What I Bought 8/3/2013 - Part 4

Worst part about sporadic Internet access is trying to catch up when I do have access. You people post too damn often.

Angel & Faith #24, by Christos Gage (writer), Rebekah Isaacs (artist), Dan Jackson (colorist), Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt (letterers) - So the magic orb didn't burst at the end of last issue. Its magic is so potent, it alters people merely by being in proximity to it, unless they're protected by runes, like our heroes. So there's a scrum for, which presents characters with the opportunity to confront quandaries in their lives. Giles and Alasdir muse on their current status as very young and very old, dithering about long enough for Nash to take back the orb. Sophie and Lavinia opt out of the fight, and decide to help the affected regain control. It's a little self-serving (since they don't risk harm), but it's also an excellent recognition of where their expertise lies, and shows a willingness to do so. Pearl & Nash are ecstatic that the moment their mother dreamed of is at hand, until Nadira claws herself up to continue her quest for vengeance and stabs Nash. It doesn't kill him, but it presents Faith with an opening, so that's one baddie down.

Meanwhile, Angel's trying to convince Whistler his plan is wrong, by pointing out all the innocents who will suffer for it. It doesn't quite work, because Whistler has already calculated the losses, and justified them to himself. This doesn't present a lovely scene where Angel tries to play the sanctimonious badass (and Isaacs gives him the cool guy slouch, complete with hands stuffed into coat pockets), only to have Whistler throttle him and throw him through a wall, pointing out he was in Hiroshima, so he knows suffering in the name of greater good. Angel's look of surprise when Whistler grabs him was classic. Not the silver-tongued devil he thought he was.

One thing the Buffy TV shows always disappointed me about was their portrayal of werewolves. Oz looked like some giant diseased rat, rather than a sleek killing monster. Fortunately, Isaacs draws a very nice lycan, pretty much how I always picture them. And that poor fellow who was merging with his guitar? That was creepy. The strings were growing through out through his face like giant hairs. Yeesh.

Captain Marvel #14, by Kelly Sue Deconnick (writer), Scott Hepburn (artist), Gerardo Sandoval (artist, pgs. 2, 12, 13, 18), Andy Troy (color artist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Quinones does a good job mimicking other artist on that cover. His Carol has a bit more prominent cheeks than Cockrum's (I think) did in the original image the upper right was referencing, but it's a good likeness. I do wish they'd use some image's from later in her career. Maybe Binary, or her time as Warbird, something from her Avengers stint.

Yon-Rogg's using Carol (or the lesion in her brain) to power his matter creation abilities. His goal is to make a new Kree-Lar and set it on top of NYC. He still has sufficient power to create plenty of Kree war machines to keep the Avengers busy. And Carol's not doing too hot. I'm not sure if that's because Rogg is stealing her energy, or if she's just too messed up from the lesion. Her weakened state means she must listen to his villainous diatribe. You know, he is great, she is terrible, this is payback for how she wronged him in the past, blah, blah. Maybe it was hearing all that blather, but Carol gets her dander up, and takes to the sky. Which causes a brain hemorrhage, which means no more lesion, so no more power for Rogg. The day is saved, but it leaves Carol floating unconscious in the upper atmosphere. The Avengers might want to do something about that.

I've been thinking of Hepburn's art as kind of a mix of Andrade's and Matteo Scalera. He doesn't have Andrade's skill at panel composition, at least with fight scenes, but is a lot better at consistent faces, and he doesn't have the same exaggerated anatomy Scalera was prone to. Unfortunately, he does make Hawkeye's lousy current costume look worse by drawing the sunglasses as goggles. I understand the shades would be impractical, but the elastic band under and over the ear looks dorky. Probably something to avoid if you're going to waste our time with realistic costumes.

As for the story itself, it's a mixed bag. I didn't care much about Rogg as a threat, and the whole story felt like it could have been handled in an issue, rather than five. I didn't buy any of the Avengers Assemble parts, but I don't feel I missed much. So that's bad. The good is I'm curious to see what DeConnick does with a Carol minus her memories. Will she have some innate sense of who she is as a person anyway? Will her behavior alter as she learns things about herself? What if those things clash with who she thinks she is as a person? Will she reject that story, and possibly the person who presents it?  Say she decides Frank Gianelli is really annoying, and someone says they're actually good friends? Would she accept that and hang out with him, expecting those feelings to reemerge? Or would she decide it was a load of bull, and cut off contact with him? I hope I don't have to wait two months for the end of the Infinity tie-in to see how it plays out.

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What I Bought 8/3/2013 - Part 3

Beyond the fact the library here is only open twice a week when I could actually get here, the primary problem to me posting more often is the chance the librarian brings her hyper, noisy kid to work. Every two minutes, he starts bawling "mama", and I just want to shoot him out of a cannon. Children are awful.

Hawkeye Annual #1, by Matt Fraction (writer), Javier Pulido (artist), Matt Hollingsworth (colorist), Clayton Cowles (letterer) - That is kind of an odd dress Kate's sporting. I can't really figure a checkerboard pattern on a form-fitting dress. Eh, it's Kate's world.

Which is why she headed to L.A., to get away from Clint's moping and her father's mid-life crisis. This means she's on her own when Madame Masque decides to take revenge for that little incident in Madripoor. She swipes Kate's stuff, and her car, and get her credit card cut up. Which leaves Kate broke and possession less, thousands of miles from her friends. Then masque presents herself as a concerned stranger (having removed the mask), but Kate sees through it due to a comment about cigarettes, and ultimately eludes Masque's trap. Of course, she's still stuck in Cali, broke and alone (except for Lucky), cat-sitting for two old ladies.

I thought Masque was more reluctant to let someone see her face than that. But all I have to go off is that Avengers/Thunderbolts crossover where she helped them stop Count Nefaria, which presented her as massively paranoid, to the point she made copies of her memories every night. Which did neatly thwart Stark's attempt to wipe his secret identity from everyone's mind. I'm pretty much always in favor of thwarting Stark's totalitarian tendencies. Anyway, it's a nice story, and the little internal monologues - with simplified Kate image - are amusing.

Pulido's art is the sticking point here. Probably two-thirds to three-quarters of the people drawn in this book are strictly black outlines. Pulido actually draws people - with clothes and facial features - in about 2 panels per page. The comic averages 6 panels per page. I can't discern a pattern. Sometimes the ones he draws are consecutive panels, sometimes it's the first and last, or third and fifth. Sometimes he draws Kate, but no one else. Sometimes everyone is an outline. Sometimes he draws Kate along with her little thought boxes, sometimes not. It's like he figured as long as he shows you the details once, that's good enough. You really don't need to see them again. It feels like it was done deliberately, but I can't figure the meaning. It doesn't solely happen to Kate when she's confused or doubting herself (where it might indicate her feeling lost). And it doesn't only happen to other people when she's caught up in her own thoughts (where it could indicate self-absorption). Which makes it feel like Pulido was trying to save time, which is too bad, because I normally dig his stuff. There's one panel of Masque at the head of a group of henchmen dragging Kate to her pain room. The body language he gives her beautifully conveys the frustration and impatience she's feeling. She's in the middle of throwing her arms in the air in disgust with their incompetence and it's perfect. Too bad there isn't more of that.

X-Men #3, by Brian Wood (writer), Oliver Coipel (penciler, inker), Mark Morales (inker), Laura Martin (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Psylocke never seemed like a spear aficionado to me, but she certainly carries it well. I think. Going to take a while to swing it from that position, I suppose, but they'll be too busy dodging the old psychic knife.

Arkea has traveled back to Budapest, where she first landed. There's a hospital full of people with cybernetic implants there she can control, plus she may have left some pieces of herself behind in the landing. The X-Men pursue, the X-Men fight the controlled patients, and Psylocke has a chance to take Arkea out, but hesitates, since that's an ally's body she's using. One wonders whether she'd hesitate if it was someone she didn't know. There's some disagreement about what to do, then Karima reasserts control and throws herself on the psychic knife, apparently killing Arkea and possibly lobotomizing herself in the process. Back at the Mansion, Kitty and some of the students have to deal with the remnants of Arkea wreaking havoc with the environmental systems and using the Danger Room to create lesser forms of Karima to attack. Kitty ultimately shorts out all the servers. And thus, the day is saved.

I can't tell you who inked what pages, but I think you can definitely tell the difference between Coipel and Morales' inks. One of them seems to give the work a much smoother line, which also makes everyone look a lot younger. Rogue looks to be roughly Kitty's age on the last page, which isn't the case when she's loading Karima's body in the car on the page before that. Coipel's good at expressions, as usual, but the fight scenes feel perfunctory, though maybe that was at Wood's direction. "Here's a panel of someone making an action pose. Maybe there's an explosion or bodies flying as well." There's no flow between panels, and little sense of real movement or impact within panels. But I've seen that before from Coipel's art, and like I said, the fight felt tacked on, so I'm not sure it was supposed to be impressive. I really doubt this was the end of their problems with Arkea, precisely because things ended so easily.

