neatly resolved, and justice does not always prevail.

The book is quite funny at times. Tom's got a quick wit (and a quicker mouth), and the benefit of hindsight means he can get off some decent zingers at just about everyone. Beyond that, it's a matter of how amusing you find people contorting themselves into knots to justify their present actions or excuse their pasts.

"It is time to run these bloodsucking misery merchants out of this town using every means in our power, every weapon in our grasp." The preacher moved to the front edge of the stage and screamed the phrase that became his marching cry: "THE SALOONATICS MUST GO!"

Overdue Movie Reviews #12 - Jaws (1975)

A large great white shark settles in off the coast of a New England beach town in the summer, as the townspeople are too concerned with losing tourist dollars to close the beaches in the hopes it'll move on to more favorable hunting grounds. After a handful - mouthful? - of people are eaten, the water-fearing police chief (Roy Scheider) sets out on a boat with a crazed shark hunter (Robert Shaw), and a cocky ichthyologist (Richard Dreyfuss) to kill the shark. The shark pretty quickly turns the tables and morale sinks faster than Quint's shitty boat.

Jaws ran all the time on cable when I was a kid/teenager, and I watched it almost every chance I got. When I was bored in various high school classes - which was often - I would make a list of my 20 favorite movies. The list was appalling (1995's Mel Brooks/Leslie Nielsen horror spoof Dracula: Dead and Loving It was usually somewhere around #18), owing to the limited amount of movies I'd seen, and my own, still-forming attitudes about what I liked, or what was good. That said, Jaws was usually either first or second, up against another of Spielberg's offerings this series will address one day.

The story that Spielberg only hinted at the shark for much of the film because the crew couldn't get the mechanical shark to work right is well known, but Spielberg does a lot with suggestion. We barely see the remains of Chrissie, the first victim. A sickly pale hand with a crab crawling over it in the sand, or Hooper picking up the arm, no longer attached to a body, during his autopsy.

Mostly though, we infer. From the panicked whistles that summon Brody, followed by the shot of the deputy turning away as he collapses in the sand, sobbing around his whistle. The way Chief Brody and the boy that was supposed to go swimming with Chrissie slow, and Brody makes the boy stay back. The tray presented to Hooper that contains all that's left of Chrissie is barely big enough for an infant.

Jaws owes some of its DNA to those '50s sci-fi horror flicks. Not just the ones where the populace are menaced by some everyday creature grown large by some method, but the presentation of the shark - again, out of technical necessity - reminds me of Forbidden Planet. The indentations in the soil that marked the Id Monster's footsteps. Tree being shoved aside, or brief bursts of ray gun fire lighting up a distant canyon, but getting steadily closer.

Here it's a tire with a roast hooked to it being taken away that tells of the presence of the monster, and half the dock going with it that speaks to its power. The yellow barrels Quint keeps harpooning into the shark, that never seem to actually wear it down. The tooth Hooper finds in a fishing boat that, like the Id Monster, vanishes before it can be presented to anyone as proof.

Once we do start to actually see the shark, it's blurred, partial views. Rolling onto its side beneath the water before it bites that one guy's leg off, the shark's body almost merges with the murky water around it. The dark eye is prominent, dull and black and lacking in anything we'd recognize as humanity or mercy, and the teeth it'll use to bite almost glow, but the rest is barely discernible. Like the ocean is annoyed by all these jabbering, splashing humans and concentrated part of itself into something to kill them.

I think years of watching Shark Week, seeing actual sharks, has somewhat dimmed the effectiveness of "Bruce" when he starts to reveal himself more often. Even for a stocky species like the great white, the body is stiff, the movement of the jaws awkward. It closes its mouth halfway, like it's chewing rapidly rather than biting great chunks from something, or it started to say one thing and then changed its mind. There's a sense of power, but not necessarily speed or force. Most of the time that's fine; the shark cruises with the confidence of a predator that knows there's nothing in the surrounding sea to challenge it.

It's the reactions of the people that help sell it. Brody's startled jerk when its head breaks the surface right in front of him, his dazed backwards shuffle into the cabin and murmured, 'You're gonna need a bigger boat.' I think the clearest sign of how dangerous it is comes after that, in two stages. First, when Hooper quietly asks Quint if he's ever had another shark act like this, and later, when Quint asks Hooper what he could do with his high-tech gear. These two have been at each other's throats since the moment they met. Quint sneering at Hooper's gear and college learning, Hooper rolling his eyes at Quint's sea tales and machismo. Now, each is scared enough to look to the other for an answer to the problem.

Dreyfuss and Shaw both play guys who are right, and wrong, and kind of arrogant jerks, albeit in different ways. Hooper is much chattier, ready with glib remarks about the mayor lining up to be a hot lunch, or muttered comments that the guys loading too many people into a boat are going to die. He's condescending, but Dreyfuss does it with a smile and a lighthearted tone that says he's amusing himself, that nasal cackle as he strides away after the mayor proves more concerned with a defaced billboard.

Quint doesn't say much, outside the monologue about the Indianapolis that Shaw apparently gave drunk, but most of it he says with a graveness to his tone expressing the person he's speaking to is a fool, or just not worth his time. He dismisses the island for having 'too many captains,' or his curt dismissal of Brody's suggestion that Hooper spend a while tossing chum with, 'Hooper drives the boat, Chief.' He doesn't dress it up, simply states the facts as he sees them. He's survived, he knows what's what, he doesn't care what you think.

Neither is really that concerned about the welfare of the people. Quint, certainly, wants to kill sharks and get paid for it. Revenge for what happened to his crewmates in WW2. Hooper sticks around because he wants to study sharks, and why go to Antarctica if there's a giant-ass great white shark right here? Consider that when the shark finally makes itself known to the trio aboard the Orca, Quint goes for his weapons, while Hooper goes for his camera. Quint's getting paid to kill the shark, no time like the present to start. Hooper wants to document evidence. He laughed at the mayor's insistence he wants to get himself in National Geographic, but he didn't deny it.

And in the middle is Brody. Scared of the water, no knowledge of seamanship. He can't help with the damaged engine, can't tie knots well enough to rig the barrels for Quint. When Quint hands him the fishing reel, Brody holds it like a first-time dad who's about to drop the baby. He can't even get in on the scar-comparing contest. He brought his service revolver, which might be helpful if a mermaid tries to mug them, but is useless against a 25-foot-long shark. Pretty much all he can do is chum bloody fish chunks into the water.

That's his penance, chief of police turned chore boy. He had the chance to cut this short, or at least try, and he let the mayor - never listen to a man who wears suits made of a Captain D's wallpaper - bully him out of closing the beaches until after a second fatality, and even then, only for a few days. He fears what will happen as a result of his cowardice enough to ask his son to take his new boat into the estuary, but he's not stopping anyone else from going into the ocean. He says he left New York City and came to Amity because, 'one man can make a difference,' but what we see of his usual day is he fields complaints from old men about their picket fence getting karate'd, or has guys pushing him to make the street in front of their house a "No Parking" zone. There hasn't been a mugging or a murder in decades, presumably spanning the tenures of multiple police chiefs and deputies. Are you really making a difference if anyone can do it?

