Planetary #9 (April 2000)

Now playing in a fictional comic book that treats fiction as reality: Planet Fiction!

Planetary #9 (April 2000)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, David Baron, and Michael Heisler
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by John Layman

Because our time as human beings is finite, every interest we take during that time means we're sacrificing a potential interest in every other interesting thing. That was an obvious statement but it led to me thinking about what our interests project to others about ourselves, our choices, and, ultimately, our secret inner being. I suppose I'm just using deconstruction¹ to analyze others by decentering the very thing that they provide as their center. Sure, nobody is just one thing they love or embrace or build their lives around. But when you actively, and on purpose (which seems maybe slightly embarrassing?), portray yourself as "a Disney adult", you're telling me about the parts of you that are missing — which *must* be missing — for you to embrace such a paltry and corporatized persona.² I'm going to assume that you've never read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (at least not while thinking about Goofy and Minnie to such an extent that the words you read never actually reached your brain³). Not that Heart of Darkness means anything here (or does it? Why would I have picked it? What could you possibly extrapolate from my choice of such an ambiguous and — let's face it — fairly boring text?); it's just if you get off on Disney coffee in your Disney mugs on a sunny Disney morning in your Disney pajamas⁴, you might as well set up a flashing neon "No Vacancy" sign on your head.

Sorry! Sorry! I didn't mean for this to become a "Let's bash Disney adults" bit! It's not the fault of Disney lovers that their love of Disney had to become an all-consuming passion thanks to the Internet! Some of you older folks remember the days when you could be the biggest fan of something without it consuming your entire life because you only had to prove your love of that thing to, at most, one or two dozen other people. But now with Instagram and Tik Tok and Facebook and Bluesky, you really need to ratchet up your fandom to unheard of levels. So that's not helping with the amount of things you're missing out on to your top interests in life. I feel bad for kicking Disney adults when they're probably already huddled on the ground in a fetal position because they saw me coming their way with my Kaiser Blade of Epic Judgment at the ready. I feel bad! I just meant to say that no matter your interest, vapid or academic or philosophical or hedonist, it just means the energy you're expending on that interest cannot go to engaging with other things. It's simply impossible to engage with everything life has to offer. And, often, the thing you are noticeably engaged in tells other people things you probably aren't engaged in. Like if you're a Crypto bro, you're probably not big on social justice. Or community. Or anything that doesn't have to do with you explicitly and your extra-fake currency (being that, you know, all currency is a fantastic metaphor which we've all agreed to simply to make living among others easier).

My interest in comic books and self-pleasure probably tells you more about me than you'd like to know (but not enough to believe that I'd ever jerk off into a sink. Why would you even think that?! So gross). But I have to admit that sometimes knowing what a person is missing out on isn't as easy as when you see somebody super worked up by Conservative politics or Christianity. You always know what parts of humanity and our shared experience are missing from them! Like when a person I know is so into music that they recognize more bands than I ever knew existed. What have they given up to have listened to so much music? I have no idea! I couldn't even guess! I just know that the whole of music⁵ is something I've missed out on due to my pursuit of literature, comic books, and computer roleplaying games. Imagine how much more music I could have experienced in my life if I hadn't replayed Wizardry uncountable times?! And, sure, I could have listened to music as I played but that wouldn't have helped because music played while you're doing other things becomes almost nothing. You cease to hear it on an experiential, memory inducing level and it just becomes the thing that's happening around you as you concentrate on the actual thing you're doing.

I'm not sure I've worked through this thought on a level that would be acceptable to a newspaper editor or a college English teacher but I'm done with it now⁶. This introduction to my comic book review was brought to you by the term "Planet Fiction" and The Pixies' version of Neil Young's "Winterlong". I'm just providing the alchemical ingredients that brought me to that line of thinking. And now boredom and my short attention span are moving me away from it!

Hmm. I wonder if the idea of a "line of thinking" is a way to view some of the themes in Pynchon's Mason & Dixon?

This is how it begins. Beautiful.

Ellis and Cassaday dedicated this issue to Grant Morrison for some reason. I wonder if Alan Moore read that and let out a massive fart⁷?

The story begins with a fictional farmhouse pierced by a fictional rocket under an actual moon (fictionally stylized). Is this a retelling of the Superman story? I don't remember! The only thing I remember is the title "Planet Fiction" which excited something primal in me, as if the cells of my body hold the memory of how great this issue was but my brain couldn't be bothered to remember because it was thinking, "I wonder how quickly we could defeat Werdna if we started up another run of Wizardry?"

This story begins in England, 1997. So if it is a retelling of the Superman story, it'll be more critical of class consciousness than "a boy from rural America would obviously be honest and compassionate and, um, hate queers, probably". That third thing wasn't supposed to be there but then my cynicism was all, "Fuck that rural people propaganda bullshit that they're honest and hard working and the backbone of the country!"

I just realized that I should have wished for the death of my cynicism when that genie gave me three wishes. But no! Instead, I'm stuck with these three eight inch tall pianists. Stupid idiot!

Ma and Pa Kentshire were never got a chance to teach little Clarkson about compassion, responsibility, and how shit Margaret Thatcher was.

The ship seems to be one of Britain's own having returned from a mission to who-knows-where. It contains one more crewmember than when it departed. It crashed in Norfolk on its return, mystifying the team behind the mission. They suspect that one of the "creative team" who was from Norfolk wrote this return into the mission knowing that the "creative team" would be silenced by the government to ensure secrecy of this fictional mission. Is the UK government now exploring fictional worlds? Is that the actual final frontier?! To go into the space of our dreams? To explore art? To rise above the mire of reality and learn about ourselves through our artistic endeavors?

Hmm. Sounds about right, actually.

Before the ship can be opened by the UK Government, mission central is breached by Planetary.

This is 1997. Elijah Snow is still self-exiled to a desert in Nevada. Meet Ambrose Chase.

I decided to go with the actual page from the comic book when introducing Ambrose Chase instead of the first thing my brain wanted me to use to introduce Ambrose Chase because I told my brain, "Nobody would fucking understand what you're doing, you stupid piece of shit." If you're into seeing my first take on things, enjoy the next image. If you don't give a shit⁸, just skip it and begin reading again after the next image.

This is 1997. Elijah Snow is still self-exiled to a desert in Nevada. Meet Ambrose Chase.

Ambrose Chase has a reality distortion field. That means he, um, distorts reality. It's good for not getting shot and people thinking you have a massive dong. Even with what sounds like an extraordinary power to do whatever he wants, Ambrose realizes Planetary may be in trouble. They know the UK ship has brought back something from Planet Fiction and I'm guessing "warping reality" doesn't mean "warping fiction" so Ambrose might be powerless to whatever came back with (and killed!) the ship's crew.

"Dr. Dowling" is mentioned by the head of Project Fiction as he discusses the project with the creature brought back from the story they created simply to see if they could explore it. Does this mean the UK also has their own "Project Artemis" run by Alternate Dimension Fantastic Four? Is Project Artemis a joint program between white supremacist imperialist nations? Does the fictional person brought back from the fictional world have three eight inch dongs like every fictional person⁹ I create in my stories?

Ambrose, getting overconfident and not relying on his power, gets himself killed. During his death scene, parts of his life flash before the reader's eyes: learning about his power as a kid; consoling Jakita about somebody who's missing (possibly the Fourth Man); raising a baby girl (which might be Jakita's baby) over his head; meeting the Fourth Man (who loves white suits) in 1994; joining the field team as the Third Man.

Doesn't the scientist who overreaches also always die?

Ambrose Chase uses his reality distortion field as he dies and his body disappears. So he's probably not dead then, right?

Jakita kills the overreaching scientist who relies on his singular knowledge of the plot being plot armor. Jakita doesn't give a fuck about the plot so, you know, his plot armor does him know good. She figures they'll sort it out later. And because Jakita leaves the reader slightly unsatisfied by killing the only guy who could end it in a meaningful way, Warren Ellis ends the story with a small information dump.

This sounds like a word problem. Should I be able to come up with a syllogism that answers the mysteries so far from these four premises?

The Ranking!
Interesting issue that wasn't really a complete story which might be why my brain didn't fully remember it but my body remembered it was important. This is just a reminder that Planetary existed before Elijah Snow joined and the history that he missed is important. Plus we're given a little puzzle at the end! The Fourth Man missing in 1997 and then Elijah Snow was found in 2000? Elijah Snow has never heard of Ambrose Chase but Ambrose Chase used his reality distorting powers as he died so maybe he caused Snow to forget about his existence? Jakita Wagner was already a member before Chase joined and Chase met the Fourth Man which almost certainly means Jakita met the Fourth Man before he disappeared so she knows more about Elijah than he does¹⁰. And the last premise given, that the fictional creature is still at large, is just, um, foreshadowing for a future encounter, I guess? Probably doesn't actually fit in with the other premises, right?!

