What I Bought 5/28/2022 - Part 3

Seemed appropriate to give the title wrapping up its own post. In the meantime, I'm off to try and help my dad with some errands, so expect reviews of old movies to start showing up in the near future.

The Rush #6, by Si Spurrier (writer), Nathan Gooden (artist), Addison Duke (colorist), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (letterer) - Does his gun shoot spiders? That would either be very cool, or extremely terrifying.

Caleb, Nettie's son, is the "Carrion Kid," and while he can, explains how he became this creature. Gooden does an excellent job of shifting Caleb between terrifying and pitiful without really changing his overall form. All the more because it depends on whether Caleb remembers who he is at any given moment. 

The land calls to people, what they're obsessed by, and twists them accordingly. But the Mountie, LaPointe, he understands a new set of rules. Possession, ownership, deeds, property. And that keeps the magic of the valley out of the town. Unless someone breaks the seal. Again, it's a nice touch. The idea that no one "owned" the land until LaPointe and these others folks showed and said they did. They can try to impose their rules on the land, and it may even work for a time, but it's weak magic in a sense. 

Maybe the people in Brokehoof even know it. For LaPointe's confidence, for the fact the beings (colored a sort of faded neon green and pink, which is kind of unsettling against the otherwise mundane colors Duke uses) sent to the town stand impotent at its boundaries even after he lights them on fire, the townsfolk don't go about their business. They stand there and watch. Like they know how easily this could shift. All it takes is one person deciding they're done with that shit to upend it.

Seeing Nettie had to grant her son release from this prison with a rock to his skull, it is fair to say she's done with that shit. More than willing to offer her life to the Pale, to give it the strength to end this. But that's not how it goes. This whole series, Nettie has been safe from the threats, been immune to the traps of the valley, because she's not operating on the same wavelength as everyone else. So it fits that she can't offer her life. There's also probably something about not allowing grief and loss to consume you, but I'm less steady on that as a theme, seeing as M.P. seems to have succumbed to that at the end.

It might actually be more in line with the theme of the sacrifices a parent makes. Nettie wants to put everything down, but she can't. She has to be there to the end to see it through. M.P. could probably upend the boundary marker, but only if he could avoid being killed by the Pale or the zombie things. Since he's infected with the obsession much like the rest of the townsfolk, I'm not sure he could.

Brokehoof is razed to the ground. LaPointe is dragged down to the site of his initial crime to pay the toll he owes and things return to some sort of normal. When I say that, I don't know if "normal" means the land will still pull people towards it by their obsessions, or if that was broken at the end as well. I'm thinking not.

I need to think a bit on the difference between M.P. and Nettie. M.P. has known his love's been dead six years, yet keeps up the lie. Is it because he was using it as an excuse to keep hunting gold, or is the difference Nettie truly believed Caleb was still alive until the moment she had to end his life herself? Nettie truly did just want to find Caleb and take him home, while M.P. may have truly wanted to gold at first to build a life with his beloved Hennie, but that ceased to be the real reason when she did. At heart, he was just as obsessed with the gold as everyone else, and that love had gone away somewhere along the line?

What I Bought 4/30/2022 - Part 1

Turns out part of the reason some stuff hasn't been shipping when it was supposed to is possibly due to paper shortages. Huh, that's not ominous or anything. But I do have the four comics from April I was still looking for. They even split into neat pairs. Two written by Si Spurrier, which is where we'll start.

Step by Bloody Step #3, by Si Spurrier (writer), Matias Bergara (artist), Matheus Lopes (colorist), Jim Campbell (glyphologist) - I assume the little triangles are like one of those wreaths Roman emperors wear, but it still looks stupid.

The relationship between the girl and the giant continues to deteriorate. The girl is entranced by the people she sees, and the giant seems to be growing either despondent or frustrated as she shoves it away. Which is when that princey guy on the cover sends the father of the family that tried to befriend the girl to lure her into a fancy party. The giant's given its own room, but isn't around as the girl tries all sorts of food and drink, then gets wooed by the prince and, eesh, I don't know how old he is (or her for that matte) but it sure looks like there's a troubling age disparity there.

