Action Comics (Vol. 2), Issue #1 – “Superman Versus the City of Tomorrow”

* Part 1 of 8 of the Superman and the Men of Steel storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Action Comics (Vol. 2), Issue #1! ACTION COMICS! ACTION, BABY! We’re talking fist fights. We’re talking half nelsons. We’re talking high-speed police chases. We’re talking AK-47s. We’re talking grand theft auto, baby. We’re talking oiled chests. We’re talking ninja heists.

I don’t know what to expect at all with Action Comics! I wasn’t even really expecting to start reading this series anytime soon, I thought I was gonna binge on Batman stuff! When jumping into DC Comics I figured “Hey, they literally rebooted everything from the start! What a perfect place to jump in and go through an entire run!”, not realizing that basically every single one of the 52 different series in the reboot crosses over with each other in some way eventually. Whoops! Now, any seasoned comic book aficionado would say “Hey Tom, you dingus, you don’t HAVE to read everything in order before getting to the events”. And I say, fuck you, I’m going to try! I’ll be jumping around the many series a lot on the DC side of things for sure, so be warned. Eventually it will all come together. I hope! If nothing else, you can stick to my personal chronology to at least maintain some semblance of continuity with all this shit.

Anyway, Action Comics! The most famous comic book of all time is Action Comics #1, the introduction of Superman. I’m not reading that Action Comics #1, though, I’m reading THIS Action Comics #1. The Volume 2 version of Action Comics #1. What a rip off! What will I learn? Is this just another glorified Superman comic book with a different name? Oh boy, the excitement!

Action Comics (Vol. 2), Issue #1 [November, 2011]
Written by: Grant Morrison
“Superman Versus the City of Tomorrow”

Yuck, look at Superman’s face on the fucking cover. What an arrogant-looking jerkoff. I have a feeling I’m not going to connect with Superman, mostly because he’s portrayed as flawless and has no weaknesses except some sort of rock from his home planet, right? Also, Jerry Seinfeld really likes Superman and that’s major points off right there anyway.

Two panels in and I’m already laughing because this guy says “Mr. Glenmorgan…I’m teetotal.”, which sounded like straight up Engrish to me until I looked it up and realized that it’s a grammatically correct sentence. But it reminded me of “Bart, get out, I’m piss.” and you shouldn’t look that up at all. Anyway, these two guys are some sort of pieces-of-shit businessmen and Superman pops in all angry about the businessmen. There’s guys with guns too. Superman throws them all around the room, but we don’t even see it! Where’s the Action in my Comics?!

Mr. Teetotal tells the cops who arrive on the scene that a “madman” came “out of nowhere” with “a red parachute” and took “Mr.” Glenmorgan. They go into the next room and Superman is standing there on the edge of a balcony about 50 floors off the ground hosting Glenmorgan above his head with one arm, which is an arrogant-jerkoff thing to do!

Check out Glenmorgan’s eyes rolling in the back of his head in ecstasy. He loves this shit. Really gets off on it.

Glenmorgan is rabid with rage! The police are supposed to stop Superman NOW! Meanwhile, “Superman” (I’m beginning to think this cat isn’t actually Superman, his eyes keep glowing ominously in the shadows) is like “fuck you Glenmorgan you pussy” and jumps off the roof, plummets to the ground, and lands on his feet while still holding him. After this, Glenmorgan has a few choice words for Superman, such as “Dhh” or “Uh… Guh…”, and then decides to give a full confession right then and there about his shady business dealings, corner cutting, and other various tomfooleries. Pffft.

Once the threat has been eliminated Superman starts being a jerk to the police, taunting them while smiling vaguely, which is kind of cool actually. The police start shooting at him and calling in reinforcements, but even I know that it’s futile. This is a Super-type Man, you nimrods! He’s going to live forever until he’s a gibbering trillion-year-old idiot floating around the hazy remnants of complete entropy.

Meanwhile, in some army command center, we see Lex Luthor sipping from a can of pop while General Lane (Lois Lane’s dad?) is trying to figure out how they can eliminate this big scary “Super” “Man”. The army is paying Luthor to bring them Superman by 8pm. Luthor seems confident.

It’s the very next panel where I realize that Superman seems to be wearing denim jeans as part of his superhero outfit! Gross! It seems Luthor has arranged for a wrecking ball to start demolishing a building with people in it, which is exactly the kind of tree-huggin’ humanitarian bullshit that Superman would fall for. He successfully stops the wrecking ball in its path and launches it against another wall, creating an opening for the people to escape through. ACTION!

GNUHH! Here comes the Admiral of the Denim Brigade! Got a wallet chain to go with those JNCOs?

But wait! There are tanks waiting outside the building and one of them shoots a net right at Superman, which he is apparently no match for whatsoever for exactly one panel. Superman then grabs the wrecking ball chain and swings it into one of the tanks. It’s at this point that the army guys decide to throw in the towel; this denim-clad beast must be from another planet or something! Reinforcement helicopters arrive, but Superman decides to fucking fly away easily. Bye!

