the vynsane asylum

jjreason wrote: ↑Mon Apr 10, 2023 6:21 am Was Tomasi on Superman or Action leading up to 1000? I really enjoyed both superman books for the time I was reading them.

I think Jurgens was on Action, but Tomasi sounds right on the Superman series before Bendis relaunched it. I haven’t read any of those yet, but that’s where the ‘Super-Sons’ debuted when Joh Kent and Damian Wayne started getting up to hijinks together.

It contrasted well with King & JTIV on Batman. I liked all 4 of the books during that time.

Back with more Detective.
1018-1019. A cult of Nordic mythology worshippers tries summoning an eldritch nordic creature by sacrificing one of their own. or something.
1020-1024. Two-Face is back and he’s got a cult of worshippers(what’s with Tomasi and cults??) half of whom deliberately cause chaos in the city, and the other half acting as vigilantes shutting down criminal enterprises. It turns out Harvey is being controlled thanks to an elaborate mind control scheme concocted by Hugo Strange, the Mad Hatter, and the Joker. The Joker also resurrects the Talon Lincoln March amd there’s a big four way battle between Batman, Harvey, Joker, and March. A very convoluted story arc.
1025-1026. Joker War tie-ins. Batwoman has to team up with Batman to help a pinned down Commissioner Bullock and his men fend off a bunch of Joker goons. And Killer Croc is trying to stay out of the Joker War with his newly established underground refuge for homeless freaks. But they’ve been contaminated with Ace chemical laced water and Croc doesn’t believe Batman is trying to help them.
1027. Humongous $10 issue with a bunch of stories by tons of different creators. Sets up the new status quo in one of the stories when the Joker booby traps Wayne Enterprises and police officer Chris Nakano loses his eye and his partner in the explosion and he blames Batman. Nakano will eventually become the next Mayor with a hard anti-vigilante stance.
1028. Cops are being hunted by the “ghost” of their fellow officer whom they framed. The ghost turns out to be the dead cop’s son. Batman stops him, then clears the father’s name. Nakano announces his mayoral candidacy.
1029-1033. Tomasi finished up his run. A strong anti-vigilante sentiment spreads thru Gotham thanks to an ironically masked character called the Mirror, and soon to be Mayor Nakano’s campaign platform. Batman’s team get caught up in a mob riot between pro and anti-mask protestors and they all get kidnapped by Hush(I call bullshit. Tommy manages to subdue Barbara, Dick, Jason, Duke, Kate Kane, AND Cassandra all by himself? No. I could’ve believed the first five, but they lost me at Cassandra.) He is planning to sell their organs on the black market to fuck with Bruce. Bruce and the estranged Damian have to team up to save everyone else. Nakano wins the election. In the aftermath of the Joker War Bruce says goodbye to Alfred and moves out of the Manor with his cat, his two dogs, and his cow.
1034. Mariko Tamaki starts her run. Bruce moves into a condo in the city and we are introduced to his new neighbors. And then one of them gets kidnapped.

Annual 1. An updated retelling of Clayface’s origin.
Annual 2. I think I already read this. The Reaper from Year Two resurfaces and it’s the son of the original Reaper, except he’s set up like Reaper franchises in different cities.
Annual 3. An ex-spy friend of the late Alfred comes to ask Bruce for help is closing an old case about another agent who had betrayed them.

Tomasi’s run was pretty dull. I would honestly forget what had happened in the previous issue I had just read and would have to rescan it quickly.

Not sure what I’m gonna read next…

Again, I barely remember these.
I have zero memery of 1020-1024.

I do remember how annoying Nakano was, and still is.

Diabolical wrote: ↑Sun Apr 16, 2023 7:32 am I do remember how annoying Nakano was, and still is.

And they had a chance to make him an interesting character with a legitimate beef against masks. But he threw in with that Elon Musk-ish guy and the Peacekeeper-1 fiasco. He just comes off as a chump.

I picked The Boys as my next read. I just acquired the missing issue 66 to fill out the complete run.(For those who didn’t know, issue 66 and issue 67 both have 66 on the cover. I had what I thought was 66, when it was really 67.) I wanted to read the books before I watch the series. Here’s what happens in issues 1-6 when it was still with Wildstorm/DC.

