Sucky Funnies for February 13, 2022

Between the Super Bowl today and Valentine’s Day tomorrow, you would think that today’s Funnies page would be lousy with topical punchlines. Not the case! Only a small handful of strips today even broached the subject of Valentine’s Day; Arlo & Janis and Family Circus were the only two I saw that were Super Bowl-themed; the rest of today’s steaming Sunday Strip Platter either talked about cake, childhood trauma, and other similarly hilarious and relatable issues!

The reason for this is simple: comic strip cartoonists must submit their material approximately 76 weeks ahead of schedule in order to ensure their $14,000 yearly income remains stable (unless you’re Mort Walker of Beetle Bailey and Hi and Lois fame, who gets carted around Weekend at Bernie’s-style and gets paid in children’s organs on a semi-monthly basis).

Still though, there was enough Valentine’s Day material to go around. Mazel Tov, you lovebirds.

Mutts

Mutts - February 13, 2022

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God, I remember when Mutts started and I didn’t think it deserved to be around even then at the age of 7. I’m not even mad at the punchline, it’s a decent punchline. Breaking the fourth wall like that always makes me a little bit appreciative of the comic artist’s self-awareness. Better than Dagwood’s version of breaking the fourth wall, where he looks directly at the reader and goes “I want to club Blondie over the head with my stupid 9-iron repeatedly, just over and over again without stopping until her dead body starts stinking up the living room.” That’s not funny!

My issue here is obviously the so-cutesy-I-wanna-puke “shmight”. Mooch does this all the time, and I think Debbie from Corpus Christi has always liked this infuriating speech impediment, so it stayed. The comic strip focus groups are always filled with Debbies. I’m going to try approaching my wife tomorrow and saying “Oh, Earl. I think I shmight be in love.” and see if I live until Tuesday.

Sherman’s Lagoon

Sherman's Lagoon - February 13, 2022

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Here’s a good example of a two-panel joke stretched thin and spread across eight panels instead. You know when you’re eating breakfast at, I don’t know, fuckin’ Denny’s or something and you get those two slices of toast cut into four triangles? Do you use one little packet of jelly for all of it? No, bitches, you use at least one packet per triangle! Sherman’s Lagoon is trying to make the most of just one single crushed packet of shitty jelly.

And it’s not even that good of a joke! Garfield has been doing this “I ate your food” template for over 12 years before Sherman’s Lagoon even existed! In fact, I forgot to check if Garfield and Jon Arbuckle had an identical exchange today. Let’s just pretend they most certainly did and move on.

Sally Forth

Sally Forth - February 13, 2022

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It’s a been a long time since I’ve checked in with Sally Forth, but it’s nice to see that she updated her 1982 working mom haircut. Verbose Writer Extraordinaire for the comic strip, Francesco Marciuliano, expects you to set aside about four hours today in order to hack through the strip’s wordy thickets. I don’t expect you do bother reading all that either, so let me bust out the CliffsNotes for today’s Sally Forth:

Ted wants to fuck and he was up all night creating a version of Monopoly that would earn him fuck-points. Teenage daughter Hil not only doesn’t want Ted and Sally to fuck, but she doesn’t want be a party to any event or circumstance that leads to her parents fucking, including, but not limited to, playing Fuck Monopoly.

There, that was definitely fewer words!


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Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3), Issue #8

Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3), Issue #8 – “Dangerous (Part 2)”

* Part 2 of 6 of the Dangerous storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3) Issue #8 – “Dangerous (Part 2)”! In the previous installment, the X-Men fly to New York City to fight a knockoff Godzilla, and then the Fantastic Four show up, and then the Fantastic Four bolt out of there just in case it’s bad press to associate with such mutants! At the Mutant Academy for Gifted Mutants, Wing is having a crisis and ends up jumping off a cliff. As he bleeds out, it’s revealed that he was actually in some sort of “danger simulation room”. He seems pretty dead though. He was bleeding pretty deadily.

Let’s keep this show going! Aaaaannnnnnnnnd………..action!

Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3), Issue #8 [February, 2005]
Written by: Joss Whedon
“Dangerous (Part 2)”

Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3), Issue #8

Panel One: Wing’s hand on the floor? Blood coming out of an unseen face. Caption: “I welcome the gift.”