Superman lands on his apartment building, puts on a large and smelly-looking orange shirt, dons some Harry Potter nerd glasses, rumples his hair, and now he’s in a perfect disguise! Clark Kent! His cross-eyed landlady is concerned because ol’ Clarky looks a little mussed up! Hahaha, that’s ok Ms. *squints* Nyxly? Yuck. Anyway, ol’ Clarky has had it worse growing up on his Smallville farm! Heh heh ha! They have a friendly chat about how wonderful Superman is as Ms. Nyxyxyx demands her rent money from Kent. She tells him he had visitors. He is perplexed. Probably because Superman is a little bit dumb, right? Isn’t he some sort of dumb guy? Am I remembering that right?

Clark Kent calls some little bowlhead kid named Jimmy Olsen, who is with Lois Lane at a subway station. They both look a little cross-eyed too! Clark tells Jimmy not to get on the train because of reasons. Lois Lane is like “nuh uh, that guy works for the OTHER newspaper and I ain’t listening, girlfriend”. This scene is hard to follow, ugh. A lot of dialogue is happening one-sided from the reader’s point of view and I have too much attention deficit disorder to hey look a penny.

Where was I? It seems Lois Lane boarded a train anyway and this is bad. The train goes faster and there’s some bad guy named Grundig involved who may have made a shady business deal with that Glenmorgan guy. Clark Kent, somewhere along the way, turns into Superman again and chases the train, runs ahead of it, and attempts to stop it by pushing against the driver’s cabin. Meanwhile, some guy dressed like a 1920’s gangster tells Lois and Jimmy to “SAY IT TO THE GUNS!” I’m sure they try hard not to start snickering at this. He’s even wearing a bandit mask! Cute. Superman is still trying to stop the train while he’s bleeding out the ears! ACTION! The train somehow derails, crashes through like forty buildings, and stops? And everyone’s ok probably.

Left one is Martha! Right one is Daisy! A couple o’ ladies for ya! They’s all dolled up and ready ta kiss! With a bullet thru da brainpan!

Back at Army HQ, General Lane is mad as the dickens because Lois was on that train and Lex Luthor fucking knew that! Rawr! As Lex Luthor gets yelled at he starts talking about snakes and toads and compares Superman to a parasite and Earth to a host. He points out that Superman is pinned against the outside of the Daily Planet building by the train, declares that he made good on his promise to bring Superman to General Lane by 8pm, and walks the hell on out of there smugly. Lane just kind of stares, realizing that Luthor has a point.

Final Thoughts

Mixed feelings! A lot of this was stupid, black-and-white good guy-bad guy shit, but some of it was more interesting than I either expected OR stubbornly pretended wasn’t! It felt kind of long, though. I like my ACTION with less action!

HOWEVER, if I’m supposed to hate Lex Luthor then it didn’t work, because he was the best part of the issue. He never got emotional, nervous, and he’s got a big bald head!

Superman seems like he’s not entirely flawless here! He says “ow”, among other things. Bleeding ears. I’m not sure what to make of that yet. I’m also wondering if Action Comics is going to follow Superman entirely or if it’s going to branch off into different stories. Why have a separate Superman series if Action Comics is going to follow Superman??

Ignorance abounds on my end! Will Tom learn a thing or two? See you in Action Comics, Volume 2, Issue #2, you dorkbuckets!

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Whispering Sons, Frost*, and Cannibal Corpse

Why, is that yet another Newer Release Roundup on the horizon?? Yes, yes, I believe so! Today I have albums from Whispering Sons, Frost*, and Cannibal Corpse. Bring the kids in for that last one!

Whispering Sons – Several Others
(June 18, 2021)

Whispering Sons hails from Belgium, the land of waffles and sprouts! They play a moody, gothic type of post-punk that runs the range from slow and dreary to punchy and caustic. The lead singer, Fenne Kuppens, is a woman but you would have to double check to make sure first; her voice register is super low! Like Cher! Y’all remember Cher? The band’s lineup situation is similar to the newer London-based post-punk outfit Dry Cleaning; the band minus the lead singer all knew each other for a while, and Kuppens was recruited much later for her voice and delivery. While Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw admittedly contributes not much more than her own voice to her respective project, Fenne brings much of the emotional weight to the music: the tangible feelings of alienation, of desperation, and of loneliness, all enhanced by her quavering timbre. She sounds like she’s stranded–isolated–near the vast, odd, purple dune-like wasteland depicted by the album cover.

If I had to grasp at comparisons, I’d say U2-like guitars (especially on “Heat”), Gang of Four-style sharp basslines, maybe Cure-like emotional wavering and desperate vocal delivery, Protomartyr-like desolate soundscapes, and occasional Sonic Youth-like no wave crashes of hissing noise. That oughta do it.

Personal favorites are the back-to-back tracks “Vision” and “Screens”, which nicely show the two sides of the Whispering Sons coin. The first chugs precariously along two minor-key chords, building to a high-strung and disjointed chorus. Eventually, Kuppens all but yells by the end of the song. Very cathartic. “Screens” is a cool-down; a piano-driven, woeful mid-tempo piece with static-y drums fizzling about the edges. It’s the perfect soundtrack to a rainy Thursday afternoon.

Releases like Several Others will assuredly get lost among the post-punk landfill, but don’t sleep on this one. It’s every bit as good as anything else you could stumble across. Unfortunately, with 2021 being such a strong year for young post-punk groups, it may not be Whispering Sons’ time in spotlight quite yet. They’ll get their due, you heard it here first!

