First Blood - David Morrell

The sheriff of a small Kentucky town spots a long-haired guy trying to hitch a ride. The sheriff gets him to the edge of town, only to have the 'kid', turn around and walk right back into town to get some food. So the sheriff drives him out of town again, advising the kid to keep walking this time. Instead the kid walks back into town, at which point the sheriff arrests him. Things go downhill from there.

This is the novel the first Rambo movie is based on. I had heard from somewhere - probably my dad - it wasn't as slanted in favor of Rambo as the film. Which is true. While Morrell's version of Rambo is more talkative than Stallone - a smartass, frankly, though it's understandable, when they ask dumb questions  - Morrell spends a lot of time on both Rambo and Sheriff Teasle's internal monologues.

Rambo's take the form of arguments with himself. The part of him that knows he could have just kept walking, or that he could defuse this situation by just answering some questions, or explaining himself more fully. And the other part, that kept count of all the times local law enforcement decide they don't like him and run him out, and is tired of being pushed around. When asked why he carries matches if he said he doesn't smoke, he explains they're for fires for cooking, but doesn't explain he is fully capable of hunting for food when pressed on what he's cooking if he admits he doesn't have money to buy food.  Tired of the smart remarks about his long hair, or his beard. Especially when he knows full well what he can do to these country cops, and is actually a little eager to do it.

Teasle's thoughts tend to be more focused on his past, specifically his mistakes. He's made a lot of them, with his wife and with the man who was like a second father to him. He makes more dealing with this kid, and a lot of people die as a result. So he replays old conversations, times he lost his temper when he shouldn't have, when he let pride and ego get the best of him, only to find out he was not at all prepared for what he unleashed.

Because this version of Rambo is a lot less merciful than the film version. When the few remaining cops decide it's time to retreat, Rambo opts to hunt them down like the Predator rather than continue with his planned escape. Another time where he argues with himself about the decision and why he's making it. Shouldn't he use the storm and lack of pursuit, the time lag before Teasle gets somewhere he can communicate, to cover some ground towards Mexico? Well, yes, but he wants to prove something. Or maybe he just wants some action.

It's a situation where each guy ends up making choices out of some desire to assert themselves, their superiority, only to regret it bitterly once they calm down. By then, it's too late to break things off. Rambo's got too many people after them, and Teasle's gotten too many people killed to just sit back and let the state police, or this Trautmann, handle it. There is a part, after Rambo escapes the old mine, where Teasle has some dream vision of Rambo, creeping through an old junkyard. Which is actually what Rambo did. That strains credulity, since Teasle has no way of knowing about the old mine or where there might be other exits from the cave system in links with. A semi-mystical connection between the too was an overreach by Morrell.

The final confrontation, where Teasle has finally started to figure out how Rambo thinks, how Rambo thinks he thinks and reacts, and manages to counter it, that worked a lot better.

'You don't even like this place. It doesn't even interest you. If Teasle hadn't picked you up, you would have gone straight through on your own.

That doesn't make a difference.' 

The Naked Spur (1953)

Howard Kemp (James Stewart) is chasing a wanted criminal, Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan). In exchange for 20 bucks, he gets a little help from a luckless prospector (Millard Mitchell) who met someone further back in the mountains, and a discharged soldier (Ralph Meeker), who scales a cliff to ambush Ben. At which time two things become apparent.

One, Ben has himself a lady accomplice (Vivian Leigh). Two, contrary to the prospector's understanding, Kemp is no dedicated lawman, tracking an outlaw from Kansas into the Rockies. He's a bounty hunter, because the reward on Ben is $5,000. Suddenly, 20 bucks doesn't seem good enough for the prospector, and the soldier, well, he did the actual capturing (and was dishonorably discharged, among other problems), so he might as well tag along.

Those five are basically the cast, so the movie is the tension and shifting loyalties. Stewart, Meeker and Mitchell are only united by the possibility of the reward, but Stewart has a specific purpose in mind for the reward that doesn't involve sharing. Mitchell can't quite abandon the notion of a gold strike. Meeker is unstable, and has eyes for Leigh.

Ryan, as the prize, is the focal point, but plays it so he's off to the side, a devil pulling strings from the shadows. He doesn't brim with rage the way he does in so many other roles; instead Ben is someone who shifts from charming to vicious in the blink of an eye, a knack for watching for weak points in people to manipulate. He keeps dropping hints around Mitchell about a friend who found a rich gold vein, usually right after they've encountered some sort of roadblock or hazard. You know, when the notion of a long trip to a sheriff's office to collect part of the reward doesn't sound so appealing versus going back to panning gold. When he senses Leigh is getting close to Stewart, he tells her to act as a distraction to cover his escape. When she balks, he offers an alternative, that he could always just wait until Stewart falls asleep on watch and cave his head in with a rock. She agrees to play distraction.

Stewart brings an intensity that borders on crazed at times, like he wants to catch Ben so badly it makes him shake. The reason given for why Kemp wants the money doesn't really match that intensity, but it works alright in the scenes between Stewart and Leigh, where she's looking to her future, whatever it might be, while he's fixated on the past.

What I Bought 1/7/2026

Two weekends ago, when I was working on a Saturday Splash Page for later this month, the post editor locked up when I went to load the image. I ended up closing Firefox, and when I reopened it, I couldn't open any posts, and some images were missing from posts that already went up. Logging out and back in didn't fix it, and I went to the extent of downloading Chrome to try and use that. It worked, but fortunately, things did eventually sort themselves out in Firefox. Hopefully that was some strange one-off. 

Nova: Centurion #3, by Jed MacKay (writer), Alvaro Lopez and Matteo Della Fonte (artists), Mattia Iacono (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - I'd tell Rich he needs to keep his Pip on a leash, but Pip would probably be into that.

The Accuser gets back in the game long enough to keep Nova from being completely drained of energy. They bail, and Richard decides they should actually have a plan. The interesting bit there is Rochard can apparently converse with the Worldmind in some virtual conference room, at 10,000% the speed of regular time. In other words, in what appears to be the space between two words to someone on the outside.

Lopez depicts the conference room as a mass, snowy graveyard, all the tombstone with crest on Nova's helmet and a serial number. Which seems like something Rider would do, to keep himself focused on his mission. Which makes me curious if the conference space always looks that way, or if it's because Richard is so fixated on getting Ravenous for what he did. Guess we'll see if MacKay and Lopez use it again in later issues.

The plan that involves using the facilities of this place to drain Ravenous' energy, then borrowing the Accuser's weapon to beat Ravenous like a rented mule. Annihilation did establish Ravenous is vulnerable to being smashed in the face with a big hammer. That done, Nova finds some Mysterium on Ravenous. Ravenous gets taken away by the Accuser, Rich gets paid, and Cammi's cleared of charges and looking to join the crew. Because she went snooping, and found the stolen Mysterium in the hold of Nova's ship. Because he was the thief.

So, did Rider do it because the Mysterium belonged to a big crime organization? Rob from the guilty, limit their ability to inflict harm, plus use it to keep the Worldmind charged up so he can protect the innocent? Or is the Worldmind piloting Rider when he's asleep again, to make sure they have enough money to pay the power bills so it doesn't go offline? I'd cling to my suggestion the Skrull side of the KSW did it, but that wouldn't explain the Mysterium being on Rider's ship. Unless the Accuser planted it, but then a Kree is involved in my plan that was supposed to be a Skrull double-cross..

Sunday Splash Page #409

"Reliquary", in Planetary #3, by Warren Ellis (writer), John Cassaday (artist), Laura DePuy and David Baron (color artists), Ali Fuchs (letterer) 

A man sits in a diner in what appears to be the middle of nowhere. The blacktop is being consumed by the desert sands, and based on his complaints, the coffee would be just as well buried, too. A woman in black arrives with a job offer, and Elijah Snow accepts. Now he's working for Planetary, an agency dedicated to keeping the world strange, funded by a mysterious "Fourth Man."

As it turns out, there's a lot of strange stuff out there, including Elijah Snow, who is a "Century Baby," a person born on January 1, 1900, along with several other notable individuals they come to learn about during the series 27-issue run, not counting a couple of crossovers with the Justice League, Batman, The Authority, none of which I own. Ellis, Cassaday and DePuy peel the mysteries back as they go along, delving into Snow's past, Planetary's past, the world's past, and the four individuals that have spent decades keeping every bit of the strangeness they could get their hands on for themselves.

In practice, the creative team repurpose characters from the pulps, the comics, movies, whatever to their purposes. One issue is concerned with an island where all the kaiju just suddenly appeared in the 1950s, then seemed to die out 20 years later. The first issue reveals there was a secret society of guys - all Century Babys like Snow - that created a super-computer in the 1940s that inadvertently created or unlocked (I was unclear on that part) new universes, including one that had its own protectors. The secret society is basically characters like Doc Savage, Tarzan, the Shadow, with the serial numbers filed off, and the other universe's protectors are basically the Justice League, But Not.

