#Black Flame

[nitpickrider]

That is...an excellent point, yes. Only a Kandorian would need a tooth filled because they don't have superpowers 99% of the time. Action Comics 304

[manachi34]

[diabolicphallus666]

In the distillation of the human spirit through the vile mechanisms of self transformation, instilled by the Dark Spirit of SATAN, do we truly find ourselves.

Our black flame entwined with the shadow self, as thus the subconscious and conscious minds ever following suit within the paradigm of the sinister transformation through Darkness, of knowing Flesh, and experiencing Death.

This individual path, led by all whom embrace the essence of SATAN, varies by how deep one is willing to unravel and become reborn.

[virtuouswhitehatorganization]

Why It Wasn't Until The Rehab Center Scheme That Don Porccini Was Exterminated By Black Hat?

We know from the fake and real story of Don Porccini watching over Heed it didn't get him Black Hat's wrath. It probably was because he wasn't going to think about being a hero here and just was doing dirty work for a hero or a hero aligned businessman. It would just simple like that. This wouldn't get him eliminated by Black Hat.

I think this was the turning point for the reason why Black Hat now wanted him dead because he was helping a heroine by going against and framing his fellow villains (even if they are rookies). Again it seems outright helping a hero doesn't get you condemned by actively going against the organization to become a hero is another.

And again this pig thought he could easily leave the life of villainy after being aligned with Black Hat who is notoriously emphasizes the consequences for trying to think of leaving evil behind. Even if he was a fake hero, that still would get in trouble because he wants to any type of hero is an insult to Black Hat.

As emphasized in the manual, if Black Hat suspects someone is thinking of leaving the hero life he will hunt them down and eliminate them. And again Don Porccini feared for his life because again he knew the dire consequences of what would happened but took it anyway because he saw the perks of being a heroes and thought it outweighed invoking Black Hat's anger.

Ultimately he played his hand too much and ended up invoking Black Hat's wrath by betraying his contract and paying with his life with not even PEACE willing to honor their deal since they had no reason to.

[angel-of-cruelty]

Making progress on the new painting

[ofowlsdinosaursanddragons]

Wanted to doodle some of the MH:wild’s monsters that I loved because this game is gonna peak when it drops.

[l-o-r-d-4]

Cuties

[noctisarcanae]

In the name of Satan, Lucifer and the unholy black flame ⛧

[dalesramblingsblog]

A Brief Look at Judge Dredd Novels, Part XVI: Swine Fever by Andrew Cartmel

This is, for our purposes, a book which is immediately fascinating just on the basis of author alone. There's been plenty of cross-pollination between Doctor Who and Judge Dredd in the past, with the likes of Dave Stone, David Bishop and Stephen Marley each allowing us to contemplate points of overlap between the respective franchises' novelistic offerings through the 1990s and early 2000s.

Still, this is a big one. Andrew Cartmel, script editor of the original iteration of Doctor Who in its final three seasons, and writer of the sprawling War trilogy across four years of the Virgin New Adventures, gets the chance to pen a full-length novel in the world of Judge Dredd.

As if to further hammer home the neat parallels at play here, Swine Fever is even the first such novel we've looked at to post-date the smash success of the 2005 revival; as far as I can tell from the publication date on the 2000 AD website, the book saw print roughly in the week between the airing of Father's Day and The Empty Child. The Eighth Doctor Adventures would wrap up with The Gallifrey Chronicles a mere two weeks later, while Cartmel himself would usher in the end of the Past Doctor Adventures with Atom Bomb Blues in December 2005, just in time for the arrival of David Tennant.

It would be nice to say, in light of all this, that the world of 2000 AD acquits itself just as well opposite two of the most acclaimed episodes of Doctor Who's first revival season, but... well, unfortunately Swine Fever is just a little too muddled and aimless for its own good.

That's not to say that there aren't good ideas here, because there are. They can, admittedly, kind of be boiled down to a slightly more farcical updating of themes of environmentalism and animal rights that Cartmel was playing with in books like Warhead and Warlock well over a decade ago at this point, with a mild update to focus on the issue of factory farming rather than animal experimentation.

This gets at the biggest issue with Swine Fever, though, which is that Cartmel's commentary never seems especially clear on what it's taking aim at, outside of the broadest possible statements like "factory farming is an inhumane, horrible way to treat animals." Which is definitely true, but as a central thematic statement it's not quite enough to hang a whole novel on.

