Ms. Marvel (Vol. 3), Issue #8 – “Generation Why (Part 1)”

* Part 1 of 4 of the Generation Why storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Ms. Marvel (Vol. 3), Issue #8 – “Generation Why (Part 1)”! In the previous installment, and, technically, the end of the previous storyline, Ms. Marvel and Wolverine spend a lot of time bonding as they make their way to the exit of the sewers. Wolverine takes a liking to the young lass, which is saying something since Wolverine doesn’t take much of a liking to anybody or anything, and relays his opinions to a couple of Avenger-types. They decide to get Ms. Marvel a giant dog companion.

Wolverine found his runaway, but Ms. Marvel is still keen on finding some other kidnapped runaways that are being used by Thomas Birdface Edison. I’m sure she’ll regret this decision shortly.

Ms. Marvel (Vol. 3), Issue #8 [November, 2014]
Written by: G. Willow Wilson
“Generation Why (Part 1)”

Kamala’s narration reveals that she spent the better part of the weekend punching out alligators in the sewers. Sounds like she’s finally getting the hang of necessary animal cruelty! It gets her ruminating about why adults running the planet don’t seem to care much about the big stuff going on: terrigen bomb mist, bird clones kidnapping runaway children, etc. It’s almost like they’re pretending that these problems don’t exist until the problems get too big to ignore.

Ms. Marvel is roaming the neighborhood with photos of missing runaways, asking around if anyone has seen any of them lately. As this is happening, she doesn’t seem to notice the thing that everyone on the street wants to run away from. Something that looks like a problem that’s too big to ignore.

As everyone around her flees as if in a shitty ‘50s Godzilla movie, Ms. Marvel looks around and wonders what all the fuss is about.

She slowly turns around…

She sees the problem that’s too big to ignore…

“Awww! Look at you! You are just the cutest most humongous thing I have ever seen!”

Ms. Marvel fawns over her new best friend in a big “daaawwwwww” moment.

I like hugz :3

We’re back to the old artist! I guess someone was on strike until his demands for $28M per panel were met.

ATTENTION! I’M NOT REWRITING THE RECAPS ANYMORE. Yeah yeah yeah, we get it, strict parents, nerdy hobbies, she becomes Ms. Marvel, lots of trips to the mosque, Jersey City, and erotic fanfiction.

“So…he followed me home. Ammi, Abu, can I keep him?” Kamala grins while hugging the giant canine. As if she already didn’t know the exact reaction.

“Get out! Fuck you! Gross! That thing is forty feet tall! Out! I can’t imagine how big its turds must be! Go to hell!”

That kind of thing, essentially.

Aamir tells her she can’t have dogs in a house because it’s considered haram. Forbidden. I guess Islamic law prohibits dogs purely for companionship. Kamala starts gibbering and bargaining, insisting that she’ll feed and care for the monster and keep him in the backyard at all times. I mean, how much could this thing possibly eat, right? He probably eats dirt and trash. There’s ALWAYS trash!

Ammi worries about what the neighbors would think. Abu has been silent the whole time. They walk away, and Kamala will take all this as begrudging permission. “It’s your funeral,” Aamir says, walking away as well, “I’ll try to talk Ammi and Abu off the ledge.”

“Huzzah!” Kamala cries, like Mr. Burns. Later that night, she entertains the idea of teaching Lockjaw to play fetch, but she has other more important business to attend to first. She’s got her buddy, Bruno, on the horn to discuss Runaway Julie. She’s been in a coma since Wolverine took her to the hospital. Some real feeding tube shit. Total vegetable.

Julie Harrison is the only lead Kamala has on the Inventor’s nefarious kidnapping schemes. She browses Julie’s Facebook page – I’m sorry, Facehead page – and finds nothing of great import. Some real dead-end shit. Total futility.

There is something, though, maybe: her latest Facebook – I’m sorry, Facehead – status from five days earlier. “Side trip!! Met some like-minded souls on the road. So excited!!”

“She sounds like a hippie,” Bruno says dully. Some real crunchy shit. Total granola.

You can ride your new tank. I mean, dog.

The post is has a tagged location, so Bruno punches them into Google Earth – I’m sorry, Google Earth-616 – and it’s a random spot outside of Bayonne, NJ. There’s nothing there. Kamala rubs her head in migraine frustration and wonders what to do next. Suddenly, her giant oaf of a dog is heard panting right behind her head. “Uhhh..hold on, Bruno. I think my new dog just teleported into my room.”

Kamala hangs up the phone rudely and gets right up in Lockjaw’s face. “Did you just BAMF in here all by yourself? That’s amazing! How good are you at reading maps?”

Lockjaw gives her a quick, sad-eyed stare. “Hurrh,” is the response.

Later, Kamala clad as Mrs. Marvelous meets Bruno in the alley behind Circle Q. Bruno frowns at the dog. “You found a giant teleporting dog wandering down Cator Ave.? Is this for real?!”

Oh, it’s real, son. And Kamala’s gonna use this dog to teleport to the exact coordinates within Bayonne! While she’s there she can check out the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway and then visit George R. R. Martin’s childhood home! Thanks, Wikipedia.

Kamala grabs her pet and wonders what to do to activate the, you know, teleportation sequence. I think just wondering how to teleport out loud was good enough. Bruno takes out garbage, remaining completely nonplussed, as Kamala and her giant dog disappear in a wisp before his eyes. “So yeah, I’ll hang here and take out the trash while you guys warp out to fight bad guys. I don’t feel emasculated at all…”

Whatever, Bruno, you fucking loser. The teleportation takes all of three seconds; in the gross outskirts of Bayonne, Ms. Marvel starts traversing the landscape with her super-stretchy legs looking for something, anything, that looks noteworthy. “Why would she come here? What could a teenage girl possibly be doing in a place like this?”

Lockjaw runs off ahead to a closed-off entrance to an abandoned power plant. This wasn’t on the map! Who knows what could be here, all sorts of mutanty mutant radioactive stuff. Plutonium isotopes and toxic waste and cores reachin’ critical mass! Fun! Wonder what Mr. Birdman would need this place for.

Doubt starts sinking in. This all sounds like hogwash! Ms. Marvel asks her companion if he’s sure they teleported to the right place. A big CRREEAK! and a BOOM! answers that question for her: yes! It looks like a large automaton activates among the dilapidated structure. Ms. Marvel tries punching it with an embiggened fist! It just makes it angry! This robot has an enormous meat cleaver.

