Shade the Changing Girl #5

Make your own damn bird joke.

The Review!
-1. If I wasn't so enamored with the original Shade the Changing Man, I would probably drop this book. I don't have anything clever to say about it because I've already forgotten everything that was in it this issue. Even the trip to the zoo! And the return of Megan from the Madness Zone. Those parts of the story were so uninspiring that they just didn't stick in my brain and now I don't remember them. Hopefully this review was helpful because it certainly wasn't entertaining (which is backwards from the usual way I write these things: entertaining but not helpful at all).

The Flintstones #8

Are those the only options? What about Slackers?

• The first vignette (that's a little vig. Unless it's a female vig) is about how women do work that's unappreciated while men do work that is over-appreciated. That's because men need all of that appreciation due to their tiny penises having caused serious ego problems as they grew to adulthood. This causes them to need more appreciation for the slightest of accomplishments. Women are just used to getting shit done because men are oblivious dickfarts who can't even be bothered to notice when a female they see every single day changes up her look. I mean, he'll probably eventually notice which is pretty good for a man. But don't expect him to notice immediately! If it doesn't make their dick move, it can't really penetrate the thought centers of the brain.

• If you're a guy with low self-esteem (probably due to your micro-penis (which I'm not making fun of! I'm just pointing out how that condition can cause a lot of psychological trauma to a male individual (or so I've heard from a friend!))), that previous bullet point was probably pretty sexist. But if you're a guy who gets laid all of the time because you're a super famous comic book blogger (or some other thing that is so hot women's panties fall off around you all the time (or men's panties! I don't want to seem homophobic as well as sexist right out of the gate! I need to lure you deep into my web before I reveal all of my flaws)), you probably read that first bullet point and thought, "Ha! Some guys have small penises."

• Oh, also the first vignette (that sounds delicious, right?) shows how smart women are and how totally bro guys are. You know what I mean by bro. Fucking bros are ruining this world! Go read a fucking book, bros! I mean a real book like Catch-22 or something by that Kurt Funnygut guy! Harry Potter might be an entertaining read with some inspiring messages (Or not. Who can tell? I haven't read it!) but you bros need to read something more substantial. Maybe when the ping pong ball lands in the plastic cup full of beer, how about you have to read a book instead of getting so drunk you do a bunch of stupid shit that completely embarrasses your mother (she doesn't need to know exactly what you've done but, you know, she knows).

• Betty and Wilma are ditching Fred and Barney to go visit Wilma's mother at her farm. Hopefully the farm is in a sunny place which will cause Betty to invent the bikinirock.

• Steve Pugh is back on art duties this month so I'm super happy. Not boner happy! I mean, I will be if that bikinirock thing happens. But I'm just aesthetically pleased (is a person who appreciates aesthetics an aesthlete?) because the faces of Pugh's characters are fucking great. That's as descriptive as I can get because I'm not J.R.R. Tolkien. I don't have the patience to write five pages of flowery nonsense to describe a hobbit's bunion caused by walking halfway across the world. Would it have killed Gandalf to learn the teleport spell?

There's more social commentary in this one sign than in the entire run of most comic books.

• In Bedrock! Twist! Twist!

• In school, Pebbles and Bamm Bamm learn about economics. Apparently it's a scam. Fucking Adam Smith! I knew he was a huge asshole! I'm taking my econ paper from twenty years ago where I said just that back to my professor and demanding he change the F to an A! I have a Flintstones comic book to back me up! Take that, Mr. Whaler!

• In the realm of politics, Clod the Mayor wants to go to war against the lizard people. Damn right! Fucking lizard people. But he doesn't have enough money in the budget. Nobody in the government has the foresight to see the kinds of problems these lizard people are going to cause if they go unchecked. Fuckers will rule the world one day! And for want of a few extra dollars, Clod could have destroyed them centuries ago!

• To get some support for the Lizard People War, Clod hires celebrity Stony Danza to do some Pro-Lizard People war commercials. You remember Stony Danza! Star of Who's the Mastodon? and Taxi (But A Dinosaur Taxi and Not a Car Taxi).

• At the farm, Wilma has some cathartic discussions with her mother and Betty never even contemplates the bikinirock. My boner is so sad.

Are you trying to make me angry, Flintstones comic book?!

