Not to be confused with Dolemite.

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So in all that crazy amounts of free time I have, I’ve been poking through the supplement book in the Crisis on Infinite Earths slipcased edition. Among other things (like the constant drubbing the Flash comic was getting therein, discussed on my Bluesky), I noticed the repeated references to the desire to make the android hero Red Tornado into a villain.

Now, I can get the impulse. As character development goes, his primary contributions to stories (as detailed in a probably inadvertently-hilarious Wikipedia summary) is to be Blown Up Read Good, then repaired just to be blown up again. Rinse. Explode. Repeat.

In an effort to make the character, you know, interesting, particularly in the wake of DC’s crosstown rivals having their own android, the Vision, on their own superteam, the Avengers, and getting a bit more traction with him…DC decided to blow up Reddy one final time in Crisis on Infinite Earths #8, courtesy Marv Wolfman, George Pérez, and Jerry Ordway. In this sequence, an already pre-blown-up Red Tornado is on the Justice League satellite, when it’s discovered he’s booby-trapped with a bomb:


Exuent R. Tornado from the Crisis series proper, but his story continues in Justice League of America Annual #3, by Dan Mishkin, Rick Hoberg, and Bob Gustovich. Through various means and reasons I’m not going to get into here (hie thee hither to the previously linked Wiki entry), the Red Tornado reforms without his robot body into a…well, human tornado:


That lady in the last panel is Kathy, the Red Tornado’s girlfriend, whom he addresses in the very next panel:


Yeah, the whole “Tornado Champion” stuff…long story, but in short it’s an alien intelligence that was accidentally embedded into the Red Tornado’s shell and gave him life beyond his programming.

Anyhoo, Reddy in this new incarnation is ready to blow the whole world down and rebuild it anew:


But not before Kathy manages to have a private heart-to-heart with him, managing to convince him to work with humanity to fix the world, not against them:


And of course, the second the Red Tornado drops his guard, and before Kathy can tell everyone “hold on, it’s all good,” Superman takes initiative with his super freezing breath:


…which Reddy eventually escapes from, and proceeds to flounce on out of there, but not without one final threat:


And off the Tornado goes, in his new status quo as Enemy of the Justice League and the Whole World, Maybe, to someday return in…well, Firestorm the Nuclear Man #91 (1989) by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake:


In #93 Firestorm rebuilds the Red Tornado’s body, essentially undoing the changes in Crisis and restoring him, more or less, to his status quo:


…and then it’s on to Primal Force and Young Justice through the rest of the ’90s/early ’00s. And Tornado pops up more recently in One Star Squadron and the current Justice League Unlimited comic, as well as having a pivotal role in Justice League: Red. As to how much of the old Crisis-era shenanigans still hold in continuity, I’m not sure.

But it is kinda weird that for all the talk and build-up for the Red Tornado’s Big Change in Crisis, it amounted to only a couple of appearances before being undone. Just another small sample of DC looking back at Crisis in the ensuing years and saying “in retrospect, maybe we shouldn’t have.”

The Final ’90s Countdown, Part Twenty-Four.

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So at long last, here we are…at the end of the single vote-getters in the Final ’90s Countdown poll! To repeat myself yet again, a single vote is nothing to be ashamed of, given the relative number of votes I received and the number of high quality titles folks had to pick from! And today’s subject is….

TUG & buster (Art & Soul, 1995-1998)

Now, despite owning most of these comics (I think I’m still missing an issue), I remember very little about this comic other than having Marc Hempel’s usual great cartooning. So, in a first for this series of posts, I’m going to pause here for a moment while I reread at least the first issue.

Hang on a sec.

[TEMPUS FUGIT]

Okay, I’m back. Well, that issue of TUG & buster, as Hempel himself stylizes the names, was quite the wild ride. The hugely muscled, leather-jacketed, continally-smoking, flammably-coiffed TUG remains entirely mute throughout the story, while his diminutive…buddy? Brother? Fifth-dimensional imp? buster constantly runs his mouth, extolling TUG’s virtues and basking in the glory he perceives from his idol. In the introduction to the comic, Hempel straight out says it’s “about hero worship…how low self-esteem alters our perception of ourselves and others.” TUG is basically inert throughout, cutting an imposing figure but doing little else, with buster’s continual praise clearly meaning to show how cool he himself is simply by being in TUG’s presence. So many actions and adventures are described by him, with none evidenced.

