u/spinosaurs70

Obviously, we can say that controlling for neutral processes, pleiotropic selection, phylogenetic inertia, and simply what the organism is at the start of the process, we can say that evolution in a loose sense selects for optima all the time.

But I mean if you compare something like antibiotic resistance, where it is to cause and even genetically similar in contrast to the famous E. Coli. experiment where aerobic citrate digestion is really hard to do twice. The first seems to be seeking optima in a far more specific sense.

What are some other cases, preferably experimental? And why does evolution act that way?

I don’t know if this is the right forum for this; it's not the kind of comic book that tends to get much attention on here. That it has been posted about a few times does not seem to have majorly altered my judgement. 

r/comicbooks has devolved "Garth Ennis is a person who exists" into a very stale and repetitive topic, so not posting on their subreddit for this.

I checked this out from the local library instead of book two because that was all the library carried, and I wanted the fastest reading of Ennis’s most liked material after my reading of The Boys left me saying the critical consensus on Reddit and in the TV fandom was basically right. 

To summarize the part of the plot that actually matters for this review, Jesse, Tulip, and Cassidy. The first is a former preacher having the spirit of Genesis, an angel-demon hybrid that allows him to order around even God; the second is his girlfriend, Cassidy is a vampire who seems to have used his immortality to be a relapsing alcoholic for the rest of his life. 

The Grail, an international conspiratorial organization that has everyone in either their pocket or under their thumb, is a Christian apocalyptic group that humorously seems to have everyone except All-father stop believing in their cause at all. 

Here are the positives because I think there is a lot, not just good but great, about the work. The first is that the pacing is exquisite; scenes go from a to b to c with excellent flow. The dialogue, for being often pretty heavy, is genuinely quite good. 

I frankly like most of the characters; Hoover and Featherstone are funny enough punching bags, Jesse Custer is a good protagonist; his blend of moral fever and soft Texan conservatism is genuinely effective. Tulip is obviously largely just a sidekick for Jesse to bounce off of, but it works fine. 

Herr Starr is totally hilarious; the notion of a stiff in the ass military guy who shoots the people who hired him and immediately starts trying to take over the organization.

Jesse Custer is a fine protagonist overall; I think his mix of strident morality and power is a compelling combination. I don’t love him, but he is solid. 

Tulip is just fine. 

Cassidy is a piece of accidental brilliance; I have no clue how Ennis could write such a good character given just how much better than the rest of the main cast. But making the main friend of the group be a vampire, who started out first as a sincere Irish republican then a sincere Irish immigrant. But then entered into a cycle of alcoholism and substance abuse in NYC is a genuinely novel take on Vampires. The story could have used him to say something directly depressing. He is a relapsing alcoholic who seemingly has never really adapted to any of this at all. Instead, the comic is rightfully vague on if Cassidy has really failed his life or not. Yes, he is an off-and-on alcoholic; yes, he burns through relationships like their firewood but he has travelled the country and experienced a large chunk of american history. 

The big highlight is Seth Dillion as a artist, his character design and “acting,” if you will is great. The aesthetic is just cartoony enough to make the dark humor work really well. While his use of overlapping panels and dead space is fantastic. I really don’t know how much is his idea versus Ennis’s but either way it works really well. 

Now onto the negatives. 

1. The humor is wildly uneven.

A huge chunk of this comic is funny but like it's funny to me in the same way that  say Eminem from the 90s is or a lot of South Park is to me like yes. It's extremely offensive for sure and it will get a laugh out of it for outrage but it's not clever. 

Contrast this with Frankie the Eunuch torturing Cassidy and it being both genuinely horrifying and genuinely funny in the notion of a man getting tortured and constantly regenerating. 

Or All-Father the pseudo-pope using the power of his command to send people against the Saint of All Killers, a lethal supernatural anti-hero who has bulldozed his way through a ton of people already. 

Or Jesse making agent Hoover literally count grains of sand. 

There is a lot of good humour but its overlaid btw dark humor that is really less dark and more Ennis trying to make something up as shocking as possible (so you know what people would complain The Boys does). 

1. The Vietnam War story is pointless.

 

Yeah, it wasn’t formally bad but man was I was asking why it exists. It in the 90s era printed run might work but living in 2026, with Vietnam largely gone in pop culture and it being about Jesse’s father not himself, dang does it seem pointless. 

1. The usage of religion is bad.

 

The Grail is largely filled with your pretty stereotypical goons and secret agents and only all father believes in the plan. 