He's a man afraid of water, living on an island because, 'it's only an island if you look at it from the water.' And you know he's going to have to go out there, and maybe he knows it, too, long before it happens. In the celebration of people thinking the tiger shark those goobers killed is the man-eater, the mother of the second victim arrives to slap Brody and blame him for her son's death, while the mayor stands off to one side, looking like he'd rather be anywhere else. After, as the crowd disperses, Brody walks down the pier, towards the ocean.

Of course, once they're on the Orca, Amity's no longer an island, it's invisible. There are lots of shots of just the boat, the sea, and the sky. I think, up through the first evening once they've found it, leading into Quint's story about the USS Indianapolis, the shots keep getting longer. The boat gets smaller, the sea and sky get larger. The shark could be anywhere in that vastness, the three men's isolation absolute given Quint's control (and eventual destruction) of the radio.

After that, once the shark takes it upon itself to smite these fools that challenged it, the camera starts moving back in. There's no place to go, the Orca is the only remotely safe harbor they have, and that's about like hiding in an outhouse during a hurricane. Everything around the boat, is controlled by the shark. The only thing the barrels accomplish is letting them see the shark's gaining on them as they run. Hooper climbs into his little shark cage and descends beneath the surface, the knight challenging the dragon in its lair, and his cage is destroyed in seconds. This is not his place, but he survives where Quint doesn't. Luck, or maybe because Quint wanted to die, the stubborn, contrary guy (love that as soon as Hooper tells him the engine can't handle high RPMs, Quint immediately pushes the throttle harder) that's been challenging sharks for 30 years, ever since 800 of his friends got eaten.

So it falls to Brody, with Quint's rifle and Hooper's compressed air tank, to kill the shark as the boat sinks around him. He's resting on the mast, but it's so low that it looks like he's actually floating or laying on the surface of the ocean. If part of the sea solidified into the monster to test him, test his fear of the ocean, his belief he can make a difference, another part of it has given him a bit of solid ground and said, "OK, let's see what you can do." 

What I Bought 5/15/2026

I spent the weekend at my dad's, so expect a variety of older films in the reviews starting next week. On the way up, in between searching used bookstores for his birthday gifts, I hit the comic store. I was only expecting to find one of the two books from last week, and I did, but not the one I expected. That said, it's definitely the one I'd rather have.

Touched by a Demon #4, by Kristen Gudsnuk - Oh jeez, what did this lady think would improve her life? If she could divide her focus better?

Mammon whisks Frons and Pazuzu back to Hell, leaving Wendy to come up with some sort of plausible explanation to the detective about what she just saw, and not incriminate herself as having murdered her family. She is probably not entirely convincing, but no one gets arrested so let's call it a win.

Down in Hell, Mammon isn't pleased Frons abandoned his post. Even worse, Frons started this whole life help agency without going through bureaucratic channels. On the other hand, Lucifer thinks the idea has promise. Frons has already damned 63 souls, including Wendy. If he can damn 3 more, bringing him up to a nifty 66, he'll get a promotion! And the lute he brought with him when he was cast out of Heaven, and subsequently traded for Pazuzu to get her away from her horrible boss

I did enjoy Mammon's complaint that there are souls that are supposed to be getting tortured that aren't because Frons is absent. Just sitting around, untortured, like they're in 'a hotter Purgatory.'

So Frons has a dilemma. He truly wanted to help people, but keeps fucking it up. Should he keep trying, and risk damning more souls, which gets him a promotion and recognition he finds he no longer desires? Does he accept there's no redemption for him?

There's a bit where he's debating what to do and asks Pazuzu and she replies that she was just helping him and, 'I have no moral opinions.' I started go back-and-forth with myself Friday night about which way to interpret that. Which word is the emphasis on, no or moral? Then I told myself there was no difference, then I argued back that there was. Is Pazuzu saying she has no opinions that are moral, as in they're all immoral? Or is it that she has no moral opinions, as in she doesn't even debate or consider morality? The former seems more likely for a demon, but somehow I think it's the latter. Like, morality isn't even something she thinks about. Sure, she hasn't loved how most of their clients turned out, but that could just be because she likes her boss and wants him to be happy, and the failures eat at him.

Anyway, Frons has one final conversation with Father Angelo, although they exchange contact info (which Frons immediately blocks). If the story continues, I think there was going to be something there, because Frons seems smitten. He resumes taking clients, this time an elderly woman who lives alone and is going to die soon. She has regrets, about opportunities missed and whatnot.

Frons could cast a time travel hex, allowing her to relive her life, but chooses instead to help her maximize her enjoyment of the time she has remaining. This, in turn, offers a glimmer of hope that Frons might be able to pull of his own redemption, if he sticks to trying to truly help people, instead of using demonic magic to offer quick-fix solutions. And that's where it ends, Frons, Pazuzu and Wendy as a little group. So Gudsnuk could come back to the story again some day, if she wants. The detective is still lurking, investigating the disappearance of Wendy's family, there's unresolved stuff with Father Angelo, there's no guarantee Bifrons won't still mess things up in the future, or that, if he keeps succeeding it won't start to cause a backlash from the higher-ups.

Sunday Splash Page #427

"Cement Shoes," in Adventures in the DC Universe #6, by Steve Vance (writer), John Delaney (penciler), Roy Boyd (inker), Bob Le Rose (colorist), Tim Harkins (letterer)

And we're back to the start. The first new "A" was going to be A Calculated Man. Turns out it didn't have a splash page, and I decided I didn't want to waste an entry on something where I was just going to complain about the conceit of the series the entire time when it didn't even have a splash page, so out of the collection it went!

As for Adventures in the DC Universe, I think this book was one of DC's offerings aimed at younger readers, like the comics they based on Batman: The Animated Series and the '90s Superman cartoon. Even though the artists sometimes used the character designs from the Timmverse cartoons - the last issue of the series, #19, is a Wonder Woman and Catwoman team-up using the later cartoon design for Selina, with the jet-black costume and the crooked ears - these weren't necessarily set in that continuity.

Issue 14, while using a Flash who seems rather like the overly cocky version from the cartoons, has him challenged to a race by the '90s, leather-jacket wearing version of Superboy. Issue 13 has the Martian Manhunter teaming up (or being saddled with) Impulse. Most of the issues have a lead feature and a back-up, and issue 6's back-up involved Power Girl helping stop a cargo ship full of experimental weapons from making landfall.

I only own a few issues - like the Marvel Adventures line, this series being done-in-ones means it's perfect for picking and choosing issues with an interesting concept - but it looks like Steve Vance, who wrote every issue, usually tried to connect the lead feature and the back-up in some way. Issue 8's lead is Booster Gold and Blue Beetle taking a gig in Hub City and finding themselves double-crossed, while the back-up shows how the Question (reluctantly) bails them in the course of pursuing his own case. Or Aquaman saves that drowning guy, but is too preoccupied with finding Ocean Master to think anything of it beyond surface dwellers dumping garbage in his waters again. In the Power Girl story we learn the guy is actually a fed that was trying to track down the guy who stole the experimental Russian weapons.

Delaney tends to exaggerate for comedic effect, which is what the story asks for, but I'm not sure it's always the best choice. Should it be played for yuks that Aquaman's just floating there, watching this guy drown? He's supposed to be the hero, right? I don't know what I would have made of that if I read this when it came out and I was closer to the target age. But if the story asks for comedy, he provides it. He can draw action sequences, he nails the look of the characters. He and Vance seem like a pretty good team.