Early Verdict:

Frost* – Day and Age
(May 14, 2021)

I’m frustratingly picky about my progressive rock. I’m especially wary of supergroups, which tend to comprise the strongest of the strong prog rock personalities all in one big, unstrained, self-indulgent band. My mini-review of the new Transatlantic album serves quite well as an example of my written feelings.

And, indeed, Frost* is a neo-progressive rock supergroup made up of members of Arena, IQ, and Kino, three somewhat schmaltzy, and fairly typical, neo-progressive rock groups. Casual and cautious listening of Frost* in the past has kept the band precariously teetering upon the narrow, hair-thin tightrope that also balances my other genuine prog rock interests. It represents how easy it can be for any such band to stumble and fall, never to return. A few special bands are glued to it. Frost* may get that glue some day!

I was blown away by Day and Age at first listen, and then slightly less on the second listen, but then caught some new “aha” moments on my third and fourth listens! So that’s a good sign. I was worried at first when, after the cool new wave U2-esque rhythms that begin the album on its title track (hey, look at that, another U2 similarity), it moved into some familiar Peter Gabriel/Phil Collins vocal stylings with hokey late-’80s adult contemporary melodies. Uh oh! We’re losing balance on that tightrope! But then, like all good (and I mean good) prog rock bands, they’re able to give their wussy whimsical side some real edge, tension, and some humor. There’s this extended nervous bridge section with haunted child vocals that brought me right back into it.

The album strikes a good balance between the hokey Genesis playfulness and the sinister Porcupine Tree darkness. The first few minutes of “The Boy Who Stood Still” shows this middle ground, with actor Jason Isaacs narrating a fanciful tale about a boy who could make himself invisible (and it eventually twists into a metaphor for isolation) over some futuristic, syncopated electronic keyboard arpreggios. Tasteful use of keyboards is all over Day and Age, acting mostly as an industrial/electronic rhythm section instead of a lead instrument. I really like the Stewart Copeland-like rhythmic synth progression on “Island Life”, and closer is a cool piece of business with its slow semi-bombast, the vaguely industrial percussion, and the operatic backing vocals fading in and out during the chorus.

This is a contender for my coveted Token Prog Album of the Year position. Will this slot be filled by something else in the next three months?? Only time will tell! *snore*

Early Verdict:

Cannibal Corpse – Violence Unimagined
(April 16, 2021)

Nothing here that reminds me of U2! Except maybe that I’d rather look at the cover art than Bono’s stupid face! I never got the hype for Cannibal Corpse, but then again, I never gave anything else beyond their first two albums a chance. I’m wondering if a lot of their early success rode on shock value and other transgressive attributes that aren’t nearly as shocking or transgressive these days as they used to be. Listening back to their first two again, they’re interchangeable with any other death metal band of its time. Maybe they did it better? It’s hard for me to tell.

So, why not, how about their fifteenth album Violence Unimagined? The band takes pride in finding fresh, creative ways to display their overexaggerated obsession with gore and violent death. Not having heard 80% of their catalog, I can only assume that Cannibal Corpse is one of those tried-and-true stalwarts of death metal, and each new release appeases their rabid fans with as much Cannibal Corpse-y goodness as their previous album, year after year after year.

Taking it on its own merits, which is how everything should be taken, this is some good stuff. Chunky riffs aplenty, with throaty, raspy, intelligible growls, and interesting guitar parts that alternate between hard-hitting, punctuating staccato, and lazy swirling around the pummeling blast beats. And the sequencing! Just when you think you’ve had enough of the style, they throw in a song like “Slowly Sawn” with hella interesting guitar scales dotting the fetid musical landscape.

Of course, lyrics like “Protracted slaughter/Slowly cut apart/Every day, another stroke/Serrated edge slicing/Through tendons and bone” are way more poetic than anything I could possibly contribute to this review, silver-tongued as I may be. So I’ll just leave it at that.

Early Verdict:

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Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3), Issue #6 – “Gifted (Part 6)”

* Part 6 of 6 of the Gifted storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3) Issue #6 – “Gifted (Part 6)”! In the previous installment, the metal guy named Peter is supposed to be dead and Pryde tries to hash this out with him, but he’s obtuse about it in only a way a supposed-to-be-dead guy can be. Meanwhile, Dr. Rao shows up while the rest of the X-Men were held hostage in that one room with the blue and yellow mutant girl corpse. She’s all like “RUARBABAURARBRBR WHAT’S GOING ON HERE??” and tries to explain that the blue and yellow mutant was already dead when she got here! Heh heh! Oh yeah, Ord shows up again somehow but Peter and Pryde make their way upstairs and give Ord a taste of TEXAS JUSTICE and by that I mean Ord pisses Peter off by saying he’s made of steel, when instead he is indeed made of rage, and then he rages all over Ord. When things look like they’ll be ok, Nick Fury pops in with his gun-toting fun bunch ready to give the X-Men a taste of TEXAS JUSTICE. What the fuck am I even talking about? Good god.

This is the final issue of the Gifted story arc. $20 says that I’ll have more questions than answers, which has been completely true so far anyway. So why the fuck would it change now? Maybe I should move on to Buffy comics next, Joss. You’d like that wouldn’t you.