Hughie is having lovely day with his GF of one month, Robin. A Superhero and villain have a super skirmish and Robin becomes gruesome collateral damage literally in Hugh’s arms. Billy Butcher then shows up and recruits Hugh into The Boys, a CIA funded anti-superteam that keeps all the super-assholes on the planet in check. We are also introduced to the premiere superteam called The Seven when their newest recruit, Starlight is brought up from a junior superteam and is initiated onto the team by getting mouthraped by all the guys in the Seven including their leader Homelander. Yeesh.
Billy, Hughie, and the Boys bug a different junior superteam called Teenage Kix’s hq and use the incriminating evidence to force them to turn on each other and publicly eject one of their members. Homelander sees this on TV, and suspects Billy is back at work, and tip off the Kix. They confront the Boys, and a recently powered up Hughie accidentally kills one of them(and then rescues the gerbil the guy had in his ass). After some soul searching, Hugh decides to stay with the team.

Lots of violence, lots of sex and nudity, lots of profanity and homophobic slurs. Did I mention the violence?

The series moved over to Dynamite publishing for the remainder of its 72 issues.

Sometimes I forget the show actually tones things down a bit.

The Boys 7-10. We are introduced to the Legend, a grumpy old guy who lives in a comic store’s basement and is the last word on info about all the supers. He sets Hugh and Billy on a mission to find out who killed a young man who might’ve been gay. The trail leads to Tek-Knight and his protégés, Laddio and Swingwing(being pastiches of Batman, Robin, and Nightwing respectively.) Tek-Wing has a compulsion to fuck any hole he sees, whether its the tailpipe to his Tek-mobile, or his butler’s ear. The killer is revealed to be Swingwing who was approached by the deceased kid while he was changing into his secret identity and the homophobic Swingwing rebuffed the kid’s affections and pushed him off a roof. Billy sabotages Swingwing’s jetpack in retaliation and he has a midair malfunction, killing him. Tek-Wing’s butler “outs” him in the tabloids and the scandal effectively ends his super hero career. He dies saving a a woman from a falling pile of bricks, but he hallucinates that he had to fly into space and fuck an asteroid to stop it from destroying Earth. Plenty more homophobic slurs, violence, and raunchy sex, like Tek-Wing and Swingwing spitroasting Talon(think Catwoman) after they all got drunk one night. Frederick Wertham is definitely shitting in his grave.

The Boys 11-14. The team heads to Russia. The corporate sponsors of The Seven, Voight-American, have entered into a shady deal with a petite Russian Mafia boss named Nina(who is addicted to masturbating with vibrators) to overthrow the current Russian govt with a bunch of hired supers. But both Voight and Nina have their own agendas are planning to double cross each other. The Boys uncover the plot and blow Nina up with one of own vibrators packed with C-4, and also trigger the failsafe bombs in the 150 supers, blowing their heads off.

The Boys 15-18. The aftermath of the events in Russia lead to some friction between Billy and their CIA handler Raney(who Billy has an ongoing hate-fucking affair with) over what to do with the info about Vought-American trying to finance a coup. There’s some character development for the other three members of the team, Mother’s Milk, the Frenchman, and the Female. And Hugh meets up with Starlight again in her civilian disguise(they had briefly met on a park bench in Central Park in the first story arc) and get closer, eventually consummating the relationship. But neither knows they’re ‘the enemy’. Also the super that Hugh killed in the first arc is resurrected and he comes looking for his gerbil and Hugh has to re-kill him.

The Boys 19-22. Hugh goes to talk to the Legend and gets the full origin story of Vought-American being shitty arms manufacturers during WWII and Vietnam, and how they found the infant alien Homelander in Wyoming and basically started a super human arms race that culminated in a variation of 9/11 where the Seven destroyed a plane of civilians and also the Brooklyn Bridge. And also why there’s an uneasy truce between the Boys and the Seven after the last time they squared off. A-Train also tries to rape Starlight. And the Boys have the Seven’s HQ bugged and Billy just got to the footage of Starlight’s initiation blowbang.