Of course, I'm jumping at shadows right now with this book. Everything seems suspicious. Karima reasserting control just long enough to stop Arkea. The device Pixie teleported into the upper atmosphere that didn't appear to be a bomb is suspicious (a transmitter? a storage device?). The whole battle at the Mansion seemed easy. If Arkea had studied all their files, wouldn't it know that fiddling with the environmental controls wouldn't do squat to Bling? Is it significant that Bling says she punched the excess Karima's into pixels, but Hellion comments their ordinance didn't feel like pixels? Is she supposed to be lying? Should I be concerned she's currying favor with Kitty, or is that strictly what she framed it as, a way to get someone on the faculty to have her back when it comes time for punishment over that fight in the first issue? Maybe the Hellion comment was meant to be funny. I don't know, I can't seem to tag the tone of this book yet. And with a big Event Tie-In looming for the fall, it may not get any easier.

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What I Bought 8/3/2013 - Part 2

Let's talk comics set in the Forties, and another one starring a guy from the Forties.

Captain America #9, by Rick Remender (writer), John Romita Jr. (breakdowns), Klaus Janson w/Scott Hanna and Tom Palmer (finishes), Dean White (colorist), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - Sharon Carter, having caught up to Cap, insists he hasn't been gone for ten years. Also, she wired Zola's floating city to explode. Cap pulls it together, determined that even if he couldn't save Ian, he'll save Jet, who is fighting her father on behalf of the Phrox. "Saving" her translates to hitting Zola a lot, who says he doesn't care what happened to Ian. He does however, still care for Jet, and as his city moves back into Earth's dimension, he asks her to kill him. She says she can't, because she loves him, so he pushes her out of the way before the mutates drop a rock on her. So it lands on him instead.

So much for Omni-Senses. It's funny, usually it's other writers who come along and nerf the really powerful new character, but Remender beat them to the punch. It's nice for Zola to save Jet, to show he does care for her, in his own way. It bothers me that all Cap did was hit Zola, though. He didn't shield or protect anyone, he just hit someone. Which doesn't really refute the statements Ian made about Cap's alleged hypocrisy last issue.

It's a 3-man team on the finishes, and some parts look distinctly less finished than others. Jet's nose changed shape - actually almost vanished - between panels 2 and 3 on page 18. The shape of her face shifted considerably between panels 4 and 5 of page 17. When the panel consists of a close-up on one character, or it's a full-page splash, it can look pretty good. But most of the panels lack detail, shading, and sense of depth. On a positive note, Steve's shield didn't change size. In earlier issues, it had gone from it's usually manhole size, down to a standard dinner plate. Sometimes it covered everything from his hand to beyond the elbow, and others it didn't cover his forearm. More consistency is appreciated.

Rocketeer & Spirit: Pulp Friction #1, by Mark Waid (writer), Paul Smith (artist), Jordie Bellaire (colorist), Tom B. Long (letterer) - Oh Betty, that masked man's no good for you. Then again, the same could be said of Cliff.

An alderman in Central City protests allowing businesses to control TV. He turns up in L.A. dead the next morning, discovered by Betty. This is apparently a geographic impossibility, which is how the Spirit, Commissioner Dolan, and his daughter Ellen wind up on a flight to L.A. At the airfield, Peevy overhears their plans, and is understandably worried that a masked guy wants to ask Betty about a murder. Cliff zooms in, and gets in a mid-air tussle with the Spirit, while Peevy realizes the Commish is an old war buddy. Fighting ceases, Ellen flirts a little with Cliff, they all go to visit Betty, who deliberately falls into the Spirit's arm, much to Ellen and Cliff's consternation.

I wasn't happy with how Waid portrayed Betty in Cargo of Doom, so I'm gonna be watching this whole thing with the Spirit. I wondered what Waid would do about Ebony White, and his response was to leave him behind in Central City. I think he gave the reader enough info about the Spirit to understand what's happening. Unless I was supposed to recognize Trask. I think Smith draws hands too small. Especially in the panel where the Spirit leaps onto the Rocketeer, Cliff's right hand looks tiny. Maybe it's just the angle.

Smith does some excellent faces, though. The last panel, where everyone else reacts to Betty's tumble, is a good example. Cliff and Dolan are stunned, Ellen's furious, Peevy's amused. The page in general is laid out well. It follows that "Z" pattern the typical comic reader follows on the page, but he does smartly. Betty's faint in the first panel pitches her forward into the center of the page, where she lands in Denny Colt's arms. From there, her legs guide the eye down to the close-up on the two of them, and the direction of the Spirit's gaze takes us to betty's face, and then on to that last panel. Also - and part of this is Bellaire's colors - I love how well they depict snow. Just a little bit of black and it's the perfect suggestion of a footprint.

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What I Bought 8/3/2013 - Part 1

Did some checking and Internet access is going to be limited, and thus posting will be, hopefully spotty as opposed to nonexistent. Which is why I'm typing this one up ahead of time while I have the chance.

Dial H #14, by China Mieville (writer) Alberto Ponticelli (penciler), Dan Green (inker), Tanya and Richard Horie (colorists), Taylor Esposito (letterer) - Bolland needs to stop drawing things that look so creepy, or I'm going to start getting nightmares.

As it turns out, Roxie and Bansa can't fix the jump-dial they found on the graffiti world, so the team is stuck trying to find the same weak spots in dimensions to travel through they were using before. This is taking its toll. The team is losing members, as Ejad the robot is killed, and Yabba, Unbled, and Nem get separated from the rest. It's worse than that even, because all the worlds they visit now recognize dials and aren't happy to see them. They remember the war for the Exchange, and so does someone else: O. He's gotten his hands on one heck of a dial, one that can call down apocalypses, and he's turning it against all the dimensions he despises. Fortunately, the last world the Dial Bunch reaches has someone who knows how to fix the J-Dial, and is willing to give it back to them, after they help fend off a zombie infestation. Which brings the 4 heroes to the Exchange, where they find destruction. . . and the Centipede.

My perception of the history here keeps changing. I thought the war in the Exchange was between rival factions of those who lived there, but it seems more likely it was between the residents of the Exchange, and the people of all the dimensions that were having their powers dialed away and were sick of it. I had thought O was running from the Exchange for giving dials to "lesser" beings, Prometheus trying to evade the gods' wrath. But he seems to be angry not at the Exchange, but everyone else. I'm guessing it was his handing out dials that clued those people in to the existence of the Exchange, explained the death of some of their heroes, and that's what triggered the war. I'm not sure. You can feel Mieville having to speed things up to beat the cancellation clock. I doubt the Dial Bunch was supposed to lose half its members in one issue, especially since we'd still only gotten to know a couple of them. It's still an entertaining story, but I'm frustrated thinking how much better it would be if Mieville and Ponticelli had the time to build it up properly

Ponticelli draws the frog people as simply frogs wearing clothes, rather than the hybrid human-frogs Bolland went with. Fine with me, Ponticelli's version is much less freaky looking. The heroes are still suitably strange looking. A moving pipe cleaner? I don't understand SuperOmi, Queen of Soho, though.

I don't know how the finale is going to play out, though I'm hoping my schedule will give me the chance to find out this week.

Hawkeye #12, by Matt Fraction (writer), Francesco Francavilla (artist), Chris Eliopoulos (letterer) - You figure it's significant that Hawkeye isn't positioned over the dead center of the bullseye in the background?

I was only vaguely aware Clint even had a brother, had no idea he tried to play at being Hawkeye, or that Clint stole his money. At any rate, Barney Barton's in town to look up his brother. He makes an appointment to meet with Clint, and when that falls through, tries to bum some change from the bros watching the apartment building. They agree to pay him 5 bucks if they can punch him in the face, then welch on the bet. This makes Barney the guy Lucky tried rescuing from a beating the previous issue because he thought it was Clint. The bros return in force later with a roll of bills in exchange for five minutes of Barney playing punching bag. They try to welch again, Barney beats them up and claims his money. He confirms Clint was too vague in when they were supposed to meet, but they do meet up at the end of the issue. Barney even uses a line from Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Oh, and there are some flashbacks to his and Clint's family life growing up.

I really like the color work Francavilla does. There's always a sort of pattern to the page. Take page 4, 9 panel grid. The top row and the center column are all reds, oranges and blacks. Forms a nice "T" of stupid bros and violence, and the red is more intense in the panels with actual punching. It gets deeper the farther down the page you go. The other panels are mostly yellow backgrounds and a grey violet color for Barney, except for the last panel, where Lucky comes in and the background flips to a light blue.

There's the fight between Clint and on pages 7 and 8, where Clint and Barney are in yellows while they're goofing around, and in the final panel of page 7, everything is yellow, except their booze guzzling, about to explode father, who's in red (and whose face is completely in shadow, in contrast to everyone else). On the next page, pops starts in yellow, then shifts to red as his anger begins to spill out, and Clint shifts to red to match. His mother is still in yellow, except for the red on the napkin she's dabbing at her bloody nose with.

That's followed up with Barney teaching Clint how to punch later than night. That whole sequence is in deep blues and blacks, and as the story shifts back to the present (where Barney sleeps in an alley as the bros doth approach), the blue persists around him, even as the yellow of the present (a more pure yellow, less orange than in the flashbacks) intrudes on the scene. The blue stays on Barney even after the bros start hitting him and the background shifts to pure red. Like he's stuck in the past, remembering Clint taking on their dad or something.

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Burn Notice 5.17 - Acceptable Loss

Plot: We open with Michael and Maddy at Frank Westen's grave. Michael is not inclined to believe Anson's story about his father getting suspicious of Anson, but Madeline, oddly enough, is. Even stranger, she's wisely getting the hell out of the way until things are settled, opting to visit Nate in Daytona Beach.  Speaking of Anson, Barry managed to trace that money to a law firm in D.C. Mike and Fiona make their way in, but all they can make sense of is a picture of Vaughn in a file. Which means Mike has to get Pearce to approve a transfer of Vaughn out of Guantanamo. This after he told her he was sure there were no traces of the organization left. I'm surprised Pearce doesn't press harder on that.

