Saturday Splash Page #195

"Odd-Colored Discharge," in The Rush #3, by Si Spurrier (writer), Nathan Gooden (artist), Addison Duke (colorist), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (letterer)

Nettie Bridger is looking for her son, Caleb. His preacher father took the boy to the Klondike, ostensibly to spread the Scriptures, and came back on the sly, a drunk, broken wreck, their son left behind. So Nettie takes the money she'd earned in the interim, books passage on a steamship, finds a ragged, tattered scrap of a man named "Moonpeace Thyme", or M.P., to act as bodyguard, and goes into the Yukon, ending up at a place called Brokehoof.

Brokehoof is a bad place to be. Winter holds onto the region with an unnatural strength, and the drive for gold is under everyone's skin. Both of those statements are literal, by the way, as the only gold prospectors bring in is what they dig out from underneath their skin. Which they find on a regular basis, then immediately spend in town, before heading out for more. The exception appears to be the local Mountie, Inspector Lapointe, who is prohibited from pursuing a mining claims or things of that nature.

And there are monsters in the woods. A man called the Pale, wearing a bowler hat and suit, carrying a sawed-off shotgun and riding a giant spider. His face is a vortex, and there are scarce few he allows to leave. Another, who eventually earns the nickname "The Carrion Kid," is a dark thing with sharp teeth and wings that seem to be perpetually molting. The gold-crying moose you're already acquainted with.

Nettie cares not a bit about any of it. Which both protects her, and endangers her. She's not prey to the same demons as the prospectors, who Gooden draws as scraggly, sunken cheeked, wild-eyed men. One good cough would seem likely to break their backs, but they'd still head out the next morning to dig through the snow and chip away at the rock beneath. But that makes her an affront to those same men, and Nettie's not always careful of her words.

Spurrier gives her a sharp tongue, one she hides at times behind an air of culture she's trying to affect, but the dance hall girl comes out almost as easily as the irate mother. She tears into M.P. more than once, who, despite being maybe a half-step above the locals, is at least trying his hardest to help Nettie. A few moments of insight aside, he's not very good at it, but that serves to both make him not entirely credible to the reader, and make Nettie's harsh words feel a bit like she's kicking a dog trying to apologize for piddling on the carpet.

But that's obsession, which is what has its hooks in every person in Brokehoof, whatever form it takes. It makes them blind to anything other than the pursuit of their goal. Even if they recognize the truth on some level, they make themselves turn a blind eye. Much of the narration in each issue is letters Nettie composes to Caleb. As we eventually learn, she hasn't actually written any of them out. She won't admit that she's lost him, just as the prospectors won't admit they're locked in a cycle that's going nowhere. 

Random Back Issues #140 - Step by Bloody Step #2

Why does this happen wherever I go with my fiercely protective armored giant?

The giant and the girl continue their journey, though tensions are continuing to run high, since the girl still doesn't know where they're going or why. The giant forbids her from visiting a village in the distance, so she scales a bluff at the first opportunity, only to find the village of greenish, goblin-like people being annihilated by enormous black airships. By the time the giant catches up, one of the ships targets them, and she slips from the giant's grasp, only saving her self by catching a thorny vine.

Pricked by the thorns, her blood prompts a burst of plant growth, lifting her high enough the giant can grab her and haul ass into a forest, all of which is observed by men in a smaller airship, who have taken hostage a farmer who tried to befriend the girl last issue.

Eventually, the pair reach a beach. While the girl alternately splashes in the waves and sulks in the shadows, the giant kills more potential threats and builds a big raft to cross the ocean. The girl does, while carving a scowly picture of herself on a tree, find several more carving nearby. Mystery!

Unfortunately, being extremely single-minded and direct makes their course easy to predict, so at the far shore waits a group of armed men. One shot wounds the girl, and when her blood hits the water, the giant goes berserk. Too bad the ones in his path are more of the green people, noticeably shackled around the ankles. They're slaughtered, to the horror of both the girl and the farmer, but to the glee of the soldiers, one of whom takes aim at the girl. The farmer shoves him, spoiling the shot - no doubt saving all their asses from that pissed off giant - and they withdraw.

The girl sees something in the sea and tries to push the raft there, but the ocean itself rises to bar her path, much like the desert did at one point last issue. The giant insists they keep going forward, and the girl's resentment only grows. Meanwhile, the farmer's been hauled before the prince? general? that's been tracking the pair, and gets an ultimatum: Help us out, or see what we do to your wife and kid.

Well, when you put it that way. . .

{10th longbox, 209th comic. Step by Bloody Step #2, by Si Spurrier (writer), Matias Bergara (artist), Mattheus Lopes (colorist), Jim Campbell (letterer)}

Sunday Splash Page #347

"Land of the Dead," in Marvel Zombies (2015) #1, by Simon Spurrier (writer), Kev Walker (artist), Frank D'Armata (colorist), Clayton Cowles (letterer)

In 2015, when Marvel canceled all their ongoing titles to play along with Hickman destroying the universe in service of his Secret Wars, the need for product was filled by a bunch of mini-series, allegedly set on different pieces of the patchwork world Doom cobbled together from what survived the Beyonders' attempts to destroy the multiverse. I bought 3 of those mini-series. Mrs. Deadpool and Her Howling Commandos is long since excised from my collection. The second book we'll get to next month. The third, is this thing.

I never really got into the Marvel Zombies fad. Maybe the premise just felt too much like a '90s What If? blown out to increasingly bloated proportions, what with multiple mini-series going back to the same well. Obviously I'm not entirely immune to a "everybody dies" story, just look at last week's entry, but it's rarely my favorite thing. But Spurrier had written something I liked previously, and Kev Walker drew the hell out of Avengers Arena, and I liked Elsa Bloodstone (and my list of books was dwindling), so here we are.

And the zombies are not really the focus. One does manage to teleport Elsa far away from her post along "The Shield", a giant wall I think Doom made out of Ben Grimm to hold back the section of zombie world he incorporated, but it's mostly Elsa wandering the wilderness with a peculiar child that she wants to protect for reasons she can't explain. All the while something else is tracking them. There are still other zombies, an entire gang of them led by a Mystique, and they retain their intelligence because they keep a Deadpool tied up and take out a little of his brain to feed on everyday via, as Wade puts it, "le Spork."

But as with the best zombie stories, they're really there to give the non-zombie characters a way to show their true selves. Spurrier and Walker keep showing us flashbacks of this Elsa's upbringing with her demanding bastard of a father. Who insists on no weakness, and goes so far as to expose his wife to a horror that shreds her sanity so he can have her taken away, because she was interfering in his training of Elsa. So Elsa is constantly confronted with the notion of how her father would deal with this frightened, secretive child with no survival training or combat instincts, who for some reason doesn't turn after being bitten. And then she keeps going against that training, right up to the point they encounter something much worse than a zombie.

