The Terrifics #20

Most of Plastic Man is up Mr. Terrific's butthole.

I love the word butthole. Some people think buttholes are gross but I think they're often adorable enough to be called buttholes. I'm not saying all buttholes are cute and adorable because as an Internet denizen, I have seen The Butthole That Shall Not Be Named. You know, goat.se. But I've also seen many, many beautiful and adorable buttholes too! What I'm trying to say is I hope we get to see Phantom Girl's butthole this issue.

Some people think it's weird and immature to be sexually attracted to cartoon and/or comic book characters. But I think it's a totally natural instinct for sophisticated and adult art lovers. Do you think cavemen weren't jacking it to cave art? Please. Half the markings on the wall are probably dried cum. I'm not ashamed of saying I would totally fuck Phantom Girl! I wouldn't say it to somebody I know. Or somebody I don't know. Or anybody in public at all ever. But I'll write it here!

I know what some of you are thinking: you're a gross pedophile. But Phantom Girl is actually quite old. Remember, she spent like seventy years in the Dark Multiverse. Also, even if she wasn't older than I am, she's a fucking cartoon character! I also wanted to fuck Sailor Mars! Unless I wanted to be Sailor Mars. It's hard to fucking tell sometimes! I think it was more that I wanted to be Sailor Mars so I could go around fucking guys like me. Man, to be a hot woman! I'd suck so much dick! I'm not saying I want to suck dick now, as myself. It's weird that that doesn't appeal to me. But being a woman and going around sucking tons of dick totally does appeal to me. That's probably a fairly normal fantasy, right? I bet part of the fantasy stems from the fact that there's nothing more overtly sexual than a rock hard veiny penis straining to be shoved in any opening it can find! So making a bunch of dicks cum has to be like everybody's number one fantasy, right? Also maybe putting two in your butt at the same time while sucking those dicks. Hey, I'm just as normal as the next guy!

All of that is to say I took The Terrifics off of my pull list. This will be my last chance to see Power Girl's butthole. Fingers crossed!

The Terrifics begin this issue by battling their Bizarro opposites, The Terribles. It's terrifically confusing. Or terribly not confusing? Jeez, I used to like Bizarro so much but I hate him more and more as I grow older. That wasn't me speaking like Bizarro. It's how I really feel. I'm speaking seriously. Believe the things I'm writing. I am not doing a Bizarro impression. If I was doing a Bizarro impression, it would sound like this: "Me totally joking when me not say me hate Phantom Girl's butthole." See? You can't even parse that, can you? But at least it's there in writing for everybody to plainly see my true feelings on fucking underage cartoon characters when I appear before a judge on whatever charges can be charged to somebody for that. "See, judge? I'm totally innocent of perversion! As you can see, me was totally joking when me not say me hate Phantom Girl's butthole!" And then when the judge looks confused and says, "Guilty!", I'll say, "Real guilty or Bizarro guilty?"

This is exactly the same sex speech I prepared for my butthole sex with Phantom Girl! Me am not rock hard right now!

It's weird seeing Mr. Terrible acting as if he's Mr. Terrific's opposite. I thought Mrs. Terrific was Mr. Terrific's opposite. He has T-spheres while she has T-cubes and he has T-balls while she has a T-box. Totally opposite!

The Terribles are trying to power a time machine with something from The Terrifics' headquarters. They get away with one of Phantom Girl's trinkets that allows her to contact The Phantom Zone. That's how she accesses her powers. It makes sense because they both have "phantom" in their name.

Is smell the opposite of sight? I would have guessed touch was the opposite of sight and taste was the opposite of hearing while smell was its own opposite.

The Terribles use their time machine to move themselves and everything around them (maybe the entire planet?) back to the Image 90s. The Terrifics wind up in more extreme uniforms with more pouches and tighter, more dynamic buttholes. It's a fucking dream come true!

You might be wondering how I know the buttholes of 90s Image heroes were so tight and dynamic. Just ask Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, or Todd McFarlane. It was the number one reason they began Image! DC and Marvel were adamant about Batman and Spider-man having totally loose buttholes. But the fan reaction to Todd McFarlane's new and improved Spider-man butthole sent shockwaves through the comic book industry. Who knew fans would be so rabid about heroes with tighter buttholes that they'd crash the entire market years later due to speculation! Everybody thought those foil butthole covers were going to be worth thousands of dollars thirty years later. Of course now we know a comic book will only become valuable if the character introduced in it somehow breaks out of the comic medium and becomes a film superstar, like Deadpool or Donatello Turtle.

Talk about tight buttholes! Those mutant turtles' buttholes were watertight!

The Terrifics spend a few pages reminding everybody how ridiculous life was in the 90s. People watched television on televisions that were totally different and they engaged in physical activities except ridiculous ones like rollerblading and they wore clothes but clothes that can be mocked by people thirty years down the line unlike the clothes we were today which will never be mockable. They also drink sodas out of glass bottles instead of different glass bottles and they said things like "Cowabunga is my butthole tight!" and collected things but dumb and valueless things like Beanie Babies instead of super valuable things like Heroclix and 90s comic books. Man, we were so dumb in the 90s! Ha ha! Idiots!

Look, I'm not saying I came in my pants at this shot of Phantom Girl's butt and her saying, "You want a taste of my dark matter touch." I'm just not saying it. In print.

The Terrifics continue to go back in time with The Terribles where their costumes keep changing by the decade. Phantom Girl is, of course, adorable in her Molly Ringwald look that you can barely see in the background of one panel but which I know by heart for reasons I won't go into but you can probably guess at. Why am I so fucking honest on this blog? Um, that was me being Bizarro! I'm totally not honest at all on this blog! It's all hilarious jokes!

The Terrifics #20 Rating: B+. I love Phantom Girl's butthole but I just don't love this comic book enough to keep paying for it. Even if I kind of want to finish this story. If a future issue does happen to show Phantom Girl's butthole, somebody please contact me and let me know! Thanks!

