You people, I swear.

I poke around the referrer log for this weblog on occasion to see what brings folks here; usually it's a link from from pal Mike, who flooded me with visitors when he linked me a couple weeks ago, or the Comic Weblog Updates Machine. And then there are search engine hits...

... like the fellow who came here via Google and the search string 'she-hulk cage fuck'. Which I guess makes sense in a "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" sort of way. Maybe the guy was looking for Heroes for Hire #17?

Not a terrible series, probably not John Ostrander's best work, though still enjoyable, goofy superstuff... but definitely no black-on-green therein. Just a bit of date-us interruptus courtesy of the Absorbing Man and Titania.

Also confusing is the fellow who came here via Yahoo! and the search string 'hoochies'. Through a link on something like the 36th page of results. Now that's persistent. And, ever helpful, Yahoo! suggests "Also try: ghetto hoochies, black hoochies". Thanks, Yahoo! I think I'll pass.

Overhaul'd!

Well, maybe not exactly "overhauled," but a new template, a bit cleaner, a bit nicer, I think. Added a picture to my profile — beware my new digital camera!

Maybe I'll get around to one of those "content" posts this week. Maybe I'll stop feeling dog-ass tired from being sick. Urgh.

Oh yeah, those "Acts of Vengeance" Fantastic Four issues by Walt Simonson? Fuckin' aces. The FF spends most of their time arguing with Congress against a super-power registration act and getting attacked by lame-os like Porcupine, The Beetle, and Whirlwind. Certainly a lot better than any of the AoV issues I've read about before. I'm sort of shocked Simonson got to treat it like the joke it was. I'm also suprised that several pages of Reed Richards and the FF debating a Congressional committee read so well as it did.

Just another freak

I guess it shouldn't be surprising that the only person who could take out Hunter S. Thompson is Hunter S. Thompson. Let's not kid ourselves: those of us who followed the man and his work wondered how it was going to happen.

The Good Doctor is one of the vague reasons I ocassionally attempt to write. I found his stuff sometime in college, probably, becoming slightly pissed to find out the man had grown up across the river in Louisville and I had never heard of him. It seems he did his best to beat a hasty retreat at the earliest opportunity, though, and he certainly made no friends in the Bluegrass state after that by belittling their beloved Kentucky Derby.

It's that attitude that drew me in. Something I'd been looking for in others my whole life and never quite managed to find. Someone who looked at the world and thought "something ain't quite right here," and then vocalized it long and loud. Someone who'd tell us we're being fed a line of bullshit by those who profess to know better. And someone who fed bullshit right back. Dr. Thompson was one of the first to show me opinions can, in fact and despite what I'd been taught, be wrong, and most people's are. He also managed to make reading about sports a lot less of a chore than it normally is, but I suspect that had more to do with his gambling habit than anything else.

And that's about all I can muster in my illness-induced haze. Adios, Dr. Thompson.

Buyer's remorse? Nyet!

Been feeling a bit down lately, got a flu-like illness coming on, so I've been trying to soothe myself with eBay. Today I managed to snag Walt Simonson's entire Fantastic Four run.

Poking around the Grand Comics Database to check covers and see just what I'm getting myself in for, I ran across this synopsis for issue 344:

The FF battle an alternate reality cyborg Josef Stalin.

I mean, holy shit, right? If this isn't the FANTASTIC MOTHERFUCKING FOUR, I'll eat Rob Liefeld's Captain America #1.

Gotta get those Simonson Thor collections...

My cousin Johnny watched me one day while Mom and Grandma were out, and my sister was god-knows-where, as was her fashion. I was probably eight or nine.

He sat on the couch, leaning forward, the knees of his lanky legs thrust almost up to his face.

"Hey, Johnny," I said. "Mom told me you got kicked by a horse."

"Yeah, man, check this out." And he lifts his shirt to show me the shockingly not-faint impressions of horseshoe prints on his chest. It's not often you get to see a thing like that.

I didn't see Johnny much, but that's how I remember him. Always smiling, an easy-going guy, one of the many family members I've had who never talked down to me or treated me like a little kid — though I still get reminders that I was the baby of the family for so long.

