Monthly Archives: September 2025

September 30, 2025 · 12:24 pm

Republicans insist Zohran Mamdani becoming NYC mayor would be good news for Republicans

For instance, the Necrotic Toddler of the United States, who claims Mamdani’s proposals will fail miserably — the Toddler will cut off all federal funds to NYC to ensure it! Plus it’s good for Republicans.

The “centrist” Democrats are saying the same thing: Mamdani’s policies are bad because Democrats should focus on economic concerns. Which he is, but he’s doing it wrong! Except he isn’t: “He has found a framing that has resonance far beyond New York City: The cost of living is killing ordinary people.”

For too many Democrats, it seems that’s one step away from Mao’s cultural revolution in the 1960s. Worse, Mamdani might redefine what it means to be a Democrat, which would hurt the party with moderates — a New York radical will be a party killer in other areas of the country!

As one Democrat points out in one of those articles, he’s not running in those areas, and nobody is being forced to run on the same policies. Sure, Republicans will try to hang him around every Dem neck but if a candidate were fiscal conservative, watch-the-budget type, Republicans would still call them a tax-and-spend liberal, so what’s the diff? And I don’t recall the same worries about conservative Sen. Joe Manchin hurting the party, not even when he tanked lots of legislation.

And I don’t think grocery stores in food deserts, free childcare and free mass transit would, in fact, be unpopular elsewhere. Mamdani may not be able to accomplish his goals but at least he has good targets. Yet we still have Sen. Charles Schumer withholding an endorsement.

Part of this is undoubtedly that he’s a Muslim and sympathetic to the Palestinians hit with Israel’s genocidal attacks. Which may be why the Jewish Anti-Defamation League falsely claims Mamdani has made no attempt at outreach to the Jewish community. Republicans, of course, are eager to hit Mamdani with every classic anti-Muslim smear.

As for Mamdani’s plans being insane budget busters — well, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has declared open-ended support to propping up Argentina’s economy. The Argentinian president has Republican-style right-wing economic policies that have tanked the country’s finances, so naturally we’ll spend billions to save his butt. Plus it helps Bessent’s friend Rob Citrone, who’s invested heavily in Argentina. What they’re going to spend on Argentina, what they’ve already committed to spending on ICE — Mamdani’s plans ain’t nothing by comparison. It’s not about the national wallet but the national will.

I was going to end there but we have this interesting tidbit from the WaPo’s current op-ed editor explaining they’re not going to be biased: they’ll credit Republicans for valid criticism of Democrats and they’ll credit Democrats for criticism of Mamdani. So long as everyone criticizes Dems, it’s all good.

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September 30, 2025 · 5:13 am

Covers for a Tuesday

One by the great Bob McGinnis

Next, one by Arnold Kohn

A cool uncredited cover

And finally one by Frank R. Paul.

All rights to images remain with current holders.

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September 29, 2025 · 5:15 am

You’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything

(Title is lyrics from “You’ve Got to Stand For Something” by Aaron Tippin, though I believe the phrase goes back further than the song).

As I’ve written about previously, my rule of thumb is that 10 percent of people are heroes, 10 percent are villains and 80 percent can go either way, depending on circumstances: what does their boss want? What will be profitable? How do their buddies feel? What are the chances of success? (For a more detailed analysis, click here). Like some of the potential Nazis in Dorothy Thompson’s Who Goes Nazi? essay, they don’t stand for anything. They don’t have enough of a personal code or principles to resist blowing with the wind, whichever way it’s blowing.

Being afraid of what President Toddler, ICE or other forces can do is reasonable. But as Adam Serwer says, major corporations aren’t scared, they’re chickenshit: “fear is part of human existence. Bravery is the overcoming of fear, not its absence. Acts of cowardice can be provoked by genuine danger—think of a deserting soldier fleeing the peril of the battlefield. When you’re chickenshit, you capitulate to avoid the mere possibility of discomfort, let alone something resembling real risk. Disney is one of the largest companies in the world, with a devoted following and a market cap bigger than many countries’ stock markets. It did not have to cave.”

