Harley Quinn #3

I'm a huge fan of Ivy's new dildo.

The Facts!
• Previously in Harley Quinn, Harley was living with a stuffed beaver, a wiener dog, and a cock named Mike. If those three things set you to giggling, you'll love this fucking comic book.

• The issue begins with Wannabe Deadpool (who is Wannabe Deathstroke, so we're really getting into some comic book history layers here) receiving a new arm in the hospital. I didn't know that if you arrived at a hospital missing an arm, they'd just stick a new one on! I'll have to remember that!

• Vertigax, the alien who became hot dogs which turned everybody into zombies, has parents who care for him on a planet far away. They had put a tracker on their teenage son because they're busybody, micromanaging assholes. Maybe it's a good thing they did though because now they can track him to Earth and discover he's been spread out among dozens of human stomachs.

• Did you grow up in the late 70s and early 80s? Remember how they used to have days at school where they would fingerprint all of the kids just in case they went missing? I can't believe our parents fell for that shit out of fear. All the fucking cops wanted was a record of our prints so we could easily be caught when we became teenagers later and began vandalizing shit. Fucking pigs! Do they take samples of children's DNA now and pretend it's for safety reasons?

• You can get DNA samples in other ways then jerking kids off, right?!

This page takes care of all of the formulaic bits at once! Harley and Ivy being sexy and naked. Mike Cock strutting around all hard and erect. Harley's stuffed beaver turning into Eclipso. And the wiener dog licking the weed whacker. If that doesn't sound dirty, I probably should have put a little more thought into it to make it sound dirtier.

• I just remembered I forgot to buy Sheriff of Babylon #10 this week. Eep!

• Oh wait! Here's a better Mike Cock joke!

"Dammit! Mike Cock is blocking the television!" Har har har!

• Harley and Ivy shower together so I'll be stuck on those panels for awhile.

• Oh yeah. Scrub that back. Lower. Come on! Lower!

• That reminds me of a time I was lying in my friend Doom Bunny's bed the day after a party. He was lying next to me and next to him was his friend Amanda. That's her secret name because I don't want to expose her true identity or the fact that I can't actually remember her name. We were talking and I was rubbing her back with my arm over Doom Bunny. I said something about how I didn't want to rub any lower because things would get weird and Amanda said, "You can rub lower." So things got weird.

• Sorry! That's the end of the story! Actually, the end of the story was when I couldn't get my shoelaces to tie later and I said, "Please Baby Jesus! If you let me tie my shoes, I'll never ask for anything ever again!" And then they were tied! I really fucked up with my huge miracle prayer! The really scary part was that I was getting on a plane in an hour!

• Speaking of planes and flying, I used to do this thing where I would carefully check out everybody in the waiting area to make sure they looked like major characters in their lives. Because major characters don't die! You don't want to look around you and realize you're getting on a plane with background players and people who only ever get one line!

• Wannabe Deadpool wakes up from his operation to learn he was given the arm and hand of a chronic masturbator. One who did it in public even! Constantly! He totally freaks out because, I suppose, he believes the hand is gay. I mean, it did touch a lot of another guy's cock.

Like that matters! I'm right-handed and I jerk off with my left hand! Seriously! It's because when I was a teenager, I noticed my cock was getting a curve in the other direction from the frequency of my masturbation. So even though it was awkward at first, I began jerking off with my left hand. And now it's the only one I use! I mean, it's the main one I use! I totally need both to do it properly! Wink, wink! You know why I'm winking, right? Because I need to put a finger of my right hand up my ass to really do it right.

• Also, it turns out Chronic probably was right-handed and the doctor was just calming down a patient. Does that mean I exposed my way too personal history for nothing?!

• Enh. I'm sure I've told that story before!

• The Harley Crew (different from the Gang) decide to escape the area via the tunnels under the Wax Museum. This allows me to complete my Harley Quinn Bingo Card when she says, "Holee Spelunkerolee!"

• Harley's House of Leaves Exploration B Outfit is pretty cute. I'd buy the Action Figure.

• Poison Ivy smells mothballs on the way to the tunnel and I want to smell them too! So I pull out my Leather Goddesses of Phobos Scratch 'n' Sniff card and go to town!

• Nope. That's chocolate.

• Leather.

• Pizza.

• Oh! There we go! Mothballs! Ew. Gross.