Walker mostly gets to draw various Marvel characters in various states of physical decay, and his does it very nicely. When he's not drawing that, it's mostly the flashbacks of Ulysses Bloodstone being an emotionally constipated ass towards a very young Elsa, who looks suitably frightened or sad. It makes a nice contrast from her as an adult, where she's mostly glowering with gritted teeth or looking irritated while stomping some zombie's skull to a pulp and cursing about the annoyance of the whole situation. Which also serves to contrast her from her father. Even after all the training, she still refuses to just accept the harsh realities of the life she's stuck in and bear it stoically. Is constant sarcasm and cynicism a better approach? Eh, probably not.

And with that, we bid farewell to Many Months of Marvel.

Saturday Splash Page #133

 

"Plot Threads," in The Spire #1, by Simon Spurrier (writer), Jeff Stokely (artist), Andre May (colorist), Steve Wands (letterer)

The spire in question is a city, one where the buildings are built almost atop each other, rising into the sky like a pyramid that went through redesigns at several points. From the land surrounding it, a barren plain of rocks that look a bit like skulls, it's an imposing and bleak grey monument. Within, a maze of different levels and social strata, all narrow alleys and vertical handholds along the outside of buildings.

Many of the inhabitants look basically like humans, but there are others who don't to varying degrees, and whose abilities are certainly different from humans. In polite company, the varied lot of them are referred to as "Sculpted." Less politely (or alertly, depending on the speaker's level of peripheral awareness), they're called "Skews."

Constable Sha, head of the City Watch, is a Sculpted. Able to project wire-thin tentacles from her body. Also able to knit or reform her body as needed, although this can have deleterious effects on the mind, depending how far you go.

The Spire is a mystery. Who is the mystery killer Sha is tasked to apprehend, and why are they attacking their particular targets? Why is the new Baroness, no fan of the Sculpted in general or Sha in particular, so pissed about this particular killer? Why doesn't Sha know her past or of any other people like her? It seems like several mysteries, layered upon each other, but with brief flashbacks every issue to a tense carriage ride, it's eventually revealed as one, very old, mystery. Some people try to run from ugly truths, others to bury them.

Stokely creates some varied designs for the Sculpted. Frog-like in one case, in another what seems like a bunch of asparagus that have bundled together into a bipedal organism. The Sculpted without eyes sometimes wear wooden masks with press-on eyes, so others will find them less off-putting, and hopefully not fear them so. Sha has a messenger/comic sidekick, a lumpy and battered looking fairy-thing called Pug. It's like someone mashed together a satyr's lower half with the naked upper torso of a child's doll, put fly wings on the back and a peeled potato going bad atop the shoulders.

Sha is very much a Spurrier protagonist, much like Hum in Coda. Cynical, sarcastic, impatient, disrespectful. Likes to talk, though rarely about what's useful. If she complains and snarks, then the other person may push back. Then she can grumble and insult them more. If that doesn't produce results, then she has something to complain about. Win-win.

Saturday Splash Page #121

 

"A Winter Murderland", in Step by Bloody Step #1, by Si Spurrier (writer), Matias Bergara (artist), Matheus Lopes (colorist)

A 4-issue mini-series from 2022 about an armored giant who guides a young girl on a circuit of the world. It's a silent mini-series, because while there are sporadic dialogue balloons, they're filled with pictographs, and there's no translation. Bergara's art is expressive and clear enough that the reader can grasp the notion of what's going on.

The silence also keeps the page free for Bergara's beautifully detailed landscapes. The variety sells just how far the duo are traveling. Sometimes we see a gradual transition, the snowy forest thinning into a vast plain. At others, they reach a cliff and things have simply changed. The plain overlooks a wide stretch of narrow pools and swamps, or they've reached the ocean.

With no dialogue or expository captions, the only sense of how long all this takes is via the changes we see in the girl's appearance. From a scrawny, awkward child to a sullen teenager, to a determined, clever young woman. The giant is silent and stern, always pushing her forward, but not unfeeling. It won't let her go back, not one step, but it will go back and pluck a flower for her.

But with no explanation for why any of this is happening, we see distance grow between the two. At the same time, other powers have become aware of the giant with incredible destructive power and the young girl with blood that promotes incredible plant growth it escorts. There is a war of some sort going on, the clean human-looking types spending at least some of their time in vast airship city-castles, while the green, goblin or orc creatures live on the ground below. The precise causes or motives are unclear, beyond the airship-dwellers are quite content to use others to destroy their enemies.

Lopes' colors are more subdued than what Bergara used for his work on Coda. Still rich and varied, but no searingly bright neon bursts of magic or force. While there is certainly something magic about the girl and the giant, this is otherwise not a world of that sort of thing. The people here aren't scrabbling for the last shreds of a once-commonplace power.

The threats the giant defends the girl from are often simply animals that are hungry and see easy prey, illustrated in a wide variety by Bergara. Were-creatures, flame spitting mollusks, giant bugs. Or it's the cold, the rain, the danger of crossing the ocean. The general/prince that attempts to use the girl may recognize there is power there, but his motives are more simple and base. If he didn't have the girl, he would just use guns and the lives of those he can command or coerce.

What I Bought 1/31/2024

I've been trying to rewatch the DVD in my movie collection. I tried last year, but sputtered out fairly early. I'm not that far along yet - the last one I watched was Crank - but I've been sticking to it. Progress!

Coda #5, by Simon Spurrier (writer), Matias Bergara (artist/colorist), Patricio Delpeche (colorist), Jim Campbell (letterer) - Yes, Hum, cling to that leg. For. . .protection.

Hum and Serka seem to have resigned themselves to the presence of Mildew and his sucker brigade, until the gnomads show up with their army, ready to wipe these "deluded fanatics" away. Hum makes a final appeal to Mildew, and Serka does likewise with the gnomads. Neither works. Even with Hum showing the truth about the false moon, and Serka pointing out Mildew's followers aren't going to try and fight, neither side is swayed.

Spurrier and Bergara lay those scenes out on facing pages, Hum on one side, Serka on the other, with the panels borders along the spine getting increasingly tattered and distant as no progress is made. The religious take Hum's arguments as tests meant to sway the, and the gnomad believes you "save" people whether they want to be or not.

This is the point where, if this was FallOut, I'd leave both sides to their slaughter and go do something else. Or kill both sides myself and then go do something else. Hum and Serka consider sitting it out, but they can't quite reconcile themselves to not trying to make the world a little better by doing something.

So they pull the old switcheroo. Serka knows about following a charismatic leader who promises the world but offers only death and ruin. So she knows how to short-circuit it. And Hum knows about being sneaky, about playing to win, even if it means playing dirty. I still feel like having his unicorn storm the gonamd's camp and trash everything is triumph through force of arm, but I guess the key is, he took the tools that made killing easy away from them, but left them alive. If they want to establish order through strength, they'd have to do it the old-fashioned way.

