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The Devil’s Heir- Chapter 11

CHAPTER 11: THE CONQUEST OF MABUS

Groethuis was halfway through explaining exactly how the God-killer worked when Mabus raised his hand to silence him.

“Master?” said Groethuis, looking up from the schematics he had spread across the table like a treasure map.

“That will be all today, Doctor. You may finish tomorrow.”

“As you wish, Master.”

“Can the weapon be fired?”

“It is primed and ready.”

“Good. We may get precious little warning.”

“Master, if I may ask…”

“That will be all, Doctor.”

Sensing that Mabus was close to simply vanishing him out of the throne room with a thought, and without much consideration as to whether he reappeared on the ground or a hundred feet above it, Groethuis gathered up his papers and left without another word.

Mabus silently rested in his throne for a full two minutes.

Finally, he rose to his feet and opened the door to his private bedroom.

He already knew, indeed had known from the second he had raised his hand to silence Groethuis, what he would find there.

“Ave Mabus.” said the figure who was now sitting in his chair with his legs crossed nonchalantly over the table.

“What do you want?” Mabus asked.

“Why do you think I’m here?” the second Mabus asked.

Mabus studied his double. A horrific, skeletal figure draped in sack-like skin and with the barest, mist-thin wreathing of grey hair here and there. And those terrible, milky pale eyeballs, nestling in cavernous sockets like terrible pearls in some ancient shell. Since he had no memory of this meeting, this Mabus was from his future, not his past. But how far in the future? Impossible to say. Even back in the living world, Mabus had been aged as much as a person could be aged. He could not look older if he tried. And here in Hell, no one aged anyway, making it doubly pointless. This Mabus could be from ten seconds in the future, or ten million years.

“To warn me?” Mabus asked.

The second Mabus opened his mouth to let the pale lips slip over his teeth, the closest he could come to a grin.

“To give you a little helping hand.” he said “The hard part’s coming. I think you know to what I refer?”

“But I do win? We win?”

“Well that’s up to you, isn’t it?”

Am I truly this insufferably smug? Mabus asked himself.
“Yes.” said his double.

Walked into that one, I suppose, Mabus thought.

“Yes you did.” said the second Mabus, again with the awful skull grin.

“Get to the point.” Mabus snapped irritably “What do I have to do?”

“Here.” said the double, passing a roll of yellowing paper across the table to him.

“What is this?” Mabus asked him, unfurling it, his eyes adjusting to the script. Ancient Greek. He tried a few words as an appetiser, long disused parts of his brain flickering into life at the taste of them.

“The Conquest of Mabus.” said his twin “It’s a poem, written by one of your soldiers. It commemorates your glorious victory.”

“Why give it to me?”

“Because it’ll tell you everything you need to do. And it’s good for your ego. Enjoy.”

Mabus simply nodded. He didn’t bother thanking himself. What was the point?

His double vanished, and Mabus unfurled the scroll and began to read.

(more…)

Catching up on the Devil’s Heir

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Sorry.

Sorry. It’s taken a ridiculously long time for me to do this and I can only apologise. Anyway. Regular updates of new chapters of The Devil’s Heir will resume starting next Thursday and Chapter 11 is up now. In the meantime, here is a master list of all the chapters of the Hangman’s Daughter/Devil’s Heir just in case any one wants to get caught up or has forgotten where we were (and I could hardly blame you if you have).

The Hangman’s Daughter

Chapter 18

The Devil’s Heir

Huge thanks to my brother Eamonn for all his help. You’re a legend, dude.

Fritz the Cat (1972)

“Heeey everyone.”

“Oh look guys, it’s Spouse of Mouse!”

“Heeey everyone. I was just hoping we could have a little chat before Mouse starts the review. Just us.”

“I know you all think it’s really funny that you got Mouse to review Fritz the Cat. I’m sure you’re all having a big laugh. “Ha” you might say, and also “Ha.”

“But here’s the thing. This movie messed him up so badly that I don’t know if he’ll ever recover. And I’m a simple mouse who lives by a simple rule: You hurt the ones I love?”

“I WILL FUCK YOUR FUCKING SHIT RIGHT THE FUCK UP. IF YOU EVER PULL ANYTHING LIKE THAT AGAIN I WILL TRACK YOU DOWN THERE IS NOWHERE YOU CAN HIDE. PAIN? I WILL MAKE YOU LONG FOR SOMETHING AS SWEET AS PAIN.”