• You know what? Supergirl #1 was a total rip-off because there wasn't one shot of Supergirl's Bum. There wasn't one in Supergirl Rebirth #1 either! I guess I'm going to have to drop Supergirl as my favorite butt in comics. Good thing there seems to be a replacement in this issue of Harley Quinn!

Oh yeah, Ivy. That's the stuff! Is that costume painted on?

• The door to the tunnel is the most obvious door to Hell anybody has ever seen. Which makes Harley want to go through it more than ever.

• The tunnel leads to a room full of doors. I think it might be the Hall of the Mountain King.

• The doors are just plot droppings for future plots. For now, the Harley Crew stick to the plan and go through the door that will lead them outside the radius of the Alien Zombie Hot Dog Apocalypse.

• The exit doesn't go far enough and the Harley Crew find themselves once again fighting zombies. Who's going to save them this time? Catwoman with a powerful laser pointer?

• Of course it isn't Catwoman! It's the alien's parents! They pull a transporter beam trick which yanks out all of the pieces of their son so they can put him back together. All of the creatures he was inside die in the transfer though. Oh well! The Aliens Ex Machina saved the day!

The Opinions!
So far, this series has breathed some fresh life into the way too formulaic and overused Harley Quinn. I'm enjoying it and not dreading it in the way I used to. I'm going to allow the comic book to get the credit for that this month and not my brain chemistry. But it could be my brain chemistry. Because--let's face it--I really enjoy the me part of these commentaries more than the comic book part of these commentaries.

Supergirl #1

Oh man! I hope her bum is as cute as her face!

The Facts!
• I love the term "hot take" for internet think pieces! Mostly because it makes every single opinion on the Internet sound disingenuous! Which, of course, they are! Now here's my hot take on Supergirl #1! You won't believe what I say!

• The issue begins with a poem, I think. And then a double page spread of Supergirl flying over Io which the comic book describes as "one of the last habitable places in the solar system." Are they crazy?! It's not habitable at all! It's all lava and lava plumes and lava lakes and lava lava and...oh wait! It says "least habitable." Never mind.

• The scene changes from Io to National City so the narrator can say "And so is this!" As in National City is also one of the least habitable places in the solar system! Ha ha! That's funny because...wait. I don't know why it's funny yet. Why is National City not very habitable? I bet it's because rent is so high because people are selfish pricks. If you're one of those house flippers, you can just fuck off from reading my blog! I mean, if you're a house flipper, you probably have better, more money making things to do than read a stupid blog about comic books. But I just want you to know that I disapprove of your actions! You aren't adding anything of value to the world! You're simply making it more expensive for people to find places to live so that you can line your own stupid pockets! I know your pockets are stupid because they're full of cash and I'm envious of them.

• Kara is currently learning how to parallel park for some reason. Parallel parking isn't on the driver's test so why bother learning it?! The only reason you need to know how to parallel park is because the streets are full of fucking cars because every old house in older neighborhoods has been converted into four or five units without any parking so now there are four to five times as many people with cars living on the block than there used to be and the only way you're ever going to park anywhere near where you live is if you can squeeze a car into a space three inches smaller than your car actually is. It's possible! But not if you go nose first!

• Later Kara goes to high school because she needs to learn how to socialize. She needs to know that punching people in the face and exploding your vagina in public aren't polite (although they are exciting!). Although aren't those the kinds of things people do in high school? I don't think she's going to learn anything new!

This makes no sense at all.

• Does Kara wear a wig when she's a high school student or when she's Supergirl? Or do Kryptonians living under a yellow sun have the power to change their hair color at will? I'm getting déjà vu typing this!

• Why does the phrase "déjà vu" have so many scribbles all over it?!

• Kara is having trouble at school because Earth school is way too archaic for her smarts. Her school is like "What is 2 plus 2?" And she's all, "I can only do infinity plus infinity or higher!"

• Kara has a classmate named Ben Rubel who is--get this!--a super genius! Wow! I'm glad DC Comics finally had the guts to create a smart teenager! Usually they just...oh wait. I was about to defend my statement when I realized I was being sarcastic.

• Ben is worried that Kara is super smart even though she can't use a toaster or do primitive calculus. And he doesn't want any other mysterious smart kids at his science school because that's his thing! Plus she might get wind of Cat Grant's Young Innovators Grant for People Not Named Grant. And she might win! Even though she can't work a pencil sharpener.

