The priestess glanced around the wizard’s chamber and sighed theatrically. It was a total disaster. Robes lay strewn about the floor. Forgotten bowls half-filled with snacks and cold cups of tea crowded the desk. Grimoires lay tossed about, casually left open to pages of lore best forgotten by gods-fearing mortals. She tried not to look too closely at any of them. “This place is a mess. How do you ever find anything?” she asked him. “I have a spell for just that purpose!” The wizard patted his pockets, then looked helplessly at the piled scrolls and spell books. “Err, somewhere.”
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I was assigned to the ambassador’s entourage for the day, and they were very excited to visit the Earth they had seen from so many captured and upscaled broadcast signals. They had even dressed for the part based on their favorite dramas of the period. Their planet is a about one hundred lightyears from Earth, so I wore an old-fashioned suit to the meeting. I wasn’t expecting the 8-foot tall, baby-faced extraterrestrials to show up in late 20th Century Los Angeles gang clothing, complete with antique firearms. Only my quick intervention before security forces saw them prevented an interplanetary incident.
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We Only Find Them When They’re Dead #1 Written by Al Ewing Drawn by Simone Di MeoColored by Mariasara Miotti Lettered by AndWorld Design Published by Boom! Studios
The Skinny: A weird and beautiful space opera about small business and giant corpses.
In the distant future, mankind has scoured the galaxy clean of resources. Pushed to the edges of a depleted galaxy, they find space’s last mineable source of minerals, metals, and even meat: Dead Space Gods. But the competition between fleets of ‘autopsy ships’ is fierce, and heavily regulated. As corporate entities dominate the market and push out independent operators, Captain Georges Malik and the crew of the Vihaan II struggle to stay afloat under the watchful eye of a zealous enforcement officer. We Only Find Them When They’re Dead is a sad, beautiful, and imaginative high-concept space opera of the sort that only really works in the comics medium. Ewing’s script is tight and economical, bringing the four-person crew to life in just a few pages. But Di Meo’s art with Miotti’s coloring is the real star here. There is a breathtaking use of light and shadow in this book. The characters seem to float right off of the page, and the space scenes do an excellent job conveying both the enormity of the titanic corpses and the tiny, cramped vessels that carve them up for parts. We Only Find Them When They’re Dead #1 is the start of something massive. I can’t wait to read more, and I highly recommend you check it out. Find it at Your Local Comic Shop, or digitally from Comixology!
When the lake filled with poison, the knight looked at his sword in disgust. His sole duty was to protect his lord, his kingdom, his family. He had failed. He felt like a vestigial organ, unable to defend against this new attack. His weapon and his ideals were relics. He allowed his grief to move through him, and when it passed, his sword waited for him. It couldn’t cut the poison from the water, or raise the dead. But he could find the men responsible, and show them that slow poison is no match for a quick and determined blade.
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The bluffs overlooked the vast lake, carved over thousands of years of glacial erosion. He’d visited them often as a child and he wanted to climb them again while he still had the strength. As he looked out at the horizon and felt the wind on his face, he couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed about how much smaller they’d become. He’d always known they would fall to wind and wave, but seeing them diminished still hurt him. The dunes were towering formations in his youth. Seven-hundred years seemed too short a time for them to change so much.
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The last circus touches down on the lunar surface in a cacophony of zoological discomfort. The caged animals hate microgravity, but the return to stable gravity, even the moon’s reduced pull, is even worse for them. Once we’re green, I clean out the cages and get them ready for transport into Armstrong City. I’m brushing down one of the lions when I see a line of scar tissue under his mane. I ping the owner. “Boss, Leon’s got cell degradation. You’d better call the cloners.” I pet the lion and stare up through the dome at the lifeless, ruined Earth.
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The villagers called her “The Widow.” She could be seen along the bluffs, or sometimes, on dark and desolate nights, a ship would spot her on the beach, with her lantern held high and her tattered black dress rippling against the wind. There was some debate over who the ghost had been in life, and several likely candidates were proposed from the many widows who waited for sailors who never returned over the years. All were deemed unlikely. The apparition continued to appear, watching the ships come and go. Someday her package would arrive, and then she would be free.
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The prototype superweapon was nearly completed. The Space Forces needed something big to strike against the Earth Armada. The lead designer was nervous as he led a team of dignitaries through the assembly floor. Finally they came to the machine. It stood on two massive legs, a giant robot over a hundred meters tall. It was painted fire-engine red, and it bristled with gun placements and spikes. Some rocket launchers were welded on for good measure. The others stared up at it for a moment, then burst into peals of laughter. He knew he shouldn’t have made his 12-year-old co-designer.
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Super Mario Bros. 35 Published by Nintendo Played on Nintendo Switch
The Skinny: A neat idea, but I hope you like level 1 – 1.
Following on the success of Tetris 99, Super Mario Bros. 35 is a Battle Royale game that pits players against 34 others in a contest to survive the longest on a single life in the original Super Mario Bros. Much like Tetris players simply don’t play simultaneously, but can target other players and send them ‘junk,’ but instead of random lines of blocks, players send defeated enemies into that paths of their rivals. Players start by voting on a starting level, and can unlock new levels to choose as they progress through the game. But even though there is a vote, every time I’ve played I have started on 1-1. Players get 35 seconds on the timer, and defeating enemies adds more time up to the full 400 seconds in addition to sending them to other players’ screens. Once you finish a level, the game starts you on a new one chosen at random. This isn’t a bad system, but the result is that I have played level 1-1 and 1-2 approximately a hundred times by now, and it’s getting a bit repetitive. The real magic comes in late in the game, as more and more enemies get traded back and forth between players. 1-1 is old hat, but it is a fun thrill to come out of a warp pipe thinking you’re in a safe place and discover the screen covered in bloopers. Super Mario Bros. 35 is definitely a new way of looking at a classic, and it encourages tactical thinking rather than just playing to survive or get a high score. It’s available for free from the Nintendo eShop until March, which feels about right to me. It’s a novelty, but worth a few hours of your time to see the game that launched a genre in a new light.
The haunted castle loomed in the fog like a malevolent dragon, its empty windows seeming to watch the ghost hunters’ approach with disdain. They parked the van in the front courtyard and started lugging in the detection equipment. “The British government is only giving us the night, so everybody stay alert,” Devon said, hoisting a EMF reader and nearly tripping over a sign for the gift shop. As the night wore on, they combed through the drafty halls, finding nothing. The ghosts huddled in distant rooms, waiting for them to leave, and complaining to one another about ‘the boorish colonials.’
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Hugh J. O'Donnell 