Um, anyway, just thought I'd close out with a letter to show that it didn't take the Internet to get Conservative fans angry when their stupid political ideas are called out.

Oh! Poor Mr. Bill "Snowflake" Fartrand needs his safe space!

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¹ Correctly. Or, at least, more correctly than it gets used on tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook.
² This might sound like I'm subtweeting some friend or relation who constantly posts about Disney (and it very well could be) but it's not; I sincerely just picked "Disney adult" off the top of my head as I typed my way through the void of my Abyssian thoughts.
³ I don't mean this as an insult to the person's intelligence! I mean this as that thing we all often do as we read where we know we've gone through the motion and read the words but the meanings of those words didn't actually stick and you suddenly realize, like a literate form of highway hypnosis, that you've missed your exit and you have to go back five or six pages to get back on track. Ugh. That metaphor just caused a ten car pile-up.
⁴ No judgment as I sit in my Hot Topic women's cut Wednesday pajamas, a show that I've never seen but, after discovering that Enid, the other character on the pajamas, is a werewolf, has me pondering looking into it.
⁵ I don't mean I've missed out on "all music" by saying I've missed out on "the whole of music". I mean I've missed out on much of the landscape of music, or the whole of it, because time? Where is it? How do I have so little left to me?!
⁶ Like a cat leaving a still breathing mouse lying on the pavement with its guts hanging out.
⁷ Non-magical
⁸ Although if this is the case, how did you even read this far into the "review"? These reviews are nothing but my stupid takes!
⁹ Yes. Every single one.
¹⁰ Still working on the assumption that my memory is correct and Elijah is the Fourth Man unless that's not my memory at all and just the simple deduction which the comic book is leading everybody to.

Eee! Tess Ate Chai Tea: The Newsletter #28 (Second Week of June 2018)

E!TACT #28
Grunion Guy's Musical Corner of Music Reviews!, Doomsday Clock #5, The Unexpected #1, The Man of Steel #1, and Poetry Corner!
By Grunion Guy


Grunion Guy's Musical Corner of Music Reviews!

Natural One by The Folk Implosion
This is from the soundtrack to the movie Kids. Based on the movie being set in New York and Rosario Dawson acting in it, I think it's the prequel to the Netflix Marvel shows. This song doesn't really make any kind of impact on me at all. It's like riding a bus. It gets you from Point A to Point B where Point A is life without this song playing and Point B is life after having just heard this song but it's not playing anymore. The beat also feels like you're riding a bus. And the guy singing feels like the person who sits down next to you when there were plenty of other places to sit even though you let out a huge sigh as they were eyeing the empty seat next to you and you put on your most obvious "get the fuck away from me" body language. Anyway, I didn't buy this soundtrack for this song. I purchased it for "Spoiled" by Sebadoh because it's the song that plays at the end of the movie during the credits and because it made me cry when I first saw this film. Why? I don't know. Because I'm a pussy, I guess?
Grade: C.


Lay Down and Die by Alice Cooper
Most people can probably say they know Alice Cooper because they heard "Feed My Frankenstein" when they saw Wayne's World. Also if they've ever spent any time listening to a classic rock station, they've heard "School's Out," "No More Mr. Nice Guy," and "I'm Eighteen" about seven thousand times. And maybe they remember "Poison" when it was in MTV's video rotation. But what most people forget is that Alice Cooper is seven hundred years old. That means he's had a lot of time to write better songs than "Poison" and "Feed My Frankenstein" (both songs that would get middling ratings from this expert reviewer). So unless they're the kind of freak who can distinguish people's voices just by hearing them sing, most people probably won't recognize this as an Alice Cooper song. It sounds like something The Doors might have written if they hadn't showered for three weeks and only played half-tuned, janky instruments. Which makes sense since Alice and his bandmates worshiped all the sex The Doors were getting.
      This song is from the album Easy Action. It's one of those albums you buy after you discover a band somewhere in the middle of their career and think to yourself, "I want to hear more of this!" Then you rush out and buy one of their early albums, throw it in the tape deck, and, while listening to the first track, you check the inside cover to make sure this is the same band. That being said, I love Easy Action. It's raw and youthful but not so raw and youthful as Pretties For You which was too raw and too youthful because the finished recording was, apparently, only the rehearsal. Still, I'm a big fan of everything Alice does although he skirted the edge of my apathy with some aspects of Brutal Planet and Dragontown.
Grade: B.


Rubbin' Me the Wrong Way by Electric Six
If I were the kind of freak who can almost distinguish people's voices just by hearing them sing and was a huge Internet actually nerd who can never be wrong about anything, I would insist that Jemaine Clement sings this song. But then when Mr. Valentine begins doing his rock screech instead of his dulcet sexy David Bowie in space impression, I would have to walk away from the conversation instead of admitting I'd been mistaken. As I'm writing this review, I've been trying to fix style errors that keep cropping up in this dumb Newsletter so I haven't been listening to the song as closely as a reviewer should. I'm just going to assume this is about the same thing as Billy Squier's song, "The Stroke" (which, helpful hint, isn't a sad tale about Billy's grandfather (it also might not be about what I think it's about because I'm not sure what it might be about being that my sister would never tell me why she and her girlfriends always giggled at this song (I'm sure it's something dirty though!))).
Grade: F (That's for TinyLetter's user interface)


Winterlong by The Pixies
If you put Neil Young's "Winterlong" on the stereo and then turned the treble way up and went back in time to make sure The Pixies were using the same janky guitars that the Alice Cooper Band were using, you would get The Pixies version of "Winterlong". It wouldn't surprise me if The Pixies decided to form a band where they would play covers while hopped up on powdered sugar and Pop Tarts. In Neil Young's version, it sounds like the singer is privately mourning the inescapable and eventual end of a beautiful relationship. But in The Pixies' version, it sounds like they drove their partner away with their constant yammering on about it. That might sound like a criticism but it's just a different way of viewing a thing. I mean, I've just listened to both versions about five times each. So I have to admit I really like both versions.
     If you like songs about stuff that makes you think sad things then you would like this song! Ba na DUN! That's my impression of a kid on Reading Rainbow.
Grade: A.


Free at Last from Big River
Can I say "negro spiritual" in a music review as a smarmy white man who holds nothing sacred? Maybe I'm supposed to just say "spiritual" now? Although doesn't that white wash them? I bet I should say African-American spiritual now, right? Maybe I shouldn't have even brought it up! I certainly won't bring up any other words that might crop up in the discussion of Huckleberry Finn! Although that just brought them up, right? And when I say "them," you know I just mean one specifically.
     That was a terrible introduction to such a beautiful and moving song about a man who wants to get away from exactly that kind of introduction. I'm a terrible human being and listening to this song makes me know that I'll never bring anything even one percent as beautiful as this into the world. I'm a monster. Which probably means I'm at least better than my parents because while they brought a monster into this world, I haven't brought anything into it! Go me! Vindicated!
Grade: A.

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Comic Book Reviews!

If you follow my blog, you've probably already read these. You don't have to read them again unless you really want to. It's not like I put any secret codes in these versions of them!

Doomsday Clock #5
By Johns, Frank, and Anderson

Nostalgia's branding efforts might be a little off the rails.

Today on Facebook, my cousin Laurie said, "Your thought process fascinates me." So I decided to give everybody an insight into my thought process!

My thought process: think something nobody should ever say. Say it. Pretend you were being hyperbolic and facetious when people get annoyed. Experience your twentieth shame spiral of the day. Eat a whole carton of Oreos. Fall asleep lonely and humiliated.

Or, if I wanted to be honest (which I never am! (although sometimes I am but I'm pretending I'm being facetious and hyperbolic so that when I'm judged harshly, I can distance myself from that judgment)), it's more that when I post something to Facebook, it's usually somewhere so far down the "thought process" that all context has been lost. I suppose I could explain every single thing that led up to me having a thought that makes me laugh but that's too close to just walking around naked in public. And I would never do that! Wink, wink.

So, um, Doomsday Clock! After last issue, I had forgotten that this comic book was meant to be a severe lecture to the fans who never wanted the whimsy and fun taken out of comics but are being blamed by Geoff Johns for DC doing it anyway. That might not actually be what this book is about but it's what my issues have decided it's about anyway. What made me spontaneously remember that was this scene in the hospital where Ozymandias wound up after falling out of the LexCorp building.

Dammit. I had almost forgotten how everybody blamed and mistrusted superheroes!