• Ben is creepily spying on Supergirl as she eats lunch and then gets suspicious when she leaves the cafeteria because there are still three periods left. Maybe she's fucking going to the bathroom, Ben! Maybe you should mind your own fucking business, Ben! Maybe you should stop trying to insinuate yourself into my girlfriend's life, BEN!

• Ben is right to be suspicious even though he really shouldn't have been suspicious at all. Unless she just ran out the door, down the front lawn, through the parking lot, and off into the horizon. That might be suspicious! But Kara just got up from her table and walked out of the cafeteria. So suspicious! I mean, she is leaving school to go stop a robbery on a train because she heard the threat with her super senses. But Ben couldn't know that, no matter how smart and mysterious he is.

This wouldn't worry me at all! I don't own a smart phone!

• I have two main reasons I don't own a smart phone. The first reason is that I don't agree with Contract Culture. I don't believe, to be a consumer, a person needs to agree to stay with a company for a certain amount of time. I understood that some of that was part of the system so that the true price of the phone could be subsidized and subsumed by the length of service demanded by the contract. That's changing to a great degree but it already spearheaded the movement where companies now love charging people a monthly fee for cloud based technology instead of a one time fee to own the rights to use a program indefinitely. But even if I were willing to pay the high monthly fee for a smart phone that didn't demand a two-year contract, I still wouldn't own one. Why the fuck do I want to be beholden to everybody who fucking knows me? They'll just demand my attention constantly! If they text, they'll know I have the phone on me and if I don't text back, they'll know I'm avoiding them! It's easier to just avoid everybody constantly by not having a phone at all! Besides, I am so super smart and full of information that I don't need to constantly check Google while having conversations to understand what everybody is talking about. And if I can't recall something, I don't mind living with a little mystery in my life!

• Speaking about how super smart I am, I watched The Exorcist on Netflix last night and I'm fairly certain I don't have a clue what's happening in three-quarters of that movie! I did notice before watching it that Sharknado has a higher rating on Netflix than The Exorcist. Does anybody actually use those five star ratings to determine what they're going to watch? I figure most people watching things on Netflix are idiots and their critiques aren't worth the part of the bathroom floor I sometimes accidentally pee on because my penis is looking the wrong way and I was too lazy to make sure it wasn't. I use the rating system simply to remember what I've seen on Netflix. If I watch something, I rate it 5 Stars just so I know I've watched it. I don't care how bad it is! Everything gets 5 Stars! Hmm, I might be part of the reason why you shouldn't trust the ratings on Netflix.

• The guy leading the data robbery on the train is an idiot. Supergirl uses her heat vision to melt their guns and he yells, "No! The Dataphage!" She does melt the Dataphage but not until the panel after he yells that. Next he tries to punch a sixteen year old girl in the face (she's fictional so it's okay. That's the same excuse I use to not feel creepy checking out her bum) and she uses her super breath to freeze his hand. He then yells--because he's stupid remember--"Gah! My hands!" Hands! Plural! Dude, you just broke one hand! Ah ha ha ha! What a massive idiot!

• Supergirl is all, "Why would you idiots be so idiotic to pull this idiotic stunt in my idiotic city? Idiots!" And Cat Grant is all, "I've got this now, Supergirl! You stop them from causing harm; I humiliate them!"

• Cat Grant acts arrogant and smart and professional. She's come a long way from publishing photos of Superman and Wonder Woman kissing on CatClarkTropolisStupidName.com. I hope somebody asks her about that site at some point so she can explain why she didn't sell it for millions of dollars when she had the chance. The only story it ever ran that got any hits was the kissing photo! You sell that shit when you get an offer, Cat!

• Maybe by not selling, Cat developed the site into her springboard to become the hottest hot person in National City! Look who's stupid now! Oh, it's me! Dammit!

• Cat Grant annoys me. Mostly because I can't stand strong, independent women. But also because she's arrogant and rude and has that thing in comic books where characters simply know everything by reading the situation to prove that they're super smart and capable. I hate that! That's not a thing! Here's a thing though: people who think they know everything by reading the situation as they try to prove how super smart and capable they are! But in comic books, those people never wind up being wrong! So annoying!

• Supergirl not only gets chewed out by Cat Grant for stepping in and saving the day in a way different than the way Cat Grant planned on saving it (which probably would have turned into a massacre once the robbers realized their Dataphage was corrupted by some asshat on the train who forgot to somehow hack their guns), she gets screamed at by Cameron Chase at the DEO for saving the day in a way that showed people Kryptonians are better than humans.