“’Kay? Enjoy the review.”

***

Do you know what it’s like to review Fritz the Cat? To sit in the dark watching that cat fuck everything that moves, to feel your brain slowly coming apart from the constant assault of surreal, messed up, toked out, crazy shit? No. You don’t. Because you’ve never been out there, man. Out in the real deep shit. This movie man. You don’t know, man. It’s like, you think you have a handle on things, man, like life and art and truth and beauty man like they’re all just packaged and sold in these neat little Styrofoam boxes, man, and then this movie comes along and it’s like, you know man? Like, what does it all mean, man? I…I…I shouldn’t be doing this man, I should be a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas, man…

“Mouse, relax. You’re going crazy over there, man.”

“YOU WEREN’T THERE, MAN!”

Sorry. Sorry. I’m alright. Okay. Let’s do this.

For as long as there have been comics there have been “underground” comics, the kind of comics that aren’t read in a newspaper at the breakfast table on a lazy Sunday morning but are more usually read at night. Under the covers. With a flashlight.

Jerkin’ it.

Pornographic comic books or “Tijuana Bibles” were especially popular in the Great Depression and usually featured well known comic book characters or public figures engaging in what scripture calls “the hard fuckin’”. No one was safe. Popeye, Betty Boop, Superman you name it, someone drew them doin’ it.

Trust me, just be glad it’s Minnie and not Pluto.

By the 1960s the underground comics (or “comix”) scene had merged with the broader counter culture movement. In contrast to mainstream comics which had to abide by the Comics Code Authority, comix were uncensored and didn’t abide by jack shit. These books were absolutely steeped in sixties drug and music culture, often politically radical and transgressive and extreme in their depictions of sex and violence. They also, it must be said, frequently had a streak of misogyny a mile wide. But at its best, the comix scene produced some of the finest American sequential art of the twentieth century (Art Spiegelman, for example, honed his craft in indie magazines in the seventies).

The one creator who is probably more associated with the comix scene than any other is Robert Crumb and his most famous creation is almost certainly Fritz the Cat, an anthropomorphised cat who’s kinda like Felix crossed with Roosh V. The Fritz strips first appeared in the magazine Help! where the editors famously responded to his submission with a letter saying; “Dear R. Crumb, we think the little pussycat drawings you sent us were just great. Question is, how do we print them without going to jail?” The comic became a genuine breakout hit and was read by many a long-haired hippie degenerate, one of whom was our old friend Ralph Bakshi.

Bakshi had set up his own animation studio and was looking to create animation for adults. He came across one of Crumb’s books and bought the rights to the strip. Warner Bros originally were going to fund it but then they saw Bakshi’s early shoots.

Instead, the movie ended up being funded by Cinemation Industries, purveyor of such highbrow classics as The Black Godfather, Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song and The Eighteen Year Old Cheerleaders.

It’s important to remember that there was a weird period from the late sixties to around the mid-eighties where porn was pretty much mainstream, and you could just go to the cinema and watch a big budget porno made and financed by a large studio as opposed to some dude with a camera and a couch. Fritz the Cat is very much a part of that. It’s not solely a porno but it’s got relatives who are pornos if you catch me. So before we get into this review please take note that this is a movie with sex and nudity, pretty grotesque ethnic caricatures, frequent homophobic and racial slurs and some generally fucked up shit.

What I’m trying to say is…

“This review ain’t NSFW for nothin’ baby.”

(more…)

“We’re sort of like a team. “Earth’s Mightiest Heroes” type thing.”

