REVIEW: End of Month Reviews #87 - March 2011 [spoilers]

Saxon Brenton saxonbrenton at hotmail.com
Thu May 12 21:32:00 PDT 2011


[REVIEW] End of Month Reviews #87 - March 2011 [spoilers]
     
Reviewed This Issue:
     Godling #21  [MISC] 
     RACCCafe: The Biggest War Ever!  [RACCCafe/HCC]  {high contest 18}
     SW10: The Perils of the Wolf-Woman!  [SW10]  {high contest 18}
     The Super Wizard From Space #1-2  [MV]  {high contest 18}
     Team Xero #006  [HCC/MISC]  {high concept 18}
     
     
Also posted:
     Academy of Super-Heroes #111  [ASH]
     Beige Midnight #7  [LNH]
     Coherent Super Stories #26  [ASH/HCC]  {high contest 18}
     One Day at a Time #10-11 [MISC]
     Remember To Vote Team-Up #1  [RACCies/MISC] [repost]
     SW10: December 2010 #3-4:  Cauldron Book II Part 3-4  [SW10]
     
     
     The theme for the 18th High Concept Challenge was 'The unicorn vs. 
sasquatch war'.  Which I think was pretty cool.  I mean, you wouldn't 
want to have overly complex concepts for every round, but every so often 
a nice batsh!t insane notion helps stretch the mental muscles.  Why, yes, 
I do remember fondly the 'When the Earth becomes infested with hardwired 
aliens, one Earthling and his/her chocolate respond by swimming' back 
in round 6.
     Spoilers below...
     
     
-----
     
     
GODLING #21
'The Fall of Destiny!'
A Miscellaneous [MISC] series
by Jochem Vandersteen 
     
     This issue brings to a close both the immediate story arc about 
Master Destiny's attempts to overtly conquer New Troy, as well as the 
longer term plot elements that depicted Master Destiny as the secret 
manipulator behind the scenes who was the source of many of the problems 
Godling has had to face.  
     Jochem continues to find plot twists that I wasn't expecting.  
Specifically, I would have normally expected the conclusion to consist 
of a big fight scene where the hero overpowers the villain.  Here we get 
something like that, but the elements are shuffled around in a slightly 
different pattern.
     So: Godling's confrontation with Master Destiny carries over from 
the cliffhanger from last issue, with Master Destiny threatening to cut 
the throat of Officer Janson.  This is immediately resolved because of 
the help Godling has from one of his future selves using their super 
speed.  This seemed almost a bit too quick (and I'll admit that that on 
first reading I interpreted the sudden snatching of the Spear from Master 
Destiny's hand as being a case of the villain going 'Your super speed is 
no match for me' and the hero going 'Wanna bet?' and then proving the 
villain wrong, with essentially no dramatic tension whatsoever as a 
resolution).
     However the combination of the reveal that the super speed was done 
by one of the supporting Godlings, and then the way that Master Destiny 
was defeated by a double punch from the no-longer-held-prisoners Officer 
Janson and Darlene King, makes up for that.  It's a quick bit of creative 
swapping followed by a resolution that is just as satisfying as having 
Godling get into an extended battle with the still empowered Master 
Destiny would have been.  Admit it, after all the crap that Janson had 
put up with from the apparently triumphant Destiny over the past few 
issues, it was satisfying to see her be in on his defeat.  In fact, most 
of the dramatic tension in this issue is not so much in whether or how 
Master Destiny will be defeated, but in the brief scene where Godling 
struggles to resist the corrupting effects of the Spear.
     There's also some cool bits and pieces about building a super prison 
(Tartarus II) staffed by hekatoncheires robots to hold the various 
supervillains that Master Destiny has created.  Overall the story arc 
rounds out quite satisfactorily.  But because I worry about these things 
from a story telling perspective as much as from any other, it did occur 
to me: now that Master Destiny is removed, who will be taking over as the 
next big behind-the-scenes villain?
          
