Sunday Splash Page #443

"All Grown Up," in Avengers and Power Pack: Assemble #4, by Marc Sumerak (writer), Gurihiru (artist), Dave Sharpe (letterer)

Similar to some of Sumerak's other Power Pack mini-series, this one starts with what appear to be done-in-one stories, which later connect into a larger narrative. First, the kids team up with Captain America, despite his objections about their age, to stop Taskmaster after he swiped some data from a Stark Industries research lab.

Besides Tasky losing first to a bunch of elementary schoolkids, then senior citizens (WW2 buddies of Captain America, but still, no Infinity Formula for these guys), we also get a scene where he mocks Power Pack not only for being kids, but for their costumes. This while rocking his Udon Studios, "my good costume is at the dry cleaners," look.

Then Katie Power zaps him in the face. Deserved.

Second issue, AIM stole an experimental armor (thanks to the info Taskmaster swiped for them), and Jack gets it in his head that if they recover it, Tony Stark will pay them a big reward. AIM is, surprisingly, prepared for the kids, and in an escape attempt, Jack suits up in the experimental armor. Then accidentally attacks Iron Man with it. They free his siblings and stop AIM, but when Jack asks about a reward for rescuing the armor, Iron Man says they can just deduct it from the cost of the damage Jack did to said armor. 

Which is such a billionaire move. It's pocket change to Stark, but he'd rather come up with an excuse to stiff a kid and disguise your own incompetence.

In the last two issues, the Power family travels to New York City on vacation, and the kids try to help the New Avengers fight Kang and his army of guys in suits based on Iron Man's experimental armor, as he was behind the schemes in the first two issues. I guess this is his idea of fighting honorably, stealing period-appropriate technology to fight with. Minus his own futuristic stuff that freezes his opponents in place. So honorable!

How well known the Power Pack are varies from mini-series to mini-series. Wolverine knows them, but they'd been in at least one, maybe two, other mini-series with him by this point. Captain America apparently vouched for them to Iron Man somewhere between issues 1 and 2. Taskmaster knows them, and says they're a joke among the costumed community. As he's running around in a tracksuit and a skull mask like some doofus with an urban explorer Youtube channel, so glass houses and all that. AIM has heard of them, enough to have weapons prepared to counter their powers.

Kang, however, doesn't know them, dismissing them as innocent children, until they attack him. At which point they're flung into a future where Kang runs things and they must team-up with their older selves. How their older selves are there if they were chucked into the future, I don't know. Obviously they make it back to the mid-2000s, but then the dystopian future never comes to pass, so. . . 

I did a longer review of the mini-series 3 years ago. 

What I Bought 8/12/2026 - Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let's Do the Time Hole Crawl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Bought 7/15/2026

Google sent some notice a few weeks back that they wanted me to approve some thing or the other that would let them use anything I searched for to train their bullshit faux-AI. I, being the contrary sort, said no. So now Google and Google Maps don't recall anything I searched for previously. Which I suppose I have to admire, from a pettiness standpoint if nothing else.

D'Orc #6, by Brett Bean (writer/artist), Frank William (color artist), Nate Piekos (letterer) - The fantasy world equivalent of a Ghostbusters containment unit.

D'Orc travels through some spiritual realm with a talking Super Smash Bros. logo that is apparently Fate. Fate shows D'Orc how he was conceived, but is vague about the identity of his parents, other than his mom was an orc and his dad a dwarf, the last 2 survivors of some big war, who shared one night of probably hate-sex.

Fate's more relevant point is that nothing is destined, because everyone is always making choices, and all those choices have consequences that overlap and react, so how could things be destined? Except Fate also implies it already knows what choice D'Orc is going to make as far as whether to help the bone witches (apparently there's an entire coven) burn the world down. Which sure sounds like something that's destined.

D'Orc escapes the crystal to find the Bone Witch, his shield, and the chicken are fleeing something. The something is the angry dwarf from a few issues ago, now minus part of his face. Which doesn't make sense, because the Witch's potion was actually supposed to trigger D'Orc's berserker fury so he would kill the dwarf, because the Witch hates him for something he did. Possibly sleeping with D'Orc's mom. Possibly never calling the Bone Witch by her name (whatever that is.) Probably something bigger than either of those. Regardless, why would a potion meant for that erase part of someone's face?

There's some fighting, there's some attempts at escaping, D'Orc is falling out of the sky into the dark half of the realm. Maybe? He was just supposed to head for the Scar - isn't that where he started the series? - but I guess he needs to see how the other side lives.

It feels like Bean finally did something beyond, "D'Orc runs into some random people and shit happens." There's some actual momentum towards, well, something. The Bone Witch Coven as someone for D'Orc to seek out. The angry dwarf deciding he's going to raise an army, which I guess locks him into Primary Antagonist role for the near-future. I was waiting to see if the book would actually give me a reason to look forward to the next issue beyond hoping the next issue would give me a reason, and I guess this qualifies. 

Fantastic Four #14, by Ryan North (writer), Ramon Rosanas (artist), Edgar Delgado (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) -  The glitchy effect on the logo made me confused whether there'd been a printing error, or my eyes were just getting really shitty.

Dinner at the Baxter Building is interrupted with Jo and Nikki find the rest of the family staring transfixed at a series of numbers on a screen. Or in Alicia's case, staring blankly as her fingers run over a series of numbers on a touchpad. Nothing can get their attention or pull them away from the numbers.

And people are sharing this string of numbers, which is apparently the furthest out anyone has ever calculated pi, worldwide, causing more and more people to enter this fugue state. And if they lose access to the sequence, say because their phone battery dies, or someone rips open the faceplate of their fancy-schmancy armor, they go crazy.

Yes, like that. Now Tony Stark has another excuse the next time he does something horrible, besides "booze" and "futurism."

The kids figure out this is like that time Reed explained that poison ivy pretty much only bothers humans, and this is not something to improve the odds of survival, just a weird, random development. For some reason, a particular sequence in pi fucks with humans' brains. And since the kids can't change the value of pi, they have to figure something else out.

The answer involves time travel to mess with human evolution, and goddamn does North seem to be going to the time travel well a lot. Mucking with time was a huge part of One World Under Doom, especially the FF issues, where it felt like there were no fewer than 3 different stories that involved time travel. He just sent Reed and Johnny to the Roman era two issues ago. Give the timeline a rest for a minute, man. 