Meanwhile, there's an army of the goblin/zombie looking types preparing a siege. The prince has the daughter of that guy that lured the girl in dressed up like the girl, and sends her out alone at the army. She dies, the giant draws a false conclusion and it kills a lot of people. When i say "a lot", I mean like hills of bodies. Then when it figures out it was duped and turns back on the prince's forces, it gets obliterated. Well, crap.

Bergara likes to use these layouts with one large panel to establish setting or some thing important, and then smaller reaction panels around it. When the prince guy shows up in some flying golden boat, that's get most of the page space as everyone watches it descend. There's one small panel in the corner showing the father with a big forced smile and some retainer's bland face behind him, and below that, another panel showing the retainer is jamming a knife against the father's back. The pages showing all the fancy clothes and food of the big party, interspersed with close-ups of the child eating or drinking, enchanted by the whole thing.

There's one especially nice sequence, right after the child takes a sip of something where we the giant wide-eyed, then something cracks at the base of the tree where the story began. The final panel is a hand between us and the child. So often that's been the giant keeping her away from people, but this time, it's the prince reaching towards her, asking to dance. All the things the giant's been trying to keep her from (for some reason) are finally available to her, and it seems like it's a bad thing. Unless Spurrier and Bergara are just messing with my preconceived notions. We don't know what the end goal for the child is. Maybe this is better for her. Hard for me to buy that this prince guy isn't an imperialist piece of shit, though.

The Rush #5, by Si Spurrier (writer), Nathan Gooden (artist), Addison Duke (colorist), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (letterer) - Sir, you might want to look behind you. Or maybe not. Might prefer not to see it coming.

Nettie shoots the "elk" (that's what they call it, and I guess the antlers are right, but the face looks like a moose to me) and kills it, which seems to surprise the hell out of both the Pale and the Carrion Kid. There's even a panel of the two of them pausing from their fight to just stare. The elk turns out to be a man, and what's more, the peculiar nature of Brokehoof seems broken. People are scratching gold out from beneath their skin, the Pale isn't killing the new prospectors, people are no more ga-ga over gold than they normally are.

Nettie, meanwhile, meets with Inspector LaPointe, who explains the identity of both the man who was an elk, and the man who became the Pale. Or, he explains a version of it, right before he reveals he's been the one profiting from selling Caleb's stake, over and over again. The good inspector wasn't affected by the gold fever, because he found a better way to profit from it. He's ready to get rid of Nettie as well, though he tries to dress it up as justice because of something she confesses from before she came here, but none of us are buying that. He may have underestimated how well he's got the system with the supernatural out there figured, though.

Nettie's sharp turn towards LaPointe makes me wonder if the ritual he describes seeing in the flashback wasn't about to recur, before the conversation took a turn. It certainly seemed like there was some godless rutting about to happen, and Otsmane-Elhaou was using wavy lines to connect the speech bubbles to the speaker, the way he typically has when someone sees to be falling under the particular spell of this place. Although maybe not, he uses them when Nettie is terribly confused and horrified by what's going on as well.

I don't understand exactly why the first ritual took place; maybe something in the land itself sensing an opportunity. A niche that was available for a predator. That might explain the Pale hanging up victims in a cabin to let their blood feed those pitcher plants. I guess we'll see what the final issue brings on this one, too.

What I Bought 4/4/2022 - Part 2

Wednesday was all about second issues, but today is for fourth issues. Including the end of one mini-series.

Impossible Jones #4, by Karl Kesel (writer/inker), David Hahn (penciler), Tony Avina (colorist), Comicraft (letterers) - The old ball n' chain isn't interested in a gold mine, just in making sure Impossible Jones gets the shaft. Eh, that's not a great merging of two lamentations upon the misery of marriage.

Fresh off her first outing as a "hero", Isabelle goes looking for Jimmy. She finds his apartment wrecked, and Fosca snooping around. Fosca's finally recognized Isabelle, and knows what's happened to her, though she doesn't seem to be responsible. She at least gives Isabelle a lead on where to find Jimmy, who's about to lose his arm since he can't get the device they stole off. Time for Impossible Jones' second super-villain battle, and it doesn't go much better than the first until Even Steven shows up. 