Inferior 5 #1

Hopefully this will be like when Giffen made the Legion of Super-heroes super fucking dark.

I have no fucking idea how the Inferior 5 fit into regular DC Continuity. They have to be from a different Earth, right? Earth Number This Is Fucked Up, probably. Dumb Bunny, Awkwardman, Blimp, White Feather, and Merrymaker make up the main roster of a team nobody was looking to have rebooted. I get it. They're so terrible that even they accept that they're terrible and so they came up with a self-deprecating name. I would have had Dumb Bunny come up with the name and they would be called the Inferior 4. But then I like jokes that are often seen as confusing or mistakes on my part when the reader, being so fucking smugly intelligent, isn't able to resist correcting everything they fucking read.

After their initial appearance and follow-up stories in Showcase back in the Sixties, the Inferior 5 never really took off. They had a maxi-series and then a few odd appearances that didn't last for more than a panel. I probably have a few of those appearances since one of them was the Oz-Wonderland war and another was in Grant Morrison's Animal Man. But DC, being so far up their own ass, was probably too afraid to touch the Inferior 5 for decades because they were too silly. I know DC tried to "make comics fun again!" in the 80s with titles like Booster Gold and Blue Beetle and Blue Devil. But those were real super heroes that weren't complete embarrassments. You can add humor to real superhero action and still feel like you've retained your dignity. But how can you publish something with a dumb blonde named Dumb Bunny who probably fucks like crazy (because of the rabbit theme and not the dumb blonde theme!) and a guy named Awkwardman who inherited a trait from his mother, a water hero, who had to "get wet" occasionally to stay alive? I know that's also an Aqualad trait but I just wanted to mention how the Who's Who explicitly mentioned Awkwardman's mother needing to get wet. So hot.

One of The Inferior 5's appearances was in The New 52's Bat-Mite #5 which I reviewed exactly inferior five years ago ("inferior five" is four).

The issue begins in a desert landscape on Earth Number This Is Fucked Up with some oddly shaped landscapes.

How many dicks can you find, kids?!

"How many dicks can you find, kids" is the least quotable line I've ever written.

The Kamandi just out of surgery cosplayer winds up getting exploded by the kid in the canvas sack face mask. You know the kid is bad news because he can make people explode with his mind. Although if you ran into him in the desert, you wouldn't know that immediately so I should have stated the other ways you can tell he's bad news so as to maybe avoid exploding. First off, he's a kid out in the desert alone. Kids by themselves are creepy. Plus he's wearing a canvas bag on his head. Canvas is always a warning sign that you might be dealing with cannibal hillbillies, especially when it's covering an almost certainly mutilated face. Also, the kid's canvas bag mask has a big red X on it. Anybody who's been through the American educational system has a strong aversion to red X's. Also spooky: the kid recites nursery rhymes. When you hear one of those, you know you're either about to die or laugh hysterically because did you hear how the Diceman said "cock" instead of "clock"?! How did we never stop laughing in the Eighties?! Oh, one more clue that not all is right with this kid: he lives in Dangerfield, Arizona. That's almost as big a red flag as some sweaty, long-haired kid in overalls from Back Swamp, North Carolina.

The story picks up with some nerdy kid (probably Merrymaker since he's the big virgin of the group) whining about how his dad died in The Invasion of Metropolis (what was that? Is that a reference to the beginning of The New 52 when Darkseid attacked Earth? Or is this a reference to the Invasion by the Dominators which was compiled in three way-too-long comics?). After the Invasion, he and his mom moved to Dangerfield, Arizona. Because who wouldn't feel safer in a place with a name that causes constant anxiety over a place where the greatest hero in the world lives?

According to the date on this calendar, the Invasion mentioned was the Dominator one which created the Meta-Gene explanation of superpowers which we recently learned was a computer jargon shortening of the term "metal-gene."

The calendar isn't the only proof that this invasion was by Dominators and not Parademons! By turning the page instead of trying to ferret out what's going on by examining every panel carefully and spending an inordinate amount of my short lifespan trying to guess what's about to happen instead of just fucking turning the Goddamned page and letting the writers explain it to me, I discover the Dominators are leading an invasion of Earth Number This Is Fucked Up. At least I think it's Earth Number This Is Fucked Up because the invasion seems to have worked. Superman is dead and most of the other heroes have been placed in a space gulag. Plus that kid in the canvas bag marking X's on houses seems to play an important role in the Dominator's invasion force.

Unless this is all just a comic book on Earth Number Main Earth?

Maybe I should turn some more pages!

But first, I just need to Google "Lisa Loeb's boobs."

The kid complaining about the Invasion comic book is named Lisa (no relation to Lisa Loeb's boobs) and she points out to the suspiciously bloody comic book seller with a light sensitivity named Vlad that the Invasion really happened. So I guess DC is simply profiting on everybody's pain and misery. I bet just to make the series even more painful and miserable, DC hired Scott Lobdell to write it.

Justin, the whiny kid from Metropolis, is being observed by some outside observers (as opposed to inside observers which would be, I guess, parasites?). He heads downtown where he's about to make contact with Dumb Bunny and Awkwardman! Except he doesn't. Man, I should probably read more than two panels at a time before writing anything. It would save everybody a lot of wasted effort, me with writing sloppy synopses of comics and the three people reading this having to fucking read this. But then I don't have any responsibility to anybody to make these "reviews" shorter. It's not my fault if somebody wanted to Google "Lisa Loeb's boobs" but found they didn't have enough time because they were reading this shit. That's their own fault for not prioritizing their desires! Googling "Lisa Loeb's boobs" was so important to me that I did it in the middle of this review! Come on, people. It's the modern age! You can view Lisa Loeb's boobs any time you want (through clothing, that is. I'm not advocating for searching for nude pics of Lisa Loeb's boobs which probably don't exist anyway and if you think they do, it was probably just Lisa Loeb's head photoshopped onto a naked torso).

