The Beyonder's favorite blog is back!

Trump Announces Normalization Deal Between Israel, Sudan; CNN: A “Significant Foreign-Policy Accomplishment”

Well, there's another impressive accomplishment.  Funny how last night was the "Foreign Policy" debate and apparently there was no discussion whatsoever of foreign policies.  You'd think Biden could be asked if he's going to get Muslim nations to not recognize Israel's existence as they'd been doing for decades - and it was an Arab League meeting in Sudan in 1967 that officially declared this - but that would be too Presidential for him.

This is not going to be a fun two weeks.  As I've said, I totally expect the next civil war to be out in the open after that, I just hope it's while Trump is President.

Otherwise I work on the "history project" and argue with Amazon over printing my latest book.  It has the same format as every previous book of mine they've printed and all the books printed by CreateSpace but suddenly they can't understand basic things.  I put "150" at the upper right corner of every front page so I can number which copy of the 150 books I print this is and they somehow have the insane idea that it messes up the page numbers.  They waited until my 17th book to even have this complaint.  They could have said something in April 2020 about my previous book or in May 2019 about the one before that or the four in 2018 or the four in 2017.

I haven't been happy for a while about some personal issues but this is the one that's really bothering me at present.  We're all having a miserable 2020, this is part of mine.

I have been trying to continue with Secret Wars 2 but I think I'm going to give up.  Partially the book has all the crossovers so it's just big and heavy, not something I like laying on top of me before I go to bed and partially the lettering is just miserable to read.  Yeah, it's still my own reading problems, but horrible dialogue and captions aren't helped by such tiny letters that cram up panel after panel.

So really I only made it through the first issue and flipped through some of the crossovers.  It was still ridiculous, but now the characters are on Earth and around people.  The Beyonder is infinitely powered but he has no knowledge of anything and to compensate, he goes to Earth because of superheroes.  It's basically as mindlessly childish as the previous series but now it's trying to explain all of human existence in the bargain and the guy making this happen has almost nobody who can say 'no' to him.  A few executives at Revlon, that's about it.

The rumor is that this first issue was a parody of Steve Gerber but I'm not so sure.  His lawsuit against Marvel for Howard the Duck had ended two years earlier and he'd left comics to work on tv cartoons by then.  The character "Stewart Gadwell" does vaguely look like him but it just seems off and not only to avoid getting sued again.  He specifically refers to wining a Shazam Award which Gerber had never done (yes, I looked it up just to be sure) and he couldn't have been the only comics writer doing stuff for Hollywood at the time.  I dunno, maybe it was him.  Apparently the character was, I dunno.

I haven't put the book away, it's possible I'll try to read further, but who knows?  I would guess that it's the high point of Jim Shooter's life and his desire to spread it to the rest of the world, as icky as that sounds.  And for some reason, John Byrne did the cover.  This was printed in 2009, years after he'd left Marvel permanently, so why the hell would they want him to do it?  If I hadn't seen his name on the credits, I would never have guessed it was him.  The cover has no originality or creativity, it's totally generic and the Beyonder appearance looks horrible.  Maybe it would look better without the computer coloring but not by much.  Obviously he had to work within Marvel's limitations but I've made similar complaints before about his cover for Secret Wars 2 #1 and at least that looked slightly better (and didn't have computer coloring!)  Whatever, it's not like it ended his career.  It didn't even end Jim Shooter's and that's actually a surprise.