Saturday Splash Page #229

"Another of Iron Man's Drunk Monologues," in What If? (vol. 1) #9, by Don Glut (writer), Alan Kupperberg (breakdowns), Bill Black (finishes/inker), Carl Gafford (colorist), Tom Orzechowski (letterer)

These days, Marvel pumps out What Ifs every few years, usually built around the notion that one of their various Big Events would turn out differently. I didn't want to read those events the first time around, so an alternative version isn't much interest to me.

Before that, there was the '90s volume, that ran for 115 issues and was usually about some event or another going differently. Inferno, Atlantis Attacks, The Evolutionary War. Even back then, and even with the writers making sure to explain what was different, I usually didn't care. The big summer events tended to run through the Annuals, and I usually didn't buy those, so they didn't matter much to me. Most of them could best be described as "rocks fall, everybody dies." Marvel Earth, and sometimes the entire universe, always just one hairsbreath away from total annihilation, apparently. 

The second volume did introduce "Mayday" Parker, aka Spider-Girl, so that's one thing it's got going for it.

Before that, the first volume ran for 47 issues across 7 years. I own two of those; besides the issue above, there's #45, by David Anthony Kraft and Ron Wilson, where the gamma bomb explosion links Rick Jones and Banner's minds, and when Rick dies from the radiation, the Hulk goes berserk. Considering the issue costs us half the Fantastic Four and 40% of the original Avengers line-up, you could probably file it under "rocks fall, everybody dies," too. It's fun to break the toys sometimes.

And then there's this issue, where the notion for Agents of Atlas started, which Iron Man showing off some "dimensional transporter" he built that lets them spy on other timelines and worlds. Yes, 30 years before Civil War, Iron Man was invading your privacy under a flimsy pretext. Basically, Jimmy Woo puts together a team to protect (and rescue, when protecting fails) President Eisenhower from Yellow Claw.

The roster is different from what Parker and Kirk would use. 3-D Man's in there (though Parker would eventually add the current 3-D Man/former Triathlon in the very short-lived Atlas series), and while Namora leads them to M-11 (not given a name here, much chattier), she begs off to search for Namor. Who is, presumably, roaming the streets of New York as a bum, waiting for Johnny Storm to singe his beard off. Marvel Boy convinces Gorilla Man to come along by promising to search for a way to make him human again with Uranian science, because Ken's too afraid to even be on the same continent as his wife. The wife who ridiculed his visions of a gorilla?

Glut (or Roy Thomas, since this was his concept, shocking, I know, that Roy Thomas plumbed the depths of forgotten comics history) tries to draw parallels between the characters chosen and the ones Iron Man invited to his little picture show. Gorilla Man and Beast, M-11 and Vision, Venus and Thor, Marvel Boy and Iron Man, 3-D Man and Captain America. The '50s group even call themselves "Avengers", albeit with the absolutely terrible battlecry, "Go, Avengers, Go." Like, holy shit, I'd be embarrassed to shout that and charge into battle. I'd rather yell "SPOOOOOON!" than "Go, Avengers, Go."

Some of them feel like a stretch - 3-D Man's presented as a cocky asshole who likes to wind up Gorilla Man with comments about his smell, which just screams "Hawkeye" - and I can't decide whether Thomas and Glut picked the '50s cast to conform to a current Avengers roster, and that's why Namora didn't stick around, or those were just the Golden Age characters they wanted to use, and they picked Avengers to match.

Also of note, Woo brings them together, it's his arch-foe that's the mastermind behind the plot, he's the one that tracks the villains after they escape with the President, but he doesn't really get acknowledged as part of the team. There's no one pointed to as his parallel among the Avengers. I think Parker makes him the Captain America of the Agents, the driving force that unites them, with enough courage and skill this disparate bunch will follow his lead.

What I Bought 5/8/2026

For whatever reason, the local shop didn't have any copies of Fantastic Four last week. I had Friday off, and during a trip I was making, stopped at another store and found a copy, along with a couple of other back issue projects I'm currently working on.

Fantastic Four #10, by Ryan North (writer), Humberto Ramos (penciler), Victor Olazaba (inker), Edgar Delgado (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Hey, can you try not blocking traffic while killing everyone? I got places to be!

So the Earth's being invaded while the FF are away, and since apparently every other hero on the planet is completely incapable of handling an invasion by some completely non-descript group of purple aliens, the Scarlet Witch, sorry Sorcerer Supreme, has to use Bullseye to aim a spell to bring the FF back from across the universe. Because Bullseye is, apparently, the best marksman on the planet.

Remarkably, this is not the sequence Ryan North is going to write in this issue that most irritates me.

The spell works, the FF are back, with Crazy Other Sue on their heels. The aliens immediately run away, so now it's everyone against Crazy Other Sue. They goad her into trying something while constructing some invisible reflective sphere around her, and Crazy Other Sue is now Comatose Other Sue. OK, fine, kind of anti-climactic that they beat a being that decked Galactus with the old "reflect your attack back at you," play, but sure. Except now, the FF need the Sorcerer Supreme to send them back across the universe. Because they have to save Galactus.

You made me agree with Maria Hill, Ryan North. I may never forgive you for that. But, hey, Crazy Other Sue compressed part of Big G's chest into a singularity, so there's probably nothing the FF can do. Unless Sue tries bending a lot of light into a laser to try and cut it - as in, the singularity - out of Galactus. And unless Galactus, unable to save himself, still has enough power to give her a boost by temporarily Silver Surfer-ing Sue so she can draw in more light. Whatever, point is, Galactus lives. . .to kill entire worlds full of people in the name of, essentially, being too big to fail.

Can you even cut a depression in space-time "out" of something? Shouldn't any attempt to cut a singularity out of someone with light be thwarted by the fact you'd have to cut close enough the gravity would just gobble up all the light you're using? This was not one of North's stronger efforts, and Ramos' art is nowhere near good enough to distract me from that.

Roberto to the Dark Tower Came - Tom Epperson

Roberto is a reporter in an unnamed Latin American country. He gets a phone call informing him that someone is displeased with his recent articles, and if he doesn't leave the country in 10 days, he will be killed. Roberto's received death threats before, but for some reason, this one strikes him as serious. So he decides to leave. He can join his attractive, wealthy girlfriend in St. Lucia.

But an acquaintance of his in the U.S. embassy passes along information that the military is busy carrying out massacres and atrocities against the people in a certain province, to remove any potential obstacles to extracting the hell out of some minerals. Roberto decides he'll pretend to leave, go to Tulcan instead, get evidence, and then write about the whole thing from St. Lucia.

Epperson breaks the book into specific days, each one starting with the title "{insert number} days until the day Roberto is to die." Starts at 10, works down to the day. The story follows Roberto, and only Roberto. We only see the people in his life - his father and (young) stepmother, his college friends, his work colleagues - when they're in his presence.

Epperson does usually dive into their backstories as well as their present situations, most of which revolve around some horrible act committed by one government of the country or another. His grandmother met his grandfather when she had to leave the country for her own safety. A colleague who was abducted by a rebel leader, and later survived a bombing at the newspaper's office. Roberto's photographer friend Daniel, who pretended to believe in Communism to score points with a girl he liked, and spent two weeks imprisoned and tortured by the military. A soldier who was maimed, and is struggling to find something he can do, as well as dealing with the guilt of the atrocities he took part in. 