While Pearce navigates that paperwork hell, Jesse has his own problems. His friend Ian has been helping an Indian diplomat smuggle uncut diamonds, and he's tired of it. He wants to bring this guy down before he retires. Having heard about Jesse's post-CIFA career, he thinks he and Mike are perfect for the job. Rather than let Ian barge ahead solo, Jesse agrees. The first plan - to present Jesse as a buyer - almost works. Sam and Fi abscond with the original buyer's duffle bag of cash, they manage to pass him off as someone who has his own jewelry shop for cutting the diamonds, they get him in the safe room with Yash. But the walls are reinforced, so no blasting your way in for a quick abduction. Fortunately, Ian has a new plan, but it involves getting Yash busted for murder. Specifically, Ian's murder. Well, he's dying of pancreatic cancer in six months, so why not.

In between helping plan all these shenanigans, Michael's been bargaining with Vaughn, who has added a mustache and I'd say about 15 pounds since we last saw him. Not what I'd expect for being in Guantanamo, but I guess Vaughn's a moderately resourceful guy. First he wants Scotch in exchange for his help. Then he wants immunity. Yeah, Michael's not that desperate, so he flips the script. He says he'll get Vaughn transferred to this prison - along with some of the people he ratted out for a reduced sentence. Oh, and Simon. That got Vaughn's attention, and he spills the beans. Anson is using the money to rebuild the organization, rather than to finance a retirement. Great Mike, you've given the bushy-eyebrowed bastard a chance to start the whole thing anew!

The Players: Anson (Evil Mastermind), Vaughn (The Man Who Burned Michael), Ian (The Client), Yash (Dirty Diplomat)

Quote of the Episode: Ian - 'I'm tired of living in a grey world.'

Does Fiona blow anything up? Jesse's car. Bad season for Jesse's car, between this and the damage it took in 5.5.

Sam Axe Drink Count: 0 (23 overall).

Sam Getting Hit Count: 0 (7 overall).

Michael's Fake Laugh Count: 0 (11 overall).

Other: Michael doesn't use an alias this week, but we did find out Vaughn's last name is Anderson, which is a little mundane. I don't know what I was expecting, but something more than that.

When Fi was trying to trap Yash's original buyer, and she caused that oncoming truck to swerve, I don't understand why the guy turned right, since it took him into the same street as the truck (it was swerving to its left). Why not swerve to your left, go around behind it?

When we were introduced to Pearce, she claimed she took her investigative style from her pit bull. Setting aside my concerns that - based on Charlie, who's half-pit - those dogs are dumb as hell, she's sure not showing much of that tenacity. One of the first questions Mike had to answer in that interview to be reinstated was whether he thought there was any trace left of the group that burned him. He said no. Now he's popping up and saying, "Never mind, they're still around, and I've thought so for awhile." And Pearce lets that drop because Mike plays the "I didn't want you to get hurt" card? Bullcrap. Pearce is a trained agent, she's been under fire, and even if he wound up cleared of Max' murder, it wasn't that long ago she thought Michael was responsible for that, and he was responsible for purposely keeping her in the dark about the progress he was making finding the real killer. He's helped her quite a bit, but I don't know if he should have earned that level of trust.

I do enjoy Michael's counteroffer to Vaughn. It might not be very nice, essentially promising that Simon will kill Vaughn horribly, but Vaughn brought it on himself, just like Management had at the end of Season 3, or Carla if Victor had managed to get her in Season 2. You ruin people's lives to make them your killing machines, don't be surprised if the machine decides to kill you.

I also liked the whole story with Ian. It wasn't subtle by any means, but his frustration with living in a world of shades, where horrible acts are excused in the name of diplomacy, contrasts nicely with Michael. Mike lives in that world. As (ugh) Anson pointed out, Mike probably ruins the lives of lots of innocent people by making them look bad at their jobs. He does it to save lives, but that's of precious little consolation to those people. I'm surprised we haven't seen an episode where someone who Michael ruined while serving a client comes back, demanding Michael help them. I mean someone generally decent, not a Brennan or Larry. Michael hasn't been at it as long as Ian, and he's likely seen more positive results of his work, so he isn't as sick of it, but give it time. It's another perspective on what he got from Paul in 4.7, that if you survive long enough, all you have are ghosts and memories, if you're lucky.

Which would play into the old arguments Fiona made about Michael needing to get out of this line of work. Which she hasn't been making lately. She has, however, been demanding Michael not compromise himself by working with Anson just to protect her. She's encouraging to step out of the grey, where he does awful things that hurt others to save her.

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Quick Notes For The Weekend

FX has been showing Spider-Man 3 lately. It isn't a good movie, but there are still several parts of it I like. I'll never stop laughing at Evil Parker strutting down the street, trying to give smouldering looks to every woman he sees, then busting into impromptu dance moves. That evil Peter Parker isn't a world-conquerer, doesn't start robbing banks or snapping the necks of purse snatchers. He's just thinks he's way cooler than he is, to the point that he swings between being an ass and a doofus, depending on what he's doing at that moment. I figure that's a mark of how good he is, that being a kind of sleazy jerk is what passes for evil with him. Getting to see Harry be happy for a while was nice, even if it was doomed to end.

That being said, I hadn't remembered Harry having so much cranial trauma. The initial crash into the AC units, the hoverboard to the head, flying headfirst into a girder. Roger Goodell thinks Harry ought to look into better protective headgear. Goodell also thinks Harry could still spend more time fighting, and wouldn't agree that there's any link necessarily between the head trauma and Harry's behavioral shifts in the film, but that's Goodell for ya.

I have no idea what posting is going to be like for the next two weeks. I'm heading back to where I spent last summer, so Internet access could be sporadic. Or perhaps things will be better. I do have the next 3 weeks of Burn Notice posts ready to go, so you won't miss out on me complaining about Anson (I actually enjoyed the Season 6 opener a lot). Beyond that, it's up in the air.

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Not Quite Ambulance Chasing, But. . .

I was driving today and got caught behind a funeral procession. One minute earlier and I'd have been fine. As it was, I crested the hill as the cops blocked both lanes, and I had to wait for the entire procession to pull out and make its painfully slow way down the road.

So I'm following the procession, noticing how they get to ignore red lights, and it occurs to me, what if I put on my emergency flashers like them? Just pretend to be part of the procession?

Before you get horrified and/or offended, I didn't do it. I wasn't even thinking about it in terms of my getting to ignore traffic lights. I was thinking of what would happen if the cops figured it out. They recognize my car as one of the ones waiting for the procession, or they spot me turning my flashers off when our paths diverge.

Do they pull me over and give me a ticket? Settle for giving me the stink eye? Throw me in jail for a night? What's the charge? Impersonating the bereaved?

It didn't come to anything. I had places to go, and wasn't inclined to tempt fate by messing with the police. But my brain needed something to keep busy after 5+ hours in the car, and muttering, "Now I know how Buford T. Justice felt," wasn't cutting it.

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The Girls Make The Plans, The Guys Blow Them To Hell

Reading Avengers Arena up to issue 11, the girls have been more mature or productive in how they've handled things than the boys.

It isn't absolute: Hazmat's shifted between impetuous, violent behavior and an attempt to disconnect completely from the reality of her situation. Nara was as focused on revenge as Juston (though she also seems to have Anachronism wrapped around her finger. Not sure if that's intentional, or she just likes aggressive guys). On the boys' side, Bloodstone was the first to see through Katy's deceptions, and he's been quite cool under fire and willing to work with others.

Overall, though, the guys seem to devolve into chest-thumping and stupid attempts to protect their turf (meaning typically, a girl). Chase threatening to kill Reptil if he behaves threateningly towards Nico again, when they're supposed to be working together. Or deciding to ignore the majority of the group's wishes and kill Katy/Tim himself. As it turned out, he had the right idea, but went about it in the wrong way, getting himself expelled from the group, leaving him alone and vulnerable to Katy's powers. Or Kid Briton bullying Anachronism for whatever reason he sees fit. As for Anachronism himself, he's paying attention to Nara and not much else, plus there's the issue of how helpful it was to kill Kid Briton, however enjoyable (and deserved) it might have been. Reptil, interestingly, is going the other way. He's passive, following Hazmat or X-23's lead. It would appear the break-up with Finesse and the loss of Mettle have kind of dampened his self-confidence. He's not causing problems, but he's also not been doing much to confront them unless someone prods him along.

Contrast that with several of the girls. Nico really stepped up, recognizing that she and and Chase couldn't make it by themselves, and tried to forge an alliance with the Academy kids. When that got blown to hell, she still saved Cammi, and the three of them formed an alliance. She held the line alone against Katy's Robo-Army and got everyone else to safety. Cammi, despite her distaste for relying on anyone or feeling weak, was also willing to try and work with others. First Darkhawk, then Nico and Chase. I thought X-23 going to look for Juston was an intelligent decision. She'd been sticking with Reptil and Hazmat to help them, but once that wasn't a viable option (because of the trigger scent), she turned her attention to another friend. Sure, it doesn't work out so well for Juston that he was an afterthought until there weren't other choices, but I still think it's a good call on Laura's part. She could sit in the woods and bemoan her fate, or she could accept she can't look after her two less-survival savvy friends for the time being and try to do something productive. Like determine the fate of another friend who, if he's still alive, might be able to help.

