What I bought, read, watched, or otherwise consumed – May 2025

May 2025 was a weird month for me, and I’m not going to do a traditional review column. You know me — sometimes I’m just not feeling it, and trying to catch up on the first four months of the year took a lot out of me, plus there just wasn’t a ton of stuff in May that really inspired me to write about it. A few comics were pretty keen, and I’ll get to all of them, but not in a logical way. Who needs logic in today’s world?

***

It was a weird month partly because it’s the end of the school year here in Arizona, and this year, that meant the end of my daughter’s tenure in high school. They called it “graduation,” but it was really her aging out — in Arizona, you’re allowed to go to high school until the year you turn 22, and as she turned 22 about a month after school started last August, she was able to go this entire school year. I get why they do it, of course — by the time you’re 22, you ought to have enough credits to graduate, and even if you’re a special needs kid who doesn’t (which she didn’t), I assume the theory is that most special needs kids are grown-ass adults by this time and shouldn’t be around young teenagers, because sometimes you can’t control ambulatory special needs kids. Mia is small, however (and very unlikely to get any bigger), and can’t go anywhere on her own, so it’s a bummer that they can’t make an exception for her. Her teachers and the staff love her, and we would honestly like to keep her in school for her entire life, because she can learn (very slowly, but still) and she loves being in that environment. We’re investigating day programs for her, because we need to do something with her other than keeping her at home (I need to get a full-time job, my wife works from home but can’t do that and deal with Mia on a regular basis, and she does get bored watching DVDs, even though she digs them). We want to find a program that’s at least a little like school, where they have lots of activities and maybe teach her some things. We’ll figure it out, but it’s still going to be annoying.

She “graduated” on Thursday the 29th, and that’s that. For eight years, she was in high school, and I know the people there will miss her. She is almost always happy, and she has a mischievous sense of humor, and she loves laughing and making other people laugh. A few months ago, the choir she’s in (she loves music and likes to bop along to it, so choir seemed like a good choice of elective) sang “Let It Go” (one of her favorite songs) to her at the year’s penultimate concert as a tribute to her, and of course, we found out a bit later that they had dedicated an entire page in the yearbook to her, as I noted here. Everyone digs Mia!

The graduation ceremony was quick (a bit over an hour), and we got lucky because the day was mostly cloudy and cool (for May in Arizona), and when it started, at 7 p.m., the sun was close to the western horizon and wasn’t an issue. Mia got to hang out with the choir one last time (when they sang the National Anthem) and she got to go up on stage, and she seemed to enjoy herself. Still, it’s a bittersweet moment. I know graduation for any parent is bittersweet, but considering that school was a safe haven for Mia, it stings a bit that we don’t have that option anymore. We hope to find someplace good to help her through the next phase of her life. Here are a couple of pictures of her graduation stuff — one was a few days before, when they took the kids around campus and got several nice photos of them, and the other was on the night, with her teacher adding the caption, which was nice of her:

***

I don’t know if I’m just getting too old (I know, I’m not that old — I turned 54 in May, so yay! — but I mean old in spirit), and I’ll keep watching television, but the writing on TV shows makes me so angry these days. In May we watched the second season of Wolf Hall, which is subtitled The Mirror & the Light. Then we watched Daredevil: Born Again, the second season of Marie Antoinette, and the first season of Paradise. All of them were fine, I guess – the acting was pretty good, the production was high, and there were some cool moments, but for me, they were just that … fine. Nothing too special. It’s frustrating, because I get the things they do in television, but it doesn’t mean they don’t annoy me. As I’ve noted in the past, I get that they don’t waste film (I know most — or all — of television is filmed digitally, but you know what I mean) or the audience’s time, so we learn things when a character does but then, when another character asks them what’s up, they don’t tell them, because we already know it, so a character explaining it again would be redundant. I get all that, but it still means we have characters deliberately misleading people and that causing a lot of problems instead of them just, you know, telling the truth and moving on. It’s just frustrating watching television that does that. Also, the stupidity of some characters never ceases to amaze me. Hector Ayala is killed in Daredevil: Born Again (sorry — spoiler!) because he’s just that stupid. He gets acquitted in his trial because Matt Murdock reveals his identity (it’s a clever move, trust me), and then tells Hector he can never be White Tiger again because of it. Hector knows this, and he knows the cops are unhappy that he was acquitted (he was accused of killing a dirty cop), yet he puts on his costume and wanders out into the night, with a crippling lack of zanshin, and gets shot in the head. BE CAREFUL, YA DUMMY! I mean, he’s wearing his super-amulet, so maybe he thought that would protect him, but come on, Hector, what the hell? Meanwhile, in Paradise, Sterling K. Brown does that thing where he finds the crucial key to the mystery and completely forgets about everything around him, allowing the bad guy to get the drop on him. Aren’t you a damned Secret Service agent, dude? There’s just a lot of this in television these days … and in comics, as we’ll see. It’s frustrating. I guess I am just getting old.

***

I only read a couple of books in May … or, I should say, I only read a couple of books since my post in mid-May about all the non-comics stuff I was consuming in the first four months of the year. Last year at the Phoenix comic book convention (“Phoenix Fan Fusion,” because I guess they don’t want to be a convention and had to come up with the stupidest name possible), I bought Charles Soule’s novel The Oracle Year because he was there and I had already bought all the comics that he wrote that I wanted (he has written some comics that I’m not interested in) and I talked to him for a few minutes and he seemed like a cool dude and I felt bad. I mean, the book sounded neat, but I’m not sure I would have bought it if someone had just randomly said, “Hey, Charles Soule wrote a novel.” Anyway, it’s pretty good – a random dude has a dream in which he suddenly knows 104 predictions about the future, and he starts posting them on a web site and selling a few to very powerful businesses so he can make a shit-ton of money. Of course, people want to know who he is, so he gets a techie friend of his to set up everything with lots and lots of security, but eventually, the president gets a very scary person to hunt him down. Meanwhile, it seems like the predictions are random and even unimportant, but our hero — Will Dando — begins to realize that they’re doing weird things to the world, perhaps bringing about its demise, so he has to try to stop that, naturally. It’s a well-constructed book, as Soule shows how the predictions can shape what people are doing even if they resist it — one prediction is about a televangelist who definitely does not want it to happen, and the parts with the preacher become darkly cynical as the book moves on — and he does a good job resolving it, as well. It’s a bit strange, because despite the fact that the world might be ending, it’s not really a dark book — I mean, there are bleak parts, sure, but I guess because Will is kind of a hopeful character despite his predictions causing all these problems, it feels hopeful even when things are dire. You might not like that tone, but I thought it worked pretty well with the kind of odd apocalypse going on in the book — Will is trying to fight against a disembodied … evil, I guess (although is it?), and the end of the world is definitely in slow motion (which, as we can tell from turning on the news these days, is how the apocalypse will definitely occur), which makes the pace of the book a bit more langorous than you get with your more standard end-of-the-world scenarios. I dunno, I liked it. I don’t know if Soule will be at this week’s Fan Fusion, but I’ll tell him I dug his book if he is! [Update: Sadly, he was not.]

My next book is another odd one, for different reasons. Daniel Stashower’s The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder bugs me because of the title — this was certainly not the “invention of murder,” nor does Stashower offer any reasoning for the subtitle, which falls into the pattern of far too many popular history books these days: the main title, and then a subtitle which consists of two things (usually names), and then a final list item that presents a thesis phrase. In this case, there’s no rationale behind that final phrase, and it really dig bug me while I was reading this.