And most of these people, to varying degrees, have abandoned whatever brought them into trouble initially. The reporter focuses more on fashion and gossip, Daniel now takes photos of celebrities and food. Each of them reached a point, for one reason or another, where they decided it wasn't worth the risk.

I don't know if the point is a shorthand way of explaining why Roberto decides to try and get this story, or highlighting the futility of the attempt. Everyone has been touched by the horrors committed in the country by governments, militias, wealthy landowners, drug cartels. Except perhaps, for Roberto. He's not been arrested and beaten, he's avoided being blown up. Even as the clock ticks towards his death and people all around him die, Roberto remains largely unscathed. So maybe the point was that those people needed someone to tell their stories.

Or maybe the point was it's useless. If all these people have these horrible experiences in their pasts, stretching back decades, if seemingly every piece of ground in the country had some massacre or expression of brutality stain its soil, what good has reporting on any of it actually done? What the military plans is apparently based on something the Sri Lankan government and military did. But people know that happened, the United Nations knows, the famed "international community" knows, and we're told there were no repercussions. No one was prosecuted, no one was made to account. Even if Roberto gets in, gets his story, and escapes to publish it, what good is it going to do?

Epperson dedicated the book to journalists who lost their lives pursuing the truth, so I don't think he was making an "it's pointless" argument, but it sure feels like it. I definitely thought Roberto was an idiot. Well-meaning, but an idiot nonetheless.

The book is tense, Epperson keeping you guessing whether Roberto really will die or not right up to the end. It's less the ticking clock the chapters mark and more because it's hard to tell which direction the threat will come from. There are enough stories in here of people being betrayed by comrades or long-trusted friends, of soldiers dressing up as paramilitary groups to divert suspicion, that it seemed like the danger could come from anywhere. The book does point strongly in one direction, but I kept myself keyed to the possibility that was another misdirection. Roberto is dealing with a lot of people where he only has their word they are who and what they claim to be. And since we're tagging along inside his mind, we don't know any more than he does.

'She's surrounded by religious bric-a-brac. His eye is caught as always by a porcelain figurine of Christ. It's a particularly macabre representation of the crucifixion, blood spilling down Jesus' face from his crown of thorns, his eyes bugging out and his mouth agape as if to say, "Hey, I don't care if I am the son of God, it's no fucking joke being crucified!"'

What I Bought 5/6/2026

Well, we've finished April books, so it's on to selections from May! I was able to get all three comics from last week I wanted, although it took looking in a different shop in another town I happened to be passing through on other business Friday to get the third.

Batgirl #19, by Tate Brombal (writer), Takeshi Miyazawa (penciler/inker), Juan Castro (inker), Mike Spicer (colorist), Tom Napolitano (letterer) - Looking at Batgirl charging into battle with a bunch of weapons made from her blood-shadows, all I can think is this power is a lot like having a symbiote, and my distaste for the whole concept becomes clear.

Cassandra fights her way up this big tower, from the inside and the outside, with the help of Tenji, Jaya, and Wu Lin She embraces the power at one point when it looks like her family is about to fall, but Miyazawa really draws it more like Cass just cut loose with her fighting abilities and that blood-shadow sword. She throws some regular old Batarangs, but I can't tell that she's making throwing stars or spears out of the blood.

Whatever, they make it to the top, she summons this Midnight Eye - basically a cloak, one of those broad rice-picking hats (festooned with streamers) and some glowing orange eyes - being her ancestor made the deal with. Even though he agrees she was cursed with this power being active without asking for or agreeing to it, he won't undo the situation. Because rules is rules and deals is deals and really, he's just a lazy bureaucrat.

Which is when Wu Lin makes his pitch, offering himself as a servant to handle things her and in the mortal realm, as well as offering up three living souls (Cass, Tenji, Jaya), in exchange for power. That, of course, is a deal the Midnight Eye is all about, so it looks like Cass and the other two got boned. Cass makes a speech that's half-apology to Tenji and Jaya, half her saying screw it to all this "family" that never did anything for her but place burdens on her.

Wu Lin returns, having dealt with the people that betrayed him in the mortal realm and declaring he's got to let these 3 living souls go, because otherwise things are out of balance. Sure, he's the one who offered them, but that was like 5 minutes ago! He's got an entirely different job now! I can at least appreciate the hustle there. And Midnight Eye agrees to remove the curse - as long as Batgirl agrees that someday she's going to work for him, or she gets cursed again. They return to Gotham, Cass introduces them all to her Bat-family, and that's that.

Does the fact Cassandra said family is what you make of it, which I've been yelling in these review posts for months, and that she chooses not to carry the burdens of this "family" that were never around or never accepted her mean she's going to let the Shiva issue go? Will Tenji stop bugging her about it? Their whole argument over whether to see if Shiva's soul was in the Spirit World and could be nudged into resurrection never really got finished. They just got busy with other stuff.

That's not even getting into the question of how rebirth works in this case. Presumably Shiva would be reborn as an infant, so it'd be years before she could even talk coherently with them. And is she going to have her past memories, or is she an entirely new person? If the latter, does it even matter? She's not Shiva at that point. Never been a fan of reincarnation, frankly. Feels like, with the way people want to play it that you have past memories and you're the same person, just in a new body, you probably stole that life away from someone new that could exist. Instead, it's just you, fucking things up a second time like you did the first time.

Marc Spector: Fist of Khonshu #4, by Jed MacKay (writer), Devamalya Pramanik (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - The first glance I got at this cover, I thought the moon was actually some new design for Marc's hood, or it was billowing in a way that made it look really big and I was not a fan. Then I took a closer look.

This issue is Marc learning from Dr. Sterman about what the rest of the cast got up to when he went missing two weeks ago. In short, they beat up a bunch of villains for answers. That didn't work. Hunter's Moon communed with Khonshu to look for Marc. That didn't work, either. MacKay provides no explanation for that.

Then 8-Ball rushes in, pointing that several buildings are being slowly swallowed by darkness, and nobody other than their crew notices. And the people who lived in those buildings are vanishing, too. The others are skeptical it has anything to do with Marc's disappearance, but this is happening on his turf, so they need to handle for him.

They never came back out, so Marc's going in after them. Bringing along his big, soul-stealing dragon sword. Pramanik and Rosenberg are stretching Marc's cape to Breyfogle Batman and/or Spawn levels of size. On one page, as Marc ventures into the Midnight Mission's basement to retrieve the sword, it's a spiraling staircase - both comics in this post feature that, one going up, the other going down - and the cape trails behind him, making a spiral panel border.

On the last page, as he ventures into this new, haunted building, the cape actually has some threads that seem to be fluttering loose of the cape. Which could either read as the cape is, as part of a holy uniform, more than just fabric and has paranormal properties, or that Marc is, as Sterman suggests, making a mistake marching in there when he's wounded. Coming apart at the seams, so to speak.

Chick Fight (2020)

Anna's (Malin Ackerman) life is in a funk. Her car was repossessed, her coffee shop was losing money before it burned down, she's on 'self-imposed abstinence', and still processing her mother's death, and not nearly as far along as her dad (Kevin Nash), who's got himself a boyfriend and a spray tan.

So her friend Charleen (Dulce Sloan) brings her to a fight club, where Anna quickly finds herself on the wrong side of Olivia (Bella Thorne), a very aggressive woman determined to make the place fit her notion of it. Which is less a supportive environment where people can release some aggression, and more an "only the strong survive!" combat sports place. Anna has to get some training, and ends up with a drunk guy (Alec Baldwin) who supposedly trained Sugar Ray.