Even Katy's a good example. She's decided to try and survive, just like the others. It's simply that her approach is to kill everyone she can't control, rather than form alliances to thwart Arcade. It strikes me as a "being cynical = mature" mindset, but that isn't necessarily out of place for a teenager. I was of a similar state of mind in high school (more pessimistic than cynical). Even so, she's proven to be clever, adaptable, and focused. She got herself a pair of powerful, easily manipulated weapons (Deathlocket and Briton), and tried to remove those she considered easy prey in a way that would give her deniability (by using Deathlocket). When that plan hit a speed bump - her targets survived and not only was one of them was smart enough to see through the deception, one of the others killed her pet boytoy - she was able to regroup within a day and take advantage of the opportunity presented. Now she has more firepower on her side than ever.

You could even throw Arcade and Ms. Coriander in. Arcade's always been portrayed as somewhat childish. The whole way he explained his origin way to the X-Men's friends as his daddy cutting him off when he hit 18, so 'the next day, I cut him off'. He treats it like a joke, which is how he's treated most things. It's all a game to him. If a target was boring, then success was irrelevant. Which didn't mean he let them go, he just wasn't much interested in their death. And now he's sick of being considered a joke, and can't recognize that the people saying it are even bigger losers than he is (the Constrictor should not be talking smack about anyone), so he has to prove them wrong. It's a big "nuh-uh, you're stupid!" Coriander acts out of some misplaced pity for her old boss, but she's smart enough to a) anticipate the double-cross, and b) set him up with his new digs and then skedaddle. Win, lose, or draw, this isn't a scheme she wants to be anywhere near when it's all said and done.

I did a (very) brief search on the Internet to see if there was evidence girls mature faster than boys psychologically. It seems agreed that girls brains develop earlier, what with them hitting puberty first, but that doesn't necessarily equate with maturity. Though I didn't find much consensus on how to evaluate maturity. I was thinking along those lines because of something my dad had said about how he'd noticed a decline in maturity in his students over his last 15 years of teaching, including the girls, who he felt were typically more mature. I didn't ask him at the time to define the term, but my guess is he meant more likely to stay on task, pay attention, etc. He might have meant in terms of their ability to synthesize information from different sources into a coherent argument, I don't know. Something for me to remember to ask him though I've been meaning to ask him if he threw that Goldeneye deathmatch against my friend for about 6 years so who knows when I'll get to it.

I don't know if it is true that girls are more mature than boys on average in adolescence. I wouldn't be surprised. But in the case of Avengers Arena, it seems too common to be coincidence that the girls are the ones doing most of the planning and thinking, while the guys posture and throw things into chaos by being needlessly aggressive towards each other. I don't have any issue with it, if that's what Hopeless is doing. Before I started looking for research, I took it as given girls matured mentally faster than guys, so it seemed perfectly appropriate to me that it would play out that way on the whole, with a few outliers in both directions.

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True At First Light - Ernest Hemingway

I think it's a good time to take a break from Hemingway. True At First Light was a well-written book, but I struggled to get through it at times. It details part of a stint Hemingway and Mary, his last wife, spent in Kenya in a safari camp. At the start of it a local hunter who is a longtime friend of Hemingway's, departs, leaving the writer as the local game warden to an extent. Meaning that if there's troublesome wildlife - elephants destroying homes, lions eating livestock - it's his responsibility to deal with it. Mary's determined to kill a particular lion before Christmas, and in the early chapters, there's the threat of an insurgency by the local farmers against the European farmers, who presumably were granted more power and influence. And Hemingway is also courting a young local girl from a nearby village, even considering making her a second wife, with the apparent full knowledge and consent of Mary.

Then again, this is at least partly fictional, though which parts are true and which aren't, I couldn't tell you (a quick online search suggests the whole subplot with Debba isn't real). It seems unlikely Mary would be OK with his fooling around with Debba, but Mary does frequently ask for reassurance that he loves her best, that he's not leaving her for Debba, and Hemingway doesn't spend much time with both of them simultaneously. He may simply be oblivious (or unconcerned) with her doubts and fears. Everything is from his perspective, we don't get either of the ladies' opinions beyond what they tell him (and of that, only what he saw fit to include in the narrative).

Debba's even more of a puzzle to me. Does she really love him, or is this a matter of convenience? She lives with the Widow, her aunt near as I can tell, who doesn't seem to have much (other than potential suitors), and Hemingway doesn't think much of Debba's father, so I wonder if she's trying to help her family. Hemingway certainly favors them with gifts, food, and such. If so, I don't think he picks up on it, but there's a sequence where she grows distant, and I wasn't sure what to make of that. Mary was away, and he'd invited Debba and the Widow to stay at the camp for dinner, and for the night. The implication being he and Debba were going to have sex, but I was pretty Keiti cut that off. But there's a later mention of Miss Mary's cot being broken, and I'm left wondering if Debba did that out of jealousy, or if she and Hemingway did that from fooling around. Which would be pretty sleazy to my eyes, but hardly out of character for him. Like, I said, that relationship appears to have been fictional, a metaphor for Hemingway's concerns about his writing skill fading with age (which reminds me of his idea that mediocre writers live forever, and thus have the largest library from Across the River and Into the Trees).

One thing I've noticed in his fiction over these last few weeks is how the main characters all shift abruptly between cruelty and reconciliation. Things will be going smoothly, then someone makes a snippy remark, or an outright cruel one, there's some more hostility, but by the end of the page, they're apologizing and asking that all be forgotten and let's just have a good time. I wouldn't say this an unheard of characteristic in people - I am frequently hostile or impatient with people initially, only to regret it shortly after - but it's pervasive in Hemingway's characters. Some of the things I've read about Hemingway suggest he was much like that - writing letters that insulted friends in one paragraph, only to apologize at the bottom of the page - so it makes a certain amount of sense that some characters would speak that way. I wonder if a lot of his conversations devolved into that because his attitude brought out a similar one in the people he talked with.

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October's Looking Pretty Quiet

The last two months things have been chaotic for my pull list. Books getting canceled, books skipping months for unknown reasons, or skipping them because of stupid publishing stunts.

The solicits for October's books are largely lacking in all that. Hawkeye's skipping a month, though my guess is September's issue will show up then. This is a way to get things back on track.

Other than that, there's not much of note. Rocketeer/Spirit is back. I half expected DC to use their Villain Month as cover to cancel more low-selling titles, but Katana's still going, so I guess not. I'm pleased to see Captain Marvel made it out the other side of its Infinity tie-in without getting canceled.

The most notable thing for me is how small my pull list is for the month. 8 books, 2 of which are mini-series scheduled to end in November. I shouldn't be surprised, given all the cancellations and books I've been dropping, but when it happens a little at a time, I don't always notice.

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The Raid: Redemption

I caught The Raid: Redemption last night, because the movie channels show about one flick per week I'm interested in. I'm guessing it was dubbed? The voices didn't seem to quite match. Not sure how much of a difference that made, though I usually find dubbed voices (at least on live-action things) to rob lines of their impact. Even if the voice actor and the actor are doing their best, somehow it doesn't mesh right.

Not that I was watching for the depth of the performances. I was watching to check out the action sequences, and the movie has plenty of those. I was disappointed I didn't see anybody get kicked through walls, or take a heel stomp to the chest that knocked them down to the next floor. I guess the movie was trying to be somewhat realistic in terms of what people could do. There were a lot of little bits that were good - the knife work, Rama slamming a guy's head against the wall repeatedly, but working down the wall as the guy falls to do it. The fight in the drug lab was pretty good, the old lieutenant not doing any high-flying maneuvers, but typically grabbing and swinging whatever he could find. Two guys jumping onto either end of a table and sprinting full out towards each other. The fights flow, nobody mows through opponents. You can feel them adjusting to each other's styles, getting sloppy as they get winded, regaining the advantage when they can.

I thought the fight with the two brothers teaming up against the "mad dog" was really well done. Even a neophyte like myself could pick up on differences in the styles, and they gave it enough time to show the advantages and disadvantages for two guys fighting one guy. The build-up was excellent. There was a minute or two of everyone getting themselves ready, the mad dog letting the one brother down so his sibling could free him. They'd already established the mad dog liked to fight, so it made sense he'd wait, and it lets the anticipation build. Even though he seems like he's going to wait until they're ready, you're still thinking "he's the bad guy", and the brothers are just urgent enough in bandaging a wound to have that hint that he might jump them early. But he waits, and so do we, and he's so casual about it. Rama hasn't even seen the guy fight, but he's just as apprehensive as his brother, simply from how Mad Dog carries himself.

In the early stages of the movie, I thought everything was going too smoothly. Then things stopped going smoothly, and at the same time, you realize it doesn't matter, they never had the element of surprise. That comes right about the time the cops realize everything's going wrong, but I don't think they realize it in quite the same way. Which is kind of coo, even if it all leads to the same place. Namely, that a whole lot of them are about to die horribly.

The lieutenant should have run out of bullets one shot sooner, I think. Which could have made for an exciting end in its own right, but I don't have any complaints with how things went.

