PROJECT 60: Preparing Dead Man's Hand Wave Two

Wave Two of miniatures for Dead Man's Hand

With Matt having done such a splendid job painting up my first batch of miniatures for use with the Dead Man's Hand skirmish game (and possibly other games), I thought it was time to rustle up a second wave of figures for Matt to work his magic on.

This new collection includes a complete gang (The Plains Indians), some heroic figures (Butch and Sundance, Rooster Cogburn), and some other miscellaneous miniatures (including a woman in a tin bath that will find a spot in the upstairs accommodation of my saloon).

I've already got another gang - the religious zealots of The Family - to lead off a third wave of figures, but I'm trying to break up my spending on Dead Man's Hand material throughout the year.

The Family were originally going to be in wave two, but having been watching random episodes of The High Chaparral I was persuaded to pick up The Plains Indians (although the Apache depicted in The High Chaparral were most definitely not Plains Indians, but Great Escape Games don't - yet - make Apache miniatures).

Hopefully, as the weather is turning brighter and hotter, I'll get myself down to our garden "craft room" to do some basing, build some rocky terrain etc But I'll need to sort out those old "bitz 'n' pieces" storage boxes first, to find out what I have and what is still useful and useable.

I might even start painting my nameless saloon!

Supergirl Continues To Radiate Silver Age Energy

Supergirl has a new 2025 series that sees her returning to Midvale to face off against classic foes. This latest DC All In series contains numerous nods and references to classic silver and bronze age stories, and some villain comebacks. How does Lesla Lar [h]old up in the contemporary era? Is this book fun? We discuss [it] here on Casually Comics!

The new Supergirl book is fast becoming one of my favourite new comics of 2025... largely because of its Silver Age energy. And the super-bunny, of course!

The simple trick to the title's success is that writer/artist Sophie Campbell acknowledges that superhero comics can be fun and a bit silly without destroying a book's verisimilitude: hence the full-throated embrace of Silver Age wackiness and Bronze Age throwbacks. 

Once again, Sasha of Casually Comics (above) deep dives into reviewing the issue for you, so I don't need to.

The Monkey (2025)

Having been abandoned by their father, twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn (both played by Christian Convery) are searching through the junk he left behind and discover a creepy-looking, wind-up, drum-playing toy monkey.

Very quickly the young boys realise that by turning the key, and setting the monkey drumming, random people in their environs start to die in statistically improbable ways.

Unfortunately, one of those people is their mother, Lois (She-Hulk's Tatiana Maslany), which drives the final wedge between the constantly-feuding twins.

Twenty-five years later, the monkey returns to plague Hal's (Theo James of The Time Traveler's Wife) life, but now - even though he has cut himself off from pretty much everyone - he fears this force of evil might harm his own son, Petey (Colin O'Brien).

Petey is being raised by Hal's ex-wife (Project Blue Book's Laura Mennell) and her new husband, self-help guru Ted (Lord of The Rings' Elijah Wood), who is going to adopt Petey and excise Hal from the boy's life completely.

Thus, Hal has a final week to spend with his son before losing him to Ted.

Learning that the aunt who raised him and Bill after their mother's death has also died in a "freak accident", Hal hopes to track down the monkey - and finally destroy it - when he returns to her house, with Petey in tow, to deal with the disposal of the estate.

However, this just sets in motion a series of violent events around Hal that end up in a reunion with his twin (also played by Theo James).

Bill has been driven insane by his involvement with the cursed monkey, and now sees its magical power as a route to a kind of immortality, regardless of the cost to others.

Based on a Stephen King short story, produced by James Wan (of Saw and The Conjuring fame), and written for the screen by director Osgood Perkins (who also wrote and directed Longlegs), The Monkey is a gloriously gory dark comedy and meditation on the randomness - and inevitability - of death.

Except for its drumming, the mysterious monkey is never seen moving (Bill claims it "teleports") which gives this absurdist Grand Guignol a distinct flavouring of the Annabelle movies blended with the Final Destination franchise.

The very definition of weird fiction, there are no easy answers to explain the enigmatic animatronics' origin or abilities, and no pat resolution to Hal's troubles... but that's rather the point. 

Full of mesmerising, bizarre and creative kills, The Monkey clearly aims to challenge its audience whether to laugh out loud or squirm and wretch as it segues from set piece to set piece.

More shocking than scary, this wonderful film is an over-the-top, blood-soaked rollercoaster that doesn't let up for its 97-minute duration. 

Refighting Bunker Hill (In 15mm)

Today on Little Wars TV we commemorate the 250th anniversary of Bunker Hill with a spectacular miniature wargame played at the Army Heritage & Education Center in Carlisle. 