Shut up, Supergirl! Arrogant, asshole adults are telling you the way things are!

• The Danvers try to make Kara comfortable in her new home with them but they just fuck it all up the way parents do. It's because they're so old! They just don't understand what it's like to be young! Or Kryptonian! So Supergirl runs away to the Arctic.

• Supergirl discovers her other father, Cyborg Superman, is waiting for her in the Fortress of Solitude. He wants to take her back to Argo City.

The Opinions!
Great! Supergirl now has two fathers to worry about! Not to mention three mothers! Four if the corpse of her mother that Cyborg Superman was fucking in the Rebirth issue ever comes back to life! It's confusing enough having one pair of uncool people trying to teach you how to make your way in the world. How is Kara going to deal with a government agent, an alien cyborg, a narcissistic journalist, and two DEO field agents all trying to tell her the best way to live her life?! Can't they see they're going to drive her straight into Ben Rubel's bed! Bastards!

Cyborg Rebirth #1

Cyborg has a brand new vibrator and he's sort of afraid to use it.

The Facts!
• Oh Cyborg! Haven't we given you enough chances to be an interesting character?! If as a character you hit your peak when you're stuffing your face full of pizza and playing video games, it's probably time for a little soul searching. Perhaps just bow out gracefully. Let some other people have a chance at the spotlight. Stop embarrassing yourself! At this point, I'm more compelled to read an Aquaman comic book than a Cyborg comic book.

• Part of my current distaste for Cyborg might be because I'm reading the late eighties, early nineties Marv Wolfman run of The New Titans where Cyborg spends about thirty issues as a remote controlled piece of taxidermy. I really can't imagine why they keep him around anymore. Maybe it's because all of Gar Logan's Playstation save game files are stored in Cyborg.

• In his early years, Cyborg was basically just a life support system for a white noise blaster. But nowadays, he's the ultimate computer hacker! He's also a shape changer! Basically if anybody needs to recover their files from a crashed hard drive or needs to rent a Bobcat to bury a body in the garden, Cyborg is your guy!

• Cyborg is twenty-one years old at this point and has been half-machine since he was fifteen. I mean sixteen! Stupid fat fingers hit the wrong button on the calculator. He's currently training at STAR Labs. The "STAR" part of the name stands for "Scientific and Technology Advanced Research." That sounds fucking stupid. Didn't it used to mean "Scientific and Technological Advanced Research" Labs? Who authorized the idiotic change?!

• Cyborg is currently battling the monster version of himself. Although maybe it's more robot and less monster with zero human. So it's not a real reflection of Cyborg. It's just Cyborg's projection of a reflection of himself! See, he sees himself as an unlovable monster. At least he sometimes did and might still think that. Perhaps we'll finally get a confident Cyborg who doesn't worry about asking "Who or what am I?" at the beep of a boop.

• Cyborg gets knocked unconscious by his enemy which is a perfect time for the system running the simulation to pop open a subroutine to figure out Cyborg's identity. It's weird to think that a STAR Labs computer doesn't know Cyborg's identity. Although it isn't weird to think some of the people picking up this book don't know his identity or how he became the inhuman monster with the white noise cannon on his wrist. Let's find out about Victor Stone! If that's who he really is! Maybe his entire life has been a lie and we'll find out he was adopted by the Stone's! That would put a new spin on Cyborg constantly asking, "Who am I?!"

• The computer checks the DNA records and confirms that Cyborg is Victor Stone. That's when it realizes its database is full of romantic stories about how people in STAR Labs met. I think most of them met through T.O. Morrow's Dating App which was also his cybernetic son.

"I am a computer. I can speak normally and use all of the words without calling attention to my computerness. At least until I have to mention love. Why do humans call it that? Can they not simply refer to it as the engaging of their input/output devices?"

• The simulation might not actually be a simulation but an actual attack on STAR Labs. The computer is just monitoring Cyborg's efforts to defend STAR Labs so it can analyze his powers. I'm fine with either thing being true since Cyborg is unlikely to die in a simulation and he's also unlikely to die in a real battle in his Rebirth issue.

• The monster politely introduces itself to Cyborg as Malware. Hey Malware! According to my grandmother, I'm Mal Ñino!

Hey look! Cyborg made a joke that was actually kind of funny and he didn't follow it up with "That was a joke!" This series is different than his last one!