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Burn Notice 5.16 - Depth Perception

Plot: Mike didn't attend Benny's funeral, but that's OK. He'll get plenty of emotional fallout from explaining to Madeline that hes' known for awhile Anson had been her substitute therapist. He also explains that Anson used what he learned there to coach Benny to be the perfect boyfriend. Way to shatter her illusions. No time to worry about that, because Michael has another meeting with Anson, who completely denies any responsibility for Benny's death. Anson wants his money, which is stashed in a flagged Cayman Islands account. Since Mike can't travel without the CIA noticing, it falls to Jesse and Fiona. Not much difficulty, they have the banker's - George Anders - entire client list, so it's a simple matter to threaten to reveal those names to convince him to make the transfer. Fi and Jesse even help George disappear (with a healthy pile of his other clients' money).

Mike's not sitting around idle. Beatriz, the young journalist Sam met in the Fall of Sam Axe is in town and one the run. One of her articles on Russian oil companies in Colombia outed a Russian spy, and now he's out for blood. Sam's hellbent on protecting her, which means Mike is, too. But for once, Michael is incapable of predicting his opponent's movements. So he calls in Anson, initially using Anson's need for Michael to be alive as a lure. Unfortunately, it doesn't take long for Anson to turn things around, and before you know it, he's doing a ride along, pestering Michael with questions about his motivations and justifications. Not that I haven't wondered if Michael feels guilt for the innocent people whose careers are ruined by his chicanery, but I damn well don't want to hear Anson bring it up.

Mike gets stonewalled by the local FSB bunch, who are well aware of who he is, and his attempt to trap Oscar fails miserably. Fortunately, Anson holds the key to bringing Oscar in, and the head FSB guy proves a little more receptive by this point. Of course, Anson had his reasons. His solution was to have Beatriz declared a Russian agent herself, which means Sam is a close friend of a Russian agent, which blows his meeting with the deputy director of the FBI all to hell, which saves Anson's bacon. Which leaves Fiona contemplating going on the run again, and Michael really doesn't have any plan at this stage.

The Players: Anson (The Man Who Framed Michael), George Anders (Scummy Banker), Agent Harris (Sam's FBI "Buddy"), Beatriz (Sam's Old Friend), Oscar (Russian Spy Hunting Beatriz)

Quote of the Episode: Anson - 'You're done by the end of the month, Michael. I promise. In the meantime, remember actions have consequences. Just ask your mother.'

Does Fiona blow anything up? Nope. Gets to light a car on fire, though.

Sam Axe Drink Count: 3 (23 overall).

Sam Getting Hit Count: 0 (7 overall)

Michael's Fake Laugh Count: 0 (11 overall). There was a laugh in there, but it wasn't fake, so much as slightly hysterical.

Other: Michael passes himself off as Dmitri Malkin for a good three minutes.

This episode had a lot of Anson in it, so no, I didn't enjoy it. He's such an incredibly smug dick about everything, that every moment he's not getting punched or shot is an irritation. Unfortunately, that's all the moments he's on screen. I guess it's a credit to Fiona's confidence in Michael that she doesn't go ahead and shoot Anson. She trusts Michael will find the way out, because he always does.

She really ought to shoot Anson, though. His arrogance practically demands it. Or let Maddy do it. I don't care.

Seriously, though, at least Brennan and Larry accepted responsibility for their killing. Anson tries to act as though he had nothing to do with the bomb that killed Benny, as though Michael sent it. One more thing for me to hate about him.

I find it strange that Michael, who has gone up against any number of trained agents over the course of this series, it consistently flummoxed by this guy. I could accept Mike having trouble deducing his identity, but after that, no. I mean, how hard is it to find the guy? He's after Beatriz. If you go where she is, you will find him. And frankly, Oscar is a lousy sniper. All those shots he fired and the best he could do was get Beatriz with a little shrapnel. Pardon me for not being impressed. For that matter, what does killing Beatriz even accomplish? The story is already published. He's outed, killing her gets him nowhere. I guess it's revenge, but if that's the case, why bother trying to touch base with Ivan? He'd only do that if he thought he could get back in, and killing a reporter is hardly going to help.

And given all that, the solution is pretty ugly. Tell Oscar all's forgiven, come on home, then shoot him in the head. That wasn't even Anson's suggestion, it was Mike's. Not happy with anyone in this episode.

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Only Partial Recall, Sadly

I watched part of the new Total Recall last weekend. It was OK. I didn't understand why Kate Beckinsale's character tried to kill Quaid one more time there at the end. Her boss was dead, his plan was blow to bits and scattered across the surface of Mars. It seemed to me the smart move was to disappear, but no, she just had to try and kill Quaid.

It didn't make sense, unless it was professional jealousy, her not wanting to accept he was better than she was. Once she found out who he really was, there was this sense that made her really want to kill him. Based on some things she said, I think she'd spent a lot of time hearing about how great Hauser was. And it undoubtedly had the undercurrent of, "You're not as good as him. That's why we didn't trust you with this mission." I can see how that would get maddening after awhile.

I had thought the Cohaagen in the original Total Recall was a CEO, and I was going to talk about how it was interesting the bad guy was a corporate executive in the 1990, but a politician now. Then I looked it up, and the plot summary on IMDB says Cohaagen was the Mars colony administrator in the first one. So politician either way. Although if you think of a colony as an economic endeavor, and the administrator as being ordered to maximize profit (possibly without much oversight from the home country), he could be roughly equivalent to the head of a business.

Maybe it's because I haven't watched the original the whole way through in a long time, but I have this impression the bad guys were more reactive, or at least less overt. They knew the resistance was up to something, and were trying to figure out what and how to stop it. Whereas in the new version, they seem more overtly aggressive, what with bringing an army of robots to subjugate the entire colony. The resistance really doesn't seem to be much of a threat, seeing as Cohaagen has to create incidents which he can blame them for, rather than having things they actually do to point to.

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Garden of Eden - Ernest Hemingway

Garden of Eden is supposed to be an uncompleted Hemingway novel. Which makes me wonder how much more he might have added or subtracted to it before he would have declared it completed.

What we have is a story of a recently married couple, Catherine and David. David's a writer, Catherine seems to come from a family of wealth, and has provided funding for David's works, which sell modestly (I assume a print run of 5,000 or so would be modest). The story follows them across several months as they travel from France to Spain and back, and things deteriorate. Catherine is, well, it's hard for me to say. It seems pretty clear she has some sort of mental disorder, maybe she's manic-depressive, but it could also be an identity issue. She likes to be a boy sometimes, gets her hair cut short, like she envisions a boy would have it, and tries to tan herself as dark as she can get. She meets a young woman, Marita, while out one day, and before you know it, she's encouraged her to come stay at the hotel/resort Catherine and David are staying at. Initially Catherine plays it off as her just wanting to experiment, but then she's encouraging David and Marita to sleep together as well. Then she starts to regret that, and tends to act in a more hostile fashion towards David.

Through all this, David has his misgivings, but tends to go along with Catherine's wishes. Part of it is a honest desire to make her happy, but part of it seems like a desire to avoid conflict, and that part only grows stronger as he starts avoiding Catherine and throwing himself deeper into writing stories about his childhood in Africa with his big-game hunting father. he starts out trying to avoid Marita, but ends up spending more time with her than Catherine. Marita seems to be what David thought Catherine was, and I'm left wondering if that's why Catherine encouraged her. She recognized that the person she wants to be isn't the person David liked, and so she finds a replacement for herself. She tries to be happy about it, because she loves David still, but part of her is angry or resentful that he can't love who she wants to be.

I really wish this was written from Catherine's perspective, frankly, because I am fascinated by what's going on inside her head. Like I said, I think she must have some sort of mental difficulty, but then there are times I feel more like she's a spoiled wealthy girl used to getting her way. So every time David indulges her, get his hair cut and died identically to hers, fools around with Marita, it just encourages Catherine to push further. Other times I think she's straining against what's expected of her. At one stage she asks if he likes her as a girl, and when he says yes, she responds it's good someone does, because it's a goddamned bore. So maybe she just hates being limited. If she feel she's a boy, then her frustration and anger would be understandable, and it isn't always going to manifest itself when or how I might expect.

David is almost passive in all this. Catherine and Marita make all the real decisions between themselves, David just goes along with it, while secretly resenting the situation. I figure it has something to do with the story he's writing about the time he regretted helping his father track down an elephant, but I'm not sure how. The story is the point where David learned the difference between the idealized version of how we see things and the truth. Sure, your dad being a ivory hunter sounds cool, but then you get a good look at the elephant he's going to kill, and suddenly it's a different perspective. So he found a beautiful, kind, curious woman willing to subsidize his writing. And look at that, she's encouraging him to sleep with another woman! It's a dream come true! But the reality is messier, when real emotions are tied up in it. The honeymoon's over.

I really would have like to have read a finished version. As it is, Garden of Eden is intriguing, but the writing lacks a certain something. The descriptions aren't quite as vivid as in his other works, and the ending sputters out. Things wrap up a little too neatly, given the personalities involved, and it feels like there were other things he was getting ready to expand on, but didn't get there.

'I can because I'm lion color and they can go dark. But I want every part of me dark and it's getting that way and you'll be darker than an Indian and that takes us further away from other people. You can see why that's important.'

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These Birds Feathers Have Rusted

I traded in another four XBox 360 games around the 4th. I didn't see myself playing Eternal Sonata or Halo 4 again, and Left 4 Dead was getting old. I can see the appeal if you play with friends, but solo wasn't nearly as fun. I got the feeling the computer-controlled characters were using me as bait for the zombies, since they always let me go first. Eh, shooters are touch-and-go with me, that's old news. Something else that's old news is that I like flight combat games, even if they frequently let me down.

