Wis[s]e Words

Steve Lieber Is the Modern Kevin Maguire

Published on October 12, 2025Leave a comment

Steve Lieber just posted this page of original art from Superior Foes of Spider-Man to Bluesky (login required) and it got me thinking, once again, that he really is the modern equivalent to Kevin Maguire on Justice League:

A page of original art showing the origin of Boomerang

Let me explain. Stylistic they’re not that close, but that’s not the reason. On Justice League Maguire became famous for his use of body language and facial expressions both to convey humour as well as for subtle characterisation that was relatively rare in superhero series. The first work of Lieber I saw meanwhile, Greg Rucka’s Whiteout and Whiteout: Melt was drawn in a more realistic, slightly Kubert-esque style that really fit the story, a murder mystery set in Antarctica. Lieber really made me feel the cold.

Batman telling Guy Gardner to sit down, the latter showing a range of emotions in response before sitting down

With his recent work for DC however (Jimmy Olsen, One-Star Squadron, Metamorpho), Lieber uses a somewhat simplified, streamlined style that really showcases his talent at depicting body language and facial expressions. The first time I saw his promo art for Jimmy Olsen it therefore immediately reminded me of Maguire’s work. Just look at that original art on top and how easily readable Boomerang’s emotions are by his body language and expression. Granted, they’re not subtle but then Boomerang was never a subtle character.

The Secret Empire shows up in full costume, red robes and hoods, to recruit Myers. He ask if it's a sex thing, they ask why it would be.

Fred Myers was a professional baseball player who made the mistake of allowing himself to be bribed to throw games and then got caught at it. Because he could throw things hard and fast and because he liked to have a lot of money but not work hard to get it, he became a supervillain. Because he was Australian his first employers, The Secret Empire, called him Boomerang, though in his first appearance I don’t think he actually used any. He was actually supposed to take on the Hulk. Once that obviously failed, he went freelance, still looking for easy money to finance his lifestyle. Not to mention pay his debts to Justin Hammer, the supervillain who supplies tech based villains like him with their suits and weapons.

Boomerang is one of those villains who you can put in most series without needing any complicated reason for him to be there, the perfect one issue villain for your protagonist(s) to beat. He usually plagues Spider-Man or Iron Man so it’s also the perfect opportunity for any new, fledging hero to meet their senpai and get some superheroing tips. A classic “costume versus costume” character, as Steve Gerber called that sort of stories, but nothing wrong with that.

And look again at what an excellent job Lieber does at portraying that first part of Boomerang’s origin in just one page, as well as capturing his mental stage in that last panel. No dialogue needed. It’s about as perfect an origin recap as you can find this side of All-Star Superman.

Among Us Non-Binary Edition — Gnosia — First Impressions

Published on October 11, 2025Leave a comment

True, I never heard of anybody falling for an especially attractive pair of kidneys

They say that humans who have a gender are easily swayed by external looks, says Racio a non-binary person

Our protagonist Yuri, wakes up onboard an interstellar space ship and discovers their memories are missing. They have no idea who they are, where they are or what’s going on. Which is a bit of a handicap as they find themselves in a situation where one of the four other people on the ship isn’t actually human but a gnosia, a human infected by a murderous alien lifeform devoted to murdering any human it can. Normally in such a situation the ship would blow itself up to prevent infection from reaching an inhabited planet, but in this case the onboard AI has been persuaded to pause proceedings and give the crew the chance to sniff the gnosia out — by playing werewolf.

a close-up of the red haired SQ lunging at Yuri from their point of view, imitating a typical zombie, going gawr

Five people vote, one will be send to cold sleep. If the right person is chosen, the AI will no longer see any gnosian infection onboard the ship. If they guessed wrong, on to the next round. And sadly, they guessed wrong, but the ship has to go into warp before the next round of voting can take place. During warp humans are helpless but gnosia can walk round freely. Which mean they can kill with impunity. And indeed one of the four doesn’t wake up from warp.

a close-up on a face of a person with purple hair and one yellow, one brown eye, the face too big to fit in frame], hinting that Yuri might have faked their amnesia

Now with three people and each of the other two voting for the other, the casting vote lies with Yuri. With basically no information to go on, Yuri has to trust their instincts, but choses wrong. All die. O the embarrassment. But then Yuri wakes up again in the same medbay he woke up at the start of the episode and the real game can begin….