Can our British players devise a new strategy to dislodge the rebels without suffering crippling casualties? Or will the stubborn colonials find a way to overcome a lack of centralized leadership and give King George a bloody nose?

We want to thank our hosts at AHEC, as well as veteran wargamer and Revolutionary War re-enactor Jim McGauhey for running the game.

Jim built this fantastic tabletop and painted the 15mm armies you see in the video. He used the rules British Grenadier, a descendent of Andy Callan's brilliant 1987 classic, Loose Files & American Scramble.

Wargames Illustrated magazine just re-released Andy's old article with beautiful new illustrations and design notes. Better yet--they made it available for free!

While I still firmly believe that roleplaying games - on the whole - aren't a spectator sport, I've always had a soft spot for actual wargames, because of the beauty of the miniatures, terrain etc

Even though the subject matter of this game is (technically) outside the remit of my blog (my wargaming focus is on America's 19th Century - Wild West and Civil War) and in a scale I don't have any interest in playing (I'm a 28mm guy), this video is still a wonderful example of the attraction of historical wargaming.

Abraham's Boys: A Dracula Story With A Difference

Max and Rudy Van Helsing have spent their lives under the strict and overprotective rule of their father, Abraham.

Unaware of his dark past, they struggle to understand his paranoia and increasingly erratic behavior. But when they begin to uncover the violent truths behind their father’s history with Dracula, their world unravels, forcing them to confront the terrifying legacy they were never meant to inherit.

Based on the short story by Joe Hill.

DC Stages A Comeback In My Superhero-Dominated Pull-List

Krypto: Last Dog of Krypton #1 movie variant cover (out this week)

As we were talking about statistics yesterday, I thought today would be a good time for a breakdown of my comic book pull-list.

This will then set a baseline for future comparisons as I monitor my shifting tastes.

There are currently 36 titles on my list, which sounds like a lot but includes pre-orders and one-shots as well as ongoing titles and limited series.

Over my nearly five decades of collecting, my "publisher of choice" has oscillated between DC and Marvel every few years - often with a short spell in between to focus on the smaller publishers. 

I actually thought my current list was dominated by DC at the moment, but I'd overlooked the number of Fantastic Four titles Marvel is pumping out to coincide with the arrival of their First Family in the MCU next month.

Pull-list broken down by publisher - June 2025

DC and Marvel are actually running pretty much neck and neck, thanks to both publishers pushing books tied into their potential summer blockbusters - which just happen to feature my favourite team and my favourite solo hero.

Pull-list broken down by genre - June 2025

I'm not surprised to see "superhero"-themed comics holding such sway over my list though as DC has really hit its stride this year, with its All In initiative. I hope this quality of storytelling will set the status quo for the company's books for a looooong time.

Prior to this, DC had pretty much been wiped off my pull-list (as I wasn't a fan of whatever convoluted balderdash they were doing with their storylines), but now the pendulum is definitely swinging back in the direction of the Distinguished Competition. 

Which is all great fun for me as a reader, but it's also starting to really put a strain on my budget. 

Therefore, largely for financial reasons (the cost of a single comic book continues to creep upwards) I'm aiming to trim my list down to books related to DC's Superman, books related to Marvel's Fantastic Four, and books related to the works of Robert E Howard (e.g. Conan The Barbarian, Solomon Kane etc).

We'll have to see how that goes. I'm already pondering "exceptions", such as catering to my interest in the Green Lantern Corps and its members as well as the JSA!

Fantastic Four Fanfare #2 (out this week)

We're Getting There (I Hope)

Photo by fauxels

We're kinda half-way through the year. While I still haven't made Cowboys, Capes, and Claws available to the general population yet I've invited a select few of my friends (both online and IRL) to an early sneak peek at the site.

I look forward to hearing what they have to say in due course.

As it stands, this is the breakdown of post content (by "labels") so far:

I'm pleased with the balance and the representation of my core objectives (superheroes, horror, and westerns).

I wonder what this pie chart will look like by the time Cowboys, Capes, and Claws goes public later in the year? 

Eventually, I'll run out of "retro reviews" (that is, reviews originally posted elsewhere and now brought over here so I can reference them in the future if needs be), so provided this blog has legs then that percentage should drop off as new material takes precedence. 

Unfortunately, in "real life", it looks as though my laptop is on its last legs and will probably need replacing at some point soon.

Being the technophobe that I am (I love technology when it works, but tend to freak out when it doesn't because I don't understand it), I'm not sure how this will affect my blogging/writing capabilities in the coming months.

