Category Archives: Comics

BORN TO BE POSTHUMOUS: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery reminds me of my friend Ross’s observation that epic biographies should be reserved for people who live epic lives Four hundred pages isn’t epic by 21st century standards but it’s still too big for Gorey’s life.

Gorey was certainly a fascinating person, flamboyant in personal style and grotesquely whimsical in his art. I was surprised to realize he’d died in 2000 — his work seems very much out of another era, which is part of its charm. Despite all of which, his life story isn’t as interesting as the man himself. Dysfunctional family. Flowering in college. Endless details of the plays and the artists he liked, the books he read, the literary friends he made (I’m impressed he had the poet John Ciardi as one of his college teachers). As I often say, it’s not the author’s fault I’m not as interested in the details of the topic as they are; still, the details really don’t seem interesting.

A bigger problem is Dery’s determination to see Gorey as a gay icon. Gorey described himself as uninterested or asexual when the subject came up, though his history shows that may not have been the case. It’s a legit topic for a biographer but Dery really obsesses over it: look at his gay friends, his gay sense of style, his love of Oscar Wilde, his arch, gay sense of humor… by the time we get to any gay subtext in his art I no longer cared. A third, minor problem, is that like many nonfiction writers, Dery tries to make the subject bigger than it is — without Gorey, the graphic-novel industry would never have been open to something as gay as Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home! For various reasons, I think that’s nonsense.

G. K. Chesterton’s second Father Brown collection, THE INCREDULITY OF FATHER BROWN has a number of moments I love. There’s Father Brown explaining the difference between a real mystic and a fake (real mystics tell you everything and you’re mystified; fakes hide everything and when you see it you’re bored), his discourse on vigilantes in “The Arrow of God,” on dressing gowns as a perfect disguise in “The Dagger With Wings” and the killer’s motivation in “The Oracle of the Dog” (“If he had really known the money would come to him, I actually believe he wouldn’t have done it.”). Some of the stories, such as “The Doom of the Darnaways” don’t work half as well. Plus we have Chesterton’s religious biases, for example frowning over the 19th century American secularist Robert Ingersoll (more vicious an enemy of religion than Voltaire!). And did you know Jews were subject to fair less persecution in medieval Europe than Christians (for anyone who doesn’t know religious history, this is blatant anti-Semitic bullshit)? Overall I enjoyed it but I can see why some people avoid the series like the plague.

MARVEL MASTERWORKS: Deathlok the Demolisher by Rich Buckler (who did the striking cover here) and a variety of collaborators, including Doug Moench and Bill Mantlo, was one I read for this month’s Genre Book Club; the theme was cyberpunk and this 1974-76 series is very much proto-cyberpunk.

Luther Manning had been a capable military officer. When war hit the United States in the 1990s, he wound up stepping on a mine after which his CO, Major Ryker, rebuilt him as a cyborg (in a moment that’s now hilarious, the cyborg’s computer program runs on punch cards inserted into his prosthetic arm). “Deathlok” did a good job at first eliminating Ryker’s enemies, then Luther’s consciousness reasserted itself. Now he has two missions: take down Ryker and regain his humanity.

This has many cyberpunk elements: powerful computers, advanced tech, a decaying, violent urban setting, omnipresent surveillance. It’s most distinctive high-tech element is that even after Luther regains his mind, the computer is still in his head. The dialogue between Manning and the “‘puter” is the thing many people who glanced at the series on the stands remember.

In the Bronze Age, it was different from anything else out there, much bleaker than, say, the Atomic Knights (who were in reprint in Strange Adventures in the 1970s). There’s a lot I like, some nice touches (Luther’s in an interracial marriage) but the plotting is often wonky. Ryker’s girlfriend discover he’s a cyborg, then spends the rest of the series comatose, hooked up to a computer to enable more intuitive control of the weapons it commands or something like that. And she’s the chief woman character in the series for most of the run. And it’s really disappointing that while Ryker talks about merging with his computer and becoming “the God Machine,” the reveal is anticlimactic — apparently the entire series is about a turf war for control over New York, nothing more imaginative. A mixed bag, but one I’m glad to have read (this also includes Deathlok’s adventures in the present after his series ended, but I won’t get into that here).

