Saturday Splash Page #250

"Forced March", in The Surgeon #6, by John Pence (writer), Omar Zaldivar (artist), Hedwin Zaldivar (colorist), Taylor Esposito (letterer)

Another 2025 mini-series. The Surgeon is set 15 years after some sort of climate disaster. Humanity has started to pick itself up again. At least, some of the folks living on the surface are doing that. The wealthy are living in FallOut-style bunkers underground. What, they couldn't get their asses to Mars and die there like ambitious pricks?

Jenny Hanover is the surgeon in question, someone who earned her medical degree before civilization collapsed, but hadn't established a career enough to pay off student loans, let alone afford to go underground. At least she doesn't have to worry about the loans now! She roams the frontier on her ill-tempered horse Paint, trading expertise for food or supplies. Since it's not an easy world for someone traveling alone, she's a pretty hardcore fighter, fully able and willing to hack through enemies with her saber.

Responding to a request for a medic on "Craigslist" - a series of watch towers - brings Hanover to Turtle Island, a fort community somewhere in the western half of the U.S., led by a variety of people with useful skills. Dr. Martinez is an engineer, Rogers is a Marine, Smithy knows forging, Ben knows chemistry, especially fermentation. Hanover sets up shop, saving a little girl from appendicitis during a tornado right off the bat. The community celebrates with a big party, and Hanover is goaded into making several promises while drunk. The community's rule is "word is bond," so she's on the hook. This includes training what passes for their militia in hand-to-hand combat, since Rogers knows marksmanship, not swordfighting.

That's one of those things Pence sort of hints at without discussing in depth. Mentions of learning from people who taught Chinese farmers to fight the Japanese, but other times saying she wasn't trained so much as she just learned. Like her discussions of different types of storms, or what conditions are like in the eastern half of the country. Alluding to her lengthy history surviving the apocalypse.

(Of the three pencilers the mini-series has - Zachary Dolan for issues 1 and 2, Stan Yak for issue 3, Omar Zaldiver for issues 4 thru 6 - Dolan does the best at drawing her as someone with years of experience who's been living rough. She graduated med school before society collapsed, and it's been 15 years since then. She's got to at least be in her 40s, but Yak and Zaldiver minimize her scars, give her shiny smooth hair, pretty her up a lot. Dolan's version smiles bigger, groans and stretches and slumps. Her hair is stringier, her skin's darker and lined, like she gets a lot of sun and doesn't have a lot of opportunities to bathe.)

There's a need for training, as the fort is soon targeted by a group Hanover is acquainted with, Fury Road rejects calling themselves "Hot Animal Machines." Seems like a contradictory name, but their motto is also, 'everyone dies tonight, or dies trying,' so we are not dealing with geniuses here.

Turtle Island wins the battle, a violent and bloody one with Hanover as the point of the spear (or the edge of the sword) but can't drive the invaders away solely by force of arms. Not without more casualties than they're prepared to accept, anyway. To win the war, they fight dirty, offering opium laced with warfarin. That gets the attention of the United First Nations, especially this she-devil doctor with a sword. Hanover manages to talk herself out of trouble, offering to help Chief Long and his people rescue others being sold as slave labor to the wealthy underground (in exchange for fresh drugs.)

Then she breaks her word and runs off with the chief's nephew. That decision doesn't turn out well for anyone.

Running through the book is the notion of ideals or creeds. The gap between what people say they believe in and what they do when the chips are down. Hanover explains the concept of triage to a young man at the fort named Abner, who shows interest in becoming a healer. That if a patient is beyond saving, she lets them die, to put that energy and resources towards someone that has a chance. If the patient has a chance, then she has to do all she can to help them, including remove an appendix during a tornado.

This becomes a sticking point between them, and to an extent between her and Turtle Island in general. Rogers is wounded during initial contact with the Hot Animal Machines. Arrow in the shoulder. He gets hooked on opium during the recovery; Pence does a nice bit where Rogers' internal narration agrees he should switch to liquid aspirin, but then he says aloud he's still in too much pain. It gets bad enough, he swipes some of the tainted opium without realizing it.

Hanover gives him all the blood she can, then leads Abner and some others out to see if the Hot Animal Machines took the bait. Which leaves her ill-equipped to fight when Chief Long's guys get the drop on her. After negotiating her release, she braves a torrential downpour, at night, to get back to the fort and check on Rogers. Abner sat around drinking and playing cards with the First Nation guys. Where was the commitment to healing? To Abner, it's not a 24/7 thing, he just wants to know how to patch someone up and then go on with his life.

Martinez keeps talking about "word is bond," and Hanover plays by those rules. She gives Turtle Island everything she agreed to - while heavily intoxicated - and more besides. The terms of agreement didn't say she would fight a war for them, or compromise an oath by offering tainted drugs, but she did that too. She fulfilled her terms of the deal, but Martinez gets pissed when she decides to leave, and when Paint brings her back, badly wounded, says to let her die. Smithy, the only one who points out she did as promised, disagrees and takes care of her himself.

Little Bird seduces her, then steals her sword and Paint. Partly as revenge for not letting him die of a wound, partly because that was how he interpreted his uncle's stories about counting coup to prove you're a warrior. Chief Long is not impressed, correctly noting Hanover is not someone you want for an enemy.

Not that Hanover is above breaking her word or bending her ethics. Maybe "do no harm" went out the window the first time she had to kill in self-defense, but she still raises it as an objection to the tainted opium, then goes along with the plan. She promises to help Chief Long on his rescue mission, then bails with Little Bird at the first opportunity, even though she seems to accept payment for aid she didn't provide.

And I think part of the conflict between her and Abner is a different notion of how to use medical knowledge. Hanover wanders, going where the work is. She's seen the world outside Turtle Island's log walls, and it's hardened her. She has at least 3 scars on her face and others on her arms. Probably more we don't see. She's missing a tooth, at least when Dolan draws her. She mentions not being able to use opium because she's addicted. She's probably performed uglier operations than that appendectomy in worse conditions than a tornado.

That's not Abner's goal. He wants to help the people of Turtle Island, and that's the extent of his interest. Maybe if someone rides up asking for help he'd offer, though he flatly declined to help Hanover when she returned, so maybe not. Maybe it is, as Hanover suggests, that he just liked the pretty idea of being a healer, and the reality is too ugly, too difficult for him. Or maybe he knows his limits. He wants to protect his world and the people in it, limited as that is.

Hanover seems willing to help people as she comes across them in need, or answer the call when it's put forth, but I'm not sure her world has anyone in it but her and Paint. Everything else is transactional. Which means, when she has nothing to trade, she's got nothing to rely on but someone's pity. If not for Smithy, she dies. Little Bird might be an asshole, but he's got friends. When she gets a shot at him, they ignore Chief Long and try to rescue their pal. Like I said, that doesn't end well for anyone. People get run over with wagons, bit by horses, take hatchets to the foot.

The mini-series doesn't end with any significant change in how Hanover's going to do things, either. She briefly considers going back to Turtle Island, but brushes it off after one panel. Can't imagine she's going to want to have any run-ins with the United First Nations going forward, and she and Little Bird made some enemies before he sprang his trap. Enemies everywhere, and no friends to be found. 

What I Bought 10/5/2026 - Part 1

Based on the Youtube ads, I think one of the guys running for governor in Iowa is actually from Kansas, and still lives there most of the time. Which really ought to be disqualifying. Run for office in your own state, shitheel! But apparently he was, prior to his, involved in politics in Montana. So the hierarchy of desirable political offices apparently goes, from best to worst, Kansas-Montana-Iowa.

The comics didn't arrive until Monday, so I didn't have time to prep either of the review posts before going on a long 3-day inspection trip. So I'm trying to write this Thursday, two hours after I got home. Let's see how that goes.

The Matron #3, by David Bowles and Drew Edwards (writers), Monica Gallagher (artist), Harry Saxton (color artist), Stephen Kok (letterer) - Well, now we know the Matron will hit (and kill) a guy wearing glasses.

The entire issue takes place in and around Zina's house, after she returns home from killing her former bosses. Except it's not Zina's home any longer, because her older brother, Cyril, sold the house under some bullshit eminent domain claim to the hated Maldonados. We get a quick flashback showing as the utterly selfish type who refuses to help anyone, but always shows up to help himself.

In this case, he was planning to help himself to a quarter-million dollars, which he was taking to Aruba with a new girlfriend, abandoning his own wife and children, along with Zina's. As a blizzard rolls in and the power goes out, Zina starts hearing that voice. Out comes the hatchet and the mask, out goes a large amount of blood from Cyril and the state employee unlucky enough to have drawn the assignment of delivering the check with relocation funds.