Likewise, the "Four" that Planetary finds themselves in opposition with are the Fantastic Four, But Not. Ellis taking the notion that Reed Richards' inventions never seem to actually improve or change Marvel-Earth beyond what our world is, and attributing that to selfishness and malice rather than editorial diktat.

Cassaday and DePuy absolutely illustrate the hell out of the book. Need a ghost cop to shoot bullets of fire that move at right angles, with a close-up on the target as the bullet ignites them from the inside-out? They can do it. Need to draw back, show a single man wandering inside an immense ark from another reality, full or pillars covered in shiny gold wrought into intricate patterns? They can do that. Enormous rotting monster corpse, or people having a philosophical argument inside said rotting corpse? They got you covered.

There are times I wish Cassaday's style was a bit more exaggerated. Like he would let his lines get more jagged or loose for things that might beggar a human's perception. But overall, I think the fact he kept that steady, smooth line, tending more towards a photo-realistic approach, really works. Part of that is that Ellis' characters, even when confronted by some of this strangeness, never seem all that shook. Jakita or Drummer might get excited, in the way a child is with a new toy, but no one's sanity is in danger. They aren't gibbering in tongues or clawing at their faces. In general, the people affected like that by what they encounter end up dying shortly thereafter. For Planetary, what they encounter might be something they've never seen before, but they've certainly seen things as strange before, if in a different way.

Likewise, while DePuy's colors are strong and vivid, she doesn't really go for anything bizarre. Nothing day-glo or technicolor, blinding you with how garish it is. Things are not muted, exactly, but not something that makes you avert your eyes. The idea is for you to see the strangeness, and maybe comprehend it.

Similar to the artistic approach, Ellis using all these knockoffs both works for and against the book for me. At times, it's interesting to see what he does with, essentially, James Bond, or in the case of the issue above, the trope in Hong Kong cop flicks of the honorable cop being killed by his bent partner. At others, I'm distracted by my mind's, "Oh, that's the Lone Ranger. Oh, that's the ship from Jules Verne's story about going to the Moon," and so on. 

That said, while Elijah Snow is definitely a Warren Ellis protagonist - he smokes, he's sarcastic and rude, likes to get on his soapbox while also threatening to kill people he perceives as disrespectful to him - the book itself is also more optimistic than I might have expected. Snow concludes that simply cataloguing strange artifacts and phenomenon isn't enough; they need to use these things to make the world better. (We don't really get to the part where they do that, but I think we're meant to assume it will start happening.)

This is (part of) his issue with the Four: They help no one but themselves. They resented that they weren't granted special abilities, so they went and got some (which, I don't think is an issue in of itself), but then decided to close the door behind them. There was no ideal beyond, 'get that bag,' and this is what Snow finds unacceptable. He even chides Jakita at times for regarding the things they find as nothing more than a way to alleviate boredom, like all these discoveries are just like trophies you collect in a Grand Theft Auto game to pass the time between running people over.

There are certain parts that don't mean anything to me, most of which I assume are related to the larger Wildstorm Universe, of which I have little-to-no interest. The Bleed, for one. There's also an issue where Snow's mind is sent into a sort of microverse that underpins all existence. Except he learns that as a Century Baby, he is somehow not part of it. But the place underpins everything, so how is he not part of it. Snow later mentions something about all the members of Planetary being parts of different "systems" of defending existence or the universe, but I don't really follow that, either. I don't think any of it is necessary to read the comics. It's probably enough to grasp that Snow rediscovers his purpose, then goes to war against the group that he feels stands in the way of said purpose.

The book suffered from a lot of delays, though that wasn't much concern for me, seeing as I bought used tpbs a decade after the series concluded. Two years between issues 15 and 16, three years between issues the final two issues. I would assume that was Cassaday, but he was also drawing that Joss Whedon-written X-Men book during part of the decade (1999-2009) the book spans, so maybe Ellis took his sweet time getting scripts to him? Obviously, this was written by Ellis, but at this point I imagine you could find a used copy of the original set of tpbs for fairly cheap, thus ensuring he wasn't getting any of your money. Or pirate it. I'm sure that's also an option, if the book interests you and you've somehow taken even longer to investigate it than I did.

Saturday Splash Page #211

"Hanging Garden," in Roche Limit: Clandestiny #3, by Michael Moreci (writer), Kyle Charles (artist), Matt Battaglia (color artist), Ryan Ferrier (letterer)

Released just a few months after Roche Limit concluded, but set 75 years after the end of that mini-series, Roche Limit: Clandestiny is focused on a disparate crew of hired to deliver a mysterious cargo to what is supposed to be the abandoned colony of Dispater.

And when I say "disparate", I mean it. Elbus is a professional soldier, same for Lee, Maggs, and Colt (most of whom don't live long enough to demonstrate much in the way of personalities), who seem to have worked with Elbus for a while. But Kim is some sort of botanist or biologist, Sasha is a scientist (I can't really discern her area of expertise beyond that), and Stockton. . . I have no idea what he brings. He and his twin brother had some sort of business about giving people back dreams, which I suspect means they were able to replicate Recall without Ford's help. But the brother is dead, and some rich uncle sent Stockton on this delivery run. I think the scientists were requested or recruited by Moiratech, but under what pretext is unclear. "We have a ship delivering. . .something to a colony that's been abandoned for decades. Want to ride along and poke at stuff?"

As it turns out, Dispater had changed a lot in 75 years. There are trees now. An entire forest on a planet that couldn't support life, and at least one animal, vaguely boar-like, though Charles draws it like it's exterior is made of shifting plates or interlocking pieces. The city is abandoned, save for massive shadow things that swirl and shift like liquid and seem generally unconcerned by bullets. Don't care for fire, though.

And in a small compound on an isolated edge of the colony are two beings. One is an AI constructed from the memoirs of Langford Skaargred (although there's a flashback that suggests Langford's body drifted into the anomaly, but it shows him with his helmet on, and Roche Limit showed him removing it as his air ran out, so maybe that was just a broader example of people being chucked into the Anomaly) and placed in a robot body. The other is the first artificial human, Danny, or "Hello Danny," since that was his answer when asked for his first words (he was looking in a mirror at the time.) Danny supposedly killed the child of the Moiratech CEO and was to be executed, but was sent here instead.

Which I don't really get. OK, the people running Moiratech have long since been either co-opted or replaced by the shadow-things from the other side of the Anomaly. Danny is, due to his lack of a soul, immune to the corrosive effects proximity to the Anomaly or the materials of Dispater (which I assume are irradiated or otherwise altered by radiation from the Anomaly.) But if he was sentenced to be executed, why send him to someplace which is theoretically no danger to him, but puts him close to the center of your plan?

There's also the fact the forest apparently shows people what they want, which Danny says is the worst thing possible, because people almost always want more. As he puts it, he's seen dozens (because this is the 13th cargo run) of people enter the forest, and not one ever wanted the cure for cancer. They want wealth, they want power, they want revenge on their perceived enemies.

I was going to say that was a bizarre turn after the first mini-series, where Recall sent people's minds back to a particular memory and let them relive it, while rotting their soul. But if the things everyone wants are based on what they perceive as past injustices or mistakes, then it's still them being wrapped up in their past. Only now, the desire manifests in the physical world, somehow. Stockton sees his dead twin (and is killed by him.) Kim sees the wife and child she lost, Sasha sees the husband and child who died in a car accident while she was off working. They regret, they want to do it over, do it right this time, but all they can really get is a facsimile. Which both of them acknowledge and ultimately reject, to the creatures' displeasure.

The Skargred-bot wants them to focus not on trying to escape back to Earth, or even destroying the ship they've unwittingly brought the final piece of with them, but on killing the monster. Which he says will definitely get them all killed in the process. It feels like, with how he describes each past crew as trying to have circumvented this "truth", that it's related to what the forest does, granting people what they think they want or deserve, based on their perception of reality.

But if, as Danny says, humans shift reality to fit what we want it do be - and boy does that feel accurate - why is Skargred-bot's "truth" anything more than the reality he wants to make happen? You could say he's a machine, and not prone to the foibles of humans, but he's an AI based on the memoirs of one particular human. His base is human, specifically an idealistic human who bankrupted himself trying to build this colony, then killed himself rather than fight to fix it. Skargred was definitely a person who saw what he wanted in the world around him, and couldn't deal with what happened when his blinders finally fell.

