The Light's Gone Out

Deadlight is set in the Pacific Northwest in 1986, in the midst of a societal collapse due to, they're referred to as "shadows". They swarm towards any live body they detect, but at a shuffling gait. They moan and take a lot of bullets (or strikes with an ax) to put down. They're zombies, but apparently zombie movies aren't a thing in the world of Deadlight.

You play as Randall, who has hooked up with a ragtag group of survivors, but I can't remember what any of their names were. No, wait, I think there were a pair of sisters, and the one that didn't die in the opening cut scene was Stella. Maybe. You know what? It doesn't matter, because they get split up at the beginning, and Randall doesn't really care anyway. All he wants to do is find his wife and daughter, who he somehow got separated from when they left their little town and headed towards Seattle for safety.

The game is a side-scroller, with lots of platforming. You spend most of your time trying to get Randall from one place to another without him dying. Jumping across gaps, climbing ladders or across convenient pipes attached to the ceiling, stuff like that. The game doesn't give you a lot of time to deliberate how to get where you're going, sometimes none at all. At one point you sprint Randall across rooftops as an attack helicopter swings past trying to machine gun him. Leaping to fire escapes, clambering into open windows, then dashing through office space and smashing through weak doors or vaulting obstructions. Take too long, you'll get killed. Later on, you smash through a rotted door, but have to keep moving as the ceiling begins to collapse. You have to wall-jump to scale one wall, then tuck and roll and dive out another door before you're crushed.

(I will note here I frequently failed at the 'without him dying' part.)

There's a little bit of shooting. Mostly when you need to clear a horde of shadows from your path, but occasionally other humans, and sometimes to shoot a lock or plank that's holding a window closed so you can jump out said window. You have to scrounge for bullets, though the game will put a gear symbol on the screen when you're next to something you can interact with. It may be a lever, or a shelf you can block a door with to slow pursuit. Or it may be a pile of trash to search through. Or a corpse, which I suppose could qualify as "trash" by this point in things. That's where you tend to find bullets. 

(Also driver's licenses and other stuff Randall collects in a sort of scrapbook, which seems really creepy.)

Like with The Fall, aiming is handled with the right joystick, which isn't so bad when shooting shadows (who tend to come straight towards him, heads perfectly level with his sight.) When you have to start angling up or down to hit some piece of the environment it got trickier, for me, at least. Especially when it's got to be done in a hurry, before you're overwhelmed or shot by soldiers. Overall, those parts have the feel of a lengthy quick-time event, minus an actual prompt to push a particular button.

During the game, Randall has the occasional flashbacks to when all this went wrong. Specifically, to him rushing home to his wife and daughter. No points awarded for guessing the big reveal late in the game about what really happened. It does, combined with the pages of his diary you somehow find scattered across miles of city and countryside, make me wonder just how long Randall's been crisscrossing these places.

What I Bought 6/2/2025 - Part 4

Alright, last of May's books. Theme of the day is Fantastic Four.

Fantastic Four #32, by Ryan North (writer), Cory Smith (penciler), Wayne Faucher and Oren Junior (inkers), Jesus Arbutov (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Poor Valeria, only one who doesn't get to turn into green static.

The timeline's being re-written, but Sue protects the kids with force-fields. From a temporal re-write, after she's already been re-written herself? Sure, fine. Valeria's bubble fails last, and she finds herself in a different body, in a timeline with no FF. She finds her parents, and figures out where in that Twilight Zone episode with the kid sending people to the cornfield, except the kid is this universe's version of Franklin, who makes himself look like Galactus.

Basically, Franklin's bubble failed first so instead of merging with a pre-teen version of himself, he merged with an embryonic version of himself. His memories faded, the god-like powers didn't. When Galactus showed up and there was no FF, Reed and Sue had their baby get rid of Galactus. That doesn't seem to match, timing-wise, but I guess North is arguing with less Dr. Doom and travels to space, there was more time for marrying and baby-making.

The only two people left free of Franklin making everyone "nice" are Jean Grey and Namor. Do not ask how, it's dumb as hell. Like North was going for one of his Squirrel Girl jokes in a story entirely unsuited for it. Valeria thinks they can avoid all this if she can stay off Franklin's notice long enough to build a machine to project a thought back in time to herself in the Fantasti-car. Well how does that work if the timeline's rewritten? There is no Fantastic-car, because there was never an FF, because they never got hit by cosmic rays!

Ugh, whatever. It works, and so things are set up for them to fix this in the finale before the restart. 

The Thing #1, by Tony Fleecs (writer), Justin Mason (artist), Alex Sinclair (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Definitely a lot of doofuses punching out of their weight class on that cover. The Grizzly? Sidewinder. Is that Jigsaw in the lower right? Man can't beat the Punisher, but he's gonna fuck with the Thing. 

An old acquaintance - not a friend, Ben is very clear on that - from Yancy Street asks for Ben's help finding his sister. Marty was a jerk to Ben as a kid, but Shelly was nice, so Ben agrees to help. Apparently people disappearing is happening a lot lately, and Marty knows a guy, who knows a guy that might know something about it.

Said guy turns out to be the Gladiator, who's in a bar in the morning looking very spaced out. As soon as they try talking, he starts yelling about monsters and people putting things inside him. And he's got super-strength, enough Ben can feel the hits, although Fleecs and mason make it pretty clear he's holding back. A lot of panels of Ben keeping his arms raised, palms out, still trying to reason with Gladiator and ask questions. Eventually he figures he's got as much as he's going to, and knocks Melvin out with one hit. But the only other patron is Turk - the Daredevil supporting cast guy - and he calls Kingpin. Which is how Ben's going to end up with a contract on his head.

Trying to get the Thing killed seems a bit much for Fisk. The FF are publicly-known and beloved heroes, not like those loner weirdos Spider-Man and Daredevil. But I get the feeling this is set at some amorphous period in the past (people are using rotary phones, plus HERBIE's around), so maybe Fisk is more cocky, or just less concerned with appearances at this point. Mason draws Fisk in the style I remember from well into the '90s. Big white suit jacket, yellow vest underneath, purple pants like he raided Banner's wardrobe.

Fleecs seems to be going for something about the proper use of strength. That is doesn't exist just to throw things around and smash people weaker than you. Sue thinks Ben doubts himself and that's why he holds back, but it seems like the point is Ben knows exactly how strong he is, and is being deliberately careful. Like I said, he's mostly trying to restrain and reason with Potter to avoid unnecessary damage to the bar they're in, and tells the owner to contact him if there's any trouble getting the repairs paid for. Strength is supposed to help people, and sometimes that means punching someone's lights out, but not always, and not needlessly.

Overdue Movie Reviews #1 - Little Big League (1994)

Billy's (Luke Edwards) a huge baseball fan, knows all the arcane rules and can cite situations and examples from the lengthy history of the game as evidence. When his wealthy, baseball-loving grandfather (Jason Robards) passes away, Billy learns he's the new owner of the Minnesota Twins. And when the manager of the team (Dennis Farina) chooses to disregard Billy's suggestion that screaming at and insulting the players isn't helping their performance, Billy fires him. In need of a manager, Billy takes his friends' suggestion and hires. . .himself. Hijinks and life lessons ensue.

The movie has a bit of rising and falling action. The players' initial resistance to being coached by a kid, only for them to eventually buy in when he encourages them to remember baseball is fun. Then the pressure starts to get to Billy, the tough decisions - releasing an aging veteran who is one of Billy's favorite players - take the fun out of it. He starts ignoring his friends, snapping at the players. The team's star (Timothy Busfield) is dating his mom, and Billy doesn't handle that well.

The team starts losing, there's a funny bit where Billy gets ejected from a game for calling the ump a dork, then adds a few more, colorful, remarks (which are blocked by an air horn.) When the umpire repeats them to Billy's mom, he gets grounded for a few games, and gives a press conference where he refers to himself in the third person (always a bad sign.)