Of course, it's not a clean resolution. Doesn't work like that in their world, or ours, which is the rough point Spurrier's trying to make. Always be people looking for someone to promise them an escape, or looking for someone to push against and wrest control from. Do the best you can while keeping hope alive, something like that.

What I Bought 12/27/2023

Well, I hoped to have more than one of the three books from this week for today, but no luck. I should have some more of the last holdouts from this month by Monday, but we'll have to see if I make it back from traveling to another gig with Alex this evening.

Coda #4, by Si Spurrier (writer), Matias Bergara (artist/colorist), Patricio Delpeche (color assists), Jim Campbell (letterer) - Hum looks like he needs some coffee.

This issue is related to us, via Serka telling it to the Lunar Magus, upon whose prophecies Mildew is basing everything he's used to build his cult. So it details how Serka and Hum went searching for the Magus, who of course has three different hideaways. Serka is rather excited for the adventure, the monster fighting, puzzles to decipher and traps to avoid.

Hum is busy insisting they aren't on a quest and wondering why Serka's intent on doing this. Each of them is wondering about both Mildew (preparing some big show for his starving fanatics) and the Gnomads (gaining forces on their march to kill Mildew and his bunch.) Shown via glimpses through some crystal ball thing they brought to find the Magus. 

But really, it comes down to the child. Or children. Each of them wants this to time to be the time that works, and each wants a better world for their child (or children.) Hum thinks the way to that is forgetting all the magic and prophecies and just focusing on living and working. Though he doesn't turn away from the trip, doesn't try to talk Serka out of it. Serka doesn't want there to be another Whitlord, the dark kings that sold her people on a great reward in another world if they helped destroy this one.

There's a couple of lovely double-pages with small panels on either side of them couple talking. There's always a panel on the left side that shows one of their faces and just beside it, part of a larger image, in a faded colors of memory, is the same character as they were before. Serka as a crazed warrior in obsidian armor, spurred on by her Whitlord. Hum, an uncertain bard in the shadow of his king as said king proclaims they'll all fight to the death. Neither of them wants any more of that.

And I think Serka also hoped this would make certain the child (or children) survived birth. I don't know if she hoped the Lunar Magus had the skills to help a half-urken, half-human child survive, or if it was a belief that the quest itself would somehow carry the day. She mentions thinking this would make each of them their best selves, so maybe she thought that would help.

It didn't, so all that's left is to go home and watch another cycle of bloodshed gear up.

What I Bought 12/22/2023

I know it's already passed for some of you, but if you celebrate, Merry Christmas. Or a pleasant and/or unobtrusive December 25th. I was hoping to pick up both comics from last week on the way to my dad's, but only managed one.

Uncanny Spider-Man #5, by Si Spurrier (writer), Lee Garbett and Simone Buonfantino (artists), Matt Milla (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Kurt, the suit was a gift. Try to take better care of it.

The captured Nightcrawler is, to the surprise of no one other than ORCHIS, actually Mystique. Nightcrawler is pretending to be the mutantphobe on Silver's team. Kurt, his mom, and his girlfriend fight it out with a techno-organic'ed up Vulture and the Hounds. It's not going well until Kurt and the Bamf ghost free Warlock, who can at least cure the Hounds. Vulture's more of a problem, but Kurt's magic sword takes care of that.

Buonfantino takes over the art chores right after Kurt defeats the Vulture, so at least they waited until we're into the wrap-up. Everyone's a bit sharper-edged, bigger eyes. For Garbett's part, either he or Milla obscure or blur his linework on Warlock, especially when he's first freed. Makes him a bit seem malleable, suggesting he's not really holding a distinct shape in that moment. Things are shifting and rearranging.

After, Kurt decides he's got to get back into fighting for mutants, but Spidey lets him keep the suit. And the Bamf ghost is a part of Legion, while the rest of him hides. . .somewhere. I'm assuming the part about hiding with Kurt's heart and hope was metaphorical.

So, what do we got now that this is done? Kurt's rediscovered his resolve after having his self tampered with and manipulated. He's willing to get back in the fight. The specifics of Nightcrawler's birth have been retconned for at least the third time, with at least partially the goal of making Mystique less of a shit parent, and I guess codifying something Claremont says he always intended or wanted to do.

You could argue ORCHIS was dealt a loss, but the X-writers seem so unclear about how ORCHIS was planning to go about their goals (or even what their goals are, since the machines would ostensibly have a different goal than the "humanity defenders") that's difficult to square. How big a deal was infecting mutants with the techno-organic virus to make them mutant hunters to ORCHIS? How much does losing that actually hurt them?

My impression of the current situation is there are a bunch of different forces fighting a bunch of different parts of ORCHIS all over the place, with very little coordination on either side. Which could be the heroes dealing with problems as they arise, as has historically been the case in superhero comics, while ORCHIS is some kitchen nightmare scenario, with a dozen cooks all running in a dozen contradictory directions. So nobody's really making any progress in any direction.

What I Bought 11/22/2023

Well, alright, holiday's over, for the folks here in the States that celebrate it. Which means back to work for me. Booooooooo. But here's some comics, which work helps me to afford, so it all works out.

Fantastic Four #13, by Ryan North (writer), Iban Coello (artist), Jesus Arbutov (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Do you really need me to attempt a jokey comment for this cover?

First things first: In regards to Kelvin's questions after the previous issue, we are not told what the Savage Land of Dino-Earth is like. However, there is an offhand reference to "Moon Girl and Devil Human" made by the Dino-Thing. I'm assuming Moon Girl is a big red intelligent T-Rex, and Devil Human is a tiny, speechless ape. Or maybe Devil Human is King Kong, I don't know.

Anyway, plot stuff. Human-Earth Doom narrates this issue, because there were other portals and he and Dino-Doom have a plan, and they can't let the "heroes" (Doom always puts the word in quotes) interfere. They're going to combine the universes into one twice as large, with twice as much to rule. Which they will do together, equally.

You see where this is going.

Human-Doom trounces the Avengers and Dino-FF because he's got a gizmo that transfers quarks from one universe to a spot on top of another quark in the other universe, creating a powerful release of energy that can't be shielded against or absorbed. And he can precisely direct it, so he could put it inside their skulls, if they force the issue. They don't, but the two Things go after the two Dooms and point out that obviously they're going to betray one another eventually, they just hadn't realized the other Doom came to the same conclusion yet. Cue fight, cue Things rerouting energy, cue universes being pushed apart, cue Dooms being consumed in big explosion.