So there's a clue in a particular something that's off in Rosanas' art throughout the issue, up to the point Jo and Nikki explain it. And then when they make their fix, it reverts things to what we would consider normal. Except it's more like they made that the new normal. I'm not sure if I have more trouble with that, or the idea this was supposed to be an entirely random thing, and not a targeted attack. Also, I can't believe that, "Hey, we calculated pi to 8 billion digits!" would get that much traction on social media. Not to mention all the people that would never see it on social media. Like me.

Not to mention all the people on Marvel-Earth who aren't humans or aren't entirely humans, that therefore shouldn't be affected. Carol Danvers is half-Kree now. Beta Ray Bill's apparently Thor now, he ain't a primate. Clea's mother is whatever the heck Umar is, which I doubt is "human," regardless of what she looks like.

Sunday Splash Page #435

"Norse God of Annihilation," in Ant-Man (2022) #3, by Al Ewing (writer), Tom Reilly (artist), Jordie Bellaire (colorist), Cory Petit (letterer)

Released in 2022, this 4-issue mini-series centered around a mysterious future Ant-Man, who kept traveling back in time and briefly interacting with the previous holders of that title. His purpose, other than it has something to do with the ants they control, is kept a mystery until the final issue. By which time there are really much bigger problems to worry about (see above.)

Pym's story is set either prior to the formation of the Avengers, or very close to it, and involves him being targeted by a group of enemies from his solo book. No, the Scarlet Beetle wasn't invited. It also involves Pym and Jan's date at the movies being interrupted by a young Eric O'Grady, who throws popcorn at Pym. So Pym follows him into the lobby and sets ants on him. When Pym is captured, the Wasp finds him because Scott Lang is trying to break into the apartment and opens the soundproof window, letting out Pym's agonized screams.

Lang's presence is apparently to set up Jan letting him use Hank's old Manhattan lab whenever he wants as a favor, though Scott has no idea what she's talking about. How, exactly, he forgot meeting a diminutive flying woman while trying to break into an apartment, the occurrence of which apparently convinced him to move back to Florida, I don't know, but it certainly makes the whole thing feel needlessly convoluted.

Reilly and Bellaire try to modify their styles or approaches to mimic the eras the stories are set in. In this case, Bellaire uses mostly solid, basic colors, what would be bright colors, but the shades give the impression of being a little faded, or maybe yellowed? Reilly, meanwhile, has a sort of stiff, solid line to his figures - although his O'Grady has a wicked smirk straight out of Ditko's style - and straightforward layouts of 5-6 panels per page.

O'Grady gets the second issue, shortly after he stole the experimental suit, as he doesn't know it can generate Pym Particles (thanks to Skrull tech Skrull-Pym built into it), so he tries digging up Scott Lang's Avengers Disassembled-corpse. Because he's an idiot. Lang's is set in roughly the present day, and involves he and his daughter trying to shrink Ultron (at this point partially Hank Pym) into the Microverse inside some Asgardian-rune inscribed Vibranium coffin.

In the second issue, Reilly and Bellaire try to mimic Irredeemable Ant-Man. Reilly does a pretty good Phil Hester impression, with more heavy blacks and a stronger, more squared-off look to the characters. Some occasional pages of characters just sitting in one place for a bunch of panels in the same position, thinking over things. Bellaire uses a lot of a muddy orange-red that I definitely feel I saw regularly in Marvel comics of the mid-2000s. It's giving me New Avengers flashbacks, and I don't like it!

Third issue is closer to what I think of as Reilly's art style, at least based on Walter Mosley's The Thing mini-series. Much lighter line than Hester, busier than the Pym story, and Bellaire uses more variety in the shading here than the prior two issues. Softer shades if Cassie is a little embarrassed by her dad, or bright, sharp shades for explosions or lightning. The layouts are more dynamic and varied in panel count, there are more elements that jump across the page or through panels.

This is still the era of Lang being regarded a joke by most other heroes, so Stark and Thor are pretty disrespectful. No surprise from Stark, but I'm disappointed with Thor. Where's your humility, hammer-boy? Did you trade it to get back your arm? At least Cassie tells her dad to stop sucking up to them, and references Scott saving the world in World Hive, though he shares credit with her. Because he's a good dad.

They get interrupted by Black Ant (the robot duplicate of O'Grady from Remender's Secret Avengers) and the coffin gets flung somewhere in time. Ewing ties things into Age of Ultron, which I could do without remembering exists, but I can't tell what parts of the explanation were actually from that, and what are things Ewing bolts on for his own purposes. Either way, the four Ant-Men deal with an Ultron hopped up on Odin-sauce, and that's that.

This time around, Bellaire's color work really dominates. It's a lot of solid blocks of color, bright blocks, and Reilly's lines almost vanish under it. Which might be something about the mythic nature the heroes of the past have achieved in the future, that leaves them blurrily defined because there's so much that got lost over the centuries. (Future Ant-Man definitely wasn't expecting O'Grady to be like he was.) 

But what, exactly is Ewing driving at? There's a bit at the end, as they get ready to try their plan to stop Ultron, where Pym says all the World's Smallest Hero can do is 'think big.' The Ant-Man of 2549 found his "nano-swarm" couldn't fix an ecologically devastated Earth, so he cloned a bunch of extinct ant species. They lacked any natural instincts. So he fucked around in the timestream to measure how past Ant-Men controlled insects as part of some plan to install the instincts. His time traveling provided a guide for Ultron to find his way back into the timestream. Big plan, big fuck-up, big problem. Pym's own examples of overreaching are well-known, but after that, it feels stretched.

O'Grady is just trying to stay alive, and going about it in the dumbest way possible. Maybe the over-reaching is that the suit exists. Skrull Pym internal monologues that it was only Pym's need to prove himself that made the Skrull build such a suit (which contains Skrull technology that might give him away) in the first place. Lang, though, is trying to be careful. The Avengers don't like that he's bringing the coffin to New York, but he argues it's got the most precise equipment, and this is the sort of thing - shrinking a hybrid of a genocidal artificial intelligence and its creator into a micro-universe - you want to be precise about. As it turns out, Ultron-Pym figured out how to communicate on the ant-helmet's frequency and was subtly guiding Scott there, but it still doesn't feel like taking unjustifiable risks for uncertain gain.

So is it the inferiority complex thing? Pym, well, again, the history of his attempts to prove himself that end disastrously are well-established. I don't feel like Ewing accounts for '60s Pym meeting both an endpoint of an artificial intelligence he created and seeing what happened to himself. Although maybe '60s Pym's bold statement that if he ever does create and AI, it'll be a lot better, is the over-reaching thing again. Lang is constantly scrabbling for respect and to try and look cool so his daughter will look up to him. Zayn Asghar apparently wasn't content with a "nano-swarm" that could at least rebuild homes and stuff. No, he has to bring back ants to fix the planet's ecosystem, by himself.

