Sucky Funnies for April 3, 2022

In the United States, the average salary for a newspaper comic strip artist today is $51,650, with the range between $10,545 – $263,465. That’s a huge spread. I like to think the artist making $263,465 is Peter Gallagher of Heathcliff, and he’s making $200,000 more than the next-highest paid artist.

I also like to think that the Marmaduke guy and the Blondie guy have to split the $10,545.

Sally Forth

Sally Forth - April 3, 2022

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The worst part about being a responsible adult is the awareness of just how little of one’s sad, anxious existence comprises of unadulterated free time. Take my life, for instance. I have a career and a family. I spend exactly twenty minutes a day doing what I want to do, and even then I don’t entirely know if I’m doing exactly what I want to do anyway. I’ve fantasized about downloading Portal for my Xbox 360 for the last six months. One of these days I might do it when I have the time, and I’ll find out it’s not what I wanted to do at all.

Sally might not be spending her hour fantasizing about downloading Portal for her Xbox 360, but at least she knows what she wants: an hour on the couch with Ted fucking gone. Get the fuck out of there Ted. Go find a mistress to bang or something. Jesus Christ, why does a family have to have people in it? Criminy.

Garfield

Garfield - April 3, 2022

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I’m old enough to remember that Jon Arbuckle was originally terminally single. I guess Liz the Veterinarian has been dating Jon since 2006? Holy cow. Their relationship is old enough to have its own driver’s license.

So that means there’s almost two decades of Liz putting up with both Jon’s and Garfield’s shit, which can’t be easy. That’s a full-time job. And you know that, in about 20 minutes, Liz is going to have to help Jon extract himself from the giant, gooey marshmallow that he’ll inevitably accidentally fall into. His flesh will be 96% covered in third-degree burns. Maybe then she’ll finally break up with him.

Daddy Daze

Daddy Daze - April 3, 2022

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I suppose I always assumed the mom from Daddy Daze was dead, but I guess it makes way more sense that the couple is divorced. Every time I read what this guy has to say, he seems desperate for the attention. Like, he gets bit by his kid and the first thing he thinks to speak about out loud when he has an audience is his family’s history of terrible people. And he’s proud of it too.

So if lying, cheating, and swindling runs in the family, which combination of three do you think resulted in the divorce? Now there’s a topic for rich Daddy Daze discussion.


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Supergirl (Vol. 6), Issue #2

Supergirl (Vol. 6), Issue #2 – “Reunion”

* Part 2 of 7 of the Last Daughter of Krypton storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Supergirl (Vol. 6), Issue #2 – “Reunion”! In the previous installment, Supergirl crash lands (so to speak) in Russia from space. She was in a dang meteorite! She doesn’t know what happened, how she got there, why, when, where, who, how, what, when, why, what, and where. Well, she knows who she is. But the rest is a mystery.

Some army fucks in robot suits terrorize her for about 15 pages, but she kicks all their asses by accident because she’s on the yellow sun planet or something. I still don’t know the whole mythology there. Before the robot suit army men bring her in, Superman shows up to save the day! Like a man.

So there’s much more to learn. I hope Superman stays out of it, though. That guy kinda sucks, actually.

Supergirl (Vol. 6), Issue #2 [December, 2011]
Written by: Michael Green & Mike Johnson
“Reunion”

Supergirl (Vol. 6), Issue #2

LOOK AT THAT COVER! Best cover I’ve seen yet! FUCK HIS ASS UP, KARA! BREAK ALL HIS PERFECT TEETH!

Flashback to three days before the events of Issue #1. Kara “Supergirl” Travolta-Zeta-Jones is angsty because she has to babysit her infant cousin Kal-El instead of studying for her trials like she should be. But, obviously, it’s all a smokescreen! She’d rather procrastinate on those anyway. Whatever they are.

Once she passes her trials, she’ll get to wear her family crest (probably a dumb Letter ‘S’ affair) and take on all the responsibilities that come with it (probably beating people up). She looks at her drooling cousin and realizes, in awe, that he’ll do the same someday.

“Kal-El” is Superman’s name, right?

So Supergirl is older than Superman? I thought she was an illegitimate daughter or something. A product of some one-night stand bonin’? Guess not.

