#comics everybody

[demi-shoggoth]

WHAT?!?

[badmusesarch]

In the 80s: 

Johnny: sees Danny

Johnny:

In 2019: 

Danny: sees Johnny

Danny: 

[itbeslikethat]

Frank Castle has been a spirit of vengeance, Frankenstein, Captain America, Black, and now he's War Machine. He is the hardest working man in comics.

[tfmatrix]

I’m....very sleepy now.

Buster has greater power than he knows, and than he can safely access at times. He is not a mere holder of a Matrix- he is a Matrix, he is raw energy stored and channeled from somewhere else, pulled through a fragile child’s body.

On rare occasion, though...there is enough. Enough energy, enough pressure, and enough of a dire need to do something that he can manage something truly spectacular.

[joshversus]

... Amazing Spider-Man (again)

As previously mentioned, I've been working my way through the entire run of Amazing Spider-Man from the beginning. I've reached 1990, through the McFarlane era and now Erik "Shitty Person" Larsen (whose early work here includes some racist caricatures so stunningly offensive I had to reread the pages to believe they'd happened, though I suppose some blame there must also be assigned to writer David Micheline). But I'm not here to talk about the fact that this era has my least-favorite art so far. No, I'm here ​to talk about ASM #339, the culmination of The Return of the Sinister Six, which contains the craziest villain plot I've ever seen, and I've read Grant Morrison comics and most of X-Men from the 1960s to the '90s. So, the basic gist is that Doc Ock has gathered the six (himself, Sandman, Electro, Hobgoblin, Mysterio, and Vulture) with a plan to use a satellite (being launched as part of a graduate student research study) to disperse a toxin into the atmosphere. They will have the only antidote, and according to Doc Ock, this will allow them to force the world to surrender to them, making them the rulers of the world. Okay. This is obviously crazytown bananapants. Holding the world hostage so that it will agree to let a supervillain be world ruler is more of a silver-age, really DC-feeling move, and feels wildly out of place by this time in the comics. Putting aside the logistical nonsense of such a thing, the plan is stupid on its face - if the poison kills without the antidote, and you give them the antidote, you've lost your bargaining chip. So that's dumb. But wait. It gets So. Much. Crazier. It turns out, it wasn't poison at all! See, Doc Ock had played the rest of the Six. His actual plan was to release this chemical to end cocaine addiction, by making it so that if you tried to use drugs after exposure, you'd suffer convulsions. IT GETS CRAZIER. The plan was, see, that the are enough wealthy and powerful cokeheads in the world that this would let him parlay the other drug, the "cure", into world-ruling power, alone. Because they're really into being coke addicts and would have no other option. Let's repeat that: the plan was to instantly force all the world's coke addicts to go cold turkey, because then they'd let him rule the world in exchange for helping them keep doing coke. Folks, this is Snowflame levels of batshit. This couldn't be more late '80s comics if it tried (1990 was still the late 80s, especially in comics). And it's still got the same problem as the original plan: you give up your leverage to make it work. And if you think you can trust a coke fiend once you've lost your hold on them... Bad plan, Doc. Just a dumb, crazy move all around.

[demi-shoggoth]

COVID-19 Reading Log, pt. 15

This batch is mostly comfort reads for me; monster manuals and books I’ve read before. Unfortunately, one in particular was decidedly uncomfortable.

76. The League of Regrettable Superheroes by Jon Morris. This book is a survey of weird superheroes, mostly from the Golden Age. The book is full color, with a short article explaining/cracking jokes about the hero on one facing page, while the other facing page is a comic page or cover. The book lumps everything from 1970 on as “the Modern Age”, but I get that splitting that up gets into both fragmentary returns (there are only two or three 90s heroes, for example). Also covered are some intentional joke character—Squirrel Girl, for example. There are some characters in here I genuinely want to read the comics of, like Mother Hubbard, who’s a rhyming, potion brewing witch who fights fairy tale gnomes and giants.

77. Lusus Naturae by Rafael Chandler. The book is written for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, a game with all the tastelessness of FATAL but a higher art budget. It’s supposedly a monster manual for horror-inflected games, but the tone varies wildly from over the top gore to robots to standard post D&D fantasy to a genuine comic book supervillain. The gore is really truly over-the-top; the first monster is kind and pleasant, except when it liquefies human children to mix with resin and sculpt into plinths. This kind of crude shock value is nearly omnipresent in the book, as well as a ton of forced impregnation, sex-obsession and general toxic misogyny. A lot of the monsters don’t seem fun even in a horror context—they rely on damned if you do, damned if you don’t gotchas, where killing them only makes things worse. In addition to the deeply unpleasant material, the mechanics also show huge gaps between concept and execution. For example, the ideologue is a monster said to be an entire pocket universe, and it attacks by destroying whole solar systems within itself. It has 5 HD and that attack deals 1d12 damage. The worst book I’ve actually finished for this project. I feel like downloading it has put me on some sort of watch list.

78. The Legion of Regrettable Supervillains by Jon Morris.  Supervillains are more my speed than superheroes, anyway. This book is very much of a piece with its predecessor. Some characters in this book are villains that battle heroes from the other one. For example, 711 is a superhero whose alter ego is locked in prison, so he sneaks out to fight crime; his enemy Brickbat (he dresses like a bat and throws bricks at people, of course) appears in this one. There are several fairly prominent Marvel characters who show up in this book—Stilt-Man, MODOK and Batroc the Leaper all make appearances. Again, because I like supervillains, I feel like there’s a few strong candidates who got left out of this one. No Armless Tiger Man? No mention of the Outsider that fought Silver Age Batman? (The Outsider, btw, was a silver-skinned monster who could communicate telepathically and control objects from miles away. Also, he was undead Alfred the butler. Too bad Michael Caine never got to play him).

79. Endless Realms Creature Compendium, project lead Kirsty Garbe. Read in an attempt to wash the foul taste of Lusus Naturae out of my mouth, this book mostly succeeded. Endless Realms is a RPG that falls into the category of “fantasy heartbreaker”; it clearly wants to be the next D&D, plus more. The “more” in this case is more mechanics like Fire Emblem and more furry player races. Lots of elemental rock-paper-scissors mechanics, and these mechanics provide the fuel for many of the monsters. There’s elementals for each element, corrupt spirits for each element, and dragons that represent both pure elements and mixes thereof. The book wears its influences on its sleeve—it pinches myconids from D&D, boggards from Pathfinder, and some of its gem dragons have the personalities of their respective Steven Universe characters. The book’s creativity is strongest in the creatures of the Dream realm, many of which are truly weird and alien. All of the art is done by the same artist, Jennifer Elliott, which lends a unified vision to the project. Plus, she’s put all of her art online for free if you want to check it out. That’s how I heard of this book in the first place.

80. Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. This book, about the relationships between fungi and other life, has been getting a lot of press lately. The book is mostly themed on the topic of symbiosis, of which fungi are well attuned, through sub-topics such as lichens, mycorrhizal associations with roots and human uses of fungi. The author has a sense of awe and wonder about biology, which I appreciate. There are both color plates and black and white illustrations (drawn with ink-cap mushroom ink!), all of which are lovely. My one complaint with the book is the absolute gung-ho nature of the author about hallucinogenic mushrooms and consciousness expansion—the potential hazardous effects of LSD and psilocybin aren’t even mentioned once, and even ergotism is basically glossed over.