Tavella's Toys

Posted by CalvinPitt

http://calvinpitt.blogspot.com/2025/06/messiah-without-clue.html

Kid Eternity: Book One covers the first 9 issues of Ann Nocenti and Sean Phillips' Vertigo imprint Kid Eternity series (mostly with Daniel Vozzo as colorist, and Clem Robins as letterer, minus the first two issues that are lettered by John Workman.)

The series starts with the idea Kid Eternity needs to "save" mankind, but Nocenti quickly dives into a variety of problems with that. How do you "save" mankind? Does mankind even want to be saved? And if it does, why would you put that job in the hands of this teenager(?) who died in the '40s, mistakenly spent 30 years in Hell, and got superpowers as kind of an apology from the Forces That Be.

Nocenti writes Kid as very much a young, naive, tempestuous, well, kid. His ability to resurrect anyone (typically well-known figures) is played as a sign of the shallowness of his knowledge. He summons figures he's heard of, whether their reputation is legit or not. He's tasked to find people who might be able to produce future Buddhas, and summons Madame Blavatsky, because he thinks she's the world greatest psychic.

He finds out several issues later from a friend she was actually a fraud, but by then, all the people whose doors she marked as potential parents have been murdered by half-demon kids and the fabric of reality is falling apart, partially because Kid got distracted and never sent Blavatsky back to the afterlife. I'm not sure how her sitting around scarfing junk food and watching TV is causing people to not die or for Swiss Army knives to fly, but those things were happening.

There are forces working against Kid, one of the demon kids a girl named Sara in particular, and maybe a woman named Infinity, but it hardly seems necessary. Kid gets easily distracted or depressed, seizing on any little idea. A mushroom he ate is able to use him to communicate with the leader of a hate group opposed to the mixing of the races and make that guy see how pointless the divisions are. Kid gets real excited about the success and thinks it's just the start of him helping everyone see that they have far more in common than not.

He promptly gets slapped in the face and told he's acting like a "damaged hippie." He tries using TV to get his message across by resurrecting a notable figure (he picks Marilyn Monroe), and she's shot by some guy affected by watching TV within about 5 pages, so the whole thing comes off as just a stunt. Especially as Phillips and Vozzo depict her differently from everyone else in the book. Phillips thins out his linework and cuts down on some of the cross-hatching, while Vozzo colors her and her outfit in tones that much brighter and more solid than everyone else. It gives her an otherworldly quality, almost like one of those concerts with "hologram Tupac" or whatever. 

For the first 6 issues, Phillips keeps Kid's eyes hidden behind those sunglasses. It's only when Infinity tries to, well, I'm not sure what she was doing besides trying to dissuade him from his mission, that we see behind his glasses (and even then, his eyes are black-and-red spirals because of whatever she's doing.) He ends up in a mental hospital, under the care of a guy who has horns like a demon, but ultimately just wants to understand why some people are gifted with great abilities, but he's stuck watching and trying to understand.

Kid's time under that psychic microscope contrasts with his early attempt to figure himself out, when he summoned Freud and Carl Jung to simultaneously psycho-analyze him. In that conversation, Kid mostly is shown as a static figure, face partially shadowed as Freud and Jung argue with each other on either side of him. Like the proverbial angel and devil, though it hardly matters which is which because they seem more intent on pushing everything he says into their respective frameworks than actually helping him resolve any issues. Kid ultimately decides therapy is a 'vanity performance' and bails, again not sending them back to the afterlife.

With "Dr. Pathos", Nocenti and Phillips show us Kid's memories as he lived them, or show him in a straitjacket, floating in the middle of the panel, besieged by those various memories. Pathos sits outside all that, watching with growing irritation as he can't find what makes Kid special enough to get this honor. Sometimes, we don't see anything more of him than a finger, pushing a button on his machine that digs into the subconscious. This dive into the psyche is about kid, but it's not one he's undertaken willingly. The writer - or the audience? - digging through the character's trauma to get something usable, or appropriate, or maybe just suitably interesting. 

http://calvinpitt.blogspot.com/2025/06/messiah-without-clue.html

Posted by CalvinPitt

http://calvinpitt.blogspot.com/2025/06/sunday-splash-page-381.html

New Avengers. At times, there's been precious little "new" about the books that carry that title. Ewing's version, starting post-Hickman's Secret Wars, at least had a different concept. Sunspot, through some mechanism I don't know, came into possession of at least part of AIM, which he turned into a radical science international peacekeeping force. Complete with its own island, pocket dimensions to house secondary bases, giant robots, and sleeper agents within SHIELD.