Though you can see Isabelle gaining more confidence in her abilities. Hahn draws her not only using multiple arms, but different types. Human arms with boxing gloves, tentacles, rocklike arms. She's not surprised at what she can do anymore, either, which is a nice way to show progression. Though when Homewrecker gets in a really good shot, Isabelle notes she feels a lot of somethings break, but she's still up and fighting a couple pages later. So it may be an unconscious thing, her expanding the limits of her powers without realizing it.

So, four issues to get us back to where the issue 1 started, Impossible Jones with a stolen necklace she retrieved from a villain. We got her origin, though there are still mysteries afoot about who did this to her, why, and what exactly they did. She doesn't know where Jimmy ended up thanks to the device, and there's an unscrupulous former fed turned scientist who knows the true identity of the city's newest hero. She seems to have found a way to make the hero thing pay, but I feel like word of that is going to get around.

I don't know. The notion seemed to be, thief gets superpowers, pretends to be hero while finding the one who set her up. But we didn't get to "finding the one who set her up," because while Fosca certainly set up Isabelle's betrayal, she isn't the one who threw her in the weird science machine that gave her these powers. And the question of who did do that doesn't seem to be on Isabelle's mind any longer, since it apparently doesn't merit mention in her internal monologue at the end of the issue. I'm not disappointed in the mini-series; I'd certainly be interested in Kesel and Hahn doing more with the character. More dissatisfied, I guess. A lot of tease, but not much payoff.

The Rush #4, by Si Spurrier (writer), Nathan Gooden (artist), Addison Duke (colorist), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (letterer) - First wilderness rule: No eye contact with a bloody-eyed child.

Nettie's ready to throw in the towel, and finally gives in to the polite Mountie's urging that she leave. She's not the only one, and the find once they get to the edge of Brokehoof that spring has arrived, just not in that blighted crater. And not everyone is allowed to leave, as the Pale arrives on its giant spider to inform them. Those who are far enough gone the gold is appearing beneath their skin, must stay. They belong to the ground. That includes M.P., who we see has begun digging at his arms at some point in a panel where Duke colors his arm noticeably red than his face and Gooden draws pointy bumps from under the skin. Otsmane-Elhaou adds in a "schlooorb" sound effect in a squiggly golden font that just looks unpleasant. 

At least a few object and try to fight it out with a man with a wormhole for a face and a giant spider for a steed. That goes as well as you'd expect. Nettie tries to retreat to town with M.P., but they're intercepted by the Pale and the spider. But they can't kill her, or they won't. The pale phrases it as the latter, but I kind of suspect it's the former. She's not her for greed or wealth, she's not tainted by whatever brought all this madness forth.

And it's getting worse, because even as we learn the Mountie used Nettie as bait, the weird winged creature shows up to attack the Pale. Then a giant golden salmon bursts from a frozen stream to speak to them. Then the giant, gold crying moose makes an appearance.

Is Nettie's presence what's causing all this? She has consistently shown no interest in the gold, only in finding Caleb. Even the Pale knows it, because it uses that to barter for its life, and then the "Carrion Kid" attacks. So these creatures aren't all on the same side, or there are rules they have to abide by, and the Pale was breaking one of them. I'd figure each of the monsters used to be a person, since Tsikamin (aka Bill) seems to know who the Pale used to be. But that would mean the moose used to be a person, too. Maybe. Bill said there's a legend about something that happens when there's a crime, or a man becomes "over-mighty", but what was the crime, and why does it manifest in people digging gold from under their skin?

All sorts of questions, and the only thing I feel reasonably sure of is Nettie won't enjoy the answers she gets about Caleb. The Pale said he's alive, he didn't say anything about what state he's in, or if he's still human. I think he might be the Carrion Kid now.

What I Bought 2/28/2022 - Part 4

We finally reach the tail end of the stuff from prior months, but next week I'll get into everything from last week I bought. I'm still a month behind on The Rush, but I guess it's a good sign there don't seem to be copies available where I look. I'll take it that positive view, at least.