Eventually Billy figures out he's not ready for baseball to be a job yet, loosens up again, and the team goes on a late winning streak to get into a 1-game playoff against the Mariners. Kind of weird to see the Mariners played as the big bad, but the Mariners were an up-and-coming team in the mid-90s, so it actually makes more sense, given the time period, than the Yankees being the final boss in Major League (the Yanks were mediocre to shit from 1988 to 1994.) Of course, the Twins had won 2 World Series in the previous 7 years before this movie came out (compared to Cleveland, which has not won a World Series since World War 2), so the notion the fans would be ecstatic about the team almost making the playoffs as a wild card is a little odd.

Where was I going with that? Oh right, the Mariners as bad guys. Ken Griffey Jr. in particular is played as this imposing, cocky hitter. He hits a home run to give the Mariners the lead, then practically saunters around the bases, even winking at one of the Twins' infielders as he goes by. When he walks later and Bowers (Jonathan Silverman, playing a goofball relief pitcher) tries a pickoff, Griffey remarks that just for that, he's going to steal second base, maybe third, maybe even home. Then gets tricked by a faked, wild pickoff attempt the entire Twins' team, including one of the security guards, take part in. Pure cocky heel getting his comeuppance, which is just an odd role for a super-popular player known at the times for highlight reel plays and nicknamed "The Kid."

The movie gets some good mileage out of "child in an adult world" stuff. Billy learning about the wonders of adult films being available to rent in hotel rooms when on a road trip. The principal calling Billy into his office, then being real excited because the Twins might be able to sign Rickey Henderson. Billy and Bowers having fun with water balloons. The best bit is probably in the hours before the playoff game, when the team rallies to help Billy with his math homework. Maybe help should be in quotations marks. I've heard from people who at least played in college, that baseball players are the stupidest of all collegiate athletes, and this movie certainly plays to that stereotype.

What I Bought 6/2/2025 - Part 3

My boss went on vacation middle of last week, through the end of this week. I have been tapped as interim boss, which has largely meant more data entry and dealing with e-mails and phone calls. If it wasn't on top of all the usual madness (or if I was better at delegating, assuming there was anyone available to delegate to) it wouldn't be too bad. As it is, it sucks. Somebody else can take this on the next time he goes on vacation. There's gotta be someone stupid enough to want to actually pursue a leadership role.

Metamorpho: The Element Man #6, by Al Ewing (writer), Steve Lieber (artist), Lee Loughridge (colorist), Ferran Delgado (letterer) - For some people, the sun truly does smile upon them. May those people all burn in its unrelenting heat.

Metamorpho's on his way to the Sun! Solaris, the Rogue Sun, that is, who plans to unleash a storm to push humanity back to the Stone Age! If that means I never have to hear about crypto or "AI" ever again, it might just be worth it. But Rex doesn't agree, so he's going to fly into Solaris, convert his body to Staggium, a superdense element Stagg created that will cause a chain reaction in the core and blow Solaris up. Leaving the Solar System minus the "solar", but small potatoes.

The plan doesn't work, and Metamorpho is narrowly saved from disintegration by Prince Ra-Man's sun, who is willing to give a Rex another chance to win. Because Solaris cheated by fighting a Metamorpho 1 million years in his past. Cue a, flashback, a vision, something of how the fight would have gone in the 853rd Century, which Lieber draws in a parody style of some Golden Age hero I remember being on the cover of a book about bizarre Golden Age heroes.

Why you do that when drawing a fight set way in the future, I don't know. Also, Lieber is incredibly inconsistent about where Solaris is. Why do you need a spaceship if he's hanging out right above your building? Point is, Rex gets one more chance to challenge Solaris, with the power of DC 1 Million Metamorpho, but minus the knowledge of how to best use it. And he only gets the power long enough to change into something once. Rex figures it out, becomes a new Sun, absorbs Solaris, and that's that. Unless the readers write in demanding more Metamorpho!

Eh, I could take it or leave it. It was fun, but Ewing may have started a few too many threads. Which did have the effect of making this last issue feel really stuffed, as he and Lieber try to cover a lot of ground in 20 pages. It's hard for me to picture Solaris running a secret criminal organization, though. That felt out of left field in that sense, even if its inclusion fit nicely with all the "solar champion" stuff. 

The Surgeon #5, by John Pence (writer), Omar Zaldivar (artist), Hedwin Zaldivar and Trisha Mariscal (colorists), Taylor Esposito (letterer) - What, they haven't figured out how to rebuild umbrellas in your post-apocalypse?

Hanover wakes up a prisoner of Chief Long, who turns out not to be interested in her spiking opium, but in the fact that someone is actually producing new supplies of pre-apocalypse medicine. The Hot Animal Machines have a line on it, but they deal in children they abduct to get it. So Chief Long would as soon wipe them out. Hanover agrees to help, and also to treat the guy that came to the fort to warn them of the Hot Animal Machines a few issues ago.

Then she treats the guy (Little Bird), and the two of them bail on everyone else. Then he seduces her, or they fuck, whichever, and he steals her sword and her horse. The whole thing was proving himself as a warrior ("touch an enemy without killing them"). Which leaves her sans transportation, sans weapon, possibly sans pants (or she was in too much a hurry to futilely chase him.) And she ditched a lot of people.

Where that leaves the book with one issue to go, I have no idea. I guess she could go back to the fort, hat in hand (if she still has a hat.) The scientist guy seemed kind of pissed, but the blacksmith pointed out she fulfilled her end of the deal. But I think she's got too much pride for that. Little Bird seemed to prove his point, don't envision him coming back to kill her. The Hot Animal Machines (whatever is left of them) are gonna have problems with Chief Long's group, and vice versa. So what's left for Hanover to do? Find some pants?

Sunday Splash Page #378

"Extreme Elimination Challenge," in Nature's Labyrinth #1, by Zac Thompson (writer), Bayleigh Underwood (artist), Warina Sahadewa (colorist), Rus Wooton (letterer)

Eight people accept a cruise, that is really a way to dump them on an island that's been converted into essentially Murderworld, for the amusement of, well, whoever is watching I guess. The contestants have to navigate a labyrinth of traps and puzzles and human threats (both the other contestants and people besides that).

Thompson's protagonist is Jenny, a CIA agent there to shut this whole thing down, as it's apparently been going for some time. Although the married couple running the show insist the CIA sent Jenny there to die, because of something horrible they did. I don't know which is true, because Thompson leaves a lot of things unsaid. Jenny spends most their time working with Nasir (the guy freaking out in the above image), who was involved in weapons trafficking charges (which he insists were bullshit.) Whether that's true or not is also unclear. Nasir certainly seems incompetent and largely helpless, but he's also one of the only ones who survives to the end, so maybe that's an act.

Each of the contestants gets a specific weapon. Jenny, who has a lot of scars that could be from knives, gets a combat knife. Another guy gets a katana, one gets a flamethrower because he likes to set fires and killed his parents with an accidental fire. Nasir gets a Game Boy. The reason is never explained, nor does it ever prove useful in any way during the entire story.

Thompson uses the fact we don't know much about any of these characters to increase the unpredictability. Characters you might expect to fight bitterly instead become kindred spirits. Nasir seems quick to say whatever he needs to stay alive, then change sides at the drop of a hat. The labyrinth is interpersonal relationships as much as it's a physical place full of flowers with drugged scents and animatronic singing critters that pop up just to mess with the players. Even the machine gun toting squad that appears halfway through are actually players in a different game.

Mostly the story boils down to a lot of brutal fights. Some characters take to it like fish to water. Others get into the groove as they fall prey to some of the labyrinth's more underhanded dangers. Jenny doesn't go out of their way to pick fights, but also doesn't hold back once it starts. No stranger to violence, and one who accepts it as a necessity at times. That said, I think Underwood takes the brutality too far at times. Not in the sense of shock value; the idea behind this is the audience gets to watch these people who have apparently done awful things die horribly. Shock value is the point of the "show."