Setsu, blonde and with red eyes, leaning over Yuri shown from their point of view, asking them if they understand

And yes, Gnosia started life as a video game and honestly the whole setup of this first episode really shows its origins. Yuri having amnesia gives the rest of the crew an excuse to explain the setting through them, while the rest of the episode does a neat job of showcasing the game dynamics. For what’s basically an entire episode of people talking to each other with no real action, it held my attention well. The animation looks good even if the direction has a penchant for weird facial close-ups. But the setup gave me problems.

Do you thinl hunanity should be erased from the universe, Setsu asks Yuri

Because it is all a bit artifical. The gnosia are such an existential threat –the planet the ship left from being hinted at being overrun by them– that ship AI have standing orders to self destruct, yet it allowed itself to be overridden and get the crew playing werewolf instead. That and the fact the AI can infect gnosia presence but not pinpoint it necessary to tell the story Gnosia wants to tell, I understand that. So is making Cold Sleep dangerous enough that you can’t just sent the entire crew into it or again you wouldn’t have a story.

But you could just cycle people through cold sleep without the need for an elaborate voting ritual. Select one crew member, see if putting them to sleep erases the gnosia detection; if not defrost them and go onto the next. That way you’d never get into the situation where the gnosia has the upper hand.Similarly, from the gnosia point of view it makes no sense to let this voting drag out, if they’re free to move around and murder anyone they want during warp. Why stop at just one, why not the entire crew?

These are just minor quibbles for me though. With three of the crew (Yuri, Racio and Setsu) seemingly non-binary and SQ being bi if her flirting with Yuri and Setsu both is an indication, this looks to be a rather queer series. And while the setup for it is a bit dodgy and gamey, it’s still interesting enough to make me want to watch it.

Your Happening World (Good News For You Edition)

Published on October 10, 2025Leave a comment

Thanks to the increase in renewable energy, more than a hundred countries have managed to cut their fossil fuel imports:

As well as increasing the need for fossil-fuel imports from other countries, switching renewables for fossil fuels would require significantly higher energy usage “due to [fossil fuels’] lower conversion efficiencies”, the IEA notes. Each gigawatt-hour (GWh) of renewable power produced has avoided the need for 2-3GWh of fossil fuels, it explains.

For the Netherlands this meant that instead of having to import 69 percent of fuel needed to provide energy, only 31 percent was needed. And all this despite the abysmal state of the electricty networks, ill prepared for the growth in renewables and the sometimes active resistance of successive rightwing governments to it.

Speaking of renewables, this year marks the first time that reneweables globally have generated more electricity than coal has:

The world’s wind and solar farms have generated more electricity than coal plants for the first time this year, marking a turning point for the global power system, according to research.
A report by the climate thinktank Ember found that in the first six months of 2025, renewable energy outpaced the world’s growing appetite for electricity, leading to a small decline in coal and gas us

Soil dug up during the reconstruction of the Toronto waterfront, as part of the ongoign effort to restore the wetlands that had been destroyed there a century ago, turned out to be full of life still:

The samples that came to Riskin had themselves been the source of disbelief three years before, when heavy machinery was excavating vast amounts of dirt and debris from Toronto’s waterfront in an effort to re-route the Don River.
When one of the bulldozers was halted by thick green shoots, the machine operator soon realized that the sedges and cattails looked nothing like the other weeds at the site.
Scientists soon knew they were witnessing something both unexpected and profound: seeds and plant scraps, trapped underground for more than a century, had roared back to life.
The peat bogs and wetlands had been buried under nearly 25ft of dirt and gravel more than a century ago, in an attempt to pacify the remaining scraps of wild around what is now one of North America’s largest cities.

An EU proposal for mass surveillance of online & mobile chat has been defeated thanks to German withdrawal of support for the new law:

In a major breakthrough for the digital rights movement, the German government has refused to back the EU’s controversial Chat Control regulation yesterday after facing massive public pressure. The government did not take a position on the proposal. This blocks the required majority in the EU Council, derailing the plan to pass the surveillance law next week.

Finally, to help you into the weekend, this is the legendary blues concert that Granada TV recorded in 1964 in Manchester. Featuring Muddy Waters, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Cousin Joe Pleasant, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee:

The Villainess Strikes Back — First Impressions

Published on October 9, 2025Leave a comment

I’m glad to say that the anime version of Saigo ni Hitotsu dake Onegai shitemo Yoroshii deshou ka / May I Ask for One Final Thing is as good as I hoped.