Now, she’s on Earth, three days later, looking her cousin in the face. He looks 40. She’s all in a tizzy. Like she didn’t have enough weird stuff going on in the immediate present to worry about on top of this.

Superman asks who she is, and Supergirl turns the tables. She DEMANDS to know who HE is and WHY he’s wearing the FAMILY CREST! He tells her to calm down (dumb move, dummy), and she tells him to go eat a bag of chicken necks! “Don’t tell me what to do!” she yells, and asks again where she is, how she got here, and where the rest of her family is.

Supergirl (Vol. 6), Issue #2

<And you can go <suck> a <<dick>>, you horrible man!>

Superman turns the tables now. HE wants to know why SHE’S wearing the family crest.

You get the picture. This goes on for a bit of time. She finally backs off and answers the question: “I am Fleep Florp of Planet Blurt Blizz”. That’s basically what I see here. I hate the Superman naming conventions. “I’m Kara Zor-El! From Argo City! On Krypton!” she hisses, looking like angry Maria Bamford. Pretty uncanny, actually.

Supergirl tells him that she doesn’t know what the hell is going on. She woke up here, these machines started attacking, now her eyesight and hearing is all out of whack. Superman, not a fan of believing women, says “Impossible…”, but starts opening his mind to the possibility that this girl is his older cousin. SO HE STARTS HITTING ON HER!! HA HA! WELCOME TO KENTUCKY!

No, ok, he fishes for more information to confirm her identity. He admits to her that he is Kal-El, son of Jor-El and Lara. Nice to see ya again! She doesn’t take this well, screams “LIAR!” and pops him right in the face. The blow sends him flying 50 feet, plowing through a few tree trunks along the way. “…ouch.” he grimaces.

Supergirl (Vol. 6), Issue #2

What’s Kara gonna do next? Spit in the wind? Mess around with Jim?

But Supergirl’s not done yet. She tugs on Superman’s cape, against the advice of Jim Croce, and kindly informs him (read: yells at him while throwing him around some more) that Kal-El is a baby! A baby that, three days ago, she was holding in her arms! Bitch! Take that, bitch ass! “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH HIM!” she screams, breaking a few more trees with his…uh, bulk.

Off in the distance, far from the woods where the “BOOOM” and “KRAKK” sounds of Superman getting thoroughly destroyed rattle the crisp air, a couple of those soldiers assess the crazy situation. One soldier has checked in as ok after being punched to Mongolia by this skinny 103-lb firecracker! Nobody was expecting these ultrastrong weirdos to show up. “We secured the primary target from the crater. The girl can wait.” says one of them. Not sure yet who the primary target is. I hope it’s Jon Hamm.

It’s really funny how Superman is just getting his ass all torn up. Supergirl all up in that ass. While he’s on the ground getting his face pummeled, getting yelled at because Kal-El is a baby, she freaks out because she can suddenly see her bones. I’m not kidding.

I guess she doesn’t have X-Ray vision on Krypton. She thinks that’s weird and unsettling and stops punching Superman long enough for him to hoist his limp heft off of the snowy ground.

Supergirl (Vol. 6), Issue #2

We can all see our bones, lady. Welcome to Earth.

He starts mansplaining X-Ray vision to her. Just one of the many new awesome features the yellow sun brings to a Kryptonian individual. Same thing happened to him, you see, but it took longer than 45 minutes for it all to happen to him. So now it’s his turn to be weird and demanding! “How did you get here?” he asks, and I seem to remember her already asking this to HIM. In fact, she did, right after “Don’t tell me what to do!”. Superman ain’t smart, my friends. Don’t let anyone say otherwise.

Supergirl thinks to herself that this douche’s accent doesn’t sound authentic. Like he learned Kryptonian from a textbook. Fuck this guy.

So she lunges at him again. He’s had enough of that and finally grabs her and throws her a few thousand feet up in the air. She doesn’t like the taste of her own bitter medicine! As she hurtles toward the cosmos, she realizes that she’ll now either escape orbit or plummet back to the ground with a wet thud. She does neither. She floats in the clouds, mesmerized by her flying powers.