Which is how we get to Birds of Steel, which was the fourth game. It had one thing going for it right from the start: That I wouldn't have to give my wingmen commands, then watch them fail to carry them out. Instead, the wingmen operate more as extra lives. If I get shot down in one plane, I can switch to any of the remaining wingmen, assuming there are any. Well, that was encouraging, and the fact you can switch around even without dying was nice. Sometimes I get tired of chasing the same plane forever, so try a different plane and see if I can make it work.

So as long as the wingmen aren't dying quickly, they're not hampering me - except when one of them crashes into me, which is possibly a realistic simulation of the chaos of air combat, but that's precious little comfort when I lose three of my four lives in one moment - but they aren't a huge help. What I found was if we were fighting an enemy of roughly equal numbers, I have to shoot down enough of the enemy to where my forces have roughly half-again as many (so from 15 vs. 15 to 15 vs. 10) before the other planes are good for anything besides giving the opponents something to shoot at besides me.

The game does allow for a bit of customization even in the historical campaign. There are three levels of controls - simplified, realistic, and simulator. I'm not clear on why simulator would be a higher difficulty than realistic, but I never tried it. I found the risk of blacking out in realistic a problem I didn't want to deal with, so I stuck with simplified. The controls themselves are pretty smooth, though some planes were considerably less responsive than I expected (the Zero fighter being the prime example). The other bit of customization related to fuel and ammunition. You can choose to have unlimited quantities, or to have either one or both limited, though I never did receive any warnings about running low on fuel. Also, the game's definition of "unlimited" or "limited" ammo are a bit curious. Even with unlimited ammo, you can still run out, at which point you have to wait some predetermined amount of time before your ammo is magically replenished. This can run anywhere from 20 to 60 seconds, so you're better off just hopping to a different plane, if you can. Likewise, on limited ammo, your stores will still replenish themselves. Sometimes. And sometimes they won't. I wasn't able to discern a pattern to it.

If you want to create your own missions, I think there are a lot more options, in terms of what your objective will be (bombing mission, defend bombers, ground attack, air patrol, etc.) and what you'll face. I tended to ignore that in favor of of the Dynamic Campaign, which allows you to play certain battles and try to determine the outcome. That's overselling it some. Say you select the Battle of Malta. The island will be split into sectors, and you can play as either side, and you can determine how many sectors you start with. Then you select a mission, and if you succeed, you capture a sector. If you fail, you lose one, and this continues until one side captures all sectors. What missions are available vary depending on circumstance. You won't have the option to attack shipping if you aren't attacking a water sector, for example. The problem being, it doesn't really make me feel like I'm part of a larger campaign. I go for air-to-air combat, and me and my 15 buddies beat the 15 fighter planes on the other side. I can sort of visualize how that helps us capture that sector (if I take it to mean we establish air superiority), but I don't feel like I'm accomplishing that much.

Another irritating aspect, is the hanger. If you play historical campaign, you can use whatever plane they say you're supposed to have, out of the 100+ they have in the game. In Dynamic Campaign, though, you're limited to planes you've unlocked. You unlock planes firstly, by completing missions, which earn you experience so you level up. You can't use a particular plane until you reach a certain level (or rank). Then you have to earn enough points to purchase the plane, which is why I was playing Dynamic Campaign, because completing missions there was the fastest way available to earn those points. Except you win two Dynamic Campaigns, you have maybe enough to buy 3 planes, 4 if you're lucky. I still had about 80 to go when I gave up the ghost, because it wasn't worth it. I was tired of having to fly the damn Brewster Buffalo all the time, so that maybe I could earn enough points to get the Wildcat.

Plain and simple, it started to feel like punishment to play, because I was slogging through the same missions to earn enough points to buy better planes - which I would have then used in those same missions. Also - and maybe this was my old, non-HD TV - but it was really hard to distinguish targets on the screen. Especially ground targets. On the positive side, torpedo bombing was oddly satisfying, and I felt good any time I managed to land successfully on a carrier. The game captured the speed of the planes, but not the maneuverability. Overall, not remotely worth it. Another console, another disappointing World War 2 flight combat game.

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What I Bought 6/29/2013 - Part 9

It's the last day of reviews. Yes finally. Don't worry, come fall I expect these are going to be a lot fewer parts, given the direction my pull list is going.

Daredevil #26 & 27, by Mark Waid and Chris Samnee (storytellers), Javier Rodriguez (color art), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - I like that they moved the title down to the bottom so it didn't interfere with the overall picture, and that Rodriguez colored the same as the clouds. I love it when the clouds are that rosy pink color. It's one of the nice things about being up early.

What we've got is Matt completely spooked after the beating Ikari gave him. He tries to put a calm face on, but it cracks quickly and once that happens, he spends several pages running liked a panicked rabbit, until Foggy settles him down. Samnee and Rodriguez do real well there. During the interview with Foggy's replacement, they draw Matt as very composed, rigid, expressionless, with shadows obscuring much of his face. But once he loses control, the shadows vanish (and the room brightens considerably), and Matt's fear comes pouring out. The part in the subway tunnel, where Matt is once again surrounded by darkness, but now is not shrouded from it is a nice bit. Even though his radar sense tells him there's nothing there, he's still so spooked that the darkness is actually ominous to him, the way it can be for the rest of us who can only imagine what terrors lurk inside.

Anyway, Foggy helps Matt sort through the evidence to find the mastermind, and just as they've come to a conclusion, Pym calls to let Matt know he traced a shipment of radioactive chemicals to Matt. I do question how Matt can read texts. I thought he couldn't read something that was flat, so he can he pick up pixels on a screen? Do they alter the temperature on the screen, so he tracks it by that? I think D.G. Chichester and Lee Weeks had him use that in their "Fall of the Kingpin" story. Matt, certain that Ikari is somewhere nearby, alters his pulse with three shots of adrenaline and takes off to the address. Where he finds Bullseye, living inside a metal coffin that keeps him alive. Because only his brain came back from the dead after Matt killed him in Shadowland.

Matt, having found Bullseye, demands answers, which he gets because Bullseye figures with Ikari and Lady Bullseye there, Matt's toast anyway. Plus, Bullseye has agents ready to strike at Matt's loved ones. Too bad, Matt anticipated that and called in favors. Which won't help him survive his current situation, so he better get smart, which he does. I love the smile Samnee give DD when he surprises Ikari with the billy club. This seems like the perfect situation for Matt to be gritting his teeth and snarling, but he has a plan, has confidence in his friends, and so he's fine. Even when things start to go south, he's still relaxed, adjusting and adapting, and smiling through a lot of it. He has the experience advantage, he uses it. Ikari has all Matt's powers plus sight? Fine, turn the sight against him. The contrast between his smile, and Ikari and Lady Bullseye's dual looks of shock and horror as the ceiling collapses was excellent.

I am not entirely happy with the idea Matt stood by and let the toxic waste blind Bullseye before saving him. It isn't that I feel bad for Bullseye. He's an unrepentant mass murderer with a body count in the triple digits, who was also dumb enough to store a ton of toxic waste near the giant metal sarcophagus he calls home. At the same time, I don't like the idea of Murdock standing aside and letting it happen. You want to say he was buried under rubble and couldn't dig himself free in time? Fine. That is exactly what I would have assumed and it's how it's presented in the comics (see page 17). But once Waid and Samnee have Foggy raise the question, and once they show stand silently for two panels, then issue a non-denial ('I did what was right.'), I have to think I'm wrong. That Matt got free sooner, then stood and watched as Bullseye was scarred by toxic waste. Which is something I could possibly see myself doing in Murdock's place, but I like to think the heroes are less vindictive assholes than I fear I am. It's frustrating because when Foggy asked the question, it jolted me out of the story, because I was disappointed that Waid/Samnee had opted to go that way.

That long, complaining paragraph aside, I still love Daredevil. The creative team is doing a great job, and now that they've completed this long, initial arc, I'm curious to see what's next. This has been a trial of Matt's ability to remain positive in the face of severe difficulties, but he made it through. He may have learned the importance of not trying to do it all himself, of not trying to always respond to threats immediately, so what's next?

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Death In the Afternoon - Ernest Hemingway

Death in the Afternoon is Hemingway's book on bullfighting. If you have any interest in bullfighting, or in Hemingway's writing when he's genuinely invested in the topic, it's a great book. If neither of those categories applies to you, give it a pass.

I don't have any real interest in bullfighting myself. I'd enjoy it more if bulls which defeated the matador were allowed to live. The matador has an entire team with him, the bull is on its own. If the bull can triumph in spite of the odds, put it out to stud. Hemingway explains they were spared originally, though it was so they could be reused. The good news - from the bull's perspective - this works to its advantage*. Many matadors were dying, so Pope Pius the Fifth threatened excommunication to any princes that sponsored bullfighting, and barred those participating from Christian burials. The compromise was that bulls was not used more than once. Which somehow translated into killing them at the end, no matter what.

As usual, the Vatican ruins everything.

