IRON MAN: FORCE OF ARMS by Stan Lee (Archie Goodwin comes in at the end) and Gene Colan is the second Epic volume of the Golden Avenger’s adventures so the reproduction looks great and Gene Colan’s art is amazing. His plotting — “Marvel method” had the artists doing a lot of that — is less so; it’s obvious in some storie that he’s trying to fill space with as little plot as possible, like one where Iron Man and Titanium Man both spend the story flying down to Washington DC. The subsequent clash when they arrive makes up for it. Then there’s the story on the cover here, one of those rare moments where a Silver Age superhero kills.
Things improve as the book approaches the end, starting with the introduction of SHIELD agent Jasper Sitwell, Whitney Frost and Goodwin taking over the scripting (I’ve written about reading his run in B&W here). Overall it isn’t A-plus material but it’s at least an A-minus.
I thought I’d blogged about Grace D. Li’s PORTRAIT OF A THIEF before but as I can’t find it when I search … The book has a great set-up, with a Chinese billionaire recruiting five Chinese-American college students to steal back some Chinese artifacts from museums that took possession with, shall we say, dubious provenance. A caper story with a serious subtext appealed to me but this is more a serious literary novel about the immigrant experience, how they feel about America, their relationship to China the Mother Country etc. And once it became serious the absurdity — why is a billionaire recruiting college kids when she can hire professionals? — made the story come apart at the seams.
BLACK ORDER was the third of James Rollins’ Sigma Force stories and shows his usual breathtaking flare for pulp action. Sigma agents are dealing with Nazi book thieves, monsters in the veldt and a plague of madness in Tibet and the book jumps from cliffhanger to cliffhanger with an energy and skill I greatly admire. While I don’t buy the big super-science reveal, his speculation about the nature of evolution was outrageous enough to be entertaining. On the down side, while he has some distinctive supporting characters his core cast is generic — I couldn’t tell one Sigma agent from the other except by which woman they’re in love with. He’s also got too many mistakes in the infrastructure supporting the reveal — the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, for instance, is not the same thing as quantum indeterminacy. Which explains why even though I enjoy Rollins’ books (here’s another), I don’t seek them out.
STORM OF LOCUSTS: The Sixth World Book Two is Rebecca Roanhorse’ superior sequel to Trail of Lightning wherein Maggie the Godslayer discovers a fellow Diné creating a cult of human locusts to avenge his own outcast status among their people. Stronger than the first book, though really rushing to establish Maggie’s found family; apparently not strong enough as we never got the sequel the ending sets up for.
ONE-SHOT HARRY by Gary Phillips is a historical mystery set in 1963 Los Angeles. The eponymous Harry is a news photographer and Korean War vet who begins nosing around after the suspicious death of a fellow Korean War veteran. This immerses him in black politics, gets him in bed with a beautiful woman and introduces him to a shadowy cabal of white puppet-masters manipulating politics for what they insist is the greater good. The mystery peters out badly without enough answers (I’m guessing it’s seeding for the sequels) but the period stuff is well done as is the black perspective on the era.
#SFWApro. Cover by Colan, all rights to image remain with current holder.