The rest of the family is horrified, until Zina makes a brief speech. Even when she's speaking in English, as opposed to, what I think is an Eastern European, or maybe Scandinavian language, Kok uses that same stylized font. And in one panel, Saxton tints her and everything around her red, versus the normal coloring for the two characters in the foreground. After which, everyone is totally on board with Zina murdering two people!

I realized during the drive home Thursday, the mini-series is half over, and I don't know what kind of story this is going to turn out to be. Is it a horror story, where the lovers from feuding families are doomed to destruction at the hands of some primeval force? Or are Sam and Ros going to represent some healing of the fissure that defies the thing driving Zina forward? Is Ros going to prove as susceptible to whatever mind-hoodoo Zina had going on as the rest of the family, or has she distanced herself enough to resist?

Vampyrates! #3, by Fred van Lente (writer), Luca Pizzari and Alberto Canale (artists), Adam Guzowski (colorist), Jodie Troutman (letterer) - I see she's smart enough to keep a grip on something. So many people go for the dramatic pose at the railing, only to fall into the sea when the ship hits an unexpected wave.

Captain Akeyo attempts to interrogate one of the prisoners from last issue's fight on the location of a place called Absolution. Unfortunately, the use of a "day-lens" designed to collect and magnify the little bit of sunlight present around the 1000 year eclipse, is imprecise, and the prisoner incinerated.

In the meantime, Akeyo's insistence on ignoring any ship that doesn't have Church officials is causing some discontent, and Longlocks tries getting Nira on his side for a mutiny. At the next port, as he tries recruiting more muscle, Nira sees her old Majordomo, who is looking to purchase a human similar enough in appearance to Nira that, once turned and killed, can be presented to the new Empress as proof the old Empress is dead. Nira, a little drunk, picks a fight and cleans house, but is stopped from killing the majordomo.

Which seems ill-advised, but it's a nice little fight. Smashes a bottle across one guard's face, backhands a thrown dagger into another's throat. Though Pizzari's faces seem to be rougher and closer to sketches with each issue. But they did draw a "ghost typhoon", which is just a fantastic bit of madness. Full marks on that. Sensational Concept of 2026. Pushing issue 4 back to November hopefully will allow Pizzari some breathing room.

What turns out to be more ill-advised is Nira alerting Akeyo to the brewing mutiny. Akeyo takes this as proof that Nira has no loyalty to anyone. Of course not, loyalty only runs one way. It's like blame, except it runs the opposite direction. So it looks like Nira's going to be roasted. And just as she was realizing maybe her subjects didn't actually love her. The epiphanies always come too late, especially as it turns out "Absolution" is an enormous ship. And it's just arrived.

I'm actually most curious what Nira will take from the fact her subjects largely don't care she was overthrown. She is exceedingly self-centered, so it's possible she'll decide to hell with them. But, I could also see her wanting revenge. To regain her throne as a means to put the boot to everyone. Which is probably the wrong lesson to learn, but I'm not sure she's a quick study.

Quicksand - Nella Larsen

Helga Crane is a teacher at a prestigious school for black children in the American South in the 1920s. But she isn't happy there, feels confined, constrained by a stuffy, limited way of thinking that she doesn't believe she could possibly change. So she leaves, first to Chicago, then New York, specifically Harlem, then Copenhagen. Back to Harlem, before finally ending up in Alabama.

Again and again, Helga arrives at a new place and feels certain that it's the place for her. Again and again, the novelty wears off and she finds herself feeling trapped. Disgusted with the people around her. Helga is of mixed race, a white mother, who fell for a black man who was an inveterate gambler that eventually abandoned mother and daughter both.

So Helga never feels at home, not for long. She grows frustrated with her friends in Harlem's constant focusing on race issues, on how her best friend there is adamantly opposed to the mixing of the races, unaware Helga is herself of mixed descent. She initially enjoys the attention she receives in Copenhagen, but quickly recognizes it's because she's considered a novelty, one her aunt and uncle are using in an attempt to social climb. The expectations eventually grow too much for her, and she finds she missing the culture of Harlem, which she previously grew to despise.

This was part of a collection of Larsen's two novels (I'll likely get to Passage next week.) There was an introduction by a Deborah McDowell that speaks about how much both books are about the struggle for black women to come to grips with their sexuality, or their feelings of desire. Like they are supposed to be desired, but not experience desire themselves? Like it was expected they'd want to sleep around with several men, to the extent some women were scorned for not doing so, but certain organizations of colored women considered that to be a big problem?

Seems like a damned if you do, damned it you don't, though I'm not sure Helga ever gets to the "do" part of the equation. Desire seems to be something she can't quite recognize or name or, perhaps, acknowledge in herself. She's engaged to another teacher at the school when the book begins, but she seems bored by him, and breaks things off easily. A painter in Copenhagen proposes, but Helga feels he initially made his intentions known in a disrespectful way, via an offhand comment he seemed to make more to the portrait of her he was painting. So she shoots him down, bluntly.

She eventually, desperate for a connection, falls for a southern preacher she meets in an wild church service in Harlem. that doesn't end well, as she's stuck pumping out child after child, growing steadily weaker. When she finally followed desire, she let it lead her into marriage, apparently the only acceptable expression, and has surrendered everything else she loved along the way. She vows to get out, but it seems a false hope. She's sunk too deep.

There is Mr. Anderson, who was the principal at the school. We first see them interact when she informs him she's decided to quit mid-semester and somehow, that interaction sticks with her. It's almost like kids on the playground, where Helga can't admit he stirs something in her, so she gets cross with him. She responds to his encouragements to stay and help make the school better with snippy remarks and later berates herself for not being more cutting. Yet they keep crossing paths, and her eyes keep being drawn to him. And when she thinks something is going to happen, and it doesn't, it crushes her. Throws her into the despair that leads her to the preacher and that particular disaster. I will admit I was never entirely clear what she saw in him that pulled at her like that, but given that she seems confused by the situation, that's appropriate.

Really, I felt like she was sometimes less interested in provoking desire in men than she was in simply provoking others. Contrary for the sake of it, which, as a contrary person myself, I can respect as a motivation. She liked dressing in brighter colors, those felt she felt set off well against her skin, at the school, against the headmistress' admonitions that darker colors were better. She likes at times dressing in outfits that could be considered a bit provocative for the setting in Harlem. But she gradually balks when her aunt and uncle encourage that same behavior in Copenhagen, buying her outfits and accessories - big bracelets and earrings - she finds too gaudy.

Probably because it feels like they're trying to play up that novelty by evoking the "jungle savage", and Helga often tries to reject that in herself. That was what drove her from Harlem the first time, disgust and shame at a part of her that responded to the music in the clubs like everyone else does. Maybe the provocation is because she never feels a part of any world. There is always some part of her that doesn't seem to fit, or that she can't reconcile herself to. She tries, at the end, to play the preacher's wife and mother. Tries to take the strength (solace?) the other women take, that God will provide them rest eventually, in the, 'by and by.' That doesn't last, and she comes to find the idea of black people taking comfort in White Christians' God laughable.

But it's not an idea she vocalizes to anyone, because there's no one she feels connected to. Always alone, always feeling that whatever others see in her, it's wrong. She's too flashy, she's too educated, she's too white, she's too sad, she's too picky. She feels alone, but she can't stop trying to not be alone, and it never works out. Until eventually she's got no more strength to try and find another place. It's not a happy ending, that's for certain. 

'Frankly the question came to this: what was the matter with her? Was there, without her knowing it, some peculiar lack in her? Absurd. But she began to have a feeling of discouragement and hopelessness. Why couldn't she be happy, content, somewhere? Other people managed, somehow, to be. To put it plainly, didn't she know how? Was she incapable of it?'

L.A. Story (1991)

Harris (Steve Martin) is the "wacky" weatherman for a Los Angeles news broadcast. It's a satirical, or maybe surreal, version of L.A. Harris says he's survived 7 heart attacks, all of them imagined. He works out in a stationary bike park, where running is prohibited. He and his current girlfriend leave for a get-together at the time they were supposed to arrive, and are the first to arrive. Everyone orders decaf, or decaf espresso, or double-decaf with a twist of lemon. One person mentions taking a class in the art of conversation, and when Harris confirms this, they reply only, "Yes."

Must be a minimalist art class. 

