Too rushed for regular reviews, so …
One by Bob Larkin. Very 1970s “sexy girl with a sword.”
Next, one by Gray Morrow. I saw this series on the paperback racks but never read it.
Art on this one is uncredited.
All rights to images remain with current holders.
I found this in the Nasher Art Museum gift shop during our recent visit.
Like many of the volumes in Abe Books’ Weird Books Room, I find this less of a weird book than a highly specialized one. Which is cool: even if it doesn’t grab me, I love that there’s a niche market out there for subjects like this. What does surprise me, though you can’t tell from the photo, is that it’s a very thick book. I think that’s because it’s got color charts like the one on the cover for most of the mushroom-based dyes, which takes up space.
Happy Friday!
Filed under Miscellanea, Reading
Walt Simonson’s 1980s run on Thor is one of the comic book greats. His six issue Wonder Woman arc, “Game of the Gods,” isn’t in the same league, but it is entertaining. It comes right between Phil Jimenez and Greg Rucka but I didn’t get around to blogging about it until (obviously) now. Creative credit goes to Simonson for plotting, Jerry Ordway for drawing and Adam T. Hughes for the covers.
We open with a gathering of mystics in the late 1800s who discover signs that the Shattered God is returning to Earth. Then Trevor Barnes, whom she dated during the Jimenez run (he decided being a superhero love interest was more than he could handle) begins worrying when he can’t reach her.
Cut to a funeral that culminates in Diana, in the white pantsuit associated with her depowered years at the end of the Silver Age (though her clothes in that era had a lot more variety), emerging from the grave. The funeral party then turns to monsters and tries to kill her, but fails. At the end of the issue she’s alive but amnesiac, and holding a clay figurine of an infant that the monsters coveted — funny, when she smooths over a cut in the clay arm, a cut on her own arm heals. What’s with that? Simonson said in an interview the inspiration was Hammer’s classic Kiss of the Vampire which opens with an ominous funeral.
The second issue went boldly where no scripter had gone before. Putting Wonder Woman in civvies is one thing, but cutting her hair? Even the depowered years never crossed that line. But you see, Diana soon finds she’s being followed; her shadows are human but possessed, and they wither and die once the possessor leaves them. Fortunately she stumbles into the salon of Becca Doherty, hair stylist and diehard WW fangirl (“You kick butt better than Superman!”). She gives Diana a crash course in who she is even if Diana doesn’t remember it. With Becca’s guidance, Diana successfully turns into Wonder Woman, but devoid of tiara or bracelets, still amnesiac (her attempt to make sense of her superhero life is hilarious). Meanwhile, the Amazons discover that Olympus is empty, the gods gone — hmm, do you suppose there’s a connection? And to strange things happening on Oa, which is situated at the center of the universe?
To prevent the pursuing possessor tracking her, Diana has Becca give her a new look, as you can see on the cover, then sets off to find answers. In the following issue, Diana, the Roman goddess, arrives on Themyscira riding Scylla, the mythological multi-headed sea serpent. Amped up by divine power, it petrifies them. During the War of the Gods crossover event the Roman and Greek pantheons merged but Diana opted to stay free rather than fuse with Artemis. Now she’s on Team Shattered God. Diana arrives on Themyscira, regains her memories and battles Scylla; still only half herself, she does well but ultimately has to flee. Meanwhile, the goddesses of Africa endow Trevor with some mysterious power and direct him to find Diana.
Over the next couple of issues we learn what’s at stake. The Shattered God was a primeval deity; when the God created the universe, it shattered said deity. Who didn’t mind much: the new universe was glorious and he was a part of it all. Except then he realized that countless other gods had sprung up, and he didn’t like it. Now his plan is to reverse creation, restore the primal atom, then start over. His will be the voice that says let there be light, his will be the mind that shapes reality — and he’ll get it right! Diana is a key part of his plan because of her unique makeup: clay and flesh, mortal and divine.
The plan works … almost. That clay image retains the essence of Diana’s god-given powers; without it, she can’t fulfill her role in the Shattered God’s plan. Off to Earth to find the figurine but of course there are surprises waiting and cards the Olympians and other gods have yet to play ….