Gratuitous violence and sex aside, the narrative is keeping me entertained. I’m already a third of the way thru the entire series and I’m not even slightly burned out in reading them.

The Boys 23-29, and an Epilogue in 30. This was the most fucked up storyline so far. One of the G-Men, Vought’s biggest money earning super team(s) kills herself. The Boys send Hugh in undercover on the one of the junior teams called G-Wiz and Mother’s Milk starts investigating the suicide’s history. The further we get along, we discover none of the “orphans” on all the G-Teams(an obvious pastiche of the X-Men) were actually orphans, but kidnapped children. Furthermore, the head of the G-Men, Mr. Godolkin was molesting the kids, and as they joined the adult teams, they would join in and perpetuate the cycle. The Boys go in to confront the entirety of the G-Men and their off shoot teams being outnumbered like 50 to 1, when a kill team of attack choppers from Vought flies in and wipes all the G-Men out with rockets, machine guns, and flamethrowers. Cleaning up their own mess before the story leaked. The epilogue has Vought reassessing the Seven’s profile now that the G-Men are gone, and Billy finds out Rayner was using the suicidal G-Man as a deep cover agent and didn’t tell the Team before they sent Wee Hughie in undercover, and threatens her and her entire family if she fucks them over again.

Fucking dark. And I won’t even mention the cargo container that get’s dropped in the ocean off Iceland. Jesus Christ, Ennis. Holy shit.

The Boys 31-34. After the G-Men fiasco, Vought escalates against the Team by sending their second best team to kill them. Stormfront, a Nazi supersoldier from WWII attacks the Female and puts her in a coma. This lures the rest of the Boys into an ambush. Billy easily fucks up most of them, but it takes the combined efforts of all the Boys, plus their Russian ally Love Sausage to defeat Stormfront.

The Boys 35-38. Hughie learns the secret origins and recruitments of Mother’s Milk, Frenchman, and Female.

The Boys 39-43. Billy discovers Hugh’s relationship with Annie and suspects he’s a mole for Vought. He sends him on a mission to surveil a completely Naive super team called Super Duper while he figures out whether Hugh is the Enemy. Mother’s Milk also investigates Hugh and discovers he’s NOT working with Vought which leads to a confrontation between MM and Billy. Hugh inserts himself into Super Duper’s lived when their newly assigned ‘leader’ from another super team tries to rape two of the younger girls on the team. Hugh gets his ass kicked and Billy steps in to kill the prick.

I’ve read over half the series in the last couple days. So it must be pretty good.

The Boys 44-47. Vought’s handler of the Seven hires a new assistant and she is tasked with coming up a solution for the Boys now that they’re on VA’s radar. We find out Queen Maeve is the Boys source inside the Seven. Annie comes clean with Hughie about being a super-hero. He, in turn, tells Billy that he’s been sleeping with the enemy this whole time. Billy then manipulates things so Hugh finds Annie’s ‘audition’ onto the Seven and he freaks out, confronts her about it, and dumps her. Meanwhile, Homelander is at a religious fundraising function of some sort, and starts putting out feelers to other heroes about the feasibility of a super powered coup of the White House.

The Boys 48-51. As both sides begin to prepare for the inevitable showdown, we also get a better flashback to the events of their first confrontation after the debacle on 9/11. A terse standoff where the Boys blackmailed Homelander with photos of him eating babies and shit(that his team didn’t know about) leads to an impasse. Until Lamplighter follows Mallory home and kills his two granddaughters, which escalates until the teams face off again. They reach another impasse with the Seven offering Lamplighter as a sacrifice. Mallory kills him and then quits the team, which gets defunded shortly after as a casualty of shifting politics, and didn’t get reformed until the beginning of the series when Billy recruited Hugh as a replacement for Mallory.

