Was out walking one day last week and there was a woman taking this little guy’s picture. Then, the very next day, I was walking past the exact same spot, at the same time, and he was there again. I’m afraid he might not be the brightest bunny, especially as he let me get quite close to take his picture. If he doesn’t smarten up he won’t be long for this world! (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)
This third volume of the Something is Killing the Children series collects issues #11-15 and even though it kept on after this (and may still be going, for all I know) things are brought to a conclusion here with the adventures of rogue agent Erica Slaughter in the Wisconsin town of Archer’s Peak. All the “big-toothed scary things” are killed and while the Order of St. George (not a team of heroes, it turns out) has suffered some uncomfortable exposure, they at least manage to find a fall-guy and hush things up.
Given how this volume ends I think I’ll take a break from the series. A break that may be permanent. I haven’t liked this comic much, and all the mumbo-jumbo mythology about the monsters and the familiars that the monster-killers carry with them didn’t interest me. I’m not into the story, or the characters, or the art.
I had an earlier post about a house I pass by when I walk downtown that has a really wild front yard. This is the front yard of a house I walk by when I’m going in the other direction. It’s not quite as flowery, but it definitely goes for the wild look.
And here’s a picture taken from the other side.
I know people who don’t like this sort of thing but I think it’s actually a lot of work (though you it’s true you don’t have to spend as much time cutting the lawn). I don’t think I would be able to manage it, but I do have the same sort of thing going on in my front garden.
Usually it’s a bad sign when familiar characters go off into space. In terms of horror franchises it didn’t work for Jason, Pinhead, or the Leprechaun, with each of those movies being clear indications that a shark had been jumped. So Batman in space wasn’t an idea I was keen on. “I have no business battling alien empires,” he reflects at one point. I could not agree more.
Given all that, I thought Jason Aaron did a decent job with this this six-part series. The set-up is, admittedly, crazy. Batman gets his butt kicked by some muscle that a Gotham gangster has brought in from way out of town. Specifically, he’s a goon from the Slag Galaxy. How he got to Earth I’m not sure, but I may have missed that part. Anyway, Batman figures that the only way he can beat the goon is to actually go to the Slag Galaxy himself and train against this new competition. So he gets on board an experimental rocket ship and off he goes.
The Slag Galaxy is a brutal place that’s run by the Blakksun Mining Company. The BMC have a mercenary force of War Stormers that go around enslaving the populations of various planets, resulting in mass orphanization. This of course gets Batman’s back up since he has a soft spot for orphans, not to mention injustice generally. So he decides to take on the BMC as part of his training, which proceeds with the assistance of the requisite sexy alien (a Stormchaser named Ione with lots of tattoos), a giant war wolf, and a Punch Bot that likes to get into fights (and lose them).
It’s pretty brutal stuff, as Batman works up the corporate ladder until finally taking on the co-CEOs of the BMC, a pair of baddies called the Blakksun Twins who rule the galaxy with “lawful omnipotence.” Wrath Blakksun is a tall dominatrix warrior woman while her brother Whisper is a nerdy-looking runt who makes people’s heads explode when he says something to them. They’re actually quite a creepy couple and I was only let down by how easily Batman manages to withstand Whisper’s dirty talk. It seems all you have to be is tough enough and you can take it. And we all know Batman is the toughest guy there is. Even if, as always, his code doesn’t allow him to kill any aliens. Which makes his taking out whole armies of mercenaries a bit hard to swallow, but at this point we just have to roll with it.
Then . . . back to Earth and a rematch with the goon he fought at the start. Who this time doesn’t stand a chance. It’s a tidy ending, and things are even set up for Ione to launch as she adopts the Batman mantle back in her galaxy (her sidekick, the Punch Bot. is now Bat-Bot for good measure). I think I can live without those adventures though, at least for a while.
No, I never scratched any of these. Even if I did wonder what Punk Berry Penguin was like. According to the promo material (printed on the back) they are “KAPOW! (Kid Activated Power Scents!) Super Fun Scented Bookmarks Activated by Scratch Action!” I’d be concerned that some of that smell might come off on the book I was reading!
Book: A Natural History of Human Emotions by Stuart Walton
Clever idea, but I didn’t think Andrew Grant pulled it off.
Here’s the clever part: a retelling of The Hound of the Baskervilles in the form of text messages. Note that the story itself isn’t updated to modern times. We’re still out on the moors at the end of the nineteenth century. But I guess everyone has some kind of Internet connection and iPhones. So the events are presented as a series of brief posts with follow-ups and likes/dislikes from other characters.