As it turns out, Sasha must agree, because she stays on the planet to try and confront the monster, while Elbus, Colt and Danny swipe the fresh spaceship. Sasha appears to die, and the others ditch a plan to return to Earth in favor of, attacking another ship that appeared from somewhere. None of this is aided by the fact Charles seems particularly rushed. The art gets rougher and simpler, linework thicker and jagged in places. Characters' faces begin to get oddly elongated or barely visible. Battaglia colors things like the light is being filtered through a kaleidoscope, strange streaks that almost overwhelm the page. 

The comic ends with Elbus, Colt and Danny piloting a ship into the Anomaly and the last panel is a bunch of outlines of ships, colored the same as the surrounding sky, flying, somewhere. Towards the cast? Away from the cast? Are the yellow streaks engine trails or weapons? No idea. Especially since Danny theorizes the monster they're contending with is the Anomaly, then they fly into the Anomaly, and come out in the place with all the ships. Which would seem to suggest the shadow creatures come through the Anomaly, not that they're part of the Anomaly.

But there's still one more mini-series to get through. Will it help everything make sense? If my vague recollections of reading 10 years ago are anything to go by, no. 

2025 Comics in Review - Part 5

7 single issue artists hit 110 pages this year, out of the stuff I bought. Devmalya Pramanik and PJ Holden each ended at 110 pages. Russell Olson was at 116, while Alexandre TefenKgi ended at 122 pages. Humberto Ramos narrowly edged that out with 125, while Domenico Carbone drew 140 pages. Props to both the Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu artists for making the list! But in first place, Batgirl's Takeshi Miyazwa, with 180 pages.

As always, I'm just ranking things I actually bought in 2025. If I didn't buy, it doesn't get considered, so go look for people who read, but didn't rank, that thing you really liked, and complain at them. 

Favorite Ongoing Series (min. 6 issues):

1. Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu

2. Batgirl

3. Fantastic Four (the second one) 

There were only 4 options, and that required counting Fantastic Four before and after the new first issue as two separate entries. The restarted numbering gets 3rd because there were a few issues that weren't event tie-ins. Batgirl, despite not having a plot I'm wildly invested in, at least looked good a lot with Miyazawa's art, and had some decent emotional beats for the title character. Fist of Khonshu comes in 1st easily though, because I thought the arc with MK trying to take down Fairchild was pretty interesting (and occasionally hilarious), and the Pramanik/Rosenberg team made it look gorgeous.

Favorite Mini-Series (more than 50% shipped this year):

1. Bronze Faces

2. Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt

3. Metamorpho

Lots of mini-series again this year. Several that didn't ship enough issues - Avengers Assemble, Babs, Calavera P.I., Red Before Black - some I just didn't enjoy enough - Dark Pyramid, Past Time, Runaways - for them to be in the running.

Bronze Faces felt like it had the strongest story, TefenKgi did some very nice work with the art. If I sometimes had trouble keeping the supporting characters in the crew straight, the issues and messy interrelationships between Sango, Gbonka and Timi always shined through clearly. And it was ultimately about them, that they all came into this with different ideas and goals, and that helped eventually wreck things, because they were never really a united front.

Great British Bump-Off probably edges out Metamorpho because I like John Allison's write more than Ewing's, and Max Sarin's art much more than Steve Lieber's. 

Favorite One-Shot:

1. It's Jeff! Jeff Week

This category was supposed to have a few other contenders, but Tuatha and Marvel All-on-One aren't here. All hail the Land Shark!

Favorite Trade Paperback/Graphic Novel (purchased in 2025):

1. Atomic Robo: The Vengeful Dead (Brian Clevinger/Scott Wegener)

2. Bandette: The Marriage of B.D. Belgique (Paul Tobin/Colleen Coover)

3. Bad Machinery: The Case of the Good Boy (John Allison) 

Obviously I've not reviewed any of this (or the next category) yet. Still got a half-dozen things from 2024 to get through first. But the Atomic Robo story tied together various threads Clevinger and Wegener had been setting up for years into a pretty satisfying package. I'm a little dodgy on stories where people try to force a couple to confess feelings and get together - it's my contrary nature - but Bandette was its usual mixture of humor and theft. I also started trying to find those collections of Bad Machinery Oni Press released last decade. of the four I've so far procured, The Case of the Good Boy was the one I liked the best. The silliness of the magic pencil charmed me, I suppose.

Favorite Manga (purchased in 2025):

1. Precarious Woman Executive Miss Black General vol. 11 (Jin)

2. No Longer Allowed in Another World vol. 9 (Hiroshi Nota/Takahiro Wakamatsu)

3. Dragon Ball vol. 10 (Akira Toriyama) 

Again, haven't reviewed any of these yet, but volume 11 of Precarious Woman Executive might have been my favorite of the entire series. Jin sticks mostly to one or two-chapter stories, and focuses on the characters mostly doing mundane or ordinary tasks, but makes it funny, and occasionally touching. Volume 8 of No Longer Allowed revealed a big plot twist, and volume 9 shows how that reveal ripples outward. Volume 10 of Dragon Ball I bought mostly because it's the beginning of the second World Martial Arts Tournament arc, and I get nostalgic for when non-Saiyan characters where allowed to look like they could actually keep up with Goku.

Favorite Writer:

1. John Allison

2. Jed MacKay

3. Jin 

Just kind of playing the numbers, between Great British Bump-Off and the Bad Machinery collections, I probably bought more of Allison's writing than anyone else. MacKay is on here strictly from his Moon Knight writing, but if I find his pacing a little questionable at times, he finds some nice hooks to hang character beats on in his work. And I actually bought 2 volumes of Precarious Woman Executive, and they were both pretty good, so I figure Jin deserves some credit for that.

Favorite Artist: 

1. Devmalya Pramanik (with Rachelle Rosenberg)

2. Adam Warren

3. Takeshi Miyazawa

I didn't buy as much of Warren's Dirty Pair work as I hoped this year, but the amount I bought is probably at least as many pages as Pramanik drew. Plus it's Warren's later Dirty Pair stuff, as he was moving his style into its own more distinctive direction.

But, again, I loved the work Pramanik did on layouts and doing interesting stuff with close-ups on characters, so they get the top spot with Rachelle Rosenberg, since I know her color work is part of what made Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu (and all MacKay's other Moon Knight books) look so good.

And, we're done with that for another year. 

2025 Comics in Review - Part 4

Out of the publishers other than Marvel or DC, Mad Cave came in first in 2025, with 10 comics. First year Mad Cave tops the list. Boom was second with 9 comics, then Image with 8.

I've also been tracking cumulative totals. In 2022, it looked like we were moving towards almost a 4-way tie. Boom was at 76, IDW at 71, Dark Horse at 67, and Image 65 comics after 17 years. After the last few years, Boom's pulled away, now at 98 books, and has been in first place for the cumulative total now for 7 years. Image is up to 2nd (77 books), then Dark Horse (75), Scout (73), and IDW (71.)

Past Time #1-5: Joe Harris and Russell Olson's story of a guy who was turned to a vampire while fighting in the trenches of World War I, but now he sees in the rise of nighttime baseball, a chance to play baseball again. If he can just convince a blind, black former pitcher to give him a hand. . .

High Point - I enjoyed the baseball parts. Especially the reporter's work tracking all the different identities Henry used as he jumped from one league to another, always dipping out when he started to attract too much attention and digging into his past.

There was also the element of Henry's selfishness. How determined he was to make certain not only that he got what he wanted, but that no one else got it. Even if I have no idea how he rigged that spotlight to burst exactly when it did so a player would get hurt and open a roster spot for him. 

Low Point - Some of this is the result of who is telling the story. Ronnie is telling the story, and he only knows of Henry's past what Henry tells him. That said, it was strange for Ronnie to tell us how determined Henry was to get his way, turning Ronnie to have another in that way, and then Russell and Olson give us flashbacks where Henry seems more interested in going to war than playing college ball, or his misfortune in the trenches to encounter a German soldier that was also a vampire. They don't seem to match, and that could be a point about how what Henry's become has changed him, but I'm not sure of that. Nobody really gets into it, not even when Henry confronts another vampire.

But the actual baseball action is also incidental to an extent. The story isn't really about any tension in an actual game, just Henry trying to figure ways to keep playing.

Red Before Black #4-6: The back half of Stephanie Phillips and Goran Sudzuka's story about a former soldier trying to get a pardon by infiltrating a drug cartel a squadmate of hers works in, only to screw it all up for a wacky blonde girl. I still have no idea why Leo can see the jungle Val hallucinates, because that never gets explained. The ending feels rushed, as Leo brings Val to a spiritualist community where a woman tells Val she has to confront her ghosts, and Val dies like 5 pages later. Maybe spend less time at the gator farm Leo's step-brother ran?