Of course there's always been a long history of Gotham Police mistrusting and hating Batman (if only because he does their job better than they do and obviously has way better pay and benefits). But DC really fucked up when they decided that level of mistrust should be applied more broadly so that every citizen suddenly turned against even Superman, the universally acknowledged boy scout. I'm not a comic book historian so I don't know when that attitude began but I think it's generally acknowledged that it was a byproduct of Watchmen and similar comic books of the time. "Look at how more realistic this is! Why should a world embrace and trust masked heroes?! And Watchmen was so popular, that aspect of it must be what made so much money!" But, of course, that's the kind of thing people who didn't read Marv Wolfman's New Teen Titans believe. Because if I had to pick a starting point for when the mistrust of heroes seriously got rolling (I'm not saying it wasn't there before! It just wasn't the standard reaction of the public), I'd point to Wolfman's work trying to adapt The X-men feel to DC's superheroes. In the X-men, the "heroes" were actually mutants enrolled in a school where they could feel safe and learn to control their powers. They were hated by the public due to bigotry and a misunderstanding of what they represented to humanity's future. They were constantly attacked by "evil mutants" due to a disagreement on what mutants meant to the world. This worked as a plot point because of the bigotry aspect and the underlying difference between mutants and superheroes. But translating that to DC's world where mutants don't exist completely missed the mark. Wolfman's world became a place where The New Titans formed to help the world but never actually did. They simply created a headquarters in New York where they were constantly attacked by family members. Of course the people of New York would begin hating them for bringing danger and destruction to the city. Because they were actually doing that! And since The New Titans became DC's biggest seller for quite some time, every comic book writer on Earth learned that Wolfman's model was acceptable to readers. Instead of having heroes exist for saving the world, they could just exist to be targeted by super villains. And if that's all super villains seemed interested in then isn't it true that heroes are the root cause of all the problems with super villains? It's one thing to comment on bigotry in America by portraying people's hatred of mutants. It's a totally stupid other thing to have people hate heroes because of the destruction caused by the heroes attempting to simply save themselves from their enemies. In the first one, you side with the mutants because the people hate them for irrational reasons. In the second one, you have to side with the citizens because who wouldn't be upset if their house was destroyed and their dog was killed because The Joker was trying to kill Batman?

I've said all of that before. Sometimes, I feel that's all I have left to say about DC. At least when Priest recently had the public hating the Justice League, it was because the Justice League was racist! Not in the regular racist way where Batman is using slurs and Superman is flying around in blackface and a sombrero but in the systemic way where they don't realize they're being racist but they just are. That was at least different (even if I still wasn't happy about it).

I don't understand people who prefer heroes who are mistrusted and hated over heroes who are inspiring, loved, and embraced by the public. Wasn't the latter version the whole point of them in the first place?

Dammit! I should really read ahead before I go on a rant! Although, technically, I think this somehow proves my point about how this is all supposed to fix what went wrong with The New 52.

This issue is called "There is no God." I'm guessing at the capitalization because the font actually reads "THERE IS NO GOD". But it doesn't end in an exclamation point (or any other kind of punctuation, being a title and all) so I'm assuming it isn't meant to be yelled and it's just DC's perverse avoidance of lower case letters.

Anyway, "There is no God" is the perfect title to ruffle religious feathers. But I bet it's a set-up! I bet Geoff Johns is going to write a story about how God does exist, even if only in a metaphorical way that gives hope to people who need more than a few decades of random, chaotic life! I mean, I would like more than a few decades of life too! But I wouldn't mind if it remained meaningless. Who needs a purpose? That's just adding obligation to this precious gift! Why do people want that?! I think that's why "being inspiring" has become such a huge achievement for so many people. Because it seems to give meaning to your life without you having to actually do anything except exactly the thing you want to do. So, say, I was coming up with a completely hypothetical situation where a guy I know survived an IED attack in Iraq but the four other people in his Humvee were killed, he might want to find meaning in why only he survived. He might feel somehow responsible for carrying on in a meaningful way to make their deaths less random and nonsensical. He might also become religious because it's too painful to believe that those four other guys simply winked out of existence in a meaningless war that didn't do anything for anybody (aside from some people making a lot of money (and aside from opening up the country to more chaos and instability)). And the meaning he might find in his life is becoming the center of attention just like he always wanted but could never attain. He became a comedian who also inspires people because he's so badly burnt and disfigured, how can he tell jokes?! Now his life has meaning even if his jokes and his poetry never get any better because the people who hear and read them are Christian and patriotic supporters who can't be critical of anything he does. So if he says in a poem that his daughter is crying "alligator tears," nobody tells him that they're "crocodile tears" and that if his daughter is crying them, it means she doesn't actually care that he's off in Iraq. And when his only joke is that he was blown up and set on fire, nobody minds because he was blown up and set on fire and — look at that! — he can still stand up and tell jokes! So inspiring!

Now if my thought process were better than it is, I would delete all of that so that I don't sound like a jealous and bitter friend. But I explained my thought process earlier so you can judge me but I've got my Oreos ready to go after you misunderstand the hyperbole and facetiousness. Also, I'm not jealous and bitter. I'm supportive but critical! Which is why I didn't post what I just wrote on his [Facebook]. Because he can take supportive but I don't think he's up for critical. Especially hyperbolic and super truthful critical. Hypothetically, I mean!

Back to how this comic book is doing its part to reset the DC Universe into the Post-Zero-Hour, Pre-New 52, Post and Pre a bunch of other stuff I can hardly guess at because DC Continuity is super fucked, a news report on a hospital television reports on Hawk, Dove, Red Star, and the Rocket Reds. So maybe I was wrong about Post-Zero-Hour! Maybe this reboot is post-Crisis only? And I might be wrong about that too! Isn't the current Superman from the Crisis timeline where they actually beat the Anti-Monitor? It's hard to remember Convergence because it was super boring and terribly written. It rated 5 Flaccid Penises out of 5. Unless you're totally into flaccid penises and then it rated zero of them.

Along with the Rocket Reds and Red Star gearing up for an anti-west battle, Pozhar has stepped up to the plate as well. Or whatever you step up to in Russian baseball. Do they have something akin to baseball in Russia? Maybe cement-block-ball? If we're going by themes, it's beginning to look like we're headed back to the eighties cold war, so a reboot to pre-Crisis levels of continuity isn't completely off the table! If I didn't know Geoff Johns was writing this, I'd be tempted to guess it was Dan Jurgens.

The Cold War of this era isn't about nuclear superiority but about metahuman superiority. But that's just a superficial difference, really! What's actually happening in Watchmen 2: Doomsday Clocks is identical to what was happening in Watchmen. Which means everybody will get along at the end not when Mister Terrific teleports a fake space creature into the middle of New York but when an actual cosmic threat attacks Earth and all the American and Russian metahumans have to team up to save the day. Then everybody will be inspired and begin fucking. Right on panel! I hope.

In Moore's Watchmen, there was a thread with that kid reading the pirate book. I wasn't smart enough to know what that was about. Maybe it had something to do with how, to survive, the lead turned himself into a monster the way Ozymandias did. Or maybe it was just about the kinds of things media used to distract the populace. Who can tell?! Not me! Anyway, this series has Nathaniel Dusk stories as the story within a story. I guess it's the only way DC could get people to read them. So boring! You can tell they were boring if you read them in 1984. Also because an old man really loves them in this comic book. That old man is Johnny Thunder! His name makes him sound exciting but you'd be wrong! More boring! And he's trying to get the Justice Society back into continuity. Most boring of all!

Some of you might be bristling at my description of the Justice Society as "most boring of all." But you've forgotten about the hyperbole and facetiousness! There's a twenty-five percent chance that I actually liked the Justice Society and own a bunch of their comic books!

The Superman Theory states that the American government is in the business of making metahumans to make sure they retain control on the world stage. Most of the heroes deny that they were made by the government because they were actually made when they were exposed to Nth Metal. Duh. Everybody who believes The Superman Theory must not have read Metal. How did they miss it? It was the biggest and longest blockbuster ever produced! Anyway, Lois thinks Lex Luthor is the one behind this propaganda. But Lex denies it. In fact, he says somebody in the government is creating metahumans and that person was once a member of the Justice League! So, um, like Lex?

Hopefully the reveal of the person behind The Superman Theory doesn't wind up being somebody like Commander Steel. With a twist like this, it's got to be somebody you generally associate with the League, like Martian Manhunter or Gleek.

Here Ozymandias lectures Batman thanks to years of terrible comic book writers.

By the end of this issue, Rorschach and Saturn Girl have caught up with Johnny Thunder who finally found Alan Scott's lantern. Batman has been captured by The Joker. And Geoff Johns is well on his way to telling comic book fans how dumb they've been for accepting the bullshit narrative they've been fed for years that super villains only exist because super heroes exist.