Panel Two: A couple of hicks peering over the edge of something unknown. One guy looks like Kid Rock with a Caterpillar hat and workshirt with a “BOB” nametag. The other guy looks like a sad William H. Macy in a checkerboard shirt and denim overalls. “BOB” says “We’re gonna be rich.”

Panel Three: Frost hears a sound.

Panel Four: Pitch black and the “click” of a lightswitch.

Panel Five: Lights on. Frost, and everyone else in the room, seems to be in pain with blood coming out their noses.

Panel Six: A red light engulfs the two hicks. “BOB” yelps in surprised shock. Sad William H. Macy recoils.

Panel Seven: The door of a large chamber hums with electricity. Here, I’ll show that panel!

Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3), Issue #8

See? Look at all that electricity!

Panels Eight and Beyond!: Frost has collapsed on the floor. And maybe all the cuckoos. And the weird lady without eyeballs. The rest of the X-Men are ok. Kitty phases through the wall to go find help. The rest carry the unconscious ones and run to the infirmary. Something strange is afoot!

The hicks, still awash in a strange red light, are hiding on some sort of upper level area near a barn roof, looking down. “What’d you do?” asks one. “I never powered it up–I wouldn’t know how!” says the other. “Took three months to dig that thing out of the woods. If you messed with it–” says the first, but he doesn’t finish that thought. A giant…uh…robot…thing…bursts through the barn roof and reduces most of it to kindling. “I HEAR YOU, LORD.” it says. “I COME. PRAISE BE TO YOU.”

One hick got his dang leg impaled with a 2×4!

Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3), Issue #8

I dunno, that puddle could be licorice syrup. Looks like he’s having a good time to me.

Logan Wolverine, Kitty Pryde, and Peter Colossus are outside looking for Wing. Wolverine can’t pick up his scent, but if “I find out he started all this…he’s dead.”

Scott Cyclops is by Emma Frost’s side. He tells her, per Hank Beast, there’s nothing physically wrong with her. She should wake up! So do it!

Hey, do you like this Firstname Heroname convention I’ve adopted? Not at all annoying huh? – Tom Blog

So, the fact that there’s nothing physically wrong with her (per Hank Beast!), this means that “someone’s in there, shutting you down”. And Emma Frost is too powerful to let that happen! GET THE FUCK UP!

Scott asks if Emma can hear her, but her head is filled with the voice of someone else. “Don’t worry, Lamb, I’m cloaked. I’m not about to give our little game away so soon…” says the mysterious unknown voice that I probably should know, but I don’t, so oh well. The voice makes fun of Scott: “If that geek was sharing my bed, I think I’d try not to wake up.” Ha! I like this voice. Best character so far.

Elsewhere, the giant…uh…robot…thing…drags itself across a forest, tearing down trees in the process. While he goes and finds his lord. Or whatever.

Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3), Issue #8

Hey! Don’t interrupt the green-haired lady’s up-pushing.

Even more elsewhere, Agent Brand is doing some sexy push-ups in her quarters. She’s all like “Huhh. Huhh. Huhh. Huhh.”, and I think that’s pretty…pretty cool. A guy comes by, an underling perhaps, to let Brand know that every tap they’ve got in Professor Xavier’s House of Treats is offline. “Even our mole’s not responding.” he tells her. Agent Brand’s perplexing reply: “You think they made us?”

The X-Men heroes REGROUP! Beast can find nothing wrong with any of the unconscious suckers. Wolverine says that all phones, computer lines, wifi, TV, telegraphs, flags, smoke signals, carrier pigeons, bricks with menacing notes tied to them, and sexy finger gestures are offline. They think they’re being set up. The only way to communicate with the outside world is to leave the premises, and that sounds Dangerous! Part One through Part Six!

Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3), Issue #8

Yeah, he found a pile of bones he buried in the yard. “Long range recon” indeed.

The X-Men’s special pet dragon comes swooping around the doorway. Kitty Pryde had sent Lockheed on a reconnaissance mission, and it looks like he found something! What is it, boy?? What is it?? Go get it! Go get it! That’s a good boy!

They all run out to the school grounds, and they find a giant…uh…robot…thing. And it says “DESTROY.”

So it’s time for a fight scene! So I’ll throw on some music while it goes on:

Doot doot doo-doo-doooooo…doot doot doo-doo-doooooo….

The giant robot starts throwing large objects at the school. Cyclops instructs Kitty to send all the kids down to the Danger Room until the robot is defeated. You know, the Danger Room where a child is decomposing as we speak?