At this point, I bet Kamala kinda wishes she was punching alligators again.

Robot Butcher, at your service!

So they fight a bit. Eventually, Ms. Marvel crashes the robot to the ground. “Structural integrity compromised,” it chirps, “Switching to defense weapons array.” Doesn’t sound good, does it?

“Initiating weapons command sequence in 3…2…1…” Oooh, that extra extra EXTRA doesn’t sound good!

“STOP!” yells Ms. Marvel, and then headbutts the assuredly very hard and strong metal robot. Granted, she made her head extra-large, almost as large as Tyra Banks’ head, but still. Ouch. It did the job the, she put a big fucking dent in it. The robot, I mean. Not her head. The robot stopped moving.

Ms. Marvel and Lockjaw flip the robot over on its front, revealing a large, domelike cover on its back. She presses a button, the cover unhinges. There’s a fucking kid inside.

CAPTION GOES HERE

Just like in the sewers, this kid is being used as a living battery in order to provide power to the robot. “Is this happening to all the missing kids?” she asks herself. Why? How? Where? When? What? Which? Whom? Whose? ALL the interrogatives!

I barely remember this kid anyway, but I think he was one of the two who was stationed out in front of that house and possibly inhaling illegal substances. Ms. Marvel tries to rescue him out of the robot hatch; while she does this, a tiny robot crawls out of another compartment and sneaks into her boot without her somehow noticing. Seems unlikely, but I’m not a comic book writer! I’m barely any kind of writer. I’m barely literate.

“Nnno– stop–,” the kid rises up suddenly and alarmingly, like a corpse you didn’t know was still alive, “I’m p-part of it now– I’m giving back–”

Ms. Marvel doesn’t know what the HELL this kid is talking about! She’s trying to save him. Be grateful, goddamnit! “Lockjaw, warp us to the nearest hospital,” she instructs her faithful companion. I hope the closest hospital is the one from House. Hugh Laurie will know what to do.

We cut to later that morning, where Kamala’s teacher is in the middle of taking roll call as Kamala sprints through the halls to class. She makes it to the room after the teacher utters the third “Khan…”. Too bad her last name isn’t “Zahn”, she would’ve been on-time and also, as an added bonus, be related to Steve.

“Sit, Ms. Khan. What’s today’s excuse? This is the second time you’ve been tardy this week,” her grumpy, stumpy, frumpy teacher squawks. I’m not entirely certain why, but the teacher has a knife on her desk. She’s also holding a two-by-four, ready to smack someone unconscious. Today’s excuse is as follows: Kamala had to take a friend to visit that pill-popping miscreant Dr. House!

Her friend Nakia sees that as the filthy, flimsy lie that it is! “Kamala, we’ve known each other since kindergarten. Why does it seem like you’re hiding something from me?” she eyes her “friend” suspiciously. Probably because she is hiding something from her. Everything, honestly. They may as well not even be friends anymore!

Yeah, that was me in high school too, sister. The trick is taking naps during all your classes like I did!

Ms. Old-Time-Religion is getting tired of these two talking during class. She’s about four seconds away from thunking that piece of lumber right into someone’s brain. “Ms. Bahadir! Would you like to share your thoughts with the class?” she says to Nakia, referencing the discussion article everyone was supposed to read for homework. Maybe it was this one! Lol

“Well, Mrs. Van Boom…I found the article insulting,” proceeds Nakia, “The writer says teenagers are just parasites addicted to their smartphones, who don’t give back to society…but that doesn’t sound like anybody I know.”

As she’s talking, the little robot stowaway from earlier peaks out of Kamala’s backpack.

“I mean, how can you write off a whole generation before its even had a chance to prove itself?”

Easy, Nakia. It’s because every generation thinks it’s better than the one before it and the one after it. It’s called being human. It’s one of the 19,000,000 reasons why we suck a whole fucking bunch!

Ms. Van Boom (the “Boom” stands for whack, thunk, drop, dead) turns to Kamala and asks if she agrees or disagrees with her colleague. Kamala doesn’t get very far into her own opinion before a giant BA-BOOM!, one that has nothing to do with the piece of lumber, rocks the school.

“Remote homing beacon located,” announces the very large, definitely still-working robot as it plows right through the wall. It found its mark.

Senseless school violence. smdh

Debris falls from the crumbling walls and ceiling. Kamala gets trapped under some shit. Her inner monologue keeps trying to motivate her to get her butt in gear and help stop this thing, but she’s stuck. Lockjaw apparates within school grounds, which is something that even Dumbledore can’t do, and helps Kamala out of the rubble.

“Heal first, then transform. No time to go to the Circle Q for my costume,” she thinks, scrambling to figure out why the robot appears to be chasing her down.

The healing is a drain on her powers. She tries to transform, to look different, but nothing’s working. She stands there in the wreckage, helpless, just like the rest of her classmates.

Nothing happens.

“I don’t understand.”

Final Thoughts

You just explained it yourself! The healing is a drain on your powers! Case closed ! Let’s get some Funyuns.

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The Umbrella Academy, Season 1 – Depression and Daddy Issues

Through the Idiot Glass Disclaimer: There will be spoilers. If you’re even remotely interested in this show and you haven’t yet seen it, or if you’ll be mad if you accidentally read any possible spoilers about it, I’m going to chalk it up to “not my fucking problem”. You have been warned.

Discussion Subject: The Umbrella Academy, Season 1 (2019) (Netflix)

When I started watching this show I didn’t know it was based on a Dark Horse comic book limited series by motherfucking Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance. I don’t know that until halfway through Season 1. Not that it would have particularly swayed me against giving the show a shot.

But seriously, Gerard Way? Yuck.

I started watching Season 1 in December, 2021. I finished it in July, 2022. There are ten episodes. If that doesn’t tell you everything about it right now, not much I’ll write after this will either, I suppose.

The Premise

Bear with me here. On October 1st, 1989 (exactly two years after I was born IF YOU ALL MUST KNOW), a few dozen women all over the world, who weren’t previously pregnant, suddenly went into labor and gave birth to a child. This isn’t explained at all for the rest of the season. A billionaire, Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore), decides to buy seven of the babies from their unwilling mothers and raise them as his own. And by “raise them”, I mean “torture their childhoods with strict, exploitative regimens designed to maximize their innate super abilities”.

Sir Reginald’s fashion sense could use some work.