The sacrilege is high, obviously involving the Humperdoo being an inbred line of Christ descendants, but like only All-father, the pseudo-pope of Grail, believes in it working as a way to dominance after the apocalypse. God is bad and evil and stupid but the whole comic never gets to depicting him in this volume. 

Jesse Custer being the supposed tool of Herr Starr for world domination is also clever and maybe you could read him as a biblical figure of some kind inverted. 

But the whole framework here is laughably thin, there are no references to apocalyptic Marian apparitions, the militaries of 1844, Jehovah's Witnesses or a specific formulation of premillennial theology at all. Its just Christianity has an apocalypse tradition. And well, that is all you need. 

Similarly, no major biblical human figures from what I can tell appear, nor any allusion to the bible including the Book of Revelation. 

Like, Tulip references seeing god after dying and Ennis seems to be mocking the beatific vision. 

And maybe you can read Cassidy being tortured by Frankie the Eunuch and god coming and telling him to shove off as a mockery of Daniel in the Den or Christian martyr accounts. 

I have read comics from the 70s like Swamp Thing #8 and Black metal lyrics with deeper cut references. 

Even the Genesis origin story as cool as it is, involving the mixing of angelic and demonic ancestry and the fall of an angel only works because of Dillon’s artistic efforts more so then Ennis, who seems to take the piss out of it for some reason.

It feels like the Judeo-Christian mythology you would see in basically any comic or piece of media that mentions demons or such, but with the added insult of angels and god as well.  

The biggest issue with the whole comic is I just can not imagine rereading the early Jesus DeSade parts at all, they don’t forward the main plot and they are more grotesque than genuinely saying anything else with an insane level of simple moral coding compared to even Herr Starr. 

Which is why the whole comic feels like a very odd ⅗, the beginning is garbage and the ending is a fantastic story. 

On a side note, reading a comic with extremely loose supernaturalist worldbuilding in a simulation of our own, a superpowered protagonist with a ton of moral fibre and a hydra-like entity makes me genuinely confused if Garth Ennis has anything other than aesthetic complaints about superhero comics.

Afterward it seems pretty obvious that homo massively expanded its range, reduced predation to at least modern chimpanzee levels and lower and spread the Stone Age culture globally.

But before that, given discoveries in the survival of non-Homo hominins deeper into the evolution of the homo lineage and the gigantic Pongo relative we know little about in Asia.

Do you think Homo might have been a side story if we could time travel back 2.4 million years?

Like in sheer numbers, niche dominance, or a lack of major predation (the key innovation in both pan and homo lineages).

I have a lot of complaints about the Odyssey movie, even if I think I would give it a 3/5 on Letterboxed.

But the big thing and this one did genuinely baffle me, is the sea peoples plot.

It seems Christopher Nolan thought either for storytelling purposes or his own historical views thinks the Homeric age was meant as an account of the literal bronze age civilization and the sea peoples ended it.

Now, my big issue with this is that isn't this backwards?

My general reading of modern scholarship is that Homeric stories were likely dark age in orgin with bronze age elements mixed in. Basically its unlikely there was anything like the heroic age stories before it given what appears in Linear B tablets and the political geography of the stories themselves.

There are bronze age archeological discoveries that fit Homer but they don't seem particularly deep.

Let us assume the core Orthodox Christian view here. God largely follows consistent natural laws but sometimes suspends them for revelation.

How exactly is this supposed to work?

Following induction and trust that god isn't lying, by default one should be deeply skeptical of any miracle because God constantly gives even theists constant data against it.

To think of a thought experiment, imagine you are playing Super Mario World; generally, touching piranha plants kills you. You thus plan around it and yet accidentally hit a piranha plant and there is no effect.

Now, there are multiple possibilities, but you would likely run to odd hitbox dynamics or glitches or such before you run to this was an intentional design feature.

Now, onto some possible disanalogies.

Objection 1# Revelation contains specific signal data for a specific faith, here Christianity.

I don't think this holds all that well empirically at all; maybe Jesus was resurrected by some guy called Zeus. Most of his apparent miracles seem to be limited in ways any random Japanese Kami could do them.

Even if we assume the miracles are real? So what?

It also doesn't really solve the epistemological issue at all.

2. There are a lot of miracles.

This argument is odd; the issue here is that there have to be enough miracles to be proof of the revelation but not enough to stop the world from having consistent natural laws.

Even assuming we can avoid this, so what? The cumulative probability can be very low if each miracle has a 1 in a trillion starting chance.