The robot has red laser eyes that blast through the building. Kitty is hurrying everyone to safety. “I want this thing off my lawn.” Cyclops says like a grumpy old rocking chair man! He removes his Cyclops goggles and blasts the big fucker with his big, scary eye-blasts blasting power! That did the job.

The robot lies unmoving, arm ripped off, among some burned trees. Cyclops instructs Wolverine to tear it up further.

Kitty Pryde opens the door to the Danger Room, allowing her and dozens of kids to discover Wing bleeding out. Kitty tells Hisako to take charge, get the kids back out into the hallway, and then find Cyclops.

Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3), Issue #8

Look Hisako, if it makes you feel any better… you can have some of that licorice syrup.

However, one of the students informs Kitty that the door disappeared…

Wolverine approaches the smoldering robot Jesus freak. “MY LORD IS WATCHING YOU. SHE KNOWS WHAT YOU’RE GOING TO DO. SHE TELLS ME THE CHILDREN WILL PAY FOR THE FATHER’S SINS. AND I MUST NOT FEAR DEATH.” Ahh, so Jesus was a woman after all! I knew it! Wolverine is grumpy and starts tearing up his circuits.

Pryde types in her Doom cheat code again and clips through the wall with her arm. “I’m not feeling the exit. Listen up everyone, someone’s messed with the programming in here.” She tells them that she’s going to leave the room for a minute to investigate further.

“Go ahead, Sprite. Leave the children with me. After all, I only need a minute or two…to murder them all.”

And that was the voice of Zombie Wing, lurching twistedly and bloodily toward all the tasty students! Cool!

The X-Men check the Danger Room. Colossus pulls on the door with all his mighty, mighty might, but it’s no use! They suspect that someone intended to lure all the students to the room, but they’re mystified as to how the Danger Room could’ve been tampered with in the first place. “It’s supposed to be unbreachable.” Scott Cyclops Sunshiney Summertime Summers says. Wolverine tells everyone that Sentinel (that’s the big giant robot’s name!) was being all weird while he was tearing him up! Mentioned the “Lord”! Said that the children would pay for the father’s sins.

Cyclops starts to beat himself up for directing Kitty Pryde to take all the children to the Danger Room in the first place. Now all the children are locked in the Danger Room with the Danger!

Emma Frost corrects him with wide-eyed blue-lipped melodrama:

“No, Scott. Our enemy’s not in the Danger Room.”

“It is the Danger Room.”

“The Danger Room is angry.”

Final Thoughts

I hate it when the Danger Room gets angry! Really messes up my day!

Do you think Zombie Wing will be able to turn back into Regular Wing?

You know, sometimes we all want to turn back into Regular Wing in our lives.

Really makes you think.


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State of the Blog Address – February, 2022

State of the Blog

Obama would deliver his State of the Union Addresses over the phone seventeen months ahead of schedule. He demanded the recordings of the addresses to be played in ice cream trucks, sound cranked full blast, and driven around every neighborhood in the country at 4:15 am.

Greetings, fellow Internet button-pusher types. It’s me again, Tom. I’m Tom, the guy behind the Tom Writes About Stuff blog , aka the TWAS blog, aka the Worst Blog on the Internet since 1897! You may not know this (since it’s hard to believe ONE PERSON could be so damn creative and so prolific and charming), but I am the sole owner, maintainer, writer, contributor, designer, marketer, janitor, lobbyist, prostitute, and all-around Smiley Boy Extraordinaire of Tom Writes About Stuff Dot Com. As such, I refuse to do anything I don’t want to do, and I refuse to pander to the Google Machine or the nefarious SEO Gods when it comes to how I want to write and present my content. This means that you are most likely not reading this since you don’t even know that this website exists! I’m a terrible promotor!

It’s been a good 4.5 months since my last State of the Blog Address, and in that time I’ve really gone nuts behind the scenes on this waste of invaluable Internet real estate. Big things are happening! Big, big, big, big, BIG things! You remember David Byrne’s big suit! Think bigger!

So let’s get you all up to speed.

