World's End #13

Is reading the cover sufficient? I think I've gotten the entire gist of this issue and can just move on now.

I know people hate hearing about other people's dreams but since I hate the people reading my blog, I'm going to talk about the dream I had last night. But I'll spare everybody the details because I don't want my retelling of my dream to turn into the next World's End. Maybe a one sentence synopsis with one extra scene of detail will be enough.

Last night, I dreamt that I was working for Amanda Waller in an adult daycare for addicts and people with mental illnesses which was owned by Cupid. At one point, Amanda Waller was speaking with me and she was covered in chunky bits of flour and dough. Once she noticed, she sighed and began to explain it to me. I said, "I don't even want to know. I don't care. The mystery is more intriguing to me than the explanation."

Here's the thing about the dream that I won't forgive my brain for: it was skinny Amanda Waller. You too, brain? You too?

One thing I find truly interesting about dreams is how your brain can build an entire world for your consciousness that is somehow partitioned off from your dream character's knowledge. I woke up about the time it was revealed that Cupid owned the daycare center, realizing that the revelation had been foreshadowed in multiple ways earlier in the dream. Sure, maybe my brain did that "A-ha moment" thing writers do all the time where the connections of what they've written earlier only later reveal themselves to be something they hadn't considered but it all winds up making perfect sense. But it's also possible that aliens wrote the scene for me to experience and then injected the scenario directly into my head while I slept. It's like a fifty-fifty chance that it's either of those. And maybe a ten percent chance that it's something else.

Who is the Avatar of the Red?! I saw the cover of Earth-2 #30 already and think it might be Trigon. So the Avatar of the Red might be a bit of a cosmic rapist.

Huntress has become the Fury of Famine and joined her sisters, The Other Three Horsewomen of Apokolips. The other three Horsewomen were having trouble once the Avatar of the Blue, Cthulhu, arrived. But The Fury of Famine was trained by Batman and this is a DC Comic book. So not even a Great Old One can stand up to the Batman trademark. I bet H.P. Lovecraft is rolling over in his eternally burning pit of shit.

This issue is called "Burden." Who decided that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush? Is that adjusted for inflation?

The Huntress decides that killing the Avatars isn't as much fun as making them feel guilty for loving each other. That's because she represents the Famine of the Soul! That makes her the least scary Horsewoman of the bunch to me since I know the soul is just a metaphor for hunger used by people that aren't currently starving from real hunger. Christians should come up with some commercials that parody those Snickers ads where a celebrity that everybody hates is being a complete dick and then somebody gives them a Snickers so they can calm the fuck down. But the Christian commercial should show somebody murdering babies until Kirk Cameron comes up and hands them a Bible and then they turn into a righteous motherfucker who now realizes that infanticide is wrong.

Hawkcop has a point that I've been making since I was like three years old. Nobody would understand or hear The Flash if he weren't slowing down to make his speech comprehensible.

Meanwhile in Chicago, Dick Grayson is still crying about his life turning to shit in the last few issues. He should probably be regretting throwing his kid on the train and not going with him. I still don't understand why that happened. Hey, comic book writers, can you please stop making characters do things just to ramp up the drama? After Constantine took over the train, there was no reason why Dick couldn't have gotten on with his son and his wife's corpse. But I guess Little Dick (whose name, I think, is John Peter (I know, right?)) needs to grow up an orphan to become a great new legacy hero once he makes it to Earth-Main-Earth. Can't have Twofer Dick Grayson and Twofer Babs Gordon crossing over though because that's just the kind of confusing thing that brought a Crisis to Infinite Earths!

Ted Grant knocks out Dick Grayson, picks him up, and then outruns a tidal wave. Not a realistic tidal wave but one of those Godzilla took a shit off the coast of Japan and now waves taller than skyscrapers are raining down on Tokyo Tower kind of tidal waves.

Remember when I mentioned Ted Grant was pretty old so maybe there was still hope that Yolanda Montez would be DC's future Wildcat? Remember that? Because, um, well...what's the best way to serve up "Death of Hope"?

It probably should have been a Red Lantern, actually.

Desaad cackles as he watches the Avatar of the Red beat the crap out of a bunch of Kryptonians simply by turning into different animals.

Up on Apokolips, Commander Khan decides to use the ship Sloan booby-trapped as a weapon against Darkseid. And then The Atom dies the most boring death of any character in the whole history of literature.

World's End #13 Rating: No change. Atom's death is so boring that I've already forgotten how he dies. But at least a cavern under the Earth is now named Atom's Haven in his honor! Some honor. I bet in no time, the teenagers are going to be referring to it as "Atom Shaven." Then they'll spray paint graffiti all over the walls so that they'll soon be covered with renderings of The Atom naked save for his mask, revealing his lack of pubic hair.