I know you'll all be eager to hear what's been happening in The Amazing Spider-Man, but I'm actually going to give that a miss this time, because it's kind of in the middle of everything right now and I'll be able to cover it better in a week or two. Instead I'm going to start with Prince Valiant, who recently crashed his ship (with his family on board) onto an island where they all got attacked.
While Val climbed further inland, lured by the call of a siren, Aleta and Karen were attacked by a serpent. Fortunately Aleta had Val's singing sword and has managed to hold the beast at by thus far. Meanwhile, Val managed to offend the siren (who seems to have him confused for someone else) and she set a cyclops, Polyphemus, on him. Val head-butted the cyclops and took his club, but the the cyclops also has a large knife.
The giant swings and Val ducks, hitting him in the knee with the club. Polyphemus steps back, dangerously close to the cliff edge, while in the sea below the serpent rears up to strike at Aleta.
Seizing the opportunity, Val tackles Polyphemus and the two of them fly out into the air...
Seriously, read Prince Valiant, it's awesome.
The Phantom's current Sunday storyline has been pretty great recently, too. The weekday strips have been just incredibly dull, but an entirely separate story runs in the Sunday strips (for the benefit of newspapers that decide to carry the strip either only on weekdays or only on Sundays), and the current plot is a flashback about Juliet Adams Walker, wife of the fifth Phantom and also known as Captain Amazon.
I'd actually like to hear more about Captain Amazon's adventures from before she married the Phantom, but what we are getting is pretty good. See, the Phantom went after a bunch of slave-trading pirates who managed to overpower him and held him prisoner on their ship. Not knowing what had happened to him, Juliet decided to go after him.
She located a girl the pirates had taken prisoner and snuck into the place they were holding her, traded clothes with her and took her place to be taken aboard the ship.
"Juliet Adams Walker boarded that evil ship to learn the fate of her missing husband!" narrates the Phantom.
The year 1652...
"Heh heh!" leers a pirate.
"Filthy vermin." thinks Juliet as she's led past. "Escape now if you can!"
A single pirate brings her down below decks to the room where the prisoners are kept.
"These pirates think I'm that frightened girl they captured!" thinks Juliet, and as the pirate unlocks the door she lands a solid punch to his head, leaving him unconscious.
"Oh, Kit, where are you?!" she thinks, searching the ship.
"Pirates thought their captive must have swam to freedom after felling her guard!" narrates the Phantom.
Meanwhile, below decks...
Juliet finds Kit, beaten, bloody and chained, but still alive...
At the other end of the Spectrum is Mark Trail. People still get punched but instead of it being by badass crime fighters and costumed vigilantes it's by a mentally challenged nature magazine writer.
Mark's heard about a couple, Jessica and Marlin, who live on a private island, and one of them is a taxidermist who mostly works on fish, so he decided to write an article about them. It's incredibly obvious that they are up to no good, but Mark's just bumbling around in his innocent naivety, as he does.
Mark has just spotted Marlin bringing some people with hunting gear back to the island on his boat and something about it doesn't sit right with him.
"Those guys could be clients of his..." says Mark loudly to no one, while standing in the shadows a few meters from Marlin and his clients. "But why bring hunting gear here?"
Losing interest almost immediately, Mark returns to camp.
"I think I have enough material about Jessica for my story ..." he says, again to absolutely no one. "I'll get a few more pictures tomorrow! Then I'll get back to Rusty and Doc at the hotel!"
In the distance, a deer watches.
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