Deathstork the Hunted #0

For a comic book that I'm fairly certain will chug mild to average amounts of donkey semen, this cover is pretty cool. Except for Deathstork's elf shoes.

Holy fucking fuck balls with spicy fuck sauce. I know in my Team Titans Annual #2 commentary I mentioned how much DC and Marvel wanted to be Image around this time but I sincerely forgot just how much. I think I can rest my case with this advert for a new Doctor Fate comic book.

"This is what our audience wants, boys! I guess we have to give it to them!" To be fair, I actually love this cover and I really want to fucking read this comic book now.

The cover of Team Titans was proof of my argument much in the same way that the low-level Chernobyl radiation detectors were proof that there'd been a radiation leak. This is like finally getting their hands on something that could measure extreme levels of radiation and everybody suddenly shitting themselves.

I could make the argument that this is just DC still trying to capture that whole X-Factor X-men hype and McFarlane's Spider-man days. But that's all really just the precursor to Image. For whatever reason, these guys made art that made fangenders ruin the couch they were sitting on. Not that I ever ruined a couch I was sitting on over their art. But I know a few jerks who definitely did! Anyway, that Marvel stuff was just the prologue or the opening chapters of Image. And DC definitely would dip their toes in this fucked up poison art well many, many times before the industry nearly collapsed under the weight of all the extra stress lines drawn all over every character's face. And also maybe the pouches and the bullets. Oh, and maybe the variant and foil covers.

Currently, Checkmate and other government agencies are hunting Deathstork because he did the worst thing in all of history. I don't know what that thing is yet but I'm sure there'll be a flashback. Remember, Zero Hour was all about touching up everybody's origin stories and slightly recontextualizing the current story arcs. Maybe some changed dramatically but since I certainly didn't read many of them and I've done no research, how am I supposed to speak with authority and also know I'm speaking the truth?! Let me just state facts in a way that sounds like I know what I'm talking about so I don't have to do any real work and not be embarrassed by constantly being called out by Actually Nerds.

Before Deathstork dies (or kills everybody chasing him, more probably), he remembers what happened to him three weeks ago. He was visiting the Hmong whorehouse in New York (where Rose and a bunch of other children were being raised) to find out what happened to one of them that was seriously injured. She told a story about tying up a senator and then making him wait while she sat in the bathroom. While waiting, some guy in an omega outfit broke in and shot him dead. She jumped out a window, landed on her face, and blacked out.

Ahem. She landed on her face, artist!

The prostitute must have noticed the assassin was a big dumbfuck because how could he not know a prostitute was in the house? The senator was tied up and the assassin made a crack about the senator's wife knowledge of this event before killing the senator. Anyway, Deathstork will probably be framed for this. And maybe the murder of a few other senators because why would it be such a big deal if he killed just one?!

It turns out the senator gets replaced by a double who has access to Clinton. His plan to blow himself up while jogging with Clinton is foiled by Deathstork when Deathstork shoots him from a helicopter. Afterward, the government thinks Deathstork was out to kill Clinton as well so now he's Deathstork the Hunted. The whole thing was some plot by some guy from Zandia named Crimelord. I think Zandia is where Brother Blood is from. It's sort of like Qurac. It's just a place where DC can house all of their terrorists so nobody gets upset when they use the wrong race of people as terrorists. It just makes comic books easier! Although it really seems more like a dog whistle of sorts. "We all know that every person living in specific countries are total terrorists! That's why people buy into places like Qurac and Zandia and Latveria. Wink, wink!" Which is kind of a weird way to go about things when, in comic books, you could easily just have a super villain be from any country without automatically being a representative example of the people from that country. It's not like everybody blames every American for The Joker! Or do they? Oh man, what an international public relations nightmare that guy's been! No wonder people in Europe can't stand Americans! Fucking Joker!

Deathstork the Hunted #0 Rating: C. So that's the big Zero Hour twist on Deathstork! He's now the most wanted man in America where before he was just the greatest assassin in America but also kind of a good guy so people like Batman and Superman mostly just shrugged their shoulders and let him be. Although once every few years, they have to battle him, just to show that they're keeping an eye on him so he doesn't get too out of control. Although isn't Batman at least partly responsible for every one of Slade's murders simply because Batman never tries too hard to bring him in?

Deathstork's art versus my version of Deathstork's art. Has somebody been reading my blog?

Deathstork #18

I could totally have done a decent job Photoshopping this but why bother when I can just as easily Shoop it!

The Review!
This is the conclusion to the "Twilight" story but it doesn't really resolve much of anything. I suppose it's only called "Twilight" because it's kind of a prologue to the coming Lazarus Contract series. Priest reminds readers of practically everything that has happened in the last eighteen issues so readers know all about the Rebirth version of Deathstork going into the story that will probably change everything again. Not totally, of course! But this issue covers the basics of the things that from his past that made Deathstork who he is: Grant's rebelliousness; Joseph's slashed throat; Rose following in his footsteps; Slade's time with the Suicide Squad; Adeline's hatred for her ex-husband; Red Lion's association with Deathstork; Pat and Luis's previous post-Crisis relationship with Slade; Wintergreen as Slade's moral compass. I may have missed some but those are the stresses acting on Deathstork's life (plus the ones he doesn't know about like Dr. Ikon turning into some kind of Solomon Grundyesque beast) as he goes into the story where he'll get to remember more horrible things he's done. The Titans should remind him how he got Grant killed and how he got Terra killed and how he got Joseph killed (although Joseph isn't dead anymore so that memory will be a weird one to deal with). I think he's about to learn that he's not even as nice as the hardly nice guy he currently thinks he is.

The Ranking!
No change. This series really does need to be read in one sitting, right? It's a nice change of pace to read a comic book that doesn't forget the past every six issues or so while also packing in lots and lots of story to keep me from being bored. I'm not being too obvious looking at my Wonder Woman comics right now, am I?

Deathstork #17

"I spy with my humongous eye something tiny that begins with D."

Last issue, I mentioned how angry Power Girl's fake boob window was making me. But then she got shot through the torso with the Infinity Rifle. That shot was taken from a higher advantage (because she was normal height and Deadline was standing on a car) which means it should have created a hole in her costume right around her tits and come out the back right around the top of her ass. She recovered but her costume probably shouldn't have recovered. Which means Power Girl should now have a boob window as well as a butt crack veranda. I'm all over that costume.

This is part six of the story called "Twilight." I feel like no stories should ever be called "Twilight" ever again.

The issue begins with a conversation between Slade and Billy Wintergreen. Wintergreen now has Deadline's Infinity Rifle and is storing it for some time when Slade needs to fight Superman again. Or kill him for a contract. Whatever. You never know what tomorrow will bring when you'll do anything for a paycheck.

I can practically hear all of the Deathstork Fangenders screaming their heads off after that characterization of him! So many people want to see him as a hero. But he's just a guy who kills people for money! Stop projecting your feelings of wanting to fuck him onto his morality!

While Slade is on the phone with Wintergreen, Beast Boy stops by to see if he can get into Power Girl's panties. Oh, sure, he simply asks her if she wants pizza. But since Gar Logan is a serial sexual harasser, we all know where that's going to lead.

I can practically hear all of the Beast Boy Fangenders screaming their heads off about that characterization of him! So many people want to see him as funny but he's really just a desperate pig who won't take anything less than a starbolt to the groin as an answer.

Beast Boy happens to notice Slade in the other room and his rectum falls out. He's all, "Oh shit! I've got all of these memories in my body that seem new but aren't new at all! They're like these red and blue memories but they're merging so that I suddenly remember that Deathstork is like the Teen Titans worst enemy ever and he once got the young girl I loved killed! And also statutorily raped before that! I need to end his life!" Gar turns into a gorilla and screams, "Call the cops! Call the Justice League! Call anybody but the Teen Titans!" But Power Girl is all, "What? Why? Oh, him? That's Deathstork? I mean, I knew it was Deathstork and not some blind jerk I was helping! I totally have this covered. Now exit the door and don't try to get back in and just leave the comic book completely even though you know my life is in very real danger! Good bye! We'll get pizza next week when I probably won't be dead!"

Power Girl figures Deathstork heard the encounter with Beast Boy since he went blind and not deaf. So she slinks into the room and asks him if he's going to kill her. As if he could! She just proved that she can basically heal from anything if she simply grows to giant size! So Deathstork is all, "Don't worry, young lady who is definitely too young for me to be fucking. You and all young women like you are totally and historically safe with me! Double wink!" He says "Double wink" because he's used to people not being able to tell when he's winking because he usually has that patch over one eye.

He does like to lie with little girls! Also...Roscoe can talk?!

Meanwhile in Minneapolis, Rose teaches Hosun about the Kiss of Death. Unless maybe she's just really happy that somebody, somewhere, finally told her the truth about something. Does that work? Does telling women truthful things that they don't want to hear get them to sleep with you?! I've been doing it all backwards and telling them lying things they totally want to hear! No wonder I still don't know what a vagina looks like! I bet it's like a doughnut, right?

Back in New York, Power Girl threatens to take Slade into the police now that she knows he is an assassin. So Slade does something that all of Slade's Fangenders finally won't be able to go along with. Maybe they can justify fucking a teenager and getting her killed. Maybe they can justify killing whomever he wants for the right price without letting any kind of justice but his own ethics decide. But how will they justify this dick move?

He murdered a fucking dog! He's as huge a monster as Peter J. Tomasi and Patrick Gleason!