But, as soon as she thinks too hard about it, she starts falling back to Earth. Superman catches her, still up in the clouds, and tells her that it’s time to talk. No more time for games.

But fuck that! She punches him again! Holy Hell, dude.

Supergirl (Vol. 6), Issue #2

Get KRAKed, nerd!

After a few more panels of tussling, Supergirl decides to try to get away from this loser instead of fighting back. She needs to find her pod, the one she came in, to see if she can fly back home somehow. As she flies around the Great Wall of China, WE THE AUDIENCE KNOW that she’s nowhere near her landing site, but SHE DOESN’T KNOW! LOL! Gotta be from Earth to appreciate it, I guess!

As she flies around the Great Wall, wondering what kind of “ruins” they could be, she bumps face first into Superman again. That guy just won’t leave well enough alone, will he? He tries again to reason with her. “If you are who you say you are, I can help you.” he bargains, “But the more you fight, the less I believe you.” And, at this, she finally gives in. “Okay…but…the thing is…”

Psyche! She throws his ass through the Great Wall. “I DON’T NEED YOUR HELP!” And he hurtles through the wall 15 times over. Every time the wall curves back into his path, he blasts right through it. It’s fantastic. This is my favorite issue of anything I’ve read so far! Make a note of that.

Supergirl starts thinking to herself about what her father told her about General Zod. About his plans to create a new kind of soldier. Perhaps this maniac is one of them? Could be. She sees his shadow looming toward her and prepares to fight again, but it turns out to be a man and his child scrambling around the wreckage of the wall. She notices a whole bunch of other people starting to group around the damage, and she realizes now that she has destroyed a part of their home.

Supergirl (Vol. 6), Issue #2

Wimp.

And then she’s all “I’M A MONSTEEER!” like Buster Bluth.

And Superman, always taking the moral high ground like an asshole tells her that they will no longer fight before there are too many innocent lives at stake here. At last, the angsty teenager calms the fuck down and allows Supertramp to show her how great a place the Earth is (pfft). He talks about Worldkillers, a group of warriors I’m not aware of that were a threat to Krypton before they were no longer a threat to Krypton anymore for some reason. He lets her know that, on Planet Earth, with that yellow sun, they have the strength of Worldkillers…and they must be careful. Ergo, stop throwing people through Great Walls.

She’s like “Why don’t you go back to Krypton, ya dummy?”, and Superman makes a face like Mr. Horse from Ren & Stimpy and tells her that the planet done blowed up real good. That shit sucks, I guess, if you like your planet and everything. Frankly, Earth could use a little bit of the Krypton treatment. It would do it some good.

Elsewhere, at some unknown research center, a woman approaches an unseen man to let him know that the “artifact” they retrieved from the “pod” is “safe to handle now”. He is happy about this and holds up the artifact.

It looks like a big red dildo.

Final Thoughts

lmao


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Only Murders in the Building, Season 1 – Podcast-Obsessed Sad People

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: Only Murders in the Building, Season 1 (2021) (Hulu)
“She is… how do I put this politely… reverse helpful.”

Only Murders in the Building - Season 1
Hey guys, remember podcasts? It’s like radio, except you can listen to episodes of your favorite show whenever you want! Haha! Well, septuagenarians Steve Martin and Martin Short know about podcasts, and they also know about murder, so they combined the two like peanut butter and jelly and made us all a murder mystery show! Even if it did debut seven years after Serial came out! Even if it did debut five years after Serial‘s peak popularity! Whatever, it takes a while to make a show, you guys.

The Premise

Steve Martin plays Charles Haden-Savage, a washed-up TV actor who starred in his own ’90s Kojak-like detective show Brazzos. Martin Short plays Oliver Putnam, a washed-up Broadway director who is basically just 70-year-old Martin Short. Martin Short plays himself. Selena Gomez is Mabel Mora, a young woman living in her aunt’s apartment while she works on renovating it. She says “fuck” a lot, breaking away from the squeaky clean Disney Channel upbringing that likely screwed her mind up significantly and permanently. Their shared love of the same murder-themed podcast brings them together, and a mysterious murder in the apartment building that they share only brings them even togetherererer. Hilarity and antics ensue. Martin Short often raises his voice flamboyantly. Steve Martin acts like kind of a dumb guy. Selena Gomez is visibly unhappy that she has to spend a lot of time with two men who are forty years older that her. Nathan Lane is in it too, he’s the best part of the show!