More because some of these people take damage that really ought to have killed them much sooner. In issue 2, Jenny fights the flamethrower guy. He takes a slash to the neck from the combat knife, gets half his face scraped off on jagged metal, and ends up with said jagged metal jammed into the back of his skull. He survives for another 3 issues, a span of at least 30 hours, without any apparent first aid or impairment.

The comic ends on another cliffhanger, as the surviving contestants know one of them took a knife off the wall, but we don't know which. I don't know what the point is, beyond violence begetting violence, often in ways you don't expect (the ones running the game clearly never grasped what impact it was having on their kid), and that every interaction with another person is taking a chance. You're never going to know them entirely, what they're hiding, what they're capable of. Who is on your side and who isn't. Seems like the life of an animal, the maze they navigate every day until they lose.

Saturday Splash Page #180

"Who is that Helmeted Man?" in Sensational Spider-Man #27, by Todd DeZago (writer), Mike Wieringo (writer/penciler), Rich Case (inker), Gregory Wright (colorist), Richard Starkings and Kiff Scholl (letterer)

So, Marvel canceled Web of Spider-Man in late 1995, still in the midst of the increasingly tedious Clone Saga. Shortly after that, Peter Parker (touted as the clone, but married and a father-to-be) went into retirement and Ben Reilly (at that time touted as the original Peter Parker after all) took over as Spider-Man, with a new costume and all that jazz. And Marvel decided they naturally still needed a 4th monthly Spider-Man book, and here we are.

The book ran for just under three years, and probably the most notable part was that Mike Wieringo was the artist for a decent chunk of those issues. I remember reading somewhere (maybe the online "Life of Reilly" history of the Clone Saga) Wieringo wasn't happy to finally get to draw Spider-Man, but not the "real" Spider-Man.

As it turned out, Marvel only dragged the clone thing out another year, then it was Peter Parker back in the classic look. Maybe that perked Wieringo up a bit. Hard to say, because I never hear much about this book. Anything about it, really. Even by the standards of Marvel's mid-90s output, there was no reason for this book to exist. I don't think it had any special focus to differentiate it from the other monthly Spidey books.

Nor do I think, based on the 4 issues I own, that Todd DeZago was doing anything as the writer that really made it stand out. This issue above features editor's boxes that point out inconsistencies or lies in the Looter's account of things, playing up that he's off his rocker. Which I assume was a collaborative effort between DeZago and editor Ralph Macchio. But after the 2-part Identity Crisis tie-in, there's a two-part team-up with the Black Cat against Arcade that's just lifeless and perfunctory. (Also, none of the artists can keep straight what the Cat's costume is like at the moment.)

Maybe the Spider-books were too tightly interconnected for a writer to go far afield. This was the era where they routinely had 4-part stories that ran across all 4 ongoing series in the span of a month. Each creative team had to stay within the prescribed role for their chapter. But I don't think that's all of the problem.

What I Bought 6/2/2025 - Part 2

I love that in this year's NBA playoffs, "get a 15-point lead on the Indiana Pacers," is the worst possible thing you can do. With last night's Game 1 win in the Finals, the Pacers have now won 5 games (out of 13 total wins) where they were losing by 15 in the second half. It's bonkers, and hilarious, and just fantastic, really. 

Bronze Faces #3, by Shobo and Shof (writers), Alexandre Tefenkgi (artist), Lee Loughridge (colorist), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (letterer) - I still question how easily anyone can breathe and/or see through those masks, but they do grab attention.

Ogiso's still making waves with their heists of the Benin Bronzes, although it occurs to me, I don't know what they're doing with them. I'm not sure of what happens if a museum receives a donation of something stolen from another museum, so I don't know if they could just give them to a museum in Nigeria.

It may be a moot point, because even if the cop that's hounding them wasn't closing (in the party of a heavily armed private security company), the group itself is starting to fracture. The two brothers, Liam wants to take what they've earned and bail, while Declan's getting swept up in the symbolism of the work. Cisse, their forger and phony i.d. man, is hiding something. I'm guessing he's tipping off the detective.

But the real fault lines are Sango, Timi and Gbonka. Sango knows the other two are sleeping together, and this is making her pissy and volatile, to the point she treats the last member of their crew, who she's sleeping with, badly when her mood sours enough. I'm waiting to see if Shobo and Shof go into the backstory for those three a little more, because there's clearly some stuff going on. Especially with regards to how Sango seems to think everything within her view should belong to her, including Timi, that I'm not getting. So she just comes off as a spoiled child. If she really wanted Timi, maybe she could have tracked him down sooner, before all this. But it didn't interest her or suit her then, so she didn't. Snooze you lose.

Most of the issue is people in the crew talking, and Tefenkgi repeatedly goes with a panel-in-a-panel approach. The main panel shows most of the scene, and then the smaller one is like a zoom in on one person's face. And sometimes the other person in the scene is talking, so the tail of the voice balloon comes from the edge of the panel or somewhere beyond it. Nice way of grounding the smaller panel within the larger scene, but still guiding the focus where the creative team wants it.

Dark Pyramid #3, by Paul Tobin (writer), PJ Holden (artist), Sara Colella (color artist), Taylor Esposito (letterer) - Is this what happens when a population of goats gets isolated up on a mountain?

Becca seizes a moment of distraction to clock the general in the face with a rock, then smash some remote thing that was controlling or guiding Eve. So now Eve's killing soldiers and party people, which at least affords Becca and Shailene a chance to resume fleeing. They make it above the treeline and find a landmark because Hooky live-streamed himself peeing on the rock. Whatever works, I suppose.

Then they find a bunch of goats with human faces, who mostly say "Interior?" Then the military catches up, and while Becca and Shailene are able to convince Eve (who somehow got ahead of them without being noticed) to go attack the helicopter instead, that does nothing when General Cho and his boys show up. And then they kill all the goats as "abominations." I'm not inclined to disagree, but why are you just getting around to this now, and shouldn't you save some bullets for when Eve gets back?

I don't get the deal with Eve particularly. I can sort of parse some of what she says, and the bit where she picks up the rock Becca used and calls it "long sleeper", and "old friend" was kind of funny. Maybe it was meant to be disturbing, that Eve's maybe been around 60 million years, but it didn't hit that way. I do like Holden's design for Eve. The glowing eyes and thin slit of a mouth in front, then a huge, almost Venom-like grinning mouth on the back of the skull. And whatever Eve is, she can apparently twist her neck so the toothy mouth can face forward. Either that or she's able to run and jump backwards with great skill. Maybe that's the sort of thing you learn with 60 million years to burn.

Anyway, Becca and Shailene are back in the military's grasp, loaded on a truck, and oh, dang, looks like Hooky's dead. Tough break, can't even livestream a reaction video because General Cho will probably shoot them. 

Punctuated Equilibrium - Stephen Jay Gould

For maybe a century after Darwin proposed his theory of evolution by natural selection, the conventional wisdom was that this occurred through gradualism; that is, over the course of generations, a given species will slowly change and one day you look around and it's a different species. And the species it was before, is gone.

Problem: The fossil evidence for this was pretty thin. The response was that the fossil record just had too many gaps to properly catch the intermediate stages. In 1972, Gould and Niles Eldridge instead proposed the explanation of punctuated equilibrium. This argued that most species tended to remain the same for long periods, and then part of the population, usually isolated in some ways, shift to a new species in a short (in geologic terms) time period. The original species still exists alongside the newcomer, for a time.

This idea was apparently met with much harrumphing for at least a decade or two, but by 2007, when this book was published, it was gaining wider acceptance as the evidence to support it mounted. This book, which seems to be Gould covering the history of the concept, the arguments against it and the studies that investigated those claims, is strongest when it sticks to discussing actual research done to test the ideas of punctuated equilibrium and gradualism against the fossil record. He cites a lot of studies, done with a variety of phyletic groups, and he's usually able to summarize the findings in a clear manner, with accompanying charts to help the reader visualize. He makes it clear that he and Eldridge were never arguing that gradualism doesn't happen, only that it's far less common a driver of speciation than punctuated equilibrium. So when a study does show signs of speciation through gradualism, or at least, doesn't show signs it was through punctuated equilibrium, he makes sure to mention it.