This scene is why I love Priest's Deathstork book and why every other Deathstork book has failed until now. Slade will do anything — ANYTHING — for his own benefit. Before this moment, Slade tells Power Girl that there are no heroes and no villains. That "people simply do what they do." And that's how I want to see Slade written. He is not the upstanding, ethical hero who knows when it's right to kill. He's just a fucking guy doing what he needs to do for himself and, sometimes (though not often!), his family. And when a writer decides they need to make Slade likable at any cost, it costs the book its personality. Ironically, Slade needs to do wretched and unpopular things to be likable. He has to be Slade Wilson. He needs to be free to be Deathstroke. Most writers up until now just haven't had the stomach for it.

Power Girl, obviously, flips the fuck out when he murders her dog. Now Slade, blind and without a guide dog, has to figure out a way to get away from Power Girl. It shouldn't be too hard. It's not like she's an experienced Teen Titan that knows Slade's tricks and behaviors. It's not like she's like the guy she kicked out who just wanted pizza and could totally have helped her catch Slade. Hopefully he knew better than to simply go home and forget about seeing Slade in Tanya's apartment. This might be the beginning of that whole Judas Contract thing. I mean Lazarus Contract!

Slade manages to track down his suit while evading Power Girl, thanks to his glasses' connection with Ikon Suit Wintergreen. Ikon Suit Wintergreen is all, "I cannot come up with a plan to kill her." And Slade is all, "Whoa, what now? I don't want to kill her! I just want to fuck her! OH!" And the suit is all, "Dude, you should probably hope that the Superman Reborn story did not include reintegrating you with your Terra history." And Slade is all, "No way! That's one sweet ass memory!"

Slade escapes to live again but at what cost? How many Deathstork Fangenders have just decided this is the worst version of Deathstork ever? They're wrong, of course! This is the absolutely finest characterization of Deathstork I've seen in a comic book with his name on it. This is the Deathstork I keep writing about which almost always gets me yelled at by Deathstork fans. Usually those fans are fans of the Slade from the Teen Titans cartoon, so they can be forgiven for not truly understanding what Slade Wilson really is. But now they know! He murdered Tanya's pet for pretty much no other reason than to make her hate him and cause her to be distracted by the pain of loss while he escaped her. What a fucking dick. I love it!

Although I still hate that Tomasi and Gleason had Superboy kill his mom's cat Goldie because that's just fucking painful. He will never get over being responsible for the death of a family pet. Never! No matter how much Pete and Pat try to pretend it didn't happen. Goldie had better get the chance to return to life like every other superhero! Hopefully whatever weird shit is going on in the ground around the Kent Farm and Deadman's Swamp will bring Goldie back. But she'll be different! They never come back right! You reap what you sow!

Meanwhile, Rose (like the Deathstork Fangenders) is having a nervous breakdown after realizing just how big a monster her father is. But Wintergreen, Slade's spin specialist, PR Agent, and all around conscience in waiting, spends some time on the phone trying to convince her (and himself) that Slade's better than he appears to be.

Sure, whatever. BUT HE JUST MURDERED A DOG!

Oh, and just to be clear: Ikon Suit Wintergreen explicitly mentions how Slade killed the dog. I only say that because I'm less than trustworthy in the way I usually relate events in the comic book. But he did kill Roscoe. Snapped his neck like a doggy biscuit!

Meanwhile, Joseph is having problems of his own. Etienne just discovered that Joseph was fucking Dr. Ikon on the side. And because of that, she lets Joseph know that she's been fucking Slade on the side. So I guess that's why he's going to have to murder her. Or at least that's giving him a reason to murder her so all of the Wilsons are now suspects! I know she isn't dead yet but the comic book keeps showing the scene of her dead in her wedding gown so I'm assuming it's going to happen. But who will do it?! Rose the angry sister? Joseph the beta cuck? Slade the dog murderer?! So many people to choose from!

The Ranking!
+1! I never would have thought that I'd raise the ranking of a comic book where the lead character just murdered a pet. Context is important!

Deathstork #16

I am not Shooping this cover so just pretend it reads "Deathstork".

The Review!
Deathstork has gone blind so now his name is Twilight and he kills people with the help of his guide sidekick, Roscoe. Currently he's battling a guy named Deadline so if you had "Eventually somebody will come up with a stupider name than Deadpool" on your superhero pool at work, you still haven't won anything. Let's face it. Deadpool is a dumb name derived from Deathstork. At least Deadline makes it sound like "Oh! I've taken out a contract to kill a person so now that person's life is running on a deadline! And that deadline is my gun! KERPOW!" I guess Deadpool is called Deadpool because there was that Clint Eastwood film a few years earlier and it was probably on television when Rob Liefeld was thinking, "What should I give the name of my Marvel version of Deathstork?"

Although Deadline might beat out Deadpool for stupidest idea ever because Deadpool eventually found a niche in the superhero world that made him popular and Deadline has a weapon called an Infinity Rifle. It uses alien isotopes to create static disruptive shells around its targets. That sounds cool!

The new Power Girl has a fake boob window and it's making me angry. She also has an illusory underboob awning! That's making me less angry and more the other thing. You know, the emotion that powers the Violet Lanterns except more sexy.

Well, now she has a belly window!

See what kind of damage the Infinity Rifle does? Pretty awesome, right?! It could probably kill Superman. Why didn't Lex Luthor think up this weapon?

In the B-story line, Rose finds out that her Hmong family are all actors paid for by Slade. She finds out from Etienne, the woman Joseph is about to kill. I mean marry. He's already fucked her. Also I think he probably will kill her after marrying her when he finds out she's been fucking his father. That story doesn't have any blood in it yet so let's go back to the story where Deadline is about to get his hand cut off and then mauled by Roscoe.

Deadline has all sorts of special powers which he received from his encounter with an alien race. I bet it was just government agents in stupid costumes fucking with him. He also explains his moniker. If he doesn't kill a person by the guaranteed deadline, the kill is free. So why didn't he call himself Domino's?

Deadline's alien tech allows him to phase through solid objects. He likes to kill people by phasing a hand into their chest and going solid. Although that probably hurts his hand too so he usually just relies on the Infinity Rifle. As you saw, that makes a pretty good mess of even people with invulnerability.

Do you think Power Girl is actually dead? It would be interesting if DC allowed her to die in this series. It's not like she was being interesting in any other comic book, even the ones she was appearing in.

Darn it. She's still alive.

The Ranking!
No change! I wasn't paying particularly close attention to this issue. That'll happen, life being what it is.

Deathstork #15

A Hound of Death would make sense if his name were Deathhound.

The Review!
No change. The reason for the story's name, "Twilight", is revealed in this issue. Since Deathstork has gone blind, he's decided to change his assassin name to Twilight. I also think maybe he's a little bit ashamed of his name (his real name, Deathstroke! Obviously he'd be embarrassed if his name was actually Deathstork!) since he's now butting heads with a rival assassin who goes by the name Deadline. Seriously?! I suppose it's kind of creative in that it has a form of "dead" in the name which all bad-ass comic book assassins should have (except for Lobo) and it underlines the idea that all people have an expiration date, or deadline if you will (or don't. I mean, if some other person told me I should equate "expiration date" with "deadline" just to fit the flow of what they were saying, I'd call them a cunt (yeah, yeah. I go to that word way too quickly! But discussions about writing can get heated!)) and it's a riff off of Deathstroke! Stroke? Line? Dead? Death? Ha ha! Good one!

Also in this issue, Deathstork probably breaks some kind of sexual predator registry laws.

She's sixteen and a half, Slade! Way too old for you!

Other important plot points to remember for next month: Jericho's comatose boyfriend who he practically murdered for his supersuit has died but Jericho has taken him to Doctor Villain so that maybe he can have a new Origin Story; Rose has had a vision of Jericho covered in blood with a woman's body at his feet, so I don't think the wedding is going to go over great; and Wintergreen acts shocked that Deathstork is causing chaos at a Congresswoman's fancy party.

The best moment is when Deathstork realizes he's hanging out with another underage Teen Titan and he spends the rest of the issue trying to hide his boner.

Deathstork #14

I wonder if DC would be up for publishing a Deathstork variant cover so I don't have to Photoshop every issue.

When I was Photoshopping the cover, I assumed the white streak running through the "O" was water. So when I actually gave the cover a good look, I thought Deathstork was in The Mystery Spot where water spilled upwards out of the holes he shot in the walls. I'm not sure the reality of the cover is any better. Why is Deathstork using bullets that smoke? Maybe he uses Ice Bullets so that they melt, leaving no evidence of the crime! And that's steam coming out of his gun the way wispy tendrils of cordite don't ever come out of the barrels of guns because that's pretty much why cordite and other smokeless propellants were invented. Not that any artist doing covers for Deathstork have ever cared about that! Smoke coming out of the barrel of a gun is just shorthand for "This gun was just recently shot! You can tell by the smoke that is pouring out of the barrel the way smoke never does!"

Deathstork continues to fuck his son's fiance. But he has good reasons to! He knows she was just getting close to Joseph to get to him anyway. And also he likes fucking her. That's probably the primary reason. But she fell in love with Joseph while trying to get to Slade and now things are complicated and she's just going to have to continue to fuck the father and the son, preferably at different times. Although I don't think Slade or Joseph would really have a problem with fucking all together. Maybe they can get Rose to join too!

Speaking of Rose, she's still in Minneapolis dodging marriage proposals from Hosun and fuck proposals from her hip-hop cousin. It's too cold in Minneapolis so I won't be scanning any pictures of Rose in her underwear. Sorry perverts and lesbians and lesbian perverts.

I just noticed Norm Rapmund is doing the inking on this issue but Brett Booth isn't doing the art. Did they have a lover's spat?

Don't get me wrong! I'm thankful Brett Booth isn't doing the art on this series! Judging by his style, it seems he spent 95% of his time learning to draw by practicing drawing thighs.