Rating: This issue was called "There is no God" and it had nothing to do with the story inside. But it was used because it was part of the Eugene O'Neill quote that closes the issue: "When men make Gods, there is no God!" Is that how every issue has been titled so far? Using a bit of the quote at the end? I haven't been paying close enough attention to know. Anyway, I have a few issues with that quote. First off, you shouldn't capitalize "Gods." I suppose you can argue that you would capitalize "Johns" but if you choose to do that, I probably don't like you and would discount your argument on that basis alone. I mean, the point is that men are making little gods which kills the proper noun God. Second, why does it end in an exclamation point? Is the second half of that statement such a huge twist that it needed the surprise element of the exclamation point? Maybe Eugene knew it was a fairly weak turn to the phrase and thought the exclamation point would bolster the sentiment. I know that trick! The third problem I have with it is that I don't understand it in the context of this story. Is Johns saying that super heroes have replaced God? Are fans now supposed to feel reprimanded for being blasphemous monsters?! Am I supposed to believe that if we rely on heroes, we have lost our faith in God? Is Johns saying inaction through faith is better than relying on super heroes? Or is he saying that we lose our own motivation and free will when we expect heroes to save the day? How is that any different than expecting God to save the day? I guess in that context, I understand the quote! "When we come up with something more entertaining that still doesn't actually help or save humanity, we've forgotten the original concept we came up with that doesn't actually help or save humanity!" Hmm, good quote! I've won myself over! Five out of five stars! Not for this issue but for my twisted logic!

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The Unexpected #1
By Sook, Nord, Orlando, and Plascencia

You really only have a limited number of times you can use the catchphrase, "Nobody expects...The Unexpected!"

I'm not surprised I don't recognize anybody on the cover because you know why. You read the same title that I just read. Stop playing dumb.

The woman in the front who is about to engage in oral sex with the reader is named Firebrand. I vaguely remember her getting a scene in one of the previous "The New Age of Heroes" comic books (New Challengers, I think). She's a fighter who loves to fight in and out of the ring. That's a secret shortcut to writing a strong female character. You can tell she's strong because in the first page, she knocks out Killer Croc with one punch. You can tell she's female because of the boobies. I know that joke risks alienating the trans community due to erasure but sometimes you have to take risks to become a leading comedy writer known for their third grade humor. Plus it's empowering to the trans community that I think they're way too smart for my stuff, right?

Speaking of society's double standards for boobies, remember that scene in Mad Men when Ginsberg cuts off his nipple and gives it to Peggy? What if Peggy had cut off her nipple and given it to Michael? Would it have been too obscene for television to show the nipple in the box once it's been detached from Peggy's breast? Where is the line drawn between being able to show a nipple on television and not being able to show a nipple on television? What if Peggy had just found a detached nipple left on her desk? Would ambiguity make the nipple offensive to a censor's tastes? Can a trans man's nipple be shown? What about a trans woman's nipple? It can't just be that the nipple on fatty tissue is obscene because remember that show The Biggest Loser? There were a lot of exposed nipples on large breasts in that show but they were deemed acceptable for some reason. Why are nipples such a contentious aspect in the discussion on vulgarity and human body?

Don't misunderstand me! I don't think there is anything vulgar about the human body at all! I mean as long as I'm attracted to the specific human body we're talking about. I don't want to see stuff I don't want to see! You know the stuff! Gross!

I would describe the stuff I don't want to see but I don't want to be called a fat shaming homophobe. Anyway, I just got rid of all of the full length mirrors in my house and solved the problem.

Firebrand was a civilian killed during Metal. But she got a new futuristic heart that only keeps working if she gets into a fight every twenty four hours. Don't ask how it works. That's boring detail that doesn't really matter. Just know that her heart is called "the Conflict Engine" which is the only reason you need to understand why something this stupid would be developed.

Weird Doctor: "We have some good news and some bad news! The bad news: we brought you back to life by giving you a new heart. Welcome back to the pain of existence! The good news? You legally get to beat somebody's ass once per day to keep yourself alive!"
Firebrand: "Wait. What? Why?!"
Weird Doctor: "No time to explain! I have to rush off to give somebody a fake rectum who will then have to eat three large linguiça and jalapeño pizzas per day or they'll die! Good luck!"

Firebrand currently explains her life by being so contradictory that I don't care anymore. Not that I cared at all from the beginning. But I needed some way to end that initial sentence that didn't take a lot of effort to construct.

Every scumbag in New Jersey knows where to find her but the CIA and some black ops corporation have no idea where to look. *shrug*

I get it, lazy writer. The heart wants what it wants and what your heart wants is for readers to simply accept the scenario you've created without thinking about it critically at all! Although I will allow myself to be wrong in this instance. Because generally what comic book writers have found is that readers are so willing to accept every idea that they'll do all the critical thinking they can to contort reason and logic until they can explain away any poor writing within a comic book they like. It's just too bad nobody has any reason to like this comic book yet! Unless you're one of those people who read one word from a new character and instantly claim "THIS IS MY FAVORITE CHARACTER!" just in case the character becomes super popular. Then you can claim to be the character's biggest fan! Good for you!

What I'm trying to say is that Firebrand is totally my new favorite character.

An evil guy named Alden Quench wearing a Project Runway outfit comes to take Firebrand's heart. He spouts a lot of stuff that would make people who read Metal think "That sounds familiar!" which ties everything together and satisfies my need for closure. It might not provide the link to Metal that other people need but remember how I said I don't care anymore? That makes me easier to please than other readers of this book.

Alden Quench calls himself Bad Samaritan which is a totally racist stereotype of Samaritans. The only reason Jesus tells a story about a Good Samaritan is that everybody in Jesus's time simply accepted that all Samaritan's were terrible people. He might as well call himself simply "The Samaritan" (except I think that bad guy was already taken by an enemy of The Outsiders (unless he was also called The Bad Samaritan! (double unless this is actually him!))).

A huge fight breaks out between The Unexpected (who arrive to help Firebrand for selfish reasons) and the Bad Samaritan putting everybody in the hospital at risk. So because Firebrand exists, regular people are endangered. I really don't want to be on the side of the argument that claims heroes endanger everybody but come on! I can't get any stories that don't prove the paranoid civilians are wrong!

The leader of The Unexpected is a guy named Neon who is probably an Aurakle like Halo because he gets cut in half and rainbows slosh out. The Bad Samaritan splashes this rainbow blood on Firebrand and then chops her in the heart with Viking Judge's axe (Viking Judge might not be her real name but I sincerely hope that it is). In so doing, he kills himself and creates a new Nth Metal isotope.

Meanwhile beneath the surface of Thanagar, a guy named Onimar Synn eats a dinosaur guy and then settles down for a nice long pout. I guess he wants to eat Firebrand's heart but its too far away. FOR NOW!

Anyway, The Bad Samaritan created something called Destruction Metal. It's going to blow a hole in the multiverse if Neon and Firebrand don't do something about it. Viking Judge and Ascendant (the woman with the horns and the blue guy on the cover) apparently died in the conflict. I'm glad I didn't declare they were my favorite characters!

Rating: You know what? Going against my screaming brain, I'm going to buy the second issue of this comic book. It's interesting even if it's relying on that same old lazy premise that I keep shitting all over: heroes that exist only to be targets of super villains. In this one, people want Firebrand's heart and they'll hurt the entire world to get it. Neon might be trying to save the Multiverse though which is one reason I'll hang around for a bit. I would like The Unexpected to be some kind of multiversal freedom fighters. Apparently they haven't been doing too good a job so far though because worlds keep dying around them.

* * * * * * * * * *

The Man of Steel #1
By Bendis, Reis, Prado, and Sinclair

Imagine trying to get fans rabidly excited about a new Superman event and the only adjective you can come up with is "weekly."

I've never read anything by Bendis (aside from that Superman advertisement in that twenty-five cent comic book). I'm only saying that because if Bendis Googles for reviews of this comic book, I wanted to warn him right up front that some writers haven't been able to handle my comic book reviews. Some reactions have been "I'm Cullen Bunn and you're terrible!" and "You're the meanest jerk and I should know because I'm Cullen Bunn!" and "You have no right to say those things about me, Cullen Bunn!" On the other hand, I have had some positive reactions like these: "I want to take you out behind the handball court and get you pregnant with my Gail Simone babies," and "Yeah, security? This is Tom King and that guy offering to suck my dick is bothering me again," and "I don't know who this guy is but I, Scott Lobdell, like him a lot!" In other words, there's a fifty percent chance that I'm about to forever ruin any chance of becoming Brian Michael Bendis's new best friend.

Maybe I should change that from a fifty percent chance to a ninety percent chance because before I even read this comic, I'm already biased against it. I can't stand any comic by a hot shot creator who comes on the scene and knocks all the pieces onto the floor before shitting on Dan DiDio's desk and saying, "I'm going to do whatever I want!" Don't get me wrong! I like that scenario a lot! But it definitely biases me on the comic. I mean, are we really going to get yet another comic book by a writer who says, "You thought you knew everything there was to know about Superman's past! But you were wrong! Now eat it, DiDio!"?