Mary Rogers was a young woman who became known around New York in the late 1830s as the “beautiful seegar girl” because she worked at a cigar store (the owner hired her to lure people in, and I guess it worked) and because New York was a lot smaller then, so a lot of people could know a random cigar store girl. In 1841 she died, and the circumstances around her death led people to believe it was murder, although no one was ever charged with the crime. It became a newspaper sensation (this was, of course, early in the Golden Age of newspapers, when famous people like James Gordon Bennett and Horace Greeley competed for readers) and attracted the attention of Poe, who wrote “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” in response to it. The life and death of Rogers doesn’t take up too much space, nor does the aftermath of the death and what happened to the principals, so Stashower spends a lot of time on Poe, giving us, basically, a mini-biography of the writer. That’s fine, but I do wish Stashower had spent a bit more time on the society of New York at the time, because it is fascinating (he gets into, for instance, the debate over abortion that was happening at the time, and that’s one of the better sections of the book, but there’s not enough of that). I don’t mind that he spends so much time on Poe’s attempts to write the story and what it meant to him and how he had to react to news about the death (the story was published in three parts, and Poe promised to reveal the killer in the third part — he claimed that he was going to solve the case of Mary Rogers even though his story featured “Marie Rogêt” and was set in Paris — but before the third part could be published, there was a break in the case that wrecked his ending), but I don’t think we needed as much as we got about his early life. Maybe we did. Anyway, it’s an interesting book, certainly, and Stashower could make the case that Poe “invented” true crime fiction — his story starred Auguste Dupin, a fictional character, but Poe insisted that all the facts of the case were taken from the actual death of Mary Rogers — but I don’t see how murder was invented in this case. It’s just weird. Still, it’s always interesting to see how real life worked in different time periods and to see how little things have changed. Young women are still dying under mysterious circumstances, artists are still getting shafted by capitalists (although, of course, Poe was usually self-destructive, but he did get screwed over a lot), we’re still debating abortion in much the same way they did 180 years ago, and the media can still influence people in both good and bad ways. So it goes.

I’ve been reading a lot about how people don’t read anymore, and how kids can’t read critically, which is making their education more difficult. I don’t know why people in general don’t read — I imagine that television/movies have a lot to do with it, but with kids, it’s their phones. Apparently, it’s not that people — and kids — are illiterate, it’s that they don’t have the attention spans to read longer things. We read articles on-line, and apparently people still do that a lot, but if it’s longer than a few pages, people lose interest. I imagine that adults have read less, so their kids don’t see the point (although my daughter doesn’t read very much, even though she once did, so it’s not a direct connection, as my wife and I read all the time). I’ve noticed this the few times when I’ve substituted, but I’m not sure if it’s as bad as people say — complaining about the laziness of the younger generation is a fun thing for the olds to do. It is frustrating, because reading is so fundamental (to coin a phrase) and I’m sure that the situation we find ourselves in today — with politicians getting caught lying and not even caring; scientists getting ignored because they say things we don’t like; anyone with a microphone and a video camera being able to say whatever they like and be taken seriously — isn’t helping. The decrease in reading makes critical thinking decline, and this leads to proudly ignorant people and the clusterfuck we’re living through. It also makes things more boring, I would argue, because we have lost the ability to enjoy language and allusions. When I read books like The Beautiful Cigar Girl and check out the way the newspapers write about it, it’s impressive how florid the language is and how people were expected to understand the words. They also used a lot of references to classical works which they assumed everyone would know, and it’s clear that even lower-class people generally knew them. These days, the most classical references you can make are to The Simpsons (see above! see below!) or Friends or Seinfeld. That can be funny, but it’s not the same.

It’s odd, because it’s not that people are unintelligent. My daughter’s physical therapist (who’s 35 years old) is a very smart woman with a very good memory, but she never really learned the Bible or even Shakespeare, so a lot of allusions in literature are lost on her. She didn’t know that “the writing on the wall” is Biblical, for instance, and she doesn’t know why Jacob is climbing a ladder or why Daniel is in the den of a lion. I noticed this years ago — when I was getting my master’s degree, my advisor referenced something in the Bible during class and the kids didn’t get it, and I told her that people just don’t learn the Bible anymore — and this was in 1999 or so. You don’t necessarily need to know all these references, of course, but they do make life, for me, deeper and richer. I got my daughter’s PT a children’s Bible a few years ago for Christmas so she and her husband could at least know the stories and get some references. She seemed delighted by it — I should ask her if she’s ever cracked it open.