After clearing up the prison break incident in Florence, Deathstork heads to New York because the incident in Florence isn't totally cleared up yet. To get his sword back from lock-up, he has to do a favor for Dex. My guess is that favor is shooting a cab driver in the face. But since Deathstork only has the one eye, he has trouble hitting the cabbie, even at point blank range. Granted, point blank range also includes hanging onto the hood of the cab as the cab driver smashes into buses and swerves all over the street. The messed up mission ends with a giant Power Girl inadvertently coming to Slade's aid. She's not involved in the chase for long but long enough that I figure Priest has a reason for her being here. All of the characters in his book have a story. He doesn't just throw them in for a quick guest spot. Unless that's exactly what he did with Raptor. It's too late to tell! Although Slade's Ikon suit still has the bird Raptor painted on the chest. So see? Leaving his own mark on the story! Plus he'll probably be back to challenge Slade. Probably whenever Nightwing winds up in this book.

Does the Ikon suit's gravity sheath not extend to the sleeves? Seems like an amputation disaster waiting to happen! Or maybe it just can't stop needle points?

Deathstork smashes the guy Dex sent him after between a Dumpster brand trash receptacle and an alley wall. After that, he has enough time to change back into his civilian gear before passing out from whatever was in the needle. And that's exactly the moment Power Girl reappears! She missed all the Deathstork stuff and just thinks Slade is a victim of the rampaging taxi driver.

Rose visits a pawn shop to pick up a sword that's now been in her family for generations, wink, wink! Fittingly, it's inscribed with the word "Rose" in Hmong. Lucky! I mean, the story is called "Destiny" but it's really more "Lucky!", right?

Oh! Back at Power Girl's Power Cave (a studio apartment on the some compass direction side of New York), I learn that one of Deathstork's sleeves is missing. I either missed how that happened or Raptor still has it. Anyway, one benefit of being taken home by Power Girl is that she decontaminates Deathstork's radioactive suit. It also turns out Deathstork is currently blind. Well, that finally explains that! Remember how he bumped into the wall while visiting Pat awhile back? Sure, that was a few issues ago but it apparently took place in the future. Stupid stories that don't tell themselves in a linear fashion. I still don't even know why this story is called "Twilight"! There hasn't been one teenage vampire or dying god in it at all!

Oh! Maybe Deathstork is the dying god. Or vampire!

The Ranking!
No change! I'm assuming Slade went blind after being injected with whatever he was injected with. But he couldn't even shoot the cabbie in the face so maybe he was already blind but he just didn't know it yet because all of his other senses are as fine-tuned as his reflexes. He didn't realize he couldn't see because his other senses were compensating so well! That totally explains why he couldn't shoot that guy in the face. What also explains it? That cabbie is probably some super villain! I bet he's not dead at all! It's not like Deathstork saw him die, what with being blind and all.

Deathstork #13

Once again, I've spent all the time I have to read this comic on Photoshopping the cover.

Joseph Wilson — who is Catholic, I guess? — begins the issue by leaving the woman he has yet to marry but is currently sleeping with in bed while he goes to confess his sins. That seems like a pretty laid back religion, right?

I wonder if he'd be so forgiving if Joseph confessed to putting his pee-pee in a man's boo-boo?

Catholicism can be summed up in this one boring anecdote I'm about to anecdotally anecdote now: in college, my friend Soy Rakelson (whom I've spoken about before because he's the go-to guy for stories about homophobia, white anger, hypocritical religion, and mocking the disabled) found himself in a religious dilemma. He wanted to fuck a girl whom he wasn't married to. That wasn't the dilemma. He didn't think once that that was a problem, probably because confession awaited him where he could brag to the priest about getting some pussy. No, the dilemma was whether or not he should use condom. He didn't want to get somebody pregnant but the Pope said birth control was abhorrent! That's pretty much religious people in a nutshell. As long as they feel they're strictly adhering to the most controversial religious mandates, the other shit that they're not supposed to do but that they really, really, really want to do doesn't matter. God will understand banging that sorority girl! But he might not look so kindly on using a condom!

Although, really, what is God's problem with birth control? I hope that argument doesn't stem from Onan because that story wasn't about sex at all. It was about business deals and honoring your father. God was only mad about Onan spilling his seed because he had a contract to get his brother's wife pregnant and he broke that contract. God wasn't all, "Oh shit, dude! You're only supposed to ejaculate if it's going to have a slight chance of ending in pregnancy!" No, God was more like, "Dude! DUDE! You promised your dad that you'd impregnate your dead brother's wife! He didn't just give her to you to use as a cum-dumpster (which you totally jizzed on the side of anyway, you miscreant)!"

I think I got the voice of God exactly right.

Meanwhile, Red Lion critiques Deathstork's old uniform while Deathstork battles Raptor. Raptor stole Deathstork's Ikon suit which has forced Deathstork to wear his orange and blue suit with the boots and gloves with enormous cuffs. It's so embarrassing. At least he didn't have a Nightwing disco collar. I wonder what George Perez was on when he designed those outfits. Probably Quaaludes and monkey semen.

I don't know if monkey semen was an actual drug in the eighties or if being coked out of your mind led to people blowing apes. Maybe none of those things happened. I think I'm just remembering my Planet of the Apes/American Psycho slash fiction.

Deathstork is a better overall fighter than Raptor but Raptor is indestructible while the Ikon suit's gravity sheath is in place. So Deathstork needs the Ikon's AI (which sounds like Wintergreen because Doctor Ikon had a huge boner for Wintergreen (much like Slade does!)) to shut down the gravity sheath. Unfortunately, it can't do it. But it might know somebody who can! Like maybe the kid of some guy who stole his lover's suit after killing him and, incidentally, that lover was the creator of the Ikon suit? You know? Joseph!

Oh, for some reason — probably to add drama and tension to the story — he wants Isherwood (Doctor Ikon, RIP!) himself. That seems like a lot of trouble when he could just get Joseph to shut down the suit, as he noted in this exact conversation!

Deathstork realizes he's wasting time battling an enemy he can't currently stop so he turns his attention to Red Lion. He knows Red Lion lured him here for a reason and he figures they should just get around to being honest with each other so they can get the work done and they can all go their separate ways. Also, it'll buy time for Joseph to get the Ikon suit shut down so that Slade can kill Raptor.

Red Lion's plan makes sense but I'll just turn it into a bunch of convoluted statements about his penis so let's just leave it at the theft of this aircraft carrier benefits Red Lion, Raptor, and Deathstork. So they should all work together! Which they do! Sort of! I mean, it wall works out in the end for all of them. Mostly? Red Lion gets a ship, Deathstork gets evidence that could convict his ex (which he destroys, dum-dum!), and Raptor gets radiation poisoning!

Oh, plus Deathstork gets his Ikon suit back.

And I guess he's fucking his son's fiance?

The Ranking!
No change! One of the best things about this comic book is that Priest isn't just filling a story about Slade with minor characters with which he can interact. He's telling the story of a bunch of characters whose lives all revolve around each other. I'm hoping Raptor gets more involved than just this story, now that he's been sucked into Deathstork's gravity sheath.

Deathstork #12

I got the half-finished variant cover!

• I fucking know, Actually Nerd! Shove your actually up your fucking ass!

• This story is called "Twilight" so I'm pretty excited about that. I love vampires. Especially vampires who are super fucking old but look so young that nobody blinks if they go around fucking high school girls. Those vampires are the creepiest kind.

• I wonder if Vampire Tim Drake from the future will appear in this story!

• The issue begins with wheelchair bound Pat (a former Vigilante) being visited by Slade Wilson. He's got a message for Pat: Luis will live! Well, thank somebody for that! The readers were all kinds of worried about what was going to happen to Luis. Maybe not all of the readers. Most of the readers probably thought, "Who the fuck is Luis?", before shrugging their shoulders and turning the page. The other handful of readers knew Luis was Pat's kid who almost got into gang violence because Pat wasn't around to make sure the maid didn't let him get into gang violence. You can bet that maid lost her job!

• After Slade delivers the news, he runs into the wall instead of exiting through the doorway. Pat realizes he's blind and the readers are all, "What the fuck?" At least some of them were! Most of them probably remember how comic books work and just turned the page expecting the story to flash back in time so we could see how Slade lost his eyesight (which is probably temporary because DC Comics doesn't need their own Daredevil knock-off. Especially when that knock-off is the knock-offer of Deadpool. That's just making things way too complicated).

• Jeromy Cox did the colors on this issue so I expect a bunch of poorly colored flags.

• Just kidding, Jeromy! Ha ha! We have so much fun, right?! Hey, did you ever color any of Cullen Bunn's stuff? He's a big jerk, right? Let's get the gossip!

• The first page of the comic is always wasted. It's like dipping your toe in the bath before getting in so you don't burn off your genitals. Now that I've gotten a feel for the temperature of the comic book with the bit showing Slade run into a wall (although why would he do that? His reflexes and senses should be honed to such a super degree that he'd never walk into anything while blind! He must have done it on purpose so Pat would sympathize with him), I can dunk my bag right into the thick of this story.

• Deathstork is breaking out of the Coast Guard's Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. That sounds like a made up place. I've never heard of a Florence in Colorado before! And if I haven't heard of it, I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist. That's just simple philosophy!

• Deathstork wasn't the brains behind the escape. That would be The Red Lion. I once went to a high school party at a Red Lion Inn. My friend Aaron and I wound up dropping all the little glass crystals that hung on the bedside lamp out the sixth story window and into the parking lot. That wasn't one of those stories where I'm bragging about my youthful experiences. If I were going to tell those kinds of stories, they would be filled with sex with lots of hot sexpots who were so totally into sex that we would sex all over the places people have sex. A lot. No, that was just one of those stories which are an example of why minors should never be tried in court as adults. The person I was at seventeen shares a lot of similarities with who I am now. But I would fucking beat that kid for shit he did that was way worse than vandalizing the Red Lion Inn. Young people do stupid shit and they shouldn't have their lives ruined forever because of it. And, yes, I even think that if they've ruined somebody else's life. Punishment without the possibility of redemption is simply cruel vengeance.