It's a little oddly paced, or maybe oddly put together. There's a reveal about the origin of the club that feels like the sort of surprise usually saved for late in the movie. The sort of thing that you'd expect to motivate her to win her big showdown with Olivia. It's instead brought out after Anna's first fight, to motivate her to come back, and possibly drive her to run her mouth at Olivia and set up their big fight. Anna quits, or vows to quit, the whole thing no less than 3 times in a 100 minute movie, being alternately talked out of it by Charleen, Olivia (in a mean girl way) and Alec Baldwin's character.

There's also a sort of awkward romance between her and the brother of one of the women who runs the club, the brother acting as sort of a ring doctor. Since Anna gets one-shot KO'ed a lot early on, they see a fair bit of each other. Or he sees a fair bit of her, since she's spending part of that time unconscious. It's complicated by the fact he goes on a date with Thorne's character at one point, so there's avoidance and denial of feelings and all that jazz.

The movie does avoid the development that as Anna starts to have success in the ring, this automatically translates to success in the rest of her life. Even as she wins fights - though her face is remarkably unbruised during the daytime, she must be great disguising it - she's still avoiding the doctor, still can't get a new job, and is evicted from her apartment. Things don't start to turn around on that score until she tries something new in the rest of her life. Even if the fighting thing is new, she's still in the same patterns for everything else. Avoidance and taking the safe path. She ultimately finds success when she says to heck with it and tries something different from what she's been doing.

Ackerman plays Anna as awkward and uncertain most of the time. Never at a loss for the worst way to put things. That doesn't exactly fade as she gets more comfortable in the ring, so at least it's a consistent part of her personality. She only has so much in the tank for clever conversation. Sloan's the outspoken beset friend, always trying to draw a laugh from Anna or push her to get outside her comfort zone. Which means she gets a lot of the best lines, whether it's in reference to her sexual prowess or how badly she's going to beat someone up, and Sloan sells those pretty well. It doesn't feel like Charleen's acting, so much as she's fully this confident. Conversely, Baldwin's coasting on acerbic drunk. This is not a role requiring any great effort from him.

Thorne's mostly just aggressive and in everyone's face, but does get to show a more clever side in the scene where Anna unwittingly applies for a job at a coffee place Olivia owns. Anna tries to backpedal off some of her (weak) shit talking, Olivia plays friendly, discussing the paintings on the wall and her gym in the coffee place, and then cuts Anna's knees out from under her in a couple of sentences.

What I Bought 5/4/2026 - Part 3

I finished rewatching Soul Eater last week. It's funny that it takes about half the anime to get through maybe a quarter of the manga. If I ever actually get all those "perfect editions" of the manga, I guess I can expect a very different story. Hopefully one without chapters devoted to Excalibur, because that joke got old fast.

Is Ted OK? #1 and 3, by Dave Chisholm (writer/artist/letterer) - If "Ted" is another of Johnny Storm's bad aliases, then yeah, he's probably OK. Otherwise, no.

So, starting from the beginning: Sarah's job for Ayn-Styne is to monitor three employees in the marketing division for suicidal or homicidal tendencies, though she suspects only the latter is really important to the company. One of the three Sarah watches - as much as possible, no matter where the employee is - is Ted Green, who comes up with ads designed to play on people's fears. Ted doesn't talk to anyone, except a stray cat he visits on his way home. Sarah's concerned, but her boss can barely pronounce Ted's name, and Brody - the man-bun wearing macho idiot, doesn't think there's anything to worry about. So Sarah followed Ted, lost him, then drove her scooter right in front of him causing him to crash and his car to burn. But Ted was fine by the start of issue 2.

By issue 3, Ted's having nightmares where a blood (and mascot chicken head) covered version of himself spouts dire portents at him. Sarah's hanging out with Ted outside work, in an effort to help him, but in violation of the company's ethics code about fraternizing with co-workers (not that Ted knows that they're co-workers.) But Brody doesn't much worry about that when he pressures her into a date, because his department handles violations of the ethics code.

At a big presentation where their company head, Noah, announces he's running for President, and his employees are now his campaign team, Ted learns Sarah works for Ayn-Styne, freaks out and accuses his coworkers of being aliens, gets shot in the head by Brody, and then flies away, with Sarah. Meanwhile, the reporter from the second issue has revealed Noah's companies control all the militaries that are about to start a war over whatever's locked in that Dome.

One thing I'm curious about, Sarah is narrating all this in voicemails she's leaving for someone. Someone she hasn't named, but left behind when this job required her to move cross-country. Someone she says Ted reminds her of. My guess is the person is dead, and she's trying to save Ted as some proxy, but I don't know.

I'm also curious about the color schemes Chisholm is using. Ted's office space is this blue-white I assume is replicating fluorescent lighting. It's cold and almost unpleasant to look at. Kind of washes everything out. He kind of leaves behind a similar color as an energy trail when he flies. His apartment is mostly a darker, duller blue of his TV, which he uses for playing video games. Except when he wakes from nightmares, at which point Chisholm drenches the panel in a dark red. The same color returns, maybe a little brighter, during the whole crazy scene in the elevator with Sarah and Brody. Awakening from nightmares is like a rebirth?

Meanwhile, Sarah's office/apartment is a sort of bland tan-yellow. I guess it could be considered soothing, or at least not unpleasant. Also, no one has anything on the walls in their offices or apartments. There are shelves and coat hangers, but no posters, no paintings, no photo collages. I don't know if that's significant or not. Things seems a little more technologically advanced than we are. Motorcyles and airplanes leave lines of glowy rings as trails behind them rather than exhaust or anything. There are holographic ads that project off the billboards. So maybe everyone's abandoned tactile, analog representations of art? Although people still have phones, and Ted's using a console with a controller, but it looks about 8-bit in the graphics, if that, so it may be a deliberately archaic choice by him.

One other thing in issue 3 that Chisholm does three times - once on a single page, twice on double page - is almost do a splash page, but then have a single, rectangular panel in the far right corner. The last thing before you'd go to the next page. He didn't use that in issue 1 or issue 2, so I wonder why he brought it out 3 times here. There are other pages where the lower right corner panel is a square and the panels above and to the left give the impression of boxing it in, so maybe it's a sign someone's options are being closed off? Ted's, or Sarah's? Or both? 

Sunday Splash Page #426

"Not First Law Compliant," in Menace #11, by John Romita (artist), Joe Letterese (letterer), writer and colorist unknown

Menace was, as you might guess, a horror title. This is actually from the last issue, although it's not the cover story (that was "Locked In!") The robot has no name in the original story; the name Parker gave it is a reference to being in the 11th issue. In the Agents of Atlas ongoing, he's revealed as the 11th robot in what's called the "Menacer" series, and Suwan has a much more recent model, albeit one that can't compete on its own with all the Uranian science components M-11's gotten from Bob.

The original story is only 5 pages, revolving around a scientist who refuses to release his robot until it's perfect, to the annoyance of his business manager who wants the 5 million bucks they can get for it. The robot obeys commands, but doesn't know when to stop obeying. You tell it to pick up a chair, it picks up one, then another, and keeps going until it's picked up every chair. A flaw the manager isn't aware of when he gets impatient and tells the robot to kill "the man in the room." Which is the end for the scientist, but also the end for the manager, as another man in the room.