I like North's Doom. The arrogance, the insistence Stark refer to his as Doctor, not Victor. The sort of casual way he fights. Coello draws Doom as basically standing in one spot and just gesturing to defeat the attackers. He doesn't need to leap around or do anything so lowbrow as dodging. It does throw me when he calls Reed that, rather than "Richards". Granted, it was Dino-Reed, but I don't figure Doom makes much distinction, and "Reed" seems too familiar for someone Doom hates that much.

Uncanny Spider-Man #4, by Si Spurrier (writer), Lee Garbett (artist), Matt Milla (color artist), Joe Caramgna (letterer) - Guys, the giant genocide 'bot is behind you.

Kurt sits back to watch Spidey protect the pizza delivery guy from anti-mutant mobs. Until one of those Stark Sentinels shows up and declares, this guy ain't a mutant, but we're going to take him in for possible mutant sympathizing. Oh, and Spider-Man's a mutant, too. Those pages look very rough. Garbett's line isn't as smooth, the shading is less of a gradation, it just all looks rushed. It gets better in place later in the issue, but overall, the work's not as strong as it was the first two issues.

I saw someone insist that was probably the Vulture's doing, but I can't imagine he's high enough up the ladder to muck with those Sentinels' programming. More likely this is the machine's first step in eliminating other potential threats to their ascendance besides mutants. Now if they'd get around to killing Judas Traveler and MODOK. . .

Mystique tries to fire on the crowd with a bazooka, so Kurt finally gets off his ass and redirects the rocket into the robot. He chases Mystique, leaving Spidey to deal with the pizza guy and the crowd of bigots. Silver Sable has another date with Kurt, where she has little more success than the Bamf in getting Kurt to stop running away from dealing with real problems. But it does convince him to talk to Mystique. . .in another comic that I'm not going to buy, so oh well.

And then Silver goes ahead and catches Kurt (maybe) because that bigot on her payroll is gonna blab to everyone otherwise. So Spurrier's Silver Sable is both unprofessional and incompetent, because that dude is a meathead, but he managed to get a bug on her.

Setting aside the Mystique & Nightcrawler stuff, which will be resolved in that one-shot, I still expect a lot of this stuff to remain unresolved at the conclusion of this mini-series. Will we know who sent the Bamf? Probably not. Will Kurt free the Hounds with his Hopesword? Maybe, but wouldn't bet on it. Will he even kick Vulture's ass? You'd hope he could manage that much. It just feels like there's way too much here to conclude in one issue, unless Spurrier has decided that once Kurt stops running from his problems, he's hyper-efficient at solving them.

What I Bought 11/15/2023

I thought I found both of the new comics from this week I wanted, but upon a second glance, it was last month's issue of Fantastic Four. Oh well, leaves us with a Si Spurrier double feature.

Uncanny Spider-Man #3, by Si Spurrier (writer), Javier Pina (artist), Matt Milla (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - I ended up with the variant with the Vulture on it, and he looks really blurry. Is it supposed to be 3-D?

Nimrod and Vulture discuss recent attempts to deal with the "Creepy Crawler", as he keeps interfering in their plans. Nimrod's also not pleased Toomes hired Silver Sable, who refuses to leave until the job is done, under the cover of "professional ethics." Which don't preclude her canoodling with Nightcrawler in her off time.

Spurrier and Pina spend 5 pages on Kurt and Sable talking on a rooftop, with basically all the panels focused on them from the shoulders up, because they're both naked. Then another page on the lyrics to a Lila Cheney song Sable apparently really likes. If it's so critical the comic end next month that they're double-shipping this month, maybe cut some of the filler and make it a tight 4 issues, instead of a bloated five.

Kurt abruptly leaves to try and talk to his mother again, only to get attacked by Feral, Cloak, and Dagger, turned into Hounds by Toomes experimenting with the techno-organic virus. Did Dagger get caught in some other comic, because she was just fine last issue. But I guess this is why she couldn't find Cloak last issue, so assume he got caught sometime between issues 1 and 2, and her between 2 and 3.

Kurt cuts his way out of Cloak with his weird glowy "hopesword", and then Mystique shoots Cloak in the head. They show the large exit hole, naturally. It only slows him down, though one can't help but wonder what happens once the techno-organic virus isn't around the heal him up. Not like Mystique would give a shit either way, even if her brain wasn't a mess right now. Kurt's still arguing with the little ghost Bamf, what ever it is, and Mystique pulls a fade again.

Milla's colors maintain the feel of the book with the shift from Garbett to Pina. The Hound designs are pretty blah, nothing really remarkable or memorable about them. Some bright yellow-white bits, the old "yellow network of lines against black backdrop" from Warlock in places. I'm sure ORCHIS doesn't want the Hounds to be individualized - they're weapons - but it's still not visually interesting.

Coda #3, by Si Spurrier (writer), Matias Bergara (artist/colorist), Patricio Delpeche (color assists), Jim Campbell (letterer) - Lo, and I tell you, fear not the big marble being eaten by the big snake, for it, like a mouse's skeleton, shall pass.

Hum is trying very hard to stay out of what the preacher, formerly Mildew the Breaker, is doing. This new prophecy, which involves rewriting the end of the old world for a bunch of suckers. And a miracle, of course, or the appearance of one, which the mad illusionist is capable of creating. 

Hum is trying to focus on names for the possible approaching baby, without alerting Serka to that fact. For her part, Serka is aware the gnomad is going to use his new weapon to kill the preacher. Which could solve their problem of all these people trampling their garden, or make it much worse. They choose to get involved, though Spurrier and Bergara ignore the crowds outside for the entire discussion. It's just Hum and Serka and the pieces of their life. Hum fussing over her, Serka slowly armoring up. Glimpses of their respective steeds. It's ultimately about them as a couple, deciding what to do.

The miracle does not occur, nor does Mildew die. It doesn't matter. People believe what they want to believe, the only apparent deterrent is to kill them, and neither of the leads are up to that. Though they both lie to the other about how things went, Bergara contrasting what they say in solid panels with the typical color scheme, against panels with no borders done in basic shades of yellow for the truth. 

I mean, at least kill Mildew. Fine, he's a martyr then. But he doesn't benefit. Because he's dead. See if the threat of it's enough to make him change his tune, since this is all just a ploy anyway. Instead, Serka's got a notion to go on an extended vacation to seek a solution to the problem.

What I Bought 10/25/2023 - Part 2

The temperature started dropping like a rock midday Friday and didn't stop until Sunday morning. Went from mid-70s to mid-20s. As long as there's no ice, I'm fine with it. Meanwhile, we've got two X-Books to review.

Ms. Marvel: The New Mutant #2, by Iman Vellani and Sabir Pirzada (writers), Carlos Gomez and Adam Gorham (artists), Erick Arciniega (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Again, only one of these characters appears in the book. Thankfully, it's not Gambit.