Superhero teams have been around for almost as long as there have been superhero comics, with the first, the Justice Society of America, debuting in 1940. Since then they’ve been a staple of the genre and for good reason. They give editors a place to test out new characters that can be spun off into their own books if readers take a liking to them and there’s simply more stories you can tell with a large group than you can when you’re focused on a single hero. One character’s not working out? Simply kill him off and replace him and the book carries on unaffected, much like the earth will keep turning inexorably after your inevitable death (wow, where did that come from, Mouse?). In fact, it’s pretty much a cast-iron rule that where you have superheroes, you will have superhero teams. My point is, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby did many ground-breaking, ingenious and innovative things with the comic book medium during their partnership in the sixties, but inventing the Avengers was not one of them. Once they had created a certain number of superheroes, putting them all in the one book was about as inevitable as the tides. And to be honest…that kinda shows. When you read those old comics you can tell when Stan and Jack were really invested and bringing their A-game to a book (Fantastic Four, Thor, Silver Surfer) and when they were kinda phoning it in (Daredevil, X-Men and the Avengers). Even the name is half-assed. The first issue literally ends with the heroes standing around and saying “What should we call ourselves?” “The…avengers?” “Sure, let’s go with that.” Like, they literally just went with the generic place-holder superhero team name.

If the creation of the Avengers comic book was unremarkable and by-the -numbers, though, the movie was anything but. In fact, I’m pretty sure future movie historians will be looking back at this as the start of something entirely new. Whether that’s a good thing or not remains to be seen but regardless, this movie is a big effing deal. For the first time, audiences were expected to go to a movie that shared continuity, characters and plot with four separate pre-existing series of movies. This was something on a scale that the film industry had simply never seen before.

And, be honest, you kinda thought it would suck. Didn’t you?

Didn’t you?

C’mon. Be honest. You thought it was going to suck. You can say it.

“Yeah…”

“SEIZE HER!”

Seriously though, the reaction to this movie was damn near euphoric but part of that just had to have been due to the fact that Marvel had even pulled it off. The fact that it was simply something you could point to and say “Yup, that’s a movie.” was in and of itself something to Marvel at (I ain’t ashamed). Four years later, though, when every studio and their mother is trying to ape Marvel’s shared universe concept, does it still hold up as anything other than a well-executed gimmick? Is it even a good movie in its own right? Does it have what noted film-maker Jackie Treehorn called the “little extras”?

“Story? Production values? Feelings?”

Let’s take a look.

(more…)

Unshaved Mouseketeers Assemble!

Hey guys, so you know how everyone is always saying how women in Saudi Arabia have it so easy? Yeah, they don’t say that, and there’s a reason. Longtime readers of the blog already know my friend Sahar and her blog Saharcasm.

“Good title.”

Sahar has just been shortlisted for the Philadelphia Creativity for a Cause contest. As well as making sweet, sweet, delicious cheese, Philadelphia is offering to fund a business idea to improve the lives of people in the middle east. So what’s Sahar got in mind? I’ll let her explain it in her own words:

“If I win, (when I win – let’s stay positive!) I will get the mentorship and support to put my business idea to life. I want to focus on an English club for ladies in the Middle East. After living in KSA for 17 months, working as an English teacher, I have realised that it can be very difficult for women to survive. THERE IS NOTHING TO DO.

There were days where I almost went mad with boredom and I’m seeing a lot of the same from various online communities. I want to offer ladies English lessons, new mommy classes, book clubs, public speaking courses, microsoft word/excel/powerpoint course, halaqa, art & crafts, and so much more. The education system in KSA for the most part does not include any extra curricular activities so for some ladies it will be the first time they ever did anything like this. We don’t have a service like this in KSA, and anything even a little bit similar doesn’t cater specifically to the needs of the women involved. (Nurses struggling to keep up in an English speaking environment? Unemployed women without a college education who want to enter the work force?) They’re all just thrown together and given a standard course – it just doesn’t work!

I want to bring this service to the women in Saudi Arabia that really need it. I will be fighting constraints that hindered their education in the past such as – transport, childcare, timing, commitment, and cost so anyone can avail of the service. I’ve met these women, I know what they need, and they are some of the most wonderful people I’ve ever met in my life. There’s so much potential, it’s time to tap into it…”

This is a fantastic cause and I really want to help Sahar pull this off, so if you’ve got a second, please click on this link log in with your Facebook account and give her a vote. Thanks guys.

Guest Reviews with Paper Alchemist: The Snow Queen (1995)

Hey, everyone!

And see ya later, arachnophobes!

It’s your favourite Antipodean arachnid alchemist here. Mouse is off recovering from his holiday in the Big Apple, so I’m filling his wee little shoes this week.

As Australia is home to the Big Pineapple, the Big Prawn and the Big Banana, I was very disappointed to discover that there is no Big Apple in the Big Apple.