The story is about the two of them being dropped off at the local hangout by buster’s mom, where they hook up with a couple of ladies who essentially settle for them, despite buster’s constant self-and-TUG-aggrandizing and TUG’s lack of any interaction. The romantic encounters that follow involve TUG…essentially doing nothing, and buster putting moves on his partner by essentially saying throughout “and here’s what TUG would do!” And both achieving some success, oddly enough.

It’s a wild and adult story, the humor coming primarily from buster’s endless blustering dialogue. It’s not without some minor pathos, as once the pair are separated and each with their “date” in their respective rooms, it becomes clear that buster is a little lost once he’s away from TUG. Though, that goes away quickly once, as I said, buster begins to be all “WWTD.”

We also get introduced to a couple of supporting characters in this issue…the dour and downbeat Stinkfinger, who’s at the bar making sure people know he would rather be somewhere else but prefers to stick around to let people know he doesn’t want to be there. And then there’s Ben Genital who…well, he’s like Hitman‘s Bueno Excellente, except somehow worse. You can almost feel the sweat peel off this guy as he perpetually monologues about sexual things in a repellently non-sexual way.

Sorry, I haven’t really done straight-up “plot summary” in these entries much, but this should at least give you a sense of of what TUG & Buster is like. As I said, it’s been a while since I’ve read any of these, so I don’t know if TUG eventually says even a single word, or if there’s any growth of any of these characters. But I’m presuming it’s just variations on the formula…buster talkin’ big about the both of them, TUG not really doing much of anything, Stinkfinger and Ben complicating matters. All of portrayed beautifully in Hempel’s black and white illustration.

While Hempel may be best know for his work on DC’s Sandman, and perhaps his collaboration with Mark Wheatley on Mars, TUG & buster is probably most closely related stylistically to his Piranha Press book series Gregory, in which we follow the imaginative exploits of a young man confined to a mental ward. It’s all about the same level of “political correctness” (i.e. hardly any at all, on the surface level), all hilarious and compelling with a touch of “oooh, perhaps I shouldn’t be laughing at that.”

This probably isn’t the sort of book that’s easy to find in the back issue bins, giving its indie status and its late ’90s release dates. My sense is that if you can handle a little ribaldry filtered through critiques of various forms of “masculinity,” it’s well worth seeking out. There were seven issues released by Art & Soul, followed by a single issue from Image in 1998 (which I’m guessing the easiest one to track down). There is one reprint collection, The Four-Fisted Adventures of TUG & buster, released by Image in 1998 (and in a limited signed hardcover by Graphitti Designs). The collection contains only issues 1-6 of the Art & Soul run. Should also note there’s a TUG & buster/Radical Dreamer flipbook preview from 1995, which I believe contains material from the first issue of the Art & Soul run.

So…perhaps not for everybody, but a completely unfettered bit of cartooning from Marc Hempel that I think is worth seeking out. And definitely another example of the kind of work in comics that is unfairly consigned to the back issue bins and should probably still exist in some kind of in-print form.

To my iPhone (and probably other cellphone-using) pals.

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I had a bit of style sheet programming that forced the sidebar to appear to the right on portable devices, like iPads, iPhones, and the like. This was regardless of whether of not you were viewing the “mobile” version of the site or if you had the “View Desktop Site” option selected.

Apparently, in Mobile view, that was causing some issues, making either the sidebar or the main section or both too squished to easily read. As such, I did away with the style sheet instruction and now the sidebar should render on your portable devices below all the blog entries on the page, as Steve Jobs intended.

However, if you select “view desktop site” for my page, it should just render normally in your browser, with the main section at the left and the sidebar at the right. It’ll be small, but you can expand it. Or you can look at the page with your phone held at the “horizon” position.

I’m just basing this all on what I can see on my end. I create the site on a desktop, which I feel like is the ideal way to view it. It looked fine on my iPad, both with the “forced” sidebar and with the sidebar at the bottom. And my cellphone…I don’t have an iPhone, my cell practically has a rotary dial*, but before it rendered…okay in Chrome, with the sidebar squished in Mobile view but the entire site looking fine in Desktop view. Now, of course, with that style sheet removed, the sidebar has moved to the bottom and the main section looks fine. (And Desktop view looks great.)