Comic Book Stuff

There are no signs whatsoever of this slowing down. Not to delve too deeply into the process, but I’m writing these up faster than I’m preparing them for posting. As of today I am roughly 15 weeks ahead of my current three-per-week posting schedule, and not only that, but I’m preparing another side-feature AS WE SPEAK where I will tackle Image, Dark Horse, Vertigo, and possibly some other publishers that are somewhat off the beaten path; completely separate in nature from my main Loneliness & Cheeseburgers project. This hitherto unnamed feature will be dropped weekly, upping my output to a four-per-week schedule on comic book commentary. Ambitious, but I’m pretty motivated in the respect. Comic books are fun. I can’t believe it took me 33 years to realize this. I feel like I have a lifetime of catching up to do.

I have a few other ideas for comic-related content in the works: features that spotlight awful comic books from the Golden and Silver ages, features that focus on long-form graphic novels, and even, if I become brave enough, features focusing on manga series. I already got the ball rolling on a reboot of an ancient feature from a previous incarnation of my blog, Sucky Funnies Sunday, which cherry-picks a few Sunday strips from the newspaper that very day and I rant and vent about it.  A feature like this demands same-day turnaround, so it may not drop weekly like I’d like it to, but I plan on keeping up with it on as regular of a basis as I can muster. Don’t forget, I’m Mr. Full-Time Job with Two Young Children. With all I’ve got going on, I can’t believe that I’m able to even to spell 5% of all these words corrcelty wihtuot scewring it all up coasntanatntly.

Music Stuff

State of the Blog

An early version of the State of the Union Address, delivered by Martin Van Buren, would involve goat sacrifices and “ketchup parties”.

I’ve been slacking hardcore on the music stuff. I’ve realized recently that this is because my grand, elaborate visions for the Album Reviews and Discography Deep Dive projects far exceeded the limitations of my blog and, as a result, my motivation had waned. BUT, since I’m learning how increase the limitations of my blog through PHP magic, I’m slowly finding out that I can better tailor my pages to present this content how I actually WANT to present it. More on that later. My desire to pick this back up again has increased fifty-fold since the beginning of the year, so once I get all the crazy mumbo-jumbo code and taxonomic organization correct on the back-end, I’ll be ready to continue these projects with the enthusiasm I’ve been wanting for. Also, since list-season is over and I’m not fervently absorbing only new releases anymore, I have more time to listen to old stuff again. I imagine at this point that I’m pretty close to getting things where I want them to be, the reviews and discography pages should start dropping again pretty soon.

Other Stuff

Other stuff is always in process. I come up with ideas faster than I can execute them. I keep a little notepad file to collect ideas so that I don’t forget them later. Some of them are small, like one-off posts ideas. Some of them are large, like entire featured sections that I plan on contributing to with some semblance of regularity. Some are very ambitious, like an idea I have with respect to a new twist on Let’s Plays, but I just can’t see something like that coming into fruition at all in the near future. Again, I’d love to just work on this website as a full-time job, or even be able to dedicate as much time as I’d like to with it during my off-time…I just don’t have that much off-time in this period of my life. Once my kids grow up and they’re banging around in college, snorting coke and not studying for their midterms, I’ll have all the time in the world! But that’s 15 years from now! I’m a great dad, I swear it on a stack of Hustler magazines that I leave laying around the house.

Website Maintenance

More than half my time lately has been dedicated to tinkering with files and layouts under the hood than to writing, which I have conflicting feels about. On one hand, writing has dropped to the point where I’m struggling to keep ahead on comic book articles within the last couple of months (especially during the holidays). On the other hand, I’m making this amateur bush league website look more and more how I want it to, and need it to, with every passing day.

My whole family got mild, nearly negligible, cases of Covid in the first week of November. Being forced to stay home for nine work days, I had ample amounts of free time that I hadn’t had since before children! And when I get a lot of free time, I get a lot of ideas, and I decided that I was getting increasingly annoyed with how little control I had over my own website. I gained the GUMPTION to buckle-down, pop the hood, and start messing a little bit with the .php files.

Things took a turn for the obsessive during Christmastime, when I took the week off and found myself with another abundance of that sweet, sweet free time. Here’s where I learned about pagination and querying posts. Here’s where I started going absolutely nutso with it. Here’s where I finally realized that I had the power to create the dynamic website of my dreams.

Category archive pages now have posts automatically catalogued by year. Comic series pages now auto-create and auto-populate with a grids of individual issue links. Every comic series now has its own Comic Storylines section that will automatically slot issues into their individual story pages, with the parent pages automatically creating lists of stories for that series. Eventually, my album reviews will all get auto-populated individual artist/band landing pages that list their discographies in release order, allowing me more freedom to review albums out of release order and still keep them easily organized. Eventually, the final form of my vision, discographies will be able to be sorted by era, genre, rating, and even more. I’m not even close to that point yet.