Art by Gorey and Buckler, all rights to images remain with current holders.

When I read James Turner’s Rex Libris about an immortal librarian who’s a one-man army, I called it “enjoyable bizarre.” The sequel REX LIBRIS: The Book of Monsters isn’t as bizarre — it comes closer to a conventional urban fantasy about a monster-fighting hero — but it’s still a lot of fun. The plot involves a reference guide to monsters from which horrors are seeping out into the real world (“This kind of thing never happens with home renovation books.”) and Rex, in turn, gets sucked in and finds unpleasant surprises. While I’d have liked more library adventures, I’d definitely pick up V3 if one had happened. It didn’t.

DC FINEST: Hawkman — Wings Across Time collects the Silver Age Hawkman’s adventures from his debut in Brave and the Bold, then backing up Adam Strange in Mystery In Space, then the first 11 issues of his own book. I already have most of the material in the originals and the missing ones in the Showcase Presents Hawkman black and white book. However it’s nice to have the missing ones in color. All the stories were written by Gardner Fox; Joe Kubert drew the Brave and the Bold adventures, then the art passed to Murphy Anderson (who did the cover here).

The tales are an odd mix. Initially they have a strong pulp feel, then Hawkman and Hawkgirl — cops from the planet Thanagar, studying how Earth police battle crime — take on a string of ordinary thieves with gimmicks, not that different from some of Batman’s foes. In Hawkman proper, we get super-villains and SF mixed. A fun collection.

THE CURIE SOCIETY by Janet Harvey, Sonia Liao and Heather Einhorn has three teenagers recruited into the eponymous secret society of women scientists. Can the underage genius, the young rebel and the overpressured overachiever learn to work together, let alone become friends? How will they deal with an unethical former member offering an alternative approach?

I love the concept but this is the first in a series and spends too much time setting things up for the future rather than standing on its own. I could also have done without a reference to “PLO terrorists” in an early flashbacks — it feels like a gratuitous anti-Arab stereotype, especially as the terrorists play no role in the story otherwise (and the PLO was at the time the Palestinian government, not an active terrorist group). In fairness I am not the target audience.

When I read Walt Kelly’s The Best of Pogo back in 2017, I said I’d have preferred less reminiscences about the classic comic strip and more strips. Turns out our library has POGO: The Complete Syndicated Strips Vol. 1: Through the Wild Blue Yonder so my wish is answered. This covers the initial couple of years of the daily strip, first in the liberal paper The Star, then wider syndication, plus a separate section for the Sunday strips (which ran a separate continuity so a paper could run Pogo six days a week, Sundays only or both).

This really shouldn’t work for me; as a long-time Southerner, a strip stuffed with ignorant, unschooled Bayou folks would normally get my back up (even though they’re mostly good-hearted and sympathetic). However the adventures of lovable Pogo, gluttonous alligator Albert, misanthropic Porkypine and the others come off charming and funny instead.

Much like the same publisher’s Complete Peanuts run, this has several text features: a biography of Kelly, an explanation of how Sunday strips worked (the top two panels were unrelated to the rest so the paper could cut them for space), and explanations of some of the then-contemporary references. It’s a terrific volume though I think having to write and draw the Sunday strips to meet the space limitations worked against Kelly’s strengths. I’ve already reserved V2.

All rights to images remain with current holders.

Last month the Genre Book Club’s topic was cozies, which got me to read THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN by G.K. Chesterton. As I thought, reading this shows how much the style of cozies has changed over the years. Modern cozies like From Beer to Eternity have big supporting casts and play up community and setting. This short-story collection has two recurring characters — Father Brown and the thief turned detective Flambeau — and no fixed setting. The 1970s Father Brown TV series did likewise; the more recent TV show has a much larger supporting cast.