And a ton of miracles, like, say the tilma of Guadalupe, that in fact hinge on other previous miracles occurring. Which seems to lead to yet more skepticism that multiple apparent miracles are not in fact one account weaved together psychologically.

Side note here, I think this is the best way to reframe On Miracles by Hume.

From what I can tell its roughly, largely looking outside in given my limited reading of Delano in part and the shoot collection so far.

Great to good canonical Runs.

• Delano
• Ennis
• Si Spurrier

Mediocre to bad runs

• Peter Milligan

And then there is everything else, which seems oddly hazy. Not all bad and some even good but not worth discussing much despite have full blown omnibuses published.

For such a long running comic having the original stories that are great but very "of there time" is odd. Obviously, the much later publishing data helps compared to decades old silver age and even bronze age material but still.

There are just so many layers to this beyond a corrupted small town worshiping a Lovecraftian monster story that Swamp Thing solves; for one, there are the near-constant biblical allusions to child sacrifice and the town's name.

Going through them, Ezekiel (the name of a biblical prophet) is killed by a bear and is a prophet, a telling reversal of Elisha unleashing the she-bears onto the children; the covenant with M'Nagalah is with Abraham; a child sacrifice of Jason is ultimately avoided by Swamp Thing; M'Nagalah claims to be the genesis of the entire universe. And the ending is ultimately humanistic, the rejection of anything other than human morality with swamp thing walking away.

The next elment at the core is the economics of the town. The town did not merely lean into the occult like in some Lovecraftian fiction but made a supposed deal only after the towns economic decline, the entirety of the town is running on a dark image of itself.

The meta-fictional elements are also key, the monster is not just real but crossing dimensions with his power somehow creating Poe and Lovecraft (who was just started being re-read in the 1970s) as if his fundamental to horror itself.

The ending is mentally crushing, as the monster marly infects Jason.

All directed with fantastic art, equally of M'Nagalah himself at the climax but also creepy flashes of him in the lead-up to him. With cramped panels giving way at the climax of panels on top of a wide view of the monster. The sheer expanse of the Lovecraftian monster is shown through the panel layout. I was genuinely shocked after reading the previous stories in the collection, just how cutting this is for 1973 of all times.

Edit: Messed up Elijah with Ezekiel and some spelling and grammar.

Given the scandal involving Warren Elias, which I refuse to research as a general rule of ignoring artists' personal lives if I am not paying for the media ( I got the book from a library) I consume, I am doubtful the story has the same cachet.

But despite good buildup and a fakeout involving John Constantine being responsible, the whole thing ends with it being revealed that children in America are just committing murder-suicide.

What a pretty boring letdown.

Now onto the rest of the collection.

Ashes and Honey is a solid, if not novel, anti-war story, but the fake-out of a necromancer thinking he is doing the right moral thing and having his grandfather sacrifice himself for his magician son to live is telling. The notion of honey as a source of magic and the physical dirt of the homeland (Bosnia) in this case is also interesting. I wish to read more stories focusing on this kind of gray magic with an almost magical-realist aesthetic.

The third part of the book is a bunch of short stories, most of which have a familiar problem, solved within a few pages set up including dealing with a crazy person and a demon in stories that, while competent, are pretty paint-by-numbers. Crazy guy tries to commit child sacrifice; a demon is there, turns out the ash angels are in fact good, etc. All competent, all boring. With only really a Christmas theming tying them together.

Jamie Delano's poker story is the best one of the lot about a morally degenerate but winning gambler and a man needing money to save his daughter from a pimp. The whole story is ambivalent on whether John manipulates poker odds deliberately through magic-induced luck or the spirit of Christmas might be genuinely real.

Newcastle Calling in the middle is the one story that really irks me. The stuff on the irony of that Mucous Membrane (John's old band) might have sucked, but somehow convinced music nerds obsessed with obscurity as worth a doc is deeply funny.

But beyond this quite careful and cool meta-media and history commentary is the main A story, and it gets banal fast. Basically, John comes in, solves everything in spite of a total mess across northeast england and nearly all the Doc crew dying. And John comes off as cool, calm, and collected.

Despite dealing with a demon that was the first cause of Newcastle, which is like Batman responding to Joe Chill as if it's a regular citizen's arrest.

Also, the parade of horribles outside the Newcastle site itself was clearly pointless and was done to pad the issue; it felt like.

It's a clear case of a 3/5 story because of one great half and one bad half vs two okay ones.

Which is likely how I would rate the collection overall: interesting but probably not worth reading from start to finish like I did.

