Absolute Martian Manhunter 1: Martian Vision

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

Absolute Martian Manhunter 1: Martian Vision

DC’s Absolute Universe (AU) is a re-imagining of the DCU that I think takes pride in just how radically it refashions the traditional DC line-up of superheroes. That’s certainly the case with Deniz Camp’s and Javier Rodríguez’s version of the Martian Manhunter. Gone is the shape-shifting guy from Mars who assumes the human identity of a detective on Earth named John Jones. Now John Jones is an FBI agent who is somehow possessed by (or psychically “entangled” with) an alien force that can read minds, which is the essence of the “absolute perspective” that is “Martian vision.” What this looks like on the page is a groovy psychedelic burst of swirling clouds of coloured smoke with text that reveals various inner lives. The Manhunter him- (or it) self is rendered as a green Picasso face with a single big red eye and long rubbery arms. Yes, he’s Gumby. But he has no physical form that anyone can see and remains John’s imaginary friend.

He’s not even called the Martian Manhunter here but the Martin Mind****er. Because that’s what he’s all about. He’s not a superhero so much as an alien therapist with the reach of the Internet, operating like some concerned AI program able to read the minds of everyone in Middleton. “Why do people do the things they do?” John asks. MM replies in his typically disjunctive manner: “Traumatic quantities of pain damage despair! You I we are coming apart! Overexposure to fundamental reality results in anti-life spiral!” It seems the whole world is suffering some kind of psychic breakdown.

It’s nobody’s fault though because what’s really happened is that people have been infected with the mind virus of the White Martian. This is another alien force, opposed to the MM, that is turning people into homicidal maniacs. Together John and his Gumby parasite have to stop the White Martian, which I think they mostly do, though I couldn’t follow the story at all.

OK, it’s something different. Very different. Different enough to give you a headache. The feeling I came away with though is that there really wasn’t much story here. It felt like six issues of set-up, at the end of which I still didn’t think the idea had been properly introduced. If the style of it is your thing, I think this is creative to the point of being visionary and it’s incredibly original. At times I felt blown away. But in the end I wish it had been more grounded, with an actual story, and had made a bit more sense or been more coherent. Plus I hate almost everything psychedelic.

Graphicalex

Bookmarked! #165: The Event of the Year!

/ Alex Good / 32 Comments

Yes, the annual book sale the library puts on is coming up at the end of the month. I’ve posted bookmarks for this event before, but this year I managed to find a couple of really old ones. If 2026 is the 18th sale then 2007 and 2008 must have been when it all got started. Back when they only advertised “hundreds of books.” There now must be tens of thousands. I’ll bet these bookmarks from twenty years ago are the only ones still in existence. This is what happens when you never throw anything out!

Book: The Rise of Athens: The Story of the World’s Greatest Civilization by Anthony Everitt

Bookmarked Bookmarks

I deserve better trolls

/ Alex Good / 16 Comments

Just had some fun responding to a couple of troll comments I received over at Alex on Film. Sometimes people have raised good points correcting things I’ve said about movies, but more often it’s just randos on the Internet popping off. Still better than spam, but perhaps not up to today’s AI-generated commenting. Anyway, this time the strays I was catching came in response to my notes on Bunraku. And if you’re interested here’s an earlier exchange I had in the thread following my take on Key Largo.

Criminal 5: The Sinners

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

Criminal 5: The Sinners

I don’t know if this is the longest volume yet in the Criminal series but it sure felt like it. There’s a lot of plot to get through. When last we left tough guy Tracy Lawless he’d gone to work, reluctantly, for Center City’s crime boss Sebastian Hyde. As things get going here he’s basically an enforcer and hit man, but Mr. Hyde thinks he’s not a team player and is too soft because he only whacks people who have it coming, not just anyone the boss man thinks needs whacking.

A problem has arisen though in that a bunch of crooked but supposedly protected types (“made men”) are being offed and nobody can figure out who’s doing it. Hyde puts Lawless on the case, which ends up involving a gang of vigilantes looking to clean up the mean streets. At the same time the army has sent a special agent after Lawless, who has technically gone AWOL. And Lawless is trying to rein in Hyde’s wild child of a daughter while at the same time having an affair with Hyde’s wife.

There’s a lot going on that needs to get sorted out, which it is in the usual brutal fashion. The pieces all fit together nicely though and I thought this was the best constructed story in the series so far. The only complain I’d register has to do with the speech balloons. These are often doubled so that two balloons are placed side by side with an open gap between them. The problem is that the space doesn’t make it clear if the text should be read straight across or in all of one bubble first and then on to the next. Once you get used to it you can read it more easily, but it remains a bit off-putting.