Chesterton is a frustrating man, capable of great insight, great turns of phrase (“Where do you hide a dead leaf? In a dead forest.”) and great bigotry. His anti-Semitism doesn’t figure into these stories but there’s a discussion in “The Wrong Shape” of how all Eastern art is unnatural, wrong and inherently creepy.

At the same time, Chesterton’s storytelling and sense of humor are otherwise delightful. In the opening story, “The Blue Cross,” Flambeau — still a thief — assumes this middle-aged, benign, obviously harmless priest will be easy prey. He’s genuinely shocked to discover that by listening to criminals make confession Father Brown is fully informed about the ways of the underworld (“You — you know about the spiked bracelet?”). Chesterton has a keen understanding of human nature (part of what makes “The Invisible Man” so good) when he’s not blinded by his own biases. Obviously this won’t work for everyone but it still has enough charm I’m glad I reread it.

BLACK MAX Volume III by Frank Pepper, Ken Mennell and Alfonso Font wraps up the saga of WW I ace Maximilian von Klorr who in V1 created a squadron of giant bats, obedient to his every command — now nothing will stop “Black Max” from driving the Allies out of Germany! Alas, British pilot Tim Wilson did indeed stop him, becoming Max’s hated nemesis, a clash that continued on into Volume 2.

V2 worked some changes on the formula and this volume goes even further afield (as I mentioned writing about Von Hoffman’s War, that sort of soft reboot is common enough in British comics). First Black Max strikes an alliance with Gratz, a German scientist with superweapons and an agenda of his own. After Max eventually falls into British hands, he strikes a new alliance with a subterranean race of bat people. It’s a bit too off-brand to be peak Black Max but it still works, though the continued lack of any female characters is not a plus. While the ending leaves the series open for further adventures (if you don’t see the body, they’re not dead) I’m not sorry it ended here,

In WHO COOKED ADAM SMITH’S DINNER? A Story of Women and Economics, Katrine Marçal takes issue with Smith’s explanation for how self-interest moves the world. According to Smith, the grocer and the butcher put dinner on his table because he pays them. This ignores that his widowed mother, who lived with him, cooked Smith’s dinner and otherwise cared for him his entire life.

This leads into a general discussion of how women’s economic contributions — caregiving, cooking, cleaning — are undervalued, if not invisible. This in turn makes it easy to undervalue women and delegate anything too soft and nurturing for ruthless capitalism as women’s work. It’s an interesting book, though some reviews say modern economics is better on these issues than Marçal claims.

Black Max art by Font; all rights to images remain with current holders

Ever since reading Jackie Morse Kessler’s Hunger, I’ve been meaning to follow up with the sequel. I finally got around to RAGE: Riders of the Apocalypse 2 which continues the premise of having Death — a Kurt Cobain lookalike — recruiting teenagers for the remaining three slots of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (though the protagonists of both books are girls). In Hunger, an anorexic becomes Famine; in this one, Missy is a teenager who relieves a boatload of emotion (bad relationship, death of her cat) by cutting; then Death shows up and suddenly she’s got a much bigger sword and the option to cut other people. The book establishes there’s a high turnover rate in War, Famine and Plague, hence the need for new recruits

From some of the reviews on Goodreads, Kessler does a good job capturing the impulses that lead to cutting. However where anorexia feels connected to Famine, cutting yourself hardly mirrors War. Nor does the book deal with war as much as the first book did starvation — it focuses much more on petty feuds, resentments and small-scale violence. Missy’s big struggles with bullying and slut-shaming at school, plus with her family, don’t connect with the main plot other than to add to her stress. The book does better in the straight Y/A stuff, which is not what I expect to enjoy (I am after all, way aged out of the target market). Not a bad book — I do like that Missy’s family really does have some dysfunction, rather than just her misreading everything, everyone was nice all along (a reveal I rarely like) — but a drop from the first too.

