Grifter #7

If the fight with Midnighter is even close, I'll go buy a hat and eat it.

Last issue, Grifter defeated the Daemonite God, Black Curate, by believing in faith and hoping for trust! He also lost his girlfriend but no time to mourn her! It's time to go to the Himalayas and go toe-to-toe with Midnighter!

The title of this issue is called Blood on the Snow featuring Midnighter! That exclamation point is part of the title because it's so exciting! I can hardly wait! Especially because the blood on the snow is probably going to be Grifter's!

Before I begin reading this, let me ask an important question. How the fuck is Grifter going to get to the Himalayas from Seattle? I suppose Sofia has some super expensive method of transportation she stole from Q-Core. She seems to have enough money to waste on a small sea plane that she let crash to the Earth last episode after jumping out of it and onto an invisible space ship. But they never did get any money to fund their anti-Daemonite campaign since Grifter's lost locket con failed to go anywhere. By the time Grifter gets to the crash site, Midnighter will have been and gone!

Oh shit. I'm crying from laughing. I should just make a compilation of all of Grifter's narration boxes throughout the whole title. Fucking gold. No, platinum! No, Unobtainium!

It sounds like you've found a soulmate, Grifter!

How? How did you travel across the globe? How did you get out of America when the government has a manhunt going for Cole Cash? Did you take the snowmobile the entire way?

Note to Self: Figure out how to make animated GIFs again. I haven't made one 8 or 9 years.

This was the last animated .gif I made. It's using demo mode!

Now they're just getting boring and mundane! Talk about how you've never been one to come when called! Like a fucking cat!

Since Grifter's Narration Boxes became boring, let's just skip ahead to where he finds the crashed object, notes that something has escaped from it, and then encounters Midnighter.

It's like Nathan Edmondson doesn't know how to insert the story he wants to tell into a believable framework! Midnighter would have been there instantaneously with Stormwatch's Door travel technology!

Even if I'm asked to believe that Grifter knew about this crashed fragment before Stormwatch (somehow!), Cole Cash still had to make his way all the way across the world with no money and hiding from the law (which you'll see in the next panel I scan is even stated by the comic)! And he still arrives before Midnighter can step through a magic doorway. Although what most surprises me is Grifter wearing a shirt!

See? He's the world's most wanted man! Really? WHY?! How is he the world's most wanted man?! I can see how maybe he's currently a top ten wanted felon for being behind that whole plane attack thing in Issue #1. But the world's most wanted man? Highly doubtful!

Fuck. Look at me! Arguing with a Goddamned comic book! I'd be totally ashamed if I wasn't so proud of myself!

Gifter and Midnighter's discussion about why the other one is there quickly devolves into trying to kill each other! Midnighter says Grifter can't be allowed to leave. Grifter shoots at Midnighter. Midnighter dodges bullet and kicks Grifter's gun. Grifter gets message from his Soulmate that he must depart immediately.

Midnighter is willing to kill Grifter to keep this thing secret. That doesn't actually seem like a Midnighter thing to do. He may kill but I'm pretty sure he doesn't just go around killing innocent people. Especially when all Midnighter wants to do is protect a secret. They've got Martian Manhunter on the team! He can fiddle with Grifter's memories and that's that. Stupid writer just wanted to make Grifter and Midnighter fight. Or the editors just told Nathan Edmondson that he needed a Stormwatch guest star and to do whatever he wanted except kill him.

Grifter winds up touching the crashed bit of whatever and the thing transfers its memories to Grifter. So now he knows all about Stormwatch and possibly some more about the Daemonites and it's a really convenient plot device for Cole to stop running around trying to figure everything out. Now he can get busy fighting the Daemonites! After he gets done fighting Midnighter.

Well if you suddenly know so much, then you'll also know that Midnighter only recently became a member of Stormwatch and has known about the Daemonites for a far shorter amount of time than you have!