• Although I'd probably change my mind if some assfuck teenager maliciously killed a pet of mine. Then I would wreck that person so hard, they'd feel my wrath twenty generations down the line.

• What I'm saying is, I don't know everything! Maybe not even anything, really! But at least I know the colors of the stripes on the United States flag! Ha ha! Just kidding, Jeromy, buddy!

• Meanwhile in Minneapolis, Hosun (Slade's ex-dispatch guy) confronts Rose so that they can explicate some of the more confusing parts of the plot so far. I was going to scan that page so that I'd have all of the pertinent information in case I was confused by the story later, but then I turned the page and thought, "I should scan that!"

Slade loves staring at his grown kids in post-coital slumber.

• In Joseph's scene, the readers learn Joseph needs to rush his marriage because that should cure his gay headaches.

• Slade returns to Florence to interrogate Dex, the man who interrogated him when he was thrown in the supermax. Slade wants to know who else was freed from the supermax when he was because he figures Red Lion was just using Deathstork as cover. It turns out Raptor was currently in the supermax too! And now he's gone! Hooray! I hope he's talking to an agent about getting a biweekly anti-hero series of his own. At least his would come with a catchy theme song.

• Slade realizes Raptor and Red Lion are off to steal an aircraft carrier in dock ready to be turned into a casino. Red Lion needs it to get his country back. Slade might not care about all that anymore since nobody is paying him. But he needs to stop Raptor for another reason: Raptor took Deathstork's Ikon suit from the prison and painted a hawk on the front. Right over the dildo!

The Ranking!
No change. A good portion of this story feels like a not too intelligent editor read the previous eleven issues and said to Priest, "Dafuq?" So then Priest was told to write this issue and have a bunch of the characters explain what actually happened in the previous eleven. It still told its own story and moved a bunch of plots forward but the amount of exposition and explication in this one probably quadrupled what came in the previous ten issues.

Deathstork #11

Just based on this cover, I know this Creeper is five bershillion times better than Nocenti's Creeper.

There's this thing people do where they tell other people words that they're not allowed to say. Sometimes the person is shouted down for being gross and problematic while other times the person reacts appropriately (determined by the angry people) and is let off with a warning and some side-eye (but they're never really in the clear ever again). Mostly it's a ritual to make a person feel like they're actively participating in making the world a better place. But the real truth of the matter is that people will always call other people derogatory names. Not because they don't know that they shouldn't but because they hate the other people and don't give a fuck what anybody else thinks. This is why there's such a thing as the euphemism treadmill. That's a phrase coined by Stephen Pinker to describe how a perfectly neutral word for something eventually comes to be used to describe people in a derogatory manner. Subsequently, the previously neutral term must be updated to shed the now negative connotation associated with the word. Obviously the new phrase will eventually be picked up by assholes and used in a derogatory manner. This causes people to think up a new neutral phrase and so on. An easy example of this is in the use of the word retard. Even if that word is completely retired, it's only a matter of time before the phrase "intellectually disabled" becomes more hurtful than simply descriptive. I'm not saying it isn't right to try to avoid being a dick or that using language can't be hurtful and knowingly used to harm! My narrative voice certainly makes it seem like I'm against changing our vocabulary but I was just being snarky to poke fun at the people who really fucking make a career of it. Anyhow, this is just the preface for something else I'd like to discuss. I will be using the term nigger in the next few paragraphs because it's essential to my point and not because I couldn't wait to find an excuse to say it. My point is that there is something going on in conservative media which needs to be called out for what it is.

People who know they shouldn't use offensive terms but still use them will never stop using those offensive terms just because other people tell them to stop. They will stop for one reason only: because the use of the word actually results in negative consequences. Here is a quote by Lee Atwater from the dog-whistle politics entry on Wikipedia:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968, you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

Atwater readily admits that the change of behavior (a change you still see as the basic building blocks of the GOP) is due only because the language has become so unacceptable by the populace that the person saying it loses support. But like the euphemism treadmill, changing the language doesn't change the message or the asshole nature of the person using the abusive language. Those people will try to hide in plain sight but they can never actually succeed completely. They need a way to vent their hatred and anger. Which finally brings me to the word that, in today's climate, identifies the racist: thug.

If you don't know who David Duke is, bless your ignorance.

Thug is thrown around constantly these days with a wink and smile. It's the currently acceptable way of saying nigger and people using it need to be called on it. As an added bonus of winks and smiles and elbow nudges, you'll note that racist David Duke expects readers to understand that "decent Americans" means white people. This is the current narrative being seen on channels like Fox News and dining rooms across the country. To some of you, this is the most obvious thing in the world and you've probably been angrily rolling your eyes at the word for years now. But I wanted to talk it through a bit because I know, from my own family's posts on Facebook, that there are way too many people who find it way too easy to call Black Lives Matters protesters "thugs" while never seeming to use that word in any other context ever (except maybe if they're reading an old Batman comic book).

Call it out when you here it. Point it out to your family. Don't let the racists get away with normalizing this word.

Dammit, DC! Maybe get a new model for your Thug Heroclix!

The Review!
This issue begins like this:

Dammit, Deathstork! I don't have the energy to rant about guns now!

When I say "rant about guns," of course I mean it as much as when I say I want to "rant about dogs." It's not really the guns or the dogs I wind up ranting about. It's the gun and dog owners who are always the huge idiots that need a verbal wedgie. Although this first page ties in a bit with my thug rant (and not in the way you think if you're thinking what I think you're thinking, you racist piece of rat excrement). Smoking bans have happened because of consequences, both monetary and electorally. The only way a politician will change their views on a subject is if they face consequences for being on the wrong side of it. Right now, a lot of politicians are on the wrong side of gun control. But thanks to gerrymandering, the ability to self-delude, and a strong NRA lobby, they can't see it and have yet to face any career consequences. Until politicians begin losing their jobs because they don't give a shit about gun violence, they will continue to do nothing about it. Hell, they'll continue to do less than nothing! Fucking idiots just blocked a measure that would prevent schizophrenics and other mentally ill people on social security from purchasing a gun. That isn't just unsafe for the public, it's unsafe for schizophrenics themselves! You don't want somebody with schizophrenia to have a gun on hand when the voices begin telling them it's time to die.

The police at the scene of the shooting come up with a typical cop description of the crime. Two black men stop to rape a white woman in a broken down car at one in the morning. She shoots at them and hits a kid going by on his bike. But Jack Ryder, Creeper Extraordinaire, describes what really happened. The two black men are mechanics who stopped to help a woman in distress. Woman panics because, well, two black men! She shoots off a gun with no training and kills the kid coming up to sell her the drugs she was parked in this neighborhood to buy.

That's a lot of social commentary packed into a three page scene. The bottom line is that it's rumored Deathstork is in town to murder a bunch of murderers. The Creeper just wants to get to the bottom of it before Lois Lane does.

Oh, and for people who actually read this comic and my review who are thinking, "That black cop written by the black writer and drawn by the black artist just called those black men thugs!"? Of course he did. The guy's a fucking cop, fer chrissakes. Edit: Later a priest uses the term but this time, it's in quotes. Get it?

According to Jack Ryder, gang members responsible for child deaths have been turning up dead. But not one of them has been shot. The Creeper thinks Deathstork (I miss the nickname Douchéstork) is sending an anti-gun message. Also an anti-smoking message because not one used butt has been found at any of the crime scenes. Also an anti-rape message because nobody has been raped. Also an anti-Batman message because somebody has been scrawling "Batman is a dick!" on the wall nearby each death.

The mothers of these dead children did indeed hire Deathstork. They want the people responsible for killing their kids to pay. Jack Ryder swoops in with his trench coat and his notepad and his Pulitzer dreams and begins discussing issues of race with them. The mothers are all "Dafuq?" One white man is helping solve their problems. Another white man is all, "Is this really appropriate?" (Said in that voice that black comedians do when they're imitating a white person! You know, basically Steve Urkel.)

Okay. Maybe the Batman is a dick thing was a lie. He's writing DS.

Jack Ryder is aghast at these mothers perpetuating a cycle of violence. But the detective explains it to him logically: "Guns don't kill people. Deathstork kills people."

Is there a test to find out how old you are "on the inside" by how many times the name "Deathstork" makes you giggle? I must be nine months old.

Most of this is Jack Ryder working the clues and following leads and asking witnesses. It could end up being an M. Night Shyamalan shocker: The Creeper is responsible! Maybe the "DS" is actually an emoji of The Creeper's horrified face.

Jack Ryder's story leads him to a different story and a different reason for Deathstork being in Chicago. It also leads him to getting shot so now he's going to have to get all Creeperfied before he dies. Then maybe he'll come clean as to what this is actually all about.

It turns out Jack Ryder is actually a pretty good investigative journalist! He saw all the clues that I didn't. Like how did a bunch of mothers get enough money to hire Deathstork? Answer: they didn't! They hired a knock-off version who felt he was doing the right thing. Douchéstork manages to stop by to kill the guy impersonating him due to "brand dilution." Before leaving, Deathstork offers Jack Ryder his solution to the gun violence in Chicago, and it's pretty fucking cynical. I mean, I thought I was cynical but Priest's Deathstork easily has me beat.

See, the problem was innocent victims being gunned down and if...why am I explaining the punchline?!

