What I Bought 6/29/2026 - Part 2

I almost never get $10 bills back in change. Because yes, I buy most things with cash. It's a chemical affliction. Whether it's a automated checkout thing or a good old human cashier, I usually receive two $5s instead. Which seems odd. Why bother with two bills when one will do? Did Trump do away with $10s because Alexander Hamilton's not even a President, not like Ben Franklin?

Babs: The Black Road South #4, by Garth Ennis (writer), Jacen Burrows (artist), Andy Troy (colorist), Rob Steen (letterer) - This feels like the sort of thing Babs will give Izzy grief about endlessly.

Our protagonists survive sledding off a cliff on a frozen barbarian and end up in a great sea of - well, let's not discuss what they're floating in. Babs is still playing cagey about her prior trip, though she's starting to suspect the Samwise stand-in has to be behind all this. Troy washes the whole sequence on the sea in this dull greyish murk that just looks nasty. Like the air would have a tangible texture that clings to you, and it would be awful.

About the time Izzy points out the Orb couldn't have been destroyed, because otherwise all the great evil in Mordynn would typically get sucked into a great hole, they notice Lilith Lazuli isn't dead. Or, she was, but the eldritch properties of the land brought her back. Sort of. She's about as articulate as your typical zombie, but she gets them to shore.

Where they're met by an army of pig-men mercs, working for the angry little hobbit. He hauls them off to some camp, rather than the tower where the great evil is sort of sulking and doing not much of anything. Because the hobbit's working on his own, to get the Orb. Which shouldn't be possible, unless someone had formed a soul bond with said Orb. Someone like Babs.

I think the thing that surprises me is that she'd actually think she could get away with selling it. Just seems like the sort of thing where any person eager to get their hands on it, is also the sort of person you couldn't trust to honor the terms of whatever deal you made with them. Hmm, maybe she'd been drinking when she made the arrangement. 

Is Ted OK? #4, by Dave Chisholm (writer/artist/letterer) - See? The doc agrees with me, last month's cover was nausea-inducing.

Dr. Paganini explains what's going on with Ted. She had a theory that human consciousness is stored somewhere other than inside your brain, but a place our brains access. A place with enormous storage capacity, and enormous energy potential. And Noah thought that could be a way to create true artificial intelligence. "Artificial intelligence", in the sense that he created a human body artificially, with no animating mind or spirit, and needed something to make it go.

They tried somehow linking the bodies to people who were dreaming, allowing access to what she called "Soul Space" through a shared doorway. It worked, and didn't require ten simultaneous nukes going off, which was the other notion she had for how to open a doorway into that space.

Except the further along things got, the more she sees that Noah's not after whatever she and the other scientists think he is. He wants to have an artificial human, but it needs to be able to use that Soul Space energy to do cool stuff. Like a lightning punch! Well sure, if I built an artificial person, I'd want them to be able to do cool shit. She figures out he's trying to build a video game character. Literally. The character in the game Ted plays before going to sleep each night. Who dies and is reborn with a different cool power.

But when things aren't going the way he'd like, Noah shifts to the nuke option. Being rich enough to have your thumb on the scale of several militaries helps. And that explains the Dome, if not how Noah was able to stand in a radioactive nightmare without issue. Unless he's given himself an artificial body and is drawing off that space as well.

The further into the story the Doc gets, the more Chisholm shifts how Noah is presented visually. He starts out positioned on the ends of panels, usually at the same level and size from our perspective as Dr. Paganini. He's sitting a lot, he's smiling, the colors are soft. Once the work begins, the colors shift to colder tones, like flourescent lights in a hospital. Noah tends to stand, and more than that, he tends to stand in the middle of things. Often stepping between our view of him and Dr. Paganini, making her smaller, pushing her to the edge of the panel, into the gutters. He's not asking about her work with interest, or promising that money won't be a problem. He demands she fix things, or insults "Soul Space" as a stupid name.

Having learned he was intended to be some next-gen human war machine, that his love for cats and paranoia are the result of Noah's capricious whims in how the "manowars" were programmed, Ted is ready to pack it in. He should just be destroyed. Sarah objects, making a whole spiel about Ted and who she thinks he is and that he doesn't get to give up. Ted comes around, decides it's time to stand up and be counted, and that doesn't go well.

I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop with Sarah. I'm not sure what that shoe will be. The person she keeps leaving voicemails for was someone Noah killed along the way? One of the dreamers, one of the mercs. That she's a dreamer, and all this is her and Ted sharing a consciousness? I can't quite buy that she's faking all this and is secretly loyal to Noah, because I don't think weren't meant to believe her internal narration is lies, even if it's remained vague who she's talking to. She's definitely projecting something about that person onto Ted, which he could end up seeing as a betrayal, if it's never really been about helping him, so much as him being a proxy for someone else she wished she could help.