Only Murders in the Building - Season 1

Cower, my friends, in the intimidating presence of Nathan Lane.

My Half-Baked Thoughts

I unironically really like Martin Short, only kind of like Steve Martin, and I couldn’t care less much about Selena Gomez. I tried to imagine Chevy Chase playing a role in this and I couldn’t picture it whatsoever. Never mind the fact that Chevy Chase is Hollywood’s Biggest Asshole Whom Nobody Wants to Work With Anymore and, Frankly, Nobody Would Mind if He Just Keeled Over and Died Tomorrow Following a Fentanyl Overdose (Laced with Heroin and Crushed-Up Sweet Tarts), but he also looks like Dick Cheney now and nobody wants to see that face on their TV screens anymore. They’d shoot their sets like Elvis.

The show’s plot, though, I’m a bit lukewarm over it. I’m not much of a murder mystery kinda guy in the first place, and I’m not particularly interested the kind of investigative reporting that gets packaged as a 20/20 or Dateline special, or a podcast series. Usually, my morbid curiosity of these kinds of stories begins and ends at a Wikipedia article. FOR INSTANCE, I’d rather read about the whole JonBenét Ramsey thing than hear someone talk at me about it! That one’s a real humdinger, though. Absolutely nothing about it makes any sense STILL after over 25 years! It’s insane.

Only Murders in the Building - Season 1

Our three heroes meet in the elevator. From this point, the plot thickens like so much starchy gravy.

However, plot aside and all the various twists and turns therein, there’s much that I did enjoy to make it all worth it in the end. The relationship dynamics among the characters, specifically between Oliver Putnam and literally anybody Oliver Putnam came into contact with, were tremendously entertaining. Clearly, the old guys stole the show. Steve Martin’s strengths with playing the straight man, undercut by occasional moments of absurdity, reach the climax in the season finale when he lumbers around on his back during his gas leak-addled urgency. Martin Short is just as cartoonish as he always is, yelling like an easily frustrated lunatic. Both these guys have aged well into their schticks, having based their respective comedy careers on the “young guy acting like a complete idiot” character. Now they’re old guys acting like complete idiots and it suits them well.

Speaking of old guys stealing the show, the constant references to Sting were fantastic. What was it, episode four or five, where they actually questioned him in his apartment to rule him out as a suspect? I would have lost my shit if they circled back around to him, nabbing him as the killer all along. Also, in real life. We can’t rule out that Sting didn’t fucking murder someone back in the ’70s.

Only Murders in the Building - Season 1

Tim Kono is dead, and the Chief of the Police is a suspect!

Oh yeah, and Amy Ryan, aka Beadie Russell from The Wire, aka Holly Flax from The Office, aka Jan the unassuming bassoonist from Only Murders in the Building, she does a good job of playing a role that reminds me exactly of my own grandmother. Right down to the pleasant smile and the homicidal tendencies! Haha, but I kid! Hey, there’s a spoiler for you. Shouldn’t have read this, should you?

Worth the Watch?

I will watch Season 2 if none of these actors dies by then! I went into this show expecting fluff, and that’s exactly what I got. It did the job.

If you like murder podcasts or Dateline specials, you’ll like this more than I did. I was only in it for the funny joke-abouts.


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Avengers (Vol. 5), Issue #5

Avengers (Vol. 5), Issue #5 – “Superguardian”

* Part 5 of 6 of the Avengers World storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Avengers (Vol. 5), Issue #5 – “Superguardian”! In the previous installment, we read about Hyperion’s stupid origin story (with respect to his presence on Earth, that is), and the Avengers travel to one of Ex Nihilo’s impact sites in order to kick around some scientists who are running experiments on the contaminated land. After successfully removing the threat and quarantining the land, the Avengers think they have all the sites contained.

But there’s a seventh site in Norway…

Oh no!