The Ranking!
+1! Priest tells a good fucking story. Also, I just want to point out that I wrote the rant on the word "thug" before I even knew what this issue was about. It's my super power! To discuss things appropriate to the comic book I'm about to read!

Deathstork #10

I wish Deathstork were real. I think it's okay to hire a pedophile for the contract I'm thinking about.

The Review!
The current story is called "Four Rooms". I'm repeating that because I don't want to just start this commentary with the following sentence and then have everybody think, "Why the fuck is Tess talking about Four Rooms?"¹ Remember how they found the corpse under the mattress in the movie Four Rooms? That may have been the first time some of you heard about that Urban Myth. I have loved Urban Myths for most of my life, especially when you learn something you thought was true was actually an Urban Myth. Some people never mature enough to realize that sometimes things get reported by actual news agencies which never actually happened and will hold on to certain beliefs for most of their lives. People don't like to acknowledge that they were foolish enough to believe false information. They will stick to their beliefs and even retrench further into their bunker when told by other people how silly the things they believe are. Some people think you shouldn't drive people into those bunkers by being aggressive with your dismissals of their false beliefs. I think the exact opposite. Drive them into their bunkers of ignorance where they will either think on the thing or just fucking hate me. If they think on the thing and eventually emerge, chagrined but grateful, I will accept them with open arms. If they choose to hate me forever and see me as a despicable, lying, monstrous piece of shit, I'll fucking accept that too. I don't have any time for people with no critical thinking skills.

Although sometimes, I just sit in my bunker and wonder why nobody is talking to me.

Oh! About Urban Myths! The first one I ever heard was the one that Mikey from the Life Cereal commercials died from eating Pop Rocks and Coke at the same time. I also remember the one where Rod Stewart collapsed on stage and had to have his stomach pumped. They found it was full of semen. Years later, a couple of the neighborhood kids who hung out at the 7-11 (who used to watch me complete Super Mario on one quarter with no warps) told me the exact same story but about Bon Jovi. I was thoroughly entertained.

I've told that story before. But what do you expect? I've written like thirty-five hundred of these things!

Me on Facebook.

Here's a helpful hint if you want to add footnotes to your own terrible blog! If you want a superscript one, you hold down the alt key and type 0185 on the keypad. Guess how you get a superscript two? WRONG! It's alt plus 0178! You can figure out superscript three because it follows the pattern you probably thought would be a pattern starting with the one. Guess how you type superscript four? WRONG! I have no idea how to fucking type that. I usually find one online and copy and paste it. I guess you're only supposed to have three footnotes per written work.³ I suppose I could learn the HTML codes for them but that's being too rational for a paragraph that was meant to engage in some hyperbolic elements for humorous effects.

Don't you hate it when you say something in an exaggerated manner and then somebody matter-of-factly corrects you? Like when I say, "Donald Trump is an asshole!" Then somebody, probably a conservative cousin, says, "Actually he's just a human being like me or you and not a sentient anus that has removed itself from the original organism, swept some long butt-hairs across the top of its sphincterish shape, and squelched its way into the White House."

I want to amend the previous paragraph. There is no way a conservative cousin could come up with that response.

Fucking hell. This is all I've ever fucking asked for out of a Deathstork comic book! Don't make his morality easy! The reader doesn't need to feel comfortable liking him!

Popular entertainment loves to tell stories where the audience automatically knows who to root for and who to denounce. I like my characters to be more complex. I suppose there isn't any real evidence for that being that I'm still reading comic books in which complex is a dirty word.

Not that Slade Wilson killing people who might kill him makes him complex! But Deathstork writers have a history of making sure he kills the bad guys and ultimately does the right thing so that he can be seen as a hero (or, for want of a word that losers don't love, anti-hero). Killing people shooting at him is par for Deathstork's White's Only course. But killing people who are innocent victims of a genocidal war against their people because he's desperate to get paid for a job they want to stop? That's a bit to ambiguous to defend. He's adding to the misery of a people for his own pocketbook. That's the Deathstork way but no fan ever really wants to accept it. They're all such sycophantic ass-kissers.

The Room Four story ends with Slade getting a promotion to Captain and walking past Dex, the interrogator from Room Two. That's how those tie in! Anyway, Dex from Room Two explains to Slade how they have enough evidence to convict him of some political shenanigans. Right. As if something won't come up where Dex will be all, "You know what? We could use Deathstork's help right now! We won't convict! EEE!"

Meanwhile over in Room One, Jericho is learning some medical mumbo-jumbo from Doctor Villain. He's all, "Deathstork's sword is coated in Promethium! That shit is whack! Now you got super powers!"

Over in Room Three, Xia (Rose Wilson's Hmong name) meets her mother Lillian's family. She also beats the crap out of a disrespectful gang-banger and deftly fends off the advances of her cousin. Not in the usual way with a sword but just with her words. There are a lot of entertaining words in this comic book. Isn't that interesting that the best Deathstork comic book is the one with more words and conversations than bullets and corpses?

Finally, the Red Lion comes to break Slade out of prison. But first Slade has to read something about the new Flash and alternate universes to remind readers that this comic book still takes place in the same universe as all of that other boring Rebirth shit.

The Ranking!
+1!

_______________________________
¹Not that any regular reader probably ever questions why I suddenly begin discussing anything. If you do, I apologize for making my commentaries so confusing.²
²I had to make that comment a footnote since the sentence it footnotes stated "the following sentence" which would have been wrong if followed by the footnote.
³Take that, David Foster Wallace!

Deathstork #9

If this were me, they'd have to stick my cock in one of those arm shackles too. Mostly because I'd have requested it.

I don't know how much longer I can be funny because I'm just getting angrier and angrier at what the Republicans are doing. They were anti-Trump when they feared he might bring some liberal ideas into the White House because he's one of those Hollywood types (plus he expressed quite a few liberal ideas previous to running as a Republican) but now that he's carrying out their hateful and selfish agenda, they're happier than pigs in shit. They are pigs in shit. Hell, they are shit. I don't want to demean pigs. Here's what I just posted as a Facebook status because I'm ready to burn down all of my relationships with people who think Mitch McConnell basically telling a peer who is a woman to shut up (and then not doing the same to my Senator from Oregon, Jeff Merkley, because why? Oh, wait. The why is the easy part, the fucking coward. I wonder how many times Little Mitch got his nose bloodied at school by another boy for being a dick to a girl? Too bad some girls didn't bloody it to (additional note: oh look. More white men were allowed to read the letter on the Senate floor. Go fucking figure):

If you agree with what Trump and the Republican toadies are doing, you are:

A. Ignorant.
B. Sexist.
C. Racist.
D. A Coward.
E. All of the above.
F. Fuck you.

Liberals are constantly accused of playing politics when it's quite the opposite and there's an easy way to spot why that's true: use your fucking brain. I'm not a liberal because I wanted to choose a side and then win the game. I'm a liberal because I don't view the world through my own selfish desires. I don't look at a government safety net program and think, "How many fuckers are abusing this?" I think, "Who fucking cares how few people are abusing it because it actually fucking helps people in need, you piece of shit motherfucker." I understand how the tax code works and while it gets complicated in the details, the overall system couldn't be simpler and yet nobody seems to fucking understand how people are taxed across their range of income. This leads to a rallying cry that the tax code is too complex and needs to be changed to some kind of disastrous straight percentage across all incomes that would lead to the biggest deficits this country has ever seen. I don't fear for my life so much that I think freedoms should be exchanged for illusory security, especially when that security is aimed at keeping cowardly white people feeling safe from brown people. And I don't even fear for my life so much that I think all guns should be taken away but holy Christ's jizz in alphabet soup something can be fucking done to tighten up regulations on who can get their hands on them and what kind should be in mass circulation. If you approve of a ban of immigrants from seven countries where no terrorist attacks on American soil have originated in the last thirty years and also approve of lifting restrictions on people with mental illnesses buying guns, you're the political one. You're the scared racist who thinks you need a gun to protect yourself from the brown people. You are almost certainly one or all of the above in my previous survey.

I have been called paranoid because of my criticisms of Trump and the Republican majority. It's actually vigilance. Paranoia was when people saw a black man governing the country and expressed all kinds of "What-if" scenarios about what he was going to do to the country without any evidence. Vigilance is when you see the fuckers in Congress doing everything your government shouldn't do and pointing out how it's fucked up. If you're not, at the very fucking least, concerned with their war against transparency, you've proven to everybody around you that you really don't fucking care about America. Hell, if you don't care about that, I don't fucking know what you give a shit about. I guess you just care about living in a world where nobody points out that you're an asshole.

The Review!
Last issue, Superman captured Deathstork and was all, "You'll rot in Coast Guard prison, you miscreant!" This issue, Deathstork probably escapes from Coast Guard prison.

This issue begins like this:

All of Trump's cabinet picks could have had similar names and nobody would have batted an eye, apparently.

Dr. Villain is waiting to speak with Jericho for probably innocent reasons. But currently, Jericho is out sitting on a bench in his Ikon superhero outfit. At least his body is. His mind is inside of a nun.

Doctor Super Villain tells Joseph that he's Slade's personal physician. I know when I was a doctor who totally wasn't a super villain at all, I used to hunt down my patients by bothering their family members when I thought my client needed to see me. I felt it was better than waiting for my patients to alert me to a problem.

Dr. Villain can't track down Slade because he doesn't know Slade is locked up.

And apparently guarded by cyclopes.

Things you learn from playing Dungeons and Dragons for so many years: A. A little something about courage and B. the plural of cyclops.

This multi-part story is called "Four Rooms" but it does not take place in a hotel. The first room is Jericho's office where Doctor Villain is waiting for Slade. The second room is where Slade is being interrogated at the Coast Guard's supermax detention center in Florence, Colorado. I don't know how they get their prisoners there by boat.