Which is a long way of saying…I don’t have immediate access to an iPhone to test things on. I know a couple of you longtime readers have noted that the page doesn’t look ideal to you on iPhones, so I’m hoping the change I made helps. I even ran the site through this Mobile View Website Checker, and everything seems to be good.

But you guys are of course the final say. Please let me know if things have improved. Clear the cache, reload the site, and hopefully you’ll be able to see at least the main blog easily. I hate not having the sidebar right up there with everything else at all times, so don’t forget to check it once in a while…at least for my weekly new icons!

* Note: I’m only joking, I just bought a new phone about a year ago. It did take me a couple months to realize “oh, it has a stylus!”

Did I almost include a picture of Sand Saref from Frank Miller’s The Spirit in this post? Maaaaybe.

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First off, a few notes about the site. Yes, I tinkered with the appearance a bit, bringing it a little more in line with What Had Come Before. The post titles are now all caps again, we’ve got serif fonts back, and most importantly, I’ve brought the comments and category links to the top of each entry. Honestly, that last bit was driving me crazy ’til I fixed it.

I also enlarged the size of the text in the body of the posts a little, so I hope that helps with readability.

Anyway, I appreciate all your comments and thoughts on the new design. Coming up next…a musical background for the site that continually loops “Hamburger Lady” by Throbbing Gristle. That’ll improve the ol’ experience!

• • •

Following up on my Absolute Crisis post from Wednesday:

Somehow I didn’t clock that the cover to the main book in the set was the original George Pérez wraparound drawing produced for the previous hardcover edition, only without Alex Ross’s paintjob and now inked by Jerry Ordway. Here’s a bit of it, since the book is too big to fit onto my scanner:


Ooh, nice, right? Thanks for pointing that out, Greta!

And Daniel T notes some other reprintings of the Crisis series, such as this big ol’ box set:


…and if you peek your peepers at that link, you’ll see that box set has everything. Hardcovers for all the Crisis on Multiple Earths books, all the Crisis tie-ins, all the pre-Crisis Monitor appearances, the JLA/JSA team-ups…I mean, really, the whole shebang. Yes, even that Legends of the DC Universe special I was lamenting last time.

DC is also currently in the midst of publishing paperbacks of the Crisis-specific materal as part of their DC Finest line:


…that is presenting the main mini and DC’s many, many tie-ins in story order. Thanks, Daniel, for reminding me and my aging brain.

I’ve actually made my way through a few more pages of the supplementary book since we last met. I’m kinda/sorta skimming over Marv Wolfman’s plot outlines for now, though I definitely want to go over them more thoroughly to see what’s changed. I did notice some differences already, but I want to pin down some more specific ones to perhaps discuss here at some point.

Instead, I’m favoring the in-company memos on the book, especially the novel-length ones from Roy Thomas to the Crisis team, most of which amount to “don’t screw up my future plans for Infinity Inc..” Thomas does seem cooperative and willing to help with the event, but there are so many requests to leave this, that, or the other thing alone. It’s pretty amazing.

There’s also a memo to editors reminding them that if any new characters were developed and to be included idn Crisis, they first need to be established that they are DC Comics property and that creators don’t claim ownership. I mean, I realize that’s just how things are with some of these characters at the Big Two, but it still felt semi-dystopian to see it spelled out like that.

Speaking of the Big Two, there was some bullets fired over at Marvel’s own Big Crossover Event, Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars, with the book text referring to its “short-lived” changes, and Marv himself calling it a “catastrophe” in one of his memos. (But one that sold tie-ins, which he was encouraging.)

So that Absolute Crisis just keeps on giving the right gifts. Like I said last time, we’re probably getting a lightly whitewashed series of events. That TwoMorrows Crisis Companion will likely be a little more forthcoming.

Crisis of Infinite Reprints.

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So when Crisis on Infinite Earths came out in 1985, I dutifully bought each installment, starting by peeling off the top copy from the giant stack of the first issue on the shop’s glass counter. It was a fun run of books, with each chapter (more or less) delivering wild twists and shocking changes. It was an actual Event Comic, with genuine excitement (and anxiety) at what new surprises would come in the next story. I’ve noted several times here that folks who come to Crisis after the fact, especially in the context subsequent multiple reboots/relaunches of superhero universes, miss its primary ingredient: the coming of actual change, not just the “illusion of change” that is often invoked.