Or consider the Department of Justice. The Felon wants his enemies arrested because people opposing him hurts his snowflake fee-fees sooo much. John Bolton is on the list; some of the DOJ’s political leadership suggest doing it “to placate the president.” If Bolton hasn’t done anything, he shouldn’t be charged; the leaders who want to do it to please their boss do not deserve they’re position. They’re 80 percenters all the way. (Bolton has since been charged by a grand jury). Ironically some of the people the Felon hates are no better: former FBI Director James Comey is no Trumper but his warnings about Clinton’s emails helped the Felon win in 2016 — part of the “feckless elite response” that didn’t think the outcome would be a big deal.

Anti-vax Governor Ron DeSantis refuses to say whether his kids are vaccinated. I assume that means despite his caving to anti-vaxxers, they are. And coming up with bullshit rationales such as fewer mandates means more vaccinations. I’m proud some blue state governors are standing up and doing the right thing.

School administrators faced with Republican whines they’re not doing enough to deify Charlie Kirk sometimes fire people for offenses that don’t deserve it. They’re pre-emptively complying, which makes it much easier for the other side. And it won’t save them: ABC paid $16 million to the Felon to settle a dubious lawsuit, then he came back and pushed them to fire Jimmy Kimmel — and contrary to Vice President JD Vance, it was a threat. While $16 million is chump change to Disney, ABC’s corporate owner, it was wasted chump change (on the plus side the wind blew so intensely against Disney’s decision, they tacked and changed course).

And let’s not forget the sensible centrists who don’t necessarily hate LGBTQ or women or POC the way Republicans do, but they’re happy to throw them under the bus because having principles is not a winning tactic.

The 80 percent (I admit the percentage is a guess — I’d like to think it’s a lot lower) aren’t all the same. There are people who have principles but fold under pressure. There are people like JD Vance, whom I think would go Nazi, Communist or go anything that would advance his career. As someone put it online, he’s made a conscious decision to sell out and to whom at every step of the way. Then there are those who don’t stand for anything because they don’t believe in anything, whose beliefs are a mix of irony and nihilism like the recent ICE shooter, whose attitudes at the link are described as “half-irony — where you’re half-kidding, half-serious, just in case.” In other words, not even committed to irony. “He was into politics only in the 4chan sense — contrarian, provocative, boundary-pushing for laughs, not conviction.”

Those laughs included “‘rape jokes — “playful shock humor,’ the friend said.” Which shows one aspect of the problem: nihilistic, half-ironic young men (and it does seem to be young men) are likely to turn misogynist or fascist in a non-ironic way. And they’re very likely to break bad even without that: “People without an ethos — people who don’t believe that anything is true or that anything matters — are always dangerous.“

At the same link, Fred Clark quotes from The Screwtape Letters about flippancy: “In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armor-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it.”

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September 28, 2025 · 5:28 am

Green Lantern, time travel and death: graphic novels read

The new DC FINEST reprint line enabled me to replace one of my black and white Showcase Green Lantern TPBs with the all-in-color The Defeat of Green Lantern by John Broome and Gil Kane (with a couple of team-ups by others), covering GL’s series from #19 through 39.

I think this is the peak of the Silver Age run (I count the Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams stuff as Bronze Age). We have a great lineup of supervillains (Hector Hammond, Black Hand, the Shark, Evil Star and more), multiple space adventures; the Green Lantern Corps (Hal Jordan teams up with several alien Green Lanterns); and human interest stories such as “The Amazing Transformation of Horace Tolliver” in which Hal accidentally turns a milquetoast office drone into a dynamic powerhouse.

Plus the ongoing romantic triangle in which Hal keeps trying to win boss Carol Ferris’s heart while she’s just as determined to win his other identity. All of Julius Schwartz’s superheroes had steady love interests — much as Iris used to nag Barry, she loved him — except Hal.

I look forward to the next volume which will enable me to wrap up the Silver Age in living color.

As a teen, I found Warren’s black and white comics magazines — Vampirella is the best known — interesting but too pricey for me to buy them more than occasionally. One of the most intriguing was Restin Dane, AKA The Rook, a time traveler whose TARDIS looked like a chess castle, hence the name. I recently jumped at the chance to pick up THE ROOK ARCHIVES Volume I by William B. DuBay, Budd Lewis, Jim Stenstrum and Luis Bermejo. My verdict? Not classic but interesting and engaging.