Meanwhile, Max Cash is still alive because you can't kill Max Cash by crashing a helicopter into him! And he's ready to kill his brother because Cole put him in the hospital. Which Cole actually didn't do. So maybe Max's memory has been damaged as well.

Back to the fight, Grifter runs because he knows this can only end in his death. Well, that's one point for Nathan's grasp of characters. Grifter ends up crashing though the ice to fake his death. Midnighter decides that the only way to be sure Grifter is dead is to smash the ice and collapse a bunch of it. You know, instead of finding the dead body and making sure it was dead and maybe cutting its head off too just in case. Midnighter does have Engineer scan the area for lifeforms but the Eye of the Storm scanner is conveniently acting wonky. No signs of life!

Ugh! Another creature that Stormwatch, the most powerful group in the DC Universe, is no match for! But Grifter is going to be a match for it? No. Nope. No sir.

Grifter does realize that he doesn't stand a chance against this thing that escaped and walks away into the Himalayas. On foot. To die from hypothermia and frostbite.

As Grifter walks off thinking the amazing stuff he thinks, he comes up with a plan. There is no evidence to indicate that this plan will actually work so I'm not sure how or why he comes up with it. His last Narration Boxes: "There's only one way I can get close enough to the Daemonites to stop them...I'm going to convince the world that I'm a villain. It will be the greatest con I've ever pulled." Really? Because I think you're already all of the way there seeing as how you're the most wanted man in the world! You stupid fucking twat.

The final page shows the thing that broke out of the piece of the Eye of the Storm that crashed to Earth (so Stormwatch had prisoners on their headquarters that they didn't know about?). It's name is Helspont and it's the thing that Superman has been punching in all of the ads for the new creative team beginning in Superman #7! It also talks to itself and says stupid things. I bet it says funnier and smarter things in Superman #7 written by Keith Giffen!

He's talking about Superman!

Grifter Issue #7 Rating: No change in the rating. But only no change because I'm hesitant to say that this comic is worse than Captain Atom! We'll see what happens next issue. And then Captain Atom still has Issues 6-8 to prove to me that it's the worst comic anyway!

Grifter #6

Were backpack buckles the only things the aliens had lying around with which to tie up Grifter?

I believe I've said this before: Nathan Edmondson's Narration Boxes are horrible. Vile. Despicable? They don't actually say anything. Here's what he does: he makes a statement. Then he makes a second statement that uses a word from the first statement to tie the two statements together even if it doesn't follow. Then he tangles a few more statements together while repeating words so it sounds like the statements make some kind of sense.

But they don't. They're weaving a spell. A spell to make you stupid. A spell to lull you into a false sense that something profound is being said. But nothing is being said. Absolutely nothing. And you're spending $2.99 to read obfuscation and legerdemain.

Case in point: The opening page to Grifter #6. Sofia is heading to board a sea plane to catch up to Cole Cash on a spaceship. As she's running, Cole Cash (Grifter) is Narration Boxing.

Simple statement. Cole doesn't trust anyone. He's a hardened street urchin full of self-reliance and a grim perception of the way things are.

A joke! He's poor and can't afford anything! But he also can't afford to be let down. Again, a strong sense of self-reliance.

Here's some of that sleight of hand. Now that we've established the word trust in the monologue, let's slip it out and replace it with faith! Now instead of something that can be earned and relied upon (trust), we've exchanged it for something that must be utterly believed without any evidence. But since Nathan uses the words interchangeably, we barely notice the difference. Tricky!

And now faith, having replaced trust, is itself replaced by hope! It's like the cup and ball trick! Are you watching carefully?

And what the fuck? Where'd the ball go?!

And the big finish! A statement that has nothing to do with anything and how the fuck did we get here? But it feels like it fits because he said that unseen thing earlier and then he said that bit about what he was seeing not inspiring much hope. And trust and faith are gone but remember those basically equaled hope and now he's saying that part about being hopeless! But this statement has nothing to do with trust or faith or, actually, hope. It's just a confusing lead-in to Grifter seeing something scary.