So yes, big things are happening. Big things continue to happen. When I was a little pre-teen/teenage sprat, websites like this one were profoundly influential to me. Even though it’s not 2002 anymore, and as Web 3.0 spirals out of control and people are normalizing buying MetaBucks with Monkey NFTs, hope to someday be similarly influential to some other punks like me.


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Nightwing (Vol. 3), Issue #2

Nightwing (Vol. 3), Issue #2 – “Haly’s Wish”

* Part 2 of 7 of the Traps and Trapezes storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Nightwing (Vol. 3), Issue #2 – “Haly’s Wish”! In the previous installment, Dick Grayson had returned to Gotham to cover Bruce Wayne’s Batman shift while Bruce left town for unknown reasons. After a year as Batman, he finally gets to be himself again. He finally gets to be…

*trumpet fart*

Nightwing.

Also, Grayson used to be a cartwheeling circus boy, and Haly’s Circus is in town for a few days. He visits his old friends, but on the way home some unknown cop-killing assailant hunts him down and claims that…here, what was it again…oh yes, “Dick Grayson is the fiercest killer in all of Gotham. And he doesn’t even know it.”

Intriguing right? Hardly! But let’s see how this pans out anyway.

Nightwing (Vol. 3), Issue #2 [December, 2011]
Written by: Kyle Higgins
“Haly’s Wish”

Nightwing (Vol. 3), Issue #2

GOTHAM CITY — CURRENT VENUE OF HALY’S CIRCUS

Ughhh. Ok, look, how is a circus story arc going to be anything but lame as shit? It’s the CIRCUS. For fuck’s sake, people, it’s the stinky circus. Is there anything badass about a circus??

We see the villain holding Nightwing over the edge of the building, so I guess all the water from the water tower DIDN’T actually push him off and send him to a swift death that ends this series prematurely. Rats! I guess I’ll have to keep reading.

“You know, that’s a really nice suit you got there.” Nightwing tells him while undressing him with his eyes. “Is it insulated? ‘Cause mine is.” And then he grabs the villain’s arm, which electrocutes him nicely. And I’m not exactly sure where this electricity actually came from, but just go with it, ok?

Oh, it’s answered in the next panel: “Whole costume’s wired to deliver a 150,000 volt shock.” Wow. Yeah, cool, not dumb at all.

Nightwing thinks he took this guy out, but the villain does a pretty backflip onto a ledge and continues fighting. He launches a rocket out of his cool and believable rocket-launching wrist mechanism, which bypasses Nightwing and explodes on a car passing by on the road.

Nightwing (Vol. 3), Issue #2

Oopsy-Daisey! Heh heh.

“Gotta get the people out of the car, even if it means the killer gets away.” Nightwing says as he flings his fucking sticks into the car’s windshield, breaking right through it, undeniably killing both people in the vehicle if the villain hasn’t done so already! So, that’s funny. And now he’s leaping on the car’s hood, sticking his hands through the holes he made in the windshield, grappling blindly, and I guess pulling the driver and the two passengers out to safety? It is absolutely impossible to tell for sure based on how these panels were illustrated. I mean, goddamn.

The villain got away. So Nightwing goes home.

An hour later, Dick Grayson shirtlessly answers his apartment door. It’s Raya, the Magnificent Red-Haired Circus Woman, and she needs to go to Atlantic City NOW! RIGHT NOW!! “Something’s come up, Dick. Something I need your help with.” She’s worried and frantic like three giant mobsters are rounding the corner, ready to smash her tibias with a sack of doorknobs!

Nightwing (Vol. 3), Issue #3

Keep it in your pants, homeboy.

He asks her “What about the circus?”, and she says she has the next two days off anyway. “I have to get there tonight…and I don’t have a car. Can you give me a lift?” she pleads with her sad green doe-eyes. And because Dick Grayson’s life is controlled by his boner, he smiles dopily and, like a dumbass, agrees to help her.

Now here I was thinking “Dick Grayson doesn’t have a damn car either!”, but on the very next page he’s treating her to a ride on Bruce Wayne’s private jet. Raya speaks in air quotes like an Internet Boomer, asking Grayson if “his boss” doesn’t mind him “borrowing” the jet, and if he’s trying to “impress” her. And I’m like, yes Raya, he wants to “plow you” with his “erection”.