Lisa has been uncovering clues to the weirdness of Dangerfield, Arizona because she dresses like Velma. Unless she dresses like Velma because she searches for clues the way her hero, Velma, searches for clues. I don't know enough about Lisa's backstory to say. It's possible Lisa isn't even aware of Velma and it's just Giffen spending some easy pop culture capital so readers associate Lisa with Velma and understand her more simply by looking at her image.

Here are a bunch of the clues she's uncovered that I didn't want to try to parse through my digressions and fascination with Lisa Loeb.

Billy Shanker, the kid with the canvas bag who says things like, "Oh! The three little kittens! They fucked their mittens! Oh! Look at the way I hold my cigarette! Boom!", murders Justin's mom and takes her corpse to some guy in a hazmat suit that might be a Dominator but also might be, seeing as how Giffen is writing this, Ambush Bug. Man I hope it's Ambush Bug!

Justin returns home to find his mother gone and the interior (five?) of his house covered in red X's. Oh no. That's a really bad sign! Not one black check mark in the bunch!

Some people might think Keith Giffen isn't the best artist in town because he's a writer and his art isn't for everybody. Plus he never puts any thought into his panel layout and just goes the same size boxes every time (sometimes in the six variety, sometimes in the nine). I happen to love his art so I'm not one of those people. But in keeping with a guy whose art isn't what people would call great (although those people usually love mainstream great garbage art like John Romita Jr or David Finch or Tony S. Daniel), Jeff Lemire draws the back-up story. I don't think that was an insult at Lemire's expense. If it was, I'm sorry because I was really just trying to insult John Romita, Jr and David Finch and Tony S. Daniel. The back-up story features Peacemaker whom I only remember by look.

According to the Who's Who, Peacemaker is a guy who loved peace so much that he realized sometimes he'd have to use extreme violence to ensure it. Also he suffered a head injury during Crisis on Infinite Earths which seems like a weird thing to mention in the Who's Who. "Trillions of lives were extinguished during the multiversal extermination event! Billions and billions of worlds destroyed! People's pasts erased in the blink of an eye! Supergirl and Flash and some other people nobody remembers killed! And Peacemaker suffered some head trauma." I suppose it's important to the character. Maybe it was meant to make him more extreme so he'd be relevant in the post-Crisis era.

Peacemaker is on a mission for Amanda Waller to find some super weapon that the Russians want. His search leads him to a bunker with a dead Dominator, a mysterious capsule, and a map leading him to Dangerfield, Arizona!

Inferior 5 #1 Rating: B+. I'm a sucker for Giffen stories and Giffen art. And Giffen stories backed up by Lemire's writing are probably even better. This one was pretty good so consider it evidence that my previous statement is almost certainly correct. One thing I like about Giffen is that he doesn't mind writing things that can be confusing on their first (or even second!) read through. He tells the story, makes the jokes, slowly unveils the plot, and to hell with anybody who doesn't want to invest a little time in making it all out. Seems to me, a lot of modern comic book readers could learn to love ambiguity. But they're all so desperate for the interior monologue of the main characters so they know exactly what to think after reading something. They're so coddled that they think subtlety is when a story explicitly shows them what's happening without the main character also explaining it in a monologue as they experience it. They wouldn't recognize subtlety if it...well, I mean, it's subtlety. It should be hard to recognize so I don't know how to finish that statement. Now go read Inferior 5 and hate me for recommending it when you're finished.

Eclipso #1

Remember the early 90s when DC desperately tried to make Eclipso a serious threat?

How often has DC given a villain a comic book series of their own? Deathstork doesn't really count because even though he's a murderous pedophile, he still tends to be portrayed as somehow ethically chaste. Why else would Superman and Batman continue to let him run around murdering people? It's because he always murders bad people whom Batman and Superman don't find worthy of their protection. I'm assuming Eclipso works differently but I can't fucking remember what his motivation as a super villain is. The cover says "The Face of Vengeance" so I'm assuming he darkens the souls of people who feel wronged so that they can claim their revenge. And while that sounds like a motivation that can make Eclipso an anti-hero, I'm hoping he doesn't give a shit if the person feeling wronged actually was wronged. He's practically the face of evil in the DC Universe in 1992 so he'd better get up to a whole lot of evil! Besides, isn't The Spectre the good guy who helps people get vengeance for being wronged? Or murdered? Eclipso can't step all over The Spectre's territory.

This series is by Giffen and Fleming so I'm expecting evil Ambush Bug. At least, that's what I'm positive I was expecting back in 1992 when I purchased this. I feel like I remember being disappointed in that it wasn't funny at all. I hope I'm re-disappointed in realizing my disappointment was a false memory.

Okay. Motivation spelled out pretty clearly on the third page.

According to this comic book, Eclipso killed the dove Noah sent out of the ark that time it never returned. This comic book doesn't mention the raven that Noah sent out and then refused to let back on the ark even though it was trying to warn him of the psychopathic asshole wading through the receding waters waiting to murder everybody on the ark. Does that mean Eclipso has some kind of relationship with God? Maybe Eclipso is the one who created the flood because God promised him everything would die in it. And then God fucking betrayed Eclipso and allowed a whole bunch of creatures to survive.

Although the most probably explanation of this moment is that Giffen and Fleming needed a quick way to portray Eclipso as some kind of legendary evil. What better way than to make him practically immortal and associate him with the greatest massacre in the "history" of mankind (perpetrated by fucking God himself, the diabolical monster!)?

In the present, Eclipso has taken possession of a South American guy with a grudge against his village. He was cast out for unknown reasons (probably really fucking good reasons!) but it was enough of an excuse for Eclipso to possess him to grant him vengeance. So I guess that's Eclipso's thing, just like I speculated based on the cover pretty much telling me exactly that. I'm good at understanding! Eclipso possesses people so that they can get revenge then helps them murder as many people as possible so that everything will eventually be killed. But can Eclipso really kill everybody on Earth during the finite amount of time during eclipses? I bet more babies are born during an eclipse than Eclipso can kill!

