Category Archives: Comics

(Spoilers on the final book, Coincidence).

I picked up Meg Cabot’s AVALON HIGH because it’s supposed to be an Arthurian reincarnation story set in high school. Unfortunately the first quarter of the book has no plot, just the protagonist telling us about her life and why she’s soo fed up with her parents. Then she meets a handsome fellow student who couldn’t possibly be interested in her …I didn’t bother to go further. It makes me appreciate I Kissed Shara Wheeler which has an engaging voice and interesting plot, both of which were lacking here.

CAPTAIN AMERICA, SYMBOL OF TRUTH: Pax Mohannda by Tonyi Onyebuchi and Ig Guara has Sam Wilson — operating as Cap while Steve Rogers (I believe) also operates as Cap — battle to against a white supremacist movement in Mohannda, a Wakandan neighbor that took in refugees when Wakanda collapsed. Now Sam’s deadly enemy the White Wolf will bring the same chaos down on Mohannda’s refugee population … (which leads into the villain’s role in the god-awful Cold War crossover). The story didn’t grab me and as one review said, it’s annoying that fictional African countries are apparently all failed states now.

BABA ALI AND THE CLOCKWORK DJINN by Danielle Ackley-McPhail is the winner of this post, a good steampunk fantasy in which a Middle Eastern artificer working under Charles Babbage returns from England when his father Dies Mysteriously, then has to deal with not only his jealous brother but the Forty Thieves and the blood feud Ali didn’t know they have with his family. This suffers from not being well-knit — Ali’s sojourn in England doesn’t really fit with the rest of the book — but it works well overall.

FIVE GHOSTS: The Haunting of Fabian Gray by Frank Barbiere and Chris Mooneyham starts off great. Fabian is a treasure hunter who’s acquired the powers of five fictional characters (Robin Hood’s archery, Sherlock Holmes’ deductive genius) — but he doesn’t understand how his powers work, some of his enemies do and now they’re moving against him. However it got less interesting as it went along (the origin behind all this was unremarkable) — not unreadable but not so compelling I’m rushing to get the next TPB.

After enjoying David Ambrose’s Superstition I checked his COINCIDENCE out of the library but it proved a turkey. It starts out in the same vein as his other book as George, a writer, researches the odd nature of coincidence and synchronicity. When coincidence introduces George to his exact double they agree this will be a great hook for the book — and say, wouldn’t it be fun to swap identities to surprise the protagonist’s agent?

Oops. The double is a criminal and by trading places he ensures his enemies will whack George while he takes over his life, with some improvements: George’s wife is about to divorce him but the prenup means he’ll get much more money if she dies while they’re married — so as step one, the double frames her lover for murder. Now we’re in solidly noirish territory, but then hen George shows up and reveals the reason they’re doubles is … reality is a computer program and a code glitch has duplicated them! That’s too cliched to work for me, though it wasn’t holding me even before that.

#SFWApro. Covers by Alison Reimhold (Shara Wheeler) and Mooneyham. All rights to images remain with current holders.

THIS ONE SUMMER by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki is an odd graphic novel set during summer vacation at the beach: while it deals with familiar coming of age material it doesn’t resolve any of them, sticking to being literally a slice of life from that single summer. Readable but unsatisfying.

STUMPTOWN: The Case of the Girl Who Took Her Shampoo But Left Her Mini by Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth (who provides the cover) is the first in a series about Dex Parios, a PI with a major gambling habit and a shortage of cash to cover her debts. When a casino owner hires Dex to find the owner’s runaway granddaughter it soon turns out things are not what they seem (“She took her shampoo but left her car?”). Very well done, even though crime comics aren’t my thing.

The original X-Men team was one of Marvel’s least successful series and X-Men came to an end in 1970 (it continued to do a steady business in reprint until the new team emerged in ’75).  In late 1971, Marvel tried spinning the Beast off into his own series in AMAZING ADVENTURES with Gerry Conway writing the first issue, then newbie Steve Englehart going on to write the remaining five (with Thomas Sutton on art) before Killraven took over as the book’s resident hero. I rank Englehart as one of the Bronze Age’s best writers but as he quipped later, he wasn’t the writer who could make a commercial success of Marvel’s mutants.