One bit I found interesting was, Gould feels the idea of punctuated equilibrium has gotten people to place more importance on the notion of "stasis." Before, when it was all about gradualism, a species showing no change in the fossil record was treated as no data at all. If 39 of 40 species showed no change within a fossil formation and 1 showed gradualism, the paper would only discuss the 1 and ignore the 39. Gould and Eldridge argued lack of change is data, and needs to be considered as such. It's like how, if you decide to test the effect of substance x on substance y, your null hypothesis is probably, "there will be no effect." If that's the result you get, that isn't nothing. Now you know x does not affect y. If you were thinking x was responsible for a particular reaction or property observed in y, well something else must be responsible.

Likewise, one of the things I learned in college biology classes was the environment an organism (or species) exists in exerts selective pressure on the individual (or species.) Certain traits are going to convey an advantage for survival and reproduction. But then we have these species that their physical characteristics remain largely static (meaning the range of values remain largely the same) for millions of years. Why wasn't the environment exerting a pressure that pushed those characteristics one way consistently? A lot of the studies show the values fluctuate across that range over time, but stay around the same mean, until a sudden, relatively quick shift marks a speciation event.

All that said, the book can be a tough read. Largely because Gould won't say in 3 words what he can say in 40. There are sometimes multiple commas, a semi-colon and even a parenthetical, all in one sentence. It's exhausting and a little befuddling, in that the sentence becomes just a jumble of words where I've entirely lost the point he was driving at. He's worst about that when focused more on theory or controversy, which is part of why I prefer the sections where he describes actual research. Having data to explain seems to focus his writing. Either way, this does not feel like a book written for a general audience.

'We can distinguish the punctuations of rapid anagenesis from those of branching speciation by invoking the eminently testable criterion of ancestral survival following the origin of a descendant species. If the ancestor survives, then the new species has arisen by branching. If the ancestor does not survive, then we must count the case either as indecisive, or as good evidence for rapid anagenesis - but in any instance, certainly not as evidence for punctuated equilibrium.'

What I Bought 6/2/2025 - Part 1

I realized last weekend there are a lot of movies in my DVD collection I've watched several times, but never reviewed. Maybe they got a paragraph in those posts I used to do where I covered five movies I watched over the weekend while sitting around waiting for Alex to get off the phone, or off the can, or I wrote about some specific part of the movie, but that's it. I may try to correct that in the near-future.

For now, let's dive into May's comics, now that I've actually got them. Going to keep it simple and just write about a pair of second issues today.

Past Time #2, by Joe Harris (writer), Russell Olson (artist), Carlos M. Mangual (letterer) - The wings have got to be some sort of violation of the rules. They're obscuring the ump's sight! Not that it matters to a blind man, are you freakin' kidding, ump? That pitch was a foot outside!

Back in 1925, Ronald, shakes off the beating he got last issue, while Henry disposes of the bodies, then has to dispose of the person he tried leaving dead in the cornfield last issue. Amazing that the sun was apparently well up in the sky, yet no one saw him stake a man shuffling down the sidewalk while literally smoking in the sunlight.

Henry hitches a ride under the train the ballclub takes to Des Moines, and that night, the team's rightfielder gets injured when one of the bulbs for the field lights bursts as he's chasing a fly ball. I think the flash blinds him and that somehow makes him trip over his own feet and break a leg, but I don't love how Olson draws it.

He adds these little dirty yellow things in the air around the light as it bursts, which makes me think it's actual glass, then draws more of them around Coombs' face in the next two panels. I think it's supposed to be like he's seeing spots, but I thought at first that he was getting showered with broken glass.

Either way, Coombs is out and here's Henry, passing himself off as Ronald's friends (while messing with his mind) and touting his ballplaying days from college (which we hear about in a brief flashback, but we don't see him play.) Ronald's apparently a heck of a pitcher, even blind, but not against a guy with vampire speed and reflexes, so Henry's got himself a night job. And all it took was sabotaging that light. How exactly he sabotaged it so it would explode when Coombs was looking up at it, which would only happen on a ball hit over his head, versus it exploding during the 98% of the game Coombs is either watching the pitcher and the infield, batting, or in the dugout, I don't know. Point is, Henry does whatever it takes to get what he wants. Is that a vamp thing, or a Henry thing, that's unclear.

Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt #2, by John Allison (writer), Max Sarin (artist), Sammy Borras (color artist), Jim Campbell (letterer) - I know the tight spandex is a classic lady spy look, but I feel for an activity like that, a Spy vs. Spy reference might have been more appropriate.

Shauna's new boss just found her car burned up. She suspects a former employee-turned-competitor, and offers to pay for Shauna's boat repairs if Shauna will prove Pat set the fire. Pretend to be fired here, apply there, get the dirt. Simple, except for the part where I've not seen a John Allison character yet I thought had any capacity for subterfuge or deception. They are all, in their own ways, horrible actors and liars.

Before Shauna gets to the espionage, she's got to find a corsage. I mean, a reason to get the brooding Bryn interested in her to the point she could need a corsage. I mean, whatever. . .she wants to jump him. Or be jumped by him, but he's too busy being deep and soulful about the injustices of the world. Which he solves by keying peoples' cars. Look, man, just say you're antisocial

Shauna finally visits the other store, gets hired by badmouthing the competition, and returns for her first day of work to find someone clogged the drains to flood the store. Clogged them with quilt wadding, like you can get at the other store! So now Pat asks Shauna to play spy for her, on the other store. Again, this is absolutely not something I believe she can accomplish successfully, but so it goes.

I feel like all signs point to Bryn, as part of some attempt at a "statement" by trying to crash the local quilting economy. Wreck the stores, customers gone, husbands forced to find something else to do besides sit at the pub while their wives shop, something something revolution? Seems too obvious, but unless it's this mysterious "Mabel", I've not got any other suspects.

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) arrives in a village to give thanks for their harvest and announce his annual ball, which they can attend. When a couple of the villagers point out he only wants them there to humiliate them, Prospero orders them executed. Francesca (Jane Archer) pleads on their behalf, because one's her dad and the other the man she loves. Amused, Prospero brings all 3 to his mansion, at the same time ordering the village burned because an old woman just died of the "red death."

From there, it's Prospero trying to turn Francesca from her faith in God, while all his noble friends and his wife humiliate and destroy themselves in an attempt to curry or keep his favor. I went in expecting Price to really be hamming it up, just chewing the scenery, but that's not the case until maybe the very end, when all Propsero's illusions that he understands how the universe runs collapse.

Until then, Price keeps Prospero under control, carrying himself with the haughty swagger of a guy sure he's got all the angles covered. He's sure God is long dead and Satan rules, and he's buddy-buddy with Satan, so he's got nothing to fear, even from the red death. And so he amuses himself making others debase themselves at his command, or watching a man offer up his wife in exchange for sanctuary. He doesn't make a big show of it; a tiny smirk as he replies he's already had that dubious pleasure, insulting husband and wife both in a moment.

And sucking up to Prospero doesn't save anyone. When Hop Toad set the man who insulted his love on fire, the other nobility may stop laughing, but no one makes a move to douse the flames. Certainly not Prospero, who orders the charred corpse moved because his guests can't dance around it. His wife Juliana agrees to offer herself fully to Satan and Prospero lets her, but he doesn't care. He sees it as a transparent attempt to retain her position against Francesca, and lets it play out.

Only Francesca brings out something almost soft, although in a patronizing way. Francesca intrigues him because of her faith, which seems as absolute in God as his is in Satan. Though it sure seemed like she'd abandoned hope of salvation by the end, but I guess her surrender was in its own way a transparent attempt, just that she was trying to save someone else, rather than herself.