The team is a hodgepodge. Besides Sunspot and the 2 Young Avengers up there, you've got Squirrel Girl, the Power Man Fred van Lente created in the 2000s, a White Tiger, Clint Barton Hawkeye (although this is the era where Marvel was trying really hard via caption boxes to convince us Kate Bishop was cooler than Clint Barton), Songbird and a couple of other characters I think were new, including the daughter of Dr. Yinsen (the guy who saved Stark's life in that cave), herself a genius scientist.

Though the Master (the Reed Richards of the Ultimate Universe, now crazy and evil and somehow spread across the new multiverse) is the overarching bad guy, the team spends as much time dealing with attacks by SHIELD. Once, because Rick Jones exposed one of Maria Hill's stupid plans and Sunspot gave him asylum, and after that, because they acted on U.S. soil, and that was apparently something Sunspot promised not to do.

The book manages 5 different pencilers in 18 issues. Gerardo Sandoval draws the first arc, involving Hulking learning he's some pre-destined child meant to unite the Kree and Skrulls. Sandoval's stuff is sharp and angular as always, but the heavy blacks he favors work well once Wiccan starts showing outward signs of being possessed.

Marcus To draws the 3 issues tying in to Avengers: Standoff  (the story where it turns out Maria Hill was sending super-villains to some fake community and messing with their heads so they thought they were just regular people), except this books' issue involve a patriotic kaiju and Songbird turning on Hawkeye when he tries to defend Rick Jones from SHIELD agents. To's work is solid superhero stuff. He draws a decent giant robot/giant lizard fight.

Paco Medina handles the final arc, when the Master unleashes his group of weirdos (set up as sort of a twisted reflection of Sunspot's bunch) at the same time SHIELD attacks again. Medina's art is, also, pretty standard superhero-style art. Faces are rounded and softer than in To's work, physiques a bit more exaggerated. But, in general, all the artists do a solid job conveying emotion and action as needed.

Ewing comes up with a lot of neat ideas - threats from an earlier cosmos, a U.S. project to turn a hyper-patriotic soldier into a Godzilla - but I stumble at his portrayal of Sunspot as this brilliant mastermind, always 10 steps ahead of everybody. SHIELD asks Sunspot to let Hawkeye be on the team, acknowledging he's there to leak info to SHIELD. Hawkeye sells it by introducing himself as being there to spy on them.

In reality, Songbird's the real double-agent, except Da Costa anticipated that, so she's actually working for him by pretending to work for SHIELD. He fakes his death to draw out the heads of rival AIM factions, who he's certain will use a device to freeze time during his funeral to confirm his death, and lining the coffin with secondary adamantium will block the device they'll definitely use, so he's totally prepared.

Now, this is mostly an issue with me. I don't buy "I perfectly anticipated your every move," in stories. Not in movies where regular human serial killers stalk other regular people, and certainly not in a world with as much weird shit as the Marvel Universe. Not when Tony Stark says he's a futurist and so the heroes need to embrace fascism, with him as Chief Muck-a-Muck. Not when Reed Richards says he made psychohistory a reality, and MATH told him Negative Zone prisons were the best way to go. Hell, the Mad Thinker's whole shtick was thinking he'd perfectly mapped out all the variables, then getting tripped up by something he couldn't measure or account for.

If I can't buy it with them, I certainly can't buy it with Sunspot. Might as well tell me Speedball or Molly Hayes are masters of intrigue and counter-espionage. Especially when Ewing keeps going to the well of "things look bad, but actually is going perfectly according to Sunspot's plan." The first arc is probably the best precisely because Ewing doesn't try that. The team thinks they've dealt with the problem of a powerful sorcerer from a previous iteration of the multiverse, but he's actually hidden away inside Wiccan, who has to pull out victory at the last second on his own.

http://calvinpitt.blogspot.com/2025/06/sunday-splash-page-381.html

Posted by CalvinPitt

http://calvinpitt.blogspot.com/2025/06/saturday-splash-page-183.html

Originally intended as a 4-issue mini-series to be released under Dark Horse's short-lived Berger Books imprint, The Seeds released 2 issues in 2018, then vanished, only to appear as a complete TPB in 2020. Here's another review of the series I did 4 years ago. 