Simonson’s Thor run is a classic. His Orion is far and away the best Fourth World material not written by Jack Kirby. “Game of the Gods” isn’t in the same league. Like I said, though, it is entertaining, particularly in the early amnesiac period — and amnesia’s enough of a cliche that ain’t easy. It’s less effective as we see more of the divine scheming on both sides of the game; as the final issue points out, some things happened that appear to make no sense (and probably don’t). Still, it’s livelier and more entertaining than the subsequent Greg Rucka run has been so far (I’m in the middle of Year Two).
All rights to images remain with current holders.
Filed under Comics, Reading, Wonder Woman
INVISIBLE WOMEN: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez covers similar territory to Defined by Design but it’s a much better book. Even on areas where I have some knowledge — that medical professionals are remarkably clueless and insensitive to women’s pains and health issues — Pérez has fascinating stuff to say. And there’s a lot I didn’t know at all. I will note, though, that she doesn’t deal with cis/trans gender issues and is apparently trans-exclusionary.
Pérez shows in detail how the assumption men — their bodies, their lives — reflect a norm and that we should therefore design the world around them works out badly for women. Transportation planning, for instance, assumes the priority for roads is getting wage-earners to work, not parents taking kids to school; the roads that result are harder to negotiate. Ditto mass transit. Snowplowing roads before sidewalks can lead to more accidents, which usually affect women, who are more likely to be on foot.
For another example, while there are extensive guides on how men should lift heavy weights on construction sites to minimize injury, there’s nothing comparable for women in home-health care, even though they routinely lift hefty human bodies several times a day. Safety equipment designed for the “typical” male body doesn’t fit women, making them unsafe. Voice recognition software often doesn’t recognize women’s voices (one techbro suggested they should take classes on how to adjust their voice).
Lack of data makes things worse: there’s simply no research (at least as of 2019 when this book came out) about how women lifting invalids might hurt or how to do it safely. Even medicine has gotten by for years ignoring women’s different reactions to medicine, disease and drugs. Sometimes that makes doctors blind to adverse effects, sometimes they miss out on treatments that would help women more than men. There’s some evidence Viagra massively reduces menstrual pain but nobody’s interested in funding further studies.
It’s a good but infuriating book. However it also makes me optimistic by showing how small changes can generate big results. A bus ticket that allow women two trips within an hour is beneficial as women often multi-task on trips (first to the doctor, then to their kid’s school, say) and that reduces costs. Sweden discovered that it could encourage men to take paid paternity leave by replacing “this block of leave can go to either parent” with “the husband has up to three months — use it or lose it.” Even with that knowledge, the book is still infuriating.
Like The Exorcist, ROSEMARY’S BABY by Ira Levin spends a lot of time on the mundane lives of our protagonist, Rosemary Woodhouse and her actor husband Guy. Landing a fabulous apartment and wriggling out of their lease. Rosemary decorating and knowing the somewhat obnoxious neighbors. Even after she’s impregnated by Satan, there’s still none of the overt horror we get in The Exorcist. Nevertheless it works where the other book did not. Part of that is that Levin is a slicker, better writer than William Peter Blatty but there’s more to it. I don’t quite have the time but I might reread it and try to figure out why.
There is a horror to the book but it’s very much a woman’s horror, fitting in with the Pérez book above. When Rosemary’s demonic pregnancy starts to hurt her, her doctor (part of the Satanic conspiracy) assures her it’s nothing to worry about, just push through. Her regular doctor writes her off as hysterical when she tells him there’s something monstrous going on. Guy sells out to the Satanists for a better career, helps dope Rosemary, then lets Satan rape her in her sleep. When she wonders about the damage, Guy claims he was horny so he didn’t let her passing out stop him (I was pleasantly surprised that a 1967 novel shows Rosemary completely grossed out by this). It deserves it’s status as a modern horror classic.
All rights to images remain with current holders. Top cover by Rachel Willey.
Filed under Reading, Undead sexist cliches
I used this quote from the Holmes story “The Yellow Face” about seven years ago. I’m finding it useful as I outline the next draft of Let No Man Put Asunder. Holmes makes the observation to reassure his client that getting answers about his wife’s strange behavior will be preferable to wondering and not knowing.