Harris is just going through the motions, save maybe his roller skating through art museums, but finds himself intrigued by Sara (Victoria Tennant), an English journalist who has just flown into town and doesn't behave like anyone else he knows. Before long, Harris' car abruptly breaks down in front of an electronic road sign which starts speaking in riddles.

I assumed it wanted him to get together with Sara, but then tells Harris to get the number of Sandy (Sarah Jessica Parker), the girl at the clothing store who helped him find a new pair of pants. Sandy seems very free-spirited, studying to be a spokesmodel, in an open relationship with some other guy and extolling the virtues of colonics for cleansing yourself. Harris sort of goes along with it all, but is never exactly enthusiastic, not that Sandy seems to mind. Meanwhile, Sara's ex Roland (Richard E. Grant) is trying to get back together with her, despite the fake she's clearly lukewarm on the idea, at best. I mean, if she was really on board, she would probably say so. Too bad Roland's not only clueless, but powerless in the face of an enchanted billboard.

I don't mind the magical realism aspects. The movie was up front this was not a realistic version of L.A. from the opening credits. All the neighbors walking down their driveways at the same time to get their newspaper and wave to each other, like they're living in some idyll. Harris getting around traffic by driving through people's fences while they wave to him. The billboard is fine, even if I resent it expecting me to decipher an anagram. I hate anagrams!

But I wasn't ever invested in Harris and Sara's romance. Maybe because Harris spends at least as much time with Sandy as Sara, even if Sandy is portrayed as very immature in some ways and Harris doesn't seem invested in her. Maybe because almost everything between Harris and Sara is from Harris' perspective. It feels like Sara is swept up in his wake, not unlike Harris with Sandy. She finds him fun, or at least funny. Possibly an interesting subject for an article. I never got the impression she loves him. More she doesn't want to get back together with Roland.

Harris is the one getting assistance from the magic billboard. When Sara tries to drop him off at his place, and her car starts rolling away, and Harris insists they just jump in and ride along, he's sure it's the billboard. Sara only knows the wacky weatherman is practically shoving her in her car and telling her to let it steer itself. Then he kisses her while she's trying to rationalize what happens, and does it again when she's still discussing induction after he stops kissing her.

Which was funny, I admit. The movie is definitely funny. Granting I haven't watched a ton of comedies this year, it's either this or Paint for movie that made me laugh the most. One of the newscasters gets a good burn on Harris about the fact this job is all a doctorate in the arts got him. There's an extended gag of Harris trying to get a reservation at a swanky new restaurant, that ends with him going over his finances with the Maitre D' (Patrick Stewart!). 'With these financials, you expect to order the duck?!' 

Harris getting into an impromptu shootout with another driver on the highway, his girlfriend asking if bullets go bad. Woody Harrelson's in a couple of scenes as Harris' boss, including a decent gag when he fires Harris as he steps in an elevator. Took me all of those scenes to recognize Harrelson. I forgot he used to have a lot of hair. Chevy Chase has a brief cameo where he is the butt of one of Stewart's insults. Not something I knew I needed, but which I quite enjoyed.

Training is Serious Business. Seriously Disturbing.

Yuto Takeda is trying to defend his junior welterweight title against that remorseless fighting machine, Yu. How's that going for him?

About as expected, then.

Volume 6 of The Boxer consists of the majority of Takeda's attempt at a title defense, before shifting gears to Yu's preparation for challenging middleweight champion, Fabrizio Santorino. The Takeda fight had already taken a bad turn when Yu demonstrated he could perfectly mimic Yuto's in-boxing fighting style. Except his superior athletic talent meant he could do it even better.

All Takeda's got is what's carried him this far: a relentless drive to keep trying, keep pushing. To prove he can do it. Secretly, to make his dad proud of him. JH shows repeated panels of different people looking on. A sick kid in the hospital, the young guy that gave up boxing after challenging Yu on his first day at the gym, and Yuto's high school friend, Yamaguchi, the one who ran away to work on a ship and, for a moment in the prior volume, looked like he was going to throw himself in the sea. Turns out he came home and opened a small store, got his mom into rehab. He thinks Yuto's doing this to show people like him not to give up, and doesn't want to see him take more punishment for that.

There's also Misaki, Yuto's coach and adoptive parent. She's watching Yuto keep getting up for more beatings and wondering if her friends would be angry how she raised their kid. If she should have pushed him away from boxing. There's a flashback to a conversation where Misaki, a little tipsy, admits she worries that, since he's put everything into the idea hard work will overcome, when Yuto finds the point that's not true, he'll break.

And then, I'm not sure what JH is going for. It seems Takeda, recalling that conversation, where Misaki told him to cherish life and not cling so tight to the burdens he puts on himself, lets go and. . .gets better at boxing? Allegedly, he's found "freedom", which means he's finally stopped worrying about the exact mechanics of how to throw punches or move, and is just doing it? His eyes start glowing, in a way that reminds Yu of Injae when he defied Bakesan.

And he shatters Takeda's jaw. I mean, I knew something like that was coming, so it's kind of whatever. Too many volumes still ahead for Yu to be moved by the spirit of loving athletic competition, or the bonds of brotherhood. What actually annoys me is, in a rage, Misaki attacks Yu. Except JH, who established Misaki is a gold medalist boxer, has her throw the stereotypical hysterical girl slap. The woman probably has a better jab than Takeda did! And fine, she's not going to hit Yu either way, but K steps in. K, who we are shown crying tears of joy as Yu nearly murders someone. Let Misaki hit him. There shouldn't be any "reflexes too fast" bullshit protecting that sociopath.

Anyway, another belt claimed, Yu moves on. Welterweight and Junior Middleweight are dispatched in a couple of pages. The Santorinos, Fabrizio and his older brother Marco, pose a different challenge. They like to play mind games. Bugging Yu's house, spreading rumors of tax evasion, paying a homeless guy to try and spill something dangerous on Yu while he's running. None of it does any good, though the fact Carmen, who works for K, moves in to watch over Yu produces an unexpected result.

No, not that she poisons him. Frankly out of nowhere, Carmen instantly catches feelings for Yu. Apparently it's been 5 years since K brought him in, but they've hardly been shown interacting. I have no clue the age gap, since Carmen was already working for K then. She starts encouraging him to smile (terrifying), or dress nicer. They go to an amusement park, which runs counter to her advice that they have to severely restrict Yu's interactions with anyone but her or K. It does lead to a chance meeting with Jean Pierre, the former lightweight champ, who has changed in the intervening years.

Except Carmen gets really catty with Stella, Jean Pierre's wife, which, eh. Stella's been shown as very dramatic, but it's still a weird look on Carmen. K agrees, as, dissatisfied with whatever changes he's seeing in Yu (and Jean Pierre noticed something different as well), he takes her off Yu-detail and replaces her with some Super Mario-looking guy. Too bad nobody told the Santorinos. . .

Sunday Splash Page #447

"Breakthrough," in Batman '89: Echoes #3, by Sam Hamm (writer), Joe Quinones and Stacey Lee (artists), Leonardo Ito (color artist), Carlos M. Mangual (letterer)

Set two years after the previous mini-series, Barbara Gordon is now a captain in GCPD, thanks the info Harvey had and Selina fed to her to take down crooked politicians. Barbara knows Bruce is Batman thanks to her father's journals (Gordon figured it out), but kept the secret so long as he put away the suit. And he has, for two years.

But now civilians are dressing up as Batman, and four of them have been killed by robbers that went berserk at the sight of the cowl. Barbara wants to know what Bruce knows about it. Too bad even Alfred hasn't seen Bruce in over a month. In what is surely an entirely unrelated development, the notorious mad bomber Firefly was just captured and remanded to the care of Dr. Jonathan Crane of Arkham Asylum.

This mini-series has a lot stuffed in it. Too much, probably. You've got Bruce Wayne impersonating a traumatized soldier-turned-terrorist he hunted down, because certain things in the man's manifesto reminded him of Hugo Strange, who apparently worked for Wayne, but recently died under suspicious circumstances. Crane is Strange's protege, and a rival of TV psychiatrist Harleen Qunizel (who I think Quinones bases visually on Madonna) and her "persona therapy."

Two of Strange's other patients are "Edward Nigel Maynard," who is the Riddler (but also a former soldier), and a guy named Desmond, another soldier, but hopped up on steroids and some kind of berserker fury drug. He's called "the Blockbuster." And there's another guy, someone Strange's soldiers found overseas who was urged to participate in the work. He's in a coma, and looks emaciated at first, then steadily regains musculature until he wakes up and walks out of the Asylum. He's very interested in Strange's work, and the improvements Crane made to Strange's drugs. It's Ra's Al Ghul, who I think is based on Ricardo Montalbahn. If so, hell yeah, good call by Quinones.