But then there's O'Grady. A petty, selfish, small-minded, dim-witted putz. He's entirely realistic about just how likely he is to survive if he can't shrink to escape danger. It's not an inferiority complex if you are, in fact, inferior. He doesn't care enough about anyone but himself to bother trying to do something big to prove himself. There's Black Ant, who is planning on being a henchman for Ultron, and really wants to do a good job on this escape attempt, but still kind of half-asses it. He's boasting Lang won't be able to call ants for help because he bribed them with really good sugar, for Pete's sake. This is not a serious person.

What I Bought 6/3/2026 - Part 2

My coworkers are having a good laugh at my misery as Emergency Unit Chief (or "yuc" as my mom put it.) To be fair, I'm also laughing. If I didn't, I'd be miserable. So I vowed to lead with apathy and cruelty, and feigned disappointment when I got off a lengthy phone conversation and found everybody had left for lunch.

Although when one of my coworkers said it was a mutiny, I pointed out a mutiny is supposed to involve them throwing me out and taking command for themselves. What they did was just desertion.

Marc Spector: Moon Knight #5, by Jed MacKay (writer), Devmalya Pramanik (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - The House has decided it will be the one bringing it down tonight.

Marc charges into the people-eating house with his dragon-sword. The house creates all kinds of greenish, half-formed ghosts or constructs or something. None of which have souls, to the sword's displeasure. All of which are capable of hurting Marc, to Marc's displeasure. Ginnaar swears if Marc gets him to the house's heart, it will drink up its soul, so Marc keeps going. And he finds the heart.

It's Achilles Fairchild, the Asgardian farmboy turned drug lord. Or, it's his body, being controlled by the house. Which explains the door he vanished through in the previous volume. It, and it says its name in The Mansion Ravenous, heard the Midnight Mission's death cries and came looking for the one responsible. Because they're of the same kind, but the Mission is just a child, and the Mansion's a full-grown adult.

Still, the monologuing lets Marc stab it in the heart. To no avail. Ginnaar decides the Mansion would be a better boss, because it can give it back its old form within those walls. It's a lovely image. The dragon, but its form is only partially real. So there are details - the teeth, the claws, some of the scales, but other parts are a swirl of this dull orange that just imposes itself on the page. Marc becomes this tiny white outline in the corner.

So, yeah, Marc's royally fucked, but they let him escape. Because he'll have to come back. With help. That they can also devour. He goes to Clea (since Strange is stuck in Asgard), and she's going to assemble a Midnight Sons, which Marc doesn't remember being a part of. I don't blame him, if Clea's referring to Damnation. I got hold of the complete collection last year. What a pile of shit. The Ewing-written stuff was OK, but the Donny Cates-written stuff was as bad as I'd expect. He wrote Moon Knight (in his "Mr. Knight" persona) as basically Deadpool. I'd blot that experience from my memory, too.

Fantastic Four #12, by Ryan North (writer), Pat Boutin (penciler), Serge LaPointe (inker), Edgar Delgado (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Well, it's happened. Reed's finally acknowledged what an egotistical prick he is and declared himself Emperor.

The aliens that attacked while the FF were in space a few issues ago decide to take a different approach and conquer the planet in the past. The team tries traveling to the point of the change, but only Reed and Johnny are sent back before the others get erased. So it's the two of them, posing as Gauls, helping some Roman legions fight an alien spaceship.

Also, because the attack was sudden, everybody was in bed when the warning came. Which is how we learn Reed Richards wears pajamas that say "Mr. Fantastic" on them. I'm sure this comes as a great shock to all of you, Reed being such a modest guy. 

The aliens also have a superweapon charging that could wipe out all life on the planet if they decide that's the best remaining option. Reed and Johnny must beat the aliens, but not badly enough they opt to go scorched Earth. At least until figuring out a way to neutralize the weapon. Against an alien force that all the non-Fantastic Four heroes in New York apparently couldn't drive back.

But they manage all this by, OK, you've maybe seen articles about those weird metal dodecahedrons that are dated back to Roman history, and nobody's sure what they were for? Reed invented them, because a whole bunch of them intercepting the superweapon refracts its energy into some less harmful wavelength. I have no idea which wavelength. Maybe all the legionnaires got really tan that day. Or got skin cancer. Presumably they didn't become Hulks, or the U-Foes.

To minimize effects on the timeline, Johnny suggests the Romans not tell anybody how they needed 'two weirdos' to save them from strange invaders, because it would make the Empire look bad, and the general vows to crucify any of his men who talk about it. Which, and I agree with Johnny here, was not an idle threat. Johnny is, apparently, less successful getting them to melt down all the "prismatic refractors", but to be fair, nobody talked about them. Except now Sue has to explain to the Archaeological Society that the answer to yet another long-standing mystery is, "The FF did some shit while time traveling."

I kind of groaned when Reed showed the Legion what he needed them to build, because I could see the punchline, but Sue's exasperation made it work. Even if it does sort of fall under the same notion as aliens building the pyramids. Although aliens totally, definitely exist in the Marvel Universe, and have done a lot more mucking around on Earth than building pyramids, so maybe that's not a big deal.  

The Party that Never Stops Restarting

Alex is headed to Edwards Island for the high-schoolers' annual wild party with her best friend, Ren, and her new step-brother, Jonas. On reaching the beach, they find only two other people: the queen bee, Clarissa, who has issues with Alex, and Clarissa's friend, Nona.

But that's OK! Because Ren really just wants to investigate the spots near a cave that emit strange signals, which is why he had Alex bring a radio. And it does pick up some strange signals. It also makes a strange floating triangle Jonas finds inside the cave vibrate until it forms a big triangle. At which point everything goes to hell. Something got loose, and it's angry and desperate to stay loose. If that means hijacking the bodies of 5 teenagers, that's what it'll do.

Oxenfree's gameplay is; 1) you guiding Alex from one place to another, 2) having her tune in various signals on the radio, and 3) dialogue trees. Characters will say something, and Alex has three possible responses, each mapped to a button based on its location. Something I didn't recognize until the second playthrough, you have the option to say nothing. Dialogue balloons will (usually) fade in a few seconds if you don't say anything. I don't feel like your choices make much difference to how the plot plays out, but they do impact your relationships with the other characters.