• At the Town Hall meeting to discuss closing down the children's hospital so Clod can afford his war, Fred makes an impassioned plea to the men to get them to understand that one of their most critical roles is protecting the children. Since most men are stupid, they take his speech as being a clear reason for destroying the Lizard People. Got to keep those kids safe!

• Betty and Wilma return from the farm and there's a lesson learned or something. I can't really parse the emotional messages!

The Ranking!
+1! Look at that! A positive ranking even though Betty never got into a bikinirock! That proves this comic book is special!

Kamandi Challenge #2

I solved the mystery! Kamandi is actually David Lee Roth!

• The cliffhanger at the end of the last issue involved the stupid Tiger-Men deciding to set off a nuclear missile so they could absorb all of its power. Why would a race of tigers need a radioactive source to become more powerful? They're tigers! Just suck on each other's dicks and you'll be more powerful than they could ever imagine. And their boners will be so hard! It's like a positive feedback loop!

• Okay, so I guess I need to take a crack at solving the cliffhanger first. Kamandi has five minutes to disarm the nuclear bomb or everybody is going to die. He doesn't have the knowledge to disarm a bomb so he'll have to use all the tools at hand. One of those tools is Doctor Canus's erect dick slathered in peanut butter. Kamandi will probably suck him off and catch the load in his mouth. Then he'll run over to the timer on the missile and snowball the fuck out of it. Doctor Canus's semen, still sticky from the peanut butter and highly acidic from all the pineapple pizzas he eats, will adhere to the mechanism and short it out. Everybody will be safe! But Caesar will be upset that Kamandi ruined the ritual, so he'll probably throw him back in the arena. Or maybe he'll say to his son Tuftan, "Haven't you always wanted a pet that sucks dick? Take him!"

How does Doctor Canus get any sciencing done when he's constantly trying to buttfuck everything that moves?

• My second theory about how Kamandi solves the cliffhanger was that he'd simply run away and let the tigers die in the blast. But then I thought, "How far can he really run away? He'd be dead too! I know this is a comic book but that's so illogical!" By the third page of this issue, it seems Tomasi has opted for the Kamandi runs for his life solution. It seems a little bit like a cheat but at least it wipes out a lot of characters that don't matter. Just have Doctor Canus and Tuftan survive and call it good. Even Caesar doesn't have to live!

• Tuftan catches Kamandi before he can get away and drags him back to the missile. All of the idiot tigers stand around anticipating the moment the bomb blows so they can all scream "It's greeeeeeeaaaaaat!" together in a fiery, apocalyptic ending.

"I'll never even get to kiss a girl who isn't a robot or my grandmother!"

• It looks like Peter J. Tomasi is choosing the easiest way out of this cliffhanger: the bomb's a dud! I feel so cheated! Hopefully Dan Abnett, in his brief at the end where he explains how he would have solved the cliffhanger, uses the dog semen trick.

• Instead of blowing up, a sentient ape double fisting pistols pops out of the top of the missile. It was a Trojan Missile! And those stupid tigers fell for it! Although the ape is even dumber since his plan relied on the tigers setting off the bomb to free him so he could kill them. He could have just let them have a real bomb, I suppose.

• More apes descend on the city so Kamandi uses the chaos to steal his shit back from Doctor Peanut Butter Dick. He then rushes off to the Museum of War to find a weapon. Or to be killed by Jackdaws.

• I still don't know what the mystery is that I'm supposed to be solving before they do!

• The Jackdaws pick up some of the ancient artifacts housed in the museum to help fight the apes. The relics are all weapons of DC superheroes! I wonder if Cheeks the Toy Wonder is in the museum somewhere.

• Crashing down through the floor and into the Basement of Forbidden Jack Kirby Objects, Kamandi discovers Metron's Chair underneath an old tarp. I guess the cliffhanger will be how quickly Kamandi's head explodes after sitting in the chair.

• Doctor Canus and Prince Fuzzy-pants show up just in time to see Kamandi hop in Metron's Chair. They chase after him to try to stop him before the chair disappears. And even though Kamandi has been trying to get away from these guys, he decides to reach out, grab them, and pull them along for the ride. The chair takes off and I start singing, "All my life I've wanted to fly like the birds that you see way up in the sky! Making circles in the morning sun flying high in the sky til the day is done! I CAN'T BREAK AWAY! Like a child in his fantasy punching holes in the walls of reality! All my life I've wanted to fly but I don't have the wings and I wonder why. I CAN'T BREAK AWAY! I CAN'T BREAK AWAY!"