Contrary to the first two issues, over half of this issue is spent in Kamala's dreams, as she and her fanfic Silver Surfer/Dr. Strange mash-up travel through her mind, trying to sort out her identity issues. Whoever draws the dream sequences makes Kamala look a closer to how she did when Adrian Alphona was illustrating her adventures. Kind of gangly-limbed even without her powers, alternately drawn in on herself and uninhibited (scarfing down popcorn while watching one of her memories with Dr. Surfer.)

Meanwhile, ORCHIS' little bug thing has injected something that, if Kamala unwittingly accepts it, will attack the minds of every telepath she communicates with. The virus appears before Kamala, pretending to be her X-gene that never activated, offering her the chance to feel fully accepted by the X-Men because she'll be a "real" mutant now. It would seem ridiculous for ORCHIS to think that was going to work, if the X-writers hadn't spent the entire Krakoa era with the X-Men touting Magento's "mutant supremacist" horseshit. Also if ORCHIS wasn't employing a bunch of morons who take the zero-sum approach to human & mutant relations.

Either way, Kamala finally recognizes she won't be defined by any one aspect of herself, biological or otherwise, and wakes up. To find a Sentinel outside her window, because she does register as a mutant now. Although the color scheme seems like the classic purple Sentinel, and I thought they were all rocking the red-and-gold Stark paint job now, so I can't rule out this still being some sort of hallucination. But the art style shifted back to what it is when she's awake, so I assume this is the point where she manifests the energy powers they gave her in the TV show.

There's a point where Bruno's hacking of the little drone allows ORCHIS to figure out which dorm building Kamala's in and send drones to look for facial recognition. Which Bruno beats by slapping Kamala's floppy-eared winter hat on her head and a facial mask over her mouth. The drone concludes this student matches no one in their records. But Bruno comments the X-Men must have some serious tech to fool facial recognition software.

I know the X-Men did do something similar to that, but I'm pretty sure it turned out face masks were great for fooling facial recognition software when the cops were trying to arrest people after the fact for protesting the cops being authoritarian, jackbooted thugs. But Bruno didn't know about that, or why disguise her? And since he did, why assume that wasn't what did the trick?

Uncanny Spider-Man #2, by Si Spurrier (writer), Lee Garbett (artist), Matt Milla (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - I don't mind when Marvel does alternate universe versions of the Rhino that are in big mechanical exo-suits (like the Ultimate Universe's version), but I don't like it for the classic Marvel version.

Most of this issue is Silver Sable flirting (or openly lusting after, if you prefer) Nightcrawler. There's a little bit at the beginning where he's trying to talk to Mystique, except she doesn't recognize him. Oh, and the details of his birth are going to change. Again. I know, right? Kurt's origin gets shifted around more than Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver's. ORCHIS sends Rhino, controlled by the same doohickus they used to make Kurt kill people, after Kurt.

I would have been curious to see how Nightcrawler handled that sort of challenge on his own, but Silver Sable's group bust in and briefly capture him. The control thing is messed up and hurting Rhino, so he goes berserk and Kurt escapes into the sewers, bringing Sable with him. Who acts extremely unprofessional, unable to stop openly making comments about how attractive she thinks Kurt is.

That's one of her two settings in this issue, the other being condescending.Spurrier writes her a lot like he wrote Elsa Bloodstone in that Black Knight mini-series, but hornier. It just seems silly. Let one of Silver's subordinates be the one openly ogling and being reprimanded for it. Silver Sable's supposed to be professional, but with enough of a core of decency she ends up doing unprofitable things sometimes anyway.

Either way, Nightcrawler escapes to spend another day arguing with little Bamf ghosts and keeping all his problems bottled up.

What I bought 10/20/2023

If only one of last week's books was going to be available at the local shop, Coda is a better outcome than Moon Knight, but still, it's getting a little frustrating how often even the Marvel stuff I want to buy isn't there. I guess I'm still not good at picking the titles that really sell.

Coda #2, by Simon Spurrier (writer), Matias Bergara (artist/colorist), Patricio Delpeche (color assists), Jim Campbell (letterer) - Wonder if it gets annoying to have so many people bumping into your knees?

Hum finds that he and the would-be savior child are to be exiled. Just because the town's called Gorepit, doesn't mean they're monsters. Oh, but they're going to kill Nag, because unicorns are symbols of the old ways, and that's no good in this new world of cold rationality. The child dies protecting Nag, and Nag obliterates the soldiers, in a very effective sequence by Bergara. I'm not sure they really needed the follow-up panel of the carnage on the next page.

With nothing else to do, Hum and Nag return to the farm, only to have the false savior's hype-man show up (with most of Gorepit's population), promising a great miracle will arise from the crimson lake where Hum and Serka live. Serka had been traveling with the little gnomes to the dark hold those bandits they killed hailed from, only to find out it's Gorepit and the bandits were customs officers. Well, one person's tithe is another's person's extortion, whatcha gonna do?

So now it's the cultists on one side, luring in people looking for the false beauty of their rose-tinted memories of the past, and the little gnomes with their science on the other, prepared to kill the cultists, on the other. Serka and Hum are caught in the middle. And it appears Serka's pregnant, but this isn't the first time, and it's not ever ended well.

Bergara and Delpeche color Gorepit in more muted colors. Slate greys, and even the red armor is kind of dull. Doesn't shine. Once the hype-man and his bullshit show up at Hum's farm, the colors shift more heavily to light pastels. Bright and sort of unearthly. Could be a signal of a return to time of magic, or that this is all a dog-and-pony show. An illusion that's appealing because it looks so much nicer than the reality of life where, as Hum puts it, anyone who doesn't focus on the harvest is buggered.

What I Bought 9/20/2023

The downside to a week spent in the field was my allergies went berserk. I wore sunglasses most of the time just to obscure my bloodshot eyes. I knew it was gonna happen, I just always underestimate how annoying it is. On the positive, I didn't find anybody screwing things up badly. And, a comic shop in the town I was staying had the one book I wanted this week, plus one from earlier in the month.

Moon Knight #27, by Jed MacKay (writer), Federico Sabbatini (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - Hunter's Moon over there like, "I don't see any vampires," while Marc's getting a head start on the race for the last slice of pizza in the fridge.

Desperate for information on Black Spectre, Marc turns to the creepy guy with the mind-controlling sweat MacKay introduced back at the beginning of this series. Hawley's in a coma, but if Marc and Badr drink the sweat (yuck) and inject it into Vibro's IV drip, they can get in Vibro's mind. That is a hilariously ridiculous plan, though MacKay does address the notion of why Marc doesn't get some super-powered help by mentioning Clea's at her mother's wedding in Antarctica. And, you know, the mutants have all the telepaths and they got their own problems.