By the start of the book Restin is already a wealthy tech whiz with a robot butler, Manners, and a time machine. He heads back in time to the Alamo to save one of his ancestors from dying at the hands of those bloodthirsty Mexican troops — why yes, that part is unpleasantly racist — and winds up bouncing through a couple more adventures and bringing home his gunfighter grandfather, Bishop Dane, from the later 1800s. He has enemies — a vengeful widow, Granny Gadget, and would be master of time “Gat” Hawkins —and he has mysteries, such as why there’s an ancient alien base under his laboratory.

It’s good stuff, but it suffers from sloppy plotting. Restin can only stay in the past for a limited time or he ceases to exist; in fighting Gat he winds up staying too long and dissipates, slipping into limbo. And then he simply … gets out into the far future and makes his way home from there. WTF? The end result is, I’ll probably get the second volume and see if it improves but I’m not rushing.

SHADOW LIFE by Hiromi Goto and Ann Xu tells the story of Kumiko, an elderly Japanese-Canadian whose daughters have put her in some sort of assisted living facility. Finding the ordered life there insufferable, Kumiko runs away and tries living on her own. This leads to reconnecting with her long-lost love but Death has Kumio marked and isn’t taking no for an answer. I like the story but the art didn’t connect with me.

All rights to images remain with current holders. Green Lantern art by Gil Kane, Eerie cover by Enirch Torres

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September 27, 2025 · 5:32 am

Sick chick flicks are a kick!

For our date last weekend, TYG and I went to the Sick Chick Flicks specfic film festival in Chapel Hill. I’d written about it for The Local Reporter (at the link) and figured it would be fun to catch. Unfortunately we couldn’t stay for more than about 2.5 hours because we had to get back to the dogs. It was still fun while it lasted.

Like other film festivals I’ve been to, most of the menu was shorts. In Tasty Tongue (2024) a pretty Asian woman feeds a dour Chinese American slacker a delicious meal, please don’t ask where she got it from, okay? Of course, he really should have asked … and he should definitely have wondered why she always hides her face behind her fan. “I’m ugly, fat and disgusting.”

The Forest of Dreams (2024) was more upbeat and more fantasy than horror: A young woman on the outs with her Mom ignores the parental warning about the eerie eponymous woods where she eats fairy food and dances with a tree. Charming.

Shrieek (2024) didn’t work so well for me. Despite her husband’s outrage, an abused wife goes out in search of The Thing In the Woods. What follows was too murky and confusing (storywise, not in the camera work) to figure out.

I spotted one twist in the black-humored One Lonely Heart (2025) wherein a plumber makes an evening call on a woman who’s lost her engagement ring down the sink. As they get to chatting it turns out he’s lot someone too, she invites him to dinner … I won’t say more but this was much fun.

All the films, and the feature below are way better quality than we expected. I’m not sure if that’s because the average level of professionalism in indie films is higher than it used to be, the tech available is better, festival selections are above average or a combination of those factors.


The feature film BABY FEVER (2025) stars Allisha Pelletier as Kate, an expectant mother who’s nervous about her and her spouse moving to a small community where they don’t know anyone and have no support system. She’s happy when the local mom’s group admits here — they’re pretty exclusive — even though they don’t seem awfully, awfully perky. And isn’t it a little odd they never have children at these events?

This primed me to expect some variation of Stepford Wives. Instead we’re off on a weird ride where reality itself seems to be crumbling around Kate. Cryptic conversations. Uncertain flashbacks. Horrifying events that may or may not have happened. Is her husband lying to her and gaslighting her? Or did she imagine the horror of what he did? I’m honestly not sure. In the end the lack of clarity or answers proved frustrating but the film was, even so, well-made and watchable. “My husband has spent his whole career in nephrology.”

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September 26, 2025 · 4:09 pm

The camel’s hump is an ugly lump (or) hammered by hump day!

As I’ve observed many times before, average weeks exist because some weeks are much better, some worse. As far as writing went, this was “worse.”

