Aquaman #38

I'm going back to calling Tacoman Aquaman because I don't want to confuse my future self when I eventually forget why the hell I even began calling him that in the first place. Spoiler: it was for no reason at all!

Last issue, Grodd and Aquaman plummeted through an ancient Atlantean Portal into the Labyrinth of Monsters! That's where Hercules was trapped for thousands of years (and might still be? Did he get shoved back in by Aquaman who doesn't have a compassionate shell in his body?). Hopefully Gorillas are as good at mazes as rats and that kid I knew in 5th grade who convinced everybody that the definition of "fart" in the dictionary was "an explosion of gasses from between the legs." I'm pretty sure it said "expulsion" but what did I care about proving him wrong? You get into those kinds of 5th Grade politics and you're just asking for trouble.

Aquaman manages to hang on to something on the Gorilla City side of the portal while he steals the trident back from Grodd. He lets Grodd fall into the Labyrinth of Monsters and then heads back through the portal. Hopefully Grodd's connection to the gorillas of Gorilla City continues to allow them to dump their worst thoughts into Grodd's head or else this city is in for a rude awakening. Gorillas will suddenly be starting their weeks with Cases of the Mondays. They'll stop picking nits out of their neighbor's fur. There'll be a sudden rise in chest thumping. That line about cats and dogs from Ghostbusters.

Mera is the hero and still she doesn't get her name on the cover. Fucking sea-patriarchy.

Fucking patriarchy is right! Here's a beautiful scene showing Mera's intelligence and perception and all I can think about is how much I want to stick my tongue in her ass. How dare you corrupt my mind like that, patriarchy! Unless I should be yelling at testosterone? Maybe I should yell a little bit at Paul Pelletier and Sean Parsons for making Mera so attractive? So yeah! Fuck one of those things for my impure thoughts!

Meanwhile in Atlantis, Dr. Evans made another discovery concerning the shapes of holes and the shapes of things that might fit into those holes!

Dr. Evans could be replaced by a toddler and this story wouldn't change one bit.

Shin and Evans suddenly have a lot more information at their disposal after having read some scrolls in the Library of Atlantis, talked to some dead people living in the walls of the city, and put shapes into other shapes. They now realize that the Atlanteans knew of a way to access pocket dimensions which exist within this universe but outside of time. The perfect place to store leftovers! After Shin reveals this knowledge, Solovar is all, "Oh yeah! Us monkeys figured that out too! Easy peasy! No problem!"

The Labyrinth of Monsters was one of these pocket dimensions. And Shin believes the Maelstrom leads to another one which the Queen planned to turn into her Merwoman Cave. She probably only meant to be there for a little while playing games on her Playstation 2 but forgot about how the place exists outside of time. She probably planned to just play a few games of Yu-Gi-Oh before heading back out to get something to eat but since there is no time, she never felt hungry. So now she's been playing for fifteen years straight. And she still doesn't understand the rules to the fucking game! It's probably hard to develop a card game based on the rules that were seemingly made up on the fly by the players in the cartoon.

Pegasus: "Now I play my Big Dicked Dark Dragon card for free because you lost three hundred life by playing your Pork Pie Platypus on a Sunday!"
Yu-Gi: "Not so fast, Pegasus! By playing your Big Dicked Dark Dragon, you've activated my Trap Card, Swimming In Feces! It floods your play field in shit, dropping all of your monsters attack power by three hundred points and forcing them into defensive positions!"
Pegasus: "Ha! I knew you would activate that Trap! Which is why I'm now going to play Shit Storm Devil Bitch! If I sacrifice four creatures while my field is covered in shit, she gets a boost of two thousand attack points and can attack immediately! And you only have five hundred more life points, Yu-Gi! It looks like this is the end! Have a pleasant stay in the Shadow Realm!"
Yu-Gi: *thinking to himself* "Oh no! What am I going to do now? It doesn't look good and my friends are in trouble! And Joey is wearing that fucking dog costume again for no good reason!"

Where does this gate lead? Atom Ant's house?