As Eclipso thinks about his recent past, the editor makes sure the readers know he's talking about the big blockbuster Eclipso event in the annuals. But he also mentions something that happened in Valor #1 and my initial reaction was, "Like fuck I'm going to read that." My second reaction was, "I'm pretty sure I own that comic book and it's in the current stack of old comic books to read." I hate myself.

Eclipso discovers that the people of the village he just murdered have stockpiled tons of cocaine. So now he's going to run a criminal drug enterprise to fund his murder spree. I suppose he can possess more than one person at a time with the use of his black diamonds. And I think he can continue to possess them even if there's no eclipse? But if that's the case, why the fucking stupid name? Maybe he's just more powerful during an eclipse. Or maybe the only way somebody can shake his possessing spirit is by exposure to sunlight. So he's really just kind of a shitty vampire.

Eclipso gives a little Eclipso history lesson for the newer readers.

"The dark side of the moon" doesn't actually mean it never gets sunlight, you stupid turd. The entire concept of his name comes from an event where "the dark side of the moon" is bathed in sunlight!

It could be I'm not parsing Eclipso's speech correctly. Maybe he means that by being banished to the dark side of the moon, he was forever having to hid from the sun whenever the dark side was turned toward the sun. Maybe he means he wasn't susceptible to sunlight until he was banished to the dark side of the moon. But then the assumption, I think, is that he was in the dark for so long that sunlight became his greatest weakness. There's a few possible interpretations here and while some people might like to give Giffen and Fleming the benefit of the doubt, I would rather rake them over the coals and call them fucking idiots.

Fucking idiots.

Eclipso abandons his possessed man in the hopes that the black diamond will pass on to The Count, the man who was using them to grow and process the cocaine. In works and The Count is an angry man who easily falls victim to the darkness in his heart. Now Eclipso is the kingpin in an international drug smuggling operation. Seems like a weird and boring place to start his super villain career but maybe drug smuggling stories weren't as played out in 1992 as they seem to be today. Or are they? People fucking still eat that shit up, don't they?!

Eclipso murders The Count's wife just in case any readers weren't sure if they should root for him or not. Certain readers almost certainly only began rooting for him after he threw The Count's wife out of the second story window. Here at Eee! Tess Ate Chai Tea, we prefer to pretend that those kinds of readers don't exist. Oh, sure, sometimes I'll reference them if I want to mock their weaselly little beta cuck beliefs. Mostly though, I only remember they exist when one of them becomes irate because I called Deathstroke a pedophile. Imagine that being the thing I wrote that finally crossed a line for you!

Eclipso kills all of the drug lord's bodyguards and then takes over the town's sheriff when he stops by to investigate. The sheriff kills all of the cops so now I guess Eclipso has nearly conquered the South American country of Parador? What a dumb fake country name! I would have gone with Uruzil.

The next issue blurb just says "Eclipso for president." Man, that sounds like a dream compared to what we have now.

Eclipso #1 Rating: C-. I'm not impressed. Apparently in 1992, I was impressed enough to keep buying it. Or I was just intrigued by a comic book about a brutal villain. Either way, I kept buying it even after this mediocre start. Maybe I was supposed to be impressed by the way Eclipso sort of rules the minds of these men from between the panels. Or maybe I was supposed to appreciate his dark humor in the narration. At least I think it was dark humor. He did say "Not!" at one point. That was funny in 1992, right?

Justice League #32

He's leading them to Trump, isn't he?

It's not just the phrase "The Great Disaster" that makes me think Kamandi is taking the Justice League to Trump. It's all the other clues as well: the sad Lady Liberty, Batman's tense body language, the Year of the Villain header, Wonder Woman's dry vagina.

Kamandi reminds me of my summers as a shirtless youth in cutoff jeans quickly making friends with adults and rowing out to sea with them. Oh, the good old days when other people wouldn't tell you you'd been molested when you were bragging about your early sexual experiences!

I'm having trouble following this Justice League Year of the Villain nonsense and I hope it's just because I'm taking such long intervals between reading each issue and not because I'm developing dementia. That's not a joke reducing dementia to a punchline. It's an actual concern I have and you thinking I'm joking about it is an awful way to react. So now my feelings are hurt for as long as I can remember they are. Good job, jerko.

I think various members of the Justice League have all traveled to different points in time so they can fix the world or something. But unbeknownst to them, Aquaman rushed through the time door first and altered time before they could alter time! Which means the Justice League can't alter time before Aquaman alters time because Snyder doesn't understand time travel. Okay, fine, I'm sure he understands it. But he's hoping, for the sake of his story, that us stupid fucking DC readers don't understand it. "Oh well! Aquaman got there first and there are no take-backsies in time travel! You can't alter time more than once or time travel to stop the bad time traveler from time traveling. That's just silly and goes against all science!"

Weird that the big three hitters were all sent on the same mission, right? Who sends Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman on the same mission when that means you're leaving Green Arrow, Hawkman, The Atom, and Marvin and Wendy to fill out the rest of the teams! Notice I left off Green Lantern and Flash because — let's face it — if it weren't a popularity contest, Flash and Green Lantern would be seen as the most powerful members of the group.

If I'm ever time traveling with friends and somebody corrects me when I say, "Where are we?", by saying, "Don't you mean, 'When are we?'", I will fucking murder them.

Sometimes you read something by a writer and it just makes you think, "How much do they actually read?" I get that Snyder is a writer and not a reader but I really expect him to keep from writing stupid fucking shit lines from a time traveler like "When are we?" The argument could be made that, as much as I hate when somebody says that in a time travel movie, Snyder is just fucking tickled pink and couldn't wait to use that line in one of his own stories. But it would be a terrible argument and I would despise whoever made it.

This confirms one of two things: this isn't the real Lex Luthor who would never rely on something as ephemeral and unsure as faith or Scott Snyder seriously fucked this shit up.