How they do that, in terms of which dialogue options prompt what shift, I couldn't tell you. Sometimes when a character says something, their face will appear in a dialogue balloon above another character. Clearly whatever was said caught that character's attention, but in a good way? A bad way? No idea! Until Dawn had a screen you could check that would show how relationships between whichever character you were playing and all the others where trending, but Oxenfree's got nothing similar I could find.

Which is accurate - not like you can be sure how a comment will go over in real life - but frustrating in a game where so much is about talking. I played through 5 times - doesn't take more than a few hours once you know where to go - and when the game tells you how things turned out with everyone at the end, I kept getting basically the same results. Jonas and Alex were always distant, Ren moves across country and Alex rarely hears from him. She has only a vague notion what Nona's up to.

The 5th time, I got it where Jonas and I are tight-knit siblings, and Ren and Nona are dating. I have some idea what I did for the latter, but no idea what prompted the change in outcomes for Jonas and Alex. If anything, I thought I was doing worse than usual with him. Now I did somehow create distance between Alex and Ren, so I'd figure that was enough, except it didn't change anything vis-a-vis Jonas when I did the same thing on playthrough #4.

Maybe that's just down to me. I tried to pick different responses, or make different choices. There's a point you decide to check if the museum on the island might have any clues, and one of Ren, Jonas or Nona is coming with you. I usually pick Ren, since it's his idea, and between he and Jonas, "best friend" wins over "step-brother of 5 minutes." But one time their arguing was so irritating I picked Nona. It didn't seem to change anything, but everyone's incredulous reactions were funny.

Still, certain situations I always responded to roughly the same. Sometimes I couldn't remember what I picked the time before. Or I didn't like the other options. Too cruel, maybe. The last 3 playthroughs, I told myself going in that I'd take the spirits up on the offer to let them have Clarissa in return for letting the rest of us go.

And, without fail, when the spirits made the offer, I'd refuse. The first time I chalked up to a sense maybe their hold on us wasn't as secure as they claimed if they were bargaining. After that? It was just stubbornness. Or else a feeling that, even if Clarissa was cruel to Alex, she didn't deserve that.

I don't understand the time travel - time displacement - aspects of the story. How characters vanish and appear somewhere else. Yes, sometimes the spirits possess you, and so you lose time, but you wake up in the same place. I can sort of square the notion that this throws Alex back into memories of her and her deceased brother, maybe because the spirits are trying to distract her (although you can apparently alter past events, at least according to subsequent flashback trips.) Doesn't explain people appearing or disappearing or dying in front of you, then turning up fine later. I also don't understand how winding antiquated tape players gets you out of smaller time loops.

Part of the reason I kept playing was to see if I could get them free entirely. First time, I tried closing the doorway from the other side, consigning Alex to a horrible fate. Didn't work. We've already discussed my reluctance to give them Clarissa. At a certain point, you can find letters around the island that tell what happened to the spirits. I was banking on that info to help Alex reach the spirits' humanity, convince them to let go and move on, if I could just find the right thing for Alex to say. No dice, and a cursory search online suggests I can't get this group out, only maybe save a different Alex from falling into the same fate.

Which is not an ending that puts a guy in the mindset of having accomplished anything by finishing the game.

What I Bought 8/13/2025

Youtube has apparently implemented some new "AI" that, if it decides you're under 18, will automatically put your account under the age-restricted guidelines. And the only way to get that unlocked is by submitting your photo id or something similar. Which gives them your personal data to sell, or just as likely, lose the next time they get hacked. I imagine the "intelligence" is probably the same one that mysteriously decides some post I made on the blog 8 years ago just now has violated community guidelines.

This is a world of the dumbest hucksters inflicting their useless bullshit on the rest of us, non-stop.

Fantastic Four #2, by Ryan North (writer), Humberto Ramos (penciler), Victor Olazaba (inker) Edgar Delgado (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Ben's under dinosaur attack, Sue's in a barren landscape, Johnny's surrounded by lava, Reed's. . .in a pleasant, grassy field. Ryan North is doing nothing to dispel my "Reed Richards is Gladstone Gander" theory.

Sue can't find the "Forever Stone", so she's trapped on an Earth with no water, and a Sun on the verge of cooking her if she can't find cover. Back in the Middle Ages, Reed figures that if Sue hasn't found him yet, it's because she can't find the stone, so he undertakes an elaborate and frankly ridiculous plan to create a worldwide map to guide her, even in the far future.

My main issue is, I don't get how the Stone survived 7 billion years without being pushed back into the mantle via tectonic drift and melted. But it didn't, and inside the Stone is a device that will call the Time Sled (which they named "ROSEBUD-1"), so Sue can rescue her family. Then it's back to 2025 to attack Doom just seconds after he flings them through time. They're doing it, they're going to win! Doom's going down, and Reed's explaining what they did and -

Having apparently taken inspiration from Hickman's retcon to Moira, Doom used magic to set up a way to rewind to an earlier point, where only he remembers how the FF beat him. So they can't beat him that way again. As it kicks in, Sue is able to send the Time Sled to their home in Arizona, at some point before this mess began, which is going to be relevant somehow.

On the one hand, Doom accusing someone else of showing off their intelligence is hilarious. On the other, the fact he keeps winning because Reed can't help explaining everything is hilarious. It's Syndrome's "You caught me monologuing!" line from The Incredibles, except it's the good guy getting caught. That said, North already did an issue where Doom keeps resetting time over and over in an attempt to produce a more favorable outcome (the issue where he tries to remove the need for Reed sending the kids, including Doom's godchild, and their home a year into the future to stop Annihilus.) He's got Sorcerer Supreme magic now, and I guess he thinks that'll make the difference, but obviously it's not. At some point, they're going to keep winning, and he's going to, do something.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

Now well on in years, to say nothing of the mileage, Indy gets roped into looking for the famed "Archimedes Dial", which is being sought by his goddaughter (played by Phoebe Waller-Bridges), and a Nazi scientist (Mads Mikkelsen) that helped the U.S. put men on the Moon.

It's, fine, I guess. Didn't need to be 2.5 hours. The last act, the whole thing on the plane and the time travel, that all goes too long. Why is Boyd Holbrook's character machine-gunning Roman trimeres? I guess so he's not involved in the fight in the back of the plan between Harrison Ford, Mikkelsen and Waller-Bridges, and because he's an idiot whose first response to anything that mildly inconveniences him is, "shoot it." But it felt unnecessary. Just do the bomb bay doors bit earlier and have him fall through, too. Nobody was going to be sorry about fewer scenes with that character.