The man interrogating Slade calls him "Death Strike" which is stupid. He obviously should have called him Deathstork. The man's name is Dex and he's all, "Oh! Oh! So you think you're Jesus Christ, do you?! Well, la de freakin' da!" Actually, he might be a little more adult about it. I can't help but perceive everything through the eyes of an immature asshat.

The third room is Northern Vietnam. That's a big room! The star of this room is Xia (the star of the first room was Jericho and the second room, Dex). This is the room I'm going to like the most because Xia has breasts.

See? This room is the sexy room if you're into breasts, face kicks, and camel's toes.

Room Two is the room for you if you're into chauvinists. Some might read some of the things I've written and snarkily say, "Well then that must be the room for you, you buttfaggot!" No wait. Those are the things Deathstork fans generally say to me. What the other "some" might say is "That sounds like the room for you, Tess! You sexist jerko!" To them I would say (and have said!), "You've been reading me completely wrong if you thought that!" I have been known to make sexist jokes on occasion. But they're almost certainly and almost definitely quite probably making fun of the people who think that way. But then that's sort of the problem inherent in satire. Those who don't realize you're making fun of them wind up embracing you as a hero of their chauvinism. I've always been a huge fan of satire because it's generally more intelligent than just calling somebody a cunt but in the current climate where spectacularly dumb people are celebrating the causes of dumbness, racism, sexism, and lunacy, satire might not be the best way to go anymore. It's time to simply look people in the eyes, call them an asshole, and leave it at that.

Finally we get to room four! That's the room where they're playing poker. In the pot is an ancient sword called Deathstork. This room also takes place "years after the massacre" in Srebrenica. If I weren't an American and were able to remember things from just over twenty years ago, I would probably remember what that was. But who can remember it since 9-11 happened? That was the worst thing to ever happen to anybody in any country ever.

Sorry. My satire is showing again. Unless that's just steamy, bloody, fetid sarcasm. It's hard to tell when you're as angry as I am at the ignorance of my fellow countrymen (and countrywomen! They're no smarter than the men!).

The poker game is where Slade gets the name Deathstork (and the sword!). It's also where he meets up with his team of international muckrakers, including Wintergreen.

Slade teams up with Wintergreen's men to find General Dragas, the man behind the orders to commit genocide. As they search for him, they run into a little hitch. Wintergreen's translator is Bosniak and wants to see the general dead. Slade wants to the general alive so Slade can pay next month's rent. Usually Slade would win this argument but this is early in his career as Deathstork (the beginning, to be precise). And also the translator has a small army on his side.

The Ranking!
+1! If you were exhausted beyond belief of searching for an intelligent Deathstork comic, you can finally stop being exhausted! That's because this comic book exists. If you haven't been reading it, you'll have to be a little more exhausted as you hunt down all of the back issues (or just get off your lazy ass to get the trade (or just fucking order it on Amazon since you're already on the Internet, you lazy jerko)).

Deathstork #8

Shit, Adeline really got to Supes!

I was disappointed with Batman's guest appearance a few issues ago because he just ignored Deathstork being in his city. I suppose that's the smart thing to do, really. If Batman isn't going to arrest Slade (and he never does!), why bother getting into a tussle with him? It'll just end with a whole bunch of broken walls and windows and skylights. Which, come to think of it, is exactly why Batman should bother! Wayne Wall, Window, and Skylight Repair would make a fortune!

I don't think I'm going to be disappointed with this confrontation though. Superman has a history of solving all of his problems by punching them in the face. Okay, so Batman does as well. But there's no way Priest can pull that "the hero acts reasonably and responsibly" bullshit twice in one story arc! Fans would riot! And Deathstork fans are the worst! They riot whenever somebody points out that Slade Wilson is an unethical, morally repugnant pedophile!

Slade decides to give up without a fight. But that doesn't mean he has to shut up.

Oh my god! He's a bigger nag than Adeline!

Adeline and Slade are really making Superman look like a lazy chump. But Superman just has to put up with it. He knows the crap Slade Wilson has done because Batman probably whines incessantly about Deathstork sometimes being called the Batman Who Kills. But what is he supposed to do about Alisante? Take Deathstork's word for it? Bring Alisante in without any evidence as to why? At least Adeline had warrants on Slade and evidence of his misdeeds. Superman can't just grab anybody off the street (or the ocean) and drop them off with the cops with a note saying, "Bad person. Do something about it." Although on pages two and three of the last issue, Superman was hauling the entire aircraft carrier to land. So maybe he'll use his x-ray vision to see all of the drugs inside the ship. Does Superman need a search warrant or can he use his x-ray vision for probable cause? Not that Superman has to follow the same procedures as police officers do. But I'm sure he probably tries to, for his own peace of mind.

Luckily for me and my need to see Deathstork beat up Superman, Slade fires a shot into Superman's face as he pretends to give up. Superman then begins to do that thing that makes all of his battles last so long. He hits Deathstork as hard as he thinks he can hit him without putting his fist clean through him. It's not hard enough because of Slade's Ikon Suit. So Superman recalculates and tries a little harder. And then a little harder. And then a little harder than that. See? This is why all of Superman's fights aren't just one punch and done. If Superman knew exactly how hard he could hit an opponent without killing them, then his fights would be short. But he has to be extra careful or else the next time he sees Batman, Batman will be all, "Everybody who hasn't killed anybody can sit by me!"

Pounding on Deathstork's Gravity Armor gives Superman a nosebleed from the shock waves bouncing back at him after each punch. Superman just got rope-a-doped! If you don't know what a rope-a-dope is, you should read Catwoman #15 where Ann Nocenti explains it to the idiots reading her garbage.

Meanwhile, Rose learns that Etienne, Joseph's fiance, works for HIVE. Just like Grant! Just like Adeline! Just like maybe not those two and maybe not HIVE but probably! Nobody is who anybody thinks they are in this thing! Even Superman isn't really Superman since he's Preboot Superman!

Apparently, the Ikon Suit isn't Adeline speaking to him. It's just the stupid suit talking. But it sounds like Wintergreen so that maybe Slade will finally let the real Wintergreen retire. Superman is given an earpiece to listen to Ikon Wintergreen because he's even better at philosophical bullshit and making a person feel guilty than both Adeline and Slade combined! He's all, "So what is justice? What laws do you follow? When do you punch a guy in the face and when do you kick him in the nuts? Who told you you could police the world and what Goddamned rulebook do you follow?!"

Through a bunch of legerdemain and distracting balderdash, Deathstork manages to kill his target while Superman flails around like a Magic the Gathering player trying to take off a bra. Sure, I'm assuming the Magic the Gathering player here is a male but I'm not clarifying whether the bra is on himself or a woman he's about to see naked. You know which one is most plausible.

It's as if Priest were given Deathstork to write and told, "Give people a reason to root for him other than the disgusting bloodlust of enjoying seeing baddies sent to Hell!" And he was like, "Sure! No problem! Easy peasy! Why has everybody found this so hard to do?"

In the DC Universe, if you want to show that your character is a huge bad-ass not to be trifled with, you have them kick Lobo's ass. If you want to show that your character has a conscious and possibly a heart and is actually trying to do the right thing even if maybe they go about it in a blood-soaked manner, you have them engage in a conversation with Superman. Deathstork understands that just because something is a law, it doesn't make it lawful. Sure, his morality also offers a chance to put a significant amount of money into his bank account but maybe there's a reason Batman didn't pursue him while he was in Gotham. Batman operates on the same assumption that sometimes doing things legally isn't enough to get the job done. It's just that Deathstork doesn't mind going whole hog into that line of reasoning. I've liked the character of Deathstork for a long time (it's why I have so many of his comic books!) but I've never really liked the way he's been written. There have been the rare exceptions and this series is one of those.

Also, can you imagine if Red Hood and Batman had basically this same kind of conversation? It would go a long way to fixing Red Hood and cementing why he does things the way he does, and why Batman allows him to. I know some people might have a problem with using the word "allow," but, come on! It's Batman! He's the fascist dictator of Gotham ruling from the shadows! What happens in Gotham only happens because he allows it to happen!

Superman brought along Jericho to help stop Deathstork and to convince himself that he's washed the blood from his hands over whatever the hell situation he got himself involved in. It's all Jericho's clusterfuck now! But in the end, Supes does get the satisfaction of punching Deathstork in the face and knocking him out. Clark and Bruce will later probably swap tales of beating up Deathstork over a beer.

In the end, Superman embarrasses the United States by exposing their ties to the drug lord Deathstork just assassinated right under Superman's nose. He does it to show Adeline and everybody else in the government who wants to keep using them to fight their ideological battles that he's not on anybody's side and he won't be manipulated. He's on the side of his own ideology which is, according to Superman, totally the right one. According to Batman, it's totally an infantile one! But hey, like Deathstork or Rose or somebody said earlier in this story arc, "Tomato, tomato."

Superman places Deathstork in the custody of the Coast Guard so that Slade will be able to free himself by next issue. And, finally, Rose Wilson leaves her dad in the present while she heads off to investigate her Hmong past. Also she's being followed by some white guy! Epilogue!