In the opening issue (collected in multiple TPBs even though I read it on the Marvel app), Hank goes to work as a biochemist, gets a girlfriend and ends up mutating himself into the furry shape he would keep until the 1980s and has switched back and forth on since. Horrified, and unaware his girlfriend is a spy working against him, Hank hides his appearance behind a latex mask and gloves then stripping down to his fur to battle the inevitable supervillains who show up, such as the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants on the John Romita cover to #13. The series was readable but nothing I’d miss; its main claim to fame is that Englehart added Marvel’s once-popular teen character Patsy Walker, all grown up, to the cast, the first of many characters he’d resurrect in coming years.

THE COMPLETE ADVENTURES OF THE MOON MAN: Vol. 1, 1933 by Frederick C. Davis collects some of the stories of the eponymous Robin Hood, stealing from criminals and frauds (like a couple whose charity bash will go mostly to enrich themselves) in an opaque helmet of one-way glass, then giving to those in desperate need of rent payments or medical care. Under the glass he’s a cop, Stephen Thatcher, who can’t bring himself to believe the law matters more than people’s well-being — but he knows his partner (and future father-in-law) doesn’t think the same; if Steve’s ever caught, it will be the end of everything. I’ll catch the remaining two volumes eventually.

#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders.

DR. STRANGE: A Separate Reality by multiple writers (primarily Roy Thomas, Gardner Fox and Steve Englehart) and multiple artists (most notably Gene Colan and cover artist Frank Brunner) is both a good read (mostly) and an interesting look at the transition from the Silver to the Bronze Age. It starts out as Thomas and Colan try transforming Strange into more of a superhero figure (mask, secret identity) but that doesn’t save his book from biting the dust as the 1960s come to a close. This leads to Dr. Strange retiring then getting revived for a new and rather uneven story arc involving a thing/person/place/entity named Shuma-Gorath. Steeped in evil, it/he/she/they are rising from sleep and other dark forces are swarming after it like remoras with a shark; but what is Shuma-Gorath’s end-game? And can Stephen Strange thwart it?

By the end of the arc, Englehart and Brunner are the new creative team. While they were only on the book together for about a dozen issues, they’re a classic piece of 1970s trippy mysticism (as many people have described it) as Dr. Strnage travels in time, witnesses the birth of the universe, then gets sucked inside the Orb of Agamotto for a journey into unreality. While stretches of the book are not good, the best bits make this worth buying.

Hellboy in Hell seemingly wrapped up the series chronologically by having Hellboy transform Hell as he did the Earth. In KOSHCHEI IN HELL by Mike Mignola and Ben Stenbeck, the Russian sorcerer, has settled comfortably into the empty netherworld, at peace for the first time. Then Sir Edward Grey’s ghost (who gets a Mignola-drawn story of his own) nudges Koshchei into taking a stand against Hellboy’s demon half-sister, who seeks to resurrect Pluto, the primal lord of Hell; strange things result, including the appearance of several familiar faces among the damned. Weird in the way the best Hellboy is weird and probably laying the groundwork for further adventures. Mignola did the cover.

Up on the surface of peaceful New Earth we have FRANKENSTEIN: New World by Mignola, Christopher Golden and Thomas Sniegoski.  A sequel to Frankenstein Underground, this has a young girl in the Hollow Earth drag a reluctant Frankenstein to the surface. Wouldn’t you know, some sort of unspeakable evil shows up at exactly the same time? It seems even the end of the world isn’t the end of the adventures … Better than the predecessor volume.

HELLBOY AND THE BPRD: 1957 by Mignola and multiple co-creators has the typical weirdness of these retcons to the early years — werebeasts, a Thunderbird, a haunted sawmill and an evil medium. Nothing as wild as Koshschei in Hell but good fun.

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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.