Of course, I'm not sure how Mikkelsen's character survived getting knocked off the Nazi train in 1945 by colliding with one of those mail bag hook things. Not just survived, the guy doesn't even look like it scratched him. I expected them to at least give him a disfigured face when he popped up again in the 1960s.

There's a few set good pieces. Indy's escape on horseback through the parade. The chase in Tangiers, complete with Waller-Bridges' jilted mobster fiance as an added complication. Mangold seems to take the same approach to those that Mel Brooks takes with jokes: If you didn't like one, just wait a moment and there'll be another.

Ford gives Indy a proper amount of weary, sour old man energy The gripe about how going to the Moon is like going to Reno, except no blackjack, cracked me up. His students aren't distracted because they want to bone him, they're just bored. Their eyes are on the future, while his are on the past and what he's lost. He doesn't ever really seem excited until the end, when it looks like he's going to stay in the past, in a literal sense. Mikkelsen's not much different, except he's certain he can change the past.

(I appreciate the movie did not do a thing where Indy has to decide whether to let Mikkelsen kill Hitler or not. I was very concerned that was the direction they were going for a minute.)

It falls to Waller-Bridges to bring a little spark of joy to the proceedings, which she does fairly ably. She's a bit of early - Temple of Doom/Raiders of the Lost Ark - Indiana Jones. "Fortune and glory," though it's more "fortune and excitement" for her. Or maybe just fortune. She talks fast, with a quick wit, keeps her cool even when Tangiers cops are trying to keep her in one spot until said-jilted mobster fiance arrives. She's tried to wall off her heart from people she's lost, or who disappointed her (Indy's been remiss in his godfather duties), treat people as tools to get herself out of trouble. But she can't quite manage it entirely. For a good chunk of the film, you're left wondering (I was, anyway) if she's just waiting for the right moment to betray Indy, which is a nice bit of ambiguity.

The Wave (2019)

Frank (Justin Long) is an attorney for an insurance company, who just discovered a way the company can escape paying on a huge policy to a family where the father and husband died of an illness. He initially declines his friend Jeff's (Donald Faison) suggestion they party to celebrate - a disagreement about whether it's Tuesday or Booze-day - but after surveying the listless existence he inhabits while walking his wife's froo-froo dog in the middle of the night, he hits the bar.

One thing leads to another, he meets a girl, takes a drug from some weird guy and wakes up the next morning alone in that house, minus his wallet and late for the presentation with the boss about his big finding. Makes it to work, and while the presentation is a hit, he finds his grip on reality slipping. People become monstrous, words are distorted, random people keep telling him it's his 'big day.'

So Frank, with Jeff's help, is trying to find, in some order, his wallet, the girl, and the guy who gave him the drugs. He keeps losing time, ending up in places with no memory of how he got there. He finds the girl, but only in some dreamlike space. He finds the drug dealer, but only at a point before he met him. It's a movie where characters talk about the universe desiring harmony. I feel like, unless you count the end state of entropy as harmony, that is not what the universe is seeking, but whatever.

Frank threw things off pursuing something he convinced himself he wants because he's supposed to want it, and he has to balance that. The movie presents an apparent solution late in the film, then neatly cuts it off, only to provide an, arguably more satisfying, solution after that.

The focus sticks with Long as he scrambles around like a hamster being chased through a maze. He grows increasingly battered and erratic as he can't find a way out of the situation. Even when he finds a way to keep two friends from being killed by a different irate drug dealer, it's less that he's had an epiphany than he flailed his way into success. And they were in danger because of him. He couldn't accept his wallet was gone and just cancel the credit card. Couldn't accept he was having a bad trip and just go to a hospital or something. Everything has to get fixed right now, and he drags other people along in his wake, nearly smashing them against the reefs.

Overlapping Time-Hopping

I was thinking recently about how, while many Marvel superheroes or teams may have time travel foes, you don't see a lot of crossover between the different groups of time travelers*.

Kang's the big Time Travel Guy at Marvel, and he does periodically go to war with other time travelers. But it's usually himself, meaning either the person he was/will become, or alternate timeline Kangs. Occasionally he and Dr. Doom cross paths, but it's not always a conflict. Even when it is, it's not necessarily a battle across time.

Mostly, though, I was thinking about the X-Men. They're littered with time travelers, both friends and foes. Cable, Stryfe, Bishop, Rachel Summers, Trevor Fitzroy, yadda yadda. There's a several, and they always seem to be trying to do something. Granted, sometimes the "something" they want to do is in direct conflict with the "something" one of the others is trying to do, so they may cancel each other out.

But not always. I could see the argument Kang doesn't care what they do, because if he's in the 20th/21st Century, it's to conquer it, so whatever outcome Cable hopes to achieve for 1,000 years from now is irrelevant anyway. But Immortus was usually more interested in controlling time itself, which seems like the sort of thing that might inhibit someone like Cable.

Or take someone like Zarkko, the Tomorrow Man. Not too impressive to look at, definitely not a first-stringer as villains go. A guy who traveled to the past to steal weapons he could use to dominate his peaceful era. But, again, resisting a would-be dictator seems like the sort of thing most the mutant-related time-hoppers would be ready and willing to do.

Beyond the notion that all these characters' goals on so different or on such different scales they don't conflict, the other easy answer is there have been conflicts like that, but with all the time travel involved, they're resolved in such a way we don't notice any changes to the timeline.

The thing that interests me is, most of the time travelers are used to fighting their enemies in one specific time. Kang fights the Avengers at whatever point he happens to show up to challenge them. Cable picks a specific point to stop Apocalpyse. They can pick the battleground (allowing for however accurate the writer wants their time travel capabilities to be.) Against another time traveler, that could go out the window, and it might be interesting to see who could adapt to losing that advantage the easiest.

* I'm less sure about DC, although Flash's foe Abra Kadabra's from the future, and I can't recall him tangling with the Legion of Super-Heroes or anything like that.

Volition (2019)

Jimmy sees glimpses of the future. Mostly he uses these to grab unattended cigs and place just enough bets to keep the rent paid and the booze flowing. Real low-rent burnout loser energy. When he agrees to help an old friend sell some diamonds for some Zimbabweans (who stole the diamonds from some guys in Angola), it goes from what he initially sees as a simple handoff to a series of events that end with him dying gunshot on a floor.