So it's sort of Batman Begins, but you've also got Winston Drake, who has not retired from crimefighting like Batman, in an outfit a bit like Nightwing's, with an entire crew of people who he calls "Nightwings" that help him out. That just sort of pops up as a thing in the last two issues. Barbara abruptly finds herself the subject of an Internal Affairs investigation. At some point we don't see, she refused to help Selina with something. So Selina set up a hidden bank account to make it look like Barbara was taking kickbacks. This seems to be Hamm's way to have her to ask Bruce for help, since she'd otherwise be antagonistic, but there's no resolution. She's not cleared.

And it's an origin story for Harley Quinn, who did some unethical stuff to get herself a regular TV show, only to get screwed by her producer and the station owner. She ends up needing Selina's help to escape an assassination attempt, and Selina promises to train her up in, not playing by men's rules, I guess.

And there's an element that Batman's maybe treating this whole thing, trying to stop Ra's from getting the fear toxin, as his last ride. Basically, Crane's fear toxin is the lineage of Strange's work that Wayne funded. That's what Batman's accomplished with all his work, his efforts to use fear as a force for change: drugs that could be horribly abused in the wrong hands. He tells Drake his method, getting the community involved, giving them a stake in protecting their homes by working together, is a better way of doing things.

Quinones does some fun stuff with the page layouts during the scenes in the asylum. Crane shows "Firefly" different images to assess his responses, and Quinones alternates rows of the images with a graph of either Bruce's heartrate or brain activity, showing his response or lack thereof. Painful memories are shown in panels shaded in red and outlined with thick black borders. There's one panel of Harley's producer, dosed on fear gas, trying to hide in the room that controls the camera feeds and seeing a dozen different versions of Harley dancing their ways out of the screen. 

Can't say Hamm and Quinones aren't doing their damndest to give us our money's worth, but there's just so much going on. It's a movie sequel experiencing bloat, or villain overload or whatever you call it when they start cramming too many antagonists into the third film in the franchise (though I guess this would be the fourth, if the prior mini was the third.) The Quinzel stuff and the fear stuff are woven through the entire mini-series. Crane studying fear to see how to use it further his drug work, while Quinzel uses her patients' issues for shock value to further her career as a TV personality. Each regards the other with contempt, but they're two sides of the same coin. Crane thinks Quinzel's a fraud, but he treats his patients as guinea pigs, hardly ethical.

So much of the rest feels like flyby, blink and you'll miss it, stuff. Little set-up, less payoff. Too important for just Easter eggs, but not developed. Batman  on a suicide run, dosing himself with the berserker drug when he confronts Ra's? Out of nowhere. Prior to that, he's talking about how they'll just have to deal with the possibility Barbara outs him if and when it happens. There's a brief scene where Bruce is frightened by the sight of his own costume, as though Crane's treatments affected him. Even though Bruce took a dose of something Strange designed for him that is essentially a mind-wipe drug. Not developed, unless you figure the idea was that, if he's even terrifying to himself, it's time for Batman to end. But he doesn't end. Not dead, not retired, not outed.

Barbara's working with them by the end of the mini-series, her problem of being framed for corruption not addressed. I have no idea if Maynard is on the loose, or what happened with Blockbuster. I don't know if Ra's is dead or not. If there was going to be another mini-series, maybe it's threads to be picked up later. As far as I know, that's not the case. Maybe not a surprise, given it took almost two years for the 6 issues to come out, including 9 months between issues 5 and 6.

Saturday Splash Page #249

"Here's Juggy," in The Thing (2025) #3, by Tony Fleecs (writer), Justin Mason (artist), Alex Sinclair (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer)

A 5-issue mini-series where Ben Grimm is approached by an old acquaintance - read: childhood bully - needing help locating his niece, whose mother was a girl Ben was friends with back then. Following the leads they've got takes Ben first to Daredevil's old foe the Gladiator, who seems out of sorts about something. More concerning, he has super-strength.

He finds Sara in Hammerhead's clutches, but recovering her is only half the problem. Hammerhead's working for Kingpin, and Fisk puts a $10 million bounty on The Thing's head, bringing a lot of villains who really ought to know better out of the woodwork. I mean, the Wrecking Crew? Sure, they're strong, and amoral enough to abduct a kid. But the Sinister Six show up and, I'm sorry, what did the Vulture or Kraven think they were gonna be able to do the Thing? To say nothing of Jigsaw, a guy whose superpower is, "only maimed, rather than murdered, by Frank Castle."

The smartest people in the entire mini-series are the Serpent Society, who hear about the bounty, realize it would be real dumb for them to try messing with The Thing, and sit the whole thing out. Which did not stop Nick Bradshaw from drawing Diamondback among the people attack the Idol of Millions on 3 covers. Not sure what that was about.

The point of the story is when to use power. Sara is a mutant, caught up in a scheme where powers get "scraped" so you can temporarily give those powers to someone else. Sara's been hurt and wants to hurt the person she holds responsible. Ben has to explain the difference between fighting to protect and fighting to hurt. That he does hit people, like those trying to abduct her, and he might be angry when he does it, or enjoy hitting them, but that's not why he's hitting them.

Fleecs has the Thing hold back a lot, taking hits from guys who, amped or not, aren't on his level, until he has to stop them. He lets Gladiator hit him several times while trying to talk him down, but when it comes down to it, he knocks the guy out in one punch. As he puts it to a too-confident Hammerhead in the last issue, 'You think I punch a guy in a pinstripe suit the same as how I punch the Hulk?!'

I don't know if we need him to explain that he uses "It's Clobberin' Time!" as his way of telling himself it's time to fight for real, but what the hell, he's trying to explain things to a traumatized kid. 

Fleecs also has the Thing keep trying to avoid fighting entirely once he's got Sara. Moonstone attacks, he hits her once and tries to bail, only to run into Rhino and Jigsaw. OK, run the other way, except Grizzly and Hate Monger are waiting. Try another direction, nope, Red Ghost and his Super-Apes. Try a fourth direction, here's the Sinister Six.  He's tries sticking to rooftops, or traveling at night. He doesn't actually fight the Juggernaut so much as distract him by throwing Black Tom down the street. Which was disappointing - I was really excited for that fight - but makes sense in context. He's not out to prove something, he's trying to get a kid to her mom. 

Ben's usually fighting with one hand, the other cradling Sara against his chest, shielding her. He's still a big guy covered in rocky plates, but Mason rounds his edges, the shoulders, the shape of Ben's head, which at least gives an impression of being softer than you'd expect. Mason also doesn't draw Ben as huge. He's bigger than Sara's uncle, or Bullseye, but stands eye-to-eye with the Wrecking Crew, is a full head shorter than the Kingpin, and Juggernaut's twice his size.

The end lands with a bit of a thud. Ben marches into the Kingpin's office, dumps Sara's uncle at his feet, yells a bit, then walks off in the pouring rain while Kingpin makes threats about owning the city. Ben's final line, 'Yeah? Well, you don't own Yancy Street,' is said to no one. He's far enough down the sidewalk Fisk isn't even visible in the background, so it's not really a comeback.

Yes, beating up the Kingpin, someone much weaker than the Thing, would go against everything he's said and done up to then. But he doesn't do anything to Fisk, like point out that trying to pick a fight with the FF, beloved by the public, is much different than messing with Spider-Man or Daredevil, who are viewed less favorably. There's no implication anyone but Hammerhead and his goons will be going to jail. Even if Sara's uncle has testimony that could link Fisk to the operation, and that seems unlikely since he was such a small fry Hammerhead felt confident he could rip him off, Ben just dumped him at Fisk's feet and walked away. Guess Marty's gonna sleep with the fishes next to that cabbie Fisk had killed to try and frame Matt Murdock!

Random Back Issues #176 - Deathlok #2

37-year-old SHIELD agent Jack Truman's mind is in the body of a 6-year-old named Billy. Truman had been pursuing Cable - I assume during Joe Casey's stint writing that book - and their final showdown on the Helicarrier didn't go great for Jack. His body was trashed, but some group, I'm unclear if Extechop is a division of SHIELD or some independent company, decided to experiment on him.

But Jack learned how to project his mind into someone's body from a stint in Tibet. Wow, Doom had to swipe that trick from some aliens. The Ovoids? Maybe if he'd visited the same monks as Jack, they could have advised him not to put burning metal on his face, too. Jack jumped first into Billy's dad, then accidentally into Billy. As for his body?