Astonishing X-Men (Vol. 3), Issue #6 [December, 2004]
Written by: Joss Whedon
“Gifted (Part 6)”

Nice cover art. Looks like erotic Star Trek fan fiction, except instead of Data it’s some chrome-plated muscle dude, and instead of Geordi LaForge it’s Kitty Pryde wearing a Georgi LaForge uniform. Personally, I’d rather read the Data/Geordi slash fiction than Issue #6! Am I being facetious?? Only I will ever know…

Right off the bat it looks like something flashbacky is going on since all the panels are in black and white. That’s a classic flashback film technique right there! Except they didn’t use it in the TV show Lost and we all know what happened to Lost. Hey, are there any Lost comic books? I should look into that. ANYWAY, Dr. Rao is talking to Ord, who appears to have provided her with tons of useful data regarding development of the “cure”, but Rao remembers her Hippocratic Oath and is skeptical that Ord’s intentions aren’t altruistic and pure. I mean, I suppose if the fact that he’s some sort of 9-foot tall monster man isn’t a clue enough. He reassures her sinisterly that he, in fact, actually brought Peter back from the dead. So there! Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Rao! The flashback sequence ends with Ord asking the green-haired lady from the end of the last issue (beside Nick Fury during the armed ambush) for Tildie Soames’ file. We’re starting to come full circle here! As you may remember, Tildie is the little girl whose nightmares came to life and killed her parents from the beginning of this story arc. Chills!

Things are in color again, so the flashback is over! Or maybe this is like Memento where the black and white parts are in chronological order and the color parts are in reverse order and Joey Pants gets shot in the head. Wolverine is super pissed, and he’s usually already normal pissed, so the only thing that happens when he’s super pissed is that he grits his teeth a little bit more. Nick Fury tells the X-Men team to walk away, but that’s not happening anytime soon, so we’re at an impasse. Wolverine asks who the green-haired lady is. No answer. Nick Fury asks why Peter isn’t dead. No answer. Stalemate again! Pryde accuses Fury of holding Peter in Benetech Labs and torturing him incessantly in pursuit of the mutant cure. Fury states his ignorance. Frost calls Fury a “berk”, and I’m going to look that up really quick… … rude! Fury, at any rate, is taken quite aback that Peter is indeed alive and frowning right in front of him, so he asks the green-haired lady (Agent Brand, as it turns out) for a quick sidebar. She basically tells him to go fuck himself, so even on the same side we’re getting nowhere here. Fury tells her to go fuck herself right back, and now we’re getting somewhere! Brand decides to start talking.

BOO! HISS! GET OFF THE STAGE! BOOOO! WE WANT ZEPPELIN!

Agent Brand works with the Sentient Worlds Observation and Response Department (S.W.O.R.D., which works alongside S.H.I.E.L.D., how about that shit huh? How about that fucking shit??) So while S.H.I.E.L.D. handles Earth stuff, S.W.O.R.D. handles all the other non-Earth stuff. Cyclops finally says something for the first time in this comic book: “awwwwwww nertz!” Wait, let me double check… …no, uh, he actually gets catty about funding extraterrestrial terrorism, but Brand argues back that they’re trying to prevent an intergalactic war.

Suddenly, some rather unpleasant-looking mutants bust through the wall and demand the cure. This includes a guy with his face on his torso (his superpower is self-fellatio maybe?), a child who looks like a flying blue flame (his superpower is lighting up high-hanging candelabras) and some Keanu Reeves-looking purple guy with long, skinny limbs (his superpower is basketball). Fury and Brand’s army are incapacitated while these freaks, and many more, start jumping around the place. During the FRACAS, Ord somehow regains consciousness and slips away. I guess. He ends up crashing through the window of the lab’s observation room where they’re holding Tildie Soames, because no one in this comic book series uses doors. Hold on, there’s a lot of goddamned stuff going on all of a sudden. Maybe this is like Memento after all?

Little Tildie Soames is going to need some therapy and about 40 prescriptions in about 10 years.

I think we’re at a point later in the story now. The X-Men team are all standing over Agent Brand, who is lying on the floor. She starts talking about breakworlds and timeshadows and god knows what the fuck else. Vampires? The Initiative? Wolfram & Hart? Rupert Giles? Anyway, these timeshadows that Brand speaks of can glimpse into the future. She makes it clear that they can’t visit or change the future, they can just kind of see it. I don’t know why the hell she starts talking about this. These mysterious timeshadows that I’ve never heard about before until now have seen the future and it’s not looking good, my friends. It’s not looking good at all. The breakworld gets destroyed! Utterly, utterly destroyed! Oh no! By a mutant! TILDIE SOAMES?! RUPERT GILES?! Ok, it’s coming together now, these seers saw the future and they say that some X-Man single-handedly destroyed whatever this breakworld is, but they don’t know who it was at all, so they began to design a cure for mutantism so that they could cure all mutants so that the mutants could be cured before this particular mutant destroys the oh-so-special breakworld.

All my S.H.I.E.L.D. training didn’t prepare me for this! Let me see that training manual again, where’s the section on cocksucking motherfucking spaceships?