I’ll keep reading because I really do love it. I just wish more people did!

***

Speaking of reading, how about those comics, eh? Comics, as you’ve heard, will break your heart, and May brought some that, if they don’t go that far, are a bit depressing because of the tiredness with which they’re created. First, though, let’s discuss some good ones. Exquisite Corpses kicked off, and it’s pretty darned good, although I’m a bit worried by James Tynion’s obsession with conspiratorial cabals, because that’s all he writes about these days. This has a … decent (?) hook, I suppose, as representatives of the 13 original colonies fight it out every five years on Halloween for control of the country. They pick a small town, isolate it from the rest of the world, and send a killer of their choosing into the town to kill the other killers chosen by the other states. Any random person who gets caught in the crossfire is, well, collateral damage. The state whose killer is left at the end rules the country for five years. Some states choose serial killers, but in this issue, Massachusetts picks an ex-soldier, and while I have no doubt that Tynion will kill him off quickly in a big twist, right now he’s kind of the sympathetic POV killer, as he stops one of the others from simply slaughtering a random person because, you know, that’s not really the point. We meet several townsfolk who will, presumably, have something to do with the direction of the story, and everything is set up to be a fun, gore-filled thriller. My retailer isn’t the biggest fan of Michael Walsh, which is just wrong, as he does really nice work on the art. It seems like every issue will have Walsh, perhaps doing some kind of framing story, and a different artist in each issue, presumably doing the “main” part of the story. Beats me. Despite the annoyance of Tynion doing yet another kind of this story, it’s a neat beginning.

Outsiders, somewhat surprisingly, gets a second trade (I honestly thought it had been canceled after the first trade), and it’s still pretty keen, although it does show the folly of trying to shoehorn Wildstorm characters into the DC Universe (another example of which we’ll get to below). Lanzing and Kelly do their best to kind of square the circle of Jakita Wagner existing in the DCU, but they don’t quite succeed, which is too bad, because the stories are generally pretty nifty and certainly similar enough to Planetary without being too slavish to it. But they turn Jakita into a villain, which doesn’t really work, and her scheme is kind of dumb. Now, Lanzing and Kelly do a good job leaning into the fictionality of it all, and some of the individual stories — the Batwoman/Jinny Hex one, the Klarion/Dr. Fate one — are keen, but I don’t know if the looming threat of cancellation meant the writers just couldn’t take their time, as it feels like they needed to but couldn’t. It’s an interesting diversion into the weird corners of the DCU, which I love because DC has so many weird corners that don’t get explored enough, but it does feel a bit off. Oh well. As one character points out, they got 11 issues (yes, it’s the kind of book where characters talk about how they’re in a comic). It could have been worse, I suppose.

Chris Burnham draws a Dennis Culver story in Savage Sword of Conan #8, which is enough reason to get it, I should think. It’s a fun story about Conan fighting an evil cult (I mean, are there any other kinds?) and the thing they’re able to conjure up, so you know it’s nice and violent. If that’s not enough, the second story, by Fred Kennedy, is drawn by Marco Rudy, and if you want weird shit, Rudy’s a good artist to get! Conan has been hired to protect the daughter of a healer against the machinations of an evil sorcerer, so you know crap is going to get bizarre, and it does! If that’s not enough, Liam Sharp has his Conan story in this issue, as our Cimmerian hero meets a wounded “Norse” dude who wants Conan to kill him so he can enter Valhalla. First, he has to tell Conan his story, which involves him riding a Frazetta horse and meeting a hot woman, because of course it does! Sharp’s story is fine, but his art is painfully exquisite. There’s a fourth story about Cormac FitzGeoffrey on crusade which isn’t quite as good, but it’s still entertaining. Savage Sword continues to be a very good publication, and you’re missing out if you’re skipping it!