–Tom Hopper plays Number One (Luther Hargreeves, “Spaceboy“). He has super strength. Sir Reginald injected him with gorilla serum once to save is life, turning him into a large, hairy, half-man half-gorilla beast. He’s gross.
–David Castañeda plays Number Two (Diego Hargreeves, “The Kraken“). He has, like, super ninja skills or something. He’s not very interesting.
–Emmy Raver-Lampman plays Number Three (Allison Hargreeves, “The Rumor“). She can persuade a person to do or think exactly as she says just by starting a sentence with “I heard a rumor that…”, which also helped her land a job as an famous celebrity. She and Luther want to fuck each other.
–Robert Sheehan plays Number Four (Klaus Hargreeves, “The Séance“). He sees and talks to dead people. He has been doing drugs for 20 years and is, for all intents and purposes, literally insane. He is the best character on the show by a long shot.
–Aidan Gallagher plays Number Five (Five Hargreeves, “The Boy“). He can transcend space and time, which accidentally landed him stuck in a post-apocalyptic future for around 40 years. He’s the only member of the family who is perpetually played by a teenager, and he’s a better actor than any of the rest of them.
–Justin H. Min plays Number Six (Ben Hargreeves, “The Horror“). He’s dead now and essentially serves as Klaus’ babysitter. While alive, his super power seemed to be about something related to summoning Hell creatures from a portal to the earthly realm. Sounds awful. I’m glad he’s dead.
–Elliot Page plays Number Seven (Vanya Hargreeves, “The White Violin“). She doesn’t have super powers, so she was out of all the missions and all the fun and all the reindeer games as a child. You find out later that she does have super powers, and they’re terrifying and frightening and etc.

The two other notable characters are Hazel (Cameron Britton) and Cha-Cha (Mary J. Blige), who are partners from the agency tasked with assassinating Number Five. They spend the whole season trying to track him down. They bumble a lot along the way.

There’s also a talking monkey. There are other characters too, but who cares?

ULTIMATELY, through all the convoluted bullshit, the ultimate plot of the season revolves around the Hargreeves team working toward stopping the apocalypse from which Number Five was stuck living in the aftermath for a few decades. They have eight days to figure it out.

Oh shit, this ain’t Six Flags! Did I miss a turn?

My Half-Baked Thoughts

I’m already upset at how long the Premise section had to be. This is one of those TV adaptations where there is just so much worldbuilding from the original source material that it’s very difficult to pull it off successfully. I’m glad I learned a few episodes in that it was originally a comic book series, because I wouldn’t be able to entirely forgive an original TV series that attempts to cram a glut of information with breakneck pacing and nonstop exposition dialogue.

There’s a whole lot to take in as you’re watching the first few episodes, and it’s hard to simultaneously try to give a shit about any of the characters. Character development is disappointingly paper thin across the board with a few exceptions (Klaus, Hazel, and MAYBE Vanya if I had to pick a third). Range of emotion from the cast spans a whole colorful spectrum from “mopey” to “angry” to “slightly mopier” to “on drugs” (Klaus).

These guys are brothers?! They don’t even look alike!!

Number Five has the most interesting backstory, personality, and temperament. While I never really suspended disbelief that he’s a 58-year-old trapped in a teenager’s body, Aidan Gallagher does a fantastic job with the role and he’s probably the most good-looking adolescent actor you’ll find on TV in the last, like, 40 years. Beats the fuck out of James Van Der Beek, who played a teenager in Dawson’s Creek at age 37. If you’re a teenage girl you can slap a poster of Gallagher’s mug on your wall next to, I don’t know, who do teenage girls like these days? Danny Bonaduce?

Over the course of the ten episodes (which, again, took me seven months to get through), you witness the seven Hargreeves children attempt to cope with the death of their abusive father, an event that brought them all together for the first time in adulthood. Each has their own (thin) backstory and their own way of dealing with the loss. The narrative gets chaotic when attempts to solve Reginald’s possible murder mixes in with attempts to save the world in eight days; mixes in Cha-Cha and Hazel’s attempts to assassinate Five; mixes in Vanya’s kanoodling with a love interest who repeatedly nudges her into activating her dormant powers (and he turns out to be an ex-murderer who will cause the apocalypse…maybe). Chaotic narrative != immersive television.

Put on your INTENSE face, it’s Rachmaninoff time.

With so much shit going on constantly, it becomes impossible to connect emotionally with any character in the family. Any one of them could have gotten horribly killed and I probably would’ve been in the bathroom while it was happening and not even notice for three episodes.

With that all said, my favorite characters are Hazel and Cha-Cha. Their chemistry is much more interesting than anything going on among the family members, and their particular scenes are slow enough by comparison to allow room for actual three-dimensional humanization beyond “I’M SAD ABOUT THIS” and “I’M MAD ABOUT THIS”. Hazel falls in love with a middle-aged owner of a donut shop, which causes him to reevaluate his whole existence as a time-travelling assassin. That adds a lot of tension in his relationship and Cha-Cha. I found it amusing to witness Hazel be this really calm, kind, thoughtful, and soft-spoken man throughout the whole season considering his line of work. And Mary J. Blige is an excellent foil, spending most of the season visibly frustrated with Hazel’s behavior.

Bliss comes old-fashioned style with sprinkles on top.

The season ends on a cliffhanger. The events that lead up to stopping Vanya from causing the apocalypse are actually the very mechanism that sets it in motion. Funny how that works, innit? So the family all hold hands and Five jumps them all in the past. Together, they’ll all try again.

Worth the Watch?

Eh. The Umbrella Academy has the kind of macabre, surreal campiness reminiscent of shows like Dead Like Me or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. While enjoyable enough, I find this kind of show hard to binge (obviously). These are the kinds of shows that are fun in the moment, but very hard to muster up some motivation to move on to the next episode. And when you aren’t watching it, you don’t really think about it.

I liked it enough plan on watching Season 2 some day. Possibly. Maybe.

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Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (Vol. 1), Issue #4 – “Shaman (Part 4)”

* Part 4 of 5 of the Shaman storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (Vol. 1), Issue #4 – “Shaman (Part 4)”! In the previous installment, a fiend is running around with a shaman bat mask shooting arrows at bitches. Batman gets one in the back and lives! Dr. Spurlock gets one in the back and dies!