Since all Kitty Pryde cares about is Peter McNoShirt, she asks if Brand knew they were torturing him this whole time. She admits that she did, but Fury didn’t, and before she can admit to Beast the Rao knew, Rao bursts into the room (NOT THROUGH A WALL AT ALL! SEE, THERE’S SOMETHING TO BE SAID FOR CURING THE MUTANTS, THAT’S ALL I’M TRYING TO SAY HERE!) to announce that Ord had kidnapped Tildie. Tildie Swinton??? That’s not anyone’s name at all!

Rao’s news alarms Brand, who radios Fury and tells him and all his men to evacuate the premises and get at least 500 yards away. When the X-Men asks her why, she simply says “He’s gonna leave.” Next thing we see is a cocksucking motherfucking spaceship blasting up into cocksucking motherfucking space! They can’t shoot him down, he’s got poor little innocent accidental murderer Tildie “Patrick” Mahomes in there with him! They can’t just do nothing, what about the, you know, whatever?! Peter has an idea, he’s going to throw Wolverine as hard as he can into the sky, and I’m sure the rest of the X-Men are more than willing to deal with the loss if Wolverine bites it right now. That guy’s a real crank.

Wolverine “lands” on the outside the spacecraft, and by “lands” I mean “slams into the damn thing pretty hard lol”. Inside the ship, Ord is talking scary-talk to the frightened little girl. “There will be nightmares. I will make the Earth an endless, shrieking blackness”. This guy must be good at parties! Wakka wakka! Before Ord can even finish a fourth sentence, Wolverine punches a fist through a window on the ship and goes elbow-deep into Ord’s sexy little mouth. He calmly instructs him to land the ship back on Earth.

Whoops, haha. Get the kids out of the room for this one. This mating ritual is intended for mature audiences.

Fury stands among the ruins of Benetech Labs and declares that everyone should just pretend none of this ever happened. The X-Men think Fury’s full of baloney! Fury defends Brand’s actions, even if he doesn’t agree with nearly all of them, and insists there’s something bigger going on here and they all need to walk away. At this point the X-Men all walk away.

EPILOGUE TIME! Things are worse than when they began! The cure is now in the hands of the government! Mutants are rioting everywhere! One of them is still predestined to destroy a breakworld and start an intergalactic war! On the plus side, says Cyclops, Peter’s alive! Good ol’ Pete, he seems sharp as a tack, that one. A real asset to the cause!

Cyclops asks Beast is he’s going to use the little sample of the cure that he still has in his private lab. Beast still doesn’t know (SPOILER ALERT, THIS IS 2004, RIGHT? HE’S STILL BEAST IN 2021, AIN’T HE? SHEEEEEE-IT), but is thinking he won’t since “an X-Men never gives up” or some other similarly empty superhero platitude.

Pryde and Peter are out on the school lawn. Peter is wearing a shirt! He wistfully looks across the grounds, lamenting that nothing in the world has changed while he was dead. He also finds it quite a coincidence that Pryde was the one that found him. Pryde doesn’t really agree that it’s a coincidence at all…

We end with Frost in the school looking out a window upon Peter and Pryde. She is talking to someone off-screen (off-panel?). The unknown companion tells Frost that Peter being alive “changes the equation”. Frost says that “she’s still the problem”. The unknown companion tells Frost not to worry. “When it starts… …we deal with her first”.

Final Thoughts

What a long write-up. Sorry for making you read all that on my blog where I write a lot all the time for people to read.

So that’s it for this story! The cure was meant to prevent an apocalypse, and now the cure still exists! What a problem.

I’m sure I’ll get back to this particular run eventually, but methinks I’ll pick up another X-Men series when I revisit this franchise. I’m not completely sold on the X-Men just yet, and I’m guessing some of Joss Whedon’s funny-boy business is partly to blame? Even if this IS one of the most critically acclaimed X-Men runs of all time. Meh.

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Batgirl (Vol. 4), Issue #6 – “A House Made of Spun Glass”

* Part 6 of 6 of the Darkest Reflection storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Batgirl (Vol. 4), Issue #6 – “A House Made of Spun Glass”! It’s kind of like a candy full of spiders, you see. In the previous installment, it’s Christmas Eve and Barbara’s mom shows up out of nowhere to chat. She’s moving back to Gotham. It’s not clear where she was before, but I’m guessing Cameroon. On the bad guy side of things, there’s this mysterious new enemy named Gretel who keeps changing her hair color. It’s unclear what her motivations are, but when she’s nearby people they go into a fugue state where they smile like the Joker, repeat the number 338, and try to kill people close to them. Bruce Wayne is spearheading a Gotham City urban renewal project (which you may remember if you read my Batman Vol. 2 Court of Owls commentary…what do you mean you didn’t?? …yeah, good call), and many people are unhappy (“OCCUPY GOTHAM!”) so he may be a target from disgruntled Gotham civilians. Batgirl follows Wayne downtown to protect him for some reason, but Gretel’s there and Bruce Wayne is possessed and we end the issue with him leaping at Batgirl with a crowbar repeating “338. 338. 338.” It’s all very dumb.