Finally, Trouble Is My Business is Arvind Ethan David’s adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s story from 1939, and it’s pretty good. I haven’t read the original story, but David does focus a bit on the racism and sexism of the time period (which I don’t know if Chandler did), although he doesn’t push it too hard, which is appreciated. It’s a nice, twisty tale, with Philip Marlowe getting caught up in a pretty sordid tale (I mean, are there any other kind when Marlowe is involved?!?!?), and it’s all gorgeously illustrated by Ilias Kyriazis, who continues to show that he is a top-notch artist. He uses some very inventive page layouts, including placing all the panels on a page inside the shape of a corpse in an alleyway. Kyriazis doesn’t get enough work and I don’t know how well regarded he is in the business, but he’s superb, and you should check out some of his work. Why not start with this book?

… Then there are the books that just don’t work as well, for one reason or another. I know I’m not a published writer and therefore can never criticize anything, but I just don’t get some writers and their thought processes. I don’t understand when they have a character do something they think is cool but the only reason they think it’s cool is because they’ve seen it done so often and that should mean they recognize it as a cliché. Don’t they? If they’re writing a story and they think, “I saw Arnold / Sly / van Damme / Seagal / Stathan / Diesel / Keanu do this once and it was sooooo coooooool!” then perhaps you should think twice about your character doing it unless you’re going to comment on the clichéd-ness of it all like you’re Deadpool. Similarly, why do so many writers think that just because they have a neat idea, they don’t need to do anything else? I mean, neat ideas will only get you so far, and it’s frustrating to read a comic that has a neat idea but nothing else, because you can just tell that it could have been a great story. So much of writing is not bad, just dull, and the sequel-ization of pop culture means we just get the same stuff regurgitated back to us because consumers of pop culture rarely want to be challenged. It takes a special thing to get ahold of the pop culture consumer, and I don’t necessarily blame writers for trying to re-create something that hit the sweet spot, but it does mean we get endless similar takes on one idea, and there’s only so many places you can go with it. This past weekend at the Phoenix con, Meredith McClaren told me that I read things with a “critic’s eye,” and she’s not wrong. Her point was, of course, that a lot of people just want to be entertained, and that’s cool. I’ve made this point before that part of what entertains me is breaking things down and thinking about them, so I too want to be entertained, just perhaps a bit differently than some folk. What bugs me, though, is that if you’re being entertained by just a rehashing of what you’ve seen before, why not just watch the original more than once? They probably did it better, anyway.

What does this have to do with the comics I read in May? Well, the mediocre ones fall into these kinds of traps, and it’s frustrating. Frank Tieri and Inaki Miranda have a sequel to Godzilla: Here There Be Dragons, as you knew they would when that book was successful (Tieri’s Godzilla story is, of course, a trilogy, so we’re getting another one!). Godzilla: Sons of Giants is not as good as the first book, which isn’t surprising, but it’s not as good for a weird reason — Tieri seems to forget why the first book was pretty good, and that is Godzilla fighting people in historical times. This is still set in the past — 1804, right after Aaron Burr shoots Alexader Hamilton, which is a bit of a plot point — but this time, Tieri is much more interested in expanding the mythology of his monster-seeking group, which isn’t as interesting. Plus, Godzilla only appears in their past, not in the United States of 1804, so the immediacy of the danger is far less. Plus, Godzilla only fights other monsters — all the ones you know and love! — which takes away the danger of the first book, when people were trying to survive Godzilla with far less technological advancements than modern people have. The sense of grandeur and danger is not really in this book, so, you know, what’s the point? Tieri fell so in love with his monster-seeking society that he forgot the big draw of a Godzilla book: tiny people trying to stop the big lug!