Bruce visits the Alaskan village to try to get his bone on, only to discover the village hates his guts for funding Spurlock’s expedition, bringing Western bullshit to the little town, ruining the lady’s grandfather’s life, etc.

Then a car runs them off the road and they plunge into a lake. If this were real life, they’d all be killed instantly. But this isn’t real life, so Bruce is going to walk away without a scratch while No-Name Woman and her grandfather get killed. You can bet your butt.

Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (Vol. 1), Issue #4 [February, 1990]
Written by: Dennis O’Neil
“Shaman (Part 4)”

The cover art is getting more and more dire! The skeleton behind the man behind the mask behind the mask! Issue #5 is going to have just a neck stump with steam coming out of it at this rate.

We pick up EXACTLY where we left off! Well, not exactly. Where we left off, the car plunged into the water. Here, we see Bruce bailed from the car before it left the cliff! Clinging precariously onto a tree branch, he sees the car splash and decides that the woman and the old man must still be inside! No fucking shit, dude. Best detective in the room, right here.

Bruce sheds his coat and does a swan dive into the river. “For a moment, the chill is painful–” the narration describes. One of these days, some sucker in a work of fiction is going to dive into water sight unseen and break his neck. How often are these bodies of water deeper than three feet? Come on, now!

“–but almost instantly, the pain is gone.” Cool. Bruce has magic cold-blooded thermophysiology-changing powers now. Like a goddamn frog, he is.

So this white knight, he dives down to the car and rescues the woman first. “She may already be dead,” he thinks as he drags her body up to the bank of the river. No time to check now!

Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (Vol. 1), Issue #4

The Leaping Puma to the rescue!

Myself, I’d be content with saving only the one life. Good enough, call it a day! But no, Bruce needs to save both. How annoying.

So he leaps into the river and rescues this Bret Michaels-lookin’ floofy-haired headband-wearing shaman guy. The wind picks up, and their drenched bodies ain’t helping the staying-alive part of this whole adventure. Bruce retrieves his suitcase and accesses his Batman costume, where he keeps a butane lighter in his trusty utility belt! Good thinking, Mr. Wayne! Light them on fire!

No, not the victims! That won’t work, silly! So he looks around for giant rocks that might have some thickets dry enough to keep a flame going.

“The flame is tiny, frail. The cold is fierce. He must save the flame, nurture the flame–”

Be one with the flame. Caress the flame. Get inside the flame’s mind. Channel your own inner flamer.

Bruce notices the two of them shivering, which is a good sign. A good not-dead-yet sign. As good a sign as any. He grabs his apparently no longer shredded cape and plans to wrap both of them in it. The old man croaks out a request: “Tend to her.”

Why? Because the shaman, much like Bruce Wayne, has thermophysiological magic powers! So he’ll be ok, but the poor young woman. Yeesh. She’s got nothing going for her. Plus, she’s bleeding on top of catching hypothermia on top of having nothing going for her. She needs a doctor, stat! One of them real doctors, no offense sir. Bruce doesn’t mean to undermine your…you know, superstitious wacko ritualistic bullshit.

But desperate times call for desperate mystical powers. “Look, you once saved my life…” Bruce turns to the old drunk, “two years ago, when I was suffering from exposure…I had pneumonia…”

These are all true statements, very good! Unfortunately, the old man traded in his magic healing powers when he decided to dance for nickels in the town square. HOWEVER, sir, Brucey W., YOU know the healing story! Remember? He told it to you and then you blabbed about it first chance you got? Step up, bitch. And put on your mask.

Here, put that stupid thing on. That’ll help.

Bruce starts deflecting. He’s not a shaman, and that’s not a shaman mask! OK, well, close enough, right? It’s all snake oil, anyway, dummy. Put the mask on! Now’s not the time to be bashful, a lady is dying! Put it on!

…fine…

“And when the mask hides his face, he feels something surge–” What is it, his erection? No thanks.

This part’s pretty funny. He’s wearing the Batman mask and his ‘80s cable knit sweater trying to mumble his way through the Raven and Bat healing fable. He gets embarrassed and gives up, but the old man is like “no, look, see, she’s breathing better! Keep dancing the hokey-pokey.”
So he dances the hokey-pokey, and it works. That’s what it’s all about!

She hangs on long enough to find paramedics, they take her, everything is fine. Bruce does a lot of thinking. OR, maybe he does a lot of drinking. Sometimes they are one in the same.

Later, he visits her in the hospital. Need I remind everyone, we STILL do not know this woman’s name. Clearly no one thought it important enough for this reasonably important character to have a name. She’s got her head wrapped up in a large bandage. She has the cold, tired, dead eyes of Melania Trump, except with much more vibrancy!

I somehow survived having to look at that awful sweater.

Bruce starts grilling the poor woman. He wants to talk about two years ago, when her grandfather saved his life. There was another guy there too, right? Tom Woodley, the maniac who killed the best bounty hunter in town! The guy who was being bounty hunted in the first place! He survived his fall.

This is where Bruce rubs a couple of brain cells together and connects some dots. Dr. Madison Spurlock hired Woodley to help with some of the more…unseemly tasks. They had a falling out, but Woodley wanted revenge. He killed Spurlock and his assistant Mr. Fancypants Bennet Young.

With bows and arrows, mind you. Not a gun. That would be too hard to figure out! He stole those from Spurlock’s display.

“I’m not sure about the mask, though–” Bruce ponders. The woman confirms that Woodley, while insane, reveres the sacredness of said mask. He promised to return it. Which means, at some point, he’ll be returning to Otter Ridge. He’ll be killing two birds with one stone! And Bruce Wayne is one of those birds, because as the principal financier of the Spurlock adventure, he is also a likely target for Woodley! For some reason.

Time to go! He gives her one of those fatherly kisses on the forehead. For some reason.

Then he leaves. He cuts a check to the hospital to cover every medical expense incurred, and whatever’s left over can go to the hospital itself! That’s a lot of zeros on that check. Maybe start with better snacks in the vending machines.

At the local airport, Bruce telephones Alfred. It’s likely the middle of the night there. Alfred’s in his robe and slippies. Bruce will have “the information waiting for him” when he transfers in Anchorage. Meanwhile, there are still a few loose ends to tie up. Don’t wait up, Alfie!

Alfred hangs up the phone and heads back to his quarters. He discovers an open door on his way; an open door he was sure he had locked…

I’m not taking your money unless I earn it, sir, via very degrading sexual favors! Please? Hint hint.