In Agents of Atlas, the scientist, realizing the people who commissioned him planned evil things, sacrifices his life force to the machine so it will have emotions and free will. The fun is that, with the '50s sci-fi robot design, M-11 doesn't make facial expressions. So no one, including his teammates, can really tell what's going on in his head. There's no indication Bob can read his mind, or that Venus' emotional abilities have any effect whatsoever.

Sometimes Parker plays that for mystery. Everyone is standing silently in Bob's spaceship, and M-11 suddenly shouts "Archiving!" before going silent again. Sometimes it's for comedy, when Gorilla Man thinks the robot needs a push to get angry to win the fight with M-21 and gets a personality module based on "The Greatest" installed. M-11 spends a few pages talking like Muhammad Ali before Bob reveals the module didn't work at all and M-11's just humoring Ken.

And sometimes M-11 sparks conflict. He's the one that contacts Bob and Ken about Jimmy Woo, and it's only late in the mini-series everyone figures out why. In the ongoing series, Jimmy has just about talked their way out of a fight with the Avengers when M-11 recognizes Wolverine's voice. Because Logan blew him up during a mission in Cuba in the '50s, and M-11, like Michael Jordan, took that personally. But Logan doesn't put the pieces together - so much for House of M giving him his memories back - and M-11 won't explain his actions to anyone. It's just a thing they have to deal with.

Oh well, not like killer robots and X-Men get along all that well anyway.

Saturday Splash Page #228

"Gorilla Mad," in Men's Adventure #26, by Robert Q. Sale (penciler/inker), writer, colorist, letterer unknown

Gorilla Man's first appearance is a horror story, significantly altered and embellished by Parker and probably other writers. In Agents of Atlas, Ken Hale was a big time sportsman and adventurer type, not unlike Rex Mason before he became Metamorpho. Except Hale started to get paranoid about aging and looked for a cure. Leading him to a legend about a gorilla man that never ages, never gets sick or dies. Ken treks into the jungle, gets lost, runs out of food and water, and then comes face-to-face with the gorilla man. He kills it, hand-to-hand because his gun is empty, and becomes it. But he won't age, get sick or injured, or die! Of natural causes, anyway.

In this story, though, Ken Hale just seems to be some guy living the suburban lifestyle with his wife, who starts being tormented by nightmares of two gorilla creatures fighting to the death. Things get bad enough he can hear the howls of the beast even while awake, so he's got to find a solution or go mad. One pipe-smoking guy (who Parker reveals was Mr. Lao, the dragon that's the power behind the throne of the Atlas Organization) gives him a lead to Kenya. Hale can't find any guides who either have any idea where to look, or are willing to take him, so he goes alone. And finds the gorilla man. He drops his gun and fights it, and kills it, and well, you know the rest.

Parker's approach works a lot better, since it provides a real reason for Ken Hale to go hunt down the gorilla man beyond "he started having nightmares, for some unexplained reason." Giving Ken the pulp hero-style adventurer backstory lets him fill the "gruff, but lovable" archetype on the team. Can't go wrong having a Ben Grimm on your roster! He can have all kinds of esoteric knowledge and skills he picked up in his travels and adventures, but still have plenty of things he doesn't know that can be explained to him (and us.)

Gorilla Man might be the one that needs the team the most. Yeah, Namora being unfrozen is a definite upgrade for her, but once that was accomplished she could always return to Atlantis. Venus had found a place, Bob was living with the Uranians. Jimmy Woo obviously wasn't satisfied with how his career had gone, but he did still have a job and colleagues who either trusted him enough, or were desperate enough, to follow him down the Atlas rabbit hole (and get incinerated by Mr. Lao.)

Gorilla Man's apparently working for SHIELD - maybe in that monster version of the "Howling Commandos?" - but he didn't even know Woo recommended him for the spot. He doesn't seem to have any particular loyalty to SHIELD. He throws them over to help Jimmy without a second thought, so I doubt he formed any lasting friendships. But the guy who got him to stop hiding away in the jungle? That's the guy he'll go to the wall for, who helps him believe what he's doing matters.

That said, I think he's gotten easily the most use outside Agents of Atlas of any of the characters. He was performing some sort of role for the Avengers when they were based out of a frozen Celestial. May still be doing that, actually. He was on some "Agents of Wakanda" team a few years back. He's a talking gorilla, and like I said, he can be sort of the Ben Grimm on any roster, so naturally people are going to want to use him. 

What I Bought 5/4/2026 - Part 2

I got through Read or Die: The TV Series back in April on my anime rewatch. It was pretty good. I appreciate the silly sibling stuff between the Paper Sisters more than I remember in the past. Then Mr. Joker showed his face around episode 15, and it was ten episodes of me groaning, "Just shoot the fucker, stop listening to his bullshit!" But they never listen.

Generation X-23 #3, by Jody Houser (writer), Jacopo Camagni and Marco Renna (artists), Erick Arciniega (color artist), Ariana Maher (letterer) - So that foul-up where Laura got resurrected during the Krakoa era with a full adamantium skeleton, instead of just her claws, never got undone? Poor quality control.

The whole thing where the previous issue ended with X-Infinite saying Laura must be held responsible for two deaths is not really followed up on. Laura's alone in the infirmary, until some of those weird time shards show up, then vanish. So now Laura's got questions, and X-92's got a lead on answers. Which, predictably, point to X-Infinite, who is experimenting with some of Laura's skin that got scorched off.

As it turns out the kid's attempts to file reports that everything in the facility didn't work as well as they thought, Laura, Infinite and 92, escape. Infinite admits that, once the scientists figured out he was smarter than them, they made him help with their work. So all the other kids having multiple powers is his doing, and it's the old, a "Wolverine's healing factor could save them," bit. Well, at this point it's more like Laura's propensity for stabbing could save them. 

With the apparently abrupt passing of Jacopo Camagni, I don't know if Renna's going to be the regular artist on the book going forward. If so, I don't know if this issue is representative of their work. I would figure they were working under a time crunch, since they probably weren't expecting to draw 13 pages of this particular comic. Here, at least, Renna's style seems a little simpler than Camagni's. Faces and bodies are more basic shapes, fewer little details. Might simply not had enough time for as much shading, because I feel like that's a big difference between the two. There's more gradation and depth to Camagni's pages.

That said, Renna's art works perfectly well. The fight between Laura and X-Infinite is easy enough to follow. I'm not sure why one of the soldiers who attacked the facility is a giant, robotic crab-centipede-person, but it was a pretty impressive reveal. Got me to stop, blink, and wonder where the heck that thing came from.

Touched by a Demon #3, by Kristen Gudsnuk - As the city burns, one man tries to hide his eyes behind some strange wrapping paper.

Having concluded demons giving humans advice is not helpful, Frons takes the priest's recommendation of providing tools literally. So this week's client, Max, was given a chimp's paw, granting 5 wishes. Not a monkey's paw, mind you. No ironic comeuppance! But do I get a free frogurt with it? If you wish for one, I guess.

So after wishing for $10 million in an offshore account (the password to which he forgot), and an endless bag of weed and Adderall (which might have something to do with forgetting the password), Max starts messing around with people's free will. Making the girl he likes love him, making her kinks conform to his, for him to feel fulfilled. Stuff like that. But, as long as he doesn't try to make a sixth wish, he's fine.