It's now a cybernetic war machine, running amok in Las Vegas. A SHIELD Air Cavalry unit is there, commanded by some guy Truman doesn't think much of named Larry Young. Vegas appears to be on fire, no great loss. Casey constantly throws in caption boxes that are just definitions of some word relevant to whatever is going on in the panel. I guess to represent only a basic computer intelligence is operating Truman's body.

Young asks Fury if he'll lift the weapons restrictions so they can hit the 'bot with some 'cold lasers.' Fury declines, stating he's sending in Zero Company to handle things. Young gets pissed and crashes into the aircraft Deathlok's controlling - or is it the other way around? - sending it to earth.

Back in Suburbia, Jack's doing a shit job pretending to be a kid, but manages to hitch a ride in the back of Billy's dad's car without being noticed. Pop works at a SHIELD front company, but Jack sneaks in and takes out two guards in armor, with hand-to-hand combat. Makes a guy's knee bend the wrong direction. With a first grader's kicks. That is the least believable thing is this comic about a cyborg destroying Las Vegas. Truman finds a hanger, and while Billy's voice can't pass authentication, Truman knows a secret code word Fury had hard-wired into everything as an override, though the significance of "Wah-hoo" escapes him. 

On the other side of the country, Mr. Young decided to visit a liquor store before returning to battle. It may be too late, because Zero Company is here! When you need to kill that hero, get yourself a Zero! Hot damn! They appear only as a full-page splash on the last page, and I'm not wasting the time to scan that. Rest assured, Manco makes them look like Fury called them away from a cameo appearance in Borderlands. I can't believe Fury lets them run around looking like that, but whatever, they'll probably be dead in an issue or two.

{3rd longbox, 266th comic. Deathlok (vol. 3) #2, by Joe Casey (writer), Leonardo Manco (artist), Mariana Manco (colorist), Jon Babcock (letterer)}

Could Be A Quiet Christmas

Not a lot of new books in the December solicits, at least not that I'm likely to buy. Lilith: Blood and Burlesque is skipping that month. The Deadman wasn't in DC solicits, so either it was a mini-series, or it's also on a skip month. Vampyrates! #4 is pushed back from October to mid-November, so I'm guessing issue 5 will be out in December now.

Suppose I ought to be spending the money on presents for other people, anyway.

What's new? I was not expecting a comic by Shaq about a West African king turned slave turned pirate, but now we've got Black Caesar, from Archie Comics, no less. Am I going to buy it? No, but it was strange enough to merit mention.

Ablaze has Soldier X creative team Darko Macan and Igor Kordey releasing the first of a 3-volume story about Marshal Bass Reeves, titled Marshal Bass. Am I going to buy it? Maybe down the line, if I hear good things and it looks like they'll actually finish the project.

Abrams Comicarts is, I think, re-releasing volumes of Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda's OGN, The Night Eaters, but re-titled as She Eats the Night? I think that's what's going on. The solicit said the book had been previously released, albeit by a different publisher, but I couldn't find anything matching the title.

In terms of things I would actually buy, it's Garth Ennis and John McCrea's Hitman: It Was the Nineties from DC, which appears to be a couple of new stories set somewhere during the original run.

What's ending? Chachu wraps up, and that's it.

And the rest: Batgirl is still dealing with David Cain's dropping by. Fantastic Four has the team's only chance to save the Earth from impossibly powerful aliens relying on Johnny's ability to bridge the language gap.

Marc Spector and D'Orc are on issue 11. Marc's West Coast reunion tour continues, while Brett Bean's spending an issue focusing on Chicken. Not exactly traditional for Christmas, but whatever meets your dietary requirements.

Which leaves the two books on issue 2. The Agony of Stars has a cop trying to investigate what these cop murders are about. Don't rush, make sure to thoroughly examine all the evidence. Take it home, sleep on it over a long weekend. In Friendly Neighborhood Mary Jane, is having trouble with her investor, Tony Stank. I really ought to spell his last name that way more often.

That said, I'm having second thoughts about that book. I got a closer look at the cover to issue 1, and I think MJ still has a symbiote, which is a strike, added to my doubts about Noto as an interior artist, added to Stank's presence as part of the cast. I guess there's still issue 3's solicit to win me over before the first issue actually comes out.

Evil Dead (2013)

Mia's (Jane Levy) brother and three of their friends have brought her to the old family cabin out in the woods to help her kick her drug addiction by going cold turkey. Of course, what David (Shiloh Fernandez) doesn't know, because he hasn't been around for years, is Mia's tried this before. It never lasts. As in, less than half a day. So their friends are prepared to keep Mia there by force.

A short time into the stay, while Mia's already complaining about an awful stench permeating the cabin, they find a locked room in the basement, full of dead cats and a book bound in human skin. One friend, like a dumbass, decides he should while away the hours reading from this book, going so far as to use pencil rubbings to find the words that were on pages that are missing from the book, and then read them aloud. People get possessed, people get maimed, people die, but David is determined to save his sister.

Couple of things working against this movie with me. One, the channel it was on just finished showing the original Evil Dead and Evil Dead II back to back, so I was hoping for Army of Darkness. I got this instead. Booo. Second, gore is the least interesting thing about horror movies to me. I can roll with it if you use it for comedy, which is probably why Army of Darkness is my favorite of the original trilogy. But gore and brutality for shock value? Doesn't do much for me. It's gross, sure. Turns my stomach? Probably. But scary? No. Hence Saw being the movie I deemed the worst I've ever seen in theaters, since gore was the edifice that entire sorry sack of ape shit hung on.

Maybe if you can make it relevant to the plot, but when Natalie takes off her arm with an electric turkey trimmer, and it doesn't actually keep her from getting possessed, then it's gratuitous. Great, you got to spray corn syrup all over the place. I'm sure that was a lifelong dream.

I don't know, I thought the movie would do more with the idea Mia was the one most aware there was something wrong, but the others dismissed it as withdrawal talking. But she's the first one possessed, and things go to the extreme too quickly to waste time on that sort of uncertainty. Once she's scalded herself so badly her flesh is peeling off, they can't worry whether she's possessed or just jonesing.

Also, it seems weird this is apparently their family's cabin, and they spent enough time there for Mia to have photos all over a wall, but neither she or David comment on the rusted remains of Ash's car, and David seems completely stunned there's a door to a basement under the rug in the living room. Yet they both knew about the little hollow under the three that could let them climb into the tool shed.

That said, the complicated relationship between Mia and David is the strongest part of the movie. The others are really just there for plot reasons and/or to up the body count. They need Eric to be the curious idiot who unleashes forces he doesn't understand, and Olivia has the medical training and access to various drugs, but beyond that, it isn't as though the film lingers over their deaths.

But Mia and David have this whole thing where David is guilty about the fact he ran in the past, leaving Mia to deal with her grief alone, in self-destructive ways. Mia can't really bring herself to trust him because of that. The words are nice, the birchwood necklace is sweet, but will he actually be there when she needs him? And what would that mean? Certainly Eric sees David's unwillingness to give up on saving Mia when she's vomiting black bile and looking like she just popped over from The Exorcist as another example of him running away from things he doesn't want to face. Same as how he balked when Eric and Olivia said they were prepared to keep Mia here until she got through it, no matter what.

Also, yelling at David probably helps distract Eric from how this is his fault. Remember kids, curiosity is bad! Pursue knowledge and all you'll catch are suffering and death!

I could see David taking the most dangerous approach to getting rid of the spirit as another symptom. A live burial means he's got to go into the basement and fight his possessed little sister, and hope sedatives still work on her when something he doesn't understand is animating her body. The repeated shots of him getting thrown around the basement into stone walls somehow felt the most like the original films to me. They aren't meant to be funny, but there was something vaguely comic about it. I suppose because it sure looks like his big plan to save his sister has crashed on the reef of him getting his ass kicked. The over-confidence of Ashley Williams in quite possibly an even dumber vessel.

But he was willing to risk his own life to try that plan. Lighting the house on fire and bailing, as he originally planned, from his perspective, would have been him abandoning her again. Of course, if he'd failed, then the demon kills him, that's five souls, the skies turn red, DC runs another Big Event with the word "Crisis" in it. The usual apocalyptic shit.