Remember when Krypton exploded for reasons that weren't due to a genocidal cosmic maniac insisting that all Kryptonians needed to be wiped out to save the universe? That was before the first four pages of this comic book were published. We're in a new era now: the Brian Michael Bendis Era! Tell me how it really went down, Mister Bendis! I never did like the pansy ass passive way the world blew up due to whatever the Kryptonians did wrong. Too much fracking or sodomy or whatever. This is so much more exciting to make one monster behind it all! It'll finally give Superman somebody he can punch in the face to relieve him of his pain from the loss of his family! Not that he really focuses on that pain much. But he will once he hears the name "Rogol Zaar" and also about three or four hours of new Kryptonian history which should really get him wound up!

Rogol Zaar is a combination of Lobo, Battalion, and Perry White.

The part of the story we all still know because I'm assuming it's the same is that Superman escaped the death of Krypton. That means Rogol Zarr is probably about to learn that a baby survived and he's going to blow his frontal lobe. He's going to have such a murder boner going to complete his act of genocide that Superman is going to be all, "Whoa, dude. I think you have the wrong idea about me and my sexy body," when they finally meet.

In the opening scene in Metropolis, Superman makes friends with Killer Moth and Firefly. Then when he deals with a fire in a high rise, he imparts some of his mother's wisdom on the reader: "Fire is fire." So I guess in Bendis's retelling of the Superman myth, Ma Kent was a simple woman.

At the scene of the fire, Superman meets a female firefighter with whom he flirts. He's all, "You should call Clark Kent and tell him all about this tomorrow. Don't call Lois though! Lois can't find out Clark is talking to you and probably having lunch with you maybe?" Then he flies off and female firefighter Melody Moore causes more water damage to the smoldering building.

You understood that was a filthy joke, right?!

I'm beginning to see why people like Bendis. He has characters talk a lot. Talking a lot is always good. It's much better than characters shouting shallow one liners at one another in an attempt to fool the reader into thinking the writer knows what they're doing. In this brief post-fire scene, we see that Superman is kind and thoughtful and not averse to stepping out on Lois Lane.

Most of the issue is Superman and Clark Kent going about their day to day business. It's really all I ask of a comic book! Especially when those things are filled with conversations that build characters rather than first person omniscient narration boxes which tell the reader exactly what's going on and leave no room for ambiguity. Like if this were written by Scott Lobdell, Superman would have thought, upon meeting the firefighter, "She really wants to lick my butthole! But I would never let her because I love Lois Lane so much!" But without the narration boxes, the reader simply gets knowing looks and crooked little smiles and I think I might have noticed a slightly larger bulge in Superman's red underwear. Bendis allows me to jump to the awful conclusions I want to jump to rather than reining me in and telling me exactly what's going on so I can't have any dirty fun.

Filling in the negative spaces of Superman's life is the story of Rogol Zaar and how he wanted to destroy Krypton but the Council of Eternal Elders tells him he can't. He probably still will but that's for another issue. By the end of this issue, Lois says something that's actually funny and then Superman, Lois, and Jon all disappear in a fade to white. That's supposed to keep you excited for the next weekly installment of this weekly Superman event. So week!

Rating: I so wanted to shit all over Bendis's writing the way Bendis shit all over DiDio's desk but instead I wound up enjoying this story. I sincerely appreciate when Superman is written as a kind person with a subtle sense of humor and a raging hard on for redheads. Hopefully Issue #2 will suck so I can let loose this shit that I now have to hold in! Quick! Somebody get me an Ann Nocenti comic book so I can relieve myself!

* * * * * * * * * *

Poetry Corner with Grunion Guy!

Untitled
Look.
At some point,
The negative shit the party you support
Engages in
Really should fucking outweigh
Your opinion on
Abortion.

* * * * * * * * * *

I guess that's it for this week! Later, jerkos!

The Running Man by Richard Bachman (1982)

Good news! The best man doesn't run for president in our 2025 either!¹

If you asked Stephen King what his favorite genre of book to write was and I was standing nearby to hear the question, I would push Stephen King out of the way³ and answer, "He loves to write dystopian futures with deadly game shows!" You might follow up that question with, "Mr. King, are you okay?!" Or, if you're a good interviewer, you'd ignore King fumbling to get up and ask me, "Why would you suggest that when only two of his novels are about deadly game shows?" Then I'd scream, "This interview is over!", while everybody standing nearby would cheer and applaud as I ran off into the bushes.

Okay, so maybe Stephen King didn't continue to write about dystopian futures where everything has become Wonder bread and Barnum & Bailey. But Richard Bachman did! I'd suggest even Thinner is basically a terrible game show! Rage certainly is. And Roadwork. Not as literally as The Running Man and The Long Walk but if you squint your brain just right, you'll see how they are. Maybe you had to grow up in the '70s as a kid who constantly convinced his grandmother to let him stay home so he could watch The Match Game and Whew! with her. In the middle of the 20th Century, everything was game shows to such an extent that you could understand how all of Stephen King's visions of the future were just government game shows with loads and loads of death and misery.

Maybe instead of saying, "Stephen King loves to write about deadly game shows," perhaps it's less fun and fanciful to say, "Richard Bachman loves to write stories about the underdog facing up to authority before dying miserably." Like Rage (if I'm remembering it correctly since it's out of print and my copy is in my childhood home) and Roadwork and The Long Walk and this book and, um, Thinner? Does Thinner count? Was the old, um, G-word woman who cursed him "The Authority" the protagonist was fighting back against? Or was "The Authority" he was really battling his wife who wasn't cursed even though wasn't it really her fault that the man ran down that, um, G-word? I mean, who gives a guy a blow job while they're driving! That's completely irresponsible!

I'm curious as to why Stephen King asked to take Rage out of print because of Columbine and other school shootings but he didn't ask to take The Running Man out of print because of 9/11. What is he? A terrorist lover? Does Stephen King think it's a good thing to fly planes into buildings to solve the world's problems? Not that any problems were actually solved by the ending of The Running Man. Which makes sense because no problems were solved by 9/11 either! Except for the problem that the government couldn't get all up in our business easily. It kind of solved that problem. Hmm. I wonder if 9/11 was an inside job?!

America (especially current America) treats politics and diplomacy like a game so I suspect The Running Man is prescient in that aspect. Also in the aspect of environmental collapse thanks to corporations manipulating the government into destroying regulations because Conservative talking heads have so oft repeated the lie that regulations are nonsense hampering advancement that loads and loads of soft-brained people now believe that's true and they're all, "Yeah! Why should the government make rules that corporations have to follow?! I like my peanut butter to be at least 3% exhausted factory worker who fell into the nut smasher!" Nearly all government regulations have been put into place because people died so rolling back regulations just means that we're going to remember why they were put in place when more people die. If we're even allowed to hear about people dying due to poor safety regulations ever again!

The Running Man should be one of my all-time favorite books because my top ten list of books mostly contains stories where the protagonist realizes that they can't fight against The System and so they simply escape from The System instead. Books like Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and, in some ways although this is more like The Running Man — except the plane flying into a building is implied to happen later when Tom Joad can get his hands on an aircraft — The Grapes of Wrath. The Running Man is about a man who understands the system is shit and that he has no options to help his family so he takes the one bullshit option open to him: get maimed (or die) on national television for Big Bucks. As he "runs", he encounters an underground group of rebels who educate him on some of the really bad shit that's going down which the government's covering up and so Richards (the protagonist) decides to take up their cause and fight back. But he soon realizes that he holds no fucking cards and can't fight back. He has no power. And the propaganda machine has been set in place for far too long and is way too powerful. So in the end, he flies a plane into a building and kills some rich bastards but changes nothing. King doesn't even imply that somehow things might change somewhere along the way. Maybe Amelia survives being ejected out of the airplane while wearing a parachute she's unfamiliar with and goes on to lead some kind of rebellion that brings down the Fascist Game Show Network. But I doubt it. She probably cries all the way down until her head explodes against the earth with a loud KA-SPLAT!

Maybe I'm too cynical. Should I be more hopeful? I bet when I first read this at fifteen, I was all, "Things will work out! People have gotten enough glimpses of the truth! It's going to all fall apart now!" But I'm 54 now and if I have any earnestness, optimism, or hope left in my body, I've ejected it into space where it's fallen upon the sand dunes of Tatooine and been stolen by Jawas for parts. Too many people in this world are full of fear and hate and endless stupidity. Which is why I have chosen to spend my time with people I love whose hearts are full of compassion instead of fear; people who understand community rather than rant about individuality; people who would rather die fighting for the greater good than surround their house with barbed wire and fill their garage with oil barrels full of guns and ammo.