Bruce spots his old man shaman buddy dancing like a dumbass in the middle of the terminal. He tries to give him money, and promises plenty more where that came from on a monthly basis, but the old man doesn’t want his dang pity! …but he WILL accept payment for another story that he’d like to land softly upon Bruce’s ears. *grabs cash*

“After Bat blew the sickness away from Raven, he collected it and blew it in the nest of Vulture. Vulture went away forever.”

That’s it! That’s the story? Know why? Because we can’t tell you a story with you blabbing to everyone, that’s why. So we’re giving you one of the short, dispensable stories we have lying around.

Shaman advises Bruce to “wear the mask” and “become the mask”. Like Jim Carrey. Also, find a way to blow the sickness into Vulture’s nest! It’s only fair. Vulture kind of sucks.

Later, Bruce is on his connecting flight riffling through Alfred’s collected records that all point to Santa Prisca as the Drug Capital of the Caribbean. But what’s really preoccupying him is getting rid of the Vulture. But what’s REALLY preoccupying him is the death of his parents! Perhaps that event was pivotal? What does everyone think about that?

Bruce calls home from the plane, and even his answering machine is snarky: “You have telephoned Wayne Manor. Kindly leave a message after you hear the ridiculous beep.” The RIDICULOUS beep! Alfred is even grumpy about an answering machine beep! Now there’s a man who misses his orgies.

Wayney is gonna stay downtown tonight, which is why he’s checking in with Alfred. He doesn’t want the little guy to worry. The Batman convention is in town and Bruce has got a costume ready!

Hey, sometimes you just need a break after spending a whole afternoon studying Winnie the Pooh.

As Batman, Bruce breaks into Tom Woodley’s house to do a little snoopy snooping. He grapples and tightropes his way to the top floor of the manor instead of, you know, going through the front door. That’s way less cool, I suppose.

In a giant room with a giant bookcase, he immediately discovers a tiny Winnie the Pooh book among the shelves and shelves of banking books. He pulls it, revealing a secret compartment, where he finds the secret exit to the bonus level. “If I ever use this gimmick, I’ll pick a better book,” Batman mutters, pretending to know how to read.

The secret compartment contains a gun, a bulletproof vest, a full Chubala Shaman costume complete with feathers and a large bird skull, a couple of Snickers bars, and a box of old pornography where the ladies have stretch marks and nicotine-stained teeth! Also, but really, a scrapbook with a press release that Bruce sent out after financing Spurlock’s expedition. “I think I just found my connection,” he thinks, not fully appreciating the convenience of finding literally everything he needed to find in one spot in a secret compartment in his assailant’s residence within two minutes.

So it all makes sense! Otter Ridge is where Woodley got the whole shaman idea in the first place. Then Woodley went to Santa Prisca to research the Chubala Shaman ritual so that he could profit off of it and kill people and sell drugs and eat Ritz Bits.

At this moment, Batman starts to hear voices. Either he forgot to take his atypical antipsychotic medication again, or the guards are hootin’ and hollerin’ in another room somewhere!

Lucky for Batman, he remembered to take his atypical antipsychotic medication.

Whoa, settle down there boys! You’re out of control!

Batman tries to get their attention by throwing shit around the room, but even the loudest of THUNKS is unheard by these arguing rent-a-cops! As a final gambit, Batman takes a Christmas tree and crashes it through a window! That’ll do it, sort of. They maybe heard something somewhere. They’re gonna go check it out.

“Oh, you caught me,” Batman says coyly, thinking he’s cute, when the two guards corner him in the study. He scares them both with some real TOUGH GUY ATTITUDE and the guards scurry away like frightened mice. Then Batman leaves! The sun is starting to come up.

I didn’t mention this yet, but there was a homely, middle-aged couple that was traipsing through the airport in Alaska while Bruce was talking to the old man, and we saw them again walking through the airport in Gotham while Bruce was leaving a message for Alfred. Had Bruce not been distracted, he would have noticed these two flapping their gums about “reporting something”. We see them now in their high-rise apartment building. Let’s check in on the conversation already in progress…

“BER-R-RNIE, I still think you shoulda reported it…”
“Shut up, Peaches. What’s this, you been buying stuff again? I told you, no more buying stuff– …a bat? You bought a dead bat?”
“I don’t think I bought it. Maybe it’s from your mother,” says Peaches, then notices Bernie has grabbed a note. “What’s it say, I don’t have my glasses.”
“’I know what you did in Alaska. I saw the license plate on your rental car and traced it. Give yourselves up.’”

The robust criminal masterminds you see before you have finally been taken down.

While Bernie and Peaches call the cops, the guards at Woodley’s manor speak to a private investigator about the “giant bat what terrorized us last night hyuk hyuk”. The P.I. is gonna check out the study…alone…so get the fuck out of here while he doesn’t something completely legal and not at all suspicious.

Among other things, the completely legal and not at all suspicious actions this P.I. takes are as follows: Access the secret compartment. Pour acid on the bulletproof vest. Replace the bullets in the gun with blanks. Attach a homing device to the costume. Sew non-lethal explosives to the costume. Sniff the costume.

The P.I., who looks like Martin Mull as Colonel Mustard by the way, leaves the study and reports back to the guards. He recommends a bunch of really expensive security gadgets, insults them without them even realizing it, and leaves.

HERE’S THE REVEAL! Mr. Bruce Wayne is a veritable Master of Disguise! Why, just two issues ago he was masquerading as a drunk homeless guy, and now he pulled off Martin Mull as a private investigator! Slick, man. Slick as the dickens.

Bruce telephones Alfred again to let him know that he’s heading home (and get dinner ready, he’s had a long day). For the second time, Alfred doesn’t pick up. Now that’s strange, Alfred is always picking up phones. He picks them up all day, left and right. There isn’t a phone around that Alfred won’t pick up. Something fishy is going on.

Well, it is Christmas Eve after all. Perhaps he’s churching it up. OR, maybe he’s dead from too many strange open doors that he thought he had locked? Either way, I’m sure he’s perfectly fine!

Whoops, no, he’s not fine at all! The Chubala Shaman has invaded the home and Alfred’s tied up and gagged and getting threatened with a knife as we speak! Merry Christmas!

Woodley is raving about stalking Bruce for a month. He’s seen him out of costume! He’s seen him in costume! And he wants revenge for getting bested in Issue #1. He almost got him at that construction site, but he plumb got away! Oh well, no matter, he’s dead soon. And you too, Butler Boy! Har har!

