flit

Posted by CalvinPitt

http://calvinpitt.blogspot.com/2025/09/what-i-bought-922025-part-3.html

The food truck selling the Cuban sandwiches still has not been at the big Friday food truck thing since the first time I went. I missed my chance. On the other hand, I did have some jerk chicken tacos last Friday. The spiciness kicked my ass.

Wrapping up the books from August with the last issue of one mini-series, and the return of another after an absence of several months.

Sarah the photographer is still asking questions about the alleged child killer the sheriff let escape, while also trying to better understand the sheriff. The sheriff, back on his feet after the moonshine brothers beat his ass, has sworn off the demon drink and sets out to fix a break in the phone lines that he says the mayor didn't seem too concerned about finding and repairing.

But the mayor's found the rough drafts of Sarah's article, and doesn't approve of how his town is being portrayed. So he shreds her notes and boots her from the hotel. In general, the mayor appears to be grow aggressive and unhinged. The sight of a photo of his wife makes him hit his daughter (who is starting to figure out her baseball-playing fiance is a loser), and he's lost all patience with the alleged "rainmaker", who has produced bupkis so far.

And run through all this is the jackrabbit drive. Essentially, the locals feel there are so many rabbits they're like a plague. So they run them all into a big chicken-wire cage, and beat them to death with sticks. Based on what the sheriff tells Roscoe, they don't even use them for meat, they just kill them so they don't eat whatever pitiful amount of crops grow. The parents even encourage the kids to grab a stick and join in, but one boy, Roger, would rather read a book or help the rabbits escape.

Henry murdering that scout last issue brings the story back to where the mini-series began. Because the scout's sportswriter buddy, Jack, was a day late showing up, but spent the next several decades tracking Henry as he jumped from one bush league to another, under vaguely similar names, sometimes with an excuse for the affliction that made him need to stay out of the sun.

Eventually Henry had enough of being hounded, and has sufficient power to put everyone else in the stadium into a stupor while he smacked line drives at the writer's head. Terry ends up caught, hanging from the ceiling and bleeding into a bucket, but Henry lets him live. No thanks to Ronny, who is still hanging around with Henry for some reason, but doesn't care what he does to this guy.

Olson sets the scene in two columns of panels, one red and one blue on each row. The red are focused on Henry, on his anger or maybe just on his wants. He wants a story written about him (but only the story he wants told.) He doesn't want to hear about the war. The blue are focused more on Jack or Ronny. Jack bringing up Henry's war record like that matters at this point, Ronny just bored with the whole thing.

But they let Jack live and now it's 1988. Henry might just get to play in the major leagues, and Jack abide that thought, or whatever Henry is getting to play in the majors. But he's too late. Henry gets his at-bat, and Jack Terry gets hit by a car because he stopped in the middle of the street, too aghast at Henry getting his dream.

Or maybe for all Ronnie's talk about dying in a church, and being angry about what Henry took from him, he doesn't want his life to end, either. Continuing on, for the love of the game.

http://calvinpitt.blogspot.com/2025/09/what-i-bought-922025-part-3.html

Posted by CalvinPitt

http://calvinpitt.blogspot.com/2025/09/sunday-splash-page-391.html

Released in 1985, a 4-issue mini-series about Nightcrawler and Lockheed getting lost in other dimensions because Kitty messed around with the Danger Room after Nightcrawler described a past adventure he had after his teleportation powers got tangled with the Vanisher's and they ended up at the Well of Time. 

Nightcrawler initially ends up in a world of sky pirates, which seems like a dream come true until he realizes these aren't nice honorable pirates, but greedy killers. It does present him the opportunity to rescue a scantily-clad princess, but he also runs afoul of a shark-looking wizard, Shagreen, who'd sacrifices young women, and wouldn't mind hacking Nightcrawler up in an attempt to unlock the secrets of teleportation.

Eventually, Dave Cockrum brings in the versions of the X-Men from some fairy tale story Kitty told Illyana, where Kitty's a pirate (sailing seas, not skies), Storm's called "Windrider," and Wolverine's an even shorter-than-usual dwarf-looking thing called "Mean." Shagreen's defeated a second time, and Nightcrawler eventually finds his way back to the X-Mansion.

The series seems to get sillier the further along it goes. Kitty does, in one of her attempts to rescue Kurt, only manage to grab his costume, while he's wooing the princess. At another point, she grabs Shagreen's muscle, "Dark Bamf", who can't explain where he went when he's sent back, only that he just pawn, in game of life. During the climactic battle, Kitty's at least able to open a portal to see what's going on, and be seen. Her attempt to intimidate Shagreen with a "Great and Powerful Oz" routine is entirely ineffective. Before he makes it home, Kurt has a brief run in with Cretaceous Sam, a mammal-hating Tyrannosaur cowboy.