Fuck faith and fuck everybody who thinks faith is a virtue. Also fuck everybody who is now desperate to explain to me how we all rely on faith to a certain extent, even with scientific data and theories. We need a new word for evidence-based faith. Maybe one exists and I'm too stupid to know what it is. But if somebody says I'm experiencing faith when I expect the sun to rise every morning, I simply assume they don't really understand faith. Or science. Or evidence, even. I'm also not saying don't have faith if you want to! But I am saying, "Fuck you if you expect me to think you're more virtuous because you have faith." Just believing in something you can't know is true because you desperately want it to be doesn't make you somehow stronger than other people. It makes you sad and desperate and willing to believe any fucking lie that comes along as long as it's something you want to believe.

Oh, maybe the evidence-based faith word is expectation? I expect certain things to happen based on past experience and current mathematical and scientific understandings of the reality we perceive!

I suppose the closest I get to faith is believing that I'm going to be alive tomorrow and then the next day and then the day after that. But I'm also prepared for a really hearty shrug of my shoulders when the plane I'm in suddenly begins its terminal nosedive. So, again, it's probably just more of an expectation.

Back in the 1940s, John Stewart and Barry Allen fight side-by-side with the Justice Society, a group of superheroes that everybody only recently learned existed. Who are these mysterious heroes? Why are so many of them blatant rip-offs of DC's other characters?! How many people almost thought, for half a second, that I really didn't know who they were?!

In the future, the Justice League and Justice Legion A battle the greatest version of Brainiac ever devised!

This issue is so crazy that this isn't the final page revelation!

I'm sure Snyder's initial pitch was for the Justice League to battle Brainiac Infinity but editorial told him he had to leave some room for future Brainiac-based disasters. I bet if Scott Lobdell had written this, the Justice League would be battling Brainiac Omnillion.

I stood up and cheered.

No matter how many times I've said in this blog that I stood up and cheered, I never actually stood up and cheered. I just need everybody to know my commitment to not actually getting out of a chair.

Back at Pearl Harbor, two Justice Leagues can't defeat the Legion of Doom so Aquaman arrives to save the day by defeating the Legion of Doom with a giant octopus and, I mean, my suspension of disbelief is really fucking being strained today. So apparently he wasn't a traitor. He just made a friend who sent him back in time to help the Justice League save the omniunimultiverse. The secret to saving everything is in Atlantis!

Notice the Justice Society never had a useless underwater hero. That's why they were the superior team.

The big surprise ending was not the revelation of Brainiac One Million nor the revelation that Aquaman was alive and also saving the day unbelievably. The real big issue ending revelation was that the Anti-Monitor has decided to join the Justice League to defeat his mother and the Legion of Doom! Although is it really that surprising that somebody chose to side against their mother? Or is that just me?

Justice League #32 Rating: B+. Fine, I'm enjoying this disaster! In historic comic book terms, it's not a disaster at all. It's a fucking ginormous super event! It's the Year of the Villain, snitches! Snyder has taken the concept of The Legion of Doom, which we all fucking love to death (don't fucking deny it, asshole!), and shot it up with steroids and Special K! This comic book makes me want to do five different types of drugs at once and fuck a dolphin. Damn, that should be the blurb on the eventual collected edition of this story!

Black Condor #6

This is the first Black Condor cover that was difficult to jerk off to.

When I last read a comic book, I would like to close this clause by saying, "I was ten years old." But since I can't honestly say that and the only things I ever write must be absolutely true due to an early life encounter with a Monkey's Paw, the end of the clause I began this paragraph with must be "I jerked off in a dark room and cried while lying in my rapidly dying spunk." No, wait! It doesn't have to be that! I can't lie but I'm also able to omit things I don't want people to know! But now that I've said that thing, I just want to point out that "dying" isn't a typo of "drying."

Let me start over. Maybe if I make my opening clause a little clearer, I can foil this stupid Monkey's Paw Curse.

At the end of the last issue, Black Condor, an entire homeless encampment, four rich college Musketeers, some drug dealing baddies, a lovable priest named Gamble, and an autistic woman had just been blown to Kingdom Come (not the alternate DC Universe that readers know to take completely seriously because it was painted by Alex Ross). It was the autistic woman who did it but not because she's autistic or because she's a woman. It's because she was given secret super powers by the same organization that gave Black Condor his powers. Unless her powers were from her autism. I forget what people thought autism was in 1992. Between Rainman and various 60 Minutes reports on savants, I feel like we all thought autistic people were those whose brains were only capable of doing one extraordinary thing at the expense of communication, non-temper-tantrum-induced emotions, and being hot.

For the Internet arguers out there, I chose "temper tantrum" over "meltdown" because I was discussing how people from 1992 thought. On this same topic, I was visiting my mom this weekend and looking through old photo albums. One was a picture of me face down on the floor with the caption, "Jeff having a temper tantrum." I can't wait until my mom falls down and breaks a hip so I can document that. "Mom dying from pain and shock."

A good percentage of my other pictures were of me holding one of our cats in front of the Christmas tree each year. My other pictures were of me holding two cats. Maybe there were other pictures of me too. Mom probably could have taken a number of tantrum pictures equal to the number of cat pictures but I'm sure she mostly didn't just stand by and try to document my frustration with life.

From upper left going clockwise: Redneck, Tortoise (no tree but bonus mom's thumb), Nermal, and Kotter.

Black Condor's grandfather tears a new asshole in his henchmen because of their fuck up in releasing Karin, the autistic girl. He doesn't use his claw hand though. He just yells at them a lot. Oh yeah, he's got a claw for a hand. I never noticed that before. He almost certainly uses it to tear new assholes though.

To try to produce some public good will for The Society, Grandfather Kendall gifts one million dollars to Father Gamble's homeless encampment. Seems to me that would just produce public suspicion. Nobody has connected the catastrophe to The Society and why would anybody? But now he's created a link that might be investigated! And Mr. Faulkner of the Faulkner Foundation decides to do just that when he discovers the charitable gift! Too bad I didn't keep purchasing this series because it sounds like a huge turf war is going to erupt between two secular non-profits. I added the "secular" because my first thought was, "I've never read a story like that!" And then my second thought was, "Couldn't that have sort-of described The Troubles in Ireland?" But now that I added the "secular," I can say, "I've never read a story like that!"