Aquaman and Mera wind up in Polynesia where Aquaman speaks to some fishermen in their own language. Mera asks how Aquaman knows the language and he dodges the question with a smooth, "Oh, well, I hung out here for awhile." I know what that means! He was fucking somebody in these waters and Mera knows her! Better to let sleeping sharks float.

Aquaman and Mera find a large version of the Maelstrom carved into the island. It's surrounded by statues of giants looking inward at the symbol which Aquaman doesn't even consider might come to life as soon as he tries to open the portal. It's not as if Aquaman is living on Earth-33 where giant stone statues coming to life is unheard of! He lives on Earth-0 where gods are real and atheists like Mister Terrific are stubbornly holding onto the belief that there must be a rational, scientific explanation for all the crazy shit constantly going down in the universe. It's just super advanced science! Probably!

The creatures come to life and vomit lava and fire all over Mera and Aquaman. I guess they're so waterlogged that they can withstand this kind of heat for at least a few pages.

The battle is just a way to show that Atlanna doesn't want anybody following her. A few pages of Mera splashing water on the giants and Aquaman getting batted around like a cat toy and they eventually make it through the portal and into the Land That Time Forgot!

Poor prehistoric rhinos. The Land That Time Forgot was such a peaceful place before the humanoids arrived.

Aquaman #38 Rating: +1 Ranking. At first, I thought maybe these rhino guys were Baluchitherium so I looked it up on Google and found they're slightly different (using a liberal definition of the word "slightly"). But I did find that Van Halen has an instrumental song on Balance called "Baluchitherium." What the fuck, guys? I remember the cover to this album but I'm not sure I've ever heard it before. "Baluchitherium" does kind of sound like I've traveled to prehistoric times by the end of the song. And the guitar riffs could probably have been pulled off by a T-Rex. The most amazing thing about the song was that Sammy Hagar didn't sing on it. They must have recorded it without his knowledge so he couldn't shit it up with his grating, tequila-damaged voice*.

*Transparency: David Lee Roth paid me to write that.

Grodd #1

Oh you silly monkey! You're upside down!

I don't know if I'm in the mood to be funny right now. I just got dressed down in one of my commentary's comments section because I'm not allowed to call out assholes. Apparently I "come across as condescending, self-righteous, arrogant and disrespectful." All that says is you've been reading my blog! Anyway, I'm just trying to get people to focus their anger in healthy directions! I've been alive a long time! I've seen movements harmed due to overreacting assholes in the mix pushing people away from their side! Okay, maybe most of those movements were in Dungeons and Dragons campaigns but you can learn a lot from role playing! But now that I've been told that my cock outweighs any experience or wisdom I might have on a subject, I should probably just stick to jokes about monkeys. Good thing this comic book has a monkey in it!

I think I just flattered myself by saying "my cock outweighs any experience!"

I hope my audience has very few monkeys in it because I don't need people complaining about my views on Monkeys as well as my views on attacking allies and my views on the nonexistence of God and my views that Canada is in America.

And before I begin reading, let me just apologize to Commenter Natalie for using her serious comments as fodder for more stupid fucking jokes. All comments to my blog are appreciated! They're also probably going to be talked about. Especially if they tell me I'm being a dick. Or should I say cunt? I don't want to be accused of sexism but I don't know which word would make that less likely!

Grodd's issue begins before the Justice League have been defeated. The Gorillas of Gorilla City are helping to rebuild. And some Gorilla is narrating and going on and on about destiny and whether destiny exists or is it made up or blah blah blah fucking blah blah blah. I'm sure the narrator is Grodd since this is his comic book.

I would answer "Yes" to his first question.