I really liked the set design. The intricate patterns on the walls and floor of the ballroom, and the weird green candles they used, but also those 4 rooms that were each one solid color. Yellow-purple-white-black. It made for a striking image as Prospero leads Francesca through them, except for the last room. That actually surprised me, and added a bit of intrigue, as he actually looks scared of letting her see in there. I don't, in retrospect, understand why he's so wary. Unless it was just to pique her curiosity, get her to open the door to darkness on her own, rather than being pushed through it.

20 Years of Misery, All Leading to This

That title might be better saved for the anniversary post this December, but too bad.

The Straw Hats have finally caught up to their imprisoned crewmate. But Nico Robin doesn't want them there, doesn't want to be rescued at all. After 20 years on the run, betrayed at every turn or watching those around her killed, she'd rather die than see it happen to this little pirate crew, and have them die hating her. Luffy, of course, handles this in a delicate and sensitive manner.

Or, maybe not. Volume 41 of One Piece is the Sad Backstory of Nico Robin volume. She lived on the island of Ohara, a land renown for its scholars, her mother among them. Of course, Olvia ditched her when she was 2 to go on some archaeological expedition, leaving Robin in the "wicked stepmother"-like care of the sister-in-law.

(One Piece has a strong core of people pursuing their dreams, but so damn many of them decide to have kids first, then fuck off to be a pirate or an archaeologist or a revolutionary, and leave the kid in the lurch. If you aren't going to raise your damn kid, don't have one!)

Robin made friends with the scholars still on the island, and even passed the exam to become an archaeologist with a perfect score, at age 8. Outstanding! Now she can help them study the mysterious block covered in weird writing they have in the basement!

Oops, she's not supposed to know about that. Much worse than her knowing about it, the World Government knows Ohara's got a Poneglyph. So while Robin's making friends with a giant that washed ashore, the Marines, hot on the trail of the only survivor of that expedition (Olvia), are invading the island. And they're led by the dipshit father of that dipshit Spandam. Once it's confirmed the scholars have a Poneglyph, Dipshit Senior orders a Buster Call, essentially a ship-to-shore bombardment that will level the island, and all the scholars with it. One particular Vice-Admiral, who will grow up to be Fleet Admiral one day, decides to go ahead and kill everyone on the island just to be sure no scholars escape.

(Someone once pointed out, Atomic Age fiction in the U.S. showed radiation producing superheroes, while in Japan it produced Godzilla. The difference between dropping A-bombs and having two dropped on you. So I wonder about the Buster Call being a naval bombardment intended to destroy an entire island, given the amount of firepower the U.S. Navy unleashed on places like Okinawa. Oda's not old enough to remember World War 2, but I'm sure he grew up with people who did. And future-admiral Akainu deciding the only way to be sure the archeologists are stopped is kill everyone on the island sure feels like shades of, "we think the entire nation of Japan will resist an invasion, better wipe out a city to crush any thought of resistance.") 

Robin's giant pal turns out to be Vice-Admiral Saul, who objected to the order and tries to take out the ships bombarding the island. He ends up frozen solid thanks to his friend, Kuzan, who will one day be the pervert Admiral that attacked the Straw Hats back in volume 34. However, Kuzan let Robin go as a favor to Saul (Saul will, hundreds of chapters later, turn out to have survived being turned into an icicle), but not before Dipshit Senior caught sight of her. Which is how an 8-year-old gets a bounty, finds every "decent" person trying to turn her in, and falls in with criminals.

In the present, Spandam has the capability to trigger a Buster Call at the press of a button (courtesy of Kuzan, which tells me Saul needed to pick better friends.) Though in the nature of things will dealing with a nepo-baby who thinks he earned his way to the top, Spandam thinks it'll only target the pirates. Robin knows different, but the idea this moron would get himself and all 10,000 Marines and government agents stationed at Ennies Lobby killed through stupidity is not much comfort. She just wanted to protect the Straw Hats, but they're not interested in saving their lives at the expense of hers. If they have to declare war on the world for her, that's what they'll do.

This act moves Franky to the point he reveals he had the blueprints for the ancient battleship hidden inside his leg, and then burns them. Which means the Government can't get them, but also means there's no way to find a weakness against the battleship if the World Government gets it. Which means the Straw Hats absolutely have to get Robin back.

Then a train crashes through a drawbridge. 

Sunday Splash Page #377

"Werewolves of Normandy," in Namwolf #2, by Fabian Rangel Jr. (writer), Logan Faerber (artist), Brennan Wagner (colorist), Warren Montgomery (letterer)

Originally released in 2017, Namwolf is about Marty Spencer, a young man who goes off to fight in Vietnam and finds out he's a werewolf, although Faerber draws him less as a conventional combo of man and wolf, and more like a giant koala with bat ears. Or maybe a Chewbacca. Either way, turns out this is a curse passed down from generation to generation, and also each generation seems drawn into a war. Both those bits are revealed to Marty via a letter his father had given him before he shipped out, but that he didn't read until he woke up in a prison cell.

Marty's attempts to come to grips with this information are complicated by the interference of the U.S government, which quickly whisks him away to a location where they can drug him, steal his blood, and subject him to mind-bending psychological treatment designed to turn him into a super-patriotic furry guided missile, essentially.

The two people Marty "interacts" with during that stretch are either an anonymous doctor, face hidden behind glasses and a surgeon's mask, or some mustachioed general whose eyes Faerber draws as these blank white dots set in big dark sockets. They don't regard Marty as anything but a tool, but any humanity of their own is obscured or hidden. All men have monsters within them, some are just more obvious on the surface.

There's also the squad Marty was originally part of when arriving in 'Nam, who are drawn in broad strokes. A guy called "Doc", a gruff but kind sergeant, one guy who is always brandishing his combat knife and seems a little unhinged. They're distinguished mostly by the fact that they, or at least the sergeant, care about Marty. Or at least respect that he saved their butts. It's not so much that we see them joking around with Marty before everything goes wrong as it is that Marty clearly feels some loyalty or compassion to them, which ultimately enables him to fight off the drugs and embrace his curse, rather than fear it.

Rangel also has the Vietcong (they don't seem to be wearing any standardized uniform, so I'm guessing they aren't convention North Vietnamese Army) have a potion that can turn people into bat-winged, spider-eyed monsters of their own. Curiously, they don't unleash them until Namwolf makes his first appearance. I guess the idea is they felt confident enough about how things were going there was no need for such a drastic step prior to that. They also keep at least one of their former comrades that drank the potion in a pit, into which they throw captured American soldiers. Which the creature, who used to be a guy named Hung, though we never learn anything about what type of person he was before he drank the potion, then eats, to the raucous cheers of his buddies.

I think it's less about making the Vietcong look worse than the U.S., and more about that notion of humanity being capable of monstrous things. Humans are depicted as physically frail in this, puny figures scrambling around the monsters, their bodies easily turned into red chunks by bullets. That doesn't make them helpless. Because they can be cold-blooded enough to use those monsters, prey on their weakness of fanaticism.

Also, I think the people-turned-bat creatures are meant to contrast with Namwolf. They drank it, knowing what would happen and what they'd do. They thought it was necessary, so they did it. The unhinged U.S. soldier is willingly injected with something made from Marty's blood so he can become a monster. (That's a part where I paused, because the general just walks out of the jungle with some idiot in a sweater to make the offer. How'd he get there?) He mostly doesn't like feeling helpless, or maybe it bugs him to get his butt pulled from the fire by the wet behind the ears rookie he picked on.  

Marty went into war unaware what lurked inside him, and by the end of the mini-series, has concluded he needs to get out. That his presence is an escalation this war doesn't need. I'd say it's a little late to put that genie back in the bottle, but oh well.