The Rush #3, by Si Spurrier (writer), Nathan Gooden (artist), Addison Duke (colorist), Nassan Otsmane-Elhaou (letterer) - Those are some weird sculptures.

The layer Nettie hired is dead, of course, but some guys tracked down a bear and killed it, so that's that. Never mind it was definitely not a bear that did it. Inspector LaPointe tries again to get Nettie to leave town, but only succeeds in explaining how he ended up assigned this post. M.P. arrives, bringing gold from the site in Caleb's name, but Nettie vocally doesn't care about that, which enrages the prospectors. Still, Nettie and M.P. visit the site again, along with Tsikamin (or Bill), who works with animal hides. They find the site was "salted", meaning someone spread gold on the surface to suggest it was there. Further discussion is tabled as they hear someone dying again and find a pretty horrific cabin, plus the giant moose, now crying gold.

There's a couple of funny bits in this issue, strange as that might seem. Nettie's letter notes how quick the citizens are to give things names. The creature that killed the lawyer is dubbed "The Carrion Kid", because Nettie compared it to a crow in her first description. When LaPointe introduces her to Tsikamin and mentions he has another name, she guesses "The Redskin Kid". This goes to the second gag, where Bill will make an observation, and Nettie will ask if he's basing it off his tribe's oral history, or spiritual correspondance, only to be told no, he read it in a book. When Bill makes a comment about whether she thinks he can track the Pale because he can commune with the ghosts of the soil, she shoots back, no, can you follow the giant spider tracks in the snow.

The smartassery makes me laugh, but it also helps flesh Nettie out as a character. Even if she spent years as a dance hall girl, as she tells LaPointe, this place, this situation is outside her experience. She can't help falling back on hearsay, the sort of stuff men in taverns say about Native Americans. Plus, a certain level of superiority she feels over the people who willingly live here, chasing gold. I'm not sure the land is so happy with her disinterest in the gold. The reaction of the prospectors certainly seemed outsized and disturbingly synchronized. The way Gooden draws them, it's hard to tell what they might do, to her or themselves. M.P. may be like them soon. He started scratching at his arm about the time they began pursuing the Pale. I have got to catch up on this book.

Ice Canyon Monster #2, by Keith Rommel (writer), Jonnuel Ortega (penciler), Maury Tanaka (colorist) - I don't know what he's carrying at his hip, but years of anime make me think it's a katana and short sword. Which wouldn't fit the cultural setting whatsoever, but that's my brain.

Akutak's a shaman. He's not pleased with what's happening to Greenland, so he carves an idol and chucks it into the water, summoning forth a giant squid monster. Although between it's bulging eyes and the pointy teeth, it reminds me of Bob the Killer Goldfish from Earthworm Jim. It first appears to, Fina, a member of a fishing vessel that falls in the sea. It keeps him from being eaten by a shark, by eating the shark itself. Plus his leg. Then it cripples the propellers of a large shipping vessel. Meanwhile, the fisherman's friends aren't sure what to make of his story about what he saw beneath the waves.

It's odd the creature first emerges in a panel that states "KILL! KILL! KILL! Is all it knows!", but it kills no one. OK, the fishermen are local, maybe they're protected by how Akutak created the talisman. But it didn't attack anyone on the cargo ship. The only thing it's killed so far are a couple of sharks, because it was hungry. And I'm not sure Akutak put any limits on it. The captions state he sees himself as a doctor administering a cure, and what happens after is none of his concern. I'm pretty sure that is not how being a doctor works. Maybe the creature has to warm up before it starts killing, but, again, doesn't really match the introduction.

Ortega's style is busy in places. He works better with small panels, where he has limited space. When they go to full-page splashes, he goes overboard on the amount of shading and extra lines to try and suggest musculature or the shape of the face. In the smaller panels, either he or Maury Tanaka do a good job of shading to suggest those contours. Other than with the squid monster, I think he's trying to draw people are fairly realistic looking in clothes and body types.