THREE LITTLE WISHES by Paul Cornell and Steve Yeowell is an amusing riff on both rom-coms and three wishes fantasies. Kelly, the protagonist, is a lawyer and a stereotypically sensible, head-centered romantic comedy protagonist, the kind who clearly needs to loosen up and become more of a manic pixie.

Acting on a suggestion by her best friend, Kelly impulsively buys the contents of a storage unit in an online auction, then discovers they include the bottled spirit of Oberon, the faerie king — and releasing him gives her yes, three little wishes. Or big wishes. Well, that can’t possibly go wrong, can it?

In this case, it doesn’t. Cornell asks us to imagine what if the protagonist uses their wishes wisely? What if you don’t regret what you wish for? What if being sensible and thinking before you act is a good thing? I don’t think I’m giving too much spoilers — the fun is in how the creators execute all this — but in any case, the story is fun and worth a look.

Covers by Nick Cardy and Yeowell, all rights to images remain with current holders.

It’s been a while since I read anything written rather than co-written by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. THE SERPENT IN THE GARDEN: Ed Grey and the Last Battle for England by Mignola, Ben Stenbeck and Dave Stewart reminds me how gloriously weird he is. Like a conversation between a disgruntled fae and the good half of Morgan leFay’s soul, which is now a goldfish (trust me, it makes sense).

The story, set in England after the apocalypse that ended the world in Ragna Rok, concerns Hellboy’s old foe the Gruagach regaining his former power; can Edward Grey, happy in retirement, defend England once again? I loved it.

FRANKENSTEIN: New World — Sea of Forever by Mignola, Christopher Golden, Tom Sniegoski and Peter Bergting is a sequel to Frankenstein: New World with Frankenstein and Lilja traveling across the post-apocalyptic Earth pursued by the monstrous Murk. It turns out some of the vampires hiding underground at the apocalypse survived; a trace of ancient evil found them and created the Murk, which exists to suck out the light of vril. As our two protagonists set out across the sea in search of a mysterious spirit, the Murk follows, despite the risk of being caught on the ocean in daylight. I’m enjoying this spinoff series — and both this and the Edward Grey book have been added to my Hellboy Chronology.

Kieron Gillen has turned out some great stuff, but he also wrote the dreary Rue Brittania. POWER FANTASY: The Superpowers by Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard is one that did not work for me. I’ve read that Gillen wanted to write a book with superheroes but no fisticuffs and in that he succeeded. However while the discussions of politics and power work in small doses, by the end of the book they’re quite tedious (I skipped over one character giving a long speech about the nature of power). I won’t be back for V2.

ARDEN HIGH: Twelfth Grade Night by Molly Horton Booth, Stephanie Kate Strohm and Jamie Green is the first in a series of Y/A takes on Shakespeare, set at the eponymous high school. As I love Twelfth Night (and played Malvolio years ago), I was hooked by the premise: new kid in school Viola crushes on Orsino, but she dresses very tomboy so he thinks she’s gay and so does Olivia, the school beauty he’s crushing on. Meanwhile Viola’s still dealing with the fact her identical twin Sebastian chose to stay in boarding school instead of changing schools with her.

Unfortunately the rom-com complications don’t get going until late in the game. Most of the book is about general high school stuff and, I assume, setting up for the series (the kids have fae classmates even though that doesn’t play the slightest role in the plot). I’m not the target audience but even if I was I think I’d find this a little disappointing.

THE CHARLTON COMPANION: A History of the Derby, Connecticut Publisher and Its Comic Books by Jon B. Cooke is a fascinating read even though I never got into Charlton’s output as a kid or a teen. Its offerings were much closer to DC and Marvel than, say, Harvey Comics or Gold Key but the look and quality of the printing were off-putting, as was the lettering (I learned from Cooke that for years the company avoided paying letterers and simply typed directly onto the finished pages). Nevertheless, this was fascinating — Charlton turns out to be more colorful than, say, Quality Comics.