The broad question is the matter of destiny or free will. If you see what lies ahead, can you change it, or is it preordained? Jimmy takes the outlook that it's the latter, so there's no point fighting what he sees. Until it's his own death, apparently. Jimmy's mother died in a car wreck when he was 7, and his adoptive father worked on a project for a drug which actually allows for time travel, yet somehow your past self is able to see what you experienced. So Jimmy has really just been getting flashes of things his future time-traveling selves experienced his entire life.

(I think that's how it works. There was some particle physics gobbledy-gook I missed while I was getting my laundry.)

Anyway, because Jimmy seems to avert his death, only to watch a nice woman he met that day named Angela die instead, he starts repeatedly taking the drug, trying to jump to different points earlier in that day to save her. In that sense, it's a grimmer version of the 1955 scenes in Back to The Future II, with Jimmy trying to avoid letting his Earlier That Day self see him, while we see the same events play out with new context.

You know those zombie movies where the characters act like they've never seen a zombie movie before? This is like that, but for time travel. Eventually there are 3 Jimmys running around trying to keep Angela alive, and none of them recognize how their actions are feeding into each other. Some of that can be explained by the fact each Jimmy is increasingly injured, and the repeated use of the drug isn't doing their minds any good, but it still seems like Jimmy has to keep choosing the dumbest approaches possible.

Example: On his first attempt, Jimmy outmaneuvers the two goons that are trying to double-cross the boss and swipes the diamonds from the motel safe where Earlier That Day Jimmy hid them. He then runs to his adopted father's house, to ask him to give his past self the diamonds when he arrives shortly. OK, I get he was warned to avoid his Earlier That Day self. So he can't just hand them to that version of himself.

But he must have realized he's the reason why the diamonds weren't in the safe when Earlier That Day Jimmy and Angela returned to the hotel room, and he knows the boss will arrive at Dad's house soon. If you want to return the diamonds, why not just hide near the house until the boss shows, step out, hand them over, and explain how his cousin tried to pull a fast one? Why deliberately involve more people?

The point seems to be to hammer home the idea that things are predestined and it was always going to end this way for Jimmy, creating a sense of futility before the very end of the film. Which could either be an affirmation of how everything is predestined, or a counter that just because you can't see the differences produced by your actions doesn't mean they don't exist.

Saturday Splash Page #125

 

"Aurora Borealis," in Station 16, by Hermann (writer/artist)

This isn't actually a full-page splash, as there were three other panels taking up the top quarter of the two pages, but it was the closest thing to it, and it's a cool image.

A Russian squad stationed in Novaya Zemlya receive a distress call from a weather station that has been abandoned for 50 years. Still, best to be sure. They helicopter in, and find an abandoned base. Then the aurora occurs, the helicopter vanishes, and the base is lit up and lively. Things go downhill in a hurry from there.

Hermann keeps the story focused on Grigory Grigorievich, the rookie on the squad. He's the one who hears the initial distress call, and when everything shifts, he's the one who finds a wounded man in a lab coat, who seems to recognize Grigory and accuses him of being a counter-revolutionary. Soon after, Grigory finds his sergeant, chained shirtless to a lightpost, and an unearthly blue that I think is meant for effect.

Oh, and he's missing his eyes. Lot of people missing eyes in this story.

Grigory is written as gradually going from uneasy to panicked. There's no planning or forethought, he just reacts as threats appear or recede. Shoot until the bullets are gone, run until he can't or there's nothing to run from. Though he does know the phrase, "spatiotemporal rift," so that's something.

Hermann uses a lot of small panels focused on Grigory's face, keeping him hemmed in. That's when he isn't using broad, short panels to remind us of the isolation. Whatever time he's in, Grigory is a long way from any help. The skips through time are erratic and unpredictable in duration and the amount of time lost. It doesn't always make sense - Grigory drops a scalpel under an operating table long after the base is abandoned, then finds it there when he is shunted back into the past a few pages later - but that adds to the disorientation for the reader and Grigory.

Sunday Splash Page #314

 

"The Door of Horrors," in Locke and Key: Clockworks #1, by Joe Hill (writer), Gabriel Rodriguez (artist), Jay Fotos (colorist), Robbie Robbins (letterer)

The fifth volume of Locke & Key starts with a trip to the 18th Century, to see how the keys first came into being, and where they came from. For the latter, from the things on the other side of that portal. For the former, from a young man determined not to let his parents' deaths be in vain.

The second issue shows how Tyler and Kinsey were able to see past events, and also what Dodge is getting up to inside Bode's body. It's bad. His actions do force Kinsey to reclaim her tears and fears. That's good! And their mother is going to AA meetings. That's definitely good! But Dodge found the Omega Key. That's bad.

But Tyler wants to see their dad, so the other 4 issues detail how everything fell apart for that group. Why Dodge is the way he is. Why Ellie had a bottle with one of Dodge's memories hidden in her wall. What the hell happened to Erin (though I'm still not clear why the experience turned her hair white.) Why we haven't seen any of Rendell Locke's other friends through the entirety of this story. Why Rendell moved so far away in the first place.

(One thing I'm curious about is how Rendell explained so many of his friends just disappearing, or what the hell happened to Erin. Fine, he might forget because the house had a key magic that makes you forget past a certain age, but other people would still notice their kids, part of a small clique, being reduced by two-thirds.)

Hill plays up the similarities between the generations of Locke kids. Rendell tries to threaten Duncan to keep him out of things just like Tyler tries with Bode, even though, like Bode, Duncan's the one who usually finds the keys. Doesn't work any better for Rendell than it will his son. And Rodriguez plays up the similarities in Rendell and Tyler's appearance, especially as Tyler starts wearing glasses more often. And Rendell makes the same mistake Tyler made: he tries to use the keys to impress a girl. Except Rendell fucked up even more spectacularly than his son did.

Saturday Splash Page #39

 

"Jack Splat," in Weird World of Jack Staff #5, by Paul Grist

A couple of years after the one-shot we looked at last week, and after ending the second volume of Jack Staff, Grist did this 6-issue book. I think it's meant to be a mini-series, although it's also possible Grist just lost interest and stopped. As far as I know, he's not gone back to the character since.

John Smith (aka Jack Staff) has lost three weeks of his life, with no idea how. He's also forgotten he's Jack Staff, which is rather inconvenient when an old enemy shows up. It turns out his memory loss is related to a whole thing involving a great hero who will wield the Sword of Devastation to save the world from a dire threat in the future. The threat being the local neighborhood coke dealer up there, and the hero being, well, that's the question on everyone's mind.

