Tavella's Toys

Posted by CalvinPitt

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Alec Guinness plays Father Ignatius Brown, priest and amateur sleuth. When Brown learns that the church plans to send a cross of St. Augustine are in danger from a renowned thief named Flambeau, he opts to deliver the cross himself, expecting to draw out and reach the soul of the thief.

Well, he succeeds in meeting Flambeau, letting the guy take him into a corner of those catacombs beneath Paris, but loses the cross. Which gets him in hot water with both his bosses and the cops, since he deliberately ditched them to speak with Flambeau alone. So now Brown has to find Flambeau again.

It's not exactly a comedy. Brown is extremely near-sighted, but the movie only uses that once for a gag involving a very large, very heavy book. The movie gets some mileage out of the reactions people have to a priest using judo flips and arm locks. But Guinness plays Brown as calm, quiet and collected. He doesn't get flustered or anxious, even when he's trying to stay ahead of the police.

But it's not a tense movie, either. Brown isn't bothered by the loss of the cross so much as he couldn't reach the man who took it. But Flambeau is a sort of gentleman thief, so Brown's never in any danger from pursuing this guy, even when he convinces a society friend to put a rare chess set up for auction to lure out the thief. And the theft of the chess set is played as a sort of game, Brown trying to decide which shady character is the thief in disguise, but he spends the auction sitting in a chair, letting the suspects come to him.

The movie revolves around Brown trying to understand Flambeau across a series of conversations, hoping to get the guy to change his ways, or repent. Though Brown still dominates those conversations, running into monologues after Flambeau a single sentence. I don't find Brown's arguments convincing, revolving around scripture as they do, but I appreciate the fact he's focused enough on saving souls to shield Flambeau from the cops when they track him all the way to the thief's door.

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Posted by CalvinPitt

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Due to my buying things out of order, we're jumping ahead to volume 4 of Yakuza Fiance. Yoshino returns to Osaka over the summer break. One thing of note, in volume 1, writer/artist Asuka Konishi would show Yoshino's Kansai dialect through words like "youse" that slipped in when she let her polite facade slip. Here, Konishi has Osakan locals use more, well, British or English slang. Some older women at a restaurant where Yoshino finds Shouma say "blokes", and Shouma calls them "gits." A different approach to transcribing regional dialect differences into a different language, I guess.

At any rate, Kirishima tagged along, for reasons other than hanging around Yoshino. An old school acquaintance and hook-up of his, Shiota Nao, is in town as well. Ostensibly there on a school project and networking to boost her career, she's actually being used by some guys Kirishima and Yoshino messed up a couple of volumes ago. The guys want payback, and Nao is supposed to get Kirishima and Yoshino in the same place for that to happen.

Except Kirishima knows this, and is just playing along while trying to keep Yoshino in the dark. Too bad Yoshino is already aware of it. Konishi does a nice job setting that up by casually showing this is Yoshino's home ground and she has lots of connections. Yoshino earlier mentions that if Kirishima wants to take a trip, she knows a lady who can set that up for him easily, and she knows another person who can get him a proper traveling suitcase to deal with cobbled streets if he visits Europe.

So Yoshino's got a plan, but as is repeatedly the case when Konishi shows Yoshino trying to seize the initiative, Kirishima won't play along. Yoshino finds the pretty boy fronting the revenge scheme, with only a few goons to go through, and tells Kirishima to hurry to her location (knowing he's tracking her phone.) Kirishima instead drags in Yoshino's lifelong friend Shouma to look after Nao (by pretending it's Yoshino he needs Shouma to pick up) and goes ahead with his own plan. 

Which is a big problem with this manga. Even setting aside all the creepy stalker shit Kirishima does - there's a brief strip at the end of the book that reveals he paid for an illegal app so his phone can take photos without the shutter sound, letting him photograph Yoshino without her knowledge, and this is apparently supposed to be cute - he doesn't really seem to respect her opinions or knowledge. She's known what he's been up to for awhile and made her own plans without his knowing it. She even met Nao and exchanged contact info in a way Kirishima wouldn't catch, but he won't acknowledge that maybe he ought to follow her lead on this, while still claiming he's the only man who could love her.

I like Yoshino, I like Shouma - who seems like kind of a perpetually sullen guy, but is kind in his own way - I like Yoshino's friend Tsubaki (who doesn't show up in this volume but is in most of the others I own), and Yoshino's grandfather (outwardly goofy guy that he is.) There's just a big, Kirishima-shaped problem right smack in the middle of the book.

On another note, Nao spots Kirishima and Yoshino at one point while Yoshino's checking out a potential college (apparently something Kirishima engineered as part of his plan, but which Yoshino uses to learn more about him, and Konishi uses to set up a flashback we'll see in volume 8.) Nao ends up following Yoshino for a while, and after Yoshino asks for directions (allegedly confusing Nao for a student), Nao dismisses her as a, 'basic bumpkin bitch.' She'd already thought of Yoshino as a bitch once, just watching her walk across the campus (see above image). Yoshino didn't say or do anything, seemingly completely absorbed in something on her phone, so I don't know how Nao drew that conclusion. 

