Sunday, May 17, 2009

STAR TREK: CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER



In a state of sweaty, paranoid frenzy due to an accidental injection of space-crack, Dr. McCoy lunges into a time portal and unravels the threads of Earth's history, causing the Enterprise to fade from existence.

With the help of a big talking rock, Kirk and Spock are able to roughly pinpoint McCoy's place in time and arrive in Depression-era NYC meaning to stop his madness. Kirk wastes no time in romancing the first history-woman he meets -- Edith Keeler, a social worker who feeds the local derelicts on the condition that they submit to her lectures and wild, baseless predictions for the future (that are made only slightly less demented-sounding by our knowledge that they will come true) -- but soon Spock utilizes the series of tubes and colorful lights he's constructed to reveal the awful truth: she is a loathsome fucking hippie, and unless she dies, she will single-handedly poison America's will to stand against Germany and Hitler will conquer the world and cancel the future. Edith Keeler must die.

Meanwhile, McCoy arrives in the past and harasses street people with his paranoid delusions until stumbling into Edith's mission, where she nurses him back to sanity. Bones is overjoyed when he finds Kirk and Spock also in the past, but when Edith senselessly blunders into the street, Kirk must make the heartrending decision to stop McCoy from pushing her out of the path of oncoming traffic. Love dies, the future lives. "Let's get the hell out of here," Kirk says.

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

UNCANNY X-MEN #509



The X-Men are enjoying their new, idyllic life in San Francisco: a beautiful, tolerant land where mutants can live openly, a land where they are free to carry out their own brand of lawless, brutal justice in the streets, free to instruct young children while dressed in garish S&M costumes.


It all seems too good to be true, and naturally the state of California has introduced a ballot initiative (Proposition X) which would institute mandatory sterilization of all mutants. Cyclops feels confident that the measure will be defeated, but the others are (perhaps justifiably) uncomfortable with their right to breed being put to a vote. On top of that, Scott has to deal with everyone crawling up his ass about the supposed problems he's having with Emma. Apparently everyone in his life has pinned all their hopes for love on the success of this relationship, but maybe the guy just feels like sleeping on the couch sometimes, y'know?

As if the prospect of forced castration and relationship trouble weren't enough to keep him up at night, Scott's demented ex-wife (X-Wife?) has assembled a Sisterhood of Evil mutants, full of vague, supernatural plans for destroying the X-Men and conquering death that center on reincarnating Psylocke as their mindless slave and repeatedly stabbing Wolverine. This is what you get, when you marry the evil clone of your high school sweetheart and then act all surprised when she turns out to be The Goblin Queen.

Monday, May 4, 2009

THOR #601



In this issue, everyone is as busy as beavers!

- Thor sits in a field pondering the fate of his hammer, which broke a little after he smashed his grandfather in the face with it;

- Balder agrees to relocate to Latveria, despite his reservations;

- Dr. Doom researches exotic foods on Wikipedia;

- Volstagg becomes hopelessly drunk, shares a moment of tender understanding with a goat, throws things around, and yells at his fellows for abandoning Thor ("codpiece sniffer" is not an accusation to be made lightly, but Volstagg was angry and ashamed and I understand why he felt like he had to go there);

- a beautiful lady of Asgard falls in love, quite plausibly, with a short order cook

and there was some other stuff about Loki's female form actually being the body of Thor's beloved Sif, and that she's going to die now that Loki is abandoning it. IDK, I didn't pay much attention to this, except to wonder how Thor failed to notice that his evil half-brother had been reincarnated in the body of his estranged lover. Thor: God of Thunder, not Keen Observation.

DAREDEVIL #118



Daredevil gets yelled at by his supporting cast, who disapprove of his alliance with the Kingpin, and more generally of the way in which he's been fucking up his life and the lives of the people around him. Foggy, in particular, is so pissed that he fires Matt from their law firm. Can he... do that? Meanwhile, Kingpin bickers with the ghost of his ex-wife (who appears to be literally visible to him), and sets his plot to destroy Lady Bullseye into motion by sending Leland "The Owl" Owlsley to hire her for a mysterious job. Maybe his plan is to hire her to kill HERSELF.