The burning tree suddenly being snuffed out was a nice touch. One of thosethings that could be read glass half-full or half-empty. That lightning strike sure was ominous, the fire being gone is probably good! Or the fire was hope because it gave David the idea, and now it's gone, oh no! Or, the demon's playing a little joke, faking David out. That was my guess. He'd dig Mia up and surprise, still possessed!

As random note to close on, Evil Dead offered a very different perspective on the efficacy of nail guns as weapons compared to The Equalizer, which I caught most of the night before. Denzel pretty much removed the main bad guy, a hardened ex-Spetsnaz sociopath, as a threat with a couple of nails to his arms. In Evil Dead, Eric, who is definitely a nerd and a total loser, gets five nails in the chest and a bunch more in the arms, and he's still able to move around and use guns and whatnot. Maybe David's family cheaped out and bought a low-grade model that lacked oomph. Needed to get the exclusive S-Mart model!

Some of the emotional beats worked, some of the visuals were good - the blood rain was cool - it was just wrapped up in a level of mutilation I didn't enjoy.

A New (Lunatic) Challenger has Entered the Fray

That's standard for arranged marriages, isn't it? Lots of contracts? 

Volume 7 of Yakuza Fiance is split between two stories. In the first, Kirishima asks Yoshino to accompany him to a visit to his family. Specifically his great-aunt Sumire. Sumire has a pretty sharp tongue, especially towards Kirishima, and is stunned he has a girlfriend, let alone the granddaughter of her no-good Yakuza brother's old buddy, who Sumire clearly sees as a bad influence.

More interesting is her conversation with Yoshino about Kirishima. He apparently showed up at the family home one day, and burned every photo of himself. Why is unclear at this point. Sumire also offers more about the incident from Kirishima's childhood where he beat the crap out of a bunch of other kids. Sumire knows it was more than them bullying Kirishima and demanding money, because he kept a record of it, and not in the sense of wanting evidence for a later court case.

Kirishima ends up in Gaku's orbit not long after, when Sumire pushes him at Gaku during his grandfather's (Gaku and Sumire's brother) funeral. Kirishima's parents just, gave up on him, and later divorced. Well, OK. Kind of odd. Seems like a shortcut to explain why they aren't around, without going the "they're dead" approach Konishi used with Yoshino's father. Sumire doesn't seem to have a high opinion of Kirishima, and even advises Yoshino to leave if she really doesn't want to stick with him, but also hopes he'll have someone like Yoshino in his life.

I'm a little surprised that, when pressed on why she likes him, Yoshino can only say he's a hard worker. I figured she'd say something about how, even if he drives her nuts, he's always authentically himself. Anyway, somehow she impressed Sumire, so Kirishima's attempt to follow Tsubaki's advice (show Yoshino more of himself) worked! Yoshino even gives him a birthday gift!

Naturally everything goes to hell in the second half. While Kirishima is attending a funeral for some person, Yoshino is at a cram school prepping for exams. Kirishima gets distracted by what turns out to be Squirrel's Nest Hair stealing one of their guys' phone, so who appears to pick Yoshino up but Azami, the creepy guy with a scar that fought Kirishima a couple volumes ago.

There's a bunch of odd detours, which feel a lot like Konishi padding things out. Maybe it's supposed to humanize Azami, but given what comes next, that ain't happening. Long story short, he drugs Yoshino and she wakes up in a bathtub. Where Azami reveals his inner Silver Age villain. He was able to ditch her phone earlier, but assumes there's a tracking device on her. He has a jammer, but he's been turning it off periodically so someone, meaning Kirishima, could trail him here, at a pace of Azami's choosing.

And if she wasn't wearing a tracking device?! Well, that's the second part. Azami wants Yoshino to ditch Kirishima and return to Osaka, with Azami as her new beau. That way he can kill her grandfather, part of that power struggle Yoshino is largely unaware of (though there's a subplot through the entire volume of Shouma doing some investigating and gradually figuring it out.) Azami will kill Kirishima as a bonus. After all, her grandfather hired Kirishima to protect Yoshino, and Kirishima knew Azami was looking for her, but never warned her. What does she owe him? Suffice to say, Yoshino ain't going for that.

The fight doesn't exactly go well, though she certainly intends to go down swinging. Manages to break one of his fingers and short out the jammer. Would have appreciated if she actually did bite his tongue off entirely, though. Azami, knowing Kirishima's now coming right for him, gives her a chance to survive. If she can escape the building, he'll leave her be, for now.

Kirishima shows up during the escape attempt and runs right past Azami - who he has seen without a mask, so he must recognize him - to get to Yoshino. Which means, when he tries to get her out of there, Azami is able to put a knife in his shoulder, before they drop 3 stories. What the hell happened to beating the shit out of anyone that even looks funny at Yoshino, man?! The one time the damned lunatic actually needs to go berserk on somebody, and he doesn't. 

Sunday Splash Page #446

"Two Sides of the Coin," in Batman '89 #6, by Sam Hamm (writer), Joe Quinones (artist), Leonardo Ito (colorist), Clayton Cowles (letterer)

Reviewed a year ago, but briefly, the first mini-series continuing the universe of the Tim Burton Batman movies. A Batman that looks like Michael Keaton is still roaming the night, beating up muggers, to limited effect. He's not considered a friend by the Gotham City government, including its social climbing D.A., Harvey Dent. Dent is engaged to Barbara Gordon, the two of them working to stop Batman, even as they expect it to bring Barbara's father down in the process.

The story is about choices, those you make and those you don't. Bruce is still doing the Batman thing, but little else. This isn't even a Bruce Wayne that's a frequent subject of the tabloids, as evidenced by how blindsided he is by the media attention when he rushes into a burning auto repair shop to save Dent and becomes a major figure of public interest. As Batman, he stops an armored car heist, completely oblivious the real target was documents implicating several city and state politicians for siphoning federal aid funds into their own pockets, keeping Gotham in its miserable state. It's Catwoman who brings that to his attention.

Selina spent the year since the near-exhaustion of her nine lives in Batman Returns laying low, playing it smart. She still has the costume, but it's unclear how active she's been. Instead, she established a computer security firm, really just her, that gives her a way to bug those same systems and track everything in them. She's also going to therapy, though one questions how much good TV shrink Dr. Quinzel is doing her. Point is, Selina's evolved, at least somewhat. She still hates the Max Schrecks of the world, but she's not trying to attack them directly.

Selina makes a point Bruce's development basically arrested at age 8, but only because he was rich enough to get away with it. If he had to work for a living, support a family, maybe he'd have gotten his shit together. Stop thinking everyone could be saved, or that everyone needs to be saved according to his specific (and selective, often hypocritical) morality. At the very least, there'd be no Batman. I'm not sure about that last one. Selina's still running around as Catwoman, even with a job. But I suppose outside the cats, she's not supporting anyone. 

There's Winston Drake, a teenager living in the same Burnside District Dent hails from. (I read somewhere Quinones based him on Marlon Wayans, but can't confirm that.) Winston isn't above putting on a cloak and mask to beat up people causing trouble in his neighborhood (including Batman), but sees it's a dead end street. It's not inspiring people to do anything, except go out and beat up anyone they think doesn't belong.

Which doesn't mean he won't help people actively trying to accomplish something. When Burnside residents stage a peaceful march after Harvey's injuries, and Bullock (who I think Quinones bases on John Goodman) ignores Gordon's orders and brings out the riot cops, it's Drake who lends a hand, lobbing a big paint bomb at the cops from a rooftop, then providing spray paint cans to the protestors to help blind the cops. Meanwhile, Batman is chasing Catwoman, aka, sorting out his relationship issues.

And there's Harvey Dent. Dent is a man who, when rubber meets road, throws away principles for what he wants. Which is more power. He's going to do good things, really! He just needs more power than he has. He'll return to Burnside to show off his car, show the kids a successful black man that's not an athlete or a drug dealer, as he puts it, but he's there rarely enough the locals feel he's left them behind to move in white society. He won't let Barbara come with him to a rally in Burnside, because it wouldn't look good for the people of the neighborhood to see him with a white lady, even his fiance. But it's other peoples' expectations that make him do those things! It's what he has to do to get ahead!

The mini-series dips briefly into the difficulty for a black person to operate in a society where most (all?) levers of power are held by white people. Most of whom, consciously or unconsciously, think that's how it should be. Harvey probably wouldn't have gotten to District Attorney without "playing the game," so to speak. But he decided it was worth it, then tries to pretend he didn't, protesting when accused of not being around much for the people he grew up with.