Company founder John Santangelo was an Italian immigrant who broke into publishing by printing songbooks, a hugely popular field a century ago. His business was more profitable than most due to the simple expedient of not paying royalties; he was eventually caught, served some time and paid up from then on. He was a generally sharp operator; after a flood wrecked the company’s offices and printing press he slashed pay rates for freelancers without mentioning all the money they’d received as relief from the government

As the songbook market slowed, Santangelo turned to all sorts of other options: music magazines, skin magazines, paperbacks and of course comics. Love stories by the ton

Horror anthologies such as The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves.

Superhero books such as Steve Ditko’s Captain Atom and Blue Beetle, a short-lived line that inspired Watchmen (Dick Giordano, the former Charlton editor who convinced Moore to come up with new heroes instead, says in hindsight he wishes Moore had used the Charlton characters as they’d have a much higher profile now). And war comics, racing comics, kaiju comics such as Konga and Gorgo … While the pay rates were crap, that left Santagelo and his crew open to using a lot of newbies (Len Wein, Steve Skeates, Denny O’Neil and others who’d go on to bigger and better things) and several interviewees said they enjoyed the freedom that went with the low rates. Though I don’t see many examples of creative freedom involved — even Ditko’s heroes aren’t radically different from DC or Marvel. Was “creative freedom” just a euphemism for “I could turn my story in and never have to change anything”? Which a number of the creators freely admitted they were doing.

Charlton could have been much bigger than it was. It had an advantage in that as part of a bigger publishing company they had their own printing presses in house; over the years though, that meant it was more expensive for them to upgrade the presses than DC or Marvel, who outsourced. And Santangelo didn’t like expensive; he was cheap. One of the many anecdotes mentions one hallway that was almost unusable because it was stuffed with old, worn-out printing plates; rather than sell them and free up space, Santagelo was determined to wait until the scrap metal price rose.

A colorful company to read about, even if the comics turned me off.

All rights to images remain with current holders. Captain Atom and Blue Beetle covers by Ditko, the other two are uncredited.

More than a decade ago, I listed Steve Englehart’s Captain America run as one of my top 10 favorite comics. It was an unpleasant shock when he left the book, Cap-creator Jack Kirby took over and proceeded to ignore everything Englehart had developed in favor of doing his own thing (for reasons explained here, Kirby wanted to ignore the rest of the Marvel Universe as much as possible). I’ve been following Alan Stewart’s recounting of the Kirby run and I can safely say I don’t like it any better than I did at the time. While I admire a lot of Kirby’s Silver Age and Fourth World work, at this point nothing he was doing impressed me (e.g., Devil Dinosaur).

Discussion on Alan’s blog got me to check out CAPTAIN AMERICA’S BICENTENNIAL BATTLES, one of the big treasury-edition books DC and Marvel were putting out back then — bigger size, bigger price, more profit per issue.

The story, such as it is, has the mystical Mr. Buda challenging Captain America about his belief in America, then sending him across time to experience it: the Chicago fire, a boxing bought with heavyweight legend John L. Sullivan, helping John Brown’s son protect a runaway slave, inspiring Betsy Ross in her design for the new flag she’s working on. There’s no plot, just a set of set pieces followed by an uninspired Why America Is Cool message. Like most of Kirby’s work after his return to Marvel, this had my wondering why people thought Kirby was such a genius.

I had more fun with ULTIMATE OZ UNIVERSE: The Lost Lands by Cullen Bunn and Mike Deodato. It’s the kick off of a new Oz series, adapting Land of Oz with Ozma of Oz to follow (I’m curious if they thought the ur-book was done too much, worried about flak from MGM which made the ’39 movie or what). It looks good —

— stays close enough to the story to satisfy me and the changes (adding a special ops Oz team working for Glinda, amping up Mombi’s powers) don’t annoy me. The exception is that I’d have preferred the Hungry Tiger and Cowardly Lion as animals rather than biped beast-men, and that in stripping Wogglebug of his personality as pompous academic, they’ve made him utterly blad. I’m also surprised given the reveal, that they don’t lean into the trans overtones. Still, a solid start.

Art by Kirby and Deodata, all rights to images remain with their owners.