Saturday Splash Page #179

"New Model," in Sentinel (vol. 2) #2, by Sean McKeever (writer), Joe Vriens (penciler/inker), Kevin Yan and Udon Coloring (colorists), Joe Caramagna (letterer)

The first Sentinel book had a few unanswered mysteries. One, and probably most important to the reader, what was a damaged Sentinel doing in rural Wisconsin? Two, and definitely more important to Justin Seyfert, what happened to his mother? He and his brother Chris live with their dad. Their mom is never seen, and never mentioned by anyone save his brother, who asks at one point if his unexplained headaches were the reason she went away.

So, borrowing a hairbrush his mother left behind, Juston's got the Sentinel scanning for DNA matches as he travels the countryside, ignoring the fact that the boy who "saved" his school from a giant robot attack suddenly vanishing without a word is going to create a news frenzy, not to mention a lot of panic among his friends and family.

But part of the reason he bailed is the guilt over all these people praising him for a heroic act that he orchestrated. At this point, Juston is just trying to fix something, because he doesn't know how to fix that mistake. Well, he does, but he doesn't want to spend the rest of his life in prison, which, fair enough.

There's a scene in the first issue when Juston, seemingly having decided he'll give up the Sentinel, is trying to figure out how much evidence there is of what he did. Turns out the Sentinel's been recording almost everything, so the answer is, "a lot." This continues the theme from the first series, that Juston really doesn't understand much about this machine, or what it can really do. It tells him it can't self-repair, but later on, it repairs its eyes when they've been damaged. He eventually gives it an order to protect him, and it seems to comply, but who knows how long that's going to last. 

Reviewing the recordings is a gut punch for Juston, as he's confronted with how close some of those attacks came to hurting his friends. Desperate to get away from the guilt, he stumbles onto a recording of the Sentinel dropping some guy into a lake. It's not anything Juston recognizes, so what's the deal?

The deal is, an officer involved with the Sentinel program did a favor for an old school chum-turned Senator. Kill his opposition, secure his election, get a nice promotion. The Sentinel was supposed to self-destruct, but it apparently didn't destruct entirely, because here we are, with those two trying to cover their tracks by unleashing an experimental Sentinel.

Juston, not getting the answers he hoped for, eventually returns home where he has to actually talk with his dad and protect his town from the other Sentinel (not necessarily in that order.) He's still hiding the Sentinel's existence from his family and friends, and any hard feelings his friends or little brother have about his vanishing act are not dealt with (although McKeever consistently wrote them as just worried about him, so that tracks.) There was also a subplot about Jessie, the cool older girl Juston had a crush on, getting annoyed with Ashleigh, who had latched onto Juston when he became a celebrity. It seems like there was a whole lot of history between the two of them that was only hinted at as well. But the book only had five issues to work with, so some stuff was just going to be cut out.

After this, I'm not sure Juston appeared until midway through Avengers Academy (right about the time I dropped the book.) Then he got killed in Avengers Arena, though I understand he was shown as alive again recently in some X-book. I think one issue for him being active in the Marvel Universe (besides Sentinel's history as genocide-abetting machines, which makes team-ups awkward) is he's not bad at mechanical things, but he's not an inventor on par with Tony Stark or Moon Girl, or probably even the Tinkerer.

The Sentinel is a pre-existing weapon Juston found, and it does a lot of repairs itself. Maybe if he had more resources than hand tools and a scrap yard he could do more, but up to the end of this mini-series, he hasn't exactly demonstrated the level of know-how non-powered scientist type characters need to survive in a super-powered world. He can make a Battlebot the size of a medium-sized dog, but an exo-suit or a giant robot seem like they're beyond his capabilities.

If he continues to rely on the Sentinel, you can use bigger threats, and maybe continue to expand (or develop) the Sentinel's personality, but you have to show what Juston is bringing to the partnership beyond just ordering the Sentinel around. If you ditch the Sentinel, you probably have to keep Juston facings smaller-scale threats he has the mechanical know-how to cobble together a counter for. Which you could probably do, if you left him in his hometown in its own little bubble. Which gives you the advantage of his supporting cast for non-crimefighting stuff, but that kind of stuff seems to have limited appeal among the Marvel comics' readers. They want BIG and IMPORTANT. And I don't think the occasional team-up with the Great Lakes Avengers (or maybe Alpha Flight if he's close enough to the border, although that could be trick given current tensions) would offer enough of a boost.

Random Back Issues #153 - Sentinel #4

Hey, we were just talking about you guys!

At this point, Juston's withdrawn and surly with everyone. He tried asking out Jessie, the cool upperclassman, to the dance, but she's got a boyfriend in college. Ouch. On the plus side, he kicked one of the varsity dickheads in the junk when the guy tried to stuff him in a locker.

Unfortunately, Josh is out for revenge beyond merely a beatdown, though it won't fully manifest for another issue. For now, though, one of his buddies notices Juston and Jessie talking it out and gets a troubling look on his face. Then Josh and his boys jump Alex, Juston's best friend, while he's out on a date, and give a message to pass along.

Seems like you could call the cops in at that point. Get them on hate crime charges, assault against a minor, something. This is, beyond being cruel, ill-advised. Juston is still working on getting the Sentinel up and running. He can't buy circuitry, or liquid nitrogen for the freeze ray, but he was able to make a new knee joint support in shop class! Which means the Sentinel can walk again. Which means it might leave, so Juston tells it to add a new prime directive: that it will not leave Juston, ever.

How well that's going to work, when the Sentinel is steadily restoring its memory banks while Juston's not around, is up in the air. For now, it's time for a test drive. Juston rigged a platform and some hand grips on the Sentinel's back, and they go tearing through the woods, eventually stopping at a cliff (as seen in last weekend's Saturday Splash Page!)  So it can run, and its repulsor rays, pulse blasts, whatever it's firing from its palms work, too. Let's hope some asshole jocks don't give Juston a reason to want to use those weapons on anybody. Like beating up his friend, or making the girl he likes think he's spreading stories about scoring with her. That could end badly. . .

{9th longbox, 156th comic. Sentinel (vol. 1) #4, by Sean McKeever (writer), Joe Vriens, Sacha Heilig, Scott Hepburn, Eric Vedder (artists), Andrew Hou, Kevin Yan, Simon Young (colorists), Cory Petit (letterer)}

So Close, Yet so Far

In gameplay, Three-Fourths Home is very simple. You hold down the right trigger and the car goes "vroom" across the screen. If you take your finger off the trigger, the game effectively pauses until you start moving again.

Your character, Kelly, is on the phone with her family as she drives home. A storm (which gets steadily worse, until there are multiple tornadoes around) rolls in. You're in no danger from that; the game isn't throwing cows or silos in the road and making you swerve. Your focus is the conversations. They say something, and the game gives you options on how Kelly responds. No more than three options, sometimes only one (the dialogue trees inevitably lead to certain points.)

That's really it. This was the extended edition, so there's an epilogue where Kelly reflects on a day months earlier, when she was away at college and thought about calling her mother, but didn't. You can choose to make the call and have a conversation Kelly wishes she had, or not. If you do, you can walk on the sidewalk (by pushing the right or left trigger) as you talk, or just stand there. You don't really see a lot if you walk, the game has a very simple visual style, but it's there if you don't want to just watch buses pull up and leave.

The game's really more about the circumstances. Kelly went away to college, but now she's back at what feels like Square One, but everyone else is different. Kelly's still caught up in the fallout of what caused her retreat to her childhood home, the feeling it wasn't supposed to go like this, she isn't supposed to be back here, what's wrong with her. That is a feeling I'm well familiar with, for about a solid decade after college.

Kelly's apparently just now, while on the phone, twigging to a lot of what's been happening with her family. She hasn't realized her dad doesn't take any meds for the pain after he lost a leg in an accident at the factory (unless you count beer, at least he's not combining the two), or that her brother stopped playing the guitar after she left (he's into writing now.)