All that said, DC’s been doing its best over the last few decades poking at Crisis‘ scab, peeling it off and pressing it back on again, trying to figure out ways to recapture the DC Universe That Was, or at least apply some patchwork to some of the cracks left over from that series’ impact.

The twelve-issue run been collected a couple of times, initially in a hardcover/slipcase set in 1998. The dustjacket features an Alex Ross painting over George Pérez’s art, and (I think) includes every character that appears in Crisis? I think that’s right. I have a copy of this, and I think I recall someone from DC saying at some point that Crisis would never be released in paperback, due to whatever production issues would be involved. Anyway, the first paperback edition came out in 2000, and that’s the one that’s been in print more or less ever since.

Within the last couple years, DC Comics released “facsimile editions” of each of the 12 issues in the series…complete reprints of each issue, down to the ads. There were variants with foil covers, and because I’m 1/16th crow on my mother’s side, I of course picked up every one of Those Shiny Things.

And then there’s the Absolute Crisis on Infinite Earths slipcased set, recently released to the comics market. Like all the Absolute volumes, it’s an oversized hardcover, presenting the artwork at larger dimensions. One of my regulars ordered a copy of this, and when it came in, he unwrapped the shrinkwrap and let me take a look inside.

Now, I don’t need a fourth iteration of this series in my life. I really don’t. I sold all my copies of the original release through the shop, which was okay because that 1998 hardcover is a solidly replacement. Plus, if I really need to look at it in periodical form, I can always look at my glittery and gleaming foil facsimiles, oh yes, my pretties.

However, this Absolute edition came with something I hadn’t realized…a second volume. And in that second volume…all the behind the scenes stuff. The plot outlines, and character sketches, and office memos, and all the planning and replanning and adjusting. The memo telling the editors that you will feature this new character, The Monitor, in two issues of your titles during the year leading up to Crisis‘s launch. This is all absolute catnip to me, and I, semi-grudgingly, ordered a copy of this Absolute set for myself.

I’ve only just started to read this supplementary book, which starts off with a thorough explanation of the history of comic book character crossovers, and how it eventually brought DC to the point where it thought it needed something like Crisis to straighten everything out. I’m currently at the point where the lead up has begun, including the memo I referenced above, and Marv Wolfman’s plot outlines, and explanations to DC’s editors as to what’s going on. My favorite bit is the handdrawn note DC’s chief editor Dick Giordano sent to company president Jenette Kahn, asking if they could kill off Supergirl (with little spaces to check off either “yes” or “no,” among other options).

I don’t know how “warts and all” this history will get…I mean, I haven’t got to the Roy Thomas section yet (“Hey Roy, we’re getting rid of Earth 2, okay seeya” “Um…what?”). I mean, if Marvel ever did anything like this for Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars, they probably wouldn’t bring up the “little f**ks” memo, so I don’t imagine anything similar, if it existed at all, would turn up here. Regardless, I’m glad to have all this stuff in one place.

Here, I took a few pictures to give you an idea of what this thing looks like, inside and out.

Like, here’s the slipcase:


And the books inside, reusing that Ross/Pérez image from the 1998 hardcover:


The reproduction is beautiful, showing off the art nicely:


Even the letters pages are included, a welcome feature:


On top of everything else, the book also includes the two-part History of the DC Universe, originally intended as the final bit of the Crisis series itself, but instead released as a two-part prestige format mini.


Here’s a look at a page from this part of the book, and yes, I picked this image deliberately:


Now, the supplementary book has lots of goodies inside, like the memos I keep going on about:


…as well as sketches and print ads:


Oh, and just some original pencil art:


Not to mention several foldouts:


…and I can just keep going on and on. The History of the DC Universe portfolio is in here! The cover to the Crisis prose novel Wolfman wrote (of which I have a signed copy around here somewhere)! There’s just so much in here, and I can’t wait to dig through it all. Not included is the Legends of the DCU: Crisis on Infinite Earths special Wolfman wrote in 1999, unless I missed it somewhere in these books. This is a lot of material to get through.