Bogus!

• I hope Tomasi doesn't think the previous page will be used by the other writers! What writer is going to think, "Oh shit! Tomasi stuck that phrase into that Metron Chair bit that read 'If the Red Riders catch us, we're doomed!' I've got to incorporate that into my story! And remember he had all those comic books appear. What was that about?!" More likely, everybody will go, "Yeah, yeah. Fuck you Tomasi. I'm writing my own shit over here! Stop trying to be cute."

• Kamandi, Doctor Peanut Butter Dick, and Prince Fuzzy-Pants wind up in San Diego. That's where the big Comic Con happens! I bet they run into cosplayers in the Wild Human Reserve.

• Apparently the guards of the Wild Human Reserve are Manhunters. Even though they're called Manhunters, they shoot the dog and the tiger immediately. Then they say their trademark saying, "No man escapes the Manhunters," which alerts Kamandi to the danger he's in (just in case he thought the Manhunters were only interested in not allowing tigers and dogs to escape). So to get away, Kamandi throws himself over a cliff and presumably dies. Unless the next writers, Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner, can think up a way to keep Kamandi from dying! I just don't see how they can. He's as good as dead!

• Finally, each issue includes an essay by the previous writer explaining how they would have solved their cliffhanger. This essay is by Dan Abnett and he describes how he would have had Kamandi survive the nuke. Hopefully he just says, "I was going to kill him. Let's see the next writer get out of that!"

• Dan Abnett's solution would have been to have Kamandi flee while the nuke obliterates Tiger City. I pointed out that was an option but the laziest one of all! At least for coming up with a clever solution. I would have also allowed the bomb to blow because it's a post-apocalyptic world where bad shit happens. But Abnett also solved DiDio's cliffhanger with a lazy solution, so I think Abnett just likes to take the easy way out when writing. That's probably why I'm not reading his Titans book anymore.

The Ranking!
No change! I'm grading this on a curve and Tomasi's solution was less creative than my sticky dog semen solution.

Justice League of America #1

Lobo tries to catch Ryan so he can shove him in his urethra.

• Now that Batman has his own Justice League of B-list heroes (and Lobo!), he gets to make the rules. He was tired of Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, and Cyborg thinking his rules were just "suggestions." And no, I didn't forget to leave Aquaman off that list. Fuck Aquaman.

• Now that I've said "Fuck Aquaman" (again), I have to wonder if Aquaman wasn't the entire reason Batman moved on to form his own Justice League. As the leader of the Justice League of America, he gets to recruit the members which ensures that no useless, fishy heroes will embarrass and dilute the brand.

• This issue begins with Batman justifying his new League to Vixen. "The Justice League watches from above. That's not good enough anymore. The crime needs to be spotted from below! And at eye level! That means regular people! Common folk, like gays and blacks and women and migrants and super cool bad-ass alien assassins. I'm the only straight white American-born guy on this team so nobody will outshine me!" Vixen listens and channels whatever animal is best at side-eye. Probably a housecat, right?

Stop exaggerating for dramatic effect, Vixen! You know the only people causing problems on the team are Killer Frost and Lobo.

• If I take Vixen's statement literally, I have to assume that The Atom is a homophobe, Vixen is a Hong Konger hater, Killer Frost is racist, Black Canary hates men, and The Ray keeps rubbing his boner on Lobo. Fine, I don't have to assume all of that! But I'd like to.

• Batman is all, "People need to see heroes are human! That's why I created this team!" Then he scoots in front of Lobo and opens his cape wide so Vixen can't see him. "See? Humans!"

• While Batman and Vixen discuss the philosophy of the team, Black Canary and The Ray are rescuing people from a burning building in Vanity, Oregon.

Batman just got done discussing how these heroes are human and here's one of the most human of them jumping out of a second story window clutching two people in her arms. I guess her Canary Cry helps with landing safely?