Resurrection Man: Quantum Karma #1-3: Another year, another bad experience with DC's Black Label imprint. This was about a Mitch Shelly from another time or another world trying to help a different Mitch Shelly to avoid some terrible fate brought about because a WW2 Japanese officer had a taste for human flesh and gained super-powers for it. I didn't love the painted art most of the time, I wasn't invested in the changes Mitch was trying to make in his past to fix things, since he seemed to ignore the obvious ones, and the mystery of how things would be resolved wasn't worth buying 3 more issues.

Runaways #1-5: Rainbow Rowell uses a One World Under Doom tie-in mini-series as an opportunity to pick up threads from where her Runaways series ended. Karolina returns from space! Alex is running around as Doc Justice! Chase returns from the future, and he's a bigger jackass than usual! Nico tries to figure out if she has any magic besides the Staff of One! Elena Casagrande was the penciler initially, but Roberta Ingranata and Lee Ferguson drew about 40% of the mini-series between the two of them.

High Point - It didn't make a damn bit of sense, but Gert managing to take out a Doombot by hitting it with a car, without triggering the airbags, was kind of funny. Doom clearly outsourcing his manufacture to lowest bidder third parties. In that same vein, the fact Karolina has gone into space like 3 times now, and I'm not sure we've ever seen any of it. The rest of the cast just, watch her go, and then she comes back at some point down the line.

Other than that, watching Doombot try to work through his loyalty to the actual Doom, versus the idea of Doom he was programmed to emulate, was sort of interesting. His version of looking after these disorganized adolescents.

Low Point - Chase is pretty much always a low point. Returns from the future in Post-Apocalypse chic, big chip on his shoulder, barking orders, explaining absolutely nothing about whatever he is so pissed off about. The fact these idiots continue to let Alex Wilder hang around, despite the fact his is demonstrably untrustworthy, going back to that time he was setting them up to die to save him and his parents.

The Surgeon #1-6: A post-apocalyptic story about a woman who at least had some med school before society collapsed, and roams the land, being a doctor. When she's not swordfighting with marauders or something like that. John Pence was the writer, while the book went through Zachary Dolan, Stan Yak and Omar Zaldiver as penciler over the course of 6 issues.

High Point - The fight with the "Hot Animal Machines," basically a bunch of Fury Road cosplaying lunatics that stretches over a couple of issues was pretty good. Back-and-forth, not necessarily easy just because Hanover's a bad-ass with a sword, because she's still just one person.

It's not really a nice picture of humanity, but how quick people are to forget all the help someone gave in favor of one time she didn't. Hanover lives up to her bargain with the community, takes what she was promised, and leaves. When she returns later, badly wounded, the guy running the community acts like she's scum because she wouldn't stick around and be their full-time doc, or war chief, or something. Keeping in mind, they got her drunk to make the agreement in the first place. Like I said, not a great view of humanity, but accurate enough. 

Low Point - I really didn't understand who the United First Nations guys were raiding in the final issue. With their underground bunker with card readers and people kept in shower rooms in what look like hospital smocks. I guess Pence's idea was there had to be someone guys like the Hot Animal Machines sold people they captured to, and it was maybe someone who kept more of the old world than most managed, but it felt like an odd fit with the rest of the world that had been established, and it was too late in the series to expand on it.

The Thing #1-5: The daughter of a girl that was Ben's friend as a child (and the niece of a guy who picked on Ben as a child) goes missing. Ben finds her pretty easy, but finds himself targeted by a ton of costumed killers, many of them rocking powers they didn't normally have. Tony Fleecs is the writer, Justin Mason the penciler.

High Point - Ben being confused when Bullseye chucks some throwing stars at him in issue 2. More seriously, the calm way he handled The Gladiator (DD villain, not the Shi'ar guy) in issue 1. Trying to talk things out, block the punches. Failing that, take the punches as long as he can, before finally laying the guy out in one hit. Just really liked the idea that of course the Thing doesn't wallop a person as hard as he can right of the bat, only when it's really needed.

Low Point - That said, fighting the Juggernaut in issue 4 seemed like a time that it would be needed, and Fleecs kind of cheaped out on a fight I was honestly kind of geeked to see. Black Tom wanders into grabbing range like a moron, and Ben hurls the guy down the block and bails while Juggy chases his buddy.

And that's all the titles. Tomorrow, we close it out with ranking stuff.

2025 Comics in Review - Part 3

With 49 books, 2025 was Marvel's worst year in total comics, non-COVID year division, taking the spot from 2019's 52 comics. Although at 43.75%, 2025 Marvel does have a slightly larger slice of a smaller pie than 2019 Marvel (or 2022 for that matter.) On the other end of the spectrum, with 20 comics (and 17.86%), DC had its best year since 2015, which was, what, 4 linewide reboots ago? Were they still on DC You then?

The tertiary publishers ended up at 43 comics (38.39%), although I think over 30 of those came out before July. So that's a bit of an increase over 2024, but it's a lower percentage than the six years prior to that. Only 7 companies in those 43 books, down from 8 in 2024 and 11 in 2023. I don't know if it's that companies are going away, or I'm just having too much trouble finding their stuff now.

Hector Plasm: Hunt for Bigfoot #1-3: Called to a small town in the Pacific Northwest to deal with a lumberjack ghost, who turns out to have been summoned by a witch, Hector finds himself caught up in the search for a possibly murderous Sasquatch.

High Point - I liked some of the layouts Derek Hunter used. The bit in issue 2 when Hector and Lip find the odd stone pile that Hector is getting bad vibes from, for example. Hunter and colorist Spencer Holt draw these red ghostly blobs in the air above the stones, but in their own panels, emphasizing their existing in a different kind of space that not everyone can see.

Cereno writes Hector as a little awkward around most people, which made sense given how he spends most of his time, aka, killing undead things. He does alright with Lip, who is focused on proving there are Sasquatches in the area, but it's harder around people like the town sheriff, who mostly doesn't have time for that kind of nonsense. Definitely seems like a guy who might be involved in a grisly murder!

Low Point - The pacing was a little odd, maybe because each issue was a different length. 

It's Jeff! Jeff Week: Another collection of Kelly Thompson and Gurihiru's Jeff stories. In this case, mostly Jeff trying to find ways via either magic or science to steal other people's food. Which is at least more benign than a lot of other uses for such things.

Laura Kinney: Wolverine #2, 3: I think Erica Schultz was going for Laura being so frustrated and angry with the dissolution of Krakoa that she was trying to draw a line in the sand. No compromises, no more suffering for other mutants, which took the form of her charging in recklessly, then complaining that it still hurts to heal. Then don't run into a bunch of guys with guns like a lunatic. It wasn't really working for me, and Giada Belviso's oddly-proportioned art wasn't doing it for me, either.

Metamorpho: The Element Man #2-6: Al Ewing and Steve Lieber's mini-series continued to try and capture the vibe of the '60s ongoing series. Simon Stagg tries to make an artificial pop star to ruin his daughter's music career, and sics a killbot on Metamorpho instead. Jaya confronts Vandal Savage, the Thunderer returns (sort of), and it turns out Metamorpho is caught up in a battle between suns.

High Point - Well, the whole notion of the Orb of Ra as being used to empower champions in a battle between suns was appropriately bizarre, as was the conclusion. I'm not sure why Lieber drew the battle between Rex and Solaris like that one comic from the 1940s, but what the heck.

On a comedy note, the part where Rex and Urania decide there's strength in numbers and recruit the Element Woman and the Muttamorpho from The Terrifics, only for those characters to take the time to air grievances about their poor treatment. Plus, Ewing had the plan backfire, which was a nice inversion on the trope.

Low Point - I guess Ewing was hoping the book might get extended into an ongoing, but I didn't entirely understand why he spent part of issue 3 with Vandal Savage pointing out various continuity glitches, like Simon Stagg dying in The Terrifics, but being fine (for a given value of the word, he's still an incompetent gasbag) in this book.

Mine is a Long, Lonesome Grave #1, 2: A guy gets out of prison, intending to get some money to a daughter that wants nothing to do with him, and gets cursed. So he goes on a revenge spree. I gave up after 2 issues because I just didn't see anything that felt new or original.

Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu #4-15: Jed MacKay's multi-year run continues (in its third title), with Moon Knight and his crew taking care of the Asgardian Fairchild and his designer enchanted drug. Moon Knight got his Midnight Mission back, plus a soul-stealing sword that is actually a dragon. Leveling up his kit and whatnot. That part was illustrated by Devmalya Pramanik and Rachelle Rosenberg. Then the Wrecker showed up being haunted by people he may have killed while possessed (they were definitely killed, but I don't know about buying that he was possessed at the time.) Domenico Carbone and Rosenberg handled that story.