Did that have anything to do with the book? I don't know. Maybe part of the point of the novel was that people were too separated by their pain and suffering. The kid, Bradley, whom Richards runs into who's in a gang that visits the library and learns about the state of the environment seemed the most put together person in the book. He had friends, he had knowledge, he had family, he had compassion, and he hated the fucking cops. Just an all around great kid, you know? And his friend, the fat kid in Maine, says at one point that Bradley was his only friend. And that kid gives his life to help the cause. Was Bradley the hero? Is he the one we're staking our hopes on by the end of the book? Did he escape the Game Show Fascists chasing him to Cleveland?! I guess we'll never know because Stephen King didn't decide to make this world the world he cared about. He saved that one for that cool motherfucker Roland Deschain.

The only part of this book I didn't like was when Richards was trying to get to the front of the plane with his guts hanging out and then he steps on his guts and they pull at his insides and oh god I'm going to be sick. This review is over!




__________________________________________________________________________________
¹ This is both a joke about how 2025 isn't a year that somebody would run for president and how our president is actually the worst man in the history of men².
² Although — let's face it — men aren't actually out there being stellar, for the most part.
³ Being careful not to shove him in front of another van because I don't need to read a new and updated edition of The Dark Tower which includes me.

Planetary #8 (February 2000)

Time to learn that sci-fi B movies are real!

Planetary #8 (February 2000)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, Laura Depuy Martin, and Ryan Cline
Cover by John Cassaday
Edited by John Layman

In Issue #1, we learned that secret organizations that control the world are real. In Issue #2, we learned Kaiju are real. In Issue #3, we learned Hong Kong action films are real. In Issue #4, we learned Alternate Dimensions are real. In Issue #5, we learned Doc Savage is real. Okay, maybe we learned he was real even earlier than that and actually learned that Ming the Merciless's daughter's corporation is just another secret organization and that we'll be learning about a lot of them before this is all over. Also did we learn about Daemonites? It seems like we should have learned about them by now. Maybe they don't matter as much as all the other Wildstorm books want you to think they do. Small potatoes, those Daemonites. In Issue #6, we learned that the Fantastic Four are real. And sexy. In Issue #7, we learned that John Constantine, magic, and British authors are real. And now it's time to learn that sci-fi B movies actually happened! Every last one of them, even Little Shop of Horrors, The Incredible Shrinking Man, and Night of the Lepus. Possibly even Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

This is Allison. She's been in hiding since 1960. Her boobs are lopsided.

Allison glows blue. Is she a ghost? She's certainly too young looking to have been in hiding for 40 years unless babies often go into hiding. Maybe she's irradiated because she's hanging out in one of America's secret Science Cities¹ where they do secret radioactive experiments which make ants and bunnies and right boobs grow to tremendous size. She spoke with Jakita on the phone about something. As the reader of the comic book, I have not been let in on that conversation yet. It seems she wants to blow a whistle.

Giant ants attack while they're trading introductions with Allison because Warren Ellis wanted to skip writing a few pages and instead scribbled in the script to John Cassaday: "Jakita battles Giant Ants for four pages. She should look like Jakita and not me. Don't make her look like me, you asshat. You piece of shit. Draw what I tell you to! Don't put in some kind of visual hint that I'm a perv who only mentors young female writers who don't flinch when they walk into my office and find me upside down and naked in my Orgone Swing. You prick. You treacherous swine. I have a prescription for that swing!"

Allison is a ghost. She still might also be radioactive.

This issue came out in the year 2000 so when Allison tells Elijah, "You know what it was like, living in a country driven mad with fear of nothing?", he can say, "Yes, I was there," instead of a post-9/11 person saying, "Fucking do I?! I'm alive, right? I have ears. I have eyes. I have a penis turtled from fright of a terrorist attack thanks to the 24 hour news cycle scaremongering the shit out of my sex drive!" If you want to be really cynical, even in the year 2000, somebody could have replied, "Yeah, I know all about the fear of nothing. We just barely survived Y2K², right?!" Obviously our country is back to way too many people living with the fear of nothing. That doesn't mean they don't fear anything! It means the overwhelming fear they're full of is caused by nothing actually dangerous or scary. They're tilting at windmills. Is that why Trump hates windmills?

Science City Zero was a place the American government took dissidents³ and disappeared them. Then they experimented on them and turned them into monsters and giant ants and irradiated ghosts and werewolves and teenage Frankensteins and blobs. All those monsters in all those '50s B monster movies? Actually women who knew how to (and often did) bring themselves to orgasm.

Allison describes how she was killed by a firing squad and then brought back to life by a Doctor Randall Dowling otherwise known, in other universes, as Reed Richards. They ask if Science City Zero was part of the Artemis Project⁴ but Allison says it was actually a Hark Corporation thing (working with the government). So if Planetary didn't already realize the horror of Science City Zero and the atrocities committed there, they now know definitively that it was run by monsters. Or, to be fair to Jonathan Hark's daughter, Randall Dowling, and Randall's three compatriots, run by Planetary's rivals. I probably shouldn't assume that Planetary are the good guys, right?

Allison is radioactive. She still might also be a ghost.

Allison explains that Science City Zero was simply a place to experiment on humans and see the limits of science and the human body. She came to them now because her half-life is almost up and nobody can retaliate for having exposed their secrets. She disappears in a flash of ozone and Planetary have a massive base for the Drummer to pull all the information from.

The Ranking!
There wasn't a lot of meat on this bone. B Movies mixed with Nazi experiments on humans and the revelation that the Hark Corporation was already working in the '50s side-by-side with the Other Dimensional Fantastic Four. I guess the issue also helps solidify that Planetary are the good guys in that at least in their apathy they're not experimenting on humans and making the world a worse place. They're just not actively making it better with the information they dig up. At least that's how it's been! But now that the Fourth Man is back on the team, um, I mean, now that Elijah Snow is on the team, things are going to change, baby! Time to get proactive instead of inactive!


__________________________________________________________________________________
¹ Science City Zero, to be precise. The ur-science city, I guess.
² Some people might not think anybody really lived in fear of Y2K. But then those people didn't have to help their father bury an oil drum full of guns and ammunition in his backyard because they wouldn't fit in the garage full of bags of rice, cans of bean, and tons of water. "The first thing to fall apart will be the supply trains, son! And once people can't buy food, the rioting and looting will begin! Also, have you read this truly informative book, The Mark of the Beast? Explains everything!" Living in fear of nothing. What an appropriate statement for the way so many Conservatives live their lives today. I wish they'd all find a hobby that wasn't attacking our fellow trans citizens, immigrants, and Satan's dick suckers. I mean liberals.
³ You know what that means: anybody they didn't like. Anybody who disagreed with whatever traitorous bullshit the government was up to. Anybody with even the slightest amount of compassion for their neighbors. Also women who enjoyed sex. The worst thing of all to powerful men who never learned how to eat pussy.
⁴ Don't worry! The current actual Artemis Project probably has nothing in common with Planetary's secret government Black Ops project which paralleled the Apollo missions. It's just the whole unimaginative naming of programs after Ancient Greece and Roman myths! Obviously Artemis would both be the opposite of Apollo but also, in our reality, the more appropriate name for a moon mission. Who came up with Apollo?! Fucking dorks.

Batwoman #2 (April 2026)

I got the regular cover because none of the variant covers featured Beth's undergarments.

Batwoman #2 (April 2026)
By Greg Rucka, DaNi, Matt Hollingsworth, and Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou
Cover by DaNi and Matt Hollingsworth
Edited by James Reid and Rob Levin

Personally, I think Batwoman should respect herself more by choosing a less derivative name which rides on the coat-cape of Bruce Wayne and exemplifies her assets¹. I don't know what those assets are but I think they're somewhat akin to Dana Scully of The X-Files fames assets. Not just because they both have red hair but because they both investigated paranormal activities while also being Catholic² and rational³. And you didn't see Dana Scully taking up the mantle "Fox Mulder Woman". Although that's what I called her in my '90s fan fiction epic "Fox Mulder Woman meets Sailor Moon Boy".

Speaking of Batwoman's derivative name, I had to check to see if, after having Batman, Manbat, Batwoman, and Batgirl, there has ever been a Batboy. I know I'm not the first to follow this thread into the vaults of DC's history but I'm happy discovering things on my own instead of just passively reading the Internet and learning whatever other people choose to teach me. I actually go out there and do my own research which is why I now believe that Covid was a hoax, 9/11 was an inside job, the British Royals are all lizard people, and the original Fruit of the Loom logo did have a cornucopia. You just can't make up the kind of things the wackjobs on YouTube scream endlessly.

Anyway, I "found" this cover from 1955 which teaches us two things: Batboy existed and people in 1955 had zero cynicism what-so-ever. I mean, Batboy's a guy who shoots sticky material out of the end of his phallic symbol? Batteen, maybe. But Batboy?! Unbelievable!