“Sequel-itis” doesn’t apply to Phases of the Moon Knight, but the idea of a secret society — which is annoying — does, as we get stories about various Moon Knights though history, an idea I loathe (I don’t like it applied to any hero, not just ones I dig like MK). I am convinced there are two reasons for it: writers love setting weird, almost fantasy stuff in historical settings, so we get a Moon Knight from a crusade in 1200, we get our guy fighting a dude from the 1920s, we get a Moon Knight in the 29th century, we get a Moon Knight in 1882 Egypt, and a Moon Knight in ancient Mesopotamia. We also get a manga Moon Knight and a Moon Knight who’s a young woman whose parents have been killed, which is the other reason writers (or companies) do this: to replace the original version with a DEI hire. Marvel and DC desperately want to be more diverse, and as I’ve said over and over, that’s fine. But they also know that it’s hard for new characters to break through, so they need to use old, established IPs. If they just replace the character with a woman/minority/gay version (or some or all of the above), they believe it will ease the transition, and if they establish that the original character wasn’t the first anyway, people might accept the new version. I don’t know if it works — I guess Miles Morales is popular enough, but I’m not sure how popular others are — but it vexes me, because I would prefer they just create new characters. I mean, who doesn’t adore White Fox, amirite? These “phases” of the Moon Knight aren’t bad stories, they just feel like corporate-driven tales to make an IP more palatable to non-white and/or non-male and/or non-heterosexual and/or non-American readers, and do those people read monthly comics that often? They’re out there reading comics, I know, but do they read Marvel and DC serialized superhero comics? I know I’ve asked this question before because Marvel and DC really want to draw those people in and they seem to be pissing off their base audience a lot as they do (to be fair, we white, straight dudes need to stop whining so much, but what are you going to do?), but I don’t know if it’s working. This just seems like a very cynical ploy, and it depresses me because if Marvel and DC just worked out a better system of character ownership with their creators, writers wouldn’t need to mine what’s already there.

Then there are the comics with decent ideas that the writers biffed, which is also frustrating. Jok’s art on The Body Trade is almost enough to make it worth a look, but Zac Thompson takes the kernel of a good idea — rich people jumping the line to get prime body parts — and kind of dick-trips over it, and the result is an unsatisfying mess. His protagonist is a bad father whose son died in a car accident that was his fault. I mean, that’s fine, but the dude doesn’t seem to have really gotten any better or even dealt with his son’s death, as he finds out at the funeral that his ex-wife and her father donated the body to a company that sells body parts to rich people. Our “hero,” Kim, decides he needs to get his son’s body back, and the entire comic is about him trying to do that. Here’s the thing, though: the company is not doing anything illegal, and Kim does a lot of horrible stuff as he tries to get the body parts back, so he’s completely unsympathetic. He never tried to help pay for his son’s care, which was, of course, ridiculously expensive (the boy was in a coma for two years), and he’s trying to get the body for … why? What does it matter? His son is dead, and his body is just meat, and what would it mean to Kim to get him back — he’d still be dead, it would still be Kim’s fault, and he’d still be avoiding responsibility for it. The fact that Thompson makes the people running the company and the people receiving the body parts awful people doesn’t change any of that. It’s frustrating, because this could have either been a weird body horror story or a story about a dude actually trying to find redemption. There are bits and pieces of both, but Thompson doesn’t nail either of them, leading to a mediocre comic tantalizingly rife with good ideas.