As the title of the book suggests, this is less a Jack Staff story than of the world he inhabits. There's a sense that for all he's supposedly Britain's Greatest Hero, John Smith has often been little more than a well-meaning guy getting jerked around by those who claim to be pursuing some higher motive. Even when Grist delves into Mr. Smith's origin, it involves a Victorian prognosticator who believes Mr. Smith is his key to grasping tremendous power. As it turns out, he is and he isn't, but John doesn't have any idea what he's landed in until it's too late. And for this time-traveling jaunt, it's much the same.

Jack Staff only pawn, in game of life. Or perhaps it's simply that he's never actually in his own book. There's still that sense that this is several comics that overlap. So that one is never quite sure whose book it is at any given moment. So anybody could be the star, and anybody could be the surprise guest star. So characters can be as competent of useless as needed.

Grist does use the old saw of the attempt to avert a dire fate actually bringing it about. Except the reason the person time-traveled in the first place to make certain the dire fate was avoided, was in fact, created by their time-traveling. It's a whole mess, but at least Grist writes Staff as annoyed by it as I am.

Out of Continues

Somebody's parents were overachievers.

The eighth and final volume of Lewis Trondheim's Infinity 8, This is the End, starts where the previous volume left off. The cause behind their ship being caught at the edge of the immense space mausoleum is revealed as the ship's captain, one of the last 88 Tonn Shars. The reason the immense, deceptively happy-looking squid thing is doing this is because of why there are only 88 of its kind left.

This time the spotlight is on Lieutenant Reffo, the scruffy-looking guy that hit on every single one of the female agents that were the stars of the first six volumes. The one thing he seems to have going for him is an analysis chip that helps at least comprehend different courses of action. Well, that and the time-traveling AIs that popped up in volume 7, who have their own reasons for wanting the Tonn Shar stopped.

The problem for Reffo is the captain's already gone through the timeline 7 times, taking different approaches. It knows what's out there, what it's looking for, what is available to it on the Infinity 8, and what Reffo might try to stop it. Reffo and Hal don't know any of that, so they have to piece it together as they go. Of course, it's been a few years since I read some of the earlier volumes, so I can't really remember what some of the things they're referencing are, but Trondheim throws in enough expository dialogue to keep it clear.

The art this time around is by Killoffer, and yes, that's the only name the book gives them. The style is a mixture of hyper-detailed backgrounds and more simplified character designs. So the detail on the hulls of the ship or the device Hal uses to build Reffo a new lower half is there, but it doesn't distract from following the story.

Killoffer also seems to like having speech balloons overlap so they can draw the connecting lines with weird curves or humps as they're moving around each other. I'd think it was supposed to be for two characters talking simultaneously or over one another, but I don't think that's it. They just seem to like to do that.

As an ending, I'm not sure how I like it. There's not really a side I want to root for. Hal and the robots wanted to make sure the Tonn Shar are stopped because it otherwise interferes with their eventual conquest of the universe. The Tonn Shar have a valid grievance, but are planning to wipe out every person in the Federation. Reffo and the Federation killed the Tonn Shar's entire race and lied about it to try and maintain their position of dominance. And since they admit the Tonn Shar have no technology, the only way the Tonn Shar could ever have done anything is if someone approached them first. Like the Federation. So they would have done it to themselves, really.

Sunday Splash Page #217

 

"Room Full of Future Luggage," in GrimJack: Manx Cat #6, by John Ostrander (writer), Timothy Truman (artist), Lovern Kindzierski (color artist), John Workman (letterer)

Set between the end of Killer Instinct and the beginning of the stories from the '80s, Manx Cat continues to fill in some gaps in the backstory, while providing a fairly entertaining adventure. 

It's a difficult stretch for Gaunt. He's still settling in to being independent again, and seems to take that to mean he should keep everyone away from him. Gordon's acting as bartender, but the two are hostile to each. Gaunt barks orders, Gordon makes smart-ass remarks, and is clearly more than a little resentful of what happened to Jo Chaney in Killer Instinct. Gaunt saves Bob the Gatorlizard, but keeps trying to make him leave. It's a contrast with BlacJacMac, who's been leading a merc crew since the Demon Wars. Gaunt lives in a crappy bar, BlacJac has an entire multi-story compound. BlacJac has a new steady girlfriend (Goddess, who hasn't decided she hates Gaunt yet), Gaunt has an employee that gives him shit constantly. He's not really close to anyone, and he's going to have to decide if that's how he wants to keep it.

The Manx Cat is a MacGuffin that popped up from time to time, starting with the very first GrimJack story. It's an obsidian statuette, and Gaunt seems to be forever stealing from one person for another person. This story reveals there's a reason it constantly ends up with other people, and that there's much more to it than just being a feline-themed Maltese Falcon. Gaunt finds himself in a situation where he doesn't know everything that's going on, isn't sure who's telling the truth, and has enemies on all sides. Which I believe is what GrimJack calls "Tuesday." 

The middle issues send him into the past, suggesting that Gaunt's been tied up with Cynosure since long before his "first" death. That felt contradictory to me the first time I read this, but some of other GrimJack stories (including Demon Knight) had established the notion time isn't a straight line when it comes to Cynosure. So maybe Gaunt's decision during the Ostrander/Mandrake run cast ripples all along the timeline.

This mini-series has more of a murky feel to it than Killer Instinct, but I think that owed more to the printing, or maybe the coloring. Truman's linework seemed blurred and things weren't shadowed so much as muddied. Truman opts for an look to the buildings during the sequences set in the past. A little Victorian, a little Renaissance era maybe. Lot of tiled roofs and narrow walkways. Even though there are demons openly roaming about, the city doesn't seem as dark or a closed in as it does in Gaunt's time. And St. John of Knives isn't nearly as morally compromised as Gaunt, either.

Sadly, this marks the end of Grim Spring. There will be no more GrimJack-related splash page for quite some time. But next week begins a 3-week stretch on a different (very different) creator-owned series.

Sunday Splash Page #215

 

"This Neighborhood's Going to Hell," in GrimJack: Demon Knight, by John Ostrander (writer), Flint Henry (artist), Martin Thomas (colorist), Gary Fields (letterer)

Demon Knight was an original graphic novel, published the same month as GrimJack #64, which I reviewed for Random Back Issues #72. The machine which controls any and all time travel in Cynosure is glitching out spectacularly and GrimJack takes the job to go in and pull the plug. Except he gets distracted by a memory and falls back through time to his first life. Specifically his peaceful, happy times in Pdwyr, after he left the Arena, but before he went to fight in the Demon Wars.