If Batboy were created in 2026, the creator would have to register as a sex offender.

I can't tell if Robin is impressed by Batboy's load or shocked that Batboy can already produce, um, webs. The only explanation I can come up with for Batboy having a bat that shoots web is the disgusting one I mentioned earlier so I have to assume that the person who created him in 1955 was thinking the same thing and giggling about it the entire time. The only other reason Batboy would have a bat that shoots webs is if people in 1955 thought bats spun webs. Did they think that?! I might be suffering from that social delusion where people in every generation believe that every generation before them were gibbering idiots who could only have accomplished the things they did if aliens actually did it for them. Occam's Razor probably points to comic book writers in 1955 being dirty perverts more so than them thinking bats spun webs⁴.

One last note on Batman #90 featuring a little person pretending to be a boy who shoots goo out of the end of his rod: this was the first issue of Batman to have the Comics Code Authority seal on it. Which tells me they weren't fucking do their job from Day Fucking One!

This is Jake. I don't know who he is other than he's a creepy dude who loves to do creepy things.

I'm judging Jake by his appearance in one panel without having any information about him at all. But you don't peer around a curtain like that while being drawn in that particular style and mutter, "Oh, Kate," without being an absolute spinetingler of a clarion warning call of bad vibes.

No wait. Jacob Kane is Kate's military father (retired now, I guess). I forgot because I usually just refer to him as Patriarchy Kane.

Jake's in the town in Greece where Kate's been placed in the asylum to keep an eye on her. He's also apparently living above the Batwoman Cave? Why is that in Greece? Is Greece where the majority of paranormal crimes happen?

Jake, looking out the window, see's the Batwoman Signal plastered on the building of Kate's enemies so he hops on the Batwomancycle and rides off to wag his finger at her. Meanwhile in the building lit up by the blood-red Batwoman Signal, Slay gets on his burner phone to command his Slaylings to find the source of the Batwoman Signal. I don't think there's a Commissioner Gordonwoman in Greece so the signal could be projected from anywhere.

The Slayings do not locate Batwoman but they do find the Batwomanprojector. Oh, also a Batwoman grenade.

I assume she means pay for something other than reading this note? I don't know what that is because I didn't read DC's Mike Tyson's Punchout Presents.

I'm pretty sure the first thing I wouldn't do after being caught in the explosion of a grenade is read the note which I found just before the grenade landed. First I would scream and then I would shit my pants and then I would panic and run off the roof of the building and then I would begin to die and, finally, I would think, "I wonder what was on that note?"

I don't know if Slay's Slaylings are real people or more like Professor Pyg's Dollotrons but if they're real people, Kate Kane seems to have stolen everything from Batman⁵ except his refusal to kill. She steps on and explodes on Slayling's skull and then kicks another one off of the building. It's also possible she has an orgasm during the fight. You might think I'm saying that because she's a woman and I'm a huge pervert but I have over 5000 comic book reviews in which at least 75% of them probably describe male heroes jizzing in their costumes. So if you're going to call me sexist for sexualizing Batwoman as she battles, you'll have to discard that argument and come up with one of the dozens of other ones that I can't defend myself from.

Despina and Mr. Gores, the main villains (more so Despina but that's obvious because Despina is a woman and women heroes need strong women antagonists), do some more plotting to make sure the readers know that their goal is the capture of Batwoman. I don't know who Despina is but she's named like one of Darkseid's people. Apparently she's the head of some ancient Grecian menstruation cult?

I didn't make up the menstruation cult thing! It's right their in Rucka's writing!

Slay arrives to choke Kate for half a second before she breaks free, rolls off the roof, jumps on a truck, and falls into the street. Her dad arrives by Batwomancycle to help but he's stuck in the shoulder by a throwing knife as some Slaylings arrive. To save herself and her dad, Kate puts a bullet in the faces of every Slayling on the street. Her dad seems shocked so I guess maybe Kate has only recently taken to murdering people? Although they do say, "When in Greece, do as the Grecians do,"⁶ so maybe Greeks love to murder?

Kate walks off into the night, probably heading back to therapy.

The Ranking!
I may not know entirely what's going on in this comic book but it doesn't really matter. I'm just reading it as if it's one of the non-comic book pieces of literature I usually read. Those are always super confusing and never come right out and tell you what's going on. Sometimes you even have to piece together the parts of the story that takes place after the end of the book but before the beginning. I'm glaring at you, Infinite Jest! So I'm used to not knowing what's going on. Also, it's like my life. What is happening? I don't know. Someday I'll die after falling off of a building running from a grenade and I'll think, "I wonder what that was all about?"


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¹ I assure you that wasn't a boob joke. At least not until I wrote this footnote.
² I don't know if Kate Kane is Catholic. It feels like she's very Catholic.
³ After I typed "Catholic and rational" into the universe, four small wormholes appeared over my laptop, three of which emitted a long farting noise while the fourth dribbled something that I think may have been mayonnaise.
⁴ They don't, right? Right?!
⁵ She even has her own bird-themed sidekick at times: Firebird!
⁶ I'm sure it was originally about the Greeks. Fucking Romans stole all of their shit, why not that saying as well?

The Gunslinger by Stephen King (1982)

I first became aware of this book in late junior high or high school when I was reading all of Stephen King's books. This would have been maybe 1984 at the earliest. My mother had all of his books and she had raised me on horror movies (mostly inappropriate and terrifying. Like imagine seeing The Sentinel before you're even 10 years old. It's probably why I can't love anything properly and you try to jump scare me and I'll just stand there stone-faced showing no instinct for self-preservation at all) so I figured I'd read them all. I remember holding It in my lap in the passenger seat of her Camaro as we drove home from the bookstore, excited to dive into it and see why that claw is coming out of the sewer and going for the paper ship. It was during this time that I asked my mom why she didn't own The Gunslinger as it was listed in the "Books By Stephen King" section of one or more of her paperbacks. She told me it was some limited edition thing he put out and, if you could find a copy, they were really expensive. I was dying to get my hands on a copy. But I'd have to wait until 1988 when the book was re-released with glossy and exciting pictures to help my limited comic book imagination!

Was it worth the wait? Did it live up to my imagination? Fuck yeah it did! Roland was (IS!) fucking cool, man. He fucks every chick he meets! He shoots every dirty rotten scoundrel that besets him! He, like, walks all over the place! Wait. Is that cool? Maybe I just liked that part because I walked everywhere too (except when I skateboarded by that's sort of walking, right?). And he sacrificed children for his own personal gain! I was raised areligious so if the book was some kind of metaphor for faith or searching for some higher purpose or just riddled with Biblical allusions, I missed it all. I just loved that Roland's gun made such a loud bang! Kill them mutants, Roland old buddy! Get that man in black! Let Jake fall into some other world! Ha ha! So cool!

Well, I just re-read it at the not-so-young age of 54 and let me say this: Roland is fucking cool! I just know when he gets to The Dark Tower, it'll be the most satisfying conclusion to any story ever made! I'm sure it won't end in fire like Carrie or 'Salem's Lot or The Shining or Firestarter or, um, did The Dead Zone also end in fire? No, no, that one just had a huge fire as a major plot point. At least nothing burned up in Cujo (if you don't count Cujo's brains. Poor doggy!).

Four of the five stories told in the first Dark Tower book take place in Roland's memory, one in the recent past (the massacre in Tull) and the others in Gilead when he was a teenager. I suspect the revelations from Roland's past in Gilead are supposed to be the story bits which pull a reader into the story. How did Roland's quest begin? How did he become the gunslinger? What drives him? But I kind of couldn't give a shit about his Gilead history. I just want to read his adventures while he remains mysterious and God-like. I don't want to read stories about the first time he jerked off on the roof of the castle! Or the first time he fucked a lady! Or the first time he sacrificed a friend to get something he wanted! I just want to read about him meeting Jake and sacrificing him without having to know that kind of thing is a habit of his!

Even though a friend of mine assures me that The Eyes of the Dragon is not part of The Dark Tower series, I still can't help thinking that The Eyes of the Dragon is the story of Roland in Gilead. How come I think that? Was I just that stupid as a teenager that I couldn't tell two different stories apart?!

Anyway, this book is nice and short and interesting and fires the imagination with the stories to come. Later, a lot of it will fall apart in a lot of ways and I'm not just talking about having to read King's accent for Susannah whenever her dark side takes over. How many "Child!"s and "Sure 'nuff"s can a person read before they take a Sharpie and just start obliterating every passage where Dark Susannah speaks?! I'll let you know when I begin reading my old copy of The Drawing of the Three and discover when I began blotting out big blocks of dialogue with black marker.