Given the specific points the conversations have to hit, I don't know how much of a difference it makes which dialogue options you pick. You can get more information about certain topics if you ask questions versus sticking to monosyllabic answers. The third time through (the game takes maybe 30 minutes to play), I tried to pick the response with the fewest words (in the event of a tie, the fewest letters.) Or you can be cryptic or even a jerk. Your brother gets irritated if you call him "Benji," and reminds you that you promised two weeks ago not to do that. Then the game gives you an option to do it again a few minutes later. I refrained, but maybe as an only child I don't understand the fun of needling at siblings.

Or maybe I saw my friends' siblings stab them with forks too often to want any part of that smoke.

The "conversation" with her mother at the bus stop adds an additional wrinkle that there will sometimes be dialogue options in brackets, which symbolize the moment Kelly breaks her own illusion. The moments where she knows she's lying to this imaginary version of her mother, or the moments where she thinks her mother wouldn't have reacted like that. The background also shifts during those moments, and so does the background music if you get far enough into the conversation.

It took me until the third time through to really get the hang of that. The first time, I just had Kelly stand there as a couple of buses stopped and departed, then finally had her get on one. Second time, I had her make the call, but I interpreted the bracket options as a sign I was messing up, like when you step on the wrong square in Dance Dance Revolution. Breaking the rhythm, dragging her back to the truth of the situation. The third time, I started like that, but partway through decided to see what would happen if I just pursued those threads.

Steady Cooking in Summer Heat

The main thing I noticed in August's solicits was two companies seemed to change their names. At least, there were two Valiant titles listed under "Alien Books", and nothing listed as Valiant Comics. I also saw titles I remember being solicited through Scout Comics, now listed under various "Amp Comics" headings. If it is Scout, they've only partially learned from past mistakes. 4 books solicited, but spread across 3 different imprints: Amp Comics, Amp Comics - Chispa, Amp Comics LLC. What sense does that make?

What's new? Marvel's got a couple of things, only 1 of which I'm likely to get immediately. That's the new Black Cat series, written by G. Willow Wilson. It's spinning out of something happening in Amazing Spider-Man, and Felicia's going to be a hero, but maintain the facade of being a thief. As long as there's some cool heists in this thing, we'll get along fine.

August also brings Marvel All-on-One, a 64-page, all splash page story where the Thing returns from some outer space jaunt and finds everyone trying to kick his ass. I'm not sure an all splash page book works to the strengths of Ryan North's writing, but it probably does play to Ed McGuinness' strengths as an artist. It's also $8, so, yeah, probably not buying that any time soon.

I was initially intrigued by the Event Horizon mini-series IDW solicited, but it's a prequel telling what happened to the crew that first tested the jump drive. I mean, we know what happened, they were driven insane and tore each other apart like rabid animals. Why do we need five issues for that?

What's ending? It isn't listed on Mad Cave's website as I type this (last Friday), but I'm assuming the last issue of Dark Pyramid will arrive in August.

And the rest: Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu is on issue 11, while Batgirl's on issue 10 with the Unburied gunning for her again.

Apparently Image solicited issue 6 of Dust to Dust at some point in the last couple of months, because issue 7 is listed for August. Resurrection Man: Quantum Karma is on its 5th issue, and Mitch must have screwed something up, because the solicit says he's fleeing a former ally. Bronze Faces is supposed to be on issue 5, as well, which means a lot of books are lining up to end in September.

The Thing puts the Idol of Millions up against the Juggernaut. I'm actually pretty excited to see that fight, so hopefully they creative team can live up to my entirely reasonable, sky-high expectations. The Runaways mini-series is on issue 3, because One World Under Doom will still be 3 months from ending 3 months from now. Ugh!

*slams face against table*

*nearly spills soda on his laptop*

The 12th volume of Precarious Woman Executive Miss Black General is listed by Seven Seas Entertainment, although it won't be out until the beginning of October. It'll be a while before I get to reviewing volume 11 (or even volume 10 at the rate I'm going), but I loved volume 11, so I'm stoked for the possibility of the RX Organization against an alien invasion!

Oh yeah, and the new volume of Fantastic Four's on issue 2.

The Marvels (2023)

Dar-Ben (Zawe Ashton), who took over as Supremor after Captain Sparkle-fists (Brie Larson) killed the Supreme Intelligence in the first Captain Marvel movie (I forgot that happened, along with most of what happened in that movie), is looking for a couple of wristbands that will give her incredible power. But she only finds one, because the other is on Kamala Khan's (Iman Vellani) wrist.

Oh well, enough energy and one bangle (or Quantum Band) is enough to open jump gates enabling Dar-Ben to steal resources from worlds that important to Captain Marvel to revitalize Hala. Yeah, she uses the scheme from Spaceballs, except she actually succeeds in stealing a planet's fresh air, and another's water. Meaning Carol Danvers is less competent than Lone Star and Barf. Ouch.

With only one Band, the gates are steadily tearing apart spacetime, and have also caused Carol, Kamala, and Monica Rambeau's (Teyonah Parris) powers to somehow get "entangled", so if two or more of them use their powers simultaneously, they switch places. Leading to a lot of confusion when Carol, say, abruptly swaps with Kamala (drawing comics about team-ups with Danvers) during a fight with the Kree, or Kamala and Monica get swapped when Monica's on a spacewalk. But it provides an excuse to not send the teenager or the scientist home (since they'd likely just get dragged back in at the worst possible moment), and they have to work together to try and stop Dar-Ben.

I figured that if Dar-Ben kept managing to open gates with one bangle by supercharging it with her Universal Weapon, the solution was going to be Kamala closing the gates (or rift) with her bangle after getting it supercharged by Carol. Probably with some help controlling the energy from Monica, what with her ability to shift between different parts of electromagnetic spectrum. Teamwork makes the dream work, and there was the whole bit about Carol having been on her own in space a lot and being used to handling everything solo, and Monica being reluctant to get involved in this kind of stuff and needing to embrace her powers, and Kamala getting to live out her dream of a team-up on an Avengers-level danger, while having a better sense what that actually entails.

It seemed like an obvious reason to need both bands to create stable gates. One opens, the other closes, they regulate each other, something like that. Plus, you've got Kamala using her power to turn energy into solid barriers or shields or whatever. At least have her try to make a giant plug or patch or something. But they had to do the Multiverse thing, so there you go.

The three leads play off each other well. Vellani's got Kamala's starstruck and eager attitude down cold, and it gives the movie energy and excitement that helped carry it along. Because otherwise, Danvers is really serious and guarded, and Monica is nervous and trying to sort out her feelings about "Aunt Carol." But Larson and Parris let their characters gradually get swept up in the enthusiasm a bit. The training montage sequence was fun, although I'm a sucker for "Intergalactic" (up there with "Body Movin'" and "Eggman" for my favorite Beastie song.)

As generally repulsed by choreographed singing and dancing as I am in movies, the visit to Andala was interesting - I laughed at, "we have two newcomers - although one of them could be more cheerful" - although Carol's Princess Dress Outfit really did drive home that she needs something brighter on the lower half of her costume to break up all that muddy dark blue. If not the classic red sash, at least a bright red or yellow belt or something.

The gags with the Flerkens and the space station were amusing, though it felt weird to be worrying about that when Dar-Ben is about to steal the Sun to reignite Hala's. But the movie was emphasizing home and family, and all 3 of the leads had connections to the people on the station, so it wouldn't make a lot of sense to abandon them to die when the station blows up, implodes, falls into the atmosphere, whatever it was going to do (I wasn't clear on that beyond it wasn't working well.)

Overall, I had a pretty good 95 minutes watching this.

What I Bought 5/23/2025

Well, I tried to get the 4 comics that came out last week. The shop in town was a bust, no big surprise. The one I like to try in the next town over was closed for the holiday weekend. Well, can't argue with people taking time off. The other store in that town had one of the books, so we work with what we've got.

Moon Knight: Fist of Khonshu #8, by Jed MacKay (writer), Devmalya Pramanik (artist), Rachelle Rosenberg (color artist), Cory Petit (letterer) - That's pretty graphic, but I'm sure Moon Knight won't actually get impaled.