It’s late autumn where I live at the moment. Despite the very loveliest April we’ve ever had, the Season of Mud has now begun, and I can’t feel my extremities. You might have a mental image of me lurking in some rusty outback shack, where it’s hot enough to fry bacon and eggs on the driveway, but I’m from the temperate zone in the south. And believe me, it gets cold down here. Once, in my town, it actually snowed for a couple of minutes!

‘*snort*’

‘She’s dead serious, Europe! Everyone thinks I’m all about beaches and red dirt, but Antarctica’s just across the ditch from me. Sometimes people in Victoria and Tassie have to put on bloody trackie-dacks!’

‘Is that some kind of anti-shark armour, or…?’

‘Nah, ya dag. Tracksuit pants.’

Long trousers!

“Pfft…”

‘It’s true! Poor buggers have to cover their legs right down to the ankle.’

‘Sorry. You’re – you’re fine. It’s cute. Don’t let me stop either of you.’

Right now, most of you are probably cuddling little lambies, and dancing around Maypoles with flowers in your hair (I know you don’t have swooping magpies or termite swarms, so I have adjusted my mental image of spring in the Northern Hemisphere accordingly). You guys are just coming into summer right now, so it may strike you as odd that I’m reviewing such a wintry film. But for me, today’s movie is seasonally appropriate.

Which is probably the nicest thing I can say about it.

(more…)

“I don’t want to kill anyone. I just don’t like bullies.”

True story. A few years ago now when I was getting ready to move out of my parents’ house, I was clearing out my stuff from my bedroom, the bulk of which was pretty much every issue of SFX magazine published between 1997 and 2004. And I found myself with two copies in my hand, one from August 2001 and the other from October 2001. I idly flicked through the August issue and found myself reading the comic reviews, one of which was a little quarter-page panning of Captain America # Fifty Bajillion drawn by Who Knows and written by Who Cares. The review was scathing; the art’s terrible, the writing’s appalling and worst of all, the main character’s just not interesting or relevant anymore. The review finished by noting that Marvel had been dropping hints that one of their oldest characters was going to be killed off and it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Cap was not long for this world. I then flicked through the October 2001 issue and again turned to the comics section. And there was a full page review of the new Captain America #1, with a top tier art and script team and a story about Steve Rogers defending Muslim New Yorkers from racist attackers while trying to track down an Al Qaeda cell.

Cometh the hour. Cometh the man.

For a character whose entire schtick is being a man out of time, when he was originally created Captain America was actually ahead of his time. In America in 1940 public opinion was firmly against become involved in another European war. In New York however, many of the men working in the comic book industry were the children of Jewish immigrants who often still had family back in Europe and felt a personal connection to the horrors being committed by the Nazis. One of those men was Joe Simon who conceived of a patriotic, Nazi-battling character named “Super American”. Deciding that the name was a little too similar to a certain other superhero, he changed it to “Captain America”, a name so instantly iconic that nowadays you just have to put the word “captain” in front of any random noun and it sounds like a superhero name. Simon pitched the idea to his editor Martin Goodman who liked it so much that he ordered him to create a solo Captain America series, a big gamble to take on an untested character. Simon’s usual partner was artist Jack Kirby but Simon wanted to bring in two additional artists to deal with the workload of creating an entire book’s worth of stories based on one character. But Kirby was so invested in the character of Captain America that he insisted on drawing the entire book himself, which he did, and on time.

The first issue sold as well as any comic that features Hitler getting punched in the face should. The character was an immediate hit, becoming the first genuine superstar character of Timely comics (which would later become Marvel). Not all the attention was positive, however. American Nazis began sending threatening letters and one time even called the offices of Timely challenging Jack Kirby to come down and fight them in the foyer. Kirby ran down only to find they’d run off because it was Jack Frickin’ Kirby and they may have been Nazis but they weren’t crazy. Regardless, for a while the city of New York actually had to provide police protection to the building. After Pearl Harbour, Captain America became even more popular, with his comics distributed to American service men to boost morale. Many of the Timely artists and writers were drafted during this period. Stan Lee, for example, who got his break in Timely writing Captain America prose stories (he was the one who came up with the whole “throwing the shield as a weapon” thing) was put to work making propaganda. One day he was found breaking into the army post office, trying to mail a script off to Timely. He was told he’d be court-martialed, only to be released the next day when the editor of Timely rang his commanding officer to point out that jailing the writer of Captain Frickin’ America might be bad for the army’s morale.