Anyway, as you can tell, I’m excited by this set. In a weird coincidence, this showed up this week from TwoMorrows:


…with even more behind the scenes stuff, interviews with those involved, issue-by-issue examinations, and so on. It’s a good time to be a guy in his middish/late-50s who really likes Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Should add that DC is soon releasing a Crisis collection in their $9.99 Compact format. Speaking of being a guy in his middish/late-50s, I don’t think my eyes will be quite up to looking at all of Pérez’s tiny panels at that size, so I’ll probably pass on a fifth version of the comic entering my home.

Progressive Ruin 4.0 is on the air!

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And so there you have it…the all-new style for Progressive Ruin Industries dot Edu backslash HomeLoanOffers. This new template for the site should function a little better with different sized screens, I’m certainly hoping. (A note to folks using their cellphones…clicking on the three buttons and selecting “desktop site” (or however it works in your configuration) will improve the appearance. Sorry, that’s a side effect of me forcing the sidebar to its proper position for tablet users.)

I’ve also made a few cosmetic changes, like that new banner up there. I can fairly easily slot new images in and out of there as I see fit, keeping the banner a little less static than the exact same one I used for the past 16 years.

Also changed is the sidebar icon, where I increased the size on the darned thing, finally. Y’know, when I did that very first icon, lo these many decades ago, I just cropped and sized the pic almost at random, eyeballing the size I wanted for the page at the time. It’s only by pure chance that the dimensions were 131 by 150 pixels…that was not a conscious decision. The new icons are now 196 by 255, a totally deliberate and thought-out choice. Here you can see the difference, using this week’s icon, the charming and not terrifying at all Sluggo Doll…old tiny style on the left, JUMBO FAMILY SIZE on the right:


And this means we’ll be shifting to 4-per-row on the icon archive page. I’m sure after a while I’ll start wondering “how did I ever keep using such small images for this?”

Another small change is that the comments and category links are now at the bottom of each post, instead of at the top. It is possible to switch those back to the top, if that’s really bothering anyone. It kinda half-sorta want them at the top of the posts myself, since sometimes the category link is itself part of the gag I want you to see before diving in. I’ll think about it. It requires some style sheet shenanigans, and frankly I’ve done enough of those for this site already.

The links in the sidebar have had some minor tweaks and additions…I now have a link to America’s most valuable comic book news site, Does This Comics Have Staples, which somehow I didn’t have before. The links I had there before have all been moved to the Links page, and the links that had comprised this page previously have been saved to a local file I can fiddle with as I have time. I’m loathe to dispose of the record of all those links entirely, despite the immense linkrot, as that page may be one of the few records of some of our fallen blogging comrades. I’ll see what I can do about making it into some kind of archive.

A couple of final things: there’s now a button that appears on the right that will take you back to the top of the page once you scroll down a bit. And, at the very bottom, there’s a numbered page navigation tool. Currently 604 pages on the site! …That’s too many.

There are still some minor tweaks and fixes I’ll have to adjust over time, I’m sure, but..it took me long enough to change, and I’m glad I did.

In the title of this post, I call this “Progressive Ruin 4.0,” so let’s go over the previous versions:

Progressive Ruin 3.0 should be familiar, I mean, this is what you were looking at just a couple days ago:

This was the site’s appearance from 2010 to 2026, as I switched from the Blogger blogging system to WordPress.

Progressive Ruin 2.0 was the initial version of this incarnation of the site:

…from its launch in 2003 ’til its replacement in 2010. This was the Blogger period, using Google’s blogging tool to publish to my own domain. Except when it didn’t work and you couldn’t update the page for hours at a time, and that happened once too often and I made the switch to WP. I do miss the livelier sidebar I had there, with links to specific posts that I wanted to highlight. Plus, my “since 1969” tagline at the top of the page would randomly pick from a list every time you reloaded, versus me updating it once a week now.

And Progressive Ruin 1.0, which you probably didn’t see unless you happened to be a personal In Real Life friend of mine (or you followed the link from some computer magazine that featured the site…no, really):


…and this ran from 1996 ’til…well, I’m not sure when. The Wayback Machine has captures listed going to 2003, but none of those seem to work, and I think that page was gone before that. Anyway, it was mostly a page for our mini-comics concern, plus links to friends pages, and in-jokes, and Horrible Eyesores (really awful desktop patterns I created) and so on. An interesting thing, my “What’s New” pages were kind of a proto-blog, where I just kinda rambled on about stuff while also telling you what I’ve changed on the site recently. Here’s an archive from 1999, where none of the images seemed to have made it, but you can get a flavor of what I was up to.