Scarlet, the white haired villainess in a red dress absolutely punching the shit out of the pretty, fluffy pink haired girl who stole her man, though she is glad to be rid of him

That was a very satisfying premiere. The anime was smart enough to keep what worked in the manga version and having two episodes meant we could deal with both the setup and start the actual story in one fell swoop. Starting with the denouncement, before going into an extended flashback that shows Scarlet immense patience in dealing with her shithead fiancee, before coming back for the well deserved catharsis of the beatdown she delivers to him and his cronies, worked very well here. It’s a structure you see more often in villainess anime or manga, but rarely as well handled as this. The second episode being able to move onto the bigger plot, with the prince revealed to be no more than a figureheard for a coalition of corrupt nobles engaging in slavery, helps move the story along. A lot of villainess stories tend to spin their wheels between the big banishment scene and the inevitable redemption through romance, not so this series. There’s romance with the other prince on the horizon, but the manga hasn’t really gotten to it yet so I don’t expect the anime to get there either.

All in all this is an almost perfect adaptation, with my only minor quibble being that the big fight scenes were a bit static. Not every production can have the budget or staff that a CloverWorks or Science Saru can bring to a project, sadly. Direction and mise en scene makes up for a lot here. All of leaves me free with something that irritated me when reading the ANN reviews of these first tow episodes, viz Rebecca Silverman’s remarks about its worldbuilding:

It also stumbles in its worldbuilding; if it’s not proper for Scarlet to show her legs, why does her school uniform skirt come to mid-thigh? If slavery is illegal, why is it so easy to find the slave traders in the capital? And how credulous is Scarlet that she thinks a rock is a precious ore even though she’s clearly not stupid? Moments like that took me right out of the story.

This feels like a case of overthinking reviewer’s brain. The remark that it’s not proper to show her legs is made when Scarlet does a flying drop kick at a ruffian who tried to rob her and is clearly a joke. In any case the school uniforms do include a stout pair of stockings, so hardly improper even if the skirts are on the shorter side. That Scarlet thinks she’s been sold mithril is because of her sheltered upbringing, not her lack of intelligence. And, since she later remarks she has to go back to buy another as she broke it, it may even be that she very well understood it was fake, she just wanted to help the boy selling it.

These are minor things, but Silverman’s objection to how easily Scarlet and co found a slave trader goes directly to the heart of the story. It’s not just that it’s naive to think illegal things cannot be found easily for those who go looking — or nobody in Wall Street would be addicted to coke — but that it means you haven’t really understood what you just watched. As these two episodes have been at pain to make clear is that while slavery is illegal, it has the support of powerful people, from Scarlet’s ex-fiancee, the second prince, to the group of nobles he’s involved with to the prime minister. Just like corruption under Trump is still illegal but widely practised, so too is slavery here. Because these powerful people are involved, slavers can operate semi-openly. Even so, it takes some effort for Scarlet et all to track them down and they did have the help of an insider.

That’s the Watsonian explanation. The Doylian of course is that the series isn’t interested in doing a police proceduralesque investigation into the slave trade and wants to move on to the real meat of the story. The slave trader is easy to find because it isn’t interested in spinning the investigation out more than it needs to to get to the next set piece, where Scarlet will get to punch some more deserving bastards.

Meet on the Ledge

Published on October 7, 2025Leave a comment

Richard Thompson talking about writing Meet on the Ledge as quoted in Andrew Hickey’s podcast about Fairport convention:

It’s a fairly vague song open to a lot of interpretations, I’m proud people can find different things in it. I certainly don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote it – a 19-year-old trying to take on big subjects, like transition, youth, old age, friendship, blah blah blah. Sometimes you just hit something. Being young sometimes means you’ve experienced nothing, but in moments you see everything.

That struck me, listening to the podcast on the commute back from work today. It has long been a song full of meaning to me, from the first time I heard it on What We Did On Our Holidays a decade and a half ago. For me it’s always been about grief, mourning and remembering absent friends and family. That I first heard it when my wife was in hospital, where she would eventually die, may played a part.

Sandy Denny dying at the tragically young age of 31, or the tragic accident that happened to Fairport Convention just after recording their next albume may have also played a role. The band after all, almost sixty years on, still use it to close out their annual Cropredy Convention.

It’s a song that’s aged as fine wine, a defiant remembrance of those who went before us into the great unknown and it never fails to gives me goosebumps. Seeing Richard Thompson, who wrote it when he was nineteen, still singing it at age 71 in the clip above, all that history behind him even more so.