First, to tackle the stuff you’re really curious about, Plushie is adapting better than we hoped to his current disabled status. The new harness we bought lets him enjoy his short walks, and we can lift him out of the car when we visit the vet relatively easily. Okay, TYG lifts him; while my bursitis is much improved, 20lbs of floof dog is not something I should be hauling around whereas her workouts have given her some muscle.

He barks with surprising vigor at times but he’ll calm down once I sit in the cage with him (the advantages of a laptop and lap desk!). Then he drifts off into sleep and I go back to the couch.

Plush Dudley aside, I felt very off this week. TYG did too, a little — as we both got our vaccines for the fall last week (covid and flu) we wondered if the shots hit us worse than usual. Wednesday, for me, was execrable. My relatively simple Local Reporter article (on Carrboro’s Green Neighborhood grants) was a slog and I didn’t get much writing accomplished after that. Happily I woke Thursday feeling back to normal. However I still had a bunch more crap getting in the way of writing.

Getting Plushie’s CCL tear covered by insurance, which required talking to our vet (who was awesome) and having them talk to the insurer (the dialog is ongoing). Going to the glaucoma specialist and discovering that the fluid circulation in my eye is a problem (the channel for flushing fluid out is way narrow) that she recommends laser surgery. Then double-checking our insurance will cover it. The first “advocate” didn’t call back, the second sent me to someone else (and the wrong someone else), the third was actually helpful.

Due to changes to our federal tax return, I have to file an amended state tax return, as the IRS recalculated our adjusted gross income (it works out in our favor). There were a bunch of other, less important paperwork chores I caught up on this week, mostly on Wednesday. Annoyingly, one or two tasks such as going to the dealer for a minor car malfunction will have to wait until next week — it would have been much smoother to deal with them all and start next week fresh.

So not much writing to talk about. I did some work on Jekyll and Hyde but not as much as I anticipated.

I did get a couple of Atomic Junkshop posts up, one on Satanism in Bronze Age comics, one on the Silver Age debut of The Phantom Stranger. Above, the Neal Adams cover from the second post; below, Mike Sekowsky’s killer splash page from a Supergirl story.

I also spent part of today on a rush article for The Local Reporter covering the possibility of Hurricane Imelda hitting here — even heavy rain would be disastrous, it’s a very floodable area. But neither story is up yet.

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September 26, 2025 · 5:03 am

Leaping lizards!

Literally. Not that you can see it here —

— but the anole on the bush jumped their from the railing beside our front steps. We saw them, or another member of his species a couple of days earlier, colored brown; anoles can change color, though it’s a slower process than with chameleons.

Perhaps we’ll see them again before winter sends them into hiding.

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September 25, 2025 · 5:15 am

Women’s rights, hierarchy and prophecy

It struck me recently that feminists are, in Walter Brueggemann’s sense, prophets.

In Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination, he argued the role of the prophet is to see the unimaginable — that the status quo is unjust and can, in fact, be toppled; that there’s a new, better world we can build, even if it’s never existed before. At the link I mentioned Martin Luther King, because his words captured the vision of an equal future so well. But everyone who worked in the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement — they were living the prophetic imagination even if they didn’t speak it so beautifully. Because they had the vision, the imagination, to see we didn’t have to live in a hierarchical society.

Hierarchy is appealing if you’re high enough in the ranks. For men, patriarchy is seductive (and some women who benefit from supporting it). The advantages you get if you’re promoted or paid better than women. The advantages at home if your wife handles all the cleaning and childcare. Even if there’s no such advantage, there’s the psychological benefits. Back when I was born, every WASP man knew even if he wasn’t at the head of the line, he’d never be at the end of it. Jews, African Americans, Asians, women, they would save him from being a loser. At least, he could imagine so.

If you benefit from hierarchy it’s hard to imagine a world without it; even people on the bottom levels are often more interested in climbing than reforming it — a common tactic by “dirty whites” such as Italian or Irish immigrants was to loudly embrace WASP racism, showing they belonged on the same level of the hierarchy as Anglo-Saxons. It’s often said that if you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression; beyond that it’s hard to imagine a world without oppression. Someone has to be on the bottom rungs; if women/blacks/gays don’t want to be there, clearly they intend to switch places with white straight men.