So that was the blogging about blogging is a sin-iest post I’ve ever made. Now that my site update fun is, with any luck, mostly over, I can finally get back to what this project is really about…longform essays comparing Frank Miller’s All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder with Frank Miller’s The Spirit.

Thanks to everyone for your patience while I duct-taped this comics blog back together, here in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Twenty Six, and with any luck I’ll have many more years of comics blogging to come! I hope you’ll all join me!

I’ve been wanting to use one of these GIFs for years.

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Okay gang, hold onto your shorts, as the New Progressive Ruin is launching next Monday!

I’ve been working in a secret laboratory, tinkering with templates and japing with jpegs, and I think I finally found the right formula to freshen up this site. I won’t bore you with details (“What? Who are you, and what have you done with Mike?”) but one template I was working with, that I sure was The One, turned into a huge pain in the Athol, Idaho, so I pivoted mid-stream to another and found that it did, like, 75% of the formatting for me.

So what’s left is that other 25%, which has taking a bit of learning new tricks, and just straight up downloading CSS and PHP code to plug into the new site to make things work the way I want them to.

Ultimately, things won’t be TOO different. I was trying to find a new design for the site that worked more or less like the old one. The priority was finding a more modern theme, one that’s been updated more recently than 2010 and will play nicely with the underlying WordPress mechanics. That said, there may be further poking and prodding of the template after Monday, after we all experience it in action.

Speaking of which, a big thank you to Andrea Mignolo, designer of the Hanami theme, which I’ve been using since I switched from Blogger to WordPress 16 years ago. That it’s functioned as well as it has for so long, through so many WordPress updates, is miraculous. And while that recent glitch wasn’t necessarily because of Hanami’s age, it was a reminder that it was time to bring the site at least a little more up to date. But…ah, Hanami, I shall miss you.

Anyway, the site should be up and running properly on August 10th, but if you pop in Sunday evening prior, things may be a bit of a mess as I’m updating, so…

“Oh, I remember…Alt-function-7.”

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Marvel editor Tom Brevoort provides the introduction to Fantastic Four: 65 Years of the World’s Greatest Comic Covers that does indeed reprint every single Fantastic Four cover from the beginning, in which he speaks fondly about a similar publication he encountered as a young’un.

And while it seems strangely archaic to do something like this, in a world where all the covers are available for viewing digitally in one form or another. But that said, it is somehow strangely pleasing, almost soothing, to have all these covers reproduced at varying sizes, in chronological order. It’s almost visual ASMR.

Most of the covers reprinted at larger sizes are accompanied by quotes from various creators (Stan Lee, John Byrne, Walt Simonson, etc.), plus a couple of movie folk, talking about why those particular ones are their favorites. There are a few new quotes, but they’re primarily from previously published sources. Which is fine, they all fit nicely in this collection.

To gild the lily of the multiple covers inside, this publication itself has multiple variant covers. The one I picked is pictured above, a repurposing of the John Byrne poster from decades back, featuring all the characters Lee and Jack Kirby created during their run. I do have a replica of that old poster up in the shop, but it’s nice to have a copy of the image to take home and admire at my leisure.


So the Sensational Character Find of 2026 is inarguably Verity Pennyworth, the niece of Bruce Wayne’s late butler Alfred Pennyworth. She immediately slots into the position left open by Alfred’s death, and I really hope she doesn’t turn out to be part of some villain’s (or villains’) scheme.

Which got me to thinking…it’s been a little bit since Alfred was offed. He was killed in Batman #77 in 2019, during Tom King’s run on the book. It sort of surprised me that it had only been that long, as it felt a lot longer given how much has been happening in the Bat-franchise.

I keep expecting the “Resurrection of Alfred” big crossover event at some point, in the same way I keep expecting DC to do something to undo the biological children of Batman and Superman. That this change — well, all these changes — remain(s) intact through multiple events and creative teams, and continue to be built upon in mostly effective ways, is something of a miracle.