The hopelessness Cole feels came on because he's tied up on a spaceship surrounded by Daemonites and he's about to be sacrificed to summon the Black Frigate Curate. I'm not sure why he was rambling on about never trusting anyone at this moment. Maybe it was supposed to tie in with Sofia and how Cole doesn't trust that she'll save him. Although why should she save him? They just fucking met! And does he expect her to jump her motorcycle onto a spaceship?

Cole notices his girlfriend Gretchen in a cage on the ship and he gets mad at this. He calls the Daemonites animals but doesn't ask them if they've had enough yet. Maybe he needs to be shackled as well as tied before they start to worry that he's got the upper hand.

Oh yeah. I heard them say that once. So we're back to faith, are we? Let's see where this goes.

The ramblings of a mad man! So we discard faith because decisions don't use faith? They're based on logic, right? Is that where we're going with this?

Are you insinuating that mathematicians use faith when they need to solve for X and Y and Z and A all at the same time?

So when you have to solve a complicated equation with many variables, you "leap without looking"? You just leave it up to fate? You trust in faith? You trust your guts? How about you do the fucking math, you lazy bastard?!

Your motivations for what? Solving equations? Making decisions? Trusting someone? Having faith? What the fuck are you talking about?

Meanwhile, Sofia is jumping out of an airplane because the tracker she put on Cole has declared hat he is just under her airplane even though there is nothing there. So she jumps out and lands on the invisible spaceship. So you see, Cole's narration is related to what Sofia is doing even though he has no idea what she's up to. But in his case, where he's kneeling on the ground waiting to be killed so a Daemonite God can be called forth, I'm not sure it applies.

And then Cole escapes from being bound in the same way that he escaped the tape and bandages he put around his hand and gun in that issue where he sparred with Green Arrow.

As you can see in the top panel, his hands are completely bound. Beneath that, completely free.

Grifter runs to Gretchen and gives her his mask with a knife hidden in it. It must be a Mask of Holding. And Sofia somehow gets inside the ship even though she was outside on the invisible hull. I suppose she scrounged around, got lucky, and found a doorknob. She also brought some grenades to set off in the first room she entered on the ship which probably houses some really critical engines or gas tanks or anti-matter compartments or something. You know, like doors leading on to a ship would open into.

Carver begins summoning the Black Curate while Gretchen begins the easy enough task of breaking out of a high tech alien prison using a Swiss Army knife. And then Sofia's grenades explode causing just the distraction Grifter knew would happen because he doesn't trust anyone and he has no faith in anything and he trusts his guts to solve complex math equations with too many variables. The only thing he wasn't prepared for was the witty repartee.

I have no idea why he says this! He isn't punning on anything!

I'm beginning to suspect that Grifter is schizophrenic. If I could just see the world the way he sees it, maybe his ramblings, mutterings, and heat of the battle one-liners would make some kind of sense. I would allow for the say cheese line if he already had the gun and was about to shoot people with it. But he hasn't even picked it up when he utters this garbage.

Then the Black Curate arrives through the portal and shows that the good guys aren't the only side with assholes who turn on each other. Even though Carver is about to take care of Cole, the Curate is angry with her for calling him forth while chaos and violence is happening. So he kills her. Not quite as bad as Batgirl's detective but close enough.

And then Sofia arrives to save them while she jabbers on in English with the occasional Spanish phrase or word because that's the way bilingual people speak! Cabra de Dios!

Because hatches from outside always lead to the Engine Room. And shouldn't she have said, "We're not long for el cielo"?

The Portal begins to collapse and the Black Curate falls back inside it. Gretchen, Sofia, and Cole run in a random direction because the ship is collapsing and they need to find a way off the ship. Or an escape pod! But Gretchen doesn't make it because she doesn't listen to Cole's advice.

