If there was anything tethering Will Cardini to the dull, consensus version of “reality” — and that’s a mighty big “if” — it’s gone now, as his imagination completely and utterly flies the coop with the release of his new self-published B&W full-sized comic (he calls it a “mini,” but it’s not) Urscape #1. The cosmic clashes of absolutes that were his stock in trade in earlier pubs such as Tales From The Hyperverse and Sphere Fear are here not so much jettisoned as naturally transitioned into those selfsame absolutes — in this case represented by his recurring protagonist Miizzzard — just being absolute and doing absolute sorts of things.

To that end, I think it’s safe to tell you that what you should expect here is a series of 20 full “splash” pages that don’t so much tell a story as simply become one.

Narrative was always a threadbare…

Say one thing for the DC Universe original streaming series Doom Patrol : its own internal tug-of-war, no doubt the design of “showrunner” Jeremy Carver, is working. Last week, we were pulled back into the ongoing psychodrama between Timothy Dalton’s “Chief” Niles Caulder and Alan Tudyk’s wonderfully depraved Mr. Nobody, and in the newest episode, “Frances Patrol,” we’re drawn back out in a major way, our focus shifted squarely back onto the makeshift “team” of super-misfits, who find themselves either “flying solo” or in hitherto-unseen pairings.

On the going it alone front, Matt Bomer/Matthew Zuk’s Larry Trainor (is he ever really “alone,” though, given the “Negative Spirit” he shares a body with?) has made the gutsy decision to meet, like it or not, with former flame John Bowers (played in the present day by Tom Fitzpatrick, in flashback by, as always, Kyle Clements), while the makeshift duos in April…

On the face of it, I’ve set myself a fool’s errand here : to review Avengers : Endgame on its own merits, completely divorced from its cultural context and all which came before it, may not even be possible. But once we get a few particulars out of the way, that’s precisely what I intend to do, those particulars being : This. Is. The. Biggest. Thing. Ever.

We’re talking the cinematic equivalent of your wedding day or the birth of your first kid — or so the Disney/Marvel marketing machine would have you believe, not that they’re necessarily wrong, depending on your own circumstances. The so-called “MCU” came into being when I was in my 30s, but I can only imagine what this must mean to people who literally grew up on this stuff. Ten years of big-budget spectacle after big-budget spectacle, all leading up to this — the