As in the earlier post, I think it applies slightly differently to writing: sitting and thinking and debating about how to rewrite the book is “indefinite doubt.” Making a decision and putting it down in the outline is “truth.” It’s a truth that may not hold up; when I review the outline or when I sit down and write the story out, what I outlined may not work. Nevertheless, it’s more productive than worrying whether moving a couple of big reveals up to halfway through the book will work or maybe I should leave it as they are. If I don’t put something down on paper, the next draft will never get written. Neither will the book.
The outline changes a lot of things from Draft #2. Perhaps most significantly, I trim my overcrowded cast. Mostly by having some of the supporting cast only appear for a couple of chapters, then fade away. Maybe it’ll feel odd to have them wander in and wander out and I’ll have to revise back or come up with something new. I can’t revise the manuscript until it exists so this is an improvement. I’ve also eliminated an encounter with my vampire mastermind and made her front person, Yuki do all the adversary work. The way the book is shaping up, Yuki will make a more interesting foe.
Another improvement (I hope) is moving those reveals. Placed early enough in the story, a partial reveal should make readers curious about what they’ve learned — what does it mean, how does it affect Paul and Mandy? That’ll accomplish more than holding them in reserve until the end. And ultimately, as with Southern Discomfort, my lead characters and the change in their lives will hopefully matter more and be more compelling.
If not, more revisions ahead. I can live with that. But if I’ve made serious progress on the problems in D2, maybe there will be fewer of them.
“Yellow Face” image by Sidney Paget, Southern Discomfort cover by Sam Collins, rights to it are mine.
Filed under Sherlock Holmes, Writing
I’m a fan of Gold Key’s old MAGNUS, ROBOT FIGHTER series by Russ Manning; as Dark Horse’s third TPB of reprints is out of my price range I recently tried finding it by interlibrary loan. What I got, instead, was MAGNUS, ROBOT FIGHTER: Flesh and Steel, collecting part of Dynamite’s 2014 revival by Fred Van Lente and Cory Smith.
Magnus starts out living in an idyllic Pacific Northwest community only to wake up and discover he’s been trapped in the Matrix, more or less. Trying to make sense of this, he enters civilization, winds up fighting robots and instead of becoming a hero becomes the target of an angry society with Leeja, his girlfriend in the original, the bounty hunter out to take him down.
The rationale behind all this is good but it’s so different from the original it qualifies as a Name Only reboot. That’s the burden of intellectual property in comics — nobody wants to let it lie fallow for long. But is there that much nostalgia for the character? Or given an earlier reboot from Valiant ran close to a hundred issues in the 1990s, maybe it’s not nostalgia but fondness for that relatively recent versions.
Whatever the reasons, it didn’t work for me. However I will give the creators a point for showing Magnus’ original fantasy world as multi-racial; too many fantasy settings like that default to a 1950s white suburban look.
AUTUMNLANDS: Tooth and Claw by Kurt Busiek and Benjamin Dewey feels very much like a reworking of Jack Kirby’s Kamandi, but a much better take than the Magnus reboot was. As in Kamandi’s “Earth After Disaster” it’s a world of talking animals but here they also practice magic. Magic that, as we learn in the first issue, is slowly dying away. A desperate attempt to reverse that brings The Great One, the founder of civilization, from the distant past — but instead of a wise sorcerer, it’s a butt-kicking pink-skinned almost hairless creature. Learoyd, the time traveler, is equally horrified to find himself in such a freaky future. Equally upsetting, the dominant civilization, dwelling in its flying cities, has been exploiting the ground-dwellers for a long time. Now it’s time for payback … an enjoyable read.
Art by Manning, Kirby and Dewey (top to bottom), all rights to images remain with current holders.
STUFF MATTERS: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World by Mark Miodownik tackles a variety of topics centering on the materials that surround us: how can a paperclip made of metal bend but not break? How can pure carbon appear as diamonds but also the graphite in pencils? Why does paper fold so well? What makes chocolate so good? Plus chapters on concrete, gels and glass.An interesting work
In the fourth Father Brown collection (I meant to read #3 first but I got it wrong), Father brown is visiting his friend Flambeau, thief-turned-detective, now happily married and retired, when one of the other guests asks THE SECRET OF FATHER BROWN — how is it possible he solves so many cases? Father Brown replies that he imagines what might drive him to commit a given murder, then reasons who would have the same motive … which doesn’t to fit the series at all, at least not to me. The stories themselves are fair but not great, other than “The Chief Mourner of Marne,” which I really like. Also Chesterton’s insights feel off, like asserting suburban residents have no interest in gossiping about their neighbors.