Then he casually wished for them to not have to go into work and an earthquake knocked their office building - among other structures - down. I feel like Gudsnuk missed an easy joke there. When Max makes that wish, one of the chimp's fingers uncurls, and it isn't the middle one.

Despondent over another failure, Frons comes to the priest's church to aid in their relief efforts with a big sack of cash he. . .summoned from Hell, I think. Then he confronts Father Angelo, who he blames for giving him bad advice. Angelo either hasn't twigged to Frons being a demon, or is just jerking him around, but he claims to have found something that suggested fallen angels could be redeemed, and seems to be semi-related to Frons' idea of shattering souls to create something of pure evil. Except, you know, the flip side. Frankly, the idea of the soul as something you can chip pieces off of like some oversized ice cream cookie cake is maybe the part I'm having the most trouble with.

Oh, and the cop showed up at their office, looking into the disappearance of Wendy's family. And right as Frons' boss (Mammon) shows up. If somebody burned a roast I'm going to think I fell into an '80s sitcom. But no, in all seriousness, I'm really interested to see how Gudsnuk pulls this together with one issue to go. Interested and worried, since I actually like all these goofballs and I'm worried it's going to end badly for them. Especially Wendy, who did, you know, kill her asshole parents and her perpetually terminally ill older sister.

1222 - Anne Holt

A train crashes during a terrible winter storm in an isolated village in Norway. There's only one fatality - the man driving the train - and a hotel nearby offers shelter and food to everyone until the storm passes and they can be rescued.

Too bad people start dying. A well-known member of the clergy, then another member of the clergy who seemed to know something about what happened to his colleague. And there's a mysterious group that was traveling in a special carriage, who are sequestered with an entire floor to themselves. Nobody knows exactly who is up there, or what they're doing.

Trying to pull apart the puzzle is Hanne Wilhelmsen, a former cop, now in a wheelchair after getting shot a couple of times. Hanne really doesn't want any part of the mess, but figures they ought to at least attempt to gather some information for when the police can actually get there. She's aided by the person who runs the hotel, a lawyer who lives in the area, and a doctor that was on his way to a conference.

Hanne is an interesting choice for a protagonist. She's so reluctant, not just in her hesitance to get involved in the case, but about everything. She was traveling to meet with a specialist about certain quality of life issues she was dealing with, but doesn't seem like she really wanted to make the trip. She doesn't like to deal with people, explaining at one point that while they interest her, she prefers observing them through fiction. While her injury may have contributed to this attitude, the impression we get is she was already like that, and had been for a very long time.

She says she finds herself liking the doctor, but balks on the cusp of inviting him to dinner. He asks her to call him sometime, and she can come to dinner at his home. She says she will. Then she says she never did. I'm not sure someone's whose personality is so close to mine is really cut out for the lead role in a series of mysteries. It feels like Holt will really have to work to contrive circumstances for Hanne to get involved in mysteries if her instinctive reaction is, "Oh God, I have to be around people?"

It makes the fact she takes an interest in a teenage boy who seems to be traveling alone all the more inexplicable. Holt doesn't delve into Adrian's backstory, though if he's going to become a recurring character, I assume she will at some point. But I couldn't decipher why Hanne locked in on him to begin with, even before the murders started. He was pretty hostile towards both victims, but it never feels like the story is pointing to him as the killer.

(My money was on the doctor, especially once he made a comment that, as a dwarf, people weren't bothered by his condition because they didn't regard him as a threat. Plus, he's the one who suggests the second victim was stabbed with an icicle.)

Holt throws in several threads that end up being unrelated to the mystery, and I can't tell if these are things she's putting in place for future stories, people that Hanne will encounter again in other contexts, or if they were simply red herrings for the readers. There are also several references to earlier events in her life, like the President of the United States shooting an FBI agent in Hanne's living room, that I suspect would be expanded upon later. Maybe Holt was going to work backwards?

'If the perpetrator had actually been in the lobby when Cato Hammer's death was announced, we could only hope that he or she accepted the incorrect cause of death as a temporary declaration of peace from the hotel management.

People must be kept calm at all costs.

Including the perpetrator.' 

What I Bought 5/4/2026 - Part 1

Last week, things started going haywire with my computer protection whenever I got on the internet. I was getting concerned, but whatever was going on seems to have resolved itself on Monday. I know I'll have to get a new computer eventually, but not yet.

Originally, the stuff I ordered from April weren't projected to arrive until today, but it showed up on Monday afternoon instead, so we can dive in.

Dust to Dust #8, by JG Jones (writer/artist), Phil Bram (writer), Jackie Marzan (letterer) - I think he needed to make the "O" bigger, because it looks like the sign says "NOV" instead of "NO."

Things come to a head. The rainmaker's foul-up starts a fire that burns down the church, revealing the corpse of the baseball player and the preacher's daughter. The sheriff went to confront the moonshiners, except they've been dead for like three issues. Sarah the reporter tries calling the feds, who are slowly making their way to town, but get waylaid by the dangling corpse of the rainmaker and a sudden artillery barrage that makes them crash in front of the lunatic in the gas mask.

Meanwhile, the mayor's losing his grip, as he starts trying to kill his daughter when she says she's leaving, with Sarah and the sheriff making the last-second save. The fight is a lot of small panels of discrete actions. A punch, someone screaming, a hand near a safe. You can figure out what's going on, but there's not a lot of flow to it. Anyway, the mayor enters full "kill everyone and blame it on the sheriff" mode. Which does not pan out.

So, I'd been hemming and hawing over whether the mayor or his PTSD-afflicted brother was the guy in the gas mask killing people. Turns out it's sort of a two-man operation, the mayor picking the targets and the brother killing them. Also, the mayor stole his brother's girl while the guy was off at war, and so it was actually Van's daughter that was going to marry the now-deceased baseball player.

I feel like it's way too late in the game to be revealing secret parents, but this whole thing is paced weird. The rainmaker makes sense in the broader drought-afflicted aspect of the story, but he really just feels like an excuse for one more body on the pile. The firebrand preacher is just kind of there, I guess to have a daughter to fool around with the baseball player and a convenient church to burn down. The sheriff sort of gets his act together at the end, but he doesn't really do much. Sarah is as responsible for saving Jenny as he is, and Van is the one who kills the mayor.

Spirit of the Shadows #4, by Daniel Ziegler (writer), Nick Cagnetti (writer/artist/colorist), Ferran Delgado (letterer) - Problem with the blue guy wearing a Darkseif skirt, you get a bad view when looking.

Still moving between flashbacks and the present, though we're getting flashbacks as told by Erik and by Elizabeth finding pages of the book. The doc that brought Erik back to life is the one who killed him, on the orders of Katrina's dad. The dad wanted his wife back, and considered Erik an acceptable guinea pig for trying to bring someone back. Then Erik killed the dad by burning the house down, Katrina had followed him there and died as well, with no body to try to resurrect. So Erik started abducting women - like Elizabeth - to try and use as hosts for Katrina's soul.

In the present, the witch and the ghost of Katrina's dad are trying to make Erik extra-super-duper-dodecatuple-dead. No afterlife at all, no resurrection, because your soul's just destroyed. Which can apparently done by a spell, if the person asks for it. So they make Erik think he's got no chance whatsoever of being reunited with Katrina which, based on what I've seen through 4 issues, yeah, he shouldn't. The doctor makes some pitch to Elizabeth that maybe by saving her back in issue 1, he started to save himself, but, come on. She was dead and in that situation because of him. Give me a fucking break. 