I eagerly await everybody on the Internet telling me all of the stories I've almost surely seen where two non-profits go to war. Or maybe y'all can just circumvent that argument by pointing out that The Society isn't a non-profit and it's more of a Masonic secret society run by agents of the Illuminati.

After being blown up, Black Condor decides his grandfather and his secret society need to be stopped. Before this, he just sort of figured he'd be able to live his own life flagrantly in his grandfather's stupid face. But now he realizes that his grandfather doesn't care who gets hurt while trying to recapture Black Condor. They've already put Karin and everybody surrounding her in danger. What will they try next?

What next? Flood the streets of Philadelphia with shock troopers and laser weapons!

Black Condor reluctantly beats the shit out of all the shock troopers. He saves Karin but before taking her back to the care facility where they can give her body everything it needs while she lives inside an autistic fantasyland in her mind (totally nailed autism, by the way), Black Condor drops her off at his grandfather's board room where she poops another mind bomb all over the place. Nobody dies but I'm sure Grandpa was really fucking embarrassed. He totally learned his lesson and never went after Black Condor again. At least in my reality where I never read any more issues of this comic book. You're welcome, Black Condor. I made your life way easier.

Black Condor #6 Rating: B. My least favorite issue of the series, probably because Black Condor was less reluctant to do the right thing and yet involved in even less action and adventure. He did spend a lot of time inside Karin's fantasyland where she tried desperately to put his Black Condor cock into her autistic vagina. If Black Condor hadn't expressly stated that it was never going to happen again, I probably would have purchased Issue #7. I wonder if Karin Webster remained in DC continuity to become a member of The Outsiders or the Birds of Prey in later years?

Second Coming #3

If that bug-eyed guy on the cover is named "Preying Mantis" (with an E!), I will be suing.

I realize I didn't review the first two issues of this series but that's because I'd mostly stopped reviewing new comics. Once I began reading mostly new comics that I wanted to read because I liked them, I found I wanted to simply immerse myself in the story and enjoy it without interrupting that enjoyment every half page to spout some invective or spew my opinion about something just tangentially related to what I just read. But recently, I realized that writing commentaries (or reviews (or whatever the fuck it is I'm doing that really just amounts to distracting myself from the notion of mortality)) was more fun if I didn't have to write one hundred and twenty Teen Titans review in a row. So now I'm mixing things up! Let's see if I can find anything critical to say about Mark Russell! I wouldn't place any bets on me losing my shit. You should put all of your money on me fawning on Russell like he's the first girl to ever let me touch their private business through their cotton underwear.

I know Mark Russell isn't the first writer to discuss this because I was.

This morning, I realized I have a big crusty gash in the top of my head because I banged it on the bathroom cabinet while stumbling around in pain, dizzy and nauseated, from passing a kidney stone. So much kidney pain my nerves couldn't appraise me of the gaping head wound. And even though I instantly began to feel better after stumbling out of the bathroom and collapsing into bed, I now must live in fear of that kidney stone pain coming back. At least for as long as the human mind can grapple with that kind of sheer terror before moving on to something else. I guess reading a comic book and trusting that my insides aren't going to suddenly explode is moving on!

Jesus continues to ride around on Sunstar's back being a literal angel on his shoulder. Sunstar is all, "I'm going to kick ass for justice!" And Jesus is all, "But is that justice? Really? I mean, really? Justice?" Then Sunstar is all, "What do you mean?" And Jesus is all, "Well, I'm glad you asked! Have I got a parable for you!" And just like every single apostle, Sunstar listens to the parable and then says, "What? Explain better." Then Jesus sighs, drops the parable, and says directly whatever he was trying to say poetically. I mean, Mark Russell does a better job with the dialogue! But if you want Russell's spectacular dialogue and the soft, budding pudenda under fuzzy cotton, you're just going to have to buy this comic book yourself. Take my word for it: it's worth it! But don't think you should stop reading my review now that you got my take on it. There are still some great jokes coming up and probably a moment where I offend all gun owners! Even the ones I'm friends with!

One of the great things in the many great things about this comic book is how Mark Russell isn't specifically calling Superman to task for being a blunt instrument against crime. He's throwing shade at all the writers of Superman who haven't had the nerve or wit or understanding of the character to make him the peaceful motherfucker he always should have been. Yeah, sure, occasionally he's going to need to punch a giant alien robot into smithereens so the fans can be all, "Wow! Cool!" But every time he punches Lex Luthor (not in Battle Suit), it's because the writers don't fucking get it. Why would Superman ever have to punch a human?! First of all, whenever he punches any sentient being he's ever just encountered, he has to use the most minimal amount of force he can just to be sure he doesn't knock the creature's head clean off. Which means the fight just drags on forever as he punches a little harder each time until he calibrates just how hard he can punch his opponent without actually making his opponent's head explode. That seems like a huge pain in the ass. Instead, can't he just grab the opponent and fly them to the arctic? He can do that pretty fast. And if the opponent just happens to be too strong to do that? Well, that's the time to start punching super hard! If it's a human opponent, that person is now trapped in the arctic on an ice floe where Superman can just hover over them and scold them while wagging his finger in their face.

I just realized Jesus is Mark Russell's Mary Sue in this comic book.

Sunstar and his version of Lois head out to look for Grandma Sunstar. She's escaped her retirement community and headed to Littleton. Instead of pretending like things don't really change much like DC would have readers believe, Mark Russell takes the time to comment on urban sprawl by having Littleton subsumed by Urban City. He doesn't even hit anybody over the head with a major rant! He's just all, "Look at this shit! This is why Portland has laws against it! I mean, the laws came too late for a lot of the area. Have you seen how much Portland has sprawled? But at least it's not like the San Francisco Bay Area where you can go from San Francisco to San Jose without ever leaving El Camino's stripmallesque environment while simultaneously driving through like twelve other cities!" Um, once again, that wasn't Russell's actual dialogue! Do I have to keep explaining this? Sometimes I feel like I have to keep explaining myself. Have you seen the idiots who comment on blogs and Twitter reply threads?!