High Point - Issue #7, when Moon Knight concludes they need a bio-chemist to come up with something to get people off the drug, and decides the best option is to lure Hank Pym out of the Microverse. So he lets 8-Ball dress a bunch of them up as villains and attack Pym's daughter, the Unstoppable Wasp. Reese's pained, reluctant, "Talk to the Chalk! It's Chalk O'Clock!" battlecry will never not make me laugh.

Also, Pramanik drew some really excellent page layouts. Using Marc ripping his mask as a panel break, or somebody's electric whips as they lash at Moon Knight. Just really good stuff. Pramanik is supposed to be the artist on the new Marc Spector: Moon Knight book, so hopefully we'll get more than 5 issues of the art in 2026. 

Low Point - Issue 11, the "Birthday" issue. MacKay uses that bit where everything is drawn from first-person perspective, so the characters appear to be addressing us. All to save up for the reveal of the identity of the character at the end. Maybe if the reveal had done more for me I would have been more impressed? Kind of doubt it, though.

Nova: Centurion #1, 2: Spinning out of whatever Hickman did with that space mini-series, Richard Rider's still trying to be the only Nova, but keeping charged up enough to sustain the Worldmind takes money, and that's thin on the ground. So Jed MacKay and Alvaro Lopez have Nova acting as a merc. But for good causes! Like finding the money stolen from an interstellar crime org! Err. . . 

Tomorrow, we wrap up the remainder of the alphabet. A bunch of mini-series, some of which I abandoned but we'll get to that. 

2025 Comics in Review - Part 2

New comics total in 2025 was 112, up 18 from 2024, but still 7 less than 2023. Worse than every other year except 2020, 2021, and 2024. Could have been a little higher if Dust to Dust #7 didn't keep getting delayed, or Tuatha actually showed up, or I found a copy of Marvel All-on-One at a price I was willing to pay.

Although, through June, I was on pace for around 134 comics. The numbers cratered the second half of the year. I went from over 11 books/month, to less than 8, as all those mini-series I was buying early in the year either ended or started missing months, and nothing much popped up to replace them.

Dark Pyramid #1-5: Written by Paul Tobin, with PJ Holden as artist, a livestreamer goes missing right after finding something strange on Mt. Denali in Alaska. His girlfriend Becca goes to find him, and runs into a lot of strange creatures, including a very persistent monster and a bunch of murderous American soldiers. 

High Point - I thought the big party of Hooky's fans Becca and Shailene briefly take cover in during issue 2 was interesting. Mostly for the mixture of personalities, and trying to figure who would be useful or detrimental in Becca's search going forward. Then they all died, either from Eve (the monster), or the soldiers. But the part where Becca insists they need to go back to try and help the partygoers not run into danger, only to get trampled by a panicked mob, was not only good for establishing Becca's character, it was funny.

Holden's design for Eve was pretty cool, especially the second mouth on the back of its head. The human-faced goats were disturbing. 

Low Point - The fact Tobin and Holden spent most of an issue on that party of weirdos, only to then slaughter them shortly thereafter seemed like a waste. Maybe it was meant to establish just how far the government was going to cover things up, but I don't think it was necessary.

The ending was kind of a downer. "You can't beat 'em, so join 'em," is rarely satisfying to me, and this example was not an exception. 

Deadpool #10, 13-15: Cody Ziglar and Roge Antonio brought Deadpool back to life through some alchemical jiggery-pokery that was supposed to keep his and Eleanor's healing factors from being as overdone. Then they went to settle things up with Death Grip, who learned that keep shards of a sword that cuts souls inside your body is a bad idea.

High Point - I don't really care about the Arakko mutants, but the fight with Solem in issue 13 wasn't bad. Seemed kind of stupid they went to the trouble of bringing a magic sword, then waited so long to use it on a guy with adamantium skin, but whatever. Solem was at least sort of funny.

Low Point - I guess it has to be the 2 issue crossover with Ziglar's Miles Morales: Spider-Man book, since I dropped the title rather than buy a crossover. But I still don't really get what Death Grip's deal was, and making a point of saying Deadpool's healing factor is weaker now just felt kind of pointless. Just stop writing scenes where Deadpool heals so rapidly from extreme damage! You don't have to make an entire storyline about it! Eleanor didn't even have a conventional healing factor prior to this, Duggan gave her some weird thing that reset her age to the point when her mutant power manifested when she sustained massive damage, which is not the same as what Deadpool has!

Dust to Dust #2-6: JG Jones and Phil Bram's Dust Bowl murder mystery pressed on. The mayor's got issues, his PTSD-suffering brother is on who knows what kinds of drugs (administered by the mayor), the sheriff's trying to dry out, the mayor's future son-in-law's a cad, the big-city photographer's snooping around in ways the mayor doesn't like.

High Point - The sepia color scheme, broken up only occasionally by stark red, really captures the bleakness of the surroundings. For a specific moment, the big rabbit-killing round-up in issue 6. It didn't seem like they were killing the rabbits for food, but simply because the rabbits might eat their crops. If, you know, they could get anything to grow. It comes off as people venting their frustration and cruelty on something they perceive as a safe target. What are rabbits gonna do? Throw on a WWI gas mask and stab them with bayonets?

Low Point - Sometimes it's more apparent than others Jones is using photo references. The photographer will look a lot like Cate Blanchett sometimes, others not so much. The sheriff's mustache seems to shift in width and bushiness from one panel to another for no apparent reason.

I also kind of wonder if Jones and Bram can pull all these elements together in two issues. The rainmaker and his assistant, for example, feel like a case of maybe one too many pieces on the board. I mean, there's also the firebrand preacher guy that feels like he should be relevant, but hasn't done much of anything yet. Maybe it's all just supposed to be texture, fleshing out the world these murders are occurring in, but I'm not sure. 

Fantastic Four #28-33: Ryan North spent the last six issues of this volume on One World Under Doom tie-ins, mostly with Cory Smith as penciler. Outside of Doom tricking Sue and Reed into finding a magic sword that might have threatened him, most revolved around Doom having turned the Thing back into Ben Grimm, and this somehow steadily negating/draining the rest of the team's powers, and them trying to reverse this.

High Point - Slim pickings. Doing extended event tie-ins ran contrary to the vibe of North established the first 2+ years on the book. Maybe issue 30, when Ben deals badly with the fact not being the Thing makes him feel weak and unable to keep him family safe, unable to feel confident when he assures them everything is OK. Or issue 33, written from HERBIE's perspective as the team makes a last-ditch effort to recharge their powers. Although Smith's art made me think the FF were being kind of malicious setting the robot up to sacrifice himself for them. Like he's a sucker they've tricked.

Low Point - The whole notion that one member of the team loses their powers, the others will start to as well is apparently left over from something Dan Slott wrote post-Secret Wars, but it's one North would have been better off leaving behind.

Sue Richards being able to create a force bubble that can protect people from time being rewritten, even after she ceased to exist (or was rewritten to never have powers), was also a thing I didn't really need or buy, especially since it just turned into a What If? issue where the most notable thing is Jean Grey and Namor being the last 2 heroes standing.

Fantastic Four #1-6: North, now paired with penciler Humberto Ramos, reboots the book back to #1, and give us 3 more issues of One World Under Doom stuff. Then, finally back to more done-in-one stuff, with aliens who mess with the parts of our brain that seek patterns in things, and the Black Cat being innocent of a crime, to Sue's consternation.

High Point - The page in issue 3 where, with Reed having tampered with Doom's "reset button" machine, Doom is stuck experiencing the same moment of the Thing smashing him in the face over and over again, because he can't simply take the hit (which knocked his mask off) and strike back. He has to make it so the hit never happened at all, because to have his mask knocked off is too great an indignity. Anyway, it's presented as the same panel, over and over, each row becoming more and more copies of the panel, for all the times Doom tries to find a way to turn things around in the split-second he's granted.

Ramos also reined in the excesses in how he draws faces and proportions enough I no longer feel like his art is slapping me in the eyes with a porcupine. 

Low Point - Some of the things North is implying the FF can do are straining my suspension of disbelief. Reed being able to stretch far enough into the Earth's crust to find stuff to make artificial diamonds to create huge subterranean arrows Sue can see from the air, a billion years in the future? Also, shouldn't those diamonds have been subducted back into the mantle by that point, due to plate tectonics?

Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt #1-4: John Allison and Max Sarin bring us another mystery for Shauna Wickle to solve, while she's stuck working in quilting shops to raise funds to repair her boat. I don't know how great a mystery it is - I had it pretty well figured out in issue 2, if not sooner - but then I didn't feel like the first mini-series really did much with the mystery, in terms of providing clues to the reader to solve it. Maybe I just don't understand baking, but I don't understand quilting either, and here we are.