Even here we should perhaps qualify things a tad. It's debatable, after all, whether Warlock really had a significantly more in-depth take on matters of animal experimentation, just as it's debatable whether a science fiction novel always needs to be some groundbreaking political treatise. But what Warlock did have was a sense of scarily focused, powerful anger that never left you in doubt as to what Cartmel was trying to say, even if it could simplistically be reduced to "Don't treat animals badly"; where Warlock gave Chick multiple point-of-view sequences that culminated in a bleak, harrowing euthanasia scene, Swine Fever treats audiences to an uncomfortably long depiction of pig sex built around a bad pun about "porking." And I mean, you know I love me some bad puns, and history repeats first as tragedy and then as comedy and all that, but all the same... pig sex?

The social consequences of Mega-City One's burgeoning obsession with pork are perhaps the prime example of this confusion in action. At times, it seems as if Cartmel is angling to portray the rivalry between fans of competing pork restaurant chains as akin to football hooliganism, while the Judges' overzealous and poorly-handled attempts at crowd control seems to evoke the Hillsborough disaster, hardly the most contemporary of references for a novel published in 2005 (though, of course, it fits perfectly with Cartmel's general status as a writer whose sensibilities were honed in the late Thatcher years).

Equally, however, Swine Fever seems to want to gesture at a "War on Pork" analogous not just to the War on Drugs - so, again, Warlock's shadow is hard to escape here - but to the War on Terror. The climax sees a group of mutant, intelligent pigs hijacking a shuttlecraft and seeking to collide it with a large, prominent structure in the midst of a bustling metropolitan area, as straightforward an evocation of 9/11 as is possible.

There is perhaps something barbed in this, especially in the closing revelation that the Council of Five's response to the crisis is to legalise the indiscriminate slaughter of the pigs, a clearly disproportionate reaction that will probably achieve very little besides widespread, pointless carnage. Porkditz's ultimate fate is probably the closest the book comes to recapturing that sense of anguish at Chick's death, but as it's quite literally in the last scene, it's very much a case of "too little, too late."

Even in the portrayal of the fast food craze spurred on by the legalisation of pork, Cartmel really doesn't have much to say beyond depicting the consumers of Mega-City as dumb, stupid fat oafs willing to ingest sub-par food without a care for its negative consequences for their health. There's little thought to the ways in which fast food companies fill the vacuums left by food deserts and poverty, even though it's a fundamental pillar of Judge Dredd continuity that Mega-City One is rife with unemployment.

Instead, witness the interminable "comedy" scenes of the flatulent, bumbling Judge Carver - and frankly by the end of the novel one can't help but wonder how he and Darrid haven't been kicked out of the Justice Department altogether for their stellar levels of incompetence, let alone why Dredd keeps bringing them along on crucial missions; frankly I also just found myself wishing the pigs would succeed in blowing up the Aquatomics complex, if only to get rid of the buffoons - and try your best not to think about how this is probably about the level of commentary on fast food we could expect from a book published just one year after the release of Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me.

Swine Fever ultimately feels like a missed opportunity all around. Instead of providing a compelling point of overlap between the worlds of Doctor Who and Judge Dredd at the precise point at which the former was beginning to claw its way back into the public's good graces, it instead only serves to make one long for Cartmel's past glories.

When you get right to the heart of the matter, there just isn't that much meat on the bones.

The Ranking So Far:

Dreddlocked

Deathmasques

Black Atlantic

Wetworks

The Final Cut

Kingdom of the Blind

Bad Moon Rising

Silencer

Eclipse

The Medusa Seed

Dread Dominion

Dredd vs Death

Cursed Earth Asylum

The Hundredfold Problem

Swine Fever

The Savage Amusement

[nitpickrider]

So...the fact that we're seeing this through Linda's telescopic vision forces me to assume the multicolored and clearly labeled time barrier is a diagetic part of the universe. Action Comics 304

[helenadarlingtattoo]

Helena darling

Darling tattoos

Halifax Nova Scotia

[thereadingchallengechallenge]

so Gretchen Felker-Martin's next book sounds like it's gonna go hard as fuck 👀

Ellen, a deeply closeted lesbian spends all her time in solitude, restoring films at a failing archive in New York City. When a group of German academics present her with a print of an infamous exploitation film believed to have been destroyed during the Holocaust, Ellen finds herself forced to confront her own repressed sexuality. And the more she works on the restoration, the more obsessed she becomes over its depictions of occult practices and queer debauchery. She’s soon convinced that the acts portrayed in the film are not fiction, but reality. And they’re happening to her…

[virtuouswhitehatorganization]

Miss Heed And Dark Phantom Are More Similar Than I Think

On the surface, it would be crazy to think they would have anything in common until you examine them up close.