And there’s Bruce now, pulling up to the house!

“He comes through this door, I put a knife in him. I put it in his throat and watch him die.”

Final Thoughts

Oh no! That doesn’t sound very friendly at all! You better watch out, Woodley. Bruce is gonna spread the sickness to your Vulture’s nest.

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John Zorn, Anthony Braxton – A Tribute to Jazz’s Insufferable Nerds

Welcome again to AudioBiography, the feature where I squat over my laptop and spread music-related diarrhea all over the blog! Don’t forget to hit that ol’ Subscribe button!

*points to door that says “High Voltage”*

John Zorn

John Zorn was being an insufferable hipster nerd way before 21st century insufferable hipster nerds were continuing to be uncool with it.

When your extremely impressionable music listening years are dominated by an insatiable Zappa appetite like mine was, a large discography isn’t daunting. In fact, it’s enticing! And it doesn’t get much larger than John Zorn’s catalogue. Solo outputs, jazz ensembles, inaccessible grindcore projects, minimalist orchestral works, instrumental surf rock, etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum. I don’t remember exactly how I stumbled upon Zorn in around 2010. Perhaps it was my interest in the various Mike Patton projects that led me to the massive John Zorn discography page on Wikipedia? And that discography page has only doubled in the last twelve years. Easily.

It was difficult to get into him at first. I still hadn’t been exposed to too much EXTREEEEEME or avantgarde music yet; not even that much free jazz or modern classical either, so albums like The Classic Guide to Strategy and Locus Solus and Cobra were tough nuts to crack. I gravitated toward the more accessible Masada project, a phenomenal mix of experimental jazz and klezmer that was eye-opening and rewarding. Even stuff like Naked City and Painkiller were too out-there for me, but I have this really pesky tendency to persist for years until things start clicking. Admittedly, the idea of liking Zorn was more motivating than liking Zorn himself. It was the immature pursuit of a badge of honor that kept me going.

I don’t know when I realized I actually started legitimately loving the guy. What first appeared to be a giant collection of same-y material slowly revealed itself to be richly diverse body of work. A richly diverse body of work that draws most of its inspiration from the Jewish scales, but diverse all the same. I’ve always been naturally drawn toward the various scales of the Eastern European / Middle Eastern traditions. Zorn delivers. There’s some Ennio Morricone influence too, that’s fun.

Even though I’ve binged hardcore on Zorn in recent weeks, I’ve barely scratched the surface on albums I haven’t heard yet. Some day he’ll die and I’ll finally be able to catch up.

Anthony Braxton

Speaking of nerds, presenting jazz’s earliest completely unapologetic insufferable hipster nerd.

Anthony Braxton: the guy who was Zorning before Zorn even started Zorning. Braxton gets lumped in with the free jazz movement, but he’s so much more than that. His active years began after free jazz was already widely established by greats like Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, and Cecil Taylor, but his approach is and was always more calculated and methodical. Therefore, being the insufferable hipster nerd that I am, this resonates with me profoundly. And it must have resonated for John Zorn too, because Braxton’s groundbreaking For Alto record is why Zorn picked up the saxophone in the first place.

While John Zorn’s work is greatly influenced by his Jewish heritage, Braxton’s work doesn’t seem to be influenced by his own heritage at all. In fact, this dork was super into space travel and electronics. He spent a lot of time tinkering with circuit boards and studying wiring schematics and taking drafting classes. He found the idea of composing music akin to developing engineering prints and drawings. His compositions have incredibly creative names like “Opus 40M” and” 308M-64 / 30 / C4DM(R)- Z”. Sometimes they don’t even have titles; sometimes his titles are literally, literally, just drawings that look like abstract molecule diagrams. His improvisations are like little games where he invents systems with sets of rules and organized classifications. His orchestras are laboratories where he can conduct live experiments, dismantling and rebuilding composed pieces as if they were machinery parts.

I love that I guy like Anthony Braxton exists. As a terminally open-minded music listener with a deep background in STEM disciplines and total comfort with his obsessive-compulsive left-brain tendencies, this guy is my guy. A kindred fucking spirit. The music being so chaotic and satisfying and excellent is just the icing on the cake for me; his take on jazz and classical music is thoroughly engaging and exciting. And his discography is just as vast and varied as Zorn’s. Some day he’ll die too and I’ll finally be able to catch up.

Other Quick Thoughts

I said it before and I’ll say it again: This guy absolutely does not get laid.

-Man, I’m on such a jazz kick lately that I haven’t mustered up desire to listen to much else. I usually stick to the tried-and-true classics from the bebop era forward, my favorites being Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, and Dexter Gordon. Passing interest in Charles Mingus, Cannonball Adderley, Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry, Bill Evans, Sonny Rollins, Pharaoh Sanders, and Freddie Hubbard. I’m not the biggest fan of jazz fusion, so Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock can take a hike! Modern jazz artists? Mary Halvorson is cool. Avishai Cohen is all right. Kamasi Washington is fine. Esperanza Spalding is interesting. Tigran Hamasyan has got it goin’ on. Jaga Jazzist? BOO!

-All that jazz has taken my attention away from everything else right now, including, much to my chagrin, new releases. I just don’t feel like listening to new shit these. I’m sure the new Jack White “slaps”. I’m sure the new Lizzo “goes hard”. I’m sure the new Alan Parsons solo album is a “banger” that’s really “jake” with the “droogs”. But I dunno, nothing new sounds particularly interesting to me at the moment. These phases last a month at most, usually. WE SHALL SEE. Until I get my groove back, Newer Release Roundup will be updated sporadically.

All right, thanks for reading! Stay tuned for the next AudioBiography installment where I discuss Gordon Lightfoot’s hip-hop era, which was just an excuse for him to use excessive racial slurs!

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Ms. Marvel (Vol. 3), Issue #7 – “Healing Factor (Part 2)”

* Part 2 of 2 of the Healing Factor storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Ms. Marvel (Vol. 3), Issue #7 – “Healing Factor (Part 2)”! In the previous installment, after getting barely a lecture from Sheikh Abdullah, Kamala hears strange growling noises within Jersey City’s famous World’s Largest Pothole and suits up to investigate the sewers. There she meets a hologram of the Thomas Edison clone, aka the Inventor, aka the Birdman of Menlo Park, who intends to keep her alive to do nasty experiments upon her mutant teenage existence. She’s like “fuck that” and books it.