I’ve had ENIGMA, an eight-issue Vertigo series by Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo, on my “to read” list for a while. Discovering it available through my library’s Hoopla service, I checked it out … and didn’t finish it. Protagonist Michael Smith is shocked, utterly shocked when the Enigma and the Brain pop out of one of his beloved childhood comics — what can it possibly mean? After three issues of pretension (did you know killing a fly proves there is no god?) I gave up, flipped to the end, found I hadn’t missed anything.
Cover by Fegredo, all rights remain with current holders.
I’m not sure when I first read Stephen Jay Gould’s THE MISMEASURE OF MAN — the 1980s, maybe? — but it certainly hasn’t aged at all.
Gould looks back at the long history of efforts to measure human intelligence and to rank it, not merely between individuals but between groups — man vs. woman, black vs. white vs. Native American vs. Aborigine, native-born American vs. immigrant, upper class vs. lower. Why yes, there was a lot of racism involved; even people who were enlightened and liberal routinely accepted that the white Anglo-Saxon male was the summit of human evolution and obviously more intelligent than anyone else. Knowing this unsurprisingly biased the results. The great anatomist Paul Broca, for instance, admitted that women’s brains were smaller than men’s in proportion to their bodies but obviously, as we know women are stupid, their small brains must be the root cause.
Gould argues the fatal mistake in all the theorists he’s covering was the belief that intelligence was a single, fixed, quantifiable thing (a concept that eventually became “IQ”) and that it was an identifiable physical property of the brain, untainted by education, culture, environment, etc. And that attempts to measure it were always undone by bias; when it became obvious that IQ tests of immigrants reflected how long they’d been in America (and therefore exposed to American culture) the response was that obviously the immigrants who arrived earlier were the smarter, more ambitious types and the later arrivals were the degenerate dregs. This is wonkier than his previous books, getting much more into the technical weeds than they did, but it certainly makes its point well.
WILL EISNER’S NEW YORK is an anthology of multiple smaller works by the creator of the Spirit, all focusing on life in the Big Apple. One section tells stories built around windows, fire hydrants and other features of city life. Another looks at four ghosts haunting the site of the building where they died, even though it’s been demolished and replaced. “Invisible People” looks at the ways people can vanish in the teeming crowds; one, concerning a recluse who can’t convince anyone his obituary was wrong (they’ve never seen him, how do they know who he is?), shows similars fears of loss-of-identity to The Net.
It’s great stuff but not Eisner’s best stuff. Like his Life in Pictures, the tone is too bleak and miserable, plus the women are overwhelmingly unlikable and unsympathetic. It’s surprising, given the women of Eisner’s Spirit series are far more interesting and appealing.
Although the publisher lists Henry Kuttner as sole author of FURY, CL Moore says in the introduction that she collaborated on it (they did lots of work on each other’s stories throughout their marriage); Kuttner’s mark is on the Don’t Trust Authority scenes, hers on the Don’t Trust Love moments. Their story dissatisfied me as a teen, probably because it’s about an anti-hero against a decaying society and I wasn’t really ready for that. And Sam, “who was born into a world he had to smash before it smashed him,” isn’t a typical anti-hero.
Following the nuclear destruction of Earth, the survivors escaped to Venus and settled in domed colony cities under the Venusian oceans. A minority of people, affected by radiation, become immortal, and eventually rule the cities. They can be killed but they have advantages: decades of added experience and knowledge and the ability to make long-range plans. They’re also cautious: the confined, unchanging environment of the cities is destroying humanity’s spirit but the Immortals are unwilling to gamble on the long, dangerous challenge of colonizing the hostile Venusian surface land.
Sam was born an immortal but his mother died giving birth to him. His bitter father had Sam brought up among the lower classes. Sam becomes a tough, dangerous criminal, then slowly gains ambition, leading to throwing his weight behind the land-colonization efforts. The Immortals don’t know what to make of him but hope they can either use him or destroy him. And why does it sometimes seem there’s a guiding hand manipulating everything? There’s a lot of interesting ideas in this novel, and Sam makes a memorable protagonist, a guy who’s doing a good job but lacks many of the ennobling qualities anti-heroes often have.