The rest of the issue is those two in Vibro's mind. They find a seemingly ordinary geologist named Alton there, too, and Jake and Steven chat with him while the Fists fight a bunch of Vibros. Eventually Badr figures out Alton is who Vibro was before the accident that gave him powers, and Marc convinces Alton to tell them Black Spectre's plan, while Hunter's Moon buys them time by fighting an army of Vibros with an army of all the past Fists stored in his head. Which seems like it would only weaken the line between him and them even further, but desperate times.

That's basically it. I think the book is being canceled and rebooted at issue 30, but this really feels like it was drawn out to help stretch the story. Vibro's mindscape is rendered as a rather dull plain with some rock spires or stalagmites here and there, all drenched in red. Other than there being a lot of them, the Vibros don't really take advantage of what is theoretically home court. I could rationalize that Black Spectre's done something to Vibro to make him so devoted, and that plus the coma, have removed a lot of the depth from his mind. But if this - Moon Knight and Hunter's Moon diving into a super-criminal's mind for answers - is what you devote the entire issue to, it could be a little more visually interesting.

Uncanny Spider-Man #1, by Si Spurrier (writer), Lee Garbett (artist), Matt Milla (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Can he BAMF? Listen bub, he's got inherited genetic traits that express themselves in a variety of ways.

Nightcrawler's living in New York, wearing a Spider-Man costume Peter loaned him (and which Kurt has somehow modified to accommodate his unique morphology), fighting random crime and sleeping in a church steeple. What looks like one of those "bamfs", the mini-Nightcrawlers, is hanging around as some invisible voice, whispering stuff. Mystique is living in Central Park, seemingly muddled in the head. The Vulture is working for ORCHIS, and mucking around with the techno-organic virus from the Phalanx, it looks like.

I know all comic book scientists are multi-disciplinary geniuses, but there had to be someone better suited than the Vulture, who's into aerodynamics and magnetic lift or however his outfit worked. Whatever, ORCHIS seemingly has nothing ready to hunt Nightcrawler, so they hired Silver Sable. Or at least, Silver Sable has come to New York to find Nightcrawler, and either capture or sleep with him. Or one, then the other.

Questions about how Kurt got the costume to fit aside, and ignoring that the chest logo reminds me of Knull, I like the look. Red and black work well together, it isn't an overly complicated design, Garbett minimizes how much the ears stick out compared to what Tony Daniel does on the cover. Overall, it works for me.

The story aspects, I don't know. The X-Office threw in the whole thing where ORCHIS threatened to kill ten humans for every mutant they saw running around, then has to contrive reasons why they don't carry out this threat - which would likely turn a lot of even dumbshit Marvel Earth against them - when mutants like Kurt (who they're 97% certain it's him) or Iceman or Kamala Khan are visibly running around.

Spurrier wings it that ORCHIS thinks Nightcrawler is more likely to disappear than surrender himself. And the way Spurrier's writing this, maybe that's accurate, as his Kurt seems mentally exhausted. He apparently told Spider-Man he wanted to help mutants and clear his name, but it seems more likely he simply can't muster the energy to think about anything like that. The best he can do is save a person her or there, eat pizza, ogle women out jogging in the park. Peter Parker used Spider-Man as a way to let out the personality he couldn't show as old Puny Parker. Nightcrawler's using it as an escape. Play a role, avoid thinking about his problems.

What I Bought 9/13/2023 - Part 1

Been a long week as the only one in the office. One person on vacation, the other two away on trainings. So all the calls from the public came to me. Yay. Oh well, the shoe'll be on the other foot next week, that's for sure!

Coda #1, by Simon Spurrier (writer), Matias Bergara (artist/colorist), Michael Doig (color assists), Jim Campbell (letterer) - What happened to the Nag's wings. It was flying, last we saw it.

Set some years on from the first mini-series, Hum and Serka have found a solid routine. Serka rages in the Everstorm as necessary, and roams the land helping others. Hum pretty much tends their land, fishes, and tries determinedly to not be caught up in any sagas. Bergara cleans him up a bit - I stress "a bit" - but he's still recognizably the grouchy former bard he was before. Serka seems bulkier than before, hair a bit wilder, but again, recognizable. Bergara doesn't exaggerate expression quite as much as he did in the first mini-series, but he can get goofy when he needs to.

Mostly with the little spriggan/fairy things proclaiming the savior is nigh. Because there's another chosen one about, and the kid's followers/retinue/manager swiped Nag as a piece of the pageantry. Hum attempts to recover Nag when the kid is presented at a nearby industrial town, and promptly gets arrested by the locals along with the kid (who does have some strange hold over Nag that makes it behave.)

Serka, meanwhile, encounters the wonders of "natural philosophy" while trying to protect a group of tradesmen from bandits. The gnomads she works with have developed guns, or something similar. They wear the contraption on their head like a plague doctor mask, but it shoots projectiles out the snout. I feel like it's not a coincidence the smoke that wafts from the barrel is the same shade as the stuff the industrial town is smelting (which Hum describes as "iron pus," as delightful image.)

Spurrier narrates the issue via a letter Hum is writing to "Little Gap", which I'm assuming is a child they're expecting. Or maybe a child that died young or in childbirth. Hum seems determined to leave all the questing and whatnot behind in the "old world." It's all garbage, he refuses to believe any of it or want any part of it. His mistake would be in assuming Serka feels the same, because she seems tempted, or at least interested, in the gnomads weapons. Not sure why; maybe she's grown tired of having to kill people up close, but doesn't want to abandon protecting others.

Either way, I expect their paths will cross at some point before all this is done. Hum's caught up in what feels like a story trying to regress things, and Serka's meeting the future, or at least newer ways of doing the same old thing.

Werewolf by Night #1, by Derek Landy (writer), Fran Galan (artist), Joe Sabino (letterer) - My comic guy opined Elsa's shoulder was really going to hurt when she fires that shotgun. I imagine that's part of the fun for her, along with monster skulls exploding.

Separately, Jack Russell and Elsa Bloodstone arrive at a castle a guy had moved stone by stone from the Bavarian Alps to the Rockies. What, a McMansion wasn't good enough for his human sacrifices and whatnot? Both of them there because this guy, Doctor Nekromantik, abducted a girl from a town nearby. Yet far enough away Elsa found the best approach to be hitching a ride on a private plane owned by vampires, killing the vamps, and jumping out when the plane's over the castle.

I've seen stuff on Tumblr that suggested Europeans didn't grasp how big the U.S. can be, but that's a bit much.

Anyway, while Elsa's prediction the doc will wait until midnight for his big play is correct, she's wrong about what the big play is. He's going to unleash a bunch of monsters from some place called the Suffering Wastes on Earth, in exchange for the secrets of the universe. Or so he says. His plan to betray the creature is somewhat complicated by Elsa and Jack successfully convincing the creature Nekromantik plans to betray it for an entirely different reason. Which is kind of funny, and not a bad twist, actually. I liked that.