Moon Knight wakes up in a void, bound in chains. His soul is trapped within Carver's sword, after she impaled him with it. Well hush my mouth. So Moonie gets a rundown on Carver's backstory, as well as the sword's. She was on a gig for Roxxon in Vanaheim, things were going bad, the sword made an offer, and she took it. Now she has to feed the sword souls, or it takes hers. Fairchild promised he could free her, but that's a lie.

Rosenberg uses a yellow-gold for the flashbacks to Carver's past, an unearthly color that makes a nice contrast to the stark black void Moon Knight's chained up in, but keeps the tone muddy enough that it's not shining fairy-tale world. For Carver, Vanaheim was an ugly, terrifying place of stuff she wasn't ready to deal with, least of all a sword forged by a mad dwarf who immediately killed a dragon with it.

The sword took the dragon's soul, and with it, its desire to hoard. Moon Knight calls on the dragon-sword to surrender, as we see he let Carver run him through. Because his soul is already claimed, and Khonshu's kind of a jealous bitch about this kind of thing. Pramanik had been using chains for panel borders as Moon Knight spoke with Ginnarr, but those are replaced with a wavy white border as Moon Knight breaks free and Khonshu forces his way into the conversation, the chains now appearing around Ginnarr instead.

Moon Knight talks the Bird-God out of killing the dragon, and now Moon Knight has a soul-stealing sword and Carver owes him for freeing her. I'm not sure the sword makes up for killing the Midnight Mission. Can't keep a coffee maker inside a cursed sword, or speak with travelers requiring help there. But if Pym comes through on the antidote for the drug, Moon Knight will have taken everything Fairchild's got, save his life. I guess the sword could come in handy for that.

Sunday Splash Page #376

"Heads of the Board," in Namor the Sub-Mariner #8, by John Byrne (writer/artist/letterer), Glynis Oliver (colorist)

In 1990, when the first issue of Namor the Sub-Mariner shipped, Namor hadn't had his own ongoing series since Sub-Mariner wrapped back in 1974. There was a 4-issue mini-series in 1984 about Namor trying to make peace between Atlantis and the surface world, and in '88, Roy Thomas wrote Saga of the Sub-Mariner, a 12-issue continuity recap. But no ongoing series until John Byrne took this shot. I'm a little surprised, since it apparently meant Byrne left Sensational She-Hulk, which seemed like a passion project for him. Plus, Namor had been presumed dead following the Atlantis Attacks! summer event.

First thing Byrne does is try to explain why Namor swings between being reasonable and aggressive, which he pins on Namor's hybrid nature. Basically, the ocean deep has too little oxygen for him, and the surface world has too much, so he either suffers oxygen deprivation or, essentially, is oxygen drunk. Feels like it would be easier to just say Namor can be a reasonable, level-headed guy, but he's also very proud and tends to overreact to perceived slights to him or his people. Or, he knows some surface-worlders are good, honorable people and tries to work with them, but when he watches how casually we dump toxic waste on his territories, he tends to get a little pissed off.

Anyway, Byrne adds a father-daughter pair to Namor's supporting cast, Caleb and Carrie Alexander. Namor apparently saved Caleb from drowning when he was a boy, and Caleb has been a fan ever since. It's he who puts forth the oxygen imbalance idea, and constructed a machine to treat Namor's blood to address it. Namor flirts a bit with Carrie, but she's not ready for that kind of thing. Still, she stays around, being suspicious of the other women who show interest in Namor for at least the first two years of the book.

Byrne doesn't spend time on Namor as monarch, opting instead for Namor as businessman. Namor uses salvaged treasure from sunken galleons to buy out a company and build Oracle Inc. into something more eco-friendly. Byrne also adds the Marrs siblings, Desmond and Phoebe, as rivals, with Phoebe trying to seduce Namor before actually falling for him. Desmond, well, I covered what happened with him earlier this month in Random Back Issues #151. 

Maybe Byrne just wanted a book to do continuity "fixes." Besides the thing about Namor's mood swings, he's also the one who establishes Namorita is a clone of her mother, and that Iron Fist didn't really die. A throwdown with the Super-Skrull ultimately leads to K'un-Lun, where it turns out Danny Rand was captured and replaced by the plant-people H'ylthri when he returned home for help dealing with radiation poisoning. It was one of the H'ylthri, impersonating Iron Fist, who got killed years ago. Namor saving Iron Fist puts him in the crosshairs of Master Khan, who wipes Namor's memories and teleports him somewhere.

Which is as far as my collection goes. Byrne returned to Sensational She-Hulk as writer/artist about 9 months earlier. I imagine writing and drawing two books was too much, and Jae Lee came on as artist after that, and I haven't dug the look of the issues I've seen over the years. Byrne left entirely after issue 34, though the book continued up to issue 62. Namor was apparently tricked into sleeping with Lyrra (disguised as Sue Richards) in issue 50, and they conceived a child. Strange how the writers didn't apply Byrne's, "hybrids can't conceive" thing to the Avenging Son.

I run hot and cold on the fixes. I'm fine with bringing Iron Fist back, but the blood oxygen level thing feels over-complicated, and making Namorita as a clone resulted in people shifting her appearance and abilities all over the place for at least the next 15 years, which didn't do the character any favors. Plus, with Namor being the star, Namorita gets played as deferring to him, and is more of a "plucky sidekick" he has to protect from herself. I definitely prefer Niceza's Namorita to Byrne's. Byrne also took Namor's ankle wings and flight capability in issue 7, which, whatever man. Namor wasn't doing a lot of aerial combat up to that point anyway, it just meant he had to use elevators sometimes and couldn't always chase after enemies.

I picked up Byrne's run as writer/artist up in the early years of this blog. One of the other comics bloggers at the time, Zombie Mallet, was doing a lot of posts about it. Mostly about how Namor fought better when he didn't wear a shirt. Shirt on, Namor gets knocked out by one punch to the back of the skull. Shirt off, he's immediately busting loose. I'd read a couple of issues when they first came out, so when Marvels and Legends had a back issues sale, I pounced.

One thing a quick scan of covers and issue summaries for the whole series drives home is Byrne avoided Namor's typical enemies, something later writers didn't. Byrne leaves and here comes Tiger Shark, here comes Attuma, here comes Lyrra. Is it better to have Namor contending with eco-terrorists who sabotage his company's new oil tanker, or Headhunter (a businesswoman with hypnotic eyes), or old Iron Fist enemies? I don't know.

It feels like Byrne trying to emphasize his new direction for the character, now making inroads in the surface world via business instead of politics. But, again, he didn't necessarily do a lot with that. Namor is either too impatient or too honorable to resort to boardroom skullduggery to triumph. Not when he can punch things instead. So Byrne has Namor initially try to remain in the shadows, letting the world think he's dead, and certainly not connected to Oracle Inc. That falls apart by issue 3, when Namor rides the Griffin through Roxxon's boardroom skylight because he thinks they sent it to attack him.

Likewise, Namor doesn't spend much time actually running his company, always giving someone else "temporary" control. Caleb Alexander, Desmond Marrs, Jacqueline Crichton (aka Spitfire, who Byrne de-ages from a 60+ year old to probably early 20s. Another attractive woman for him to draw, what a harsh fate.) I think it's mostly just a means to confront him with different threats.

For part of his run as writer/artist, Byrne inks himself, through the magic of duotone paper. Later, other people take over inking (Bob Wiacek in issue #23, for example.) The duotone gives the art a different texture. Rough, but not in a way that muddies Byrne's lines, as the inking tends to fade near the edges. The art, or the characters at least, don't look as busy when Byrne's handling it all, versus having a separate inker.

Either way, he keeps his layouts straightforward here. Mostly 4-6 panels a page, sometimes laid out in rows, other times stacked vertically. There's no joke issues about fighting in a snowstorm, or people breaking the 4th wall by stepping out of the panel. That kind of stuff doesn't fit the character. Namor's pretty straightforward, handling things in a manner that's quick and to the point.