The Ranking!
No change. Isn't it nice to have a Deathstork comic book that's well done, Deathstork fans? Now you don't have to send me angry messages over the Internet every time I bash your precious anti-hero. You see, it's never been my goal to attack Deathstork. I don't have any personal vendetta against any character in popular fiction. What kind of an insane garbage hound do you think I am?! My goal is, to be precise, to attack horrible writing and terrible art! We might disagree on what those are but know that if we do, you're almost certainly wrong. Mostly because the majority of people can't get past their own internal desires that color the world with their bias, and so they defend awful and terrible things simply because they support their cuckoo world view. But I have a secret and it is this: I don't give a shit about anything except being entertained so that I can, for whatever length of time it gives me, be blissfully ignorant and unaware of my eventual descent into the grave. Just be fucking good and entertaining and, maybe on occasion, terribly, terribly smart and witty and so clever my envy will burn as fiery and hot as the interior of a thousand suns. If you're none of those things, my wrath and disgust will burn even hotter.

Deathstork #7

I think I've spent enough time this week Photoshopping covers.

This opening paragraph is for Anonymous: Trump is a stupid head!

Two issues ago, Batman failed to care about apprehending Deathstork. Although he did manage to make Rose Wilson feel guilty about her chosen profession. This issue, Adeline Kane tries to convince Superman to apprehend Deathstork. She makes a pretty good argument. At least I think it's good. She yells at him a lot and makes him feel like a piece of shit. According to Twitter, that's standard debate tactics which usually lead to winning the argument. Twitter defines "winning the argument" as being blocked by the person you were making feel like shit. Currently in America, a lot of people think they're master debaters when they are, in fact, simply assholes.

Superman decides he should bring in Deathstork just so Adeline gets off his case. Adeline needs to be careful. Superman could leave this meeting feeling sympathy for Deathstork.

The short stories in this issue take place all over the past few days. So the Superman thing was thirteen hours ago. Then he caught Deathstork on a battleship for a double page splash before shifting scenes to Joseph now using dead Uncle Dr. Ikon's super suit himself. That's the problem with secret identities. Anybody can kill you and take over, as long as they fit in the costume.

I suppose all of these stories are the final bits and pieces of backstory needed for the conclusion of this story where Superman and Deathstork have a heart-to-heart talk on the roof of the Daily Planet. Superman will learn that Deathstork is a killer but only of bad people. And Dathstork will learn that Superman will believe anything.

Eleven hours before Adeline convinces Superman to go after Deathstork, Slade Wilson pays Adeline a visit at her home in Georgetown. She's remarried but she still has at least one family picture including Slade on the mantle. Is that normal? I mean, I get having the picture. But she hasn't drawn devil horns or blacked out his eyes or anything!

Anyway, Slade has determined that Adeline is the person currently trying to get him killed. Just like I said! Remember how I said that? I totally did. At least, I think I did. Well, if I didn't, I'll just go back and add it into a past commentary so it looks like I had already said it.

While Slade explains what he's learned to Adeline, he remembers creepily watching Rose and Richard fuck.

I hope it doesn't turn out that Pat, Richard's mother and one-time Vigilante, isn't behind the plot to kill Slade because I'm not going back and changing my past commentaries again!

Apparently Adeline and Slade were made for each other because neither one of them can simply express their feelings or needs. Adeline set up all of these dominoes just to get Slade back into her kitchen so she can ask him to accept a contract for HIVE, or whatever organization she works for. Or maybe she just likes being a stinger in his ass. Whatever her reasons, she tells Slade she's going to keep after him. He decides to walk away because he somehow thinks he won't fall for any more of her intricate games in the future. He's got a surprise with a capital "S" in store for him!

At some point during the past day, Slade pays a visit to Pat the Ex-Vigilante.

Pat probably had a stroke from everybody constantly telling her how terrible her costume was.

Slade's current job to kill some rich person on a personal aircraft carrier goes tits up when his current — I don't know what to call him — you know, the guy who helps him on the radio while he's on a mission? Oh! His Oracle! Anyway, his Oracle gets a call from Joseph's fiance letting him know who he's really working for. Hosun, the Oracle, apparently didn't realize he was working for the guy who fucked his mother. Or killed his mother? I don't know but I guess Hosun is Rose's half-brother? Maybe? I'm fucking speculating like crazy here! Anyway, after Hosun cuts off his help, Deathstork has to finally activate the Ikon suit that he was forced to wear due to the initial bits of Adeline's Rube Goldbergian plan. And once he turns it on, Adeline is able to contact him and she's all, "Fucking Christ, you idiot. Why couldn't you have turned this thing on six issues ago?! Now look at what you made me do!" And that's when Superman tears open the side of the battleship to beat the shit out of Deathstork.

At least, I think it was Adeline talking to him over the Ikon Suit! This series doesn't like to easily reveal its secrets. That must make it hard for people who have to wait two weeks for each new issue to remember everything. But that's their own problem. They should start a blog to help them remember the plots of all the comic books they're reading!

The Ranking!
No change. I'm still loving this comic book even if I don't always know what's going on because I eventually discover what's going on! That's the way stories are supposed to work! I hate when comic books are confusing and then they stay confusing and they never explain themselves because the writer really never had a plan in the first place. But Priest seems to have like a dozen plans in place and they're all paying off!

Deathstork #6

Why is Slade making moose antlers?

Here's an anonymous message sent to me via Tumblr today:

Your reviews are actually kind of funny, but Jesus Christ lay off the Trump references. As a Clinton voter, I'm sick of the low lame jabs.

As anonymous messages go, it's pretty polite! Practically even a compliment! I mean, the "kind of funny" is sort of an off-hand slam that really hurt my feelings. But then everything else about the message seems like a lie, so I probably shouldn't care too much that the messenger didn't say my reviews are uproariously hilarious like they probably should have. I'm sure there are Clinton voters who still consider themselves "Clinton voters" who really hate people making fun of Trump because everybody has a right to be stupid, even Democrats (or people pretending to be Democrats!). But to categorize my slanderous comments about Trump as "low lame jabs"?! Come on! Those jabs were uppercuts! And right hooks! And they were intelligent and cutting! You know how else I know this person didn't actually vote for Clinton? Because they typed "Jesus Christ" with the appropriate capitalization! People who voted for Clinton were obviously atheists and Satanists who would never invoke the name of Christ! I'm too smart for you, Anon!

Look, Anon. If you want to read my stupid reviews, you might have to put up with me expressing opinions that will differ from yours. You can't go around being angry or annoyed every time somebody says something with which you don't agree. But you must realize that I was never going to take your suggestion seriously, right?! I mean, you'll probably never read another one of my reviews ever again! You stumbled upon them today, felt you needed to express yourself to the void of the Internet because nobody else will listen to your Magic Deck making strategies, and probably have already moved on! I would be as pathetic as Cullen Bunn thinks I am if I changed my ways for a disgruntled, anonymous drive-by commenter!

I take it you think I mention sucking dick and masturbating just the right amount though?

This issue begins with Deathstork back in Sub-Saharan Africa. I guess things there weren't completely resolved after he rescued Wintergreen and fucked over the president of the country. I guess he's there to save the president of the country after giving him ample time to think about how he tried to fuck over Slade. Being a villain is hard. You can't trust anybody. It must be nice to have a guy like Wintergreen in your corner who will do anything you say no matter how crazy because he loves you unapologetically.

The president's name is Matthew but he likes to be called Red Lion. But he doesn't matter. Also on the plane is Rose's boyfriend Richard. Apparently he was the one who put the hit out on Rose. I guess that's why all of the subterfuge last issue. It was Slade's way of telling Rose he loves her! By keeping her in the dark about how her boyfriend tried to have her killed. He's so sweet!

Meanwhile Rose is meeting with her brother Joseph to discuss Slade trying to kill her. Joseph isn't too sympathetic because Slade nearly got him killed a long time ago. Also, Slade killed Joseph in the Preboot Universe. But he did it because Joseph wanted him to and because the Wildebeest story had been dragging on for years with no end in sight. Even though I liked Jericho back then, I was glad to see that story arc end!

Oh, well that finally explains that! I was tired of being too stupid to understand what was going on! I mean, pretending I was too stupid! It was a joke! Ha ha! And you fell for it!

Okay! I think I finally understand what is going on! I sort of already understood though because Wintergreen explained it all to Rose about how her father doesn't know how to express affection. Look at what kind of trouble can happen when you don't just hug your parents? Not that the child should be blamed for lacking the ability to have close, intimate contact with their family members (not that kind of intimate contact, you pervert!). I can probably count on my fingers the number of times I hugged my grandparents and I loved the fuck out of them! Plus I have all my fingers! Just for, you know, clarification.

I saw this quote recently that may or may not have actually been said by F. Scott Fitzgerald: "An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke!" I added the exclamation point because I imagine he probably yelled this at somebody who used too many exclamation points. I use a lot of exclamation points but I assure you, I only use them when the sentence preceding the punctuation mark makes me laugh. Or I'm excited. Or angry. Sometimes all of those! See, I was excited there but not angry and I wasn't laughing. The point to this is that from now on, because he was so critical of the exclamation point which I love, I'm only going to refer to him as F! Scott Fitzgerald.

This issue is filled with editor's notes about other issues because this issue is beginning to tie up a lot of loose ends. The various short stories making up the narrative are beginning to meld into one coherent story in which Deathstork probably disovers Adelaide is behind kidnapping Wintergreen and getting Deathstork back in his suit and turning his children against him and getting him to team up with the Red Lion. Or it's totally different. I'm tired of being a Grandmaster Comic Book Reader! Sometimes I'd just like to admit that I don't know what the fuck is going on.

Oh shit! Richard is that Luis! The one that got involved in gang activity in Gotham because his mother, Pat, put the maid in charge of him while she went out to fight crime as Vigilante!

Richard (aka Luis) hates Deathstork because Richard's mother, Pat, abandoned him to go be Vigilante at Deathstork's side. Also because she was on the run from the police but she really super wanted to be at Deathstork's side. And when he told her he works alone and wouldn't let her come with him, she made the worst cry face in the history of comic books. I think I have the scan around here somewhere.