Pat Robertson (at the second link above) assumed that if black America takes the whip from whites, it’s so they can whip whites, not to make a world where nobody is whipped. Anti-feminists routinely predict feminist-ruled dystopias if women aren’t kept in their place. A new novel predicts gay rights leads to oppressing straights.

In the 1920s, when the Soviet Union officially abolished men’s property rights in their families (I’m not sure how much that affected the reality), many Americans assumed the women — as they obviously couldn’t be without some sort of owner — were now the property of the state, probably working as sex slaves.

Equal rights movements can imagine what the oppressor does not: an end to oppression, rather than simply shifting the whip from hand to hand. They can imagine equality. Abigail Adams could envision it more than 200 years ago, suggesting husbands give up the role of “master” for “friend”: “put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex.” (None of the men in her era had that sense, alas).

Mary Wollstonecraft did too. So did the feminists of my teen years. And Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, gay rights activists, they all imagined a world where the accident of their condition did not put them in “the power of the vicious and the lawless.”

Looking at the world now, I often feel the dream is inconceivable and unattainable. But it was more inconceivable when they lived and fought and yet they didn’t give up on it. We can’t either.

I’ll close with a quote from Thomas Jefferson. Even though he wouldn’t have been in sympathy with these movements, it still applies: “All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. the general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born, with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately by the grace of God.”

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September 24, 2025 · 5:15 am

Science … weird science!

The title should be sung to the tune of the Oingo Boingo song, of course.

What could be weirder than the deranged conviction artificial intelligence is the way, the truth and the light? Never mind the environmental damage, the wrong answers, the countless other problems, Silicon Valley wants it to be the next game-changing technology. And it is, but not in a way that improves things.

“A user on X complained that Grok’s answers were too progressive after it said violence from right-wing Americans tended to be deadlier than violence from left-wing Americans — a conclusion matching findings from various studies and data from the Global Terrorism Database.” So Elon Musk tweaked it to be more conservative.

HHS employees have been ordered to use chatbots in their jobs.

“A book collection steeped in 19th century thought could also be “immensely critical” for the tech industry’s efforts to build AI agents that can plan and reason as well as humans, Leppert said.” At this point AI looks more like the flop tech of the past — jetpacks, nuclear powered vacuum cleaners — than anything approaching human.

“She said librarians report being treated like robots over library reference chat, and patrons getting defensive over the veracity of recommendations they’ve received from an AI-powered chatbot. Essentially, like more people trust their preferred LLM over their human librarian.”

AI is spreading into areas it shouldn’t, like therapists secretly using chatbots to tell them what to say to clients. Seriously, what kind of hack therapist can’t think of what to say when a patient’s dog dies?

“The whole tech industry is once again facing questions over the casual way it sometimes turns unassuming people into lab rats, especially as more tech companies wade into health-related services.” And people don’t know because it turns out the Turing test — if we think a computer is intelligent, we should assume it is — is dead wrong.

Podcasts are (I think) what blogs were 20 years ago. So naturally an AI company plans to flood the zone with tons of AI-hosted podcasts. High point: “We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life,”said CEO Jeanine Wright. Um, no, but I get that her financial model probably depends on bullshit like that.

“I’m working every day on using AI to figure out how to cure cancer or launch fusion energy or understand dark matter. Our Defense Department is trying to figure out how to keep America safe. God bless the First Lady. She of course is wiser than all of us.” — Felon Energy Secretary Chris Wright. Yeah, I’m sure he’s lying but why would he even pretend he’s spending his work day to figure out dark matter?

If you’re wondering about his First Lady tongue-bathing, Melania’s calling on schools to train kids in using AI. I’m sure that will be more profitable for tech companies than learning anything valuable.

“On religious apps, tens of millions of people are confessing to spiritual chatbots their secrets: their petty vanities and deepest worries, gluttonous urges and darkest impulses. Trained on religious texts, the bots are like on-call priests, imams or rabbis, offering comfort and direction at any time. On some platforms, they even purport to channel God.The “faith tech” industry is booming.”