Jack Kirby also joined the army but opted to serve on the front lines, becoming one of the few American soldiers who had experience fighting Nazis as a hobby before going pro.

Unfortunately, America won the war…I mean obviously not “unfortunately” in the grand scheme of things but unfortunate for Captain America. You see, Captain America was very much a reaction to the Nazi menace, which is what made the character so timely (pun!) and important. But of course, once that menace was defeated, Captain America didn’t really have a purpose anymore. In fact, the same could be said for the vast majority of superheroes who had followed in his wake. The superhero boom pretty much died with Hitler, with only a few characters like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman surviving the decade. Timely tried repurposing Cap as a commie fighter, but it just wasn’t the same. Timely changed its name to Atlas, dropped the superhero genre entirely and started focusing on sci-fi and monster tales.

It wasn’t until the sixties that Cpatain America got his second origin story. The third issue of The Avengers had the newly formed team finding Captain America floating in the Arctic Sea in a block of ice having gone missing near the end of WW2 (all the stuff about him fighting communists was retconned as actually having…you know what, fuck it, no time). Captain America then joined the team as a man out of time, a morally pure Rip Van Winkle trying to adapt to a confusing and complex modern world, and that’s pretty much been his niche ever since.

Since then, Captain America has had his share of classic runs and great stories, but there’s no denying that he’s a tricky character to do right. Like Superman and Wonder Woman, it takes a writer with skill to make him work (though it’s a truly wonderful thing when he does). For a long stretches of the twentieth century it often seemed like Marvel didn’t know what to do with Captain America, often giving him to creators who really had no business writing the character, which is how we got Rob Liefeld’s godawful Heroes Reborn Captain America.

I’d say “We do not speak of the Sentinel of Libertitty” but let’s be real. We never stopped.

Since the beginning of the 21st century however, Cap has once again become one Marvel’s top tier characters, attracting industry leading talent and the kind of popularity he hasn’t really known since the time of his creation. Part of that is, well, yeah, obviously…

“9/11 changed EVERYTHING Brian!”

But as well as the natural impulse to rally around such a patriotic symbol in troubling times, Captain America is simply a character whose time has come again. In the forties, Cap was popular but he was by no means unique. The stands were overflowing with patriotic, square jawed do-gooders. Hell, Captain America wasn’t even the first superhero to wear the American flag and carry a shield. But the superhero genre has changed so utterly since those days that what once made Captain America almost generic now makes him almost unique. Nowadays, a superhero who’s just a genuinely decent person is refreshing and almost edgy. He may be old fashioned, but these day? Like the man said, people need a little old fashioned.

2011’s Captain America, the first movie featuring the character that fans will actually acknowledge exists, works and works so damn well, because it gets that.

(more…)

Song of the Sea (2014)

Pff. Women, amirite? One day you’re walking down the beach and you see a beautiful woman walking out of the sea, you hit it off, you get married, have a couple of kids and then BAM! Turns out she’s a seal and she’s off gallivanting with her seal buddies without even leaving a forwarding address for child support. Ain’t it always the way? Well, maybe not where you come from but in Ireland it’s practically an epidemic. The canon is full of selkie stories. Shit, if I had my druthers, every Irish exchange of marriage vows would include the sentence “And by the way, I am totally not a seal.”

Selkie stories are not exclusively Irish, of course. In fact, it’s probably more accurate to call them a Scottish tradition but you also find Selkie tales in the Faroe Islands and Iceland and despite the basic similarities (seal turns into a woman, marries a human) they run the gamut from tragic romances to horror stories. A common feature is that the Selkie has a seal-skin cloak, without which she can’t turn into a seal again. The fisherman hides the cloak from her for years, until one day their children are searching around in the attic, find the cloak and show it to her, at which point the Selkie’s all “Laters!” and makes her escape. A particularly grim version from the Faroese Island of Kalsoy has the Selkie return to her seal family, only for her human abductor to kill her husband and children in revenge. The Selkie then swears to basically kill every dude from his village until there are enough bodies to circle the entire island which she is still doing to this day. Then there are other stories where the marriage between the fisherman and Selkie is loving and consensual, but she has to to turn into a seal to save him from drowning and so can never return to live on land. The universal theme running through these stories is loss. Happiness is transient, loss is forever. Sounds like a fun cartoon to me!