Obviously, natural evil presents its own issues for theodicies compared to human evil.

Free will does not work unless you want to invoke demons, and the issue of arbitrariness seems particularly bright.

But there is something far more particular, worth commenting on.

Natural evil being meaningless is psychologically comforting.

With Human evil, the narrative of the final judgment of God's reconciliation with man is all competing stories; this is an argument against god. Human evil exists under theism and naturalism, but only in the first is it even possible for there to be a final judgment of the wicked and the just. A morally just order may emerge in the long run in response to human wickedness, like Jack the Ripper getting away with multiple murders.

With natural evil, on the other hand, there can be no final judgment nor any liberation from the suffering itself in an existential sense. Someone just had bad luck and got struck by lightning or killed by a large rock of hail or crushed by a building in an earthquake in 14th-century Japan or crushed by a landslide. Horrific, yes, but also with no ill intention but bad luck.

There is no justice, yes, but there is also no wickedness.

Now imagine that God allows every lightning strike, every boulder, every earthquake, all at best for the greater good. God comes off as a utilitarian serial killer; the acts of suffering now are imbued with meaning and are thus identical to those of Jeffrey Dahmer or Ed Kemper.

In fact a cognitively informed entity is currently committing horrific acts of torture via cancer and torn ACLs right now.

I don't know how one can claim that is somehow better.

In fact its truly liberating to realize that suffering can mean zilch and be purely that of bad luck.

The British comic book industry is funny because while there are quite a few writers and artists who are British who work in American comics and some big-name characters, the size of what you might call, for lack of a better term, a big broad IP is pretty tiny over there, basically reduced to Judge Dredd and not much else.

Again, there is a huge number of British creators, but that is a very different question from a British system.

Either way, after reading some Judge Dredd and John Constantine, I am curious which ones are what you think are the most British comic book characters, but the best and most telling version of what makes the character distinctly from the Island of Britian (ignore that Judge Dredd is based in the US for this).

This seems underdiscussed; the alien lord Xenu is clearly him penning sci-fi and such.

But add on the thetans and reincarnation, and you could see a bizarre Hinduism and Buddhist layer too.

You could also claim UFO cults inspired LRH, and they likely had some effect, but his theology seems more systematic than theirs.

And the shift from LRH's more optimistic take on former lives to what he later came up with is interesting too.

And that is not getting into just how late it appears compared to the founding of Scientology.

I can not get Comus-First Utterance making dark music with no distortion, no constant harsh vocals, or ugly synths, and delightfully folk music in large parts

Even if you threw out the lyrics, it would still sound dark, though too, which is impressive.

Similarly, Tonite - LCD Soundsystem seems to be one of the darkest dance-punk tracks I have heard, going from New Order melancholy of the new wave era to fully oppressive.

Arguments like the Kalam and Fine-tuning argument, are largely agreed upon by theistists even to only result in some properties we classically assign to god. 

For instance, all powerful is easy to derive because an entity that started the universe or designed its constants. 

You can also derive all knowing from the fine-tuning argument by the need for god to know what those constants do. 

Even if we just have all-powerful, we can easily conclude, for instance, that power and speed have some relationship to knowledge; a god that could traverse the universe would know more about it. Fiber optic cables allow both fast data transfer and more knowledge.

The issue breaks down fast when trying to derive omnibenevolence, Galacticus, Cthulhu, and Poseidon are all pretty terrifying monsters in huge chunks of writing about them. Ranging from universe-threatening risks to the banal torture Poseidon inflicts upon Odysseus as revenge. 

Even looking at humans its not clear that knowledge or power helps us in any meaningful way. Think of the atomic bomb or the horrors of Unit 731 done by medical researchers. 

It does not seem to me that any sort of analogical argument can do work and the history of myth and fantasy goes the other direction. 

Maybe you could claim the more knowledge at the level of omniscience suddenly has different effects because god could have all the data and then figure out what is the correct moral precepts. 

But if that is the case you are saying stuff outside god exists, which is undermining perfect being theism on a whole other level. 

Add on the evidential problem of evil and the probability of an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful god seems to approach zero. 

Very funny but very jazzy soundtrack song.

1. Velvet Underground

2. Comus

3. Glenn Branca (sorta)

Everything else I have heard that is before its time obviously has new or novel features for its time, but doesn't really leap beyond what I have previously heard from there era.

Excluding the times Jazz and Kendrick won it, it’s nearly always been a classical music award.

I’m just curious what are people’s thoughts on it?