     
RACCCafe: The Biggest War Ever!
A RACCCafe [RACCCafe] posting  {High concept 18}
by Andrew Perron
     
     "But then DINOSAURS ATTACKED!"
     Well, that's amusing, even if it is a bait and switch.  Here we 
have a narration of the unicorn/sasquatch war for the High Concept 
Challenge 18.  An increasingly over-the-top narration, which turns out 
to be Kid Enthusiastic playing with some action figures.  It follows 
up on a previous RACCAfe story where Kid Enthusiastic isn't allowed in 
because he's underage, and here Haiku Gorilla has opened an adjacent 
day care centre to keep the tykes entertained.
     
     
Team Xero #006
A Miscellaneous [MISC] series  {high concept 18}
by Jamas Enright
     
     Another High Concept 18 story.  Now you might expect the theme of 
the unicorn/sasquatch war to cause a bit of a problem.  I don't know 
nearly enough about the Xtranormal software package to say for sure, but 
I get the impression it may not even be physically possible to depict 
honest-to-goodness equine style unicorns and shaggy haired bigfeet.  (A 
case in point for shagginess: while watching this episode I noticed for 
the first time that even with normal humans their clothing tends to be 
just patterns on a nearly skin tight frame.  Take a look at the shirt 
collar and tie that the representative from U.N.I.C.O.R.N. is wearing, 
which looks like one of those novelty t-shirts with the pattern of a 
dinner jacket, ruffled-button down shirt and carnation printed on the 
front.)
     In any case, Jamas works around the problem by thinking laterally 
and presenting the only story in this round where the titular opponents 
aren't literal unicorns and sasquatches, but human members of the rival 
bureaucracies U.N.I.C.O.R.N. and S.A.S.Q.U.A.T.C.H.  [United Nations In 
Charge Of Recent Nastiness, and Strategic And Special Quality Units 
Analysis The Current Happenings].  These two groups are searching for 
a lava flow that can be exploited as an energy source, and the first one 
to report it gets their budget renewed for next year.  (An aside:  I 
probably should have boggled incredulously at the notion of a lava flow 
in a major city, just visible under the pavement but not causing havoc to 
things like subway.  Goodness knows I've nitpicked other, even less 
sensible setups.  But in this case I just rolled with it.  I can't even 
recall what I thought when I encountered it on the first viewing, whether 
to treat it as over-the-top comedy or just smile and think 'Ah comics, 
where would we be without your weirdness?')
     Wrangling the speech synthesiser continues to be a work in progress. 
On the one hand the regular cast are comprehensible enough.  On the other 
hand the attempt with ze owtrageous Fronch accent has mixed results: 
there are parts where it caught my attention just how clear and 
understandable and evocatively French sounding the U.N.I.C.O.R.N. agent 
is, and there are other parts that are nearly incomprehensible.  Thank 
goodness that Firefox and Brassica appeared in the epilogue to explain 
what was going on.
     
     
The Super Wizard From Space #1-2
A Marlo Vivo [MV] series  {high concept 18}
by Wil Alambre
     
     Hurm.  I was going to begin by saying that this is the first time 
that the High Concept Challenge has spawned an ongoing series... but 
technically that's not true.  The first issue is indeed a High Concept 
Challenge 18 tie-in, but it only acts as a starting point for a much 
wider tale of cosmic battles centred on the Super Wizard.  The ruthless 
suppression of unicorn/sasquatch war (as in: 'You haven't playing nice 
with each other, so now I'm going to blow up your planet and kill you 
all') only serves as the specific event that triggers the alliance of 
advanced alien races to defeat the Super Wizard, not as the ongoing 
focus of the series.  Actually, to the best of my knowledge the Challenge 
hasn't spawned any ongoing series so far - although I do recall Tom 
Russell expressing a fondness for the Orphans of Mars warrior girls from 
HCC9 and wanting to do further stories with them.  Anyway, as this series 
progresses it even gets to tie in with High Concept Challenge 19 - but 
that's next month.
     The first issue looks like it was thrown together with whimsy as 
its main ingredient.  The extraterrestrial races of unicorns and 
sasquatches are quickly and desperately throwing together a peace treaty 
in time to avoid the wrath of the Super Wizard, only to have the Wizard 
obliterate them all anyway.  Contrasting this life-and-death setup was 
the way that the characters are all named something like 'uni-scribe' 
or 'Supreme Sasquatch' - which put me in mind of the old Hanna-Barbara 
cartoon _Yogi's Galaxy Goof Ups_ where everything is adjectively labelled 
as 'space' this or 'space' that.  In fact, some subsequent issues of _The 
Super Wizard From Space_ will use exactly that phrasing.  At first I 
wondered whether this was simply an attempt at a quick and efficient way 
of describing a person with a phrase based on their species and then job, 
but in light of the later 'space [fill in the noun here]' labelling I'd 
say it's done for humour.
     The situation changes direction in the second issue, when the 
representatives of the various advanced races meet to decide what will 
be done about the Super Wizard's antics.  This in turn lays out the 
premise for the stories that follow immediately afterwards - although 
we'll need to see ultimately where Wil decides to take the overall story.  
Is the *entirety* of the series about the Super Wizard battling the 
champions introduced in #2?  Or will that simply be the first story 
arcs(s) before moving on to some other story type?  
     Uhm, what else?  Well, I liked the sheer range of types of life 
forms represented at the meeting.  Also, the different voices that he 
gave to the representatives of the various advanced aliens species was 
quite nice.  It ranged from the subtle to the incredibly laid-on-thick. 
My favourites were still the undead Mummy Machines of Planet M and their 
rather distinctive speech pattern.
     