For one thing they both come from wealth and have nepo baby written all over them, which influences how they are as people. Due to their backgrounds they tend to be very spoiled and immature for their age. It's evident their privileged lifestyles has coddled them from real hardship. However, I do think one major difference is that Miss Heed is a case of spoiled brat who pretends to be nice while Dark Phantom is a case of spoiled sweet despite being a villain.

Despite in the present being a popular heroine under scrutiny, she like Dark Phantom was disdained among her peers. For Dark Phantom, it's usually due to him screwing things up and her it was because she was really obnoxious. As a result, both of them were/are considered outcasts among villains. This outcast status caused her to decide to switch sides to become more popular and get the attention she craved while Dark Phantom sticks to the villain side due to legacy and probably the thought never crossed his mind.

Also another thing I noticed between the two is the fact that both are very reliant on others to fight their own battles and barely have any fighting skills. This is especially true for Miss Heed who often tries to pretend on social media she is a physical fighter but in reality she uses her cronies to do the heavy lifting for her.

Dark Phantom and her also seems to overcompensate for their lack of natural talent like with Dark Phantom bragging about his legacy despite being an abysmal villain on his own while she outright lies and steals credit from others while passing it off as her work. Unlike Dark Phantom who doesn't hide his incompetence, she does everything she can to make her appear to be this mary sue type of villain who can win any battle and villain hearts while also being a beloved person part of the hero community.

What makes them differ is again how well they also treat their close friends. Despite being a proclaimed heroine, she in the past stole from her supposed friend Flug to become help her as a heroine. This is in contrast with Dark Phantom who didn't think much helping a friend out when she was a fugitive and on the run from that aforementioned Heed. Because as much as a villain he tries to live up to, he does have more moral traits than Heed does who uses the cover of a heroine to act shitty and have her actions be misconstrued as noble.

Ultimately I think both Dark Phantom and Miss Heed are kind of sort of two sides of the same coin. Dark Phantom is what would happen if that nepo baby still tried the villain path despite his lack of talent while Miss Heed is an example of forgoing the path to become a fake heroine while still having villainous traits. It does make them unintentional foils for each other and how in an AU both could have switched roles.

[hompunkulus]

I wrote this for my other tumblr. This is the complete and beautified version.

A call to Babalon, Azazel, and Ellis to dance with the forces of hedonism and determination, of desolation and sorcery.

[r-666]

Photo Composite By MuscleSavage

[tarnishedinquirer]

Stormveil Larder

In one corner of the courtyard was a staircase leading into a basement. I followed it down, and found the castle's main larder. It was close enough to the kitchen, but it was still in an awkward place. Yet another casualty of the castle's expansion and the difficulty of building into such a steep hill.

Unsurprisingly, most of the food was spoiled. Equally unsurprising but still caught me flat-footed, the room was filled with giant rats. I had just taken on an entire courtyard full of soldiers and their pet ogre with ease, but these vermin brought me to the brink of death. Always stay humble.

For some reason, someone had locked half the larder with an imp statue. Why would anyone do that? There must be something valuable behind the gate.

This part seemed to be a wine cellar, only made slightly awkward by the fact it was well above ground on the other side. Here, there were two chests, and when I opened them, I didn't know what to make of what I found. A Godskin Prayer Book and a Godslayer's Seal

Sacred seal of the Godskin Apostles, inlaid with obsidian. Said to represent the manipulation of black flame, this catalyst enhances godslayer incantations.

Prayerbook bound in supple skin. Incantations of the god-slaying black flame are written within.

What in the hell. I recoiled from the prayerbook, realizing what it's bound in. Is this the actual skin of gods? If so, it's indistinguishable from human skin, and I wasn't taking my chances. I stored them both away and planned to keep them there for a while.

Who are the Godskin Apostles?

Is Godfrey aligned with them?

Were these among the treasures he stole from the capital?

What is the Black Flame? Is it different from Ghostflame?