Avengers (Vol. 5), Issue #5 [April, 2013]
Written by: Jonathan Hickman
“Superguardian”

Avengers (Vol. 5), Issue #5

“PREVIOUSLY ON AVENGERS”: “We have to get bigger,” says Tony Stark, talking about his and Steve Rogers’ penises again.

“OUTER SPACE. THEN.” announces a flashback sequence. Some nerds dressed up as Stargate Jaffa warriors are trying to fix a Stargate portal. I’m being absolutely serious here. It seems ridiculous, but here we are. Someone should alert Richard Dean Anderson’s fat ass on the double.

One guy announces that the Stargate is broken and the world is now lost. A lady says that Earth needs to be warned, so she sends Smasher to let Earth know that “Immundra has fallen”. That sounds like something that nobody on Earth is going to care about. Imagine trying to tell Lindsey Graham or Vladimir Putin or, like, Kanye West, that Immundra has fallen. They’ll tell you to eat your own shit.

Something explodes two seconds after Smasher vows that he will not fail, so LOL. A bunch of people die. LOL.

Avengers (Vol. 5), Issue #4

Not Pictured: The Smasher failing miserably literally one panel later.

“Here’s something they don’t teach you in school in Iowa, or Colorado…or anywhere else on Earth for that matter.” begins the very USA-centric narration, “Synthetic tri-plate spectra-forms are actually organic constructs.” Gee, I could’ve really used that information during my Iowa/Colorado schooling.

Anyway, the dead Smasher guy with his smashed-up red eyeball lenses are shown on the ground. We see a cracked piece of the lens morph into a pair of red goggles. We see a young woman, clad in plaid, the uniform of the farmgirl, spot them and pick them up in the middle of a large cornfield. “Huh.” she says.

GRIPPING STORYTELLING SO FAR! Are we done yet? Ha! Just funnin’. I love comic books! (?)

So this lady’s on an Iowa farm, and her name is Izzy. She returns to her farmhouse to try to tell her dad about these cool-ass specs, but he has to go out and fuck the pigs or whatever it is farmers do on their farms, so he’ll have to hear about it all from her later. Her grandfather is hacking and wheezing in the kitchen, hooked up to oxygen and lookin’ like Hector Salamanca from Breaking Bad. She spoons up a couple of bowls of soup and sits down to talk with Gramps.

He grumpily asks her why the hell she still lives on the farm. Izzy’s mom died a few years ago, and she dropped out of school to help out, but Gramps says it’s time to blow this popsicle stand! Farms are the worst, I agree. Go literally anywhere else! I’m on Gramps’ side with this one, she shouldn’t be stuck there anymore.

Avengers (Vol. 5), Issue #4

Listen, when a mysterious pair of goggles starts flashing dangerously, I’d advise against following its orders.

Izzy, the aspiring astronomer, goes out to her fancy-ass $9,000,000 telescope later that night. The red goggles that she kept in her sweatshirt pocket start to glow and talk to her. “Put me on.” they say. Well, fuck that! If my glasses started talking to me I’d kick those suckers to the curb. But, yeah, in a trance Izzy puts them on and then immediately turns into a Smasher! Whatever that is. She gets the suit and everything, and her goggles immediately begin surveying the night sky in order to assess her location and calibrate and download info and all that science-y stuff. The goggles ask Izzy if she would like an upgrade. “Absolutely.” she replies, and she gets launched into orbit!

Killing her instantly!

But no. Gramps watches her launch like a rocket through his window and grunts a triumphant “Hrmpt! That’s more like it.”

She’s sent through a portal hovering around Earth. The goggles inform her that it’s a “noncommercial, stealth-grade Stargate”. Literally a Stargate. Did someone get Richard Dean Anderson’s big fat butt on the phone yet?

Izzy is now in Chandilar, the Shi’ar homeworld. Nice name. What are its moons, Joey and Ross?

Chandilar looks like a complete shithole.

Izzy’s trying to make sense of this whole situation, since she was just on her farm probably 50 seconds ago: “This is…another planet…that’s…a freaking alien planet.” After Izzy announces out loud that she’s the first human to step foot on an alien planet, the goggles correct her and then start gogglesplaining that she is, actually, merely the first human Subguardian visitor in the history of the Empire. So that’s a gold star for you!