• Lobo is off on his own rescuing dolphins from magma sea trolls because, as I pointed out in my last review, he loves dolphins. Technically, does this make him the Aquaman of the group? If so, Aquaman should just retire forever.

• Frost and Atom are busy fixing up The Sanctuary in Happy Harbor. They're working on something Ryan terribly named The Troubalert. Get it?!

• While all of that other shit is going on, the team's first main threat appears in Saratoga, New York. And this threat isn't just a bunch of chumps! They took down the Post-Crisis Justice League International! Although, to be fair, a bunch of chumps probably could have taken down the Post-Crisis Justice League International.

The Extremists!

• Lord Havok announces that he and his crew have come to save Earth before it burns like his Earth. Some police immediately pull up, profile them as super-villains, and pull their guns. What kind of a welcome is that? Peace officers, my ass!

• After reading a couple more pages, I should probably apologize to the police officers and my ass. The Extremists idea of "saving the world" seems to be that one where they destroy everything and kill everybody before they can do it to themselves. It's not the greatest interpretation of the definition of the word "save," but at least it makes for an exciting comic book.

Lord Havok isn't saying anything I haven't already said in this blog. It's just that I don't burn down a city every time I publish another blog post.

• Lord Havok and I differ on our reactions to the reality that civilization is constantly just one step away from chaos. He sees it through the eyes of fear, the way a lot of American citizens see it. Too much freedom leads to too many possible chances for bad people to do violent things. I see it through the eyes of a cheerful optimist who thinks, "I could stab my neighbor in the face any time I want but I don't. And even more likely, he won't do it to me. I can live with this agreement."

• The Extremists have decided the only way to save Earth is to rule it themselves. That sounds like maybe they're not really too concerned about the Earth and maybe just a teensy bit more concerned with power.

• Thankfully, the Justice League arrives so I can make a stupid joke!

Especially if they're metric!

• The big fight doesn't start after Vixen has her say. Batman has to mouth off first! He's all, "I'm the Batman!" No wait. He doesn't say that this time. I guess that's too cliché, especially when the bad guy directly asks, "Who are you?" After that, the big fight starts! There are so many different characters that it might last six issues.

• According to the big first panel splash of the battle, Lobo is going against Gorgon. That's the only fight I care about. Hopefully it doesn't take place behind a bar and then Lobo's hand appears to grab a cigar and to indicate who won.

• The fight ends abruptly just as Lord Havok is about to decapitate The Atom. Batman calls a halt to it and trades his life for Ryan's. Not that Batman gets decapitated at the end of this issue. That probably won't happen until the beginning of the next one.

The Ranking!
Plus a jizzillion! That's as many pluses as there are sperm in one spurt of semen. Maybe a few less because Lobo wasn't the focus of this issue. But he was still in it so this is still the best comic book your money can buy. Also, this was one of those issues where the name of the story appears on the last page and I'm glad it did. This story was called "The Extremists" and that would have spoiled the surprise for me when I turned the page to see Lord Havok and the gang standing there.

Detective Comics #950

Great. An extra long comic book. I fucking live for these.

• Being a superhero must be a huge pain in the ass. The older I get, the less time I want to actually spend on maintaining the life support for my brain (you know, my body). Why fucking bother? I mean, except to keep it in good enough shape to keep the life support running longer so the brain can experience years more existential dread and worry. I suppose the eroding of wonder and passion is a necessary evil. If things still ratcheted up my emotions to teenage levels, I'd be fucking exhausted. Plus, life wouldn't be dragging me down more and more every year so that when I'm finally about to take my last breath, I'm more apt to say "Finally. Good riddance!" than "NO! It was too short!"

Who am I kidding? No matter when I die, it's going to have been too short, no matter how fucking miserable I am.

• I think I was about to make a different point in that last bullet point when the specter of my mortality gripped me by the throat with its skeletal hand and whispered...well, I'm not going to tell you what it whispered! It's personal! And terrifying!

• Oh! I remember what I was going to say! I need to exercise! I gained way too much weight after my cat Judas died because I didn't fucking care about anything and now I've got to figure out how to lose it all. But I don't want to spend extra time doing physical things! I walk all the time but apparently not enough to seriously counteract the mournful gluttony I went through for about a year or more. I suppose I could run but I can barely remember the last time I did that! Aside from occasionally sprinting down the driveway after getting the mail barefoot in the rain. Come to think of it, that usually feels exhilarating. Maybe I should do sprints for my exercise regimen?