So what we've got is an endless string of people who can't accept losing someone and just pass the pain on to someone else. Laemmle wanted his wife back, but she was already beyond his reach and all he ended up doing was killing someone he resented for trying to take something else he deemed his. Erik couldn't let that pass, and his revenge cost him Katrina, except he couldn't accept that and killed Elizabeth and a lot of other women. And now Elizabeth's sister is out for Erik's head because she thinks he's cost her the chance to bring her sister back.

But Elizabeth's a more forgiving type, so she's going to try and save Erik, which requires her to confront a sister she doesn't seem to recognize. So we'll see if someone finally breaks the chain. It won't be Laemmle, considering he's animating a suit of armor and ran the doctor through at the issue's end. Oh well, the doc was pretty smug for someone complicit in the deaths of a lot of people at the hands of these grief-afflicted dopes.

Hangmen Also Die! (1943)

Set in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, a doctor who is part of the resistance manages to assassinate the "Reich Protector", aka the Nazi currently running the country. Who was nicknamed "The Hangman", so you know he was a friendly guy.

Dr. Svoboda's (Brian Donlevy) getaway driver got hauled away before they could, er, get away, so the doc fled on foot, and Mascha (Anna Lee) helped by sending the Gestapo the wrong way. Later, when he can't find a place to hide from patrols, he spends the evening with her family in their apartment. Where he claims to be an architect who met Mascha at an event, but then shows a surprising amount of medical knowledge.

Must be nice, going to college when it was cheap enough you could switch majors that casually.

The Nazis, as they like to do, gather up hundreds of citizens and stick them in a camp, promising to execute some each day until the assassin is handed over. This includes Mascha's father, a professor played by Walter Brennan.

There's really two key threads in this film, both revolving around the assassination, tied together by Gestapo Inspector Gruber. One is whether Svoboda should surrender himself, the other about a member of the underground who is actually working for the Gestapo, his point of contact being Gruber. In the latter, there's focus on a debate among the underground about what to do, growing suspicion of Mr. Czaka (Gene Lockhart), and his eventual exposure.

In the former, you have Svoboda struggling with guilt over innocent people dying because of him, and Mascha, torn between wanting to save her father and not wanting to help the Nazis. There's an element of peer pressure in both. A resistance member convinces Svoboda not to turn himself in, even after the doctor explains his intent to write a confession and then kill himself with the gun he used. At one point the resistance tries to redirect Mascha's carriage to convince her not to talk, and when she panics about being abducted and makes a scene, everyone on the street starts harassing her about why she wants to speak to the Gestapo if they haven't summoned her.

The film also checks in on Brennan and the other prisoners periodically, as they have their own debates about whether the assassin should give himself up to save them, or whether they'll agree to speak over the radio to the public. Of course, the Nazis have already prepared their speeches, which is the point the film really hammers again and again. Collaboration is a sucker bet. The Nazis will not honor the terms. They'll make promises, but once they have what they need, there's no reason to keep them. They aren't your friends, they won't protect you when the ax is about to fall, as Czaka finds out.

The last third of the movie is almost like a heist or con film, as many people band together to keep Svoboda's name clear, by pinning the assassination on Czaka. It's clever enough, and Lockhart really sells Czaka's bluster as a cover for how panicked he is as he realizes his fellow Czechoslovakians are turning against him, and the Nazis are only too willing to swallow the lie. Plus, it follows the theme of everyone being in this together, because the resistance manages to pull together "witnesses" to implicate Czaka where the Gestapo can find no links between them to suggest it's a frame-up. They managed to get everyone on board with this plan, in a short amount of time, leaving the traitor alone, with no one to speak for him but himself.

The movie blessedly avoids a romance subplot between Svoboda and Mascha, though they have to put on appearances a couple of times. That introduces an additional element of tension since Mascha is engaged, and it doesn't appear her fiance knows what's going on. When Gruber starts buddying up to him, there's real concern this is where everything will fall apart.Mascha is torn between fear for her father and anger at both the Nazis and Svoboda, with Lee depicting her as almost whipsawing between emotions at times, then scrambling to undo the damage one hasty decision made, with another hasty decision. Donlevy spends the entire movie walking like he's wearing cement boots, the guilt just weighing him down.

A Poisoned Heart

That's your excuse for all your bad habits. The smoking, the excessive consumption of sleeping pills, making people drag you around in a coffin. . .

In the seventh volume of No Longer Allowed in Another World, Annette, Tama and Nir have learned it's Archibishop Elton running a secret prison beneath the castle that holds Otherworlder children and sends them out on missions. But Elton is a dear friend of Annette's, can she find the strength to confront him?

Well she better, because he's beaten up Sensei and thrown him in a cell, and dispatches Yamada's crew of do-gooders with ease. Sensei at least has the fairy whistle he was gifted, so he can call on Solulu - stress-eating after dealing with him a couple of times - to free him, but in typical fashion, he's more interested in what's going on inside Elton than actually stopping the guy.

Annette does get it together, but her big plan of using light magic against a goblin doesn't work, because the holy robes Elton wears negate the effect. She's still able to protect Itsuki, an Otherworlder she mentored when he first arrived, though it leaves her badly injured. And that's when Sensei shows up. It's a little strange because writer Hiroshi Nota has Sensei praise Annette for her convictions, then tell Elton that he's 'furious.' But all that results is him trying to dig into Elton's motivations.

I'm not expecting Sensei to start throwing punches, but at least exhale some cigarette smoke in the Elton's face if you're really that angry. It feels like something that was set up for the splash page as a big "oooooh" moment, but there's no pay off. Sensei's always demanding people tell him their life stories and motivations, being furious has nothing to do with it.

At any rate, the backstory is that when Elton was first assigned as a representative of the Church to Blau Kingdom, people didn't want a goblin around. Except Queen Saphira, a child then, who believed all races could be friends if humans just opened their hearts to others. Elton tried to make it a reality, even reaching out to an Otherworlder named Kaoru, who got sent here without any special skill and embraced apathy and cynicism. Which are very cool attributes, but not helpful for surviving a medieval fantasy kingdom. Elton eventually got through, and after being intensively trained, Kaoru was assigned to Saphira's guard.

And then Kaoru and Saphira caught feelings, a bitter pill for Elton, who loved Saphira for her kindess and acceptance. So he sent Kaoru off in an attack against the Dark Lord and decided all Otherworlders were good for was attack dogs. Elton, understandably, gets pissed at Sensei pulling out all his hidden pain and crimes, but his freak out leaves him vulnerable to a combo attack from Annette and Nir. Even that doesn't quite end things, as there's one last reveal that paints Elton and Annette's boss, His Holiness, in a ominous light.

So Annette stands on her own, even when Sensei isn't backing her up. Nir continues to grow in bravery and skill. Tama, doesn't get much of anything (and trend that will continue into the next volume.) There's possibly something put in play with one of the Fallen Angels, who makes a last second save and was someone Saphira and Elton know. Maybe he'll get involved again later, assuming the apathy and cynicism haven't overtaken his heart once more.

Sensei does actually finish the story he writes based on Elton's pain, but the people of the kingdom have developed their own idea about Elton and who he his. Sensei bows to popular opinion, so it's another unpublished work.