No offense, King Beauregard! I always enjoy your comments! Although stating it like that after what I just wrote makes it seem like maybe I'm being sarcastic. But I'm not! I always come off as sarcastic which is why I simply gave up on earnestness and, thus, am always sarcastic. Except that part where I said I enjoy your comments! Sometimes my sincerity comes screaming out of my skull to shout at the world: "I'm a fucking human being! I can feel! I fear! I love! I cherish my time with friends!" But then I bash myself in the head using a bathroom cabinet until the little fucker hides back inside and regrets showing his stupid earnest face. Fucking sincerity. Suck my dick!

While Sunstar visits home, Jesus wanders around looking for evidence that people remember him and his message.

That's an outstanding sign!

The new karaoke place has a bunch of Jesus Christ Superstar songs so I will be doing "Heaven on Their Minds" soon.

Jesus doesn't get much page time because Mark Russell ditches him to get back to the Sunstar story where he can insult me right to my face.

Does being vulnerable to physical harm count? Because then I'm lovable too! I have the head wound to prove it!

Sunstar gets all nostalgic which is why Fake Lois needs to hold his hand. Because he's being cute and vulnerable and stupid. They roll by Sunstar's old house to see it has become a dildo shop where they sell totally vulnerable, sincere, earnest dildos.

Jesus runs into Satan who explains God is going to destroy mankind if anything happens to Jesus on his return visit. Satan then ditches Jesus when some anti-gay Christian protesters approach him. They try to tell him about the word of Paul and Jesus is all, "Don't know the guy." It's pretty good Biblical comedy! Plus Jesus gets his ass stomped and the police pick him up for vagrancy. Exactly what we all know would happen if Jesus came back. Maybe that sentence is in the wrong tense. Let me try again. Exactly what happened when Jesus came back. Because obviously we're already in the end times.

Second Coming #3 Rating: A+. When this comic book was announced as a Vertigo title, there was a ton of religious pushback. I don't know the whole story because that would require research and how much life do you think I have left? I almost just died falling over because my kidney betrayed me! But the pushback was of the type where religious people hear that some secular person is writing a story about Jesus and so it must be fucking blasphemous. And of course it isn't at all. It's treating Jesus more sacredly than most religious idiots treat him. And don't think you secular people are any better! The amount of times I've seen people bitch and moan and attack DC or Marvel simply based on a poorly worded solicit in Previews makes me think all y'all are no better. How about we all stop relying on that one charismatic Tumblr follower whose word is somehow gospel and maybe put in the work to read and experience the actual thing people are so worked up about before totally condemning it? I mean, I'm all for condemning shit! It's a lot of fun! But maybe do the research first! And yes I know how that sounds after claiming I don't do research! Suck it sideways!

Black Condor #5

Five issues and five pure cheesecake covers.

It's possible this was the sexiest comic book series in 1992 but nobody noticed because comic book fans in the 80s and early 90s didn't understand the term "homoerotic." Remember that volleyball scene in Top Gun that all the dude bros wanted to emulate unironically? Although that's unfair to the gay and female comic book readers in 1992 who probably realized this comic book was a spectacularly little gem of a jerk off magazine. It also had the added benefit of the hot and sexy Black Condor being a genuinely good guy, if not a little gruff around the edges (of course that just adds to the sexy! Meow! Can I saw "meow" when I'm talking about Black Condor? Or should I say "Squeeeawk!"? (Here's a fun and/or boring look into my writing process: normally I would go back and edit out everything after the first sentence of the parenthetical reference and replace the "Meow!" with "Squeeeawk!" Then readers may or may not understand what I'm doing there. This time I decided to keep it more explanatory for my less astute readers. You never know when you've got a Soy Rakelson in the audience whose motto is "Don't you think writers and directors have an obligation to their audience to make their work understandable?!")).

This issue is called "Firefight in Sherwood Forest." That probably means those guys on the cover are actually good guys doing the wrong thing for the right reasons! Black Condor will probably meet them, hear how they're just protecting their neighborhoods from drugs and violence, and then beat the shit out of them anyway because those fucking uzis can hurt somebody, the dumb dicks!

Crud-for-brains? I'd wager my life savings that Brian Augustyn was an early Adventures of Pete and Pete fan.

The guys on the cover are just four young dude-bros stealing from drug dealers. They burn the drugs and take the money to give toward good causes. And probably also to buy cool shit for themselves. They're only human! Probably. I haven't read far enough along to know what they're really doing with the cash. Black Condor will find out after he beats the shit out of three of them.

Sorry. I've been gone for awhile. You wouldn't have noticed since my long absence fell between writing the previous paragraph and this current one. And unless you ran off to take a desperate shit right at the same moment, the time between these two paragraphs was negligible, minuscule (I decided to use both words because I'm so proud of my ability to spell my native language (I considered misspelling "native" and "language" but decided that was a boring old joke which has carried more water than Capri-sun (that's a new joke and it's not very good because it doesn't make sense. But at least it's new))). But I was caught up in playing a stupid computer video game about dungeon delving dice trapped in a horrific game show. Spoiler: the dice never get to fuck. But I'm back now because this is blog is the only thing that keeps me sane anymore. You might think that because this blog was my link to sanity, I'd be more earnest. You might think I'd want to be grim and serious and discuss political, social, and environmental matters with the gravity and seriousness they deserve. But that's all the stuff that's doing my head in. So I'd rather pretend that I'm angry at comic books.

Here's a secret for the few of you reading this who made it to this specific paragraph out of all of my paragraphs: I wish I were friends with Scott Lobdell. I bet he's kind of an asshole but he's the kind who, if he was getting his ass kicked at a bar for being smarmy and pretentious and smug (smug because he's a rich writer whom a lot of thirteen year old boys (and men with thirteen year old boy minds) think wrote some of the seminal X-men stories), he'd completely understand if you didn't step in to defend him. He feels like the kind of guy who knows what he really deserves (a righteous ass beating) and wouldn't think the world unfair should he ever receive it. Then he'd probably buy drinks for the people who beat his ass, and I'd look him in the eye and shrug, and he'd laugh, and we'd continue to not mention that time we jerked each other off when we were fucking wasted on single malt scotch and peyote.