The way time works, destiny is one of those words that means something different when looked at in different points of a person's life. You would say of a child that he's destined for greatness but he may never become great. It's a belief and a dream. Destiny doesn't preordain anything and it's up to the child to choose its path. But at the end of that child's life, if he did become great, one could look at his accomplishments and say, "He was destined for greatness." And it would be true because he's already chosen his life's path and gone through it and that's the way it turned out. Funny thing about time is that that's the way it was meant to turn out because it turned out that way. Sure, it's a tautology but it's my attempt to explain why I would answer the stupid monkey's question with a nonsensical yes. It's both. Whatever your life was like at the moment of death is the way your life was meant to be at the moment of your birth. We just can't see it because, and this is the strange bit, we've yet to choose it. Yes, I believe we choose our path even though it's preordained. Nothing is forcing us to choose the path we take but once we've taken it, it becomes the only path we were ever meant to take. See?

Now if you want to bring up alternate dimensions that exist for every choice we ever make then fuck you! Let's read some more about monkeys!

The Narrator continues his philosophical musings and they're all fairly well-thought out and interesting.

I am convinced that "conviction" has never been used more perfectly than in this Narration Box.

And then the eclipse happens. And even though Ultraman set it up to block out the sun in Happy Harbor, Rhode Island, it also blocks out the sun in Central Keystone City, Whatever Fucking State It Is In. And then it looks like Johnny Quick is paying the city a visit or the Earth is splitting open. Maybe it's Gorilla Grodd on a moped.

Yep, it's Grodd! But no moped. Sad face.

I was hoping Grodd would appear back in time to attack Keystone Central City so that Barry and Hal's first meeting would be fighting time traveling Grodd just like one of them said way back in an early issue of Justice League. But then The Flash Annual #2 showed that wasn't how it happened because they were obviously talking about the aliens they had to fight to save the children. I think some of them were apelike. But instead of Grodd traveling through time, he was just now freed from the Speed Force by the Crime Syndicate. And now he has Speed Force powers too!

Since The Flash is (presumably) dead, The Pied Piper makes his triumphant return in order to save the city!

Oh! I meant embarrassing return. I had my dictionary upside down.

Since Centone Keystral City is just chock full of bad guys, a few come by to join up with Grodd: Chroma, Tar Pit, and Girder. They left out my favorite of this new batch: The Folded Man! I hope it's because Grodd plans on killing these nobodies and Buccellato wanted to keep The Folded Man alive so he could become super awesome and The Flash's greatest enemy.

Grodd does react negatively to these chumps trying to join his cause and he kills Girder for his insolence.

Maybe since he's made out of girders, he survived that ass kicking.

Solovar tries to stand against Grodd, telling him that they have decided to make peace with the humans. But Grodd says "Fuck that shit!" and attempts to kill Solovar while crashing a helicopter full of humans into the ground with his new "force of mind" powers. The gorillas and the humans attack Grodd en masse but it's not enough. He's just too powerful for them all.

Ha ha! Good one! Now flip over a car!

The humans that Grodd lets live are put into an internment camp while the Gorillas turn Kentral Ceystone City into Gorilla City. Solovar and the other Gorilla Elders are chained to the fallen Flash statue and used as Grodd's throne. And apparently Chroma didn't get to last too long in The New 52.

But there's The Folded Man! Yay!

Grodd puts the Mayor and the Elder's head on a stake near his new throne to promote the clarity of his new vision. I'm pretty sure that vision is "Shut the fuck up or you'll head will be put on a stake." But Grodd didn't count on one of the side-effects of being infected with the Speed Force: super-duper-hyper ADHD. He rules Gorilla City for all of a couple of hours and then grows bored, leaping away to whatever destiny or evolution or destiolution have in store for him. But what's going to happen to Gorilla City now? I suppose that story will take place in Forever Evil: Rogues Rebellion!

Grodd #1 Rating: Better than most of the other comics from the first week! I like that it all took place in the "NOW" of The New 52 and that it didn't involve Grodd's mother beating him and calling him a fucked up chimpanzee. Besides, we already saw how his daddy issues caused him to eat his father's brains and how being king meant everything to him. And now that he got it, he still wasn't happy. Isn't that always the way? Why is that always the way! I'm glad I don't know what I want to make me happy so I'm not unhappy wishing I had that thing to make me happy! Instead I'm just happy! Maybe I'm just an idiot.