The Boys 52-55. Apparently the Highland Laddie mini took place before this arc, because Hugh and Annie are attempting reconciliation and Mallory has introduced himself to Hughie. Took me a couple pages to figure out I’d ‘missed’ some story. Hugh visits Mallory’s beach side house in the Bay area and Mallory tells Hughie everything about how Vought tried using supes in WWII and got Mallory’s entire armored platoon killed. Later on he was recruited into the CIA and as he worked his way up the ranks, he got the clout to start the Boys, recruiting Billy in the process. It’s basically the same “origin” story the Legend told Hugh in the second arc, but from a different pov so the reader is getting more details. He also detailed their falling out after Mallory’s granddaughters were killed and he warns Hugh that Billy has an agenda and he’s definitely the bad guy. After Hugh leaves, it’s implied Billy shows up and kills Mallory.

The Boys 56-59. When a trans hooker at a supes bordello is murdered, the main suspect is Jack from Jupiter, from the Seven. But that doesn’t feel right to Hugh and Billy, so they’re trying to figure out who would set up Jack and why. Then footage of Jack having his bum gang fucked by hookers gets released, which causes the Seven to kick him out. But he insists his innocence and this is a ploy by the Boys to break them off one by one. So the Seven go and confront the Boys. Billy tells Homelander it wasn’t them and Billy’s heartbeat confirms he isn’t lying. This diffuses the situation for everyone but Jack. It’s revealed the footage was released by the Vought people to provoke exactly what happened. The Boys go out for dinner, and when they get home, they find Terror, Billy’s pet bulldog, dead. Billy immediately heads to the bordello and slowly eviscerates Jack with a knife, repeating the question ‘Why’d you kill me dog, Jack?’

Only thirteen issues left to go, so things are gonna start getting intense.

Are you skipping the mini series' like Herogasm, Highland Laddie, etc.?

They were at the bottom of the pile. I’m missing the first couple issues of Herogasm, but I have Highland Laddie and Butcher Baker. Had I known, I would’ve read them at the appropriate time, but I’m already on the final story arc.

Heres the penultimate arc

The Boys 60-65. The President gets killed by an escaped wolverine(don’t ask) and Vought’s simple-minded VP stooge is put in charge. The Deep and A-Train quit the Seven. Homelander sets in plan in motion by sending a d-list superteam called Paralactic(a shitty parody of Image teams like Cyberforce) to distract the Boys. They make quick work of the cyborgs, then send Frenchmen and Female to retaliate by fucking up Team Titanic at Vought HQ. Frenchie loses his arm and Team Titanic loses most of its team before Stillwell, the Vought liaison guy realizes Homelander is playing both sides. But it’s too late, the army of supers has taken over the White House and the Pentagon. Starlight and Maeve try leaving the Seven and Homelander rips Maeve’s head off. Billy takes Hughie up to the roof where he has A-Train chained up. He plays the audio of the aftermath from when Hugh’s girlfriend died and the Seven laughing about it, then the audio of them choosing Starlight to be the next member of the Seven based on her looks. It’s enough to rile Hughie into kicking A-Train’s head off. Then they head to the White House where the military has surrounded the building and all the supes in the sky around it. Fighter jets are sent in to kill the supes with missiles, and Billy heads inside to confront Homelander who has killed the new President and basically the entire White House staff. Then the big plot twist is revealed that Black Noir is a clone of Homelander specifically grown to be the deterrent if Homelander ever went rogue. But Black Noir was dressing up as Homelander and committing atrocities like killing Billy’s wife and fucking that family to death in the blackmail photos. Black Noir and Homelander tear each other apart, and the barely alive Noir stumbles out of the White House only to be mowed down by the army. Then Billy delivers the final coup de gras by sticking a crowbar in his skull and yanking out his brains. Basically a happy ending for everyone.

I can already see where the finale is headed.

The Boys 66-72. I won’t give away the ending in case anyone wants to read it down the road. Other than to say, I KNEW Stillwell was gonna make Ms Bradley the fall guy from the very second they introduced her.

I’ll probably get to the three minis this weekend. I found the first issue of Dear Becky in a cheap bins a few months ago, but don’t have the rest of the series.

Overall, it was a very gratifying story. And I think the cherry on top is that I found like 99% of the issues in the 20 cent boxes before it blew up and became super popular.