Yeah! Stop fucking around with that Daemonite and get away from the fucking portal, you dumb broad!

The portal and the ship crash all around Sofia and Cole so they dive out of a convenient hole in the bottom of the ship and parachute safely to the ground while holding hands in a perfectly and reasonable scientific way.

They'll be okay. They're going to land in snow! It's soft!

And then Grifter finishes his Narration Boxing but I'm not going to scan these. I'll just type them out:

Grifter: If Faith is leaping without looking...
Grifter: If faith is believing in things unseen, and trusting in what you don't know...
Grifter: ...then I guess I'm a believer. [Fuck you.]
Grifter: But they killed my brother Max [Really? The Cover of Issue #8 would like a word with you.], and now the love of my life...[Highly doubtful. Both that they've killed her and that she's the love of your life.]
Grifter: ...They've taken everything from me. Believing left me with this. [He's holding his stupid mask.]

And that's it. He supposes he's a believer now instead of a gut truster. I don't know why. But then he ends as if believing is bad and look at what it left him? Like I said, the ramblings of a mad man. But they're trying their hardest to make you believe that they make sense.

The issue ends with Grifter getting a psychic call for help from the piece of the Eye of the Storm (Stormwatch HQ) that crashed in the Himalayas. I guess he's headed there to get his ass kicked by Midnighter. If he defeats Midnighter in a fight, I will swallow my tongue. That's a promise!

Grifter Issue #6 Rating: -1 Ranking. It can't fall much further but fuck it! This was horrible! Lousy narration. Unbelievable action even for a comic book. How'd she get in the ship from the outside? How'd she trace him in the sky with the bug she put on him while flying a small plane? Where was Grifter hiding his knife?! Why would the Black Curate kill his head priest? How did Sofia end up in the engine room? How did Grifter undo the ropes binding him? How did Gretchen take down a Daemonite with a Swiss Army Knife?! This comic is stupid. I wish it were done in the style of Family Circus. Then I'd only have to read one panel.

Frankenstein Agent of SHADE #8

This should be the phrase on every birth announcement ever sent out.

Frankenstein and Lady Frankenstein teleport down to a smoldering ruin of a city in search of their baby. Frank refers to it as an 'it'. Lady Frank refers to it as a 'he'. I think one of them might care a little bit more for baby boy than the other one.

How do two corpses have a child? Is the process filthy and disgusting like a pornographic film? Or is the process filthy and disgusting like rotten.com? Does Frankenstein have normal blood flow? Can his penis become erect? Does Lady Frankenstein's dainty parts produce the appropriate fluid for lubrication? Or does her pussy just get pussy? I'm making myself sick picturing two corpses fucking. Imagine the stink of it all!

I'm going to pretend Jeff Lemire never made me think about these two fucking like prom dates and just pretend that Nina Black Lagoon built their baby in a lab by using the DNA from their genitals.
And then they have a shared flashback! If only I'd turned the page before speculating about Frankenstein's stitched up cock slipping inside the putrid lump of flesh that is Lady Frankenstein's vagina.

No part of this is natural, Frank! You and your wife should just climb back in the hole Igor pulled you out of!

Yeah, the very least! "Hey, thanks for all the hard work you've put in! How about we make it even harder by giving you a baby to take care of!"

Not that it matters! The baby breaks free from its incubator and attacks Lady Frankenstein. Frankenstein shoots it in the head to save her life. And Lady Frankenstein never forgives him. That's the origin story of Baby Frankenstein and also the tale about their estrangement. And now Baby Frankenstein is alive again.

And that's the root of the conflict. Frankenstein never gave the baby a chance because he never saw it as their baby. He saw it as a monster so when it attacked Lady Frankenstein, he put it down. But Lady Frankenstein saw a frightened and scared child and was willing to endure the pain of the attack to calm and soothe it and make it right. All Father Time saw was a little itty bitty baby killing machine.