End of the day, the problem is mostly successfully resolved, but Elsa's horrified to learn Jack's rocking long hair and a longer beard when he's human. Landy's Elsa is less hard-boiled than the version that's been around since NextWave. It's the same character, but almost like a younger version. The arrogance is more of an act, she's trying for one-liners to sound cool. Just in general, this version feels like she's having to try to act the way she's been written over the last two decades, rather than it being who she is. Which is fine, it probably makes her less abrasive, a little easier to interact with Jack if she's not constantly insulting him about his fur or smell (although she comments on that) or his being a stupid American or whatnot.

Galan takes the approach of coloring most of the comic in blacks and greys, minus some red eyes for shadow monsters. The exception is Elsa, who is always colored in her standard orange jumpsuit and hair. The scenes on the plane are all in color, and the morning after, when it's her and Jack in his human form are, too. Once he transforms again, he goes back to the greyshaded look. So I guess Elsa's in color because she's still human, or occupies the daytime world, while werewolf Jack, Nekromantik, and whatnot don't. Though that wouldn't explain coloring in the vampires on the plane.

What I Bought 7/8/2022 - Part 3

Lately, it seems like every week I get to Thursday and feel the week should be over. But there's always Friday to get through. That's probably not good. Today we have two fourth issues. One is the conclusion to a mini-series, the other is an ongoing series that is way behind schedule.

She-Hulk #4, by Rainbow Rowell (writer), Luca Maresca (artist), Rico Renzi (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Ben looks like he's taking this more seriously than Jen.

We get a little glimpse of Jen's fight club thing with Titania until the Thing shows up, still seeking legal advice on the ticket for not having Lockjaw on a leash. We'll see if we get any more scenes with the fight club before the book ends. 

Ben's also sent a few friends Jen's way as clients, which is a problem since her boss wants no superhuman clients. So she'll see them on the sly. She talks with Reed Richards long enough to confirm being around Jack of Hearts hasn't messed with her gamma levels (without mentioning Jack's alive again.) After that, she and Jack get back to trying to piece together what happened to him. Jack at least remembers one thing from his escape that leads them a different part of New York. Then they drink bubble tea and discuss power, lack thereof, having two faces, until someone with heavy footsteps shows up looking for Jack.

So, a lot of talking, but not much plot advancement. That seems like a familiar comment. Rowell seems to be trying to help the audience care about Jack by emphasizing the contrast between he and Jen. Becoming She-Hulk ultimately hasn't disrupted Jen's life too terribly, at least from her perspective. She likes the power, the confidence. Maresca doesn't draw Jen in her un-Hulked form as a diminutive, shy person, but she does draw her clothes as loose enough that you can see Jen dresses to be ready to shift if needed. It's something Jen's used to and has learned to plan for. 

Jack had a relatively normal life, apparently studying poetry in college, and his powers wrecked all that. He spent, as he puts it, his 20s flying through space because he was afraid of vaporizing his friends. For him, the novelty of his powers wore off long ago. They've left him isolated, with almost no one he feels can trust or call friend. The opportunity to leave that behind is tempting, even if he's smart enough to know someone siphoning off his power is dangerous. The t-shirt with the big heart looks silly on him, but Jack isn't uncomfortable wearing it.

Maresca's artwork is similar enough to Antonio's there's no real whiplash. Maresca's line is maybe a bit rougher, there's more of sketch quality to it, but I'm also wondering if Maresca was a replacement artist and this was on a rush schedule. Renzi's color work helps maintain a consistent feel, too. I especially like the bleakly grey color scheme for the law office. It's almost like one of those cartoons where the technicolor character finds themselves in an older, black-and-white cartoon world. All these super-characters in what's supposed to be a serious legal profession.

Step by Bloody Step #4, by Si Spurrier (writer), Matias Bergara (artist), Matheus Lopes (color artist), Jim Campbell (letterer) - Ended up with the variant cover because the place I bought from didn't have the Bergara cover.

The giant is destroyed save for one gauntlet. The girl, however, can't get to him. That would be a step backward, and the world won't allow it. The father they befriended in issue 1 brings that gauntlet to her, and she continues on the path, finally reaching a tree growing from what's left of some column. Just like where the story started. There's a circular disc with instructions, but the lock is broken. She has to go back, but she can't, or can she?

Well, not alone, but the gauntlet can cleave through the force in her way, and also sends her back in time? Was not expecting that. So she walks until she's back to the fortress, to before the battle, when she was about to accept the champagne, and recombines with her earlier self. Instead of having a fun time at the party, she drags the prince off to the garden and uses a bit of her blood to get the plant growing and pulls a Poison Ivy on him. Then she saves the kid used as a decoy to lure out the giant, and then the giant saves them both and lets the goblins or whatever breach the walls of the fortress, take everything, and send the people within out naked into the wilderness.

After that, and a farewell to the family, all that's left is to finish the journey. Back to the tree, this time with the giant intact. Turn the lock, and the roles are reversed. The giant becomes the infant, the girl becomes the giant. Which someone causes the tree to bloom for a brief moment before the petals disperse. And the giant walks away, carrying the baby.

So there are things I don't entirely understand. Why they do this, what the purpose of the tree is. But I wonder if either the giant or the child know either, only that they have to do it. Presumably this has been going on for a while, not the girl's first time as the one being guided, but she didn't show any signs of remembering or understanding. So it stands to reason all the giant knew was that the girl had been the giant once, been protector on this journey, and then the roles reversed. So it isn't likely they could really explain it to us, either, even if Spurrier was doing expository dialogue here.

I like the layout where the girl springs her trap on the prince. Four tall, narrow panels descending across the page, focused on her, but panning slowly so that while the prince is focused on her in panel 3, he's missing that she's let her blood contact the plants in panel 4. Then the bottom of the page is a shot of a couple of rockets or flares signaling the battle's beginning, but we can just see leaves starting to break through the glass of the greenhouse. It's a nice bit for how things are happening relative to each other.

That and all the panels of her pushing her way back to the giant. All those short widescreen panels, done where it looks like the force is trying to tear her apart. Like she's walking into a firestorm.

What I Bought 5/28/2022 - Part 3

Seemed appropriate to give the title wrapping up its own post. In the meantime, I'm off to try and help my dad with some errands, so expect reviews of old movies to start showing up in the near future.

The Rush #6, by Si Spurrier (writer), Nathan Gooden (artist), Addison Duke (colorist), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (letterer) - Does his gun shoot spiders? That would either be very cool, or extremely terrifying.

Caleb, Nettie's son, is the "Carrion Kid," and while he can, explains how he became this creature. Gooden does an excellent job of shifting Caleb between terrifying and pitiful without really changing his overall form. All the more because it depends on whether Caleb remembers who he is at any given moment. 