Johnny killed himself this past Friday, after a long fight with drugs and depression. He was 39, oldest son of my uncle's wife, and a hell of a guy.

That's part of why this hurts so badly. So many of us loved Johnny so much, and would have moved mountains and rivers to help him, but we couldn't. It'd been years since I saw him, but if he'd have called me or my mom or sister out of the blue, we would have dropped everything. I know how awful depression can be. I know how alone you can feel. I know this stuff, it's in my head, but it's just hard to understand.

Yesterday was his funeral. I'd gone all my life without going to one, and at 27 it was still very difficult. I was there a couple of hours before I could go see Johnny, say goodbye, and apologize for having to see him like this after not seeing him for so long. "It's no way to see a guy," I told him. Another one of our weird rituals as social animals, I guess. And it makes me feel naive and stupid. There's Johnny, right there, the guy we loved so much, and there's not a fucking thing we can do about it.

I can't pretend to know what happens when we die. I can barely pretend we're much more than bags of meat and chemicals cursed with these brains of ours. But my aunt told us that in his note Johnny said he can't get hurt anymore. She said he's safer now than he's been in years, and I'm going to hope for the rest of my life that it's true.

Rock on, Johnny. We love you.

Dug-up Comics: Fantastic Four vs. The X-Men 1-4

Writer: The 'Mont
Pencils: Jon Bogdanove
Inks: Terry Austin
Letters: Tom Orzechowski

So, imagine someone says to you "Hey, internet guy or gal... c'mon a-my House of Ideas and write a story about the Fantastic Four fighting the X-Men. How's that sound?" Cherry gig, right? (I think the kids still say "cherry" and "gig". "The kids." What am I, Milton Berle?)

I mean, here you have two of the great iconic teams of superhero comics: One the loving family ready to do whatever it takes to save the world or each other, and the other a team of outcasts thrown together by genetic circumstance and a desire to bang redheads. (What? C'mon, try to act like you don't know Cyclops, Wolverine, and Charles Xavier all hunger for a slice o' Jean Grey's fire pie.)

Now imagine it's 1987, you're Chris Claremont, and you don't know the internet from an innertube. Now imagine you're a pretty twirly princess. Okay, that's good. Go back to the Claremont thing. You can keep the dress if you want. Imagine that, and you'd give us this story that's sort of about family, but mostly about a wispy, naked Kitty Pryde (oh, god, the search engine hits) and a crying Franklin Richards.

It seems like every random X-Men issue I pick up, either something horrible and senses-shattering(!) is happening or something horrible and senses-shattering(!) just happened and everyone's talking about it. Let's see... Uncanny X-Men 137? Yup, fighting on the moon, Jean dies. And there's one I've got somewhere wherein the X-Men are living in Australia and everyone thinks they're dead. And for whatever reason I read the first appearances of Jubilee and Gambit and, well, y'know. Jubilee. And Gambit. Tragic.

Drink it in, nerds.

This mini-series is no exception. Seems that in some issue of the regular X-Men series (this was back in the days when there was actually something you could call "the regular series") the X-Crew got their asses whupped by the Marauders. I think I saw the Marauders in an issue of OHOTMU once. All I remember is a generic-looking guy in grey with big elephant feet and some long-haired guy in a body stocking. Not only did these retreads beat up the X-Men, but, OH NOES! Kitty Pryde got her ass kicked so hard she's gone intangible and translucent! She's a living ghost! She dresses in purple and rides a white horse! Wait, no, she hangs out in one of those giant test tubes that all fictional scientists have. And — wait for it! — the only one who can save her is the greatest fictional scientist of all: REED RICHARDS! THE GUY FROM THE FANTASTIC FOUR WHO HAVE THEIR NAME ON THE COVER!

But it actually starts with Franklin having a bad dream about a book. The book, the little Aryan boy's dream tells him, will tear apart his family! It's a bad book! Very bad! What is it? It's alleged to be Reed Richard's diary, containing musings on mutation and Charles Xavier — because it's an X-Men cross-over, natch — and the effects cosmic rays might have on him, his best friend, his girlfriend, and her brother. What...? Reed did this all on PURPOSE!? Well, no, he didn't, but that's what this faux-diary says, and since there wouldn't be any tension otherwise, Ben, Sue and Johnny take it at its word. There also wouldn't be any tension if Reed had faith enough in his big brain to use the molecular recohesivator he just happened to be working on... which can save Kitty Pryde's life!