Earth is dying, or at least that's what everyone seems to think. A billionaire tried shooting himself into space, missed his mark, and crashlanded on Enceladus. The people living inside the walls are dealing with frequent power blackouts and loss of wi-fi or communications networks. The people who moved outside the walls are living in the remains of what's out there, trying to get by without technology. At least, without wireless technology. Phones, Internet, things like that. They still have guns and the wheel and haven't abandoned agriculture. There's a quartet of aliens going around, gathering seeds and biological specimens. They hope the Earth is dying, because otherwise, the stuff they're collecting isn't worth anything.

But I think the point is that life is more resilient than we give it credit for. It's just that our particular notion of "life" isn't going to hold. Throughout the story, technology keeps failing, but life perseveres. There are two people, we only ever see them in hazmat suits. One is convinced their mechanical drone bees will handle pollinization, now that real bees are being killed by insecticides, pesticides mites. Specifically, pollenizing almond trees, because nuts are big money. The other is betting on things like planting wildflowers for the bees, or for fungi to repair ecological damage. At the end, the real bees have turned the drones into building fodder in their hives. The hives they built inside the tech acolyte's power junction boxes, messing them up in the process.

The quartet of aliens are used to dealing with single-celled life. Intelligent alien life (as intelligent as humans get, anyway) is a new thing for them, and it seems to mess with them. Race falls in love, or at least takes an interest in, a girl named Lola. Convinces her to move outside the walls, protects her from her cohorts. Eventually abandons the project. The leader of the quartet loses it, starts watching TV and shooting the sets with rifles. When a reporter named Astra publishes a photo of him and he becomes a star, he goes inside the walls the meet the people who find him interesting. By the end, none of the aliens seem to be making any plans to leave.

If they're actually aliens. There's a panel on the second-to-last page that suggests they may be lab-created by a biotech company, one that flew by earlier (flying over the no-tech zone) and sprayed stuff that killed the bees. The seeds aren't worth anything if the planet's still alive.

Aja draws a lot of nine-panel grids. Sometimes they're each showing individual things, but other times it's part of a larger picture, just broken up into smaller bits. There's also a recurring honeycomb motif, and in many cases, it's revealed by zooming in on something. Show a turtle, then zoom in on the design of the plates on its shell. Or zoom in on the wings of a fly, or an image on a phone screen until we're looking at a few pixels. The honeycomb design keeps popping up, suggesting a connection between living things, that we're not each just individual organisms, and technology is just humanity's best attempt at replicating life.

http://calvinpitt.blogspot.com/2025/06/saturday-splash-page-183.html

Posted by CalvinPitt

http://calvinpitt.blogspot.com/2025/06/what-i-bought-6202025-part-2.html

I was looking ahead to July, and at the moment, it looks like 2 books out that I'd want every week of the month. Assuming I want to keep buying today's selection, that is.

So, in this story, Mitch and the guy who would become Vandal Savage were a couple of cavemen who found a weird meteor that changed them. Savage killed Mitch, which obviously didn't take, but Mitch, despite making a spear from the meteor, opted not to respond in kind. Even given the chance to go back and do it differently, Mitch doesn't. And then Savage shows up to challenge Mitch while he's protecting Rhea, the scientist lady in Ivy Town.

Mitch wins the fight, still sticking around, right up until Rhea finishes her project (which looks like a Cosmic Cube.) And Mitch takes the cube with him, because his future/alternate self says it'll be useful. Though he Mitch feels bad about hurting her, of course. In the meantime, Vandal Savage comes across the Japanese general, still looking like a skinned corpse. And when he hears how this game came to be like this, Savage lops off his hand and lets the guy eat it.

I guess Mitch can only see his own timeline and the changes he's wrought. Otherwise, he ought to know what his betrayal did to Rhea, the crap Savage is pulling, and so on. I don't know if he'd change what he did - maybe he'd just not get close to Rhea, lurk in the shadows and wait - but it doesn't seem like this attempt to avert disaster is going great.

Maybe that's not really what Other Mitch is after. I don't know why he needs the cosmic cube for this big plan to save things. I'm not sure he is actually a Mitch Shelly. I'm probably not supposed to doubt that, but Anand mostly keeps his face shadowed by his cloak. There were a couple of panels in issue 2 that you could see more of his face, but other than startlingly blue eyes the same shade as Mitch, the faces are such vaguely defined shapes I wouldn't really say they're identical. I'm probably not meant to be doubting that, but I'm suspicious of cloaked figures speaking in vague portents.

http://calvinpitt.blogspot.com/2025/06/what-i-bought-6202025-part-2.html