Grayson asks her what this is all about, and she deflects by telling him that it’s complicated. And, since he thinks good things might happen to his boner, he asks her to explain anyway. Her answer to him is “Mr. Haly wants to see you.”

That answer is too complicated for Grayson to follow because he has more chromosomes than IQ points. BUT, it sounds like Mr. Haly is desperate for Grayson’s presence in Atlantic City and this sounds an awful lot like Mr. Haly stone-cold angered the mafia and needs Grayson to be a sexy distraction while he skips town! I hope so, that would really turn things around here.

But no. After Grayson says that he could have talked to him on the phone, Raya tells him that Haly’s dying. And Grayson’s face is all “BZZZORRTT” about such terrible news!

Nightwing (Vol. 3), Issue #3

Yuck, sir. You look disgusting. Don’t talk to me anymore.

Now this is funny! Haly wants Grayson to meet him at some ramshackle abandoned warehouse that, surely, since this Atlantic City, 76,000 homeless people are currently squatting in. It’s dark, dingy, and full of crates and circus shit, including, but not limited to, skeletons, cages, and stuffed lions, rhinos, and elephants.

Old Man Haly emerges looking tumor-riddled and waxy and gross and, like, melting. “I need to make sure you have this before the cancer finishes the job…” and here, alone, in the middle of a weird abandoned mansion in the middle of the night, Old Man Haly shows Grayson a “tumor-riddled, waxy, gross, melting penis”.

And by “tumor-riddled, waxy, gross, melting penis” I actually mean “a rolled up sheet of paper”. And it’s the deed to everything circus-related in the warehouse and currently on the road. “It’s all yours, kid.”

Grayson’s face is all “BZZZORRTT”.

After insisting that he cannot take the whole stupid circus, Haly says “Can’t why? Because you’re too busy as a big-time ‘hero’ now?” Haly admits that he’s always known. The kid danced around the trapeze like a magnificent swan! Of course he’s a cocksuckin’ superhero.

Haly has amassed a lot of regrets over his life, but the biggest one was the series of events that led to Grayson defecting from the circus. Dead parents, that kind of thing. He should have stayed. It’s who he is. Take the fucking circus, loser.

Nightwing (Vol. 3), Issue #2

This flight manifest tells me…that ONE OF US shouldn’t even be on this plane!…

Grayson and Raya don’t even stay in Atlantic City to piss away thousands of dollars or get drunkenly married at the casino. They fly home as quickly as they flew there. Grayson sits in his lavish, roomy, first class seat frowning heavily at the piece of paper the dying old man foisted upon him. Foisted! Raya asks if he’s ok, and he’s like “FUCK NO, I WAS JUST HANDED A CIRCUS.” She apologizes for not warning him, but once they both got on the plane she had panicked. She thought about how different life had been for him anyway, she didn’t want to topple the Jenga tower with, like, the “dying old man is giving you the circus” block.

And then they flirt and kiss and fuck on the plane, yaaaawwwnn. Boring. Heterosexual intercourse? How embarrassing for everyone.

Grayson is conflicted. Circus or crime fighting? Crime fighting or circus? How about neither, sir, are you kidding me with this right now?

Nightwing (Vol. 3), Issue #2

So, uh…you guys fuckin’ in my plane?

The pilot, who has the expression of a man who most assuredly watched the two of them bone for however long it took Grayson to orgasm (four seconds), hands him the phone. It’s the villain from Issue #1 catching up with his good buddy Dickie Dickface Grayson! “I’m not normally one to give my name to a person I’m about to kill…but I’m willing to make an exception for a certain ‘hero’. You can call me Saiko…if I can call you Nightwing.”

The pilot is very nosy, being  about four feet away while Grayson chats with his new friend. Saiko is also involved with the circus, and he admits that more pieces of the puzzle are fitting together with Grayson’s involvement with all this. He knows about Bruce Wayne, Batman, Robin, Nightwing, all from Old Man Haly…after torturing him, of course! Tee hee!

Grayson asks what he wants. “For you to watch me kill the old man, Dick…right now. That is, of course, unless you can stop me?”

Nightwing (Vol. 3), Issue #3

Don’t worry, she’s used to you being quick.