I know, I know! "Why's the marker gotta be black?!" Get out of here, you smart ass!

Am I done with this review? I think I'm done. Man. Roland is so fucking cool!

Planetary #7 (January 2000)

In the world of Planetary, Vertigo stories take place side by side with kiddie hero crap.

Planetary #7 (January 2000)
By Warren Ellis, John Cassaday, David Baron, and Ryan Cline
Cover by Dave McKean . . . I mean John Cassaday!
Edited by John Layman

The copy on the cover comes from Recollections of A. N. Welby Pugin and his Father, Augustus Pugin. The full quote follows:

An unwavering faith, a most singular piety towards bygone ages, a veneration the most profound for all that appertained to the beauty of the courts of the Lord, an imagination glowing with the glories of the past, all combined in impelling the subject of this memoir to surrender his heart and soul to the desire for the restoration of the forgotten faith and for the revival in the land of its ancient magnificence in art and architecture.

Augustus Pugin was the father of the father of London's Gothic Revival Architecture scene¹. Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin was the son who co-designed the Houses of Parliament after they burned down on November 5th, 1834. No, wait, sorry: it was on October 16th of that year. Surely it was November 5th, no? If not, why am I remembering, remembering that date?! Also he gave over his designs for Big Ben to Barry, co-designer of the Houses of Parliament, just before he went completely mad. I suppose the quote was used here because of its content which sounds like maybe somebody into the occult but also because the guy it was quoting went insane. So maybe we're supposed to view this version of John Constantine as more on the mad side than the clever side?

It's also possible that John Cassaday just grabbed up the first bit of olde timey font he could find to shove on the cover and he didn't really care what it meant in context of the story, as long as the words that could be read sounded vaguely of the occult.²

Jack Carter = John Constantine. With maybe a bit of a play on John Carter of Mars?

Hell of a way to begin a John Constantine story although I've got to assume that multiple Constantine stories have begun with the assumption that he's dead. It's probably a bit of a trope with that arsehole³. Anyway, they'll be going to his funeral and reminiscing about him and eventually finding out he's still alive, probably.

This issue is called "To Be In England, In The Summterime" which is a lyric from The Art of Noise's 1984 song, "Close (To the Edit)". That's the one where the video has a mini-punk/new age kid sentencing various musical instruments to death on some railroad tracks after which three grown men curb stomp a violin, grind up a saxophone, and dissect a standing bass. The title might also be from a poem by some old shite British loser like Robert Browning as well but I stopped my research at the discovery of the lyric. You'd think I would have remembered that line being in that song since all of the other lines are "dum dum dum dum" and "HEY!" and also I remembered the video vividly after watching it on YouTube but hadn't thought of it for probably 40 years. That's a shame. One of my regrets when I die will be not having watched this video regularly throughout my life.

Man. Those were the days! When men wore make-up and music videos were fucking cooler than shit.

The title could also be a reference to Van Morrison's "Summertime in England" since that mentions poets doing drugs and writing stream of consciousness shit. That's fitting but the title of this comic isn't "Summertime in England" so I'm skeptical.

All I'm hearing is "Jack Carter knew how to lay down some dick."

While they're reminiscing about Jack and London in the '80s, The Drummer mentions that Jenny Sparks ran a team of heroes there in the '60s and '80s. I was going to write, "Wouldn't that be a cool team-up? Planetary and The Authority?" when I remembered I own that team-up. So we'll get to it later!

While they're walking through the graveyard, it being a metaphor for nostalgia, remembrance, and the past, they see Miracleman⁴ fly past the moon while Dream and Death sit on a bench feeding pigeons. And then they come upon this group of disturbing and familiar mourners.

Let's see . . . represented here we've got Alan Moore, Peter Milligan, Grant Morrison, and Neil Gaiman. Probably others. Oh! Jamie Delano! Duh!

That was almost embarrassing! The entire thing is about the guy whose comic Delano wrote for like four years and my brain farted out his name as a mere afterthought! If I had one wish, I'd wish that my brain could take the form of a person for ten minutes so I could kick its fucking ass. I hate it so much. Although if I use my brain and think about it for like one second, I guess I hate my body more. Stupid monkey paw's wish! I'm realizing that, in the end, I'd let my brain kick my body's ass. At least my penis would enjoy either outcome.

Jakita explains how Jack Carter schooled them on why British thought in the '80s was so far outside the realm of American identity. We were watching Benson while they were watching Spitting Image. Americans were all, "Ho ho! People in government are doddering idiots but it's okay because the lower classes are much smarter and in control!" But the British were all, "Holy shit we're being governed by an insane woman and nothing we do matters! Somebody needs to fucking bomb the shit out of that hag while she's in the bath!" The British Invasion came over with ideas that seemed like far-fetched science fiction but they were really warnings about how countries can also get dementia as they get older and people need to stand guard against it. But Americans were just, "What?! Swamp Thing is a plant that thinks it's a man! That's nucking futs!"⁶

Jakite tells Snow a Jack Carter story which Warren Ellis probably pitched for Hellblazer but got rejected because it's about a ghost looking to abort the second coming of Jesus. Britains, being more cynical in general, don't mind a good crack about aborting Jesus but the only thing American masses would hate more is a story about the president taking everybody's guns away. I always thought that the hypothetical question that people love to ask, "Would you go back in time and kill Baby Hitler?", should always be followed up by a second question if the person answers, "Yes!", and that would be, "But would you go back in time and abort Baby Hitler?" Doesn't seem like a big change to me but I'm pretty sure a lot of Americans would be all, "Fuck yeah I'd kill a baby but I wouldn't want to sin by being responsible for an abortion!" Most Americans are really bad at theology, morals, philosophy, and ethics.

Pretty sure I know what Warren Ellis's script had in place of "toerag" before John Layman was all, "Dude. I get he's British. But maybe lay off the 'cunts' for our American comic book?"

Jakita wants to see where Jack died, presumably beaten to death by some nobody⁷ who thought he was an arsehole⁸. Once at the site, Drummer notices that a bunch of magic was done here and begins investigating with his "talking to technology" powers. Magic is partly technology but it's the part where you cheat at reality and damn all of your friends to Hell.

Planetary discover that Jack Carter faked his own death. As they discover this, the guy who supposedly killed him returns to rant and rave and monologue why he did it.

Nobody asked to see the British Invasion from the hero's point of view, dude!

Fucking great moment, really. Shade the Changing Man. Animal Man. Swamp Thing. Some various characters like Doctor Destiny and the Silver Scarab in The Sandman. Even more I can't remember, in loads of mini and maxi series like Kid Eternity and such. Anyway, after this revelation of internalized rage, this guy gets his guts blown out from behind by Jack Carter and a shotgun. Jack Carter's head is shaved now, probably needed for the fake death ritual and certainly needed for his coming transformation from past legend to future icon.

So should I think of this as canon when I re-read Transmetropolitan? That it's a sequel to Hellblazer?!

I guess on a less literal level, Spider Jerusalem is just an examination of the end of the 20th Century slash beginnings of the 21st Century in the same way that John Constantine was commentary on the degradations and oppressive government of the British '80s. Although this story takes place in the year 2000 so what did Jack Carter do? Time travel spell?!

The Ranking!
Fucking chuffed, I am! I think. Am I using that correctly? Probably not. The only thing I know about British culture is that "Raspberry" is Cockney rhyming slang for "fart" because of "raspberry tart." No wait! I also know that "Berk" is Cockney rhyming slang for cunt because of "Berkeley Hunt"! Also I just realized today that the current season of Have I Got News For You? is already halfway through and my YouTube algorithm wasn't fucking telling me about it even though I follow at least two Brits who constantly upload it! Now I have to watch Ian and Paul and their guests discuss news that's three to four weeks old already! ARGH! I hate my life! Nobody has it worse than I do!


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¹ Was that a scene? Was it a revival? Not only do I not know how to write, I also do not know how to research. Do research? Read histories? Historiocize?
² It's also possible (quite probable, really) that Warren Ellis was reading Recollections of A. N. Welby Pugin and his Father, Augustus Pugin at the time because Ellis reads loads of boring things and marked this passage as interesting and faxed it to Cassaday to use in his riff on a Dave McKean cover.
³ Affectionately!
⁴ An assumption on my part as the caped person is mostly in silhouette but I think it's a good call given the theme⁵ of the issue.
⁵ What is that theme? The British Invasion of the mid to late '80s and, I guess with Jack Carter's death, it's dwindling in importance?
⁶ It was the '80s! Saying things like "Nucking futs!" was the height of hilarity, right after you've finished reading your 101 Uses for a Dead Cat book and then told a few dead baby and AIDS jokes!
⁷ Which is how all the greats guarded by their massive reputations usually go: Wild Bill Hickock, Omar, um, others, presumably.
⁸ Not affectionately!