• The other day, I heard somebody say regiment when they meant regimen.

• This issue is probably too long for me to care about reviewing in bullet points. Just look at the cover with all the names of the artists who worked on this. It's so long that they had to split their time across all those people. And they got paid for it! Yeah, I'm definitely not putting effort into this review. So, you know, it'll be like most of my reviews! But at least that doesn't make my reviews any worse than any of the others on the Internet. Holy shit, people who review comic books are boring assholes.

Well then Christine Montclair is an idiot because she lives in a fucking comic book where all kinds of supernatural things happen on a near constant basis.

• Does anybody remember the haunted Toys "R" Us in Sunnyvale, California? It was on That's Incredible or one of those weird shows of the early 80s. Maybe Ripley's Believe It or Not. But not Real People since that show was about real people and not fake people like ghosts. Anyway, that was the Toys "R" Us where I got all of my Atari cartridges and Star Wars Figures! I never saw the ghost. Probably because (Spoiler Alert!) it wasn't real.

Well, now it's certain she's an idiot. She doesn't even believe in creepy stalkers! Come on, Christine! Smarten up! You live in Gotham! Four out of every five guys are creepy stalkers lurking in the shadows watching young women dance!

• It turns out the creepy stalker is Cassie just trying to learn how to dance. When she's caught by Christine (who still gets to not believe in ghosts and creepy stalkers because Cassie wasn't either. Maybe I'm the idiot!), Cassie doesn't want to scare Christine so she just throws a smoke bomb and runs away. That seemed like a reasonable reaction.

• The Omniscient Narrator (who is rarer than ghosts in DC Comics) turns their attention to Cassie Cain and is all, "Cassie believes in ghosts! Oh, you better believe it! Boy howdy, does she! So real, ghosts are!" And that's the prologue to the prologue!

• James Tynion IV seems to have chosen to use an Omniscient Narrator this issue so that he could write lines like this: "Every gesture, every twitch of muscle in her face, forming words in a sentence that Harper doesn't know she might as well be shouting at her." Pee-yuke! If you want to write Young Adult Literature, write Young Adult Literature, Tynion! This is a comic book! Utilize the medium you're writing in to the best of your ability rather than writing a short story and sticking it in Narration Boxes and letting the art be the sidekick to your masturbatory wordsmithing!

• "Cassandra envies the way the emotions just bleed from her friend's body." Gross! It's like full body menstruation!

• "Even more, the way they can just tumble out of her mouth without effort." So evocative of barfing!

• The conceit here, if I may act like I know how to use the word conceit in a critique of another person's writing, is that Cassie can't articulate what she's feeling. So while her responses are short and clipped, Tynion has decided to contrast her stifled expression with the overly expressive Narration Boxes. They're the things Cassie would say if she could. Although she'd probably fill Harper with revulsion using all those disgusting body function metaphors. But then when you're raised to know only death and killing, what other metaphors are at your disposal?!

• Cassandra is sad that she didn't get to be a regular girl and was instead made to grow up as a weapon of destruction. Bah. First world problems!

• After visiting Harper and finding she cannot express her needs to her, Cassandra seeks out Batman. She defeats a drug ring and saves some children but he does not hug her. Not like the time before. That one time. That time she seeks desperately. Now, he treats her kindly but warily. He sees the potential threat she could be if she lost control, and it hurts her. She cannot express what she needs to Batman, so she moves on.

• Um, anyway, Cassie runs from Bat-family member to Bat-family member thinking, "I wish I could say the things I want to say to them! Boo hoo!" Then she goes home to dance which is the way she shouts back at the city because body language was her first language. On a rooftop across the way, Shiva spies on her and says, "I hear you girl! I'm coming!" Sexy! Also, I didn't know Shiva was that good at reading body language.

• There's a second story but it's about Azrael and I hate Azrael so I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist.

Plus there are Bat-Sentinels in it. I really want to pretend those don't exist.

• At least the Bat-Sentinels were part of the Clayface Danger Room. So it's not like anything was really stolen from the X-men.