But Nao's portrayed as someone who uses other people for her own gain without hesitation. Being kind to her male classmates so they'll do her schoolwork for nothing, sleeping with Kirishima to try and exploit his connection to the yakuza. Even people who seem to like her describe as just pretending to be nice to get things from people. So my guess is we're meant to see it as Nao projecting herself onto Yoshino. She thinks Yoshino's, 'never had to compare herself against other girls,' I guess because Yoshino seems unaware of the looks she gets from other women, but we know Yoshino's fully aware of the gossip about her being a club hostess, or how much older and mature she looks than her classmates.

http://calvinpitt.blogspot.com/2025/07/inconsiderate-guests-are-worst.html

Posted by CalvinPitt

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Due to circumstances I'm unaware of, Billy Batson sealed himself up inside the Rock of Eternity about 3 years ago, our time, taking all that Shazam magic with him. But then he had a vision and sent the power (and a magic talking bunny) to Mary, so she could be a champion. Unfortunately, Billy's timing sucks, because Mary was just about to start college somewhere she could be herself, rather than part of a group, and now that's over.

(It strikes me as weird that Hoppy tells Mary she's got to adjust to being stronger, because she's not sharing the power with 5 other people - her siblings - but somehow Billy only had enough power to send to one of them.)

So Mary ends up back at home, looking after her siblings (because their adoptive parents are missing.) Instead of going to Vassar, she going to Fawcett Community College, 'the most soot-covered campus in the country.' She's fighting giant crocodiles and weird shadow guys with phones in their chests, and dealing with Internet jackholes griping about not wanting a girl superhero in their town.

Campbell's take on Mary is that she's the planner, the one who tries to prepare and cover all the angles. It makes her the responsible one of her siblings, but also means she gets thrown off her game by unexpected stuff, and that it's easy for things to get inside her head. When Hoppy appears inside her bag with a message from Billy, she tries to tell him no thanks, she just wants to be a normal college student, forgetting she's having an argument with a rabbit in a crowded lecture hall. When she can't stop a giant, magic crocodile and flees from reporters, all the comments and jokes on social get to her. Even more so when one of the mystery bad guys can turn those words into a sort of magic weapon against her.

Shaner gives Mary a wide range of expressions and body language, and can make her arguing with a rabbit look almost normal. Most of the bad guys are just human-shaped shadows with a glowing rectangle in their chest, but it actually works very well as a contrast to Mary. For all their talk about how much better they are, they hide themselves, while Mary's out there in broad daylight, bright colors, face uncovered for the whole world to see. The criticism she gets hurts, but she takes it, while these goobers she's fighting would no doubt insist it doesn't matter, but they hide from it.

By the end of the mini-series, Mary's family is back together (minus Billy), so I guess she's not going back to Vassar. Then she gets a vision of some warning from Billy, as something was going to happen related to that Lazarus Planet event. Which, again, I didn't read, so I don't know what the result of that was.

http://calvinpitt.blogspot.com/2025/07/sunday-splash-page-383.html

Posted by CalvinPitt

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Mxyzptlk is now two siblings, who are hawking a complete set of the Encyclopedia Universal. They put Perry White in a coma when he didn't go for their sales pitch, but after Superman proved a tougher nut to crack they went big and canceled Earth's gravity.

As the Earth falls to pieces, buildings start soaring into space, and a S.T.A.R. Labs space station begins drifting into the void, Superman and the Atom make tracks to the Fortress of Solitude. Atom's brought the white dwarf star that powered his size-changing belt. Superman says it feels heavy, though the Atom says it's 100 tons. That's not much to Superman, right, let alone for a star? Was it supposed to read 100 million tons? I guess it's a star fragment, because even a neutron star probably wouldn't fit in your hands.

Anyway, the weight is no big deal because the starlight is charging Superman up, and oh come on, it's a yellow sun that does that! I mean, yes, yellow light is contained within white light, but so is red, which would cancel out any gains of the yellow! Dang it Joe Casey, have you no respect for fictional stellar physics?

The Mxys are just floating around, watching the show, playing word association games, for some reason retconning something from earlier in Casey's run to be their doing instead of the Prankster's. They're also debating if they'd like to level up to something more than an 'annoyance.' Maybe become real super-villains, which is a terrifying notion. But as the Great Wall of China disintegrates, they find themselves encased in glowing green light. Alan Scott and John Stewart are creating a breathable forcefield around the entire planet, to hold it together.

(It's odd that, even though Superman tells everyone this is being caused by magic, we don't see any magic-users trying to do anything. Unless whatever Tempest was doing riding an orca counts.)

That gives Superman time to drill his way to the Earth's core, stuff the dwarf fragment there, then alternately heat and cool it with his powers, because the expansion and contraction produces more gravity. That done, Supes zips into space, hauls the space station back before everyone freezes of suffocates. Then it's off to confront the Mxys.

He offers to take a set of the encyclopedias, though he doesn't specify how he's going to pay, which seems like not very carefully defining the terms of a contract with the Devil. Then he pokes the bull by saying he liked them better as a funny little imp. As they reset all the damage (including to Perry's brain), speaking in unison, they disappear with a promise that, 'next time, we won't hit the reset button.' 

{1st longbox, 18th comic. Adventures of Superman #618, by Joe Casey (writer), Charlie Adlard (artist), Tanya and Rich Horie (colorists), Comiccraft (letterer)}

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