And as a Subguardian, she gets to meet the Superguardians! I’m sure they’re quite nice. They’ll take you out to lunch on your first day. We’ll get back to Izzy later, I’m sure she’ll be juuuust fine!

Avengers (Vol. 5), Issue #4

Ha ha ha! Get a load of this dude’s wang! It’s shaped like a pretzel!

At Avengers Tower, in the present, Tony Stark is trying to speak to the large nude Builder guy that the Avengers took home from Mars. You know, stole from Ex Nihilo? Cradle robbed? Stark is attempting to decipher the language, and he’s making good progress! He’s figured out the word “Blackveil”, which might be the Builder’s name. The Builder waves as he says it in his weird Futurama alien speech.

A couple of the other Avengers B-Team blowjobs congratulate Stark on his progress, but Stark has more to report: he’s been trying to look for Izzy and Eden on the “Avengers Machine” (it’s like a special Speak & Spell that connects to the World Wide Web!), but all he’s getting are reports of “imperial alerts” and “threats to the empire” and “general hysteria” and “muffin recipes”. But, hey, Izzy and Eden aren’t even in our galaxy right now! So there’s that little hiccup. Anyway, does anyone want muffins?

AT THE SHI’AR GALACTIC RIM, something is happening! I don’t know what it is! Help! OK, some dudes are fighting some other dudes. A few of these Smasher-types are slumped on the ground. Someone says “Warstar is down, Oracle.” Oracle tells the other, Manta, that Galin (a Smasher) is gone. These giant dick-shaped space vessels start descending upon the land, and there are easily dozens of them. Sentient drones. “Sharra and K’ythri save us.” whispers Manta.

And then some unknown entity starts blasting these drones, painting the sky red with fire.

Avengers (Vol. 5), Issue #4

Invader ZZIIIMMM!

IT’S THE MUTHAFUCKIN’ AVENGERS! HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT HUT!

Smasher’s exospecs picked up on the Shi’ar Galactic Rim’s intergalactic alert, and they came as quickly as they could! Captain America! Wolverine! Falcon! A white lab coat nerd (?). Everyone!

“What’s an Imperial Guard unit doing getting rolled by a bunch of sleazo normal-type attack drones?” Wolverine asks with tactful curiosity. And Wolverine gets schooled! “You humans and your tiny sphere of influence…look UP.” says one of the guardians.

And UP is an entire fleet of…someone arriving. Again, I don’t know. The white lab coat nerd calls them “around twenty heavy cruisers and countless support ships”, but they look like a bunch of Steel Soldier-type suits to me! Izzy Smasher is nervous. “Most of the technology is hundreds of thousands of years beyond what we have on Earth…I would never run, but how do we even fight something like this? I mean, when facing an endless alien armada, what’s a Smasher to do?”

And Hulk, he says fuckin’ SMAASSHHH, lady.

Captain America and Wolverine are gonna take the low road. Falcon is gonna take the high road. Manifold asks Cap’n what he can do, and Cap’n suggests that he uses his move-things-to-other-locations powers to move the ships within the other ships. Manifold says that bad things will happen if he does that. “Then get busy, son…bad things are exactly what I want to see.”

Avengers (Vol. 5), Issue #4

How’s it going, pops? Oh, not much is going on with me, thanks for asking. It’s all been pretty boring, actually.

It’s time for another Izzy Smasher Flasher Backer! After a month of Smashing and not much else, she returns to her farm in Iowa. And by “returns” I mean, “crash lands like a dang meteor and scares the poop out of her old man”.

Her dad is like “where the hell have you been for literally 30 days you weirdo” and Izzy’s like “SPACE, DAD! I’VE BEEN IN GLORIOUS SPACE! THERE ARE ALIENS, DAD, AND I LOVE HANGING OUT WITH THEM!” and her dad is like “fuck, I thought that crazy syphilus-riddled grandfather of yours was pulling my leg, but he was telling the truth! Too bad I had to shoot him dead before he infected the animals with his lunacy! Yeah, grandpa’s dead! Want some muffins?”

Back in the present, the Avengers are fighting! That’s what they do. And I get to read and write about it.