The land calls to people, what they're obsessed by, and twists them accordingly. But the Mountie, LaPointe, he understands a new set of rules. Possession, ownership, deeds, property. And that keeps the magic of the valley out of the town. Unless someone breaks the seal. Again, it's a nice touch. The idea that no one "owned" the land until LaPointe and these others folks showed and said they did. They can try to impose their rules on the land, and it may even work for a time, but it's weak magic in a sense. 

Maybe the people in Brokehoof even know it. For LaPointe's confidence, for the fact the beings (colored a sort of faded neon green and pink, which is kind of unsettling against the otherwise mundane colors Duke uses) sent to the town stand impotent at its boundaries even after he lights them on fire, the townsfolk don't go about their business. They stand there and watch. Like they know how easily this could shift. All it takes is one person deciding they're done with that shit to upend it.

Seeing Nettie had to grant her son release from this prison with a rock to his skull, it is fair to say she's done with that shit. More than willing to offer her life to the Pale, to give it the strength to end this. But that's not how it goes. This whole series, Nettie has been safe from the threats, been immune to the traps of the valley, because she's not operating on the same wavelength as everyone else. So it fits that she can't offer her life. There's also probably something about not allowing grief and loss to consume you, but I'm less steady on that as a theme, seeing as M.P. seems to have succumbed to that at the end.

It might actually be more in line with the theme of the sacrifices a parent makes. Nettie wants to put everything down, but she can't. She has to be there to the end to see it through. M.P. could probably upend the boundary marker, but only if he could avoid being killed by the Pale or the zombie things. Since he's infected with the obsession much like the rest of the townsfolk, I'm not sure he could.

Brokehoof is razed to the ground. LaPointe is dragged down to the site of his initial crime to pay the toll he owes and things return to some sort of normal. When I say that, I don't know if "normal" means the land will still pull people towards it by their obsessions, or if that was broken at the end as well. I'm thinking not.

I need to think a bit on the difference between M.P. and Nettie. M.P. has known his love's been dead six years, yet keeps up the lie. Is it because he was using it as an excuse to keep hunting gold, or is the difference Nettie truly believed Caleb was still alive until the moment she had to end his life herself? Nettie truly did just want to find Caleb and take him home, while M.P. may have truly wanted to gold at first to build a life with his beloved Hennie, but that ceased to be the real reason when she did. At heart, he was just as obsessed with the gold as everyone else, and that love had gone away somewhere along the line?

What I Bought 4/30/2022 - Part 1

Turns out part of the reason some stuff hasn't been shipping when it was supposed to is possibly due to paper shortages. Huh, that's not ominous or anything. But I do have the four comics from April I was still looking for. They even split into neat pairs. Two written by Si Spurrier, which is where we'll start.

Step by Bloody Step #3, by Si Spurrier (writer), Matias Bergara (artist), Matheus Lopes (colorist), Jim Campbell (glyphologist) - I assume the little triangles are like one of those wreaths Roman emperors wear, but it still looks stupid.

The relationship between the girl and the giant continues to deteriorate. The girl is entranced by the people she sees, and the giant seems to be growing either despondent or frustrated as she shoves it away. Which is when that princey guy on the cover sends the father of the family that tried to befriend the girl to lure her into a fancy party. The giant's given its own room, but isn't around as the girl tries all sorts of food and drink, then gets wooed by the prince and, eesh, I don't know how old he is (or her for that matte) but it sure looks like there's a troubling age disparity there.

Meanwhile, there's an army of the goblin/zombie looking types preparing a siege. The prince has the daughter of that guy that lured the girl in dressed up like the girl, and sends her out alone at the army. She dies, the giant draws a false conclusion and it kills a lot of people. When i say "a lot", I mean like hills of bodies. Then when it figures out it was duped and turns back on the prince's forces, it gets obliterated. Well, crap.

Bergara likes to use these layouts with one large panel to establish setting or some thing important, and then smaller reaction panels around it. When the prince guy shows up in some flying golden boat, that's get most of the page space as everyone watches it descend. There's one small panel in the corner showing the father with a big forced smile and some retainer's bland face behind him, and below that, another panel showing the retainer is jamming a knife against the father's back. The pages showing all the fancy clothes and food of the big party, interspersed with close-ups of the child eating or drinking, enchanted by the whole thing.

There's one especially nice sequence, right after the child takes a sip of something where we the giant wide-eyed, then something cracks at the base of the tree where the story began. The final panel is a hand between us and the child. So often that's been the giant keeping her away from people, but this time, it's the prince reaching towards her, asking to dance. All the things the giant's been trying to keep her from (for some reason) are finally available to her, and it seems like it's a bad thing. Unless Spurrier and Bergara are just messing with my preconceived notions. We don't know what the end goal for the child is. Maybe this is better for her. Hard for me to buy that this prince guy isn't an imperialist piece of shit, though.

The Rush #5, by Si Spurrier (writer), Nathan Gooden (artist), Addison Duke (colorist), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (letterer) - Sir, you might want to look behind you. Or maybe not. Might prefer not to see it coming.

Nettie shoots the "elk" (that's what they call it, and I guess the antlers are right, but the face looks like a moose to me) and kills it, which seems to surprise the hell out of both the Pale and the Carrion Kid. There's even a panel of the two of them pausing from their fight to just stare. The elk turns out to be a man, and what's more, the peculiar nature of Brokehoof seems broken. People are scratching gold out from beneath their skin, the Pale isn't killing the new prospectors, people are no more ga-ga over gold than they normally are.

Nettie, meanwhile, meets with Inspector LaPointe, who explains the identity of both the man who was an elk, and the man who became the Pale. Or, he explains a version of it, right before he reveals he's been the one profiting from selling Caleb's stake, over and over again. The good inspector wasn't affected by the gold fever, because he found a better way to profit from it. He's ready to get rid of Nettie as well, though he tries to dress it up as justice because of something she confesses from before she came here, but none of us are buying that. He may have underestimated how well he's got the system with the supernatural out there figured, though.

Nettie's sharp turn towards LaPointe makes me wonder if the ritual he describes seeing in the flashback wasn't about to recur, before the conversation took a turn. It certainly seemed like there was some godless rutting about to happen, and Otsmane-Elhaou was using wavy lines to connect the speech bubbles to the speaker, the way he typically has when someone sees to be falling under the particular spell of this place. Although maybe not, he uses them when Nettie is terribly confused and horrified by what's going on as well.

I don't understand exactly why the first ritual took place; maybe something in the land itself sensing an opportunity. A niche that was available for a predator. That might explain the Pale hanging up victims in a cabin to let their blood feed those pitcher plants. I guess we'll see what the final issue brings on this one, too.