Keeping my fingers crossed that this will just be a minor bump in the road and not a headfirst dive off a cliff!

Sergio Leone's Landscape of Faces

After the success of the Dollars trilogy, Sergio Leone was told by the studio he had to direct one more Western. What he created, may be the greatest western, and one of the greatest films of all time. Deemed too long and slow for audiences, Leone perfectly utilized the nothingness of western life, causing scenes to move almost painfully slow, but in the most beautiful way.

Friday The 13th (2009)

This new telling of the story of Jason Voorhees - the indestructible, hockey-masked slayer - begins by subverting the twist ending of the original.

This version makes it clear in the opening flashback that it was Jason's mother who killed the camp counsellors because she thought they had let her deformed son drown in Crystal Lake.

But Jason had survived and made it back in time to see his own mother beheaded before his eyes by the last survivor.

The film then jumps to the present day and a bunch of potheads are going camping in the woods, near Crystal Lake, looking for a legendary field of wild weed... instead they are ambushed by the adult Jason (Derek Mears), who still inhabits the derelict summer camp.

All this in the 25-minutes before the title screen!

Six weeks later and another bunch of obnoxious college students, headed by chief douche bag Trent (Travis Van Winkle), have come to stay at a lodge owned by Travis' parents on the far side of the lake.

Meanwhile, Clay (Supernatural's Jared Padalecki) is in the area looking for his missing sister, Whitney (Amanda Righetti), one of the earlier band of delinquents, and getting nowhere with the unhelpful locals.

Little does he realise that Jason has actually kept her alive because she bears a passing resemblance to his dead mother.

There's even an underlying suggestion that the locals are somehow complicit in Jason's murders (the old woman who says: "He just wants to be left alone" and the total lack of follow-up by the authorities when one victim is impaled on the back of a passing pick-up truck), but this is never explored - to the detriment of originality in this movie.

Trent and his cohorts quickly discover the area's brutal secret though, and Clay is drawn into their nightmare as he tries to rescue his sister from the clutches of the iconic, unstoppable serial killer.

Directed by Marcus Nispel (who also helmed the far superior remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 2003; not that the original needed remaking), Friday The 13th is very "by-the-numbers" with the requisite amount of female nudity and violent deaths, while, sadly, adding nothing new to the mix.

Where Nispel's Texas Chainsaw Massacre expanded on the characters of the original film and added new layers of subtext, Friday The 13th is just a re-imagining of the old story in a new location, with new disposable victims.

Perhaps we've been spoiled by such imaginative horrors as the Final Destination franchise, but even Jason's most creative attacks are actually quite mundane and there is certainly more luck than judgement involved in many of his killings.

The extended cut DVD gives us 101 minutes of mindless, low-brow entertainment, but totally lacking in lasting impact.

All the characters, even Clay and Whitney, are two-dimensional ciphers that we never get to really know - or care for - and, to be honest, most of the victims pretty much deserve what they get from Jason.

It isn't even made clear why, at the end, having defeated Jason (as the film structure dictated they would), Clay and Whitney roll his body into the lake rather than calling the police (as any sensible, right-thinking person would do), except that it serves the plotline and thus leaves the door open for a (wishful-thinking) sequel.

Friday The 13th is good for what it is: an urban myth-style retelling of a well-known tale for a generation that might only have known of the original second or third hand.

I still would have preferred a sequel to Jason X than this trite reboot, but perhaps I was just too sober (and too old) to fully appreciate the movie's nuances?

Jason X (2001)

And so we come to the end of the Friday the 13th canon with the chapter I have seen the most times, Jason X.

A savage slice of solid pulp sci-fi served with a soupçon of satire.

In the early 21st Century, Jason (Kane Hodder) has been captured (presumably some time after his return in Freddy vs Jason) and is being held at a specially constructed Crystal Lake research centre, where project leader Rowan (Andromeda's Lexa Doig) has been investigating ways to permanently execute the mass-murdering zombie.

Eventually, she realises the only course of action is to cryofreeze him, but then interdepartmental shenanigans - and a misguided desire to monetise Jason's supernatural regnenerative abilities - leads to the monster's escape.

This ends up with both Jason and Rowan being accidentally frozen... and then forgotten about.

Jump ahead to the year 2455, and a student field trip to the wastelands of the dead Earth comes across the two frozen bodies.

Bringing them back to their ship, The Grendel, for study, the researchers use nanotechnology to bring Rowan back... unfortunately, at the same time, they also accidentally reawaken Jason.

It maybe the future, but teens are still horny and that's motivation enough for Jason to start hacking away again.