She also meets Wolverine, who is in the middle of tracking down a missing runaway from the Jean Grey School of I-Think-Professor-Xavier-Is-Dead-These-Days, so it was renamed. They team-up, fulfilling Sheikh’s advice to find a teacher to help Kamala get better at helping. AND THEN Wolverine gets hurt and now Kamala has to fight a giant alligator alone.

Kamala Khan has an audience! Wolverine is watching, she best not screw this one up.

Ms. Marvel (Vol. 3), Issue #7 [October, 2014]
Written by: G. Willow Wilson
“Healing Factor (Part 2)”

Fantastic cover art. Although she’s holding the phone with the wrong hand, UNLESS she has the camera view un-mirrored. Which nobody would ever do unless they’re a lunatic. OR, maybe she’s fondly viewing a photo taken earlier. Wolverine has never looked happier, I must say.

RECAP!

“Kamala Khan has always felt different. Nerdy interests, strict parents, and now…strange poly-morphing powers. She found out that the villain after her is a bird/human hybrid clone of Thomas Edison…yup. Luckily for her, Wolverine is on the case and is totally her friend now! Not so luckily, he doesn’t have healing factor and there’s a giant gator about to attack them. Bummer.”

G. Willow Wilson, speaking fluently the language of the kids these days.

Obviously, this is the doing of Thomas Edison the Bird, siccing a giant alligator on our heroes to keep them busy while he continues his various eugenic endeavors. Even with the alligator snapping its jaws, looking to really tear these two new assholes, Ms. Marvel is, and I quote, “trying not to squee” in the presence of Wolverine.

Even though Wolverine is hurt, he’s gonna take this beast on. Ms. Marvel, trembling, advises him to let her handle it. She’s got a plan! It’s to run away, how’s that sound? Let’s just run away. Byeeee.

Oh look, the 130-year-old superhero made a funny.

Nope! Wrong! Here’s what Wolverine wants her to try doing: poke its eyes for a bit. Get up there and kind of rattle those eyeballs around. He’ll try to head it off. Or something. Whatever. It’ll all work out, kid, trust him.

Ms. Marvel is on top of the monster, panicking as the dickens, trying to figure out what the hell to do. “This is gonna be so gross–” she cringes as she gets close to one of its enormous, yellow eyeballs…

She plunges an extendo-arm deep into the eyeball with a loud “SPLOOSH!”, which sends the gargantuan reptile into a frenzied…sadness. It looks sad now, like it’s crying. Marvel gets thrown off its head, landing what looks rather painfully into the water below.

Now it’s Wolverine’s oh-shit moment. He’s hurt, the alligator is hurt and mad, and Ms. Marvel is possibly hurt and/or dead and/or needs some kind of Wolverine-related assistance at any rate.

“How’s that one line about death go? ‘Biting the big one.’ Guess this is what fancy people call literalism,” muses Wolverine as the alligator’s open jaws ready themselves to chomp him like a tasty, albeit a bit hairy and pointy, morsel.

The alligator misses Wolverine by about three inches. Roughly twice the length of Cyclops’ cock, if nobody here is mistaken! Something pulled the creature back a little bit at the last minute. OUR HEROINE. Little Ms. Muffet, she pulled the alligator back with its tail. “Get–back– you giant– lizard!” she pants and puffs and groans and moans and huffs and fluffs! With long, spindly legs, she run up its back, clamps onto the top jaw and yells for Wolverine to do his “claw thingy”. Wolverine, indeed, does his claw thingy. SNIKT! I never get tired of that sound effect.

So he rips the alligator up a bit, it falls into the water, along with Wolvy, along with Ms. Marbles, then she gets out, then she helps him out, then the fight is over. Hooray team, good job, let’s all go out for a round of frosty chocolate milkshakes!

Kid, you don’t even want to know how many cute little baby ducks I’ve had to fucking pulverize in my time. Just crushed to paste.

Ms. Marvel hates that the whole superhero schtick has to involve hurting people, or animals, or places, or things, or vegetables, or minerals once in a while. That’s life, though. “It all circles around. The hurt, I mean,” Wolverine lays down some tribal knowledge, “Sometimes you can avoid hurting other people, but it usually means you get hurt pretty bad instead.”

He grabs his aching butt, which has aching-butt lightning bolts drawn next to it. The universal symbols for “ouch, my butt”.

“The pain’s gotta go somewhere,” Wolverine says. Ms. Marvel doesn’t want to believe that, but it’s true. She’s still young, but she’ll come around on that eventually.

Anyhoo, time to scurry. The closest sewer exit is blocked off by giant fallen rocks, so they’ll need to traipse through more of the sewer to find another way out. There could be more ghoulies and ghosties and fecalpheliacs and god knows what else in here. “Now might not be the best time to say this, but even without a few torn ligaments, I’m not the best swimmer,” bemoans the grumpy Wolverine. That’s ok! You can ride on Ms. Marvel’s back! He weighs about 700 pounds, but they’ll make it unless she collapses and dies right here in the sewer like a little loser. And we can’t have that happen, can we?

“How did you lose your healing factor anyway?” she asks during this perfect time to break the ice a little and share a stronger bond (so she can tweet about it later, probably). He says it’s a long story, perhaps one to read about in some other ongoing series, but the moral of the story is “appreciate it while you got it”. Healing is the only thing worth piffle. Everything else is flashy and stupid. ESPECIALLY those Cyclops plasma eyeballs. Fuck that guy.

They encounter an opening in the ceiling that looks like it leads outside. She stretches up enough for Wolverine to grab onto the ladder. It’s a tight fit, and it looks like it twists and turns. “You claustrophobic?” Wolverine asks his fresh-faced companion, and she’s too excited at this point to care. In she goes.

On their way up and out, Wolverine asks what Ms. Marvel is doing with Carol Danvers’ old moniker anyway? Seems pretty haughty, eh? Well, Kamala has looked up to Ms. Danvers her whole life. “And when she came to New York and all that stuff went down, I felt like she was the bravest person who ever lived.”

There’s an editor’s comment with respect to the “all that stuff” mentioned. I was advised to check out Captain Marvel Issue #17. So if I ever get around to that, you’ll see a link right there! Thanks for playing.

Anyway, becoming Ms. Marvel felt like it was necessary to emulate Carol Danvers. Then, after a bit of time, Kamala learned that she could just be herself, y’know? She doesn’t have to pretend to be anyone else.