Issue #6 marks the end of the Darkest Reflection story arc, and that means I’ll be moving on from Batgirl for a while! To what I don’t know just yet, but deciding where to go next within the New 52 imprint will be way more thrilling than what may be in store for me here in this particular issue. Let’s get the goddamn thing over with, shall we?

Batgirl (Vol. 4), Issue #6 [April, 2012]
Written by: Gail Simone
“A House Made of Spun Glass”

“Possible last words of a passenger on the Titanic: This isn’t going to end well.” says Batgirl’s inner monologue as Bruce is about to cave her skull in with a crowbar. Personally, I would’ve thought something more like “AAAAUUUGGHHH!! FUCK! FUUUUUCK! WHAT THE FUCK? FUCK FUCK FUCK!”, but even in the tensest of moments Batgirl thinks about 100-year-old ship disasters. “338! 338!” bleats Bruce Wayne as he swings at Batgirl and misses her by about 338 miles. She tries to get through to him, tries to tell him that Gretel is controlling his mind, but he’s not listening at all since, you know, Gretel is controlling his mind and everything. So Batgirl kicks him right in the face, he lets out a pained “UGNGN!”, you know the drill. Wayne’s personal assistant (not the driver that tried to kill him, but a lady who didn’t try to kill him) smashes Batgirl in the head with some sort of square piece of…uh, something hard. Batgirl tries to
explain that she’s not looking to hurt Wayne, but EVERYTHING IS SO CHAOTIC HUBUBUBLUNBUUB!

Bruce Wayne is feral! Oh no! Not again!

Batgirl tries to figure out what could possibly cause Bruce to lose control like this? Is he faking it? The Mighty Bruce Wayne has the mental fortitude of a million Bat-like men! Why would he be susceptible to some skirt holding a saber? Right? Hahahaha!!? Well, sister, it doesn’t look like Bruce Wayne is faking SHIT so get ready to manslaughter a bitch! Meanwhile, Gretel loads up a pistol. “I have only three bullets and there are four of you, altogether. So this will be much more fun.” she says, and I’m left wondering what’s so fun about that when, like, 50 bullets when there are four targets altogether seems much more fun for your usual deranged Gotham lunatic fare. As Batgirl threatens Bruce with her baratang (A BOOMERANG SHAPED LIKE A BAT!), she starts going into some Batman/Batgirl batstory. Uh, I mean, backstory.

“We weren’t always close, Batman and I. Not always.” starts Batgirl. HEY! Isn’t that how the Batgirl/Nightwing relationship backstory started back in Issue #3? Did Batgirl and Batman fuck? Man, Batgirl gets around! “He didn’t want another partner, and I didn’t want to be another partner. Similar name and wardrobe, sure. But I stood apart. I was Batgirl.” BOOOOOOORING! What the hell is with the overdramatic musings, Batgirl? I’ve read five and a half issues of this series and it just seems like there’s no real reason whatsoever that Batgirl even HAS to be Batgirl in the first place! She just shows up and feels bad that she can’t do everything that she wants to do and then she goes home and lives with the guilt. Repeat the next night. Seems weird to me.

“Eat your vegetables, Barbara! Finish your homework, Barbara! Why can’t you be more like your brother, Barbara?! Stop leaving the toilet seat up, Barbara!”

Batgirl remembers Batman showing up at the hospital shortly after getting crippled. Since she was afraid of getting chewed out, and he didn’t chew her out, she feels like she owes him? Perhaps he was chewing her out internally? I would be! But not for misogyny reasons, I promise! A lot of my best friends are friends with women, I swear!

Back in the present, Batgirl attempts to jog Bruce’s memory by further traumatizing him. “Don’t you remember where you are? You’re two blocks from Crime Alley, where your parents were murdered!” Ha! Oh my god, his parents were murdered in a place called CRIME ALLEY?! LOL! That’s pretty awful. Bruce Wayne responds to these sentences with a series of 78-IQ facial expressions, but apparently that’s all it took to bring him back to reality. “What…what have I done?” he says as a plothole the size of Kansas opens up around everyone. As Wayne comes back to his senses, Batgirl notices that Gretel took a powder. Flew the coop. Fucked off into the night. But she wonders why didn’t Gretel put her charms on any women? Wayne’s female assistant, Batgirl herself, not even attempted to be under Gretel’s spell? Perhaps women aren’t susceptible to Gretel’s hypnotic charms? I BET BARBARA’S ROOMMATE ALYSIA WOULD BE, HINT HINT. Although, after Batgirl asks Wayne if he was faking it, Wayne says “yeah kinda”. So there you go.

Batgirl, Vol. 4, Issue #6 – “Validation From Men (Part 6 of 9,000,000)”

After the tender little moment shown in the above panel, Batgirl is on top of the world again! The moral of this story, girls, is that apparently your self-worth comes from the validation of men. Good lesson, Gail Simone. Really progressive. This is the pep talk she needed, though, and now she’s going to go after Gretel for realisies.

We’re switching POV now! Interesting! We see Gretel’s internal monologue as she awaits Batgirl. “They’ll come for me, now. They’ll all come for me…like in my dreams. Like they did when I was alive. When I believed in things.” Hell yeah, Gretel, just like that, became the most interesting character in this whole godforsaken series! She used to be Lisly Bonner, fresh out of journalism school, looking to be the next Lois Lane, gonna take down the Whittaker crime family! The penis mightier than the sword!