• Cyborg gets knocked unconscious again so it's a perfect time for another flashback! I hope everything readers need to know is covered in this Rebirth issue or else Cyborg is going to be suffering from a lot of concussions to set up the flashbacks for his backstory.

• This flashback is about the death of his mother. It was the first failure of Silas Stone and it hardened his heart like a hard thing! And it's hard to love with a hard thing!

• As Cyborg is beginning to recover, there's time for one more short flashback to when Cyborg was half destroyed by a Mother Box opening a Boom Tube inside of him. Victor's life was saved only because Silas took him to the Red Room and attached him to all of the technology and crossing his fingers. Some scientist!

• I mean, it worked, so...um...Some scientist!

• Cyborg and Malware have their final face-off in a secret room just past the Red Room and three doors down. The room is buffered against any kind of wireless technology sending any streams of data through it. That way, nobody can hack into and find the data being stored in the secret safe in the center. I bet the safe contains Vic's actual penis!

• Malware tries to hack Cyborg but Cyborg is so full of his own malware that Malware is destroyed. Or something. I don't really understand how computers work. I think it's just a bunch of cockroach brains linked together with fiber optics?

Oh look! Cyborg is definitely more human than machine! No human knows when to use whomever over whoever!

• The information inside the safe in the center of the room...the information that was so well-guarded so that nobody would discover what it was...that information? It automatically begins telling Cyborg what it is. It's all, "Hey! Hey! Is somebody out there?! Oh man, I've been so lonely in this room! Let me tell you all about me! I'm a Victor Stone program! I'm what's in Cyborg! Does that mean Cyborg isn't real? Oh no! Mystery! I hope you're not Cyborg, whoever you are. Or is it whomever you are? Oh man, that's a tough word to figure out! Anyway, don't worry if you are Victor because, um, I was just kidding. Ha ha! You're real. Don't spend your entire comic book series wondering if you're real or not! Bye!"

• The computer narrating the story turns out to be STAR Labs' scary version of Silas Stone. It's Victor's Machine Dad! That's good because now Cyborg can have Human Daddy Issues and Machine Daddy Issues! He'll be twice as interesting as every other DC character! Other members of Machine Dad's step family include Amazo, The Engineer, The Metal Men, Cyborg Superman, Red Tornado, The Shaggy Man, The Brain, Steel, Robotman, OMAC, and some guy with goggles whom I don't recognize!

The Opinions!
At least I'm not completely disinterested in this Cyborg series yet! It's got some potential, I suppose, even if it's going to go in the usual direction of Cyborg questioning his authenticity. At least they threw in the Double Daddy Issue Deal. Maybe that'll be interesting. Especially if Machine Daddy shows any kind of affection at all because Human Daddy is a stone-hearted dick! Oh! A stone! That's the hard thing Silas Stone's heart became!

Team Titans #5

Monsieur Poniard has two left arms.

The cover pretty much sums up this comic book: it's a huge mess. We do learn that Battalion can cry as long as he's reminded by somebody how he got his family killed by thinking he was above punishment by Lord Chaos. This is why you don't get married and have children if you want to be a revolutionary! Families are a way for the system to control you, both figuratively and literally. Figuratively in the sense that the entire system is set up so that people want to have children which traps them into the need to provide for those children! Literally because they sometimes kidnap your family until you do what you want to do! I'm not sure that happens too often but it happens in this comic book so I figured I'd better mention it. I'm sure there are some stories of this happening to a friend of a caller's friend on Coast to Coast AM.

Nothing else really happens in this one. For some reason, Terry and Donna's farmhouse which they just moved into is burned to the ground by the Judge and Jury so that Terry and Donna can declare that they will rebuild. I guess that was to show how heroically determined they are to have a normal life. I just feel like it was a waste of a good farmhouse to make a point. Seems a bit excessive! Even if it was only a drawn farmhouse.

There's also a reminder that Gar Logan, who loves chasing women like crazy, keeps pushing Terra away. He wants her to think it's because he was traumatized by a woman who looks just like her, but I think he's just nervous about losing his virginity.

Team Titans #4

Worst prom ever.