“When asked “How many Ds are in DEEPSEEK?” the DeepSeek-V3 model with 600 billion parameters “returned ‘2’ or ‘3’ in ten independent trials” while Meta AI and Claude 3.7 Sonnet performed similarly, “including answers as large as ‘6’ and ‘7.’” — from an excellent look at how AI hallucinations may be inevitable.

“Many of the students have completely surrendered to letting AI do their homework, badly, I might add. How do you fix this?” — Roxane Gay. One solution discussed in the thread: handwritten assignments.

Ted Chiang (quoted in the same thread): “The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write […]. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning.”

Now some non-AI links:

Stuff we post to the Internet doesn’t last forever.

The Toddler of the United States’ new $1,000 fee for HB-1 visas will undermine our tech industry (plus the option to waive the rules is an invitation to corruption).

A solar storm could wreak havoc on our electrical systems. It’s something we can prepare for, but I have a lot less faith in either government or corporate leaders doing so than I used to.

The Toddler claims one in 10 boys is born with autism, which is a lie, and that they get 80 different vaccines pumped into them in infancy, which is another lie. Surprisingly, RFK claims a definite link (spoiler: another lie!) to women taking Tylenol, and his anti-vax worshippers are furious (though he’s still anti-vax — I don’t know what his beef with Tylenol is). Though Newsmax’s fascist toadies are happily embracing the lie. So is ever-idiotic Senator Ron Johnson. And Politico sanewashes the Felon by explaining he’s really compassionate and wants to “solve the autism problem.”

Oh, RFK Junior’s also lying about the Amish not getting vaccinated and therefore not having autism.

I’ll wrap up with a comment from someone online elsewhere: “RFK Jr. seems to walk through life like it was always 20 minutes after he smoked his first joint in ninth grade.”

Remember, every Senate Republican voted for him, knowing he was a hardcore anti-vaxxer. Including the ones now pretending they’re shocked, shocked that he’s an anti-vaxxer.

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September 23, 2025 · 5:15 am

A chess queen and Jekyll: research reading and viewing

I thought I’d wrapped up my Southern Discomfort bibliography but I remembered one more book, Birth of the Chess Queen by Marilyn Yalom.

A major plot point in Southern Discomfort is when Gwalchmai and Olwen agree to settle their blood feud with a chess game; whoever wins, they strike the other’s head off. Maria, hearing this, thinks Olwen’s nuts but the elf replies that she’s been playing for centuries, both the classic game and the new “queen’s chess.”

That throwaway bit was inspired by Yalom’s book. As she details, the king’s companion in the earliest chess sets was the vizier, a piece that moved one square diagonally. When chess reached Europe, the vizier became the queen but still had only one diagonal square per move. Many variant forms of chess sprang up, however, and the one that one out had the queen as the powerful piece she is today; Yalom sees that as tying in to the medieval presence of strong queens such as Eleanor of Aquitane. It’s a good book and added a nice little detail to my novel, showing that Olwen is, from the human POV, really, really old.

JEKYLL (2007) stars Middleman‘s Matt Keeslar as a scientist on the brink of marriage, struggling to balance his research time with his fiancee and her father’s insistent demands he move into more lucrative private practice. Jekyll is obsessed with the idea that if we could tap into our minds, we could unleash an inner healing power (reminiscent of the same “woo” in Jekyll and Hyde … Together Again). After an encounter with a sexy stripper at his bachelor party, what he unleashes with his computer mind-adjuster is, of course, Hyde (due to the videogame being played on the same computer, he dons the requisite Victorian look).

This didn’t quite work for me though I’m not sure why. It may be something as simple as having OD’ed on the story by this point, or that I watched it on the weekend (I’d normally be watching movies for fun). It’s well cast and the character bits are interesting. Jekyll’s fiancee is close to the kind of woman I thought Bess Armstrong would be in Together Again and it’s clear the Carew family dysfunction will mess Jekyll up if he marries her. Utterson is a woman, Jekyll’s BFF, and has some romantic interest in him too. Jekyll and Hyde bleed into each other more than usual: Hyde’s moved when he learns his mistress really cares about him and the feelings Jekyll normally represses start to bubble out even when he’s not Hyde. I’ll see what I think of it when I give it another look. “I think he went home. Normal people do that.”

Image from Through the Looking Glass by John Tenniel

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