For two weeks, all my clothes smelled like gin and cigars and blood and piss and hamburgers and cologne and semen.

Bonner went undercover mingling with the gangsters, enjoying the high life, being one of them…until someone found the pocket voice recorder stashed away in her handbag. Whoops! Time to start sleeping with the fishes, Lisly BONER! Haha! Daddy Whittaker kills her dead at the end of a pier, she falls face-first in Gotham’s stinkiest bay, and that’s the end of that!

But not really. She didn’t die. Some kids found her and pulled her out, she woke up in the hospital. Gee, that sounds familiar, a woman gets shot and wakes up in the hospital. Hmmmmm. Bonner is salty because she spent her whole hospital stay without any visitors, no get-well cards, no gift baskets, nothing. Apparently, a bullet to the head scrambled her brain, she found out she can control minds! Whatever.

We jump back to Batgirl and her efforts to figure out Gretel’s motivations. She has a hunch about the meaning behind “338”. Back as Barbara, she stops by the apartment where she discovers her mother has been baking all day and creeping the crap out of Alysia. Barbara thinks her mom is bribing her back into her good graces and she AIN’T HAVING NONE OF IT.

Oh fuck me, there’s math involved? Nuts to this! I’m going home.

But she takes two muffins anyway and sets to work on her laptop in pursuit of cracking the Gretel code. 3 bullets for a .38 revolver. 338. This is also how Bonner died. She phones Bruce Wayne with this info, he tells her that there are some new problems afoot: Daddy Whittaker was killed in his hospital room only 30 minutes ago. What terrible luck! Anyway, Bruce wants to use Barbara as bait to lure Gretel. Capital plan!

We arrive at a Bruce Wayne rally. Make Gotham Great Again! A lot of people in the city think that Wayne is too dumb to know jack-shit about urban renewal, and they’re probably right, but nonetheless Bruce Wayne has a vision and he has money and he’s white so that’s really all that matters (not even the “vision” part is truly important). Wayne stands at the podium and starts blah-blah-blahing, and Batgirl notices that the police in the crowd are acting strange. “338! 338!” they shout as they start opening fire on Wayne, but JUST IN THE NICK OF TIME Batgirl pushes Wayne out of the way. Now she starts cop-killing Body Count-style with her bata-ma-rang, and spots Gretel (blue hair now) with a megaphone on top of a construction site crane. “PEOPLE OF EARTH” she says. Just kidding! “Oh great men of Gotham,” she starts while McKenna appears on the scene to bring down Batgirl, “…COME INTO MY HOUSE OF CANDY AND DELIGHT AND BURN FOREVER!” Gretel sounds like one of those Invader Zim fans I went to high school with.

Batgirl tries to reason with McKenna, and then BATMAN SHOWS UP and tells McKenna to go screw, they have things to do right now. Batgirl and Batman start scaling the crane where Gretel is still jibber-jabbering. They try to reason with her, it doesn’t work, so Batgirl leaps at her and knocks them both down off the crane. Gretel’s wig falls off, revealing the giant-ass bullet wound on her bald dome. Batgirl uses Batgrapple to slow down her and Gretel’s Batfall to near the Batground, where McKenna is waiting. I’m paraphrasing: “Hurrr, dorf durf, uhhhh I guess since you saved Gretel I won’t arrest you this time Batgirl, hurr-de-durr, but watch out for next time!” McKenna arrests Gretel and takes her away.

“Revenge never heals what’s broken. We know about that, don’t we–Batman?” The end?

Final Thoughts

What the fuck? How anticlimactic! Things I still need to know:

-Everything

And so ends the first Batgirl storyline. I’m taking a break on Batgirl for now. Jesus Christ that was rough, you guys. Sorry about that!

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Enslaved, Caetano Veloso – Ringing in Autumn with Black Metal and Tropicália

I’m adding a new “regular” feature to the blog. I spend every waking moment of my life listening to music, no exaggeration. There’s at least one earbud in my ear at any given moment. Unless I’m in the shower. If I could do it there too I would.

So, sometimes I’m just listening to shit and I don’t have time to collect all my free-floating unresearched thoughts into coherent review-type walls of text. So here it is, the mostly autobiographical AudioBiography. *trumpet fart*

Enslaved

Oh cool, a black metal band where everyone has long hair and they’re all wearing costumes. A real nice change of pace. Way to break the mold, guys.

My first foray into black metal was trying to dip into Enslaved. This was years ago, probably 2014, back when my mind was at its most open, but metal was still sort of scary and impenetrable. Circa late 2013, I was starting to acquire a taste for the guttural death metal growls. Sort of! There has always been Opeth, which I got into in college but only the clean singing…so that would only be Damnation at the time. That was a couple years before the band’s apparent permanent shift to clean-singing progressive rock/metal starting with Heritage in 2011. But, man, did I ever like Damnation. The closest I ever got to appreciating more Opeth at the time was Ghost Reveries and Watershed, but even those were tough with all the RAWR RAWR RAWWWWWWR!

But I’m not here talk about Opeth, consarn it! Enslaved is commonly described as “the Opeth of black metal”, and since Opeth opened the door for death metal, then, dagnabbit, I was going to let Enslaved open the door to black metal! No ifs, ands, or buts! Here we go!