Two standalone issues, The Goddamn Tragedy and Mommy Blog, have the same problem. In the first, Chris Condon gives us his take on the Donner party, as a family heads into the mountains on their way to California in the 1840s and finds horror. The survivor, the daughter, is trying to set the record straight to a reporter in the 1890s, so she tells him the “real” story, which features weird stuff but also fairly clichéd stuff, from the Jack Nicholson father who often seems all right but is really crazy down to his core to the apparition who may or may not be real. It feels like there could be a good story here, but Condon takes the path of absolute least resistance, and it’s all very predictable. Mommy Blog, which is the latest Ninth Circle horror story (unfortunately, it’s sized down to a regular comic’s dimension, which depresses me because I dig the larger size!), is a fairly pedestrian satire in which a woman wants to be the perfect social media mother, and either that drives her to kill or she’s already crazy and she’s trying to be a perfect social media mother to hide it, but either way, we’ve seen it all before. It’s just kind of there — it doesn’t really offer anything new or clever. Both Marguerite Bennett and Eleanora Carlini have done better stuff. In both these comics, it’s like the writers had decent ideas — the Donner party but with supernatural elements! the crushing expectations of social media! — and decided that was enough. It would be nice if they developed those ideas a bit better.

Finally, there’s Jenny Sparks. I honestly don’t know what to think of Tom King anymore. Does he have a list of characters he hated when he was a kid, so now that he’s in a position of power, he just gives them to DC editors and says, “Yeah, I’m going to wreck these characters”? He does it again here, turning Captain Atom into a mass murderer just so Jenny Sparks … can prove how cool she is? It’s like, King has these themes he wants to explore, and for some reason (money, probably, although he does creator-owned stuff, so there is that) he wants to do it in the DC (or Marvel) Universe. In this case, he wants to explore religion and modern society’s lack of faith and what would happen if they were confronted by an actual god and what would happen if that god actually tried to make the world better (well, better according to them). This is not a bad theme, but King can be so ham-fisted about it when he puts DC characters in there to explore those themes, so we get Jenny Sparks forcing Superman to intervene in the Iraqi war and we get Captain Atom killing the Justice League. King wants so desperately to write about “real-world” issues in his superhero comics, but that does not work with the Big Guns of the two established Superhero Universes, because it can’t. Captain Atom is in another mini-series from the ALL IN initiative, and he’s obviously not in some high-tech prison. Jenny Sparks herself doesn’t work in the DCU (some of the Wildstorm characters do, but the ones that don’t really don’t), yet DC keeps cramming her into it. Now, people will tell me that this is a “Black Label” book, which means it’s not necessarily in continuity, which, yes, is true, but we get all the regular DC characters doing superhero-type things and Captain Atom is still a murderer. And speaking of Black Label, what the hell is up with it? Ever since people freaked out about the Bat-Penis in the first book, it seems like DC is terrified of doing what they claim it was supposed to do. According to their own web site, the Black Label comics feature “DC’s most iconic characters … reimagined without limits.” Ok, that’s a bit of bullshit, but ok. On another site (which I’m not sure is affiliated with DC, so I don’t know if this is the official line), it claims that Black Label “specialises [sic] in providing unique, edgy, and provocative standalone stories” and “was intended to allow writers and artists the opportunity to tell their definitive DC stories without being constrained by continuity or age ratings” (my emphasis). You know where this is going — King’s obsession with grawlix. I’ve had a few conversations with writers recently, and it seems that a lot of the grawlix in DC comics, especially, might be the writer’s choice. As in, they type it in themselves, to which I say, What the Actual Fuck? If you’re going to write a Black Label book, why the hell wouldn’t you just write the swearing in and challenge the editors (in this case, Brittany Holzherr and Chris Rosa) to actually make an executive decision to get rid of it? It’s a Black Label book, for crying out loud — you’re not constrained by age ratings!!! I said this when Amanda Conner drew that Harley Quinn/Birds of Prey Black Label book — if there was ever a time to show DC characters in the total buff, it’s when Amanda Conner is drawing a Harley Quinn/Birds of Prey book (again, not that I wanted that, because I’m not that much of a pervert — it’s just that it seemed like the perfect opportunity!)!!!! In this comic, Jenny Sparks actually says at one point, “Jesus Christ. What the @$#$ is wrong with you people?” Now, ignoring the fact that the grawlix is wildly inconsistent — if she says “fuck,” why are the “u” and the “k” replaced by the same symbol? — I do like the fact that apparently it’s ok for The Children™ to see someone take the Lord’s name in vain but not see them say “fuck” or “shit” or whatever Jenny is saying. I’m not religious at all, as you well know, and I don’t care that Jenny Sparks takes the Lord’s name in vain, but I do find what is grawlixed and what is not fascinating. Presumably, no children are buying this comic because, you know, it has a “Black Label” listing. So I guess grown-ass people can’t handle “fuck” or “shit” but they can certainly handle “Jesus Christ”!