Frank and Lady Frank have followed the Baby Frank's trail to Castle Wolfenstein Frankenstein. The memory of the place where its parents were born is embedded deep within its DNA and it's come home.

Ray Palmer is enraged at Father Time keeping the baby a secret from its parents. He storms off threatening to have the United Nations funding cut off. Good! Maybe it will be easier to keep SHADE a secret if they go with private funding! Or annual bake sales. Maybe they can sell arms to rogue nations for a quick buck. Or charge the people they save.

Back in Germany, they encounter Baby Frankenstein inside the Castle. Frankenstein promises Lady Frankenstein to give him a chance and see if they can't save their baby.

Where have I seen this thing before?

Oh yeah!

Baby Frank seems to be attacking Frank and yelling, "Kill!" Except it turns out that it's just trying to vocalize, "Kill me." So Lady Frankenstein takes pity on her poor son and does just that.

CRI CRI CRI

Father Time and the Creature Commandos teleport down to find the job finished. Lady Frankenstein removes her Shade Implant (I didn't know they had anything like that. Is it like the Nanite Bombs in the Suicide Squad members' heads?) and quits SHADE. Father Time, once again, says, "This is unacceptable!"

It must suck to be in the body of a little girl sometimes. Or all the fucking time, probably.

Lady Frankenstein quits and walks off into the snowy mountains. The end!

Frankenstein Agent of Shade Issue #8 Rating: No change. I just checked the Rankings and see I have this comic ranked at #6. It's probably top ten but I think Rank #6 might be a bit high. I'd recommend Batman and Robin before this comic. Possibly Nightwing as well. And even though this has nothing to do with this comic, I see I have Blue Beetle at #31. That might be the worst miscarriage of justice in the Rankings right now. I can see Blue Beetle being much higher than that. Oh well!

Frankenstein Agent of Shade #7

Why Frankenstein gotta be so violent?

SHADE decided to keep all of their failed genetic experiments inside a tiny space called the Zoo. Nina from the Black Lagoon couldn't kill her deformed and aggressive babies so they were imprisoned and the prison was kept inside Shade City. Everyone reading the comic knew the day would come when these creatures were let loose from The Zoo to terrorize and kill and maim and rape all of the scientists living in Shade City. That day is this issue.

Aww. The little deformed assholes have a familial bond!

The Mutant Creature Commandos (or more mutant than the regular ones) capture Nina and Lady Frankenstein while Father Time and Ray "The Atom" Palmer watch on a vidscreen. I think vidscreen is the appropriate term for a futuristic monitor. They also happen to notice that all of the Humanids have wandered off.

The Humanids have gone off to start a revolution. They're just newly sentient so they don't realize what a pain in the ass life has in store for them. Sure, it's easy enough to start a revolution when you're the downtrodden, slave class. Everyone wants to not be that! So it's easy to rise up and overthrow your masters. But what happens after that? They'll start bickering about all of their individual beliefs about the way the society should be and factions will emerge. Some Humanids will want everyone to be free to pursue the life they want to live. But other Humanids will fear a society without explicit rules and controls. It's going to be a giant cluster fuck and they'll be begging for The Pit in no time! Um, The Pit was where they went to get reprocessed after 24 hours and they began to lose their shape. I wonder if they'll still lose their shape after 24 hours or if sentience will help them keep their form?

Frankenstein and his cohorts return from Vietnam by way of Teleportation and Shrink Technology. But when they arrive, the door to headquarters won't listen to Frank's voice commands because the Humanids have hacked into the system and taken control.

Oh, Frank. You can't be a Luddite! Without technology, you'd still be decomposing in some pauper's grave in Eastern Europe!

Once they break into the tower via Frankenstein's rampage against the electronic doors, the Commandos come face to face with a couple dozen Humanids wielding Ray Guns (literally! They were probably designed by Ray Palmer!). The Humanids have also taken over Father Time's control room.

Father Time has a point!