Anyway, despite having no interest in watching bullfighting, I was curious about it, and Death in the Afternoon comes through better than I could have expected. Hemingway covers everything, from the different stages of the fight itself, to the different types of passes, to the differences in bulls depending on breeds, the best places to sit depending on what experience you're after, where are the places to go at a given time of year for bullfights, the way bulls are chosen, the wheelin-dealin' that goes on when picadors choose their horses, and how a matador gets his specific bulls for a match. He discusses the role of the press in a matador's commercial success, how we deify the past, even if we hated it when it was happening, the conflict between the fans' desire for a show and the matador's desire to not die, which results in very different ideas of what the ideal bull is. He discusses the ways in which the techniques have changed, so that what is considered a "good" bullfight changes over time, and a matador can grow to be considered old-fashioned and unpopular before he knows it.

Given the scope of the book, the level of detail he reaches, is remarkable for less than 280 pages, and that's with a few pages at the end of each chapter typically devoted to other things. Odd little stories that have nothing to do with bullfighting. Critiques of critiques of his writing**. A brief discussion of the few times he's tried getting in the ring. When pressed whether he actually did that (by an old woman he conjured as a piece to address certain things), he claims there were hundreds of witnesses, though many have sadly died from damage to their diaphragm from excessive laughing (Hemingway wasn't nimble enough, though he was smart enough to recognize it and avoid being gored). Obviously I haven't read any other books on bullfighting to compare it with, but I feel as though I learned a lot from this, as he does it best to explain things clearly, trying to focus on one subject at a time and cover all he thinks he needs to before moving on.

I think the most important thing I learned from the book with regards to bullfighting was what he explained at the start of Chapter 2. Bullfighting is not a sport, in the sense that basketball or tennis are, where you have people competing to see who triumphs. Bullfighting is more like theater, because the bull's fate is largely preordained. It will fight well, use its strength, speed, and ferocity for all it's worth, but in the end it will die. It's like going to watch Hamlet. You know everyone will die, so it's a matter of how well the carry it off. The bullfight is the same. How well does the matador perform, how well does he bring out the bull's courage, highlight the danger he is placing himself in. Thinking about it that way doesn't make me a fan of bullfighting, but it helps me understand it better.

'He was a fine-looking boy who studied the violin until he was fourteen, studied bullfighting until he was seventeen, and fought bulls until he was twenty. They really worshiped him in Valencia and he was killed before they ever had time to turn on him.'

* The bulls are smarter than we might expect (depending on how smart you think bulls are), and they learn quickly enough the tricks of the cape. It's a matter of whether they can figure it out before they grow too tired to take advantage.

** He has a great line here I'd seen in one of his biographies about his writing: 'If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things he knows and the reader, the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.' I think Death in the Afternoon, though not prose is almost an exercise in this. He can't put down everything he knows, the book would be massive, and he'd never finish, since as he admits, he's always learning new things. So the goal is to describe enough the reader can understand what he's discussing and make some of the other connections on their own.

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What I Bought 6/29/2013 - Part 8

It's another fine day for comic reviews, don't you agree? Of course you do! And if you don't, too bad..

X-Men #1 & 2, by Brian Wood (writer), Olivier Coipel (penciler, inker), Mark Morales (inker), Scott Hanna (inker #2 only), Laura Martin (colorist), Matt Milla and Christina Strain (colorists, #2 only), Joe Caramagna (letterer) - That baby looks really grumpy, but I'd be grumpy if someone dressed me in that, too. I mean, footy pajamas with a hood with ears? Yeesh. It's a good thing most of us don't remember things from that earlier, or we'd all want to take revenge on our parents.

Jubilee's headed for the Jean Grey School, baby in tow, with some mysterious fellow on her tail. Turns out he's John Sublime, which means nothing to me, but the X-Men recognize him when he shows up on their door. A few of them rescue Jubes and the baby when the train they're on gets out control. That turns out to have been caused by Sublime's sister, who was inhabiting the baby and can control machines. So she jumps to an inert body of an Omega Sentinel and wreaks havoc until Kitty damages her enough to force a withdrawal. Then Storm leads a team after the ancient, intelligent bacteria, but neglects to bring the one person who had some success against her, leaving Kitty behind to repair the School, and in all likelihood, keep the students from being killed by what appears to be a bomb.

I don't understand why Arkea (that'd be Sublime's sister) caused the train to get out of control. I can imagine she doesn't give a hoot about humans, but if the X-Men don't show up and the two trains collide, that kills the body she's using, and all the others around it, which I assume would be bad for her. There are a lot of little things that don't quite add up. How does Sublime know she has an affinity for possessing technology, given he supposedly ran her off a really long time ago? What was there for her to possess back then that let him make that determination? As far as we know, she'd only possessed a baby before she got to the school, so there's nothing there to suggest it. Why does Jubilee not appear to be a vampire any longer? How much has Wood downgraded Rachel's powers? I know she hasn't had the Phoenix Force since before War of Kings, but she seems practically useless. When Sublime shows up, Psylocke's asking Rachael if she wants them to go get some Omega-level telepaths. Well what is Rachel then? So far she seems to have been placed as the person who stays calm and talks, but nobody trusts her to handle things on her own.

On the plus side, Wood was able to provide enough clues for me to understand Sublime and what he is, when I had never even heard of him prior to this. Props for that. As it stands, I can't decide if these are deliberate things Wood's setting up to deal with later, or if it's some flaws in his story I'm just gonna have to roll with it.

Enough kvetching about the writing. Might as well discuss Coipel's art for the 5 minutes he's gonna be on the book. That last page of issue 1, the shot of Arkea in the up-and-running Omega Sentinel, it reminds me of Skottie Young's work. Some of it is how slim her arms seem, the swirl of the mist around her, and
the shading a little. Its the only page that gets that response from em, so I thought it was worth mentioning. I like it. The green and the black are striking, and shots of characters facing us with their eyes hidden are a way of making the scene feel ominous I really like. I always find that a little creepy, because it lets my imagination run wild about what I'd see if I could see their eyes.

Beyond that, I thought Coipel did some great work with the expressions and body language, especially on Jubilee. The middle panel when she's on the plane, as the baby cries and the stewardess checks on them in particular. There's exhaustion on her face, the strain of caring for this kid, but also embarrassment because she knows everyone's irritated (witness the guy next to her plugging his finger in his ear), and nobody likes having that scrutiny. Nice touch of the creative to have include the caption box stating 'alienation, shame, and seclusion' in that panel. All things I imagine Jubilee is either feeling, or wishing she could have right then. The smile he gives Arkea/Karima near the end of issue 2, when she leaves the school was appropriately creepy, though the coloring and shading in the eyes helps there. The blank look to the eyes makes a little smile more unsettling.

I will ask, is that what the Beast looks like now? Jeez, I thought the cat form that nobody could draw consistently for the last 10 years looked bad. His face is too small for his head, and his hair/fur looks like it's forming little Daredevil horns, which I think bothers me because it suggests a receding hairline. Not that heroes can't go bald, someone has to take up the mantle from Xavier, but it doesn't make a lot of sense on someone still covered head-to-toe with fur.

My overall impression is there's potential here, certainly some things I like, but I'm not convinced Wood thought this story out ahead of time. Maybe some of these things nagging at me will be resolved, but right now I can't be sure of that. Coipel's art is working well, but his aforementioned 5 minutes on the book are almost up, so I'm not sure it matters.

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Burn Notice 5.15 - Necessary Evil

Plot: Having discovered Anson's using an encrypted military radio, the next step is to bug it. Except, you can't. Well, Anson's piggybacking the signal off some nearby defense contractor, so Mike and Fi get themselves hired as window washers, stage an accident which gets them in an office, and get ahold of Anson's call logs that way. Making a veiled threat of lawsuits against the security guard seemed unnecessary. As it turns out, Anson's been calling one person regularly, and that person is Benny, aka Maddy's boyfriend. Hopes that Benny is merely someone Anson's observing because of his proximity to Michael fall apart when Fiona tails him and notes Benny's received some training in looking for tails (not enough to notice someone he already knows, though). Which means it's time for Michael to have an awkward conversation with Madeline.

While all that drama is taking place, Sam and Jesse are stuck carrying out a mission for the CIA. A weapons designer by the name of Resnick has gone missing, and it's feared he's turned traitor. Turns out he hasn't betrayed anyone. He's building a missile for a warlord named Kamba, because Kamba has his daughter as a hostage. Jesse and Sam are supposed to deliver some components for said missile, but then have to devise some way to get Resnick - and ultimately themselves - out of there without getting shot repeatedly. Or getting Resnick's daughter killed. Or letting Kamba escape with the missile. Oh, and the CIA wants the design specs for the missile, because of course they do.

Meanwhile, Madeline has set out to prove Michael is wrong about Benny, but has only succeeded in proving him right. So she bugs Benny's phone. And sure enough, he gets a call from Anson. Oh wait, Benny also received a package in the mail from Anson? Well, why doesn't he just open that up and - BOOM!

The Players: Benny (Madeline's Boyfriend), William Resnick (Hostage). Joseph Kamba (Lunatic Warlord)

Quote of the Episode: Sam - 'The last time I did a favor for the C.I.A., there were a few hiccups.'

Does Fiona blow anything up? Nope.

Sam Axe Drink Count: 1 (20 overall).

Sam Getting Hit Count: 0 (7 overall)

Michael's Fake Laugh Count: 0 (11 overall)

Other: No alias for Michael this week. I kind of like that he couldn't be directly involved with Kamba because of all his past work in sub-Saharan Africa. The odds he would run into someone who knows his face among this particular warlord's forces seems small, but there is a chance, and it's a nice nod to Michael's past history. Like how he knows Farsi, but not Spanish.