I can't tell if she's crying or she's in shock due to her brains leaking out of her eyeballs.

Whoa. I'm starting to feel like a Grandmaster Comic Book Reader again! Self-doubt can stuff it!

Meanwhile, Joseph (not Jericho as the previous writer of Deathstork thought his actual name was) meets with Uncle Dr. Ikon to let him know that he's getting married to his sign translator. I know a few signs! I know helicopter and cookie and raccoon and boy and hungry and horny and vagina and cunt. I learned most of those from Signing Times on PBS. I learned the last two from Lee Mack's stand-up. What I'm trying to say is that I might not actually know any of those signs well at all. The ones from Lee Mack because he was a comedian on stage making jokes. Do I trust that?! And the ones from Signing Times because I learned them watching barely verbal toddlers do them while shaking from yet-to-be mastered motor control and flipping the fuck out from excitement.

Anyway, Uncle Dr. Ikon has the best response to a friend confiding their love for somebody that I've ever seen.

I highly doubt anybody who knows me at this point in my life will ever confide in me about their love for another but if they do, I'm not ashamed to say I'll be stealing this response.

Uncle Dr. Ikon has a bit more of a reason to say "I love my cat" to Joseph's declaration that he loves a woman than just being snarky. He's been in a relationship with Joseph for some time, so he's making a comment on the different kinds of love and that maybe Joseph's love for Etienne is like Uncle Dr. Ikon's love for his cat. I don't mean pure and unadulterated and the best kind of love ever in the world forever and ever! I mean the kind of love where you probably aren't going to engage in sex. But Joseph points out that he refuses to be labeled and he'll love and, probably, fuck whomever he wants to fuck. I should also probably stop calling him Uncle Dr. Ikon now because that's a level of creepy that I didn't realize was going to be reached when I began calling him that.

Uncle Dr. Ikon (I decdided not to stop) refuses to accept bisexuality, especially when he's losing his lover to it. Instead of gracefully staying Joseph's secret dick on the side, Uncle Dr. Ikon decides to tattle to Deathstork that his son is a big gay homo fucking his big gay homo uncle. Knowing Deathstork's sexual history, I imagine that will elicit little more than a shrug. But Joseph decides he can't take the chance and enters Uncle Dr. Ikon one last time (or maybe for the first time. Not all gay sexual relations result in sodomy, you know. Oral and hand jobs are quite satisfactory for satisfying certain disgusting urges (I don't mean those urges are only disgusting when gay people have them! Everybody's urges are totally disgusting. Mine resulted in performing a rimjob this morning!)). But this time, Joseph enters him as Jericho in the usual way: eye contact! He then turns off Uncle Dr. Ikon's suit and allows him to plummet to his death. Possibly. The issue ends before Uncle Dr. Ikon ends.

The Ranking!
+1 Ranking! Christopher Priest reached back and plucked out Luis from Marv Wolfman's 90s Deathstork comic book! I mean, that's crazy! Maybe not Geoff Johns crazy or Alan Moore crazy. And because it's just Luis, it's a little bit boring. Also, I don't know that Luis didn't become some huge character during the Naughts! Maybe everybody reading this comic book knew right away who Richard was. Anyway, Luis is a good example of how this comic is really building a great foundation for the Rebirth Deathstork to be more than DC's Punisher with a worse costume. I'm enjoying the complexity of the entire story and how it's all coming together.

Deathstork #5

The worst thing about Deathstork is that he's probably a Trump supporter.

Deathstork has come to Gotham to get in a fight with Batman. Maybe he actually came to get Batman's help but he decided the best way to ask for help was to kidnap Damian. So, my first statement was correct. It also makes Deathstork a coward! How about fighting Batman in a comic book that doesn't have "Deathstork" on the cover?

Thanks to the inclusion of the last sentence of that paragraph, I had to go back and Photoshop the cover!

I'm going to lose all respect for Batman (not that I had much (or any?) left!) if he doesn't arrest Slade Wilson after he's done working with him. I suppose I have to give Rebirth Deathstork the benefit of the doubt that he isn't a child rapist. I suppose Deathstork hasn't been a child rapist since pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths, right? To be fair to myself and my bias and my inability to let that aspect of the character go, he did manipulate and sleep with an underage girl! I mean, the pre-Crisis Deathstork did! This Rebirth Deathstork might only have boners for appropriately aged women and Wintergreen. I suppose I should give him a chance.

Although what's up with this quote by George Pérez that I found while doing heavy duty research by typing "tara markov Judas Contract" into Google and deciding the Wikipedia entry would be the most educational link?

"I wanted her to be cute but not beautiful. She looked like a young girl. I gave her a substantial overbite, her eyes were wide, her body was slim, she wasn't particularly busty. I wanted her to look almost elven, so that when you see her for the first time wearing full-make up and dressed in a provocative outfit where you know she's just been in bed with Deathstroke that it does jab you a bit. 'Whoa, good God! This little girl is a slut!'"

George, you don't mind if I twist your words a little bit which, to be quite frank, don't really need much twisting! But you thought the best way to portray Tara was to make her look like a little girl so that when the readers discovered Deathstork was fucking her, they'd think, "Woah, good God! This little girl is a slut!"? I think this is the part of the conversation where the young people would say something like "I can't even!" But since I'm old, I totally fucking can. That's fucking messed up! I didn't read The Judas Contract when it came out because I didn't really get into DC Comics until Crisis on Infinite Earths. But if I had, I can tell you I wouldn't have thought Tara was a slut! And I was only twelve! I would have thought, "Why are they naked in bed together? Is that doing it?! Are they doing it!? Oh my god! Am I reading pornography?!"

Okay, so twelve year old me wasn't quite as sophisticated as forty-five year old me! Now I would read that and think, "Whoa! She's only like fifteen and she's doing it! Lucky!" I mean, I would be all, "Deathstork is obviously a pedophile and he's manipulating an emotionally wrecked child who desperately needs a father figure. Too bad she found one that doesn't understand boundaries and, apparently, the fucking law." Not that I know what the legal age of consent was in New York in 1984! I suppose I could do more hard-boiled investigating but I don't want to open another browser window. But even if it were sixteen and Slade didn't break the letter of the law, he certainly behaved poorly! But replace "poorly" with a stronger synonym! I'd look one up but, you know, browser window!

In other words, I'm going to give Christopher Priest's Rebirth Deathstork a clean slate! I mean, maybe not totally clean! I don't think you can ever totally wipe away the pedophilia.

Oh! They're using my plan! Except without a sniper rifle!

Just like I expected, Batman refuses to be sucked in. He doesn't negotiate with terrorists and child kidnappers! Besides, now he has the night free of Damian! Maybe not the whole night though because how long will Slade be able to handle Damian? Three, four hours tops?

Rose manages to follow Batman back to his Batmobile, impressing him, so he agrees to hang out with her for the night. Batman doesn't even know what he's agreeing to! I suppose when you're as overconfident and cocky as Batman, you can afford to go blindly into almost certain death. Or at least yet another fistfight with Deathstork.

That was the first short story. It was called "Lost". The second short story is called "In League". Like "In League with the Devil", right? But which one is the devil? Slade? Batman? Rose? Oh, I know! Damian, obviously!

Robin has been chained to the bottom of a water silo slowly filling up with water. It's a classic TV Batman cliffhanger! "Can the Robin swim to safety?! Or will the Boy Wonder go under...forever!" It's a typical cliffhanger situation so the scene changes after Robin points out how he defeated Deathstork in their last confrontation by throwing money at him.

The third short story is called "The Why". Rose tells Batman that they're trying to find the person who put out a hit on her. Batman tells Rose basically the same thing Wintergreen told Rose (minus the stuff about how he loves Slade's ass): "Slade Wilson is a manipulative bastard who uses everybody for his own ends and why are you looking at me like that I'm nothing like him!"

In the fifth short story, "Father's Day", Robin references Maude. How the hell does Robin know about that show? I know it's on those stations that play nothing but television from thirty or more years ago but when does Damian have time to watch television? Maybe he just has a bunch of MP3s of the worlds best television theme songs because Maude's theme song kicks ass. Although the line about Joan of Arc being a girl who really cooked might be crossing a problematic line.

Damian and Slade have a nice father-son chat while Rose and Bruce do the same (except for the son parts being daughter parts). I think in both situations, the Waynes have all the power. Although Slade might be trying to get Damian to reveal something Damian shouldn't reveal. Damian is cocky and inexperienced enough to understand he should just shut up. Meanwhile, Batman is just trying to point out to Rose that Slade is a dick and maybe she shouldn't be emulating him.

Batman just uses Rose as his sidekick for the night while he waits for Damian to escape from Slade's clutches. Robin eventually does by blowing up his head. I mean, not his entire head. Apparently Robin has a fake skullcap made of explosives that he can detonate. He only uses it right before he's about to drown because Damian was in power and he was the one trying to get information out of Slade. But he wasn't successful. Now he gets to flirt with Rose because she's totally into Batman's wards.

Remember what Wintergreen said, Rose! Slade just doesn't know how to say "I love you!" without it sounding like he put out a hit on you!

Meanwhile, Deathstork is still on the hunt for somebody. If he put out the hit on Rose, I don't know why he's still looking into it. But he is! So could Batman have been...wrong?!

The Ranking!
No change. Can you believe this shit? A Deathstork in Gotham story and he doesn't get into a physical confrontation with Batman! I feel so unfulfilled! My stomach hurts because there was no catharsis from the escalating tension waiting for the expected conflict! It's like The Blair Witch Project all over again! BLARG! That was me vomiting from being so wound up without any release! I think I need to go out in public and punch somebody in the face to feel better! They'll probably understand, right?