This issue is strange because it's not a great issue but it's better than a Titans book has been for quite some time. I never realized when I read this series decades ago how much influence editors have on the direction of a series. But upon reading this and the Titans series again, I see how editor Jon Peterson put Marv on a leash and led him into pure X-men territory. Not that, in some ways, leashing Marv wasn't a good thing! The things Marv usually did poorly seemed better but the stories, under Jon, lacked most of the characterization which drove the Titans in the first place. All the usual characters were killed or ousted while a bunch of one-dimensional characters like Pantha, Phantasm, and Deathstork took their places. All in all, the series just didn't feel like Wolfman was writing it anymore, or cared about writing what he was being told to write. It may have increased sales for a bit (I have no idea if it did but Jon Peterson's enthusiasm in the notes and letter pages makes it seem so?) but it really just left the Titans in an awkward place, emulating the X-men and their time travel stories, waiting to return to glory. I'm using "glory" quite loosely here.

This story is pure Marv Wolfman! That doesn't mean it's good! It's just different from what it was and, in a weird way, better. Especially after all that Teeny Titans bullshit.

Marv introduces us to Metallik, a Team Titans group from the future that is an amalgamation of every cartoon of the eighties created to sell toys. They're basically Jem and the Holograms who turn into Voltron and look like minor residents of Eternia. Throw in Battalion who is the meanest G.I. Joe you've ever seen (but with the biggest heart of all!) and I think this comic may have spawned a few dozen lawsuits.

No wait. Battalion isn't a G.I. Joe at all. He's just Lobo crossed with Wolverine and dressed like every 90s extreme character with death, dead, kill, or lok in their names.

The plot revolves around Judge and Jury becoming a rogue Team Titans team from the future who have decided to hunt down and kill all of the other Team Titans. The Team Titans all arrived at random points in the past so none of them know where any of the others are. It's time for Battalion to gather them together and protect them! The Team Titans team in Titans probably won't be an extremely important part of this comic from here on out. I think they get to be a whole group of sidekicks for the regular Titans.

Scooby Apocalypse #4

I think Shaggy's cock is hanging out of his fly.

The Facts!
• Here's how I hope the romantic hook-ups go: Fred and Shaggy; Scooby and Daphne; Velma and every piece of vibrating electronics she can get between her legs.

• I like how Jim Lee gets a "based on a concept" credit for this book. Does he get royalties for thinking up the concept of the Scooby Gang battling real monsters in a post-apocalyptic world?

• How about Perfect Strangers in the dark ages? If anybody uses that, I want a "based on a concept" credit!

• Currently, the Scooby Gang has stopped at a gas station convenience store to stock up on snacks. They probably should have read the signs before heading in because they're just the kind of signs that wink at the reader in just that way that says, "We get what's about to happen, right? 'Stop in for a BITE'! Get it? 'Open dawn till dusk'? Get it? I mean, reverse it and get it? 'Service with a "smile"'? Why is the word 'smile' in quotes?! Seems ominous!" Oh, also at the end of the last issue, there was a vampire in the stock room.

• Daphne seems to have gotten over the guilt of murdering monsters who used to be people because she's now confidently wielding a huge gun she found in the Mystery Machine. She doesn't look a bit worried about having to kill more people-monsters!

• Daphne still doesn't trust Velma because Daphne was one of those conspiracy journalists who chase after every story which could prove that seemingly trustworthy people aren't trustworthy at all. Who better to bring down than a bunch of arrogant scientists who claim they're using science to save the world? More than likely they're using science to advance a nefarious agenda that isn't completely made up in the heads of lunatic paranoids at all!

• The trouble with this comic book is that Daphne is right and the scientists are doing exactly what she suspected they were doing. But Velma isn't one of them! She really should trust Velma. How can you not trust somebody who wears that short of a skirt? She's got my full attention!

• Daphne has been left on guard duty while Fred and Shaggy sleep and Velma worries. Scooby is just standing around staring at who-knows-what.

I never understood why vampires make more vampires. Isn't that just making more competition for limited resources? I mean, unless you meet a limited resource that you think you might want to fuck for eternity. Then I can understand making them into a vampire. Although according to Ann Rice, if you make somebody a vampire, you lose your intimate connection with them and everything falls apart and then Lestat goes off to pout for another century.

• Scooby Doo is way too brave in this comic book. He's supposed to run from danger not confront it head on! Was one of Jim Lee's concepts to have none of the characters act like they did in the cartoon? That seems like a pretty bold idea! "I know!" he probably began pretend humbly. "I'll draw the characters to look like the cartoon characters (although maybe tighten up Velma a bit so she makes Eee! Tess Ate Chai Tea's dick hard) but Shaggy will be useful, Scooby will be brave, Daphne will be...um, what was Daphne? Wasn't her personality just hot and stylish? No wait. Wasn't that Fred's personality? Did they have personalities in the cartoon?! Anyway, um, Keith and J.M. (what does that stand for anyway? Jerk Machine?), just do whatever you want with the characters. Don't bother watching the cartoons for research because they're terrible."