And then there's the Bamfs. Kurt meets two different races of being that bear similarities to him. In the sky pirate world, there's the Boggies. They only reach waist-height on him, wear little but loincloths and ragged boots, and speak in a weird jumble of mashed together words ("turnloose", "nastyface" "fastpoof" for teleporting.) They also have the ability to move into and through mirrors. Boggies don't seem well-regarded, and Kurt's appearance in a town market prompts a panicked frenzy of people wanting to kill the "Boggie."

The Bamfs look more like Kurt, albeit they don't come up to his knees. They speak a bit like they escaped from the Little Rascals or something of a similar era. That's the boy Bamfs anyway; the girls are almost Kurt's size - he describes them as all looking like his kid sister - and are pretty wary of the boys, who are apparently really horny. Though the girls all start drooling over Kurt the moment they see him, so they're just as bad. One actually uses the phrase, "Hubba-hubba." 

Actually, the last we saw of the Boggies was them being happy Kurt got zapped away, because it meant the princess was alone. Which, yikes, but also, apparently the defining characteristic of furry, blue teleporters with spiked tails is a high libido.

http://calvinpitt.blogspot.com/2025/09/sunday-splash-page-391.html

Posted by CalvinPitt

http://calvinpitt.blogspot.com/2025/09/saturday-splash-page-193.html

Sand Land was a manga Akira Toriyama wrote and drew in 2000, running a total of 14 chapters, and about 215 pages. Set on a world where humans narrowly avoided wiping themselves out in a war decades ago, only for the great river that provided water to most of the inhabitants to dry up as a great drought took hold. Everyone is stuck buying their water from the king, but Sheriff Rao wants to go looking for the "Phantom Lake." It's a dangerous journey, so he travels to the home of the demons that also live on the planet, and requests help. Ultimately, the Prince of Demons, Beelzebub, and one of his servants, named Thief, agree to go along (Rao offering them a Playstation 6, complete with Dragon Quest 13, helps seal the deal.)

A lot of the story revolves around Rao's past. We gets hint at it when Rao turns out to be a pretty good hand-to-hand fighter, taking on a gang of KISS Army rejects with just a pair of tonfa, or when he knows how to turn on and drive a tank belonging to the King's Army. Toriyama pulls a fast one on us when Rao hangs a pin-up of a well-known actress - named Sexy Terrier - in a tank they've stolen. It seems like Toiyama's usual gag about dirty old men.

It turns out more sad than anything. Rao was a general, who attacked a peaceful race because he was told they were building a doomsday weapon. The resulting explosion killed most of the Picchi people, and also destroyed Rao's home village, killing his wife in the process. His wife was the actress, and with his home destroyed, that magazine pin-up is the best he can do for a photo. The real joke, such as it is, was that the Picchi people were building a machine to make water, something Rao learns from Thief.

Which is a recurring theme in the story. For all they're called demons, even by themselves, Beezlebub and his people aren't all that bad, or even bad, period. Certainly not compared to humans. Beezlebub does rob water shipments, but doesn't take all of it, and even gives some of it to a small child, arguing it's better to wait until the kid gets bigger to beat him up, when it'll be more fun. His examples of "evil" are sleeping in late and not brushing his teeth, whereas Rao acknowledges that he's killed many. In war, but, 'killing is killing.' He was the one fooled by the propaganda of his superiors, and went on a mission he wasn't meant to survive, because he didn't like his bosses and was outspoken about it. Yet he followed orders all the same, and it cost him everything. His wife, his home, the men who followed him, his idealism. It's the demons, who exist outside human society, but could conquer it easily if they chose, who see the truth of things.

Toriyama does add in a few goofier aspects. There's a family of criminals called "The Swimmers" who wear swim trunks, swimming caps and goggles. None of them except the father can actually swim, since there's not been any water around to learn, but they've got history with Rao and Beelzebub both. Thief gets them supplies from a village while dressed as Santa, because that'll provide a cover story if anyone catches him. The Supreme Commander of the King's Army is a miserable, withered old bastard, but he's confined to a floating version of that wheelchair Commander Pike had on Star Trek.

I believe Toriyama was working on a sequel or continuation to Sand Land when he passed away, and there was going to be anime adaptation as well. I don't know what the status is on those at this point, and the series seemed to pretty well resolve itself. The river was restored, Commander Zeu is dead, the King's pressured into giving up half his wealth as food for the people, and the demons are revealed to be great heroes who helped the land.

And with that, throw your hands in the air, because we are finally - finally! - done with the letter "S."

http://calvinpitt.blogspot.com/2025/09/saturday-splash-page-193.html