Sue Storm, like many women, chose to get back at her husband by blasting off her clothes with an invisible forcefield and appearing naked on the internet.

Besides She-Hulk taking Sue's place for the mission to save Ms. Pryde (after the obligatory fight-'n'-team-up with Magneto, which is preceeded by Jennifer studying for a mock trial of, who else, Magento), something should be said about this iteration of the X-Men: It sucks. Magneto in all his puffy purple-shirted glory, Dazzler, Longshot, Havok, Mullet-Rogue, Dazzler, Wolverine, Storm, Dazzler, Brit-Psylocke, and Dazzler. There's a brief shot of Nightcrawler and Colossus laid up in an infirmary, and... the guy who can teleport, the guy made of metal, and the intangible girl all got their clocks cleaned? And we're stuck with Dazzler? Miss Turns-Light-into-Sound? Somehow, I'm okay with eyebeams and telekinesis, but I always get hung up on this one. And somehow, when Doctor Doom comes along with a similar molecular recombobulator to save Kitty when Richards won't, Dazzler is the only one who says "Hey, guys, I fought Doom and he's a meanie. This is bad." Surely she's not the only one here who's fought Doom. And surely he would have put on some sunglasses and strangled her to death.

And that covers something like the first half of the mini-series. The rest is a bit more tedious. You ever write a paper for school as you read whatever's been assigned? Yeah, that's what I'm doing now. Let's see... X-Men fight some Doomsentries, Franklin astral-projects himself and hangs out with Kitty (which is kinda creepy), Ben drinks some coffee and saves some kid, Johnny hangs out with Alicia and she gives him some noble speech about loving his heart even though he burnt Storm up, and the rest of the FF decide that even if Reed is a dick, he's their dick and they'll hang out with him no matter what, and Doom makes with the sinister posing while healing Storm's burnt arm. Although Johnny Human Torch only grazed her upper arm, the whole thing ends up covered in burns. Doesn't matter, though, because in the MU a painful, potentially debilitating injury like a burn can be healed in a snap with the help of your local megalomaniac. No burn too big or too small!

Suck it, Wolverine.

And issue four... blah blah blah, think think think. I'm not one of those folks who minds thought balloons, but I swear there's something like 5,000 words worth of the damn things in these four issues, most of them focused on Reed's tortured, whiny, self-pitying internal monologue. If he'd stop thinking for five seconds and, I dunno, say out loud how that's not his journal and, y'know, they just saw Dr. Doom and it's probably something he did, this would've been a whole lot shorter. But consider this is coming from a reviewer who's never had an internal monologue much longer than "butt itches... ah, scratch... hungry... yay, Pringles." We do, however, get the best Thing/Wolverine fight ever where the ol' Canucklehead goes down like Guy Gardner. It's marred a bit by Rogue spouting the old 'hit 'em hard and fast" crap beforehand. Did Claremont have a rubber stamp for some of this stuff?

The rest is just Doom and Reed babbling about pseudo-science and the X-Men throwing their powers around. Oh, and Franklin pouting and showing that he's stupid enough to stand between his father and Doctor Doom. And we're supposed to believe a kid making puppy eyes will make Doom turn away? I call "Doombot" on that one.

It takes Sue nearly four issues to realize Doom planted that diary. Kitty's still a foggy broad in a tube, but she's been "stabalized" and will coalesce gradually. If I had spent a buck fifty an issue on this back in 1987 I'd've been pissed. The paper's nice, though, and has held up well. And Jon Bogdanove draws a pretty cool She-Hulk, whatever the hell she's doing in this story.

My upraised middle finger is the focused totality of my disdain for X-Men comics not written by Grant Morrison. Skip this unless you find it in a dime bin or maybe laying on the sidewalk somewhere.

BONUS "CRYING FRANKLIN RICHARDS" GALLERY