So, clever idea. You’ll have to know the novel pretty well because if you go into this cold you’ll get confused trying to follow the plot. But given the target audience I think familiarity with The Hound can be taken for granted. Where Grant lost me is, first of all, in how public the posts were supposed to be. People like and dislike things that they shouldn’t know about, at least if the plot is to make any sense. Then, as a second point, things get a bit woolly when the Hound and Sir Charles Baskerville’s ghost “like” different posts. I realize this is all tongue-in-cheek and having a bit of fun, but there’s a failure of internal logic that I found myself digging my heels in against. I
So it had potential, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other writers have had a go at something similar (I seem to remember seeing Shakespeare done as text messages), but it didn’t work for me in this instance.
The houses behind me are coming along quite quickly now. They were out yesterday working in the rain even. These pics are from last week and you can tell they’re not wasting any time. The first picture is even an action shot as they’re pouring stone into the foundation.
And here are a couple of pics from the end of work yesterday.
And from the other side.
We begin with Batman going toe-to-toe with Killer Croc in some Gotham alley and the Dark Knight is really feeling it, but not in a good way. “Getting’ too old for this, Batman?” KC chides. And even though Batman finally puts the big guy down for the count, he has to admit that “it was harder than usual.” Is he getting old? In need of some testosterone replacement therapy? I mean, over the course of nearly a hundred years of crime-fighting he has taken quite a beating.
Alas, things are worse than that. It seems a secret canonical villain has infected Batman with a virus that will kill him in a week. This sends Batman hopping about Europe trying to find out who’s responsible. He’s first off to Berlin, then to Prague, Paris, and finally Rome (being sure to hit all the must-see tourist monuments like the Brandenburg Gate, Notre Dame, and the Coliseum). The twist is that he finds out early on that the Joker has been infected with the same virus, so they actually have to go on this little road trip together. It’s a team-up of unlikely partners, which turns out to be as much fun as you’d expect.
I didn’t care much for the story. The whole premise seemed like the flimsiest sort of excuse for throwing Batman and the Joker together. The problem I had with it is that I just couldn’t see how it made any sense, even on the level of the way the plots of most criminal masterminds in comic books are needlessly complicated and don’t add up. And then Batman’s trick at the end to take down the bad guy struck me as ridiculous.
But the plot isn’t the point anyway. What we’re really getting here is a gallery of striking artwork from different artists for each of the travel destinations. Now if all you want is art in the standard DC or Marvel comic book style then you may be put off by it. I found the Paris section by Diego Latorre to be particularly dark and sketchy, making a lot of the action hard to figure out. It reminded me a bit of Reptilian in that regard, for better and for worse. But most of the time I was really impressed.
Despite the interesting idea of pairing Batman and the Joker as buddies I really didn’t care for the script. What sells Europa is the art though, which is well worth a look.
Just an update to a previous post where I introduced Millie and Bonnie. They’ve gone back to their regular home. Their owner really wanted me to adopt them because she’s selling her house and moving in with a guy who is allergic to cats so she can’t keep them. But even though I like cats (though not as much as dogs) I don’t think they’d be a good fit with me. I’m sure they’ll find a nice forever home though.
Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse
By Luke Kemp
Page I bailed on: 60
Verdict: This made me think a bit of my response to Peter Turchin’s End Times, being a work of Big History that tries to come up with a master thesis of how and why things fall apart, with the help of “some new terminology and lots of numbers.” But I think Turchin was probably on to something more. I just couldn’t get on board with what Kemp was saying here, beginning with his choice to label all the societies he was discussing as “Goliaths.” A glossary at the back defines a Goliath as “a collection of interconnected hierarchies in which some individuals dominate others to control energy and labour.” A Goliath is not just a state or a civilization, but a mosaic of dominance hierarchies “organized primarily through authority and violence.” So Goliath = Leviathan? Given that the first chapter tears down “Hobbes’s delusion” (that the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short) I don’t know if Kemp would go that far. But I couldn’t be sure. Goliath just seems like a really poor attempt at branding to me, and it continues with such concepts as Goliath evolution, Goliath fuel, and Goliath traps.
Language aside, I had a sense that Kemp maybe had a decent, if overly broad, argument to put forward that might have worked for a magazine article or podcast but that I just didn’t feel up to spending 500 pages with.
Alex Good 