If you think that sounds silly, please ignore the following cover by Robert Gibson Jones.And here’s another Jones cover with an unusual flying steed.
To balance that, here’s one of those weird anthology covers from the 1960s, courtesy of Robert Foster.
And here’s a contemporary book cover by Barye Phillips. From all the crying on the cover, I’m guessing that being “girls on the make” doesn’t work out well for them.
#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders.

HELLBOY IN LOVE by Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden and Matt Smith is set in the late 1970s, as Hellboy meets archeologist Anastasia Bromfield  and helps her protect her latest find from a gang of goblins. Anastasia is confident, reckless and quite taken with her defender as they investigate sinister shadow puppets and an ancient, accursed skull. Hellboy’s a lot less confident when it comes to women but love blooms — and much to my surprise, stays in bloom at the end of the book (I imagine we’ll learn what happened to Anastasia eventually). A mixed bag but some fun stuff in it.

LUNAR NEW YEAR LOVE STORY by Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham tells the story of Valentina, a Vietnamese-American teenager who becomes more pessimistic about love the more she learns about her family history. Can the art of lion dancing and the interest of a couple of boys make her change her mind — and her heart? A l0w-key, gentle story, but it worked for me.

CITY OF EROS: New York City, Prostitution and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 by Timothy J. Gilfoyle does a fine job studying an age when New York was a massive redlight district where women sold sex part-time and full-time, respectable businessman profited by renting out brothels (hookers had the money to pay their rent regularly), cops turned a blind eye and coutnless ordinary citizens had to deal with sex workers in the house or apartment next door. A very detailed look at the various ways sex was sold, the types of women who sold it, and reactions ranging from machismo (“sports” whose wild life was proof of their manliness) to reformers to anti-sex arguments that every prostitute was a sex-trafficking victim — no woman would choose sex work as an option! While sex work obviously hasn’t vanished, it shrank in the 20th century, primarily because it became easier for women to find decent-paying jobs. Makes me wish I were writing something where I could use this as a resource.

SEX WORKERS, PSYCHICS AND NUMBERS RUNNERS: Black Woman in New York’s Underground Economy by LaShawn Harris makes an interesting sibling to City of Eros, though it suffers from heavy, pretentious academese that made it hard for me to read closely. That said, Harris argues, as Gilfoyle does, that black women working in illicit occupations ranged from hardcore professionals to part-timers who turned to sex work or numbers running when they needed to pay the rent. For black women, however, it was more complicated as they dealt with racism from cops and criminals and outrage from some of their own people who expected black women to strive for model-minority status. A number of the women profiled, however, didn’t see any conflict between their work and being a good “race woman” — numbers queen Stephanie St. Claire was an outspoken civil rights activist, for instance. Interesting despite Harris’ writing style.

#SFWApro. Cover by Matt Smith, all rights remain with current holders.

THE BLACK CANARY ARCHIVES (by multiple different creators) collects Dinah Drake Lance’s adventures from when she was a bad-girl thief crashing into Johnny Thunder’s Golden Age strip through her own adventures after she got his slot in Flash Comics through a handful of Silver Age yarns including an attempt to launch a regular series with her and Starman (see here for context).

As comics writer Steven Grant once observed, the Golden Age stuff is a reminder that all the old stuff wasn’t golden. Canary never gets an origin, nor a real explanation how or why she swings from thief to costumed hero, other than, presumably, her popularity. The two team-up tales are fun but the last story, by Denny O’Neil, is painfully sexist (good thing Green Arrow taught the Black Canary to never, never give up!). Then there’s the utterly insane Flash Comics story were Dinah saves herself from death by using her magical canary-summoning powers to save the day (see below)!

Because I’m a comics nerd I’m glad to have this but I’m not sure I’d recommend it to someone who isn’t.

EMPRESS OF ART: Catherine the Great and the Transformation of Russia by Suan Jaques shows unsurprisingly that there was more to Catherine the Great than her infamous sex life (though like many royal figures of either sex, hers was lively). Along with expanding Russia’s empire Catherine was an art enthusiast whose accomplishments included spectacular architecture, snatching tons of classic art from under rival European collectors and paying for stunning jewelry. Unfortunately the book turns out to be just a big listicle of art accomplishments and that didn’t do it for me.