I don't really understand why they picked some of the full-page splashes they did. One is the doctor standing in a doorway, telling Fina's friends Fina's been saying some weird stuff, and another is three pages later, Fina in the hospital bed, talking about the shark taking him underwater. With the latter, I can sort of the see the thinking. It's one big image, so maybe the reader stops and really takes in that Fina was getting ready to die. but it's just Fina sitting in a hospital bed, staring at his lap as he talks (and now I'm wondering why he doesn't at least get a shirt or hospital gown). The image doesn't really seize the eye the way I think you're hoping if you're giving it a full-page.

That said, I am sort of curious if Fina and his friends are going to be recurring characters in this. Are they going to confront the monster again? Are they going to figure out who's responsible and confront him? I don't know. It's at least got me for another issue.

What I Bought 12/17/2021 - Part 1

Turns out there has been a comics store about 2 miles from my apartment for about a year. I was going to try it last week, and it was closed because the owner has COVID. Well, maybe this week. So I went to one of my fallbacks the next town over. Got three of the four books I wanted.

The Rush #2, by Si Spurrier (writer), Nathan Gooden (artist), Addison Duke (colorist), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (letterer) - Not that I'd recommend making a habit of shooting at ravens - they got long memories - but a derringer's probably not the best option.

Things pick up shortly after the first issue ended, with Nettie waking up in the Mountie's cabin. Lapointe not only accepts her story of seeing a man in black with a giant spider, but explains the man is called "The Pale", though his motives are unknown. He never steals possessions, just the bodies of his victims. Including Nettie's son, Caleb. Nettie's dreams that night convince her Caleb isn't dead, so she and M.P. go to investigate the claim her son supposedly made, despite not being of legal age.

They find three other men there - or is it four? - including one Nettie's sure she's seen before. There's violence, but brief. Then Nettie encounters a giant demon moose. It doesn't hurt her, and she finds Caleb's Bible. Returning to town, she hires a lawyer who's getting out of there to go investigate who filed the claim in her son's name. The guy makes it about one step, before he's killed by something.

Spurrier's both explaining a few more things, and setting up more mysteries. There's more than just the Pale and it's giant spider out there now. And this is the second issue we've seen a man cut open his arm and pull out a piece of gold. As though it just appeared there. The first time was at the very beginning, and the Pale arrived seconds later to kill him. This time, Nettie takes it after the man runs off, and uses it to pay the lawyer. Who dies as soon as she turns her back. Lapointe mentioned those who aren't seized with gold fever seem to be allowed to leave, but that raises the question of the lawyer. Of course, it could just be Lapointe and everyone else is fumbling for an explanation, and there is no rhyme or reason to who dies. Or that logic only applies to one creature. M.P. says he seeks gold to raise his social station for a woman he loves. Curious to see if that protects him, assuming it's true (or remains true.)

Nettie's having strange dreams and visions, and Gooden gives those wavy or irregular panel borders, like puzzle pieces that fit, but oddly. Duke also shifts the color scheme for those to more of a sepia tone. They also gave the moose and whatever the thing on the last page is blank circles for eyes. Either white voids against their dark bodies, or like bizarre lights shining out. Duke otherwise keeps the colors sort of dingy and washed out. Nobody looks bright and shiny in this place. The skies are always overcast. The brightest panels come with violence, when Duke puts a lot of relatively bright yellow and red across the background. Makes for a nice contrast, the abrupt change from one panel to the next.

Defenders #4, by Al Ewing and Javier Rodriguez (storytellers), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Doesn't look like Stephen can sit out of Civil War this time.

The Fourth Cosmos is a bunch of archetypes. Cloud, who gets to narrate this issue, describes them as living ideas, but trapped in an unending cycle. They fight, over different things, but always they fight. They change, until it resets and they start over. Zota's shuffling the deck, though, bringing the archetype of Galactus, the devourer, death, whatever, to end all this so Zota can be God-King of a new universe. Cloud evolves themselves into a new, non-binary form, and is able to convince the archetypes to fight together, sending Zota running for the Third Cosmos. 

I know this is all deliberate, Masked Raider leading the Defenders by the nose to bring about what he needs to happen to Zota (namely, Zota undergoing whatever change will make him into the Raider), but it's getting fucking exhausting. It reminds me of the game Metro: Last Light, when I really wanted to kill that one guy, and the game kept stringing me along. "Nope, he got away. Maybe next time!" Let me have my vengeance already!