Black Condor and Ned decide they need to find the girl with humongous afro before she hurts people who don't deserve it the way the color changing white supremacist Nazi rapists did.

What does he mean by "completely autistic"? In 1992, I'm guessing that meant nonverbal with loads of stimming and maybe the ability to play any piano concerto immediately after hearing it once.

Karin was experimented on by Black Condor's grandfather's Society but she failed to gain the ability to fly. She did, however, gain mental abilities as powerful as his own. He's concerned that, being autistic, she'll hurt people with her mind rage. Please. She almost certainly just wants to be left alone by everybody in society expecting her to think and act in a specific way that she can't think and act, nor would she want to if she had the ability. Just leave autistic people alone, normals! They don't need help. Just because your autistic kid isn't giving you the kind of unconditional love you were looking for when you decided to have a kid that you would eventually love only conditionally based on how they loved you doesn't mean the kid needs to change. That's on you and your needs. Maybe just find a way for the kid to express themselves (or not! Who knows sometimes?!) and let them do and act as they please. Unless what they want to do is fuck the dog. I'm not saying autistic people fuck dogs but I am saying we're all individuals, you know? Use your common sense! And if your kid is fucking the dog, autistic or not, don't let them near the dog!

The Merry Men on the cover (oh hey! There were Merry Men in the Sky Pirate issue! Brian Augustyn either loves old tales of daring adventure or LSD) have been robbing drug dealers to help fund a homeless camp run by a priest named Gamble. The priest isn't involved in the theft; he chastises them about their plans to get money illegally. But they assure him the money isn't tainted and he decides to believe them when they dump thousands of dollars on his desk. Doing the right thing is hard when doing the wrong thing will solve all of your money issues. If you're a weak minded jerk, that is! I totally would never sell out for thousands of dollars so hopefully nobody embarrasses themselves by offering me loads of money to write positive comic book reviews for their publications.

Father Gamble refuses the money because he just can't be sure it was honestly come by. I would be less suspicious of the money and more suspicious of the white college kids trying to donate thousands of dollars to a homeless camp. What's really going on in this camp?! Why are these young men so interested in keeping it funded so it doesn't get shut down? Four probably rich white boys risking their lives to help the downtrodden? Sorry but this is the most aggressively fantastic comic book I've ever read. And I'm not using the informal definition of "fantastic."

"Which member of this organization could possibly be giving all of this information to these white boys and why am I exposing my plan to kill them before plugging the leak?!"

Maybe that's racist suggesting that the white guy in the gang is giving the information to other white guys. But this comic book has already asked me to believe too many fanciful plot points so I'm glad Augustyn decided the white guy was absolutely the inside man.

The white guys name is Herbie and his boss, Mr. Soto, already knows he's the leak. I'm glad Mr. Soto is as smart as I am. Or as racist. Probably smart though! They follow him as he's trying to meet up with the college Merry Men to warn them that they're in danger. Luckily for Herbie, Black Condor happens upon the scene as he's searching for Karin. And even though Black Condor doesn't give a shit about this guy and his problems, he figures even a reluctant hero wouldn't just stand by and watch some jerk get what's coming to them.

After Black Condor saves Herbie, he has to take him to the hospital because he was pistol whipped. Meanwhile, the rich white kids aren't warned that they're about to die so they drive off into the trap to steal more money that Father Gamble won't be accepting for his charity.

What a dumb asshole! Even the most ignorant of ignorant jerks knows there were only three musketeers! Unless he's so familiar with the book that he's including d'Artagnan along with Porthos, Mythos, and Harpos.

I never read The Three Musketeers because I was born in the late 20th century and exciting stories to thrill young boys wasn't a popular genre anymore because we had Batman and Green Lantern. Although I did once play the text adventure version of the book. When I did that, I poked fun at the idea that the author of it was writing the game so that people would remember Alexandre Dumas and yet it's the only reason I know anything about him! Although now I know a little bit more about him because I Googled his name to make sure I was spelling it correctly and now I know what a fancy lad he was!

Now I want to listen to an audio version of his book where every few sentences, the person reading it just says, "Oooooooh, my!"

The Musketeers (maybe I was wrong to assume they were more like the Merry Men?!) manage to get away with only one of them shot in the ankle (the others weren't shot at all, if that wasn't clear). They decide the best way to save their own lives is to lead the gun men on a chase through New York back to Father Gamble's homeless camp. They already know he doesn't want any trouble so why are they taking this gunfight back there?! What is Father Gamble's hold over these young men?!

Luckily for everybody in the homeless camp, Black Condor is there still searching for Karin. He'll save everybody's lives reluctantly!

Unluckily for everybody, Karin is also there and the gunfire and chaos freaks her out so much that she has a mind-storm! That's the thing she had before that killed four of her attempted Nazi rapists. And that's where the comic book ends! Lucky for older me, younger me bought the next issue so I wouldn't be stuck with this cliff hanger! Lucky for younger me, older me doesn't have a time machine so that fucker has gotten away with some pretty abhorrent behavior which I couldn't correct by going back in time and punching him in the nose. Unlucky for him, he's going to be a virgin for a long, long time! Ha ha! Take that!

Ow. Older me just hurt older me's feelings.

Black Condor #5 Rating: B. A solid rating that I probably wouldn't have given this comic book back when I was twenty-one. I don't think I understood just what this comic book was doing and wound up only remembering it as a comic book about a reluctant hero. I didn't realize how much of it was Black Condor trying to live his now much more complicated life while also continuously doing the right thing. Even when he just wants to hole up in the woods and say "Fuck it!" to everybody and everything, he still shows the heart of a hero when he's needed by people nearby. And he's fucking sexy hot too.