High Point - Watching Shauna try to figure out how to act like a double agent for two people at the same time was a lot of fun. Her beat poetry performance in issue 4 was very cool, or maybe that was just the outfit Sarin gave her.

Sarin's artwork, the exaggerations and flourishes she provides as the characters go through emotional turmoil, fantastic as always. The part in issue 1 where she collapses into a gloopy puddle of tears at learning how much repairs will cost, then pulls it together until the moment she has to request a job, only to revert to the puddle, was just great.

Low Point - I don't know who "Prairie Lady" is, but fortunately, it's not necessary info. It's enough the quilters regard her as a big deal.

Tomorrow is the hodgepodge day. Lots of books with just a couple of issues, things I dropped, or just didn't last very long.

2025 Comics in Review - Part 1

We're back again, to look at all the new comics I bought over the last year. 4 days on that, then the Internet-mandated ranking of stuff on Friday. 17th verse, same as the first.

Avengers Assemble #5: The last issue of Steve Orlando's mini-series about an Avengers "Emergency Response Squad." Which, as pointed out by more than one person, just sounds like the regular Avengers, but what the hell. Anyway, they stop the Serpent Society's plans to turn everybody into snake-people for Mephisto, and then I think the concept continued as one of those online Infinity titles.

Babs #5, 6: Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows' barbarian lady mini-series. Babs and her friends escape from the mines and challenge the jackass that's convincing all the idiot peasants to enslave everyone that isn't a human. It isn't a pretty win, and the peasants are about as ungrateful as you'd expect, but it's still nice to see a stupid dickhead die in embarrassing fashion. And the idiot orc guy sort of comes to his senses, without being rewarded for it, which is good.

Batgirl #3-14: Tate Brombal's story about Batgirl and a bunch of other characters fighting these angry magic-flower-huffing ninja guys. Lady Shiva appears to sacrifice herself for Cass, prompting lots of confusing grief and vengeance related feelings. Then two issues (drawn by Isaac Goodheart) of flashbacks to Shiva and her sister's past, none of which explain why the hell Shiva would have a kid with the guy (David Cain) who killed her sister instead of, you know, killing him. Then there was the reveal of a new sibling for Cass, and then more fighting flower-huffers. Steven Segovia drew the most recent issue, and Takeshi Miyazawa drew the other 9 issues.

High Point - I liked Cass' refusal in issue 3 to deal with Shiva's crap and just start throwing hands at the League of Assassin. I don't think Shiva - or Nyssa, or any of the others - have earned any leeway or benefit of the doubt, so Cass might as well follow her instincts. These are bad people, kick their asses. If Shiva wanted to be a mom, or be treated with respect like one, she should have tried being one in Cass' first however many years of her life.

Miyazawa's got a heavier line than I'm used to seeing in his art, but it gives Cass a more ragged look during the moments where she's losing her grip. And the fight scenes look really nice. 

I'm not sure whether Tenji, Cass' half-brother, is a high point or not. There's really not enough of him to tell so far. He's compassionate, but inexperienced, which seems like a bad combination in this story. I'm not saying he's got "sacrificial lamb for angst purposes" stamped on his forehead (because he'd have to be Hector Hammond, or Peyton Manning to fit all that), but I don't like his odds of surviving. 

Low Point - I feel like Brombal's going to the surprise reveal or SHOCKING BETRAYAL! well too often. Cass has a brother! Nyssa al'Ghul lied about the history of the city! The Unburied have a mole amid their enemies' ranks! This is why I suspect Shiva's not dead, because it would be another bait and switch.

Black Cat #1-5: G. Willow Wilson decided to write a Black Cat series where Felicia tries to be a hero, but is really bad at it. She tried to stop some smugglers, and got crosswise of Daredevil and a vampire. Then Ms. Marvel interrupted her attempt to stop some other guys who were smuggling alien plants. Then she got crosswise of Tombstone and ended up in jail, and I was done with this book.

High Point - Ummmmm, you know, I got nothing. The variant cover I bought for issue 3 was cute? Gleb Melnikov has drawn all the issues so far, so credit for maintaining the same artist for 5 consecutive issues.

Low Point - I could see Black Cat struggling at heroing because unexpected complications keep arising, and people make assumption. Some of that even happens, what with the guys smuggling not furniture, but a vampire. But mostly, Wilson is writing Felicia as kind of an idiot. OK, Tombstone tricked her. Fine. Why is her response to confront him face-to-face and shout schoolyard insults, instead of stealing something important or sabotaging one of his other schemes? It's just idiotic. Also don't like the breaking the 4th wall stuff. Just reinforces my feeling that this was a pitch Wilson originally intended for Harley Quinn.

Bronze Faces #1-6: Written by Shobo and Shof, with art by Alexandre Tefenkgi, a trio of friends decide to recover as many of the Benin bronzes that were taken to display in various European museums. While things start off well, old rivalries and hurts start to undermine things from within. 

High Point - Shobo and Shof really took their time with the relationships between Timi, Gbonka and Sango, pulling apart all the different tensions between them, the protective vibe that veers into possessiveness the other two seem to have over Timi. Tefenkgi did some excellent work with the layouts, like doing a double-page spread of a large, circular room for the setting of a conversation between two characters, where the smaller panels progress in a ring around the two pages. Or some of the exaggeration for effect, like Sango being drawn as huge or on fire when she loses her temper.

I also appreciate they didn't skip on showing the heists and how they were pulled off. I know that wasn't necessarily the focus of the mini-series, but I like heist stuff, so it helped scratch that itch when we get to see how Sango pulls it off in issue 5, or the train heist in issue 2. 

Low Point - There were times I felt like we needed more focus on the other members of their crew. I could usually pick up on relationships between them - two of the guys are brothers, for example - on the second read-through, but it didn't always feel like I had a grasp on them as individuals. So when one guy decides to grab the money and run, it doesn't exactly come out of left field, but it doesn't have much emotional impact.

Calavera P.I. #3, 4: The final two issues of Marco Finnegan's horror-noir story. Where the revived skeleton manages to save his friend's son from a crazy grief-stricken woman who intended to sacrifice the kid as part of some weird process to resurrect her own child. I'm not clear on how the kid made it back after he fell into the portal, whether it was something he did, or the private investigator managed, but happy ending.

That's it for Day 1. One ongoing I'm still buying, one I'm not, the conclusions of a few mini-series, and one complete mini-series. Tomorrow is pretty evenly split between ongoing and mini-series.

Sunday Splash Page #408

"Spider-sicle," in Peter Parker: Spider-Man (vol. 2) #37/135, by Paul Jenkins (writer), Mark Buckingham (penciler), Wayne Faucher (inker), Transparency Digital (colorists), RS and Comicraft (letterers)

Following the general mess that was The Final Chapter, Marvel canceled most of their Spider-titles, rebooting two with new first issues. Amazing Spider-Man, helmed by Howard Mackie and John Byrne, and Peter Parker: Spider-Man, by Mackie and John Romita Jr.

Quite why anyone thought having both books written by Howard Mackie of all people was a good idea escapes me, beyond the fact nobody at Marvel was making good decisions in the '90s. Case in point: that stretch, which lasted about 18 months, is known primarily for Mary Jane appearing to be killed in a plane crash and Peter dealing with being a grieving widower.

Romita Jr. eventually moved to Amazing when Byrne departed, which is also when Paul Jenkins and Mark Buckingham took over Peter Parker: Spider-Man. While they weren't able to entirely avoid plotlines in Amazing (such as Norman Osborn drugging Peter's toothpaste so he could make him dress up as the Green Goblin and attack Peter's friends in some twisted attempt to make Parker into his new heir, no I'm not kidding), they did get to do their own thing most of the time.

(They adapted pretty smoothly to J. Michael Straczynski having Peter move into his own apartment and become a teacher. Jenkins actually had Peter strike up a friendship with a neighbor, more than JMS did, and alluded to the difficulties of getting papers graded when you were out late fighting the Rhino.)

"Their own thing" was, especially for the first year, mostly done-in-one stories about Peter's life. How it shifts to accommodate Spider-Man, and frequently, how other people perceive Spider-Man. One issue might be about a young boy in a troubled home who imagined himself as Spider-Man's sidekick, with Spidey as a sort of parental figure who reminds him to work on his math and be forgiving when his mother forgets to sign his permission slip for the field trip. Another is about how different cops see Spider-Man, or a private investigator who thinks he's pieced together Spider-Man's secret identity (based on assumptions about what the man must be like in his civilian life to act like Spider-Man.)

Jenkins and Buckingham were also the creators of my favorite entry of Marvel's "Nuff Said" Month, as they penned an issue where Spidey comes under attack from a veritable army of criminal mimes.