You can guess what happens next.

Todd Farmer's script, directed by James Isaac, wears its Alien influences on its sleeve, with Jason substituting for that franchise's iconic xenomorphs.

The Grendel has its own cadre of marines, led by Spartacus's Peter Mensah, bargain basement clones of the beloved characters from Aliens, and their hunt for Jason through the bowels of the ship (while the civilians listen in, from relative safety) is an obvious homage (rip-off?) of the sequence in Aliens where the colonial marines first meet the xenomorphs in the tunnels under the colony on LV-426.

It's then left to the civilians - and their android (Andromeda's Lisa Ryder) to escape Jason's machete long enough for the ship to reach safety.

Unfortunately, just when they think they've got him beat, he gets a new lease of life - an upgrade - thanks to the same nanotechnology that brought Rowan back.

Also, the hull of the Grendel is deteriorating and is likely to collapse before the rescue ship Tiamat can reach them.

Silly, thrilling, and inventive, for me Jason X is a perfect example of how you keep a long-running franchise alive.

Through out-of-the-box thinking that takes the overarching narrative in a totally unexpected direction, yet remains true to its core principles, Farmer and Isaac have created a genuinely unique blend of old school slasher and pulp sci-fi.

Sure, it's obviously not the first blending of sci-fi and horror tropes, but as an extension of a franchise like Friday the 13th, it's inspired.

I would have loved to have seen a sequel to this where Jason vents his wrath on the horny teens of Earth Two, but sadly it was not to be.

Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

While it was not the next Friday The 13th movie made (that was Jason X, which we will get to later), in my mind 2003's Freddy vs Jason is the next entry chronologically as it ties to final scene of Jason Goes To Hell.

Taking place four years after the dream demon Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) last plagued the residents of Elm Street, the older generation of Springwood have concocted a conspiracy of silence, to erase Freddy from the local mythology.

By forgetting him, they are depriving him of the fear that the feeds him, and so he remains trapped in Hell.

However, Freddy has a plan to escape: remind the residents of Springwood of his existence by releasing Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger) from Hell - and pointing him at Elm Street.

The idea being that Jason will stir memories - and fears - of Freddy, eventually giving him enough power to escape Hell himself.

Not only is this is a canny plot device, but Freddy vs Jason doesn't hang around - with Jason butchering his first Elm Street victim within minutes of the story getting on.

For a 16-year-old film, the visual effects are particularly striking in places, such as in the first few "nightmare" sequences, nice touches like the disappearing bloody footprints and the turning heads on the "Missing" posters, and then, later, the imagery of the burning Jason striding through the cornfields.

What makes Damian Shannon and Mark Swift's screenplay really sing though isn't just the brilliant set-up, but also the way it wove in the conflict between the two supernatural antagonists: having released Jason onto his "patch" Freddy gets pissed when he starts losing potential victims to the hockey mask-wearing zombie.

Given Jason's habit - in several of the earlier Friday The 13th films - of jumping in and out of Crystal Lake, I don't really buy the "fear of water" he's been given here (as a heavy-handed polar opposite to Freddy's fear of fire) and the script also plays a bit fast and loose with the specifics of Jason's origin story.

However, I can excuse that as we witness it through the lens of Jason's own dreamscape - nightmare? - and, of course, dreams and, recollections in them, are rarely 100 per cent accurate.

But, even with its narrative flaws, Freddy vs. Jason is a slick, pulpy, clash of two horror icons, that's probably smarter than the casual viewer might even realise.

While Freddy is, obviously, the more vocal of the pair, the film perfectly balances spotlight time for both the villains, so you can't say this is Jason appearing in a Freddy film or vice versa.

As well as interesting dives into what passes for Jason's psyche, there are also some nice touches in the movie that a diehard Fredhead like myself can really appreciate.

We get to see Freddy's world operating on an almost Looney Toons-level of dream logic, that makes a significant change in tone to match the change of setting, and then it's really brought home just how weedy Freddy actually is when pulled through into the "real world".

It's his evil cunning, as much as anything, that allows him to go toe-to-toe with Jason on the dock at Crystal Lake.

With Jason well and truly back at the end of the film - but Freddy certainly not out of contention - Freddy vs Jason actually does a nice job of restoring the status quo to both franchises.

Just a shame that Friday The 13th only managed one more (before its failed reboot) and A Nightmare on Elm Street went straight for the failed reboot option.

As the last few entries in the Friday the 13th series showed (and I'm including Jason X here, but excluding Jason Takes Manhattan), if you're willing to take risks talented writers can always breathe new life into a long-running franchise... if given the chance.