I know, I spend entirely too much time ranting about Tom King. I swear, he can write great comics! Even this one has its moments! It’s just that when he’s bad, he’s SPECTACULARLY bad, so I like to rant about it! It’s my time, after all — if I want to waste it ranting about Tom King instead of spending time with my family, who are you to judge?????

By the way, even though this isn’t a normal review post, I thought you’d like to keep up with my spending. Here it is:

7 May: $102.19
14 May: $126.63
21 May: $32.93 (!!!)
28 May: $89.30

Total for May: $351.05 (’24: $564.75; ’23: $691.27; ’22: $825.15; ’21: $880.63)
YTD: $2481.99 (’24: $2423.62; ’23: $2549.92; ’22: $4678.53; ’21: $3171.53)

I was a bit ahead of last year’s pace through April, but in May, I didn’t spend very much, so I’m back about even with it. We shall see if that continues. Comics are more expensive, sure, but I am trying to buy fewer of them!

***

So that’s what was going on, comic-and-other-entertainment-wise, with me in May. As I noted, my daughter left school, and my younger daughter is settling in a bit at a new job, which she’s happy she got because she was getting low on money. She works at the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory at Tempe Marketplace, and so far, it’s a lot less stressful than her other retail jobs have been. If you’ve never been to one of the stores, it’s really freakin’ good chocolate and really freakin’ expensive chocolate. She’s still trying to decide what to do with her life, but at least she has a decent job for now.

Other than that, I’m enjoying the MAGA meltdown even though it’s not good for the country. We do get stuff like this, though, which is entirely serious, apparently:

And we get insight like this, which is almost too sad to be funny (although it is pretty funny):

Meanwhile, our representatives are whining because they voted for a bill they didn’t read and it will do things they disagree with, and cops are back to doing what they love best — attacking unarmed protestors. Good times! I guess the only silver lining is that a lot of the rest of the world has decided that this latest brand of authoritarian wackiness isn’t for them, and I can only hope ‘Muricans come to their senses by November of next year. Of course, I didn’t think the Bloated Orange Baboon would win either time, but we shall see if his clever strategy of Destroying Everything In The Country That Actually Works is a winner in the elections next year!

Sigh. Sorry about that — I hate writing about politics, because it gets me so worked up. What’s new with you guys? I hope you’re having nice times wherever you are! I’m not sure what I’m going to do about this column going forward. I do love writing reviews, but at the same time, I’m very much trying to cut back on what I buy and even then, I buy several mediocre comics that I just can’t muster up much enthusiasm for, so you get stuff like the paragraphs above. Meanwhile, I’ve been wanting to do more general writing about comics, either what’s going on with the scene (which I don’t know much about these days, because I don’t keep up with the news, but still) or diving into some things a bit more closely. As you know, though, I don’t have as much time as I used to, so if I do more of that, I’ll have less time for just straight-up reviews. I’ll figure something out, but I did want to put it out there that I might be doing fewer reviews as we move along. If something comes out that is just super-fantastic, sure, I’ll check that out, but I shouldn’t really spill too much digital ink on something like The Body Trade, which is just kind of meh. I’ve done this before, of course — I used to do these kinds of things weekly!!!! — and I don’t know what form my future blogging will take, but I’ll still be here. I just got an old comic at the store that I really want to dive into and compare it with current stuff, so that’s what I’m talking about.

Have a nice day, everyone! Be good!