I Adore Small Art Of Scenes We Will Never Get In Big Movies. They Are The Moments That Can Most Easily

THE FINAL PROBLEM - part 1 of ??many. If the context is confusing, please check the date and remember that we last saw Holmes in early 1891 - or better yet, read the original story!

This is in the Watson's Sketchbook series!

cursive text (which is all canon, btw) under the cut for those who need it:

4 May, 1893

It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these, the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished. In an incoherent and, as I deeply feel, an entirely inadequate fashion, I have endeavored to give some account of my strange experiences in his company. It was my intention to have said nothing of that event which has created a void in my life which the lapse of two years has done little to fill. My hand has been forced, however.

It lies with me to tell for the first time what really took place between Professor Moriarty and Mr. Sherlock Holmes...

Spider-Man's Canon Cryptidization

As much as I love how Batman went from respected lawman to urban legend, I feel people fail to appreciate the Marvel equivalent. Peter Parker's alterego went from 'literally a wrestler with a gimmick' to 'he might maybe have once been human? We hope?!' in the eyes of the average civillian/mook.

Like his origin is clearly human, he's a tv performer and it's understood that his webbing is a gadget he came up with for the schtick. Then a little later when the Xmen become more popular and have more of an effect on the Marvelverse, you get the whole 'mutant scum' angle. But it eventually becomes clear that no, whatever this guy is, 'typical mutant' ain't it. (The alien suit debacle does not help with this at all.)

By the mid 80s Spider-Man is basically a cryptid, helped along by how the choreography and art style changed enough to show him moving in a way that is very inhuman, striking from the shadows, gravity optional. There's a whole arc where he adventures overseas and just straight up passes for a supernatural being so as not to compromise his secret id.

Then whenever anybody interacts with him long enough for him to start quipping they realize he's just a huge dork. Like, you know the inhumanly strong man-shaped shadow that can tell you pointed a gun at him from two blocks away without looking? He's going to give you a punny nickname while tying you up with a semi organic compound hitherto unknown to science. It's so funny.

Edit: just caught the typo in the title T-T

mr migraine. my me a grain

make it the hurtest of my stupid brain

Oh hohoho this is gonna be GOOD

So I heard it was WIP Wednesday...? June of Doom preview, and, as you can see, I am not holding back on the angst (this is Lone Pine ca ~1980).

Worst pun I've seen in at least a week, all hail all praise. Best I could've done was say they were slated for love, I need to up my game.

Been trying to learn bookbinding (to mixed results) and from the looks of this I should have started simpler!

I made this zine last year to teach Japanese stab binding. It's a technique that every artist should know—with just a few tools, it's so easy to bind your own sketchbook or to make a physical version of your art/writing/etc. Download the PDF version (with bonus photos & tips!)

“Spidey, about before. You know I think you’re the best, right? And not just the superhero stuff. You’re a big brain, too. You should be over there with Reed and Tony, saving our butts.” “Right, like I’m in their league.” “Okay, so let them do their thing. You can go work on a fallback plan.” “Johnny, look at the time. There’s no way I could… possibly… come up with… a fallback plan!” 

(ASM #648)

fallow up question, will the prologue be included in the physical book?

yes. also a secret extra bonus pre-prologue prologue they asked me to write so people would be less confused by the worldbuilding

People forget that you can light a bonfire with a candle; that's what this felt like to me.

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

Isn't that just Lex Luthor at his core?

He could ALWAYS just stop. He is who he is because he never will.

Lex could just stop. Right now. He's cleared his slate, faked his own death, the list of people who have any idea is in the single digits. Superman is willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. The people adore him, he has the power to do real, long term good for the world. He could just. STOP. Action Comics 672