“But you’re wearing a mask,” Wolverine observes, attempting to poke holes in Kamala’s teenage sense-of-self discovery like a grumpy asshole. Well, duh, sir, it’s because Kamala’s parents would lose their collective shits if they found out their daughter was gallivanting around the Jersey City sewers in spandex.

I’ve been to Vietnam, kid. I’ve paid good money for a glass bottomed boat.

They’ve almost made their way out of there, seeing a grate on the ceiling with sunlight poking through, indicating passage back to the outside world.

Then a metal door slams shut over the grate, trapping them. A TV screen, one of them 35” LCD flat screens I’d say, flips to a broadcast of Mr. Chicken Man Edison. “Greetings, my dears. I see you’ve bested my megagator. I’m very impressed. By you, I mean. Less so by the megagator.”

Chicken McEdison yammers on about how the big hungry alligator was the first trial, but now try getting out of THIS! Ha ha! And so forth.

The walls start slowly closing in on them, like this is a level from Sonic the Hedgehog and Dr. Robotnik is actually a cockatiel. Wolverine can be Tails.

“This maniac’s gotta have some power source,” Wolverine mumbles as he rips the TV off the wall, exposing many electrical components, “If we shut it down maybe we can stop the walls from turning us into jelly.”

Both are at a lost with this one, though, since neither graduated high school for vastly different reasons. Wolverine tries tearing a wire out with his hands, which gets him all sorts of electrocuted and, if he weren’t a freakish mutant about town, likely dead. But he doesn’t die. He just goes “Rrrrrrgghhh!”. Ms. Marvel tries her hand and pulling out wires too, which gets her all sorts of electrocuted and…you know the rest. “It’s like being snapped with a rubber band, except a thousand times worse and all over,” she thinks as her healing factor starts sapping energy out of her muscles. Honestly, it’s almost worse than getting hurt. Wolverine’s starting to admire this kid’s spunk!

Wolverine has a new idea. He helps her not-at-all-charred not-at-all-a-corpse up and asks her to shrink down and walk through the opening to find a power source.

And she finds a power source all right.

Great, another living thing I’m going to have to poke the eye out of.

“Is this what the Inventor is doing with all those missing kids? Hooking them up to machines?” she asks herself. Another one of those meddlesome robot bugs arrives to harsh Ms. Marvel’s mellow, snipping and snapping around the little pool. Ms. Marvel is starting to wonder if this Inventor is not a great guy at all!

Miss Marple punches the thing into robot crumbs, but another one across the pool zaps her with its Robot Scorpion Laser. She’s thrown back hard enough to punch a hole through the wall.

The hole is big enough for Wolverine to jump through! “RRRAAAHH!” Snikt snikt, mother fuckers.

Wolverine recognizes the Power Source Girl as Julie, his missing Mutant School runaway. She’s still alive, but in somewhat of a stupor. “There– there are others–” she grunts in Wolverine’s arms. Others what? Other sandwiches? Other triangles? Other doctrines of Christian Science? Gotta help Wolverine out here a little bit, sweetheart, he didn’t graduate high school you know.

Gah, too late. Julie’s out cold now! What a bitch, right?! Wolverine’s gonna get her to a hospital, Ms. Marvel wants to play in the sewers a little bit longer. Oh yeah, and find others. Heh heh. That too, certainly.

Wolverine tells her to take a break, but Ms. Marvel refuses. She goes all Batman on him. This is MY city! Jersey City is MY city! I don’t want anyone fucking with MY city! And so forth. Superheroes and their cities, my god. Relax.

Wait, what’s this about a tarragon bomb? It didn’t smell like a French restaurant to me!…well, maybe it did…

Ms. Marvel is sure that she’ll be hanging around so much more to investigate. After Wolverine shows his initial surprise about the terrigen-induced superpowers, he quickly pivots and changes the subject. Fine, she can do her thing, “but this ain’t a game. I’m gonna keep an eye on you,” he warns, training his wary eye on the teenager before leaving.

“When the student is ready, the master will appear,” Kamala ruminates of Sheikh Abdullah’s impossibly good advice. Even a slow clock is right once in a long while, eh? Things seem to be going pretty…pretty…pretty……. pretty good.

But of course, here comes the standard END-OF-ISSUE TWIST that always happens once the hero is led into a false sense of security. ATTALIN. Hudson River. New York/New Jersey border. Some spaced-out costumed lady with red hair looks over the river from her window, talking to herself. “The river is so quiet at night. So deceptive. You can’t tell what might be happening…just beneath the surface.”

Then STEVE FUCKING ROGERS enters the room, because God knows he needs to be in every Marvel series for some reason, to talk to this woman. “Wolverine just called. Seems he’s found a young Inhuman patrolling New Jersey. Says she’s got no idea what she is.”

This spaced out red-haired lady is like, really? Another one? They’re like cockroaches. This one’s not like the other ones, though. She’s special enough to warrant Wolverine actually picking up the phone. That must be pretty damn special. The red-haired lady wants her sent over right away for special training. “I don’t think that’s what Logan had in mind,” Steve says. Wolverine considers this new youngin’ as stubborn as himself. Says she wants to learn things on her own.

However, the red-haired lady argues placidly that Ms. Marvel needs a companion. “Someone to help her, and to be my eyes and ears while she grows into her power.”

And she knows just the…thing.

Lockjaw! A giant dog.

Final Thoughts

Inhumans! There’s a whole big event about that! Here, I’ll do the link thing here too, so you’ll see a link to the big multi-series Inhumanity crossover event somewhere in this paragraph if I ever get around to reading and writing about it! Even if it’s 20 years from now! That’s called magic, my friend.

Ms. Marvel gonna get a doggie. That’s cool I guess. Good for her.

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Ms. Marvel (Vol. 3), Issue #8 – “Generation Why (Part 1)”

Ms. Marvel (Vol. 3), Issue #8 [November, 2014]
Written by: G. Willow Wilson
“Generation Why (Part 1)”

Final Thoughts

The Umbrella Academy, Season 1 – Depression and Daddy Issues

The Premise

My Half-Baked Thoughts

Worth the Watch?

Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (Vol. 1), Issue #4 – “Shaman (Part 4)”

Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (Vol. 1), Issue #4 [February, 1990]
Written by: Dennis O’Neil
“Shaman (Part 4)”

Final Thoughts