Fury cover uncredited, top cover by Eisner. All rights to images remain with current holders.
If you imagine distracting events as the axe-men Luke Cage is busting on this cover —
— then unlike last week, the third axe-man did me in. Almost nothing got done this week.
I knew it wouldn’t be a stellar week because TYG had an out-of-town trip which left me with all the dog care (not a criticism of her — she does the same when I go out of town). Still it wouldn’t have been too bad, except early Sunday morning Trixie’s UTI returned. Peeing on the bed does tend to rob one of sleep. Monday I had to take her in; the vet confirmed it’s a different bacterial soup inside her from last time. This could mean some bacteria got antibiotic resistance or that her equipment is looser and weaker., leading to incontinence. Either way it’s treatable.
Happily the UTI doesn’t seem to affect anything else. She’s lively, up for walks, eats, snuggles. No small thing.
In the short term, however, I got minimal sleep Saturday and Sunday night (she got up early Monday morning too). Then Monday night I was too stressed with worry to sleep well and felt half-dead Tuesday. Need I say I didn’t get much done? Wednesday was better but not much better. TYG returned and I got more sleep Wednesday night. However Thursday I was still tired and we had a recheck for Trixie to go to.
Result? Almost nothing done. Some work on Savage Adventures and a final review of my two stories for Become the Sky. We’re shooting to get it done next month so that has to be a priority.
However, as I’ve blogged about several times over the years, some bad weeks are inevitable. Sooner or later you hit a week where everything goes wrong. This ain’t the first. Won’t be the last. The solution is to do better next week. This will be a little challenging — three different medical appointments for various things — but I shall do my best to rise to the challenge.
To end on a plus note, I sold several copies of various books so as always, thank you buyers! Hope you enjoyed them.
Cover by Billy Graham. All rights to image remain with current holders.
Filed under Doc Savage, Personal, The Dog Ate My Homework, Time management and goals, Writing
The Genre Book Club’s topic for September was “banned classics.” As I didn’t feel like reading anything heavy, I went with THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ because yes, it has been banned occasionally — most notably in the 1950s, on the grounds Ozma making sure no-one in her country goes hungry was communist propaganda! And I love the Oz series, so why not?
I’m guessing nobody reading this needs me to explain the story. Suffice to say, the book remains charming, both Baum’s story and W.W. Denslow’s delightful art (below) — though disagreements with Baum led to John R. Neill taking over as illustrator of Oz for most of the series.
What’s most remarkable is that Baum makes me believe in Oz. There’s no world-building, no magic system, yet everything works. When Dorothy and her friends wander into a country of living China dolls late in the book, there’s no set up, nothing that explains why this exists in Oz, but I don’t doubt that it does. That is way harder than it looks.
As a fan of the series as a whole, it’s also interesting to see how the beginning differed from what followed. The implication here is that Oz is an isolated area in the American wilderness, something not implausible in 1900 (Ozma of Oz establishes Oz is its own continent). The deadly desert that surrounds Oz is simply a desert here; later books establish it’s lethal to touch it. Oz appears to be the name of the wizard, not the country. But regardless of such Oz-nerdery, this is a wonderful book.
THE WIZARD OF OZ CATALOG: L. Frank Baum’s Novel, It’s Sequels, and Their Adaptations for Stage, Television, Movies, Radios, Music Videos, Comic Books, Commercials and More was my second book for McFarland (it’s still available) and my best seller: as I guessed when I proposed it, interest in Oz drew a lot of attention.
Rereading it now, it suffers from the fact so many of the adaptations have the same basic plot (something I handled better in Watching Jekyll and Hyde, I think). However it’s still an impressive, exhaustive job. And it’s fascinating to be reminded of the Oz legend’s global reach with Australian, English, Turkish, Russian, Brazilian and Japanese adaptations and spinoffs; of the nerdy enthusiasm of fanfic authors for giving even the most obscure characters their own stories; and the many strange takes out there such as Ken Kesey’s Twister, described as “the single weirdest production in this book, and that’s saying something.”
It’s also amazing how flexible the Oz story is. Take one person who’s stupid (or thinks they are), one person who’s heartless and a third whose cowardly and people know what’s going down. I’ve seen that adapted to sales videos, How To Use The Library training films, and a Fantasy Island episode.
All rights to images remain with current holders.
Filed under Reading