     
SW10/HCC: March 2011: The Perils of the Wolf-Woman!
A Superhuman World [SW10] series  {high concept 18}
by Scott Eiler
     
     With hindsight I've come to suspect that there's some information 
that is missing from this report from the World Journal Monthly.
     (I say 'in hindsight' because at first my attention was caught by 
the curious line about the Wolf-Woman being a virgin with children.  
Typical me, my first thought was 'okay, so she reproduces by 
parthenogenesis', followed by the idea that perhaps she eats her potential 
suitors and absorbs their DNA, and only after those did something like 
immaculate conception occur to me.  In the discussion thread that followed 
the posting it was revealed that the Wolf-Woman simply babysits and 
wet nurses for others without having borne any children of her own - a 
more mundane and sensible explanation than anything I dreamt up.)
     So anyway, when I got back to focusing on the story as a whole I 
started wondering about the motivations of the sasquatch elders and more 
generally about agenda of the nameless individual who filed the report...
     The plot in brief is that the government agent 'Super Wolf' is really 
an undercover sasquatch who can shapeshift into human form, and keeps her 
sasquatch legacy a secret.  In this adventure she's hunting down the 
Wolf-Woman, who had recently escaped from Nashville.  Okay, simple enough. 
Then after some sasquatch elders turn up to watch her hunt the Wolf-Woman, 
The Unicorn (and some of his offspring) also arrives from his dream world 
realm to take the Wolf-Woman as his mate.  Super Wolf and The Unicorn (and 
their respective allies) have a fight scene.
     Now, at first glance the explanation
> Wolves and Sasquatchi both shun humans, but they don't fear each other. 
> Sasquatchi had never tamed wolves.  So the elders had come to watch her 
> hunt for this wolf-woman.
seems to cover matters, but further thought suggests that this is a quick 
and dirty explanation.  Were the elders motivated by idle curiosity?  Has 
there been some sort of social shift (which plausibly could have been 
caused by the Earth being shifted from its orbit) that's prompted them to 
want to tame wolves now?  I got the impression that there's more to things 
than which is being stated, and which may deliberately be being left out 
by the reporter (possibly for the not uncommon reason of protecting 
sources).  But if 'protecting a source' is the case, then the line about 
Jo, the Super Wolf, "kept the sasquatch secret" sticks out like a sore 
thumb.  She may have successfully kept them secret up until now, but their 
cover has been blown by the World Journal Monthly!  Whose side is this 
guy on, anyway?  Or is it that the sasquatch have decided to reveal 
themselves to the world?
     Once again it may be the case that I'm over thinking things again.  
After all, the rest of the story is full of lots of interesting bits of 
information that under circumstances would be chalked up to a third 
person omniscient narrator.  And in that regard the notion of the horned 
Unicorn being a form of predatory male rapaciousness (literalising the 
phallic symbol) was an intriguing if somewhat disturbing one.  My gut 
feeling is that the Wolf-Woman better keep her wits about her and be 
ready to run at the first sign of trouble from The Unicorn.
     
     
----------       
Saxon Brenton   University of Technology, city library, Sydney Australia
     saxon.brenton at uts.edu.au 
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