Alfred appearing as “ghost” of sorts (actually, Bruce imagining Alfred) talking to Bruce throughout Matt Fraction and Jorge Jimenez’s run, has been a clever way to sort of maintain that classic dynamic. Actually, I should mention, Fraction and Jimenez have been doing a swell job on the comic, filling each issue with a bunch of action and characterization and weird things, and certainly not padding stories out to fill a trade paperback every few months.

NOTE: this new issue contains a Mystery Science Theater 3000 reference that this old MSTie appreciated. Unless it was just a weird coincidence and not intended to be a ref, in which case…I still appreciated it.

My Fantastic Four-ay: Part Eleven.

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So last time I told you mostly about what was supposed to happen in Fantastic Four #296, the triple-sized 25th anniversary issue of The World’s Greatest Comic. (And the time before that I just kept yappin’ about the Barry Windsor-Smith cover.)

Now, why triple-sized I’m not exactly sure. To use a variation of an expression I’ve used before, this was a 10 pound plot in a 20 pound bag, hardly requiring the space used for what the story needed. If it had followed John Byrne’s original plans, filling the pages with references to the team’s history, it might have at least made for a visual feast.

As it stands, it’s a Jim Shooter plot/a supposed Stan Lee script, and a parade of artists, starting with the aforementioned Windsor-Smith for a moody five pages focusing on ol’ Benjy Grimm:


…followed by a flashback to the origin, also drawn by Windsor-Smith but but with additional artwork by Kerry Gammill and Vince Colletta, giving it that retro-1960s feel.


It’s a strong kick-off to the anniversary issue, contrasting where we are “now” (i.e. 1986) and how things were at the beginning. Maybe a little long, given the 10 pages it takes out of the 64 total. And like i said, it’s not like there’s a whole lot of story here. In short, the rest of the FF discover that the Thing, alienated from the team and the world, has retreated to Monster Island, home of their old enemy the Mole Man, to live among the creatures there. They fly out to get him, fight a bunch of monsters, convince the Thing that the Mole Man’s plan to raise a new island is going to wipe out the U.S.’s Pacific coast, and Ben is back on the team. The end.

Of course, there’s usually more to a good Marvel story than just the plot, and that’s the characterization. I do like this bit where, prior to seeking out Ben, Sue Richards gives her husband Reed a good shouting at in regards to how he’s let the Thing guilt-trip him for so many years:


But Reed still wants to fly out to the island to settle things with his former best friend man-to-man.


And then there’s the Thing his own self…spending the issue giving the FF the cold shoulder, defending his new pal the Mole Man, determined to turn his back on his old way of life forever…but pushing back a bit when Moley calls his former teammates his “enemies.”

Speaking of the Mole Man, he is not unaffected by Ben’s decision to crash at his pad:


He also has his own private chamber that he absconds to time and again, but when Ben busts in to talk to him:


…he discovers that the Mole Man, despite his disdain for the surface world, finds comfort using holograms to pretend he is part of that world, and easily loses himself in that delusion.

It’s interesting little character bits like this that drive the story along, which, as I said earlier, feels a little overlong. While the various artistic contributions range from “nicely done” to “it relays the plot in pictorial form,” with Jerry Ordway’s lengthy participation probably being the best of the bunch next to Windsor-Smith, ultimately the story doesn’t feel that…special.

Byrne’s idea of visually including the history of the team in this issue would have at least been something. Mostly, though, this was a just a climax of sorts to some of the ongoing soap opera threads that Byrne had left behind due to his abrupt departure from the title. It wasn’t that long ago that I was talking about Justice League of America #200, and what a perfect anniversary issue that was, with the hook of great artists providing individual chapters in a storyline that celebrated the origins of the team while equally celebrating the characters that came later.

This FF anniversary was almost there, referring back as it does to the Mole Man’s appearance as the team’s very first adversary in issue #1. Plus, don’t forget that the team’s co-creator, Stan Lee, is attached to this new story. But the story just lacks…oomph. Aside from that wonderful Windsor-Smith cover, and some nice art and character bits inside, there’s nothing here that really grabs you. I don’t know how fast they had to scramble to assemble this issue, with Byrne bailing out so close to its publication, but the comic is simply…there. Not a celebration, not an exciting reflection on What Has Come Before and Where It’ll Be Going. It’s just a means to an end.

That end being that the ultimate upshot of the whole endeavor is to get Ben Grimm back as part of the Fantastic Four. He hadn’t held that position for a couple of years by this point, since the end of the Marvel Super-Heroes Secret Wars mini-series. It’s a restoration of the status quo, of sorts.