THE WOMAN WHO SPLIT THE ATOM: The Life of Lise Meitner by Marissa Moss is a biography of the Jewish physicist who partnered with German chemist Otto Hahn on nuclear research (he needed someone who understood what was happening at the atomic level), watched “Jewish physics” become an anathema, fled to Sweden at the last possible minute and then in correspondence with Han suggested the solution to a baffling problem. Hahn couldn’t figure out why bombarding uranium with neutrons sometimes created a lighter atom, barium, instead of heavier transuranics; Meitner became the first person to realize the answer, that the bombardment was splitting the atoms in two.

Unfortunately Meitner didn’t share Hahn’s nobel for the discovery — Hahn was a Nazi who by that point didn’t want to acknowledge his association with a Jew, and even after the war was shitty about giving her credit (Beginning or the End gives him all the credit). However she wasn’t as unrecognized as I assumed she’d be, being widely respected in her field during her lifetime, which was nice to see. A Y/A bio but suitable for adults.

#SFWApro. Art by Murphy Anderson (t) and Carmine Infantino, all rights to images remain with current holders.

 

THE RITUALS OF DINNER: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities and Meaning of Table Manners by Margaret Vissers is packed with information about the different ways we approach eating together — who you invite to a dinner party, whether it’s acceptable to refuse, the purpose of the meal (is it to honor your guests? To flaunt your wealth?). and culture-specific quirks (in one African tribe you accept even a single nut with both hands because using one hand implies it’s unimpressively small). Visser is less informative when explaining underlying meanings — did you know the hamburger is the least social meal because a circular food embodies self-sufficient completeness? A bigger problem is that her writing style drones in my head, making the book a slog to get through.

THE PREY OF GODS by Nicky Drayden is set in a near future South Africa where even poor kids have some sort of service robot attending them. A centuries old demigoddess launches a scheme to trigger the latent divine powers the story hovers awkwardly on whether we’re talking real magic or some kind of metagene) in others, thereby creating legions she can either lead to glory or drain for food. Can an alliance including a trans politician, a couple of doped up kids, a ten-year-old and a superstar singer with multiple sclerosis stop her? Not as good as Drayden’s later Temper, but still enjoyable.

SHOWCASE PRESENTS METAMORPHO by Bob Haney and various artists (most notably Ramona Fradon, but also Joe Orlando and Sal Trapani) collects DC’s Element Man’s Silver Age series, his try-out issues in Brave and Bold and team-ups with Batman, the Justice League and the Metal Men.

In the opening issue, legendary adventurer and soldier of fortune Rex Mason accepts a million dollar mission from corrupt plutocrat Simon Stagg: recover a meteoric fragment known as the Orb of Ra from an ancient pyramid. If Mason succeeds he’ll finally have enough money to marry Stagg’s daughter Sapphire and walk away from her power-hungry dad — but Stagg is determined to see that doesn’t happen. Accompanied by Java, a hulking man-ape Mason recovered from an Indonesian bog (contrary to later stories, he’s not a Java Man), Rex enters the pyramid where Java, on Stagg’s orders, takes the orb and leaves Mason trapped inside. Encountering the meteor from which the orb was forged, Rex Mason changes …

It’s difficult to capture now, when freaky looking superheroes are the norm, just how bizarre Metamorpho looked on the cover; his shapechanging, too, looked weirder than anything in comics. The stories are a mix, ranging from dark and hardboiled to full-on camp. I was a fan, though like most Silver Age stuff, YMMV.

Ultimately the book didn’t have the sales to last. Haney tried shaking things up with a three part arc that apparently wrote Sapphire Stagg and the rest of the supporting cast except for the annoying character Element Girl. The axe fell on the comic after Part Two, below, aired (cover by Jack Sparling). When Metamorpho returned four years later, Element Girl and the reboot were forgotten in favor of the old status quo.Chip Zdarsky wrote and drew PUBLIC DOMAIN, a five issue miniseries about the Dallas family, whose patriarch Sid is the co-creator of the iconic hero Domain (a minor complaint I have is that we never learn why he gets such an odd hero name). Sid’s been shut out of the millions in movie money that the company makes off Domain but now it appears there’s evidence all the rights belong to Syd — can he win back what he made?

