Spaceknight Saturdays: Things Get Bloody

Atlanta... the Big Peach... Home of Coca-Cola, CNN, the Braves, the Falcons, and... Dire Wraiths? Is no one safe!?! Is even an easy to remember state capital (seriously, what is up with not giving the biggest cities capital status?) not sacred to these Wraith gals? Apparently not.

As we found out last issue, the Wraiths have infiltrated an Atlanta hospital where Rick Jones lay dying of self-induced Gamma cancer. Rom and Starshine, meanwhile, have been tracking those Wraiths with the help of SHIELD espers. Now something's gone terribly wrong at that hospital. A massacre ensues. This is the story of just what happened. Don't trust the local national news outlet on this one, folks.

It all starts with an incompetent orderly pricking himself with blood meant for Rick Jones.
Now, first of all, is this really how they were going to give Rick three jars worth of transfusion? One syringe at a time? Second, what kind of nurse can't handle a syringe properly, that not only does he prick himself with it, but he hits the plunger too, or else no blood would have gotten into his veins. One possibility is that this is just how Rick Jones tells it, as it's part of a flashback (as you can tell from the cheap color scheme). He's not medically trained, so that's just how it looked to him, or how Rom and company interpret his words. Supporting evidence: The nurse was quite plainly a GIRL in the previous issue. So Rick may be embellishing.

Not about the monster though. All over the hospital, anyone who's gotten a tainted blood transfusion has been turned into a nightmarish creature.
Each one born out of the shed skin of its host and rampaging through the hospital killing everything that moves. Oh and that nurse monster? After it kills Rick's lady doctor, he takes care of it...
El Kabong style! (Still embellishing... damn kids and their pop culture references.)

To the blood bank! But the Spaceknights get ambushed by yet more creatures. A mutated Dr. Zoidberg gets the drop on Starshine and starts munching on her head.
While Rom has his own monstrosity to deal with.
For Rom, it's a matter of chopping heads off and taking names.
And when he loses the Neutralizer, he goes all Sienkiewicz on the creature's ass.
Seriously though, what happened there? Two panels inked by Sienkiewicz? I'm not complaining, but of all the inkers that ever lived, I couldn't think of one whose style would mesh LESS with another inker's.

Starshine shows she's come a long way since the perpetually weeping boy accessory that was Brandy Clark. Starshine: Feminist icon!
Ooookay. I feel emasculated already. Where were we? Oh yes... To the blood bank!
Screw hepatitis B and AIDS, there be Wraith stuff in that blood! Sensing it's been detected, the blood reacts violently!
But Rom sterilizes it before Rick can be contaminated. "So everything is okay?" asks the still terminally ill Rick Jones. Rom paraphrases from Pulp Fiction's Marcellus: Things are "pretty fuckin' far from okay."

Next: O Canada! Wraith activity in the Great White North.