The one interesting thing this story does is that it doesn’t necessarily resolve the main emotional conflict, that Ben is alienated from the team. Superficially, yes, Ben had rejoined and it looks like everything’s back to normal, but…his old girlfriend Alicia is still romantically attached to his teammate Johnny, he’s still a “monster,” he still blames Reed, and Reed never really hashes out the whole guilt-trip thing with him. And when we get to the issues that follow, and the new creative teams that take over the book, we see that Ben’s emotional journey continues along a darker path.

The state of the site.

filed under Categories blogging about blogging is a sin 6 Comments

Don’t be alarmed by the title, everything’s fine, I’m not going anywhere. But like I noted yesterday, my initial attempt at my Monday post someway, somehow, caused a glitch in the matrix here. Comments couldn’t be posted on the post, and for some folks the site as a whole wasn’t loading properly.

Well, I managed to do a brand new version of that post that appears to work fine…some of you have posted a couple of comments, so it all looks good.

As I also said yesterday,I wondered if the 16-year-old template I’m using is part of the problem. I’m using a WordPress theme called “Hanami,” which has been a solid and faithful visual layout for my site for all this time, but it’s very possible the cracks are starting to show. Hence, my quest for a newer, more modern-looking theme that will retain the simplicity of what I have now, but be more responsive to, say, desktop and mobile screen sizes. Oh, and will also allow for a banner across the top of the page with my site name and tagline superimposed over it.

And also won’t break everything. That’ll be good, too. Any ideas, feel free to let me know in my hopefully-functioning comment section.

If you were around the last time I changed up the site, back in early 2010, you know that was a bit of a challenge. But that was switching from Blogger to WordPress, a full transition of blogging platforms. This new template, whatever it is, will hopefully just be a visual shift on an existing platform, one that will hopefully work better with the software involved.

My feeling is that it’ll be a smooth transaction, since my site isn’t terribly demanding programming-wise. But I imagine there will still be a period of adjusting things here and there once I make the switch, so I’ll give you sufficient warning before I start messing around with the site.

• • •

Speaking of that Squeak the Mouse post, a couple of you noted that the cat vs. mouse cartoon characters Herman and Katnip are more of a direct inspiration. In fact, it’s specifically cited by folks from The Simpsons as such…this in-depth article by Brian Cronin tells you all about it.

Plus, in response to my calling Justice League of America #200 “post-Bronze Age,” Athelind asks

“I’m intrigued that you refer to a 1981 comic as ‘post-Bronze Age,’ I tend to think of the Bronze Age as running from around 1970 (Adams/O’Neil on Batman and GL/GA, Kirby leaving Marvel, Spider-Man Drug Issues) to around 1985-86 (Crisis on Infinite Earths/The Dark Knight Returns/Watchmen, the shift from newsstands to specialty shops, the black & white/indy boom).

“I’m curious to know what your benchmarks are for the transitions between Silver, Bronze, and Iron.”

And…hoo boy. I’ve talked about this before (like here and here and here), and, okay, at that last link, I note that Overstreet defines “Bronze Age” as “1970-1984.” But I’m also old enough to remember when Overstreet used to define “Bronze Age” as an informal, not generally accepted term.

But to keep this from going on too long (too late, I know) in my head I generally think of “Silver” as “mid-’50s to late ’60s,” Bronze as “’70s,” and anything past that more or less as “Modern,” because I’m fighting “Copper Age” with all the power my aging body will allow. And I don’t think I’d ever heard Iron Age before, which Googling tells me is 1985 to 2011, and man, I just don’t have it in me right now. I know I’ve said “Modern Age needs to be broken up,” but every time someone suggests something my initial reaction is “no sir, I don’t like it.” So, yeah, don’t pay attention to me on this…I’ll come to terms eventually.

Basically, all I meant was “post 1970s,” as ’70s JLA certainly felt different from ’80s, even early ’80s, JLA.

And in other site news…I will be returning to the “My Fantastic Four-Ay” series shortly, and will be getting into my non-spoiler-free post about the final issue of Rick Veitch’s Swamp Thing 1989. So, yes, soon I shall posts on the site that aren’t just about the site. I’m sure you all will appreciate that!