And I didn’t really like it. Vikingligr Veldi, their debut, is what I started with. Long, inaccessible track lengths, weird cheesy synths, unsettling low-energy, muttery, growly vocals. I couldn’t connect with it at all. And then I tried the next three albums and they all sounded about the same. I couldn’t understand the Opeth connection whatsoever.

As time went on, and I collected many more varied black metal listening experiences, I always returned to Enslaved. Earlier this year, during some particularly deep diving into the hellish void that is the world’s black metal repository (and I believe there are twice as many black metal recordings on Earth than than there are recordings of every other music genre put together), I acquired a taste for the style in a way I never had before! And then I jumped ahead to their later, more progressive output, and finally understood the Opeth connection.

That is to say, I am now a big fan. Wasn’t that interesting? The last few weeks I’ve been getting into their later career stuff more than ever: In Times, E, Utgard, it’s all solid stuff. They always keep it fresh and innovative within the confines of their own developed sound.

I still think Enslaved is a good starting point for the black metal-curious, but I wouldn’t start at the beginning like I did. I’d go with Monumension and Below the Lights, which are both middle-career transition albums. If you like the pure black metal stuff, go earlier. If you like the progressive metal stuff, go later. Bing bang boom.

Caetano Veloso

Caetano Veloso showing off that sexy, emaciated, living in a Brazilian dictatorship look that was all the rage in 1967.

While the English-speaking Western world was fawning over the British Invasion completely upsetting and changing the course of popular music forever starting in the 1960s, Brazil was having its own insular artistic revolution at the time in the form of tropicália. Before tropicália, and other similar subgenres emerging at around the same time, Brazilian popular music was largely based around Brazilian folk/dance traditions via, primarily, the bossa nova and samba styles. See, I look things up once in a while!

Tropicália, specifically, was a mixed bag subgenre. Traditional folk/dance, bossa nova, samba, psychedelia, African rhythms, British/American rock, anything goes. It was basically the Brazilian version of progressive rock (the whimsical side, like the Canterbury scene), albeit more politically motivated with an aim to be directly seditious. As a sporting young chap who is always interested in breaking into some experimental and revolutionary music, no matter where it comes from, I was totally on board with tropicália when I first learned about it a couple years ago!

Even though the tropicália movement completely pissed off the Brazilian government and forced some artists into exile, like everything else on planet, time can make even the most subversive music seem completely tame by the current day’s standards. Os Mutantes, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Tom Zé, Marcos Valle, and Caetano Veloso, these are all the biggest names associated with the movement, and my sampling of their early work left me disappointed. I’m sure it was groundbreaking for its time, but now it just sounds like the early Kinks or the early Who fucking around or something. It doesn’t help that I can’t speak a lick of Portuguese, maybe there are lyrics in there about the Brazilian dictatorship and how they can all go suck a hard dick?

I found a couple of Brazilian artists I did really like right away, but they were active decades later. They also weren’t associated with the movement at all, but were likely influenced by it. These include avant-garde weirdo Arrigo Barnabé, and avant-garde weirdo Rogéerio Skylab. I remember trying to get into tropicália during the autumn months, so that’s probably why I’m thinking about it again. So, I’m sticking with Caetano Veloso right now, whose melodies seemed more interesting to me than the others. His first three albums are all self-titled! Right now, I think Caetano Veloso seems a little more personal than both Caetano Veloso and Caetano Veloso, but Caetano Veloso has more diversity. I don’t know how I feel yet about Caetano Veloso. Does that make any sense?! I thought so.

Other Quick Thoughts

Miles Davis proves that he’s the Jim Jones of jazz…but, you know, without all the Kool-Aid mass suicide stuff. That I know of.

–Rivils of Nihil are really leaning into becoming a straight-up prog-metal band with their most recent release The Work. I don’t know how I feel about this yet, but I think I really like it??

-I like the idea of System of a Down more than I like System of a Down. I know Mezmerize better than any of their other releases, and it’s the only one that has really stuck. I listened to their self-titled debut again this week, which I only tried a few times, and I was surprised at its consistency. I should dip into Serj Tankian’s solo output someday. Maybe.

-Live jazz box sets are the shit! And there are really not that many official ones if you think about it. It’s too bad there was no real thought to recording and/or releasing full live sets on a regular basis. We’d be sitting on an endless goldmine of top-notch jazz from the greatest jazz men of the Great Jazz Men Generation. BUT, we make do with what we have. Right now I’m delving deep into Miles Davis’ Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965 (8 discs), John Coltrane’s Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings (4 discs), and Bill Evans’ Complete Village Vanguard Recordings 1961 (3 discs). There’s also a 20-disc Miles Davis release called The Complete Miles Davis at Montreaux that will take me years to absorb. Maybe I’ll listen to the whole thing tomorrow. Ha!

That’s enough of this shit for now.

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Action Comics (Vol. 2), Issue #1 – “Superman Versus the City of Tomorrow”

Action Comics (Vol. 2), Issue #1 [November, 2011]
Written by: Grant Morrison
“Superman Versus the City of Tomorrow”

Final Thoughts

Whispering Sons, Frost*, and Cannibal Corpse