• Daphne blows off the top half of the vampire. She really has come to terms with her new life of killing people who probably only need a shot of Anti-Nanites to return them to normal.

• Velma's turtle neck is actually a mock hoodie. I mean a real hoodie and not a mock turtle neck. I don't even know if I'm using mock turtle neck right. What the fuck is that supposed to be? Anyway, I just wanted to point out that there's a panel where she has her hoodie up but the colorist, fucking robot extraordinaire Hi-Fi, colored the hoodie the same color as her hair instead of orange. Way to fuck up, you stupid robot.

• I wish robot's had feelings so Hi-Fi would feel bad about its mistake!

• Since the vampires regenerate, the Scooby Gang decide to declare the case closed, hop in the Mystery Machine, and flee the scene. Since this issue is called "Fur and Fangs", I figure they'll run into a pack of werewolves next.

• The Scooby Gang finally come to the realization that they're going to have to hunt down the four scientists who got the world into this mess. If they'd been reading my commentaries, they would have known that during Issue #1! Unless I first pointed out that was going to be the basic structure of the story in Issue #2's commentaries. Whichever it was, let me just say: Grandmaster Comic Book Reader!

• Usually Keith and J.M. recycle the same jokes over and over. In this series, they just keep recycling the same conversation between Velma and Daphne over and over. Velma says the scientists didn't do this. Daphne says they did. Velma says they didn't. Daphne says they did. I think I've read that argument at least seven times since this series began.

• Scrappy-Doo makes an appearance way earlier than I imagined he would. He's not dead so nobody has to drink until they die (those were the rules of my Scooby Doo Drinking Game!). And he isn't the cause of the apocalypse, so nobody has to never drink again (more rules!). But he is an articulate little bastard who thinks Scooby is a coward and a moron. He doesn't say, at least not yet, "Let me at 'em! Let me at 'em!" When he finally does say that, y'all should probably drink.

• I think maybe the "fur" in the title referred to Scrappy-Doo and his army of semi-intelligent, half-robot dogs.

• The bonding I thought was happening last issue happens less subtly this issue. And by less subtly, I mean Fred says, "Well, whaddayou know? You're bonding!" So see? They'll be the regular old Scooby Gang in no time! Plus Shaggy and Scooby are total pigs so at least that part of their personalities is intact.

• While looting a store, the Scooby Gang fail to notice the place being surrounded by devil creatures. So this issue is ending exactly like Issue #2 ended with monster mechanics about to attack, and exactly like Issue #3 ended with vampires about to attack. I guess if the cartoon could be formulaic, why can't the comic book?

The Opinions!
This issue didn't have enough shots of Velma's ass.

New Titans #94 (January 1993)

Ha ha! Get it? A few days to kill! Smoking!

“Smoking!” or “I’m smoking!” is how my friend Doom Bunny and I tag any pun-based or sort of stupid humor. It comes from this kid John who was one of the younger kids at the Junior Theater where Doom Bunny worked doing lights and I volunteered to help backstage. During the Wizard of Oz, we were testing the smoke machine for the Great Oz scene and John kept running into the smoke and miming as if he had a cigarette and yelling, “I’m smoking!” I want to say we made the mistake of laughing which encouraged him to keep doing it but the fact that he kept doing it was what made it so great so it wasn’t a mistake to laugh at all! Christ. That was over twenty years ago and we still say it. I wonder if John has gotten any funnier?

The reason I told that story was to pad out this review of New Titans #94. There’s not a lot to say about it. Phil Jimenez’s art is terrible in that way that some people would think it isn’t terrible even though it is. And the story is bland. I don’t want to blame Louise Simonson for the blandness though! She was given Red Star and Cyborg to work with so how exciting could she have made it? Especially since Cyborg is mostly brain dead.

This story is at least a two-parter which seems a bit absurd given that it’s probably just meant to get Cyborg back to his old self. I suppose that was so Marv could take a bit of a break from this series so he could decompress and find himself after being manipulated by and forced to write pseudo-X-men stories by Jon Peterson for so many years.