So Dickie tells the pilot to do a three-point turn and head back to Atlantic City. He tells Raya that Haly was on the phone and they need to fly back to go over one more detail about the deed. He’ll be quick, because THIS TIME…*gruff voice*…IT’S PERSONAL…*cough*

So, as Nightwing, he goes back to the warehouse where Saiko is waiting, and they fight for a spell. Saiko launches more wrist rockets and blows a bunch of stuff up in the warehouse. Things are on fire now. Nightwing’s primary mission is to find Old Man Cancer Circus and make sure he’s ok.

He finds him pretty quickly in this giant multi-roomed warehouse. He’s hunched and bleeding on the floor against a large bookshelf, wheezing and apologizing for giving Nightwing up to the bad guy. Funny! That’s kind of funny. Sorry. While Nightwing is distracted by Haly’s sorry state, Saiko sneaks up behind him and SLASHES HIM IN THE BACK! Haha! Ouch!

Saiko is disappointed in this kid. He’s pretty clueless for a gruesome killer! Yeah, that’s right, “Dick Grayson – Fiercest Killer in All of Gotham!” The ceiling is starting to crumble. A piece of it lands hard with a shattering “FA-KOOMBLLLEE” (lol), and Nightwing doesn’t want to stay another second in this stupid smelly burning circus warehouse. He grabs the useless old man and gets the hell out of dodge.

Nightwing successfully carries this frail old heap of a “man” out of the burning warehouse. As they await the fire trucks, Nightwing keeps glancing back at the building wondering if Saiko got out alive. Haly quivers and whimpers, apologizing for causing all this because of the circus’ secret.

“What? You know what this is about?” Nightwing frantically asks.

“About what the circus…really is. The answers…in the heart of it, kiddo…answers in…the heart…”

Dead.

BZZZORRTT!

Final Thoughts

I SURE HOPE THIS BIG CIRCUS SECRET PAYS OFF.

EVEN IF GRAYSON HAS TO FUCK HIS WAY THROUGH A FEW CLOWNS TO GET THERE.


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Wilderun, Yard Act, and Punch Brothers

OK, we’re six years into 2022. Time to get this rolling. Here’s a semi-fresh batch of new releases from Wilderun, Yard Act, and Punch Brothers. A little over a month in and there have already been some excellent albums hitting my ears, so I think we’re in for a legendary year. Fingers crossed.

Wilderun – Epigone
(January 7, 2022)

Wilderun - Epigone

I’m wary of this band. Ever since I saw the nickname “Disney metal” with respect to their 2019 release Veil of Imagination I had placed this firmly in the “Not for Me” container. I gave it one or two listens, but waved it off as sappy, saccharine-infused symphonic folk metal. Cut to now, and the nickname “Disney metal” is still as pervasive as ever. But since I’m a SERIOUS MUSIC JOURNALIST now, I need to give it a fair shake, don’t I? It’s my duty as a SERIOUS MUSIC JOURNALIST to maintain the integrity that TWAS (Tom Whines About Stuff) demands! So what do I think of Epigone?

Here’s what I think: first of all, it takes a while for any metal to even show up! An epic, soaring, fanciful, metal grand entrance occurs just before the two-minute mark on “Woolgatherer”! That’s nearly six minutes of non-metal noodling! Who do these guys think they are?

But I got hooked. “Woolgatherer” itself is a fourteen-minute opus of tense acoustic melancholy buttressed by moments of blissful cathartic release (especially that one furious guitar solo around the eight-minute mark). And this masterful tension-and-release is a constant force, woven seamlessly through the lush grandeur of rumbling strings, crescendoing guitars, and Evan Anderson Berry’s stunning voice. He really does sound like a dang prince in a Disney movie. If you’re still skeptical by the end of “Woolgatherer”, “Passenger” brings in more action. Heavier riffs, faster tempos, swirling runaway string arrangements, waking you the fuck up if you happened to sleep for the last 20 minutes.

Notably, harsh vocals are used sparingly; utilized as a tool of dramatic effect during moments of particular turmoil. I’d personally like more of it, but I understand the necessity of not relying on them as a crutch. If I recall correctly, only one brief moment each of growly guttural goodness occurs in “Woolgatherer”, “Passenger”, and “Identifier”, which is saying something considering the size of these tracks.