Ultimately, the coin is, as Commissioner Gordon notes, just anothher convenient excuse Dent uses to abdicate responsibility for his choices. Dent used it even before his face was marked. Catching a purse snatcher and getting the guy's gun from him, Dent pretends to use the coin to decide whether he'll just murder the guy. To terrorize him, or maybe just make Dent feel big. Next morning, he's up at Wayne Manor, trying to sell Bruce on the idea they can't have Gordon's personal hit squad - he thinks Batman is multiple people, all taking orders from the Commish - roaming the streets. Vigilantism was fine for him the night before, as a momentary thrill, but today is for politicking.

Issue 3 starts with a hallucination of Harvey's about him saving Drake from the burning auto shop, while in reality his attempt went poorly and Wayne and Drake saved him. In the hallucination, everyone tells Harvey how swell he is. Drake admits he was wrong about Dent. Bruce Wayne says there's no way he'd have the guts to do that. Dent rides the wave of acclaim straight to Governor, loved by all demographics. Bruce admits he's funding Gordon's Bat-squad, Bruce and Gordon both go down, and Barbara loves Harvey for it.

Basically, in this dream world Harvey gets everything he wants, without any conflict or difficulty. He doesn't have to deal with anyone not liking him or calling him a sellout. He doesn't have to choose between a friend and his political career, or the woman he loves and putting a man he considers a criminal behind bars. There's no moral conflict or doubt, no one who can challenge him. He wants it all handed to him.

Even once he embraces being Two-Face persona, he bends the rules around the coin flips, when not outright ignoring them. He flips the coin to decide what to do about Boss Maroni and it comes up good head. So he does something nice - for himself, and shoots Maroni. The coin comes up good head when he flips it for Gordon, and Harvey kills him anyway.

(It's a major flaw in Bruce's big plan in the final issue to turn Harvey around. He's going to switch the coins and make the outcome what he wants. Great, except we've seen Harvey just decide to rationalize doing what he wants anyway.)

Once Two-Face is in the picture, Quinones starts using a lot of split panels. Not just to show the difference between the two halves of Harvey, but also Harvey seeing the way things are and the way they could have been. Like each eye is peering into a different universe. The climax in the Batcave is split down the middle of the page, the coin falling between the two columns. One where Harvey lands on a rock outcropping, another where he only barely grabs hold of it with one hand. The two threads continue on their separate courses across the top half of the next two pages, before coalescing into a single outcome on the bottom half. It's in the universe of Burton's Batman films, so take a wild guess how things work out for the bad guy.

Saturday Splash Page #248

"Talking Turkey," in The Tick: Heroes of the City #3, by Clay and Susan Griffith, Marc Silva (writers), Gabe Crate (penciler), Tak Toyoshima (inker), Dave Garcia, Nathan MacDicken (artists)

A late-90s series running concurrently with The Tick and Arthur (which I'll get to if I can ever find the final issue), Heroes of the City was an anthology, with several shorter stories in each of its 6 issues. Some focused on the main characters, but also stories exploring the other heroes of The City.

The book actually starts with Arthur blowing up at the Tick for taking him for granted and treating him like a servant. In the tradition of Boxing Day, this leads to Tick trying his hand at sidekicking, though not for Arthur. Instead, he works for several other heroes, such as Super Pilgrim, who makes the Tick rent dirty videos, which Super Pilgrim is confiscating for morality reasons. Yep, just to protect the citizenry from such filth. No other reason!

A couple of those issues show Arthur attempting the life of a solo hero while the Tick explores sidekicking. Rescuing a kitten from a tree doesn't go well, but he saved a man from choking and stopped a convenience store robbery with a gallon of milk. Successes to build on! To be fair, Tick's attempt at cat rescuing in issue 5 doesn't go much better.

Most stories are silly as you'd expect from the Tick's universe. Issue 6 is devoted to Tick and Arthur getting jobs, because Tick thinks civilian identities will protect them if the UPS man turns evil. Paul the Samurai and his assistant Ashley (formerly ninja lady Oedipus) tangle with a heartbroken Paul Bunyan. There's a 3-parter where Arthur's girlfriend(?!) imagines herself as a cheerleader-themed superhero, whose pom-pons have more tricks than Batman's utility belt. That one got at least one complaint letter about how Myndi was depicted with basically beach balls for boobs. Not sure if that person was assuaged when it turned out to be a power fantasy by Myndi herself.

Then there's issue 4, where, besides Part 1 of the Paul the Samurai story, you have one story about "Red Eye", a Tales from the Crypt-style thing about a mysterious hitchhiker who leads you to doom. Especially if you won't let him order off the dinner menu after 10. And then a story about the Crazy Blue Rocket that reveals he used to be a James Bond figure in a nice suit, with a teen ward. Now he's a deranged man eating flavored paste, replaying memories of his past life as he crash lands throughout the City.

Those are the only two stories in the six issues that take a scary or sad approach, so it makes for an abrupt tonal shift.

What I Bought 9/23/2026

I've spent most of this week doing remediation on an old site. We had some work done by contractors three years ago that didn't entirely take. Vegetation not establishing, erosion cuts, things of that nature. My bosses won't authorize using mechanical equipment on it after they've already done that once. So I've been out there trying to knock the sides in on multiple trenches 3+ feet deep to level everything back out, then seeding it, spreading straw and whatever else, by hand, alone. I may not move all weekend.

Weather's been lovely, though. Couldn't have asked for better on that score. 

D'Orc #8, by Brett Bean (writer/artist), Frank William (colorist), Nate Piekos (letterer) - Great, the feral hogs have invaded my blog, and I don't own an AR-15 to protect my non-existent children.

Chicken's attempt to trick knobgoblins out of their roasted unicorn is interrupted by a pig-man duel-wielding meat cleavers. Schweinehund - I can see a little dog in the snout or ears, but he really just looks like a boar - kills the knobgoblins, but shares the meat. The tradeoff is he criticizes D'Orc for hiding from violence and sitting around bemoaning his fate. Everyone has sob stories, and nobody wants to listen to yours, unless you make them. By hurting them.

They travel to the castle of a Goblin King who Pig-Man says deserves death. D'orc's supposed to steal the valuables, but balks at killing the guards and Schweinehund killing the king. Chicken possesses the king to keep him alive long enough for D'Orc to get there. Chicken also alerts the guards which, less good. But he pushes Schweinehund off the castle wall into the moat, mid-spiel about how he works alone, with no one to watch his back. Or dry you off after falling in a moat!

At which point the angry golem from the end of the previous issue shows up, telling D'Orc to come peacefully to the Lords of Darkness. But when D'orc asks if she would peacefully go meet with people who wanted to execute her, she answers no. Then D'Orc gets airmailed out of there by Chicken's body. I found that scene, I guess because of her straightforward answer.

It was probably meant to blunt the Golem into less of antagonist, but I'd say we can add two more people to the list of those hunting him. D'Orc is not great at making friends, so I'm still not sure what Bean is planning with this. D'Orc rejected Schweinehund's psychopathic worldview that no matters but him, and everyone is to be used and discarded as the situation demands. I can't imagine the point is for D'Orc to just run off and hide somewhere forever, either.

But he's not really made any allies, so what's the path forward here? Get the two sides so crazed about killing him he can lead them into a battle with each other, and let Light and Dark annihilate one another? Would expect a lot of innocent deaths in that event. Maybe the Golem is the first step on the path of gaining allies.

Generation X-23 #8, Jody Houser (writer), Emilio Laiso (artist), Erick Arciniega (color artist), Ariana Maher (letterer) - Logan, take your brokedown ass home. 

The Wolverines and the Generated finding a spiral staircase in the Facility none of the Generated knew about. Laura, noticing Logan's healing factor isn't working, takes point. Nanny intercepts, but after disarming her, Laura tries talking. Schweinehund does not approve. You have unbreakable claws, simply hack the egg-woman to pieces, before she can kill you. Or use Logan for a bullet shield if he is no longer an effective fighter.

Talking works, though. Nanny brings them to the nursery she found, telling how she got there in a nursery rhyme. Is that a new thing? I don't remember Nanny doing a lot of singing in the few Claremont comics I saw her in. Laura tries to leave Logan behind with the Generated, but they just follow. Not showing much respect for your authoritah, Laura.

While Laura tries to figure out if these are mutant babies that were being used as a source of genetic material for powers, or human babies mutant powers were being grafted onto, Nanny leaves. Just like that? She didn't try to take even one with her? Just decided the Wolverines were suitable parental figures and that's that? I'm not saying there needed to be a huge fight in a room full of infants - maybe that's why Nanny left, to avoid endangering the children - but it feels odd. Nanny went to all that trouble, all the killing, to get to these babies, then just left.