Father Time tries to be reasonable with the revolting mob. How many revolutions have been shut down by the leader being overthrown simply saying, "This is unacceptable." What? Really? Oh shit! Sorry! We'll get back to work then.

Brother Eye also left a little ASCII eyeball doodle so that Father Time would know that he infected Shade City with the Self Humanid Aware Destructive Encoding. Okay, that was a stretch. Sorry.

This guy must be the revolutionary leader since it looks like he's already breaking down.

The Humanids tell Father Time that when a Humanid body breaks down, a new one will be created and the Hive Mind will be downloaded into it as well. So it doesn't look like the Humanids have any individuality. They've really all just been reprogrammed to act like dicks. But they're all the same dick. And Shade.net still runs the program that controls them except it's been changed by Brother Eye. So all Ray Palmer or some other scientist has to do is run a scan with their anti-virus software and they should be good to go!

The Creature Commandos decide to take care of things their own way by ripping apart every Humanid they run across. Frank and Khalis (the mummy!) head off to fight the Sad Hepatitisy Asshole Deformed Entities that kidnapped Lady Frankenstein and Nina while Velcoro (the vampire. See? The V clues you in!) and Griffith (the wolfman!) go off to shut down the Humanid manufacturing process in The Pit.

Back in the Hub, Father Time and Ray Palmer fight back against the Humanids. Ray Palmer shrinks and does some Atom trick where he pops into all of their heads or something and makes them all explode. I couldn't quite figure out what he did but he put down all of the Humanids threatening them. I hope nobody ever gets their hands on Ray's technology and uses it to travel via the telephone and enter someone's wife's brain and end up giving them a massive stroke and causing a whole big scare in the super hero community!

Griffith and Velcoro easily shut down The Pit. And Frank and Khalis arrive to find Lady Frankenstein has already defeated all of the weirdo reject commandos. All except for one that she didn't see.

Bah! What's a little decapitation to a lich? Just get some pins and wires and he'll be fine.

Nina exclaims, "Khalis is still alive!" even though it's pretty obvious that he's already been dead for a long time! I think she means Khalis is still unalive! But instead of allowing Nina to help Khalis, Father Time sends the Creature Commandos to the Teleport room because there is suddenly another emergency. It seems there was another monster in The Zoo! And it forced a scientist to teleport it out of Shade City and into the real world! Who was this mysterious and super dangerous creature?

I wonder what corpse they took Lady Frankenstein's tits from?

Frankenstein Agent of Shade Issue #7 Rating: No change. Nothing much to say here so I'll type a bunch of stuff about how I have nothing much to say. Or maybe just that was enough.

Frankenstein Agent of SHADE #6

Is the title on this cover a spoiler or a misleading statement?! Maybe it's both since it's about Col. Quantum.

The last issue of Frankenstein was a big dumb battle with OMAC. DC is trying very hard to tie all of their New 52 titles together and make sure the readers know that these are all taking place in the same universe. DC calls it "world building" but often it's just painful stories desperately trying to find any excuse to shove a guest hero into the comic book. At some point, Frankenstein will probably fight Superman. He may even go back in time to help the Demon Knights battle some Daemonites.

Thinking about Daemonites, I hope some shitty writer like Tony Daniel doesn't decide, in a future Detective Comics story, to make Gordon or Alfred into one. Don't pull that stupid bullshit, Tony Daniel.

I may have asked this before while reading Blackhawks, but how exactly do you have a covert group funded by the United Nations? Who is the group supposed to be hiding from at that point? Just rogue nations?

Ray Palmer is inspecting SHADE's humanid processing plant. The Humanids are the synthetic beings created to do all of the menial tasks in Shade City. They live for only 24 hours and are not sentient. They perform their functions by tapping into SHADE.net, the city's mainframe. Currently the city uses 8,576 at any one time. The organic matter used to create them is reprocessed into a new humanid once a humanid loses its shape after 24 hours. So it's an endless cycle of free labour using the same goo over and over again.