Hulk smashes. Cap’n smashes. They all smash. Except Smasher! She throws blasts of eye-fire like Cyclops! Her exospecs warn her that continuous use will damage her retinas, but she doesn’t listen. “Subguardian, if you continue at this rate the deple–” starts the exospecs, but Smasher tells her to shut up! So the exospecs run crying to Smasher’s supervisors, the Superguardians, but they end up congratulating her on “holding the line”. They’re coming to help now.

And I guess they won, because we jump immediately to the aftermath. Now that’s some exciting comic book storytelling! But NOW, before the Superguardians leave, they must chastise the Subguardian. Just kidding! They’re happy! They promote her to Superguardian! How touching!

I’m happy too!! Look at all those exclamation points!!! Or maybe my lithium salts are wearing off!!!

“Would you look at that…you’re the first human member of the Imperial Guard, Izzy.” Captain America says, congratulating her on this wonderful honor I myself didn’t know about fifteen minutes ago.

Flashback again, and Izzy’s smelly old grandpa actually isn’t dead yet. But he’s coughing in his bed like Joffrey Baratheon after some Wedding Wine.

Avengers (Vol. 5), Issue #4

Grandpa! Grandpa, are you– …fucking kidding me here, sir?

“Look at you…back from Pluto.” he says. What a firecracker! Hasn’t lost a bit of his edge! He has a note for her. “Here, a good friend gave this to me and I want you to have it. I want you to use it.”

Here’s what the note says: “DAN, IF YOU EVER NEED ANYTHING, CALL ME. -STEVE”

And here I am amazed. Steve Rogers isn’t illiterate. Could’ve fooled me!

Izzy is confused, but Grandpa Dan tells her that she has a destiny now to do great things. And real heroes make others believe they can do great things. So do great things or he’ll keep coughing on her.

Back at Chandilar, the Bing-iest Planet in the Galaxy, one of the creatures that attacked the empire with his drones is in front of the Majestor for questioning. And he doesn’t speak English like everyone else on Chandilar! But that’s ok, Oracle ripped the info out of his mind anyway.

The Majestor asks pointedly what weakness they saw in the empire that emboldened them to plan and carry out an invasion attempt. Oracle tells the Majestor that it’s not what it seems. They weren’t invading at all. They were running away from something. From someONE.

Final Thoughts

I HAVE A HEADACHE NOW. Thanks, Avengers. I’m going to go get some muffins.


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Persefone, SASAMI, and Guerilla Toss

What’s up, dingleberries? It’s Wednesday already again, and that can mean only one thing: Tom’s got his Wednesday underwear on! Also, three new music reviews. Persefone from Andorra. SASAMI from the USA. Guerilla Toss also from the USA. I guess those last two weren’t noteworthy at all. I just wanted to mention Andorra.

Also “Persefone” and “SASAMI” together remind me of pepperoni and salami, and “Guerilla Toss”, well, that’s the chef throwing the pizza dough around, ain’t it? Who wants lunch?

Persefone – Metanoia
(February 4, 2022)

Persefone - Metanoia

How many artists and bands can you name from Andorra? Besides, of course, the Beatles, AC/DC, Rush, Grateful Dead, Lorde, Die Antwoord, BTS, Rammstein, Björk, U2, ABBA, Children of Bodom, and Fela Kuti? Hmm, I can’t think of anymore except Persefone! Persefone is the only other one!

I like Persefone. Over the years, they’ve transformed their Opeth-worship into a sound they can call their own, mixing all the flavors of progressive metal that you could happen to run into. The stale, epic Dream Theater kind. The moody, electronic Porcupine Tree kind. The emotionally cathartic Wilderun kind. The technical death Gorguts kind. The vast, atmospheric The Ocean kind. All emulsified into a homogenous suspension of satisfying songwriting. Almost as satisfying as that previous sentence!