Laura and Logan have a rooftop conversation about the difficulties of guiding children. Logan says the key is he cared. I thought it was that he taught them ninja stuff. They don't talk about his non-functioning healing factor, beyond Laura admitting she worries about him, and Logan assuring her he'll be fine. Yeah, he's getting to be in two different team books again and everything. Life is good for the ol' Canucklehead!

I know the book ends in two issues, so Houser is probably trying to get in position to wrap up stuff with X-Infinite - seen on the final page planning something involving Robo-Scorpion Kimura - by then. But that just makes wasting two issues on another awful secret of the Facility and/or gratuitous Logan appearance all the worse. Maybe it plays out the Generated have to protect Laura from X-Infinite, the way she stepped forward to protect Logan. That could be something. I don't figure Laura would let the Generated take sole responsibility for looking after all the babies, so I can't imagine that's going to be the resolution.

History Repeating, But Improved

Late in Gundam Wing, Heero infiltrates the White Fang's space battleship, Libra. I say infiltrate, he crashes a captured White Fang shuttle in a shuttle bay and slips away in the confusion of fire suppression. 

He's partly there to rescue Relena, who went to Libra on her own to try reasoning with her brother. Zechs plans, going by his public statements, to bring about peace by killing everyone on Earth, since it's clearly the source of the problems. As though the people living in space are some different species entirely and it'll all be Lionel Hutz's vision of a world without lawyers if only Earth weren't around. More likely, he plans such an ugly, horrific battle people will be too frightened/disgusted to fight wars again.

Which is actually stupider than the idea it's all the Earth's fault. Clearly the helmet he wore all those years did about as much good preventing cranial trauma as your average NFL player's.

So Heero is also there to assess if Zechs is really committed to this (idiotic) path. They both have suits with the Zero System, and Heero's has shown him Zechs has no future. Is Zechs seeing something different?

He and Relena confront Zechs in some command center*. Zechs gives them a history lesson on how, a couple decades ago, two people worked towards total pacifism. Zechs and Relena's father, King Peacecraft on Earth, and in space, the politician Heero Yuy. They were assassinated, and things continued on the same old path of those with military power dominating those without, making them afraid and desperate enough to do crazy shit like give five 15-year-olds incredibly powerful mobile suits and tells them to kill a bunch of people.

Back when I first watched the series, I didn't think much of that scene. I figured Zechs was making a point about why preaching of pacifism was pointless. You have to fight for peace, crush your enemies, because that's what they'll do to you. That sort of thing. But, he also asks Relena if she agrees, and when she doesn't, praises her for thinking as a member of the Peacecrafts should.

So the parallel finally dawned on me. Zechs talks about a Peacecraft and a Heero Yuy, one from Earth and one from space, working towards peace. He tells this story to a Peacecraft and a Heero Yuy, one from Earth and one from space, both working towards peace. Relena had to grow to understand the gap between ideals and reality, and Heero had to understand what he was actually fighting for, what he was hoping to achieve with all the battles. But they've each retained their resolve, maybe even honed it through their what their experiences taught them.

The critical difference between them and the predecessors Zechs spoke of is, unlike Original Recipe Heero Yuy, Kickin' Buffalo Ranch Heero Yuy is a soldier. He's not easy to kill. Hell, as good a soldier as he is, even he can't manage to successfully kill himself, and not for lack of trying. And he has, at some point along the line, decided he will protect Relena (instead of threatening to kill her.) Which means now Relena is not easy to kill, either. Good luck, would-be assassins.

I thought that was a nifty little piece of the series, certain things repeat, but people can actually learn from the past failures and get it right. Of course, Gundam Wing: Frozen Teardrop might very well have blown that whole notion to hell. I've only read plot summaries off the Gundam wiki, and am not sure I understand them - I can't even follow the way of marking years that tries to manage the difference in the length of Martian years versus Earth years - but it read like a lot of the characters ended up repeating the mistakes of the prior generations, as badly or worse. Sending kids off to war, when they weren't fucking up raising them or outright abandoning them, things of that nature.

Maybe, if you go back far enough before the events of Gundam Wing, there was a point where humanity was actually getting along pretty well, those on Earth and those in the space colonies, and then things went downhill, only to rise again, briefly. Hopefully not, I'd like to think things could trend up against the inexorable pull of entropy, but maybe.

* Actually a hologram of Zechs. Kind of odd, since there hadn't been any sign of similar technology up to that point.

The Frisco Kid (1979)

In 1850, the city of San Francisco needs a rabbi. So Poland sends the 87th-best student (out of 88) of that year's graduating class, Avram Belinski (Gene Wilder.)

Unfortunately, he arrives in Philadelphia, which is a long way from San Francisco. He doesn't make it far before two brothers and their pal, having fed him a sob story about needing to buy back their wagon and horses to get to their sick mother in San Fran, beat him, rob him, strip him to his longjohns and leave him in the middle of a dirt road somewhere in Pennsylvania.

After some brief stints with the Amish and working a railroad, Avram tries riding a horse, alone, to San Francisco. Too bad he can't tell which direction that is, but Tommy (Harrison Ford), a bank robber, takes pity on him and guides him to the Pacific coast.

At times, the movie feels like a series of brief skits. Here's Avram trying to catch some food after raccoons raided his pack, and Tommy shoots some fish for him. Here's Avram and Tommy arguing because there's a posse after them, but Avram still won't ride his horse on the Sabbath. Here they're prisoners of some tribe, but Avram's faith impresses the chief. Late in the movie, Avram gets a chance to confront the men who robbed him (who have also crossed most of the country for some reason), which turns into a gun battle on the beach, and a crisis of faith for Avram that he must confront, along with one of the two brothers, after he reaches San Francisco.

That's the most consistent thread, the fraction between Avram's faith and Tommy's more pragmatic perspective. There's probably something about how what you put in determines what you receive, because Avram is met with kindness. You know, besides the 3 guys who robbed him. Certainly more kindness than I would expect for a lone Jewish man roaming the United States in the middle of the 19th Century to get. The Amish help him, the railroad workers help him, Tommy helps him, that one tribe seems to like him, some monks share their breakfast with he and Tommy. Avram is always grateful, accepting the hospitality, thanking them for their help, apologizing when he commits a faux pas (like talking in a monastery with a vow of silence.)

Meanwhile, Tommy robs people at gunpoint. So he spends a lot of time riding away from people who want to string him up. But he tries to protect Avram, mostly from Avram's own innocence. It becomes a recurring gag of Tommy insisting he's not going to do some foolish thing Avram intends to do - ride in a blizzard, walk with a posse on their heels - only to end up doing said foolish thing with Avram after all. And when Tommy is wounded, Avram cares for him. Tommy treated Avram with kindness - minus the times he was calling him an asshole - and receives kindness in return.

Actually, I expected Tommy's wound to be a bigger deal. The movie glosses over it. Tommy says he'll talk him through it, and the next we see, they're sitting around a fire, Tommy drunk but otherwise fine. I guess because the movie wanted to focus on Avram feeling he wasn't fit to call himself a rabbi which, surprisingly, was not because he killed a man, but because of what he did before that.

But I also thought the movie would do more with Tommy, when he robbed the train, claiming he had a partner guarding all of the passengers from behind with a shotgun. After he departs, Avram steps out of the bathroom (behind the passengers) and takes his seat like nothing happened. I figured he would be accused of being the other robber, which would tie he and Tommy's fates together early on, but no.

Wilder plays Avram as sort of frazzled, initial enthusiasm for America and cowboys fading quickly. He always looks tired, maybe it's the beard, but he seems to move with almost grim determination. I guess he sees the whole thing as a trial from God.

Ford plays Tommy as sort of a loud, cocky idiot. He is good with a gun, and he must be good at robbing banks and trains if he hasn't been caught yet, but he loses his cool easily, and gives way to Avram at every turn. In terms of the competence to bullshit ratio, he probably runs higher on the competence end than Han Solo, but lower than Indiana Jones.

Ultimately though, Tommy's lonely; he makes it seem like a magnanimous gesture on his part to guide Avram, but I think it's an opportunity to have some company. If he makes himself useful, then this guy will spend time with him. Ford looks genuinely embarrassed when Avram calls him friend, and is shocked to be asked to be best man at Avram's wedding. Again, it's probably a matter of input influencing output. You rob people, they aren't going to treat you like a pal. You look after them, they'll look after you and want you to be around for important moments in their lives.