Yeah, it's the journey. Zota needs to go through all of this or he can't undergo whatever perspective shift he needs. And in the process, maybe the Defenders are making a difference. The Surfer giving baby Galen an impression of the lives he will take to carry with him into his next life as Galactus. Cloud, staying behind as an archetype in the Fourth Cosmos, who will hopefully carry over into subsequent cosmoses.

Should I trust Word Hippo that the plural of cosmos is "cosmoses"? Feels like "cosmosi" would be better, but my spellcheck balks at that, and not the former.

Fortunately, there's Rodriguez' artwork to look at. The various archetypes being recognizable, but still their own thing. Like the Hawkeye one having a bow, but a bullseye for a head. Goes with a very pointillist coloring style for this issue, which fits with earlier superhero comics. Although his "What-Must-Be" has strong elements of Sienkiewicz' Magus in it. Mostly in the face. Making the argument his work was so far away from the standard, the Buscema/Kirby/Kane/Curt Swan/whoever style typical to superhero comics prior, that it represents something totally new to the form and the universe. 

But taken to the conclusion of what it's supposed to represent, wouldn't that mean Sienkiewicz' art was going to be the death of superhero comics, or at least an end to the endless cycle, the constant "middle of the story" serial approach? That doesn't seem right.

What I Bought 11/5/2021

Spent the weekend at my dad's, so expect a series of posts about older movies over the next several weeks. In the meantime, the lean weeks for new comics continue. One book last week, a first issue.

Rush #1, by Si Spurrier (writer), Nathan Gooden (artist), Addison Duke (colorist), Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou (letterer) - The red background and the font for the title are what originally caught my eye in the solicitations.

In 1899, there's something that looks like a man in a bowler hat and tie, roaming the Yukon wilds, killing people. A giant spider seems involved, somehow. Nettie Bridger doesn't know anything about that. What she knows is her preacher husband took their son up north with him to spread the Word (and get rich), came back alone, and had been doing his best to avoid her. So she set north to find Caleb, hiring an old trapper of the name Makepeace Thyme (did he just pick his name from whatever storefront signs he could actually read?) as a bodyguard of sorts.

She's having no luck in Dawson City, but an old prospector does eventually approach, saying he'd seen Caleb in a town called Brokehoof. Before they get there, something wipes out their sled dogs. The prospector starts calling wildly to someone before attacking Nettie and Moonpeace, then getting a bullet to the skull from a Mountie. Who tells Nettie Caleb's been dead a month. Welcome to town.

Nettie says, right before everything goes wrong, she can't conceive of any interest in anything but finding her son. This in a rather brusque response to Moonpeace trying to make conversation about his wife. I would say it probably pays to be more polite to the person you expect to protect you, but I guess they didn't have manners in 1899. Anyway, now she knows the fate of her son, if not the details, so I guess she's going to be at a loose end for an issue or two.

Beyond that, I don't know. We haven't seen more than a long-range glimpse of Brokehoof, so it's hard to say what the town will be like. Gold rush towns in Westerns tend to be wild, overpriced crapholes, but this is one where the town is menaced by some strange thing, so fear's going to be an element. And Nettie does not seem prepared for this sort of thing at all, and I'm not sure there's really anyone she can rely on.

Gooden has a sort of busy art style. Lot of little marks on the faces, shadows under the eyes. Reminds me a little of Denys Cowan, but the linework isn't as firm. Jawlines and faces aren't as pronounced as with Cowan (although I guess with Cowan I don't know how much to attribute to Sienkiewicz). Either way, Gooden's work does give the characters a definite look of wear. Nettie shows the least of it, but she's also the one who has been living in a city (such as it is) until just recently.

Duke's colors are sort of washed out, especially in the scenes in the wilderness. Duke uses a shade of blue that seems to suck the color away from everything else. Like the cold is leeching it away, or maybe that the prospectors are pouring all of themselves into this place. The exceptions are blood, and gold. They aren't colored brilliantly, no neon hues, but they still stand out against their surroundings in a way nothing else does.