I'm not sure why Sam should care that he has detractors in the C.I.A. He was a Navy SEAL, who cares if the spooks don't like him? Besides, we know when Pearce says "detractors", she means Bailey and Manaro (the twits from Fall of Sam Axe and 5.6). The idea of doing something strictly in response to criticism from those buffoons is ridiculous.

That said, this mission did give us Jesse in big glasses and a sweater vest. Where such things are irritating on Anson, they're endearing on Jesse. And watching Sam try to simultaneously massage Kamba's ego and stoke his paranoia was fun. I think he needed to dial back the attitude at times, because he seemed to be pissing Kamba off too much. That might just be my inclination to not rile up a man with lots of armed guys at his beck and call.

The Benny situation has some good and bad to it. The good is I find it believable Anson could find someone he'd expect to be compatible with Madeline who he could use as a spy. He took a stint as her guest therapist, he's talked to her husband, he's studied Michael. If he's half as good as he claimed, he ought to have some idea of what she'd be looking for. It more believable to me than his assertion he can anticipate everything Michael will do. That Anson eliminates Benny when he becomes a liability (for various reasons) fits with Anson's previous actions to keep barriers between himself and threats, and to close off loose ends. It also suggests he has a wider network than might be suspected, because my guess is he had someone watching Benny who observed Mike and Fi sniffing around, and that's why he eliminated him. I'm not sure how he was funding this network, when he needed Michael to wipe his records because the CIA had a list of all his bank accounts.

The bad is, I don't care about Benny. He'd been around for awhile, but he's actually been on-screen for about 10 minutes, if that. I know Maddy was always excited to spend time with him, and so I sympathize with her, but I don't feel anything for Benny. The reveal that he regrets taking this job, regrets hurting Maddy, you can see what they're shooting for, that he wasn't a bad man, more a good one who made a bad decision. But I'm not sure it came soon enough. It does make me wonder, if Michael had confronted Benny with his suspicions, rather than telling Maddy and waiting for her to be convinced and bug the phone, would things have gone differently? Could they have saved Benny, and possibly gotten something useful from him? I doubt it. I expect Benny would have lied, and Michael wouldn't have had sufficient evidence Benny was working with Anson to press, and Anson would still have had time to kill Benny. Might have spared Maedline the gut-punch of watching Benny be blown to bits, though. I'm sure Anson did that on purpose.

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Across the River and Into the Trees - Ernest Hemingway

I went through a Hemingway phase near the end of high school and into my undergraduate years. Big surprise the guy who wrote about bull-fighting, shooting, and dying would appeal to the teenage boy. The phase ended some time ago, and I hadn't read any of his work since then, but the books were still on my shelves, several unread. No time like the present.

Across the River and Into the Trees details an American colonel's acceptance of his mortality. It isn't set in a war, he's in his fifties, and I think that's roughly when the story takes place (it's post WW2, for certain). His fighting is behind him, but his heart can't go any further, and he knows it. So he travels to Venice, a town he loved in the First World War, to visit friends, to see the young woman he loves, and to go on a duck hunt. He tries to enjoy himself, but specters loom over it all. Not just his impending death, but the past. The battles he's fought, the men he's lost, the commanding officers whose stupidity he's resented, he can't move past it, despite his best efforts. By the end, I believe he'd made peace with it, but those last few days were rocky ones.

One thing I remember liking about Hemingway's writing was this sense that he got to the point. He didn't waste time blathering on about irrelevant details, and so his books didn't seem to drag. Looking back, I think it was actually that the things he talked about were more interesting to me than what Faulkner or Fitzgerald's topics of choice. If you're interested in something, you can read about it forever.

His dialogue is more stilted than I remember. Maybe because this is later in his career, or not one of his stronger works. Also possibly because they're speaking English, but that isn't Renata's first language, so she's a bit awkward. I think the repetition, the frequent description of the Colonel as being "rough" or "bad" in his speech, the imploring him to say he loves her, it's all part of something. I guess the book was described by some affair he had shortly before he read the book, and I imagine there's much of that in this. I'm not sure whether Renata is meant to be uncertain if the Colonel is genuine in his feelings, if she believes that if he loved her enough he'd find a way not to die, or if she simply enjoys having him wrapped around her finger. She isn't written as possessing any sort of malevolence, but the Colonel is the only one we have to describe her, and he's smitten. He tends to describe her as an effortless beauty, someone who simply has something that draws the eye, but who can say? Ah hell, I should not doubt her, she is a perfectly pleasant and compassionate sort, whatever doubts I have that the Colonel isn't giving her enough credit.

Even with the repetition, the book speeds along. There's something about his writing style, not only his ability to describe things well and succinctly, but something in it that carries its own forward momentum. He's fond of run on sentences, with a lot of commas in there breaking them up, and somehow that makes it like rolling a ball down a hill, as my eyes feel like they're gaining momentum, hurtling down the page. It's pretty impressive, even in one of his lesser works.

Even though I haven't read any of Hemingway's work in years, I've read three or four books about him in that span, and I found myself incorporating what I'd learned from those into my view. Even without looking online to see he'd carried on an affair shortly before this was written, it wasn't hard to see Hemingway in the Colonel. Just into his fifties, beat-up, scarred, simultaneously critical of his physical appearance, but strangely proud of it, because of what it signified about his experiences. Trying to recapture a feeling of youth with a much younger woman. Frequently rude or coarse with his remarks, but almost instantly regretful of them, but internally and externally, leading to vows to be nicer, which are always broken before too long, leading to more internal rebukes. The Colonel's journalist ex-wife almost has to be Hemingway's 3rd wife, Martha Gellhorn, and the Colonel's scorn for General Montgomery is likely Hemingway's as well.

I don't know who - if anyone - the pockmarked and pitted writer the Colonel becomes mildly obsessed with might represent, but I found the Colonel's assessment that mediocre writers are the ones who live forever, and that's why they have the most material, intriguing. Hemingway wasn't one to downplay his own skill as a writer, but I wonder if he wasn't losing a little faith at this point, wondering if he'd lost it, and was doomed to become a middling writer for the remainder of his days.

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In The Ice Sits A Boat, Where The Boat Takes You. . .

When I reviewed Syberia, I said I'd probably pick up the sequel at some point. So guess what I did last week?

Syberia II picks up where the first one left off. You're still playing as Kate Walker, the New York lawyer who sought out Hans Voralberg to finalize the purchase of his family's automaton factory, only to decide you'd accompany him in his clockwork train on his quest for the land of Syberia and the mammoths that supposedly exist there.

Despite the fact he's brilliant, Hans is still a frail old man, so he's more hindrance than help. Which means it's up to Kate to do all the work. "Work" in this case, means dealing with every problem that comes your way. Hans falling ill, crumbling Russian infrastructure, the weather, homicidal monastic orders, bears, and all manner of puzzles  will get in the way, and Kate's going to have to figure out ways around all of them.

This game is exactly like the first one. Which means some of the puzzles are clever, and others are maddening, because I'm not sure how you'd solve them other than just randomly flipping switches until something happened. The scenery is lovely, but the camera is unhelpful. The entire game is a series of different screens, and for each screen, there's only one camera angle. Which means you can't swivel it to get a different view, and sometimes that would come in very handy. I was stuck in one area for a half hour because I couldn't see there was another trail I could take. Because the entry for it was at the extreme edge of the bottom of the screen, so you couldn't tell what was there. If I could rotate the camera, I would have found it immediately. So that's irritating. There's still quite a bit of back-tracking, and Kate hasn't learned to run faster yet.

But these were problems I had with the first game as well. The story and the larger world that was hinted at made it worth all the frustrations, and that's largely the case here. Syberia 2 doesn't instill me with quite the same curiosity about what's happened in the world as the first one did, but that's because Kate spends most of her time out in the wilderness. There aren't many signs of human habitation to begin with, so I don't find myself what wondering what's happened to them. At the same time, there are still some wondrous things along the way, and I find myself sharing Kate's awe at them.

That's something the sequel maintains, is the sense of connection I had with Kate in the first game. I don't entirely share her concern for Hans, but I can appreciate her determination to save him. In general, I really like Kate Walker. That this started as a job, but it became a chance for something more and she seized that chance. When she gets frustrated, or exasperated, it's usually with something that would provoke the same response in me, so I empathize with her. She's determined to see this through, to get Hans to Syberia. Maybe because a part of her recognizes how much she gave up for this, and she doesn't want it to be for nothing. But that doesn't harden her. She keeps a sense of humor about things, but more critically, she's still a kind person overall. The game has one moment that's shocking (in a horrifying way), and a couple that are truly touching, and the graphics and voice acting make convey that Kate feels the same way. When Oscar decides it's time for him to have a purpose, you can hear a little panic in Kate's voice, because she doesn't understand what he means, but she's grown to care for him and she's worried. And dang it, I'd grown to care for Oscar too. That was a gut-punch of a scene.

There is one problem with doing such a good job of making me like Kate, and that's the ending. I have no idea where the ending leaves Kate. I mean I know where she is, in a geographical sense, but in a larger sense, it's a little dire. Hans just left her there, alone, thousands of miles from anything. Something I read about the ark they took to get there suggests it moves on a specific current, so it only goes back to the Youkol Village every 10 years. The detective her boss sent after her, turned back well before that. No one is coming after her, so is she just stuck there? I sure hope not.

Concerning ending aside, the story, voice acting, and world building of Syberia 2 more than make up for my frustrations with the camera and some of the puzzles.

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