To follow up the phenomenal success of Secret of Kells, director Tomm Moore basically created Song of the Sea, an to homage selkie stories and to his own childhood growing up in Ireland in the eighties. I also grew up in Ireland in the eighties, but I remember it being distinctly less magical.

“Well, apart from the whole “being transformed into a mouse” thing.”

(more…)

The Secret of Kells (2009)

Guys, I’ll be honest. I haven’t been this daunted by a review since Frozen. First you have the fact that this is an absolutely adored film with a lot of fans amongst readers of this very blog, and then you have the fact that the movie is Irish (well, an Irish-Franco-Belgian co-production) and the fact that I’m Irish (well, an Irish-Greek co-production) and that people seem to think that gives me some kind of special insight into this movie. I mean what are you expecting, that I’m just going to emerge from my turf cottage and impart some ancient Gaelic wisdom through the haze of my clay pipe?

“Yes, now quit stalling.”

Okay, okay. Special insight. Special insight. Let me see. Okay. You know that episode of the Simpsons where they’re crossing from the American embassy into Australia and Homer’s all “Look boy! Now I’m in America! Now I’m in Australia! America! Australia!” and so on and so forth? Imagine an entire culture built around that joke and you have the Irish. We’re obsessed with borders. OBSESSED. The places in space and time where one thing ends and another starts. Ask an American when summer begins and they’ll say “Ohhhh, round about Memorial day, I guess?”. Ask an Irish person when summer begins and they’ll say “01 May. Midnight. Greenwich Mean time. And not a second before.” Borders are where things get weird, where things aren’t one thing or another. Why is Halloween so creepy? Because Samhain occurs on October 31^st, right when Autumn ends and Winter begins on the Gaelic calendar. It’s at times like that when the…things in the other world can cross into ours. This fear and fascination with borders runs bone deep in the Irish psyche and ties into our historic relationship with the fairy realm. My wife is a dyed in the wool atheist, but she would not enter a fairy ring if you paid her. You just don’t do that.

“IT’S COMMON SENSE PEOPLE!”

Secret of Kells is a very Irish movie, and I don’t just mean because it draws so heavily on Irish mythology, art and history and features some of the greatest Irish actors to have been claimed as British by the English media at some point. It’s obessed with lines drawn between over here and over there, between light and dark, between faith and fear and between civilization and the wild wood.

It is also feckin’ smurges.

So. Background. Secret of Kells is the product of Cartoon Saloon, which began as a loose animator’s collective in 1999 and has now produced four full length animated features, two of which have been nominated for Academy Awards. Despite this incredibly small filmography, Cartoon Saloon is already considered to be on a par with Studio Ghibli. Clearly, Irish Animation has come a long way since Daithí Lacha.

HE WAS TERRIBLE.

But is the praise justified? Yes. Is the movie as good as YES. Does it YES. Whatever hypothetical question I could ask the answer is almost definitely YES.

Let’s take a look.

(more…)

MERCH!

My friends, the day at last has come when I cast off the lodestone of artistic credibility that I have carried on my shoulders for so long, and embrace the glorious freedom of unbridled capitalism.

I am selling out, and it feels so GOOD.

“Only capital can deliver freedom and prosperity to the working class!”

“But Mouse, what about your dedication to the eternal revolution!?”

“Only capital can deliver freedom and prosperity to the working class!”

“NYEEEEEEEET!”

I’ve partnered with the good folks at Ekki Ekki to bring you the Unshaved Mouse online store! Hoodies, mugs, T-shirts and more! We’ve got it all at the Unshaved Mouse store! That’s not our motto, simply a statement of fact. Simply go to the store, select a design, item (T-shirt, hoody, sweatshirt, tank top, mug or phone case) and colour and it’ll be printed to order and shipped straight to you.

What designs? At the moment we’ve got Unshaved Mouse, Spouse of Mouse, Mini-Mouse, Baby Mouse, Unscrupulous Mouse and BluCatt with hopefully more to come.

What better gift for your significant other/child/past self/evil doppelganger/mysterious foe who turned out to be Don Bluth in the end? It’s your only option really.

Mouse out!