I could say a lot about Epigone. I already have. I didn’t even talk about the final four tracks, the “Distraction” symphony, which is likely my favorite chunk of the album. I’ll save THAT for a full review. Progressive metal was my gateway to the metalverse in the mid-2000s with Porcupine Tree, Opeth, Dream Theater, Symphony X, and Fates Warning. While I’ve been largely disillusioned over the years by the genre (and half of those bands), Wilderun breathes new life into a genre I thought I outgrew completely. If you’re a picky prog fan who despises any nagging feelings of aimlessness or melodrama, you need to check this out. These Bostonians are on top of their game here. Early contender for my AOTY list, but the year is still quite young.

Early Verdict:

Yard Act – The Overload
(January 21, 2022)

Yard Act - The Overload

2021 is going to be a tough year to beat when it comes to art punk debuts. Permit me to drop these names once again: Dry Cleaning, Squid, Black Country, New Road, Geese. Then of course there are solid non-debuts from 2021 to contend with: IDLES, black midi, Viagra Boys, Shame, Sleaford Mods, FACS, Snapped Ankles, et al. Yard Act is bold to go first in 2022 with all that before them to contend with. Their own presentation will have nothing BUT the 2021 successes to compare against, which hurts them already, but that’s not the only problem with The Overload.

Allow me to recognize the reality that this album will be a mind-blower for anyone completely new to the Mark E. Smith school of post-punk (assuming that this style will resonate in the first place). And, in fact, the titular opener is pretty mind-blowing stuff regardless. The musical phrasing is hyperactive, it’s choppy, there’s precision and care to the perceived mess, there are surprisingly hooky sudden time signature changes, there’s a speedy spoken-word bridge, there’s a really fucking good chorus melody, it’s funny, and the whole song is perfectly paced from start to finish. It’s a very early contender for my song of the year. I can’t get enough of it. I’m humming it in the shower.

The rest of the album not only fails to reach the heights of “The Overload”, but it fails to even be a good addition to the ever-growing post-punk genre. Yard Act certainly got a lot of hype, which is why it landed on my radar in the first place, but nearly the entirety of this record is a soulless carbon copy of its influences. I hear smatterings of the Fall, LCD Soundsystem, Sleaford Mods, Arctic Monkeys, and others, without a trace of a singular identity. That in of itself is bad enough, but the record displays a rather unearned, boastful presentation that I cannot stand here and abide. Not at all. If even half the tracks hit hard like “The Overload”, I’d be whistling a different tune! But when you get tracks like “Rich” that plods along on its one-trick-pony snail’s pace, or tracks like “Quarantine the Sticks” that attempts to be more profound and satirical than the thimbleful of substance allows, it’s hard not to feel a little cheated. Even while the title track completely blew me away, I was still annoyed that the very first track on a band’s very first album had a bridge where the singer breaks down what it’s like to make it in the music business. Even if it is self-deprecating, it smacks of acting above one’s station. Save that shit for album four or five.

This record disappointed me greatly, and I still haven’t yet forgiven it.

Early Verdict:

Punch Brothers – Hell on Church Street
(January 14, 2022)

Punch Brothers - Hell on Church Street

I’ve already said a lot with the other two, luckily I don’t have too much to say with Punch Brothers. They take a genuinely uncool genre like bluegrass and make it palatable for modern indie audiences. They do what they do and they do it well.

Hell on Church Street, their sixth studio album, is a track-by-track reworking of bluegrass musician Tony Rice’s 1983 album Church Street Blues. I don’t know anything about Tony Rice, where he fits into the history of American bluegrass traditions, or even how quintessential his album was to bluegrass as a whole, but guitarist Chris Eldridge was a student of Rice’s and saw fit to bring the band together to record this tribute. Rice died on Christmas, 2020.

You get a good mix of, what I imagine, all of the varying bluegrass styles. A bubbly traditional folk instrumental “Cattle in the Cane”. A peaceful instrumental “Gold Rush”. A jaunty, hillbilly romp “Any Old Time”. A baleful vocal lament “Streets of London”. A sad, fiery tale of lost love “House Carpenter”. Bob Dylan and Gordon Lightfoot covers “One More Night” and “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, respectively, performed with all the heart you’d expect from the real deals. It’s good. It’s all good.

I’ve given this band a shot about ten years ago, and the experience resulted in my complete ambivalence. I even saw them live, which I can’t say about many bands at all, and was left completely cold. Maybe I’m older and more open-minded, because Hell on Church Street is a damn fine record. These players are all fantastic musicians and vocalists, and I’ll still be spinning this one once in a while. I might even check out Tony Rice. Maybe.

Early Verdict:


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