Graphicalex

Shoulders for days

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

This past weekend the Mr. Olympia bodybuilding event was held, with a new champion being crowned in the prestige men’s open division: Nick Walker. Walker was a fan favourite as an underdog overcoming some injuries. Plus he wears glasses on stage, which is something I respect. He came in well conditioned, and his only real competition, I thought, was from the gigantic Samson Dauda, who could easily have won. But I thought the judges’ decision was fair.

I follow bodybuilding just a little bit, and have since the glory days of Arnold Schwarzenegger, before he became a movie star. I don’t think it’s healthy though. In fact, quite the opposite. This kind of training (and massive drug use, which at least competitors today are far more open about) will probably take 10 years off your life. But when it comes to athletic competition people do go to extremes.

The one thing that really struck me watching this year’s event was the overdeveloped deltoids. Here’s the final four line-up from this year’s competition (you can click the pic to make them even bigger!).

Some well-rounded characters.

Now saying these round, bulging shoulders don’t look natural, or that they look downright freaky, isn’t really a valid critique because everything about these bodies looks freaky and unnatural. But I don’t remember bodybuilders’ shoulders looking like this before 2000. It’s like they have bowling balls stuffed under their skin in a place where you don’t expect to see such massive growth. It’s not at all aesthetically pleasing and like I say, it seems like something new. Nevertheless it’s taken over elite level bodybuilding. When you add in the distended bellies or bubble guts (Palumboism), it just screams ill health to me, which is why I prefer the classic physique competition. Still, it’s hard not to stare at the big guys.

Where optimism and nihilism meet, or When Galbraith might have missed something . . .

/ Alex Good / 20 Comments

From The Great Crash 1929 (1954) by John Kenneth Galbraith:

We do not know why a great speculative orgy occurred in 1928 and 1929. The long accepted explanation that credit was easy and so people were impelled to borrow money to buy common stocks on margin is obviously nonsense. On numerous occasions before and since credit has been easy, and there has been no speculation whatever. Furthermore, much of the 1928 and 1929 speculation occurred on money borrowed at interest rates which for years before, and in any period since, would have been considered exceptionally astringent. Money, by the ordinary tests, was tight in the late twenties.

Far more important than rate of interest and the supply of credit is the mood. Speculation on a large scale requires a pervasive sense of confidence and optimism and conviction that ordinary people were meant to be rich. People must also have faith in the good intentions and even in the benevolence of others, for it is by the agency of others that they will get rich. In 1929 Professor Dice observed: “The common folks believe in their leaders. We no longer look upon the captains of industry as magnified crooks. Have we not heard their voices over the radio? Are we not familiar with their thoughts, ambitions, and ideals as they have expressed them to us almost as a man talks to his friend?” Such a feeling of trust is essential for a boom. When people are cautious, questioning, misanthropic, suspicious, or mean, they are immune to speculative enthusiasms.

From “Rational gamblers: Gen Z, financial nihilism and the great wealth transfer” World Economic Forum, Mar 19, 2026:

Recent US college grads with $94,000 in debt are buying crypto and betting on prediction markets. Priced out of housing and with stagnant wages, Gen Z adults (aged 18 to 27) have done the math and the calculations say the traditional system isn’t working for them.

In 1990, the median American home cost 3.2 times the median household income. Today it costs 5 times the median income, and for someone aged 20-34, closer to 8 times their annual salary.

In the US, the median wage for a bachelor’s degree holder, when adjusted for inflation, has barely moved from $58,138 in 1990 to $60,000 today. The generation’s unemployment rate sits at 8.3%, which is double the national average. Although younger workers historically experience higher unemployment, today half of recent grads are underemployed and entry level jobs have declined by 35% in recent years.

People in this generation also carry more personal debt than any other – $94,101 on average – and 46% of Gen Z workers have already withdrawn from their retirement savings. The main reason for 42% of them was to pay down debt.

These Gen Zers couldn’t find a chapter for their situation in the conventional financial playbook, so they started writing their own.

The phrase “financial nihilism” describes the sense that the economic system no longer rewards prudence or long-term planning. It is shorthand for a generation’s apparently self-destructive relationship with money, which includes crypto bets, prediction markets and retirement accounts raided to pay off credit cards.

A recent University of Chicago and Northwestern University study offers a more precise frame. This research shows that, as someone’s perceived probability of homeownership falls, their behaviour often shifts. They consume more relative to their personal wealth and they also take a measurable turn toward riskier investments.

This shows up in the numbers. Crypto is held by 42% of Gen Z investors – nearly four times the 11% who hold a retirement account. Almost one in five investors under 30 surveyed in 2022 held nothing but cryptocurrency. Some estimates show prediction markets’ trading volume has quadrupled in the past few years, with nearly a third of Gen Z investors participating in them or considering it.