On the plus side, the family are well-developed characters. On the downside this five-issues-and-done series wraps up everything a little too easily (problem gamblers, for instance, frequently don’t quit because they got out of the hole and settled their debts), making this little more than a fan fantasy — wouldn’t it be great if Jack Kirby/Bill Finger/Steve Ditko got a fresh chance to create Fantastic Four/Batman/Spider-Man stories, and got the money they deserved? Well, yes, but that doesn’t make for a worthwhile story.

#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders.

Via the Hoopla service, I downloaded some graphic novels from my library for Christmas —

SCROOGE AND SANTA by Matthew Wilson and Josh Kenfield has Ebenezer’s descendant Stephen kidnapping Santa to make Stephen’s company the go-to for Christmas gifts — sure, Christmas just picks people’s pocket once a year, but it’s not so bad if you’re the pickpocket, right? Stephen’s assistant Bonnie discovers Ebenezer’s reform didn’t take (once he learned how much he spent that first Christmas, he snapped back to being a miser) and that even though Stephen gets an annual visit from the three ghosts, he’s not reforming either. Can she change things around?

This was amusing, but not quite amusing enough. I did like that Bonnie isn’t in love with Stephen, she just likes him despite himself, and some of the riffing on Dickens is fun; when Christmas Past shows Stephen his youth, for instance, Scrooge snorts that he’s already lived through it so why would reliving it change him.

KLAUS isn’t what I expect from Grant Morrison (art by Dan Mora) but Morrison often does stuff I don’t expect. Here, he’s telling a sword-and-sorcery version of Rankin-Bass’s Santa Claus is Coming to Town (and sword-and-sorcery Santa has already been done in Seabury Quinn’s story “Roads”) — the eponymous woodsman and toymaker discovers the town where he grew up is now a dystopia where toys are banned, kids are miserable and the evil baron is forcing all the men to labor in the mines, digging for something — or someone … This was a lot of fun; I know there are sequels but I haven’t read them yet.

BATMAN: Noel by Lee Bermejo is a lot less successful. Set in a vaguely Dark Knight Returns future where both Batman and Bruce Wayne are hard and cold, this presents the Bat as the Scrooge to a hapless Cratchett working for the Joker out of desperation (he has a kid to take care of). It’s a good idea but the execution didn’t win me over.

Marjane Satrapi is best known for Persepolis but her EMBROIDERIES is also very good. Marjane and her female relatives sit around discussing everything from the merits of opium to being deflowered on your wedding night (or convincing your husband he has) and whether European men are terrible lovers. Lighter than Persepolis but there’s always something fascinating in the kind of story where women talk without men.

There’s little fascinating in CAPTAIN AMERICA: Sentinel of Liberty by Jackson Lanzing, Collin Kelly and Carmin Carnero though as I mentioned over at Atomic Junkshop, it was something close to a hate read for me. Cap discovers that his shield’s symbol is really the symbol of the Outer Circle, a shadowy conspiracy that’s been manipulating the world for a century, and manipulating Bucky to keep Cap under control. There were a number of little moment I liked but more that I didn’t (click over to my in-depth discussion if you want details).

HELLBOY: Castle Full of Blackbirds by Mike Mignola, Angela Slatter and Valeria Burzo didn’t do it for me either. The Return of Effie Kolb introduced us to Appalachian witch-girl Sara May Blackburn, who ended the book attending a mysterious magical school for girls in the Big Apple. This book follows Sara as she begins her studies, makes friends, but wouldn’t you know there’s some mysterious and sinister secrets behind the school’s friendly facade?

This frustrated me, constantly jumping from Sara to people having mysterious conversations or watching her mysteriously to the point I lost track of what was going on, who was who or why things were happening (though the backstory of the school was good). Not one of the stronger series entries.

#SFWApro. Covers top to bottom by Kenfield, Mora and Wylie Beckert, all rights to images remain with current holders.