Seriously, Atom. It seems like the perfect opportunity for someone to introduce something like a Pinocchio Virus into the system to cause all kinds of drama.

Or perhaps just a spontaneous case of self-awareness!

A Humanid gains consciousness. Will this become Planet of the Apes where the sentient monkey leads the rest in rebellion against their arrogant masters? Will it become Blade Runner as the Humanids fight for their right to live longer than the humans have deemed they should? Perhaps it will just be the one Humanid and will be another Pinocchio story. Or will this Humanid become the Col. Quantum from the cover?! I hope he'll just be a new stowaway character that we get glimpses of as he tries to make a life for himself in Shade City without being discovered. The way that Albert lived in Mankato before Pa Ingalls took him in as his own son.

Meanwhile, the Creature Commandos are on a journey into the heart of darkness!

I recall something familiar was felt in Southeast Asia in a previous comic. Perhaps that's what they're now after.

I'll let Frank explain why they're here.

A red Doctor Manhattan.

Apparently in 1969, covert groups could stay covert? Because nobody had heard of super heroes until Superman and the Justice League came on the scene about five years prior to the New 52 stories. Frank explains that he and SHADE had been operating throughout the 20th century in total secrecy but I find that hard to believe. What's going to happen is more and more comic books in the New 52 are going to declare that super heroes were active long before Superman's coming out. And then the stories are going to have all of these heroes interacting before the world supposedly knew about them. And then Flash is going to fuck up the timeline again because Geoff Johns got drunk with Jim Lee and they brainstormed another stupid idea to reinvent everything. And the Green Lanterns will discover that there was a Corps even before the Manhunters existed. And DC will then kill off...wait, who's left to kill off? Have they killed and resurrected all of their main heroes? I think everyone in the current Justice League roster has been killed and reborn, right?

Colonel Quantum decides that the Vietnam War isn't black and white enough for his tastes so he decides to quit.

Total secrecy, hunh? The only way a reader would ever know anything in the New DCU was secret or covert was if the author explicitly tells the reader even if it doesn't match what's happening in the story.

I have a secret. I can't keep a secret. Especially when I'm told something by someone where they tell me that someone else can't know. Like I'm supposed to partition information in my head based on who can and can't know it?! At least everyone I know well knows better than to gossip to me if they don't want me blurting the wrong thing out in front of the wrong person.

The Creature Commandos have come to Vietnam to assassinate Colonel Quantum. Shade.net noted his energy signature a few issues ago. He blasted an area 50 miles across, killing thousands. I have an idea how to assassinate him! Let the Mummy use his Mummy Death Power! Or make him swallow you and then you can burst out of his atomic stomach! Or stab him in the eye!

I bet they don't end up killing him at all!

Back at Shade City, the spontaneous self-awareness of the humanids is explained.

Too bad Brother Eye got his ass cancelled!

Frank finds the temple where Colonel Quantum has taken refuge. He's now more deformed beast than human and he's been wanting but unable to die for the last 40 years. Good thing Frank showed up with his special anti-nuclear bullet!

What the hell is an anti-nuclear payload? Is it like neutralizing an acid with a base? And if so, what is it made from? My guess is candy.

The payload works and Colonel Quantum is easily dealt with. But the Humanids in Shade City have begun their revolution. The first step of their plan: release Nina from the Black Lagoon's failed experiments from the Zoo, the micro-prison within the micro-city. And the only Commandos on hand are Lady Frankenstein and Nina!

These Creature Commandos consist of the Mostly Invisible Although Slightly Yellow Man, The Yellow Beast from the Yellow Lagoon, The Yellow Blob, and Miss Porcupine Who Will Stick You and Make You Yell Ow!

Frankenstein Agent of Shade Issue #6 Rating: No change. The comic remains steady at a ranking that probably has it placed a bit higher than some other titles that I feel are actually better than it. But I suck at rating things. It's so fucking arbitrary, isn't it?