Criminal 4: Bad Night

/ Alex Good / 15 Comments

Criminal 4: Bad Night

The fourth volume in the Criminal series is a bit of a side alley off the main mean streets of Center City. Several times in earlier comics we’d seen glimpses of a newspaper serial about a Dick Tracy-clone private investigator named Frank Kafka. And just saying that much I want to stop for a second and wonder when this neo-noir series is set. The stories in the previous volume, The Dead and the Dying, were time-stamped 1972. Bad Night is presumably set a generation later but I don’t think there were many newspapers running serial comic strips around that time. And the nod to Dick Tracy is unambiguous, down to the sharp brim of Frank Kafka’s fedora. I guess it’s always the 1930s or ‘40s in neo-noir, a timeless shade of gray.

Anyway, Bad Night tells the story of Jacob Kurtz, the creator of the Frank Kafka strip. Kurtz is haunted by various demons, including some damaging run-ins with the law years earlier, just after the death of his wife and being busted for his involvement in a counterfeit ring. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what all happened in the past, but it got a police detective named Max Starr (yeah, right) on Jacob’s case and there’s a mutual hate between the two that has continued. This complicates things even more when Kurtz falls in with a femme fatale named Iris and gets involved, against his will, in another bad heist. There seem to be a lot of bad heist plans in this series.

I found it perfectly readable, with all the requisite squalid highlights. Iris, for example, is a nurse and a stripper (virgin and whore), someone so sexually damaged that “to get off, she needed a savagery that bordered on contempt.” Which is another way of saying she has bad taste in men. I had some trouble figuring out what was driving Max Starr though, and the ending seemed a little muddled. Kurtz has visions of Frank Kafka appearing at his side throughout the back half of the book and it’s clear that he (Kurtz) doesn’t enjoy robust mental health, so any conclusions you draw have to be qualified given that you may be reading the diary of a madman.

Graphicalex

Montalbano: Voice of the Violin

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

There’s a curious feature of the Inspector Montalbano stories that I should talk about. Other detective series rarely follow a chronology, if there’s even one to be followed. That’s how things started out with the Sherlock Holmes stories, which were all drawn from Dr. Watson’s case files in whatever order he chose. There are a few instances in the canon where reference is made to earlier cases that can be identified, but dating the individual stories is itself a parlour game for Holmesians. Similarly, it’s hard to come up with a strict chronology of the cases solved by Hercule Poirot or Ms. Marple or Lew Archer or Nero Wolfe. Which is another way of saying that they are all standalone stories you can read in whatever order you want.

That’s not how the Montalbano canon works. Each novel has two stories. There’s the individual case Montalbano is trying to solve and then there’s the larger story of everything else that’s going on in his life, with events very much following in order from the previous book. So, for example, at the end of The Snack Thief it looked like Montalbano and his mistress (for lack of a better word) Livia were going to adopt François and maybe start a family. In this book, however, that plan is going sideways as François doesn’t want to leave his foster home. Complicating matters is that the woman who is fostering François is Augello’s sister, with Augello being one of Montalbano’s lieutenants and not the one he gets along with the best. There’s some rivalry going on there, and my ears pricked up a bit when Livia says Augello treats her “like a brother” and “more than a brother.” What does that mean? Anyway, when Livia finds out where things stand there are some fireworks. And waterworks. Which made me wonder a bit about this business of having a mistress. I thought the whole point of a mistress is that they bring peace and comfort and understanding into your life. Livia is a pure chaos agent and seems to make Montalbano miserable. And he isn’t even a married man! This shouldn’t be so complicated. But maybe that’s the problem. She should be his girl on the side and instead she’s his only outlet.

Anyway, that’s all part of the big story that’s going on in the background. The specific mystery being investigated has to do with a beautiful woman whose naked body is found, by accident, in an unoccupied house. Montalbano has a way of just having cases like this just drop into his lap. Luckily, the solutions come about almost as conveniently. There’s a clue that’s teased in the early going that you have to be pretty slow not to pick up on because it’s flagged in the title. Things are made more difficult though because of the endless infighting that apparently always goes on within and between different police departments and different levels of the justice system in Sicily.

I thought the mystery part of the story was interesting, with some eccentric characters and a quick pace. Along the way I also learned for the first time about a car named a Twingo (made by Renault, I don’t know if we ever had them here) and a Guarneri violin (very rare and expensive, a rival to the Stradivarius). To be honest, this was probably my favourite book in the series so far, the one I enjoyed the most, so at least things are heading in the right direction.

Montalbano index