• Azrael isn't just a religious nut whose secret identity is basically Cousin Oliver from The Brady Bunch. Apparently, he's also a twelve step junkie. Ugh, I can't stand him! I'm ignoring this story!

• Luke Fox is one of those atheists that people who aren't atheist think all atheists are. He's all, "I need a reason to believe shit! Proof and what not! I am super logical!" But some atheists are just all, "I can live with doubt. I can live with heaps and heaps and heaps of doubt. I don't need to know how the universe began or why people exist. I can live with no meaning. I'm an atheist because even though I don't know even a small percentage of the mystery of everything, I know that God doesn't exist. It doesn't fit anywhere inside the model of life and the universe. It is an outside idea that nobody studying the theory of everything would ever come up with. God is outside the system and thus not an answer as to why the system exists or works. The whole creation has to have a creator argument is legerdemain and misdirection. It's an assumption that our own lives are a reflection of the rest of reality. And it's expressly ignorant of the idea that if something needs to be created then what created God? As soon as you suggest God didn't need to be created, you are allowing that a thing can exist that didn't need to be created (at least in the way our minds can process the idea of creation). And if you can believe that, why can't you believe the universe itself is that thing that didn't need to be created by a creator? I'm really just one step away from agreeing with Creationists."

• As Atheistwing and Friend of Billzrael have their philosophical debate, the Azrael mask watches and learns. Maybe. I don't know. Anyway, the Order of St. Dumas have created a new angel to do their revelatory bidding: Ascalon!

• There's still another story! This one about Batman and Red Robin. Basically it's just Red Robin asking Batman why he's preparing for war and Batman not answering him. Typical!

The Ranking!
+1! Okay, this issue had some good shit in it. I can admit when I was being disingenuous in some of my earlier critiques in the bullet point portion of this review! I mean, can I? Really? I'm always disingenuous in my reviews! I think I'm usually honest about that though, right?

Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps #14

People relied too much on hoping things would work out. And guess what? Things didn't!

• This issue begins with Guy Gardner catching Space Cabbie. Did I have a stroke? Am I imagining Pre-Crisis comic books that never actually happened but could have happened? My head has been feeling a little weird today but I chalked it up to having eaten too much carrot cake and not enough of the other stuff. You know the stuff. The stuff that grows out of the ground.

• Based on all the hullabaloo surrounding people's diets in this country (this country being the United States of America, if you couldn't tell by my brash confidence, pockets bulging with probably money, and the constant pretension that my cock is huge (have I not been pretensing that? Sometimes, as a United States Citizen, I forget to keep up with the rules and regulations of being a citizen. It's like never visiting tourist attractions in your home town. Anyway, huge. So large. Like, ten centimeters or something (also as a U.S. Citizen, I don't do the metric system so that measurement might be an exaggeration))), I decided to ask Lord Google about modern cases of scurvy. Apparently they still happen on occasion even though some doctor named Churchill in some Slate article has this advice: "You can have a handful of McDonald’s ketchup packets a day, and that’ll give you enough vitamin C to keep you from contracting scurvy." I knew McDonald's could be healthy!

• At least that solves the mystery of why I don't have scurvy. I put ketchup on everything!

• Guy Gardner is hunting down rogue Sinestro Corps members. Maybe. I don't fucking know! Just read the stupid comic book if you need to know all of the precise details without any of my embellishments and digressions.

• Hal Jordan and Kyle Rayner embark on their own mission to find Hope. Judging by Kyle Rayner's attitude, he's been performing stand-up at open mic nights across the galaxy. Judging by his jokes, he's terrible at it. He may have mastered fear, love, anger, will, hope, compassion, and the other one but he's worse than a beginner at humor.

• Guy Gardner brings Space Cabbie back to Mogo where he tells them everything he's heard from fares about the rogue Sinestro Corps members. John's plan is to round them up and give them a choice: prison or enslavement. I mean, technically it's not enslavement. He calls it redemption. But the option to go to jail or to work with the Green Lantern Corps to protect the universe isn't much of a choice. How long do they have to spend in the Space Corps before they've been redeemed? Can they retire at that point?

• On a lava planet full of dragons (which might be Ysmault), Kyle and Hal discover Saint Walker being devoured by the Misery Mound.