Jenkins' version of Parker is a bit of a dork. Not as funny as he clearly thinks he is - there's an issue where Peter tries stand-up comedy and bombs completely - and always seems a bit harried. Like there's just a little too much on his plate for him to handle. It fits with Buckingham's depiction, where Peter always seems to have bags under his eyes and look a little older than you think he might. It's a stressful life, and all his neuroses and guilt complexes don't make it any less so. At the same time, Buckingham's Spider-Man can often look graceful, then just as swiftly look like a fool, but always seems to pick himself back up.

The few multi-part stories Jenkins did in his 30 issues were a mixed bag. There was a vengeful parent who at first appeared to be like a Super-Adaptoid, but was more of a low-grade mutant Mysterio. But, proving he didn't play favorites (or that he read the fan responses), Jenkins fed that guy to Doc Ock in a story that felt needlessly convoluted (chips that could control people being placed in advanced cybernetic limbs), but nonetheless played Octavius as a vicious, determined threat.

Then Jenkins brought Norman Osborn into play, although the story is most notable for Humberto Ramos shifting from cover artist to interior artist. Talk about whiplash, going from Buckingham to Ramos was like a brick to the face. Actually, a brick to the face might have been preferable to Ramos' weirdly disjointed, oddly proportioned, undead-esque sunken eyes, art. I could not figure out why Marvel thought this guy had any business drawing comics.

To be fair, even with Buckingham on pencils I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it. However cool I might have originally thought the reveal of Norman as the mastermind behind the Clone Saga was (and I have to sadly admit I was excited to get that comic because i thought it might be worth something, silly me), I was thoroughly sick of Osborn by the time this story rolled around. Especially when Jenkins goes to the edge of Peter killing Norman Osborn, only to pull back, because that would mean Osborn "won," somehow. Osborn had already, just in this story, beat the shit out of Flash, dumped booze on him, put him behind the wheel of a truck and driven it into the side of Peter's classroom, putting Flash in a coma that appeared to be the result of a relapse into alcoholism. That's a pretty solid win, but at least if he's dead he can't enjoy it.

I know, if Jenkins killed him, someone else would just bring him back, and we'd still have Norman trying to be good or whatever the hell is going on in the Spider-Man books right now.

All that is to say, that story got tossed from the collection (possibly into the trash) many years ago. Jenkins and Buckingham left the book at issue #50, turning it over to Zeb Wells and a host of pencilers for 7 issues until the book was canceled. Jenkins took up the second volume of Spectacular Spider-Man, occasionally working with Buckingham. While "Peter Parker" has been placed at the front of at least one volume of Spectacular since, this particular title has been left behind. 

Saturday Splash Page #210

"The Black Sun Group," in Roche Limit #2, by Michael Moreci (writer), Vic Malhorta and Kyle Charles (artists), Jordan Boyd (colorist), Ryan Ferrier (letterer)

On the edge of the Andromeda Galaxy sits an anomaly. Like a black hole in that it swallows light and energy, but without the intense gravity. Around it sits a dwarf planet, Dispater. On and within Dispater, a colony, Roche Limit. The dream of the son of a billionaire, the colony was failing before Moiratech and its 3 founders stepped in, with a vision of finding new resources beneath the surface. That vision has failed as well, and the colony is now a backwater land of criminals and addicts, in thrall to a drug made with the only unique mineral found on Dispater, a drug known as Recall. And it's into this that a cop from Earth arrives, looking for her sister, Bekkah.

Roche Limit was an odd book for me in a particular way. Up to then, certainly in the lifespan of this blog, the titles I bought were in some sense known quantities. The majority being from Marvel and DC obviously. Even the selections from other publishers were mostly things I knew previously from TV (the Buffyverse stuff, Boom's Darkwing Duck title), movies (the various Rocketeer mini-series), video games (all the Bloodrayne stuff.) Of the rest, I knew GrimJack from my cousin's collection of the original series well before the Ostrander and Truman did Killer Instinct or Manx Cat. Atomic Robo and Empowered had both been praised by multiple comics bloggers I read for years before I got around to try either.

Roche Limit? It was its own thing, not a continuation or extension of any pre-existing concept. I didn't know any of the creative team by prior work. The book being titled after an astronomical concept I was familiar with happened to catch my eye, and that, seemingly, was enough to take a chance. Which means this mini-series is, in some way, the start of all the oddball stuff I've bought from various other publishers over the last dozen years.

As to the mini-series itself, Moreci has things several threads that cross or combine at different points. Sonya, an Earth cop who spends all her savings and most of her pension to buy a ticket to come find her sister. She runs into Alex Ford, a slick-talker who knows more than he's telling. Alex is also the creator of Recall, which is all that's keeping him alive, but also what's keeping him in the colony.

There's also Janice, a nightclub owner missing an eye, and her chief goon, looking for several girls who've went missing just like Bekkah. You have Moscow, the drug lord who controls Alex, but is increasingly less concerned with such matters. A Dr. Watkins, who keeps dumping people into the Anomaly. The bodies he brings back are comatose at first, and rapidly rotting from within, while odd, glowing stone appear in the mines outside the colony.

And then there's the history of the colony itself. Each issue begins with part of a recording by Langford Skaargred, the idealist who started the colony. He had a dream for it, but like most dreams, when brought into reality, there were pieces missing, or things that just no longer made sense. He turned to Moiratech for financial help, but their dream, to the extent they had one, was simply more of what they already had.

Neither got what they wanted. Roche Limit is no shining waypoint on humanity's trek to another galaxy, nor is it a great hub of commerce and corporate profit; it's a decaying, crime-ridden backwater Earth is all too willing to ignore. What Malhorta and Charles show us are tight clusters of apartment buildings, rehab clinics with cracked walls and dirty floors. Watkins has a dingy dissection lab with pipes and cables all over, and rooms full of cages. Janice's nightclub looks a little brighter, a little nicer, but it's an isolated outpost. The Moiratech CEOs seem to live in a vast auditorium in a skyscraper overlooking the city. It's big, and empty, and there's just nothing to it. No business takes place, no discoveries, no growth. More a tomb than anything else.

Likewise, the people we see are often small, taking up limited space in the panel or on the page. They're dwarfed by walls that hem them in, or an Anomaly that sucks them in and spits them out like the husk of a sunflower seed. Lots of people brandish firearms in this mini-series, but even when they actually shoot someone, they're not drawn as looking powerful or cool. Guns aren't much use in this situation, at best a temporary reprieve. 

Faced with a spiraling situation, we see the choices people make when about what's important. Some, like Moscow, embrace nothingness as a truth. Others retreat into their pasts, via Recall, but it leads to the same point, rotting them out from within, just faster. Still others focused on meaningless turf battles. Moreci introduces another crook who thinks that Moscow's lost focus and he can seize control of the drug trade. Great, he can be the biggest tick on a tiny, disease-riddled dog's ass, but that's enough for him. You could possibly lump Janice and Woodbury into this category, but there's at least some suggestion Janice actually cares about the girls that are going missing, and is trying to protect more than just her status. And when things fall to pieces, she and her crew face it together.

Sonya and Alex, ultimately, are striving to find someone they care about to move forward. Even if Alex knows there really is no future for him, he figures he can help someone who believed in him. Sonya and Bekkah both have experience with what drug addiction costs, but rather than fall back into reliving the happy times before it ruined things, they each, in their own way, try to make something better going forward.

Which makes it seem like this is an existential struggle against nihilism, in which case Skaargred's failure was not in the attempt, but in the fact he gave up. He saw his dream fall apart, and rather than try to salvage it, or even help anyone, he consigns himself to the vacuum. As for the Moiratech CEOs, they were only concerned with profitability and found themselves engulfed by something greater. In the process, it seems to have taken the drive from them.

It's strange; I would have figured people considered as successful as the 3 "explorernauts" had a rapacious will to consume and control, to have. As they are now (that's them in the splash page), they're marionettes with a lazy hand on the strings. Maybe they think, by granting Watkins time for his research, they'll learn how to control all this, but it feels like they want the takeover, but have no drive to make it happen. Content to wait for some critical mass to be reached. It's Moscow who lights the match and Moscow who, eventually, eliminates them as surplus to requirements. Downsized, in a sense.

What I Bought 12/26/2025

Almost as obnoxious as all the ads for these sports betting apps I see on the rare occasions I watch TV, are the ads for this stupid Taylor Sheridan show. I'm tired of seeing Billy Bob Thornton, looking like a rotting cloth sack leaking cow shit, informing us that his wife owns the business, but he runs it. Yeah, that's what any sensible person would be concerned about. I wouldn't trust him to order a combo meal in the drive thru, let alone run an oil company, or whatever the hell the "business" is.

In other news, this is the last new comic of 2025. So next week, is Comics in Review.