I think Metanoia is a good “general progressive metal fan” album. It’s for people who don’t go deep into any particular flavor of progressive metal, or delve too deeply into a single band, but enjoy skimming the surfaces before continuing forward onto something else. Immediately accessible, complex but it doesn’t require 10 listens for everything to coalesce, a spirited mix of light and heavy, harsh and clean, and plenty of dynamic suite-like sections throughout most of these songs. Memorable immediately; sticks in your brain. I particularly enjoy the suspenseful, larger-than-life soundtrack ambience of “Leap of Faith”, and the smorgasbord of chaotic, tightly-arranged sections of “Consciousness (Pt. 3)”. Both of these are instrumentals, but they are so packed to the gills with character and color that you’ll barely even notice that no one is singing.

Good stuff! I’m happy. Check out the rest of Persefone’s back catalog while you’re at it. It’s fun seeing how the group has progressed over the last 20 years.

Early Verdict:

SASAMI – Squeeze
(February 25, 2022)

SASAMI - Squeeze

I haven’t heard Sasami Ashworth’s first album yet, but reviews suggest a melancholy indie shoegaze angle. I can imagine that listening to Squeeze with that context would be jarring to anyone who expected more of the same. This is an industrial nu-metal / country pop record! Sometimes it’s entirely one, sometimes it’s entirely the other, and sometimes the twain meet in a gloriously odd way. You should by know that I freely toss in the bonus points for unusual musical decisions, whether they work well or not. I appreciate the courage. Luckily, it works very well in this case.

The weirdness becomes apparent when you’re halfway through the second track “The Greatest”, which displays SASAMI’s unaltered vocal abilities in an anachronistic alt-rock tune. Juxtaposed with the opening track, “Skin a Rat”, which blares a sugary electro-industrial metal riff with distorted vocals, you get uneasy with where exactly the album is going. “Say It” feels like Grimes at her most caustic, or even Poppy without the uncanny valley representations, but the music is loaded with sharp and slippery riffs. And then, later, you get to “Try to Understand”, which is the most straightly-played indie country anthem Squeeze has to offer. It sounds like Shania Twain collaborating with Japanese Breakfast. What the hell is going on here?

While I do admit that this grab-bag approach removes some of a the immediacy that one craves from a new release, I can’t get enough of this album right now. The singing is fantastic, the melodies are catchy, and the production is engaging. I like the little drum fills throughout the hipster-grungy Pavement-like “Make It Right”. I like the breathtaking, inexplicable string quarter interlude of “Feminine Water Turmoil”. I like not knowing what this woman is doing and what she’s going to do next. It’s exciting!

Can’t you feel the excitement?!

Early Verdict:

Guerilla Toss – Famously Alive
(March 25, 2022)

Guerilla Toss - Famously Alive

I know this album only dropped five days ago, but I already have Opinions™! That’s usually not a good sign.

I’m disappointed! Guerilla Toss has travelled along one of the more interesting trajectories, starting out as a bizarre, lo-fi, electronic, no wave, hyperpunk outfit and continuously evolving into a colorful, artsy, sugary experimental pop band. Like a Deerhoof for the new generation. Every new album was so much better than the album that preceded it. 2018’s Twisted Crystal was my obsession for a bit of time, with anti-funk “Hacking Machine” and the 16-bit space alien Sega Genesis soundtrack “Retreat” on constant repeat. I heard the news of their fifth album about two months ago and I couldn’t fucking wait to hear what was in store next.

And…we’ve evolved a tad too far, it seems. Kassie Carlson’s successful life-threatening battle with a crippling drug addiction is far enough in the past that her gradually increasing, overwhelming positivity has completely taken over the songwriting. These songs are like a rave party in a vat of strawberry ice cream, hitting occasional pockets of sweetness that rival even the most syrupy of J-pop hits. Production is way too glossy and overdone. I was pleased with the hypnotic, buzzy, bleepy-bloopy opener “Cannibal Capital”, but after that there’s a wealth of cloying autotune, molasses-thick synthpop semi-balladry, and uninspired melodies. “Mermaid Airplane” reuses the uncreative “Ring Around the Rosie” musical figure that they already used in the chorus of Twisted Crystal‘s “Jesus Rabbit”. “Wild Fantasy”, similarly, feels like melody recycling. By this point, the album is about half over, and I’m disillusioned.

The weirdness is still there, but they’re starting to get less weird now. Pretty soon, the band will all grow up without me, leaving me all alone to bask sadly in my Boredoms and OOIOO record collection.

Early Verdict:


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