You'll find artists often cover up a character's feet. Not because they can't draw feet. Feet are easy! What's difficult is drawing the full body of a character at the right size on a comic book page, either because it's easy to misjudge how much room you're using when you start drawing the head or because they don't want to bother with horizon and perspective to get the footing correct. There are absolutely no other reasons!

The Ranking!
No change! I guess it's time to get the Emotional Spectrum Machine up and running again. More colors equals more problems! And more problems equals easier to write stories!

Wonder Woman #16

Imagine the chimera. At one point in the ancient world, a goat was bad-ass enough to stick on a lion to make it tougher.

• I bet the legend of the Chimera began when a drunk guy was walking home and he saw a lion off to the side and in the distance behind the lion was a goat so that it looked like the goat's head was sticking out of the back of the lion. Then he told people about the creature and they were all, "Bullshit! Didn't happen. Pics." But instead of admitting he was drunk and maybe he didn't exactly see things clearly, he doubled down on his story and was all, "And there was a snake coming out of its butt! And it breathed fire!" Then everybody was all, "Oh shit. Now that sounds plausible!"

• The Chimera on the cover is totally based on the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual Chimera. But the Chimera Wonder Woman wrestles on the first page is the more historically accurate Chimera. What I'm suggesting is that Jenny Frison plays Dungeons and Dragons.

• Veronica and Adrianna of Empire Business and Hand Soap Solutions discuss Wonder Woman and how great or not-so-great she is. Adrianna is all goofy in the pants for her but Veronica remains distant and aloof to the possibility that maybe Wonder Woman is the greatest thing to ever happen to immigration. They're busy working on a thing that will cause Wonder Woman no end of problems in the odd numbered issues. But right now in these even numbered issues, Empire Business and Hand Soap Solutions still don't know how much they despise Wonder Woman or how much the hand soap is hurting the rest of their business.

• Meanwhile in Geneva, Switzercountry, Veronica's daughter, Isadore, meets a couple of men who seem to be the same man. They begin using all the regular chat-up lines on Isadore like "This painting is called 'Kill Your Father' and 'We're twins' and 'Have you ever seen a man's stick this big and fancy?' and also, the best, 'Gaze into my magic gem of secrets!'"

• After her encounter, Isadore loses her face.

This is probably some kind of metaphor for sexism, right?

• The twins who stole Isadore's identity are Phobos and Deimos. Those are the gods of Vietnamese Soup and Gay Gods, respectively. That doesn't explain why they would need the face of a little girl. Maybe I got the translations of their names wrong.

• Phobos and Deimos are, of course, the moons of Mars. Apparently they've taken human form and this is going to wind up being a Martian Manhunter crossover. Maybe they needed the little girl's face so they could build more face art on the surface of Mars.

• The Phobros believe that Empire Business and Hand Soap Solutions can meet their needs. They would like to know the location of Themyscira but they can't seem to find it in Diana's head. So they need Veronica's not-quite-ready-to-go technology. It will probably be ready in about five or six years. Once they get the information, Isadore will be freed from some tartar sauce.

• Adrianna volunteers to hook herself up to the CyberWalker machinery. That probably explains why she's a hologram in the odd numbered issues. Unless they were, at one point, the even numbered issues. It's hard to say since there was that stupid Barbara Minerva Cheetah Origin story smack dab in the middle of everything.

• Being that the technology is in that not-quite-ready-to-go status that I so scientifically detailed earlier, it fails to provide the Phobros with the information they need. But it does manage to kill Adrianna! I mean, trap her mind inside a computer. That's the way things work when you attach brains to machines and then turn switches and run currents and all the other technological stuff that I can't be bothered to explain to dullards. Not that you, the person currently reading this right now, are a dullard! It's all those other people reading this.

The Ranking!
No change! When I was a teenager and way too naive for the age I was, I wished the local zoo had been full of creatures from Dungeons and Dragons. That's not a great chat-up line in junior high. I can only tell you the not great chat-up lines from junior high since I never figured out the successful ones. That's no great surprise though since one time, Marilyn Mendoza, the girl I had a crush on for nearly my entire junior high school life, was writing notes back and forth to me in the library. Her final note to me said, "I love you anyway," and I instantly went into a fugue state. I would explain how Marilyn reacted but, as I pointed out, I went into a fugue state! Totally botched that one!