Hector Plasm: Hunt for Bigfoot #3, by Benito Cereno (writer), Derek Hunter (artist/letterer), Spencer Holt (colorist) - Did Hector steal the live boar cloak from Bigfoot? Hope he washed it, that thing can't smell good.

Hector and the sheriff confront Jervaise in his office, where the instructor, sorry, professor, is only too eager to monologue about how he's communed with the spirit of some tribe of people that traveled here through subterranean tunnels. Not to prove how smart he is, but because he hopes to find the gold they used to make statues and idols and such.

Despite the sheriff's best efforts, Jervaise summons the ghost, eager for it to feed on Hector's blood for a boost. The caveman-ghost proving immune to bullets, it's a swordfight between him and Hector, while Jervaise goes increasingly loony on the sidelines, like some delirious sports fan. He's ranting and gesticulating wildly enough he tears the armpits out of his shirt (nice touch by Hunter there), not that it spares him the ghost's wrath.

Hector ends up beating the ghost, and the sheriff seems to deal with what's left of Jervaise. Which means, once Hector tells Lip all this, it's time to leave, Hector confident there are no Bigfoots around. Because, as he explains in a page behind some author notes by Cereno, the various subspecies were hunted to extinction during dedicated campaigns in the 1800s.

I'm left wondering about the witch and the ghost that Hector initially fought. Jervaise notified him about that as a lure, hoping to feed Hector to his caveman-ghost, but I'm not sure if the initial threat was something else Jervaise summoned, or a pre-existing situation. The ghost daughter said her mother bewitched her father to kill her fiance to protect their bloodline. Which makes me wonder if "Ferdie" (the fiance) was part of the same bloodline as the caveman-ghost (and Jervaise), or if that was just unrelated weirdness.

The Best and Worst Ways I Passed the Time Last Year

I'm not going to bother with a Music category this year. Not enough candidates. Just mark down The Catalogue featuring Requiem as the Best Album of 2025 and we'll move right along.

BOOKS

30 books read last year, 18 non-fiction and 12 fiction. The fiction was mostly in the first half of the year, and there wasn't a lot that stood out. A lot of things that were interesting or engaging in certain ways (the turns of phrase, the underlying concept), but less so in others regards (characterization, or the big reveal was something I figured out halfway through the book. Best would go pretty easily to Rebecca Roanhorse's Mirrored Heavens, where aside from one character implausibly surviving a situation with no real satisfying, she pulled together a lot of disparate threads into a cohesive and satisfying conclusion. The book never dragged, the dialogue had some snap to it, a well-written story to finish the trilogy. None of the others really come close.

For worst, as much as the good old boy in Randy Wayne White's The Man Who Invented Florida pushed all my worst buttons, I think I have to give it to Robert Richardson's The Lazarus Tree. It was a mystery, but there was never much tension or suspense. Certainly no one in the village seemed in any rush to solve the murder, and the main character really isn't trying to do that either, so much as figure out what his friend's teenage daughter is up to. It felt like Richardson spent a lot of time hinting at mysteries or secrets to us (but not his protagonist) about different villagers, but none of them were relevant to the actual story. At best, they felt like set-up for some future story, but that doesn't do much for me while I'm reading this.

The non-fiction tended to shift in areas of focus over the course of the year. A lot of baseball early, then a lot of biology in late spring-early summer. The back half of the year ran more to film history, with a little bit of political or archaeological history thrown in. I had a few more possible options here. I enjoyed Blood in the Garden quite a bit, which surprised me given my antipathy to the 1990s New York Knicks. No Name on the Bullet had some details and facts I hadn't seen about Audie Murphy, but a lot of things I had from other sources.

But for the best, I'd pick Roger Kahn's Good Enough to Dream and Edward George's The Cuban Intervention in Angola. Kahn captured a lot of the things I enjoy about baseball, without the irritating nostalgia-tinted perspective that jarred me out of David Lamb's Stolen Season. And Kahn also built a lot of humor into the book when describing the chaos of trying to run a minor league team on a shoestring budget. As for George, he gave me pretty much exactly what I was hoping for when I got curious about Cuba inserting itself into things in Africa. I got a sense of the different powers, the push-and-pull between them, the problems complicating any sort of resolution, and the descriptions of the battles were aided with actual maps and a clear organizational philosophy to the writing. On the Road of the Winds by Patrick Vinton Kirch would be a close third.

Worst would have to be Peter Polack's The Last Hot Battle of the Cold War. It was more narrowly focused than what I was hoping for, concentrating on one extended battle in Angola without going much into the context or history. But it still had time for strange digressions about how many private security companies from South Africa operate in the Middle East these days. The description of the battle and movements of the various sides weren't well-illustrated to where you could picture what happened, and there was little clear flow in how he went about describing it.

MOVIES

First off, films covered as part of Overdue Movie Reviews are not eligible, because they aren't new to me, which is what this is focused on. Which leaves 44 movies, 11 of which were from the 2020s. Which is not a pattern I would have expected at the start of the year. Second most common decade was the '50s (7 movies.)

For best films, for all the late-70s to late-80s comedies I watched, I'd say How to Beat the High Cost of Living was the best of the lot. Or at least the one that made me laugh the most. Kid Glove Killer was a quick, compact but clever little thriller, and Escape to Athena was fun simply for the bonkers cast it had. But the top 2 would have to be two movies I watched very early in the year, No Name on the Bullet and Prey.

The former was great in the way this one person arrives, and his mere presence - because Audie Murphy mostly just sits, drinks coffee, and watches people go by - causes to the town to basically tear itself apart. All the ugliness and guilt the supposedly nice citizens are hiding makes them throw away what they profess to believe in so easily. The latter just built things up so well, paralleling the Predator taking on greater and greater challenges while at the same time Naru is slowly building herself up into that great challenge, using the skills she already has.

On the negative side, well, even James Coburn couldn't make me enjoy Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (combined with the general dud that was Killer Elite, not a great year for me and Peckinpah movies.) Arrowhead had potential, but it was a '50 Western, so it was never going to be what I wanted. But I think I knew what the two worst films were going to be back in the summer, and sure enough, it's The End and Fear Blood & Gold. I mean, Throw Momma from the Train wasn't really funny outside a couple of moments of physical comedy, but it was funnier than The End, which went to exhausting lengths to assure us Burt Reynolds' character was a self-centered coward, then doubled down on that through the rest of its run time.

And Fear Blood & Gold? Just nonsensical. If Santiago wants to escape from Oscar, why doesn't he run when he successfully spikes his beans? Why does Oscar, having been drugged once by Santiago, accept a hallucinogenic drug from his later? Why does Oscar shoot with his revolver turned sideways like he's some '90s gangbanger? Why does the film need the odd old man? Who captured Oscar and Santiago at the beginning of the film, and why did they never appear again? Just a total disaster, and not even bad enough to put me to sleep. 

VIDEO GAMES

I beat a lot of games this year, although maybe that's the wrong word, given how so many of them were structured around dialogue, with only a limited amount for you to actually do. Did I really "beat" Dear Esther or Firewatch, or did I just reach the end of them? Maybe "finished" is a better word.

Anyway, worst game is really easy. It's 890B, which was a frustrating, pointless piece of crap with stiff dialogue, no character development, with almost all the run time burnt on puzzles I could play on a graphing calculator back in the '90s. The game apparently has good and bad endings, but it there's just a single Achievement for beating the game, regardless of which you get. Because they know nobody is going to play this trash twice without being reimbursed for it. A buck-and-a-half, and still a waste of money. I mean, I figured out after 30 minutes that Hello Neighbor was not for me, but I can see how someone else might enjoy that game. Not 890B. 0 out of 5, send the game designers to the gulag and leave them there.

Best games is trickier, because, with all these short, fairly limited games I played, it's a case of which thing a game focused on that I preferred. Abzu was a beautiful game, and mostly very relaxing to play, but not exactly challenging or the sort of thing where I felt really invested in the story. On the other hand, I enjoyed aspects of the story and the character development in The Fall, but it was such a murky-looking game and I really hate aiming using the right joystick.

So, if I just pick two, I guess it'll the The Stanley Parable: DeLuxe Edition, and The Sinking City. Stanley Parable simply because it was hilarious. It's probably the thing I laughed hardest at all year, outside of conversations Alex and I had at various points during our trip in October. As for Sinking City, while I'm not a huge fan of sanity meters, and definitely didn't love the wobbly screen effects that accompanied a wavering sanity, there was still a lot to enjoy in the game. Searching for evidence, being given the option what to do with that evidence once you had it. The visual look of the characters and setting. They kept crafting simple and straightforward, so it was useful without having so many options I got paralyzed by choice and couldn't figure out what to do.