GrimJack at least avoids meeting his younger, original body self, who is already off to war, but can't stay away from Rhian, the love of his life. He's determined to fix his past mistake, or so he says. He takes his sweet time getting to it, and by the time he decides to hunt down Major Lash and kill him, well, see the splash page. Never put off a manhunt until tomorrow when you should already be killing him today.

Ostrander presents GrimJack as the only one who knows what's coming but refuses to accept it. Rhian doesn't know exactly what's going on, but if her love has returned from the future in a different body it can't be good. But she doesn't fear death, because it's just the body not the soul. Likewise, her father Maethe knows exactly what's coming, but feels what would be required to avert it would be worse than letting events go as they do.

GrimJack, meanwhile, is so caught up in trying to break out of this cycle he's in he grasps at straws. Pdwyr is the place where he was happy, where he had peace. He left, it burned, so that must have been his mistake. If he just prevents that, he can escape everything else! Which ignores the fact part of the reason Maethe couldn't teach him to be a wizard was because of all the anger in his soul, that same anger that drove him to go fight in the Demon Wars. And even once he's failed, he can't let go. Has to take revenge on both the demons and Major Lash. Both decisions end up causing him trouble once he gets back to his proper time. 

There's a strong current, especially in things Maethe says, that make me think GrimJack's doomed to this cycle because he can't ever simply accept his past failures and move on. He's always torturing himself over them.

Henry's version of GrimJack here is able to exhibit a wider range of emotions because there's a brief stretch where he's actually feeling good. But when things go wrong, he takes on a nearly rabid expression. Wild-eyed and grinning in a way that looks like his teeth are going to shatter. When he really starts to let loose and tap into the energy inside him, Thomas has it green and purple energy practically bubbling out of and off GrimJack. Like he's a bomb about to explode and just so gleeful about it.

Demon Knight isn't referenced in the ongoing series until issue #70, by which time the Steve Pugh-drawn "Demon Wars" story arc, detailing John's leaving Pdwyr to join the fight to drive the demons out of Cynosure, had concluded. And the decisions he made in this story accelerate his decline in the last dozen or so issues of the series.

Friends Thru Time - Sort Of

That's what happens when you dither around too long about avenging your father.

Artemis and the Assassin was a five-issue mini-series (so far), about a time-traveling assassin named Maya, that is tasked with hunting down one Virginia Hall (code name: Artemis). Artemis works in the French Resistance during WWII, and was just given information on where the Allies intend to land and when. It's her responsibility to inform the other resistance cells, so they can hamper any Nazi counterattack on D-Day.

The attempted assassination does not go as planned. Artemis proves a little more difficult to kill than Maya anticipates, plus the Nazis show up to try and kill everyone in the general vicinity. In the confusion, Artemis triggers Maya's time travel devices, and things go from there. The two gradually build a friendship, mostly around saving each other's lives as, even when the locals aren't trying to kill them, Maya's fellow time-traveling assassins are.

Stephanie Phillips clearly sets some things up so this doesn't have to be the last we see of them. The man who trained Maya (and also wiped out everything she'd known prior to that) isn't dead, and has a new sidekick. Nothing was really explained about who is hiring these assassins, or to what specific purpose (if any). The most likely answer is people who think they'll make more money if history plays out differently, but who knows. We know Maya has completed missions successfully before, and we see one of the others do likewise, but we never see how that changes things.

Probably the biggest mystery is the mysterious books. Maya lived during the time of Emperor Ashoka and her people protected books that were said to contain all the knowledge in the world. Knowledge Isak seems to have used to make himself sort of immortal, and which may have something to do with a strange energy Maya can harness. Again, details are thin on the ground. 

Phillips does a nifty bit that I think plays off imperialist narratives, where Isak is responsible for destroying Maya's home and trying to turn her into a heartless weapon, but he presents it as some grand favor he did for her. He uplifted her to a better place. Megan Hetrick drew the first two issues, and Francesca Fantini the other three (don't know why the shift), and they both draw Isak as sort of a dapper Englishman type. Fancy walking stick, nice suit with a vest under it. He gets annoyed when it gets torn up by some Ancient Egyptians before he kills them. He makes a nice picture of the kind of guy who would insist conquering a place would improve it by bringing civilization there. The fattening of his wallet would just be a lucky coincidence.

The main thrust of the book is the friendship between Maya and Virginia. I guess it could be whether Maya is going to ultimately complete her mission or not, but I feel like once Virginia is pointing out that Maya could have just let some other guys kill her, you kind of know it's not happening. 

So, the friendship. On my first readthrough, I felt like it wasn't built very well. They seem to go from yelling and insulting each other to suddenly they're pals. But it's a friendship in the mold of any number of buddy cop movies, where the two characters start out antagonistic, but gradually grow to care about each other. The moments in Lethal Weapon where Riggs saves Murtaugh's life near the pool, and Murtaugh invites Riggs to dinner. In that sense it works, though it's still hard to see why it happens. 

Why does Artemis save Maya from a Nazi, when Maya's already killed several of her allies? Two pages later, she seems entirely ready to kill Maya. Why does Maya, in turn, save Artemis from the guys in the Old West? Is it simply to repay a debt, or did Virginia's act of compassion stir something in Maya? Or was it because they were both fighting for their lives? From that point on, they're basically in a situation where everyone is after both of them, so teaming up is kind of forced on them. That gives them time to build some sort of bond where Maya doesn't simply kill Artemis the moment Isak shows up and demands it. Prior to that, the story seems to require certain odd choices to keep things from concluding prematurely.

As mentioned above, I don't know why there was a shift in artists between issues 2 and 3. Hetrick's style is a bit more animated, a bit smoother. Reminds me a little of Ed McGuinness when he was drawing the Superman books, at least in the faces. Anatomy isn't anywhere near as exaggerated, and the linework isn't as defined, but it's very expressive. Fantini's lines are thinner, more of a realistic style. I feel like Artemis looks older in Fantini's art, but maybe that's because Maya is fleshed out and humanized, which makes her seem like less of a terminator. She's a wounded kid in a lot of ways, one who didn't realize how badly. Virginia's suffered, but she's had more time to come to grips with it. There are a few more panels during Fantini's fight scenes where the characters seem awkwardly posed rather than moving. Hetrick seems to have more of a knack for illustrating the flow of the action.