Tag Archives: Andre Norton

BLACK WIDOW: Sting of the Widow (by multiple creators) starts with Natasha’s 1964 debut in Tales of Suspense — then leaps forward to 1970 when a Spider-Man crossover served to introduce readers into her new series ——which as you can see debuted the leather jumpsuit that’s defined her look ever since. Credit goes to Spidey artist John Romita, who modeled the new look not on Emma Peel (a popular assumption) but the Golden Age hero Miss Fury.

The new take on Natasha is that having broken up with Hawkeye she’s trying to bury her past by living as a glamorous jet-setter (no explanation on the source of her considerable wealth) only to decide she needs action and danger more. While she’s relied on her weapons and her allies (Hawkeye, Crimson Guardian and others) in the past, this establishes her as a deadly martial artist. Which is, again, very Emma Peel though it also reminds me of Wonder Woman’s depowered years.

After a fairly stupid Hero vs. Hero fight with Spider-Man, she launches into her new series with Gary Friedrich scripting and Gene Colan as the primary artist. An activist group, the Young Warriors is taking over an inner city building owned by a corrupt NYC politician and Natasha winds up helping them, though pushing them to handle things through the system as much as possible (like a lot of “relevant” stories back then, it wants to be radical, but not too radical). It also has seriously dimwitted villains, as in they tie up the Black Widow but still leave her with her “widow’s sting” ray-blasting bracelets.

After guest writer Mimi Gold wraps up the story, Roy Thomas takes over as new scripter (Don Heck unfortunately replaces Colan on the art). Thomas’ story arc involves youth but less controversy — it’s a group of street kids and runaways who’ve been manipulated by a seemingly benevolent father figure into turning criminal (that one goes back to Oliver Twist). Natasha also has to deal with her growing worry that everyone close to her dies, which comes off a little overwrought. The main significance is that her chauffeur Ivan is elevated to a much larger role. He’s the one who’s watched over her since he found her as a toddler in WW II; he has the brute strength to be a formidable fighter; and he spouts cliches out of 1930s films because that’s where he learned English. He’d remain Natasha’s trusty sidekick all the way through the Bronze Age.

The book wraps up with Natasha guest-starring in Daredevil after her series went belly-up. This proved more successful as they became lovers and crimefighting partners for the next four years, with Black Widow getting cover credit alongside DD for some of that time.

Overall the material is readable. Not classic, and better for art than story, but I enjoyed it.

THE BOOK OF SPIDERS AND SCORPIONS by Rod Preston-Mafham is a very good overview of spiders (if you’re a scorpion-phile they get much less attention) covering biology, anatomy, classification, predation, web-slinging, life cycle, mating rituals, and weaponry (everything from a spider that spits sticky gumto one that can spit poison eight inches). I thought this would be a lot more basic than it was, but I’m very pleased with it.

THE X-FACTOR by Andre Norton has an alien freak (too big, clumsy and slow-witted for his elegant race) steal a spaceship to get away, crash on an alien planet and confront telepathic cats, imperiled archeologists, space pirates and the half-buried city of Xcothan. This is pretty good — Xcothan comes off eerie enough I’d incorporate it into my D&D campaign if I still had one — but so little explanation of anything it feels like it should have been Part One instead of a standalone. The ending is similar to several short stories in which a lonely disabled protagonist gets to live in a magical fantasy world, but at novel length it didn’t work as a payoff (though it felt less full of disability cliches than some of the shorts).

#SFWApro. Covers top to bottom by Jack Kirby, John Buscema and Gil Kane. All rights remain with current holders.

I was puzzled why a theater historian would write WEIRD AND WONDERFUL: The Dime Museum in America, but Andrea Stulman Dennett’s book reveals that theater was a very large part of the 19th century dime-museum industry. As she details, early attempts by American museums — mostly collectors showing off their cabinet of curiosities to the public — to charge admission flopped. P.T. Barnum, however, found the magic formula, a mix of science, freak show and humbug, all carefully packaged to be family friendly (which brought in a female audience as it was a safe place women could go together).

Museums turned to adding theater because they could swap a new play in much faster than replacing a midget or a dog-faced boy; over time, they also added waxworks, novelty acts and even short film, making them the launching pad for vaudeville, cinemas and carnival sideshows. While the offspring outlasted the parent, Dennett points out that Ripley’s Believe It Or Not appealed to the same sense of wonder that had audiences flocking to Barnum and others, and ran well into the late 20th century.

AMERICAN COMICS: A History by Jeremy Dauber does a good job discussing how sequential art goes back a long way (do William Hogarth’s prints such as A Rake’s Progress constitute the first comic strip?). Dauber then traces the history from political cartoons through comic strips to the Golden Age of comic books … and after that everything became familiar so I stopped.

That is not the author’s fault but I did find some extremely bad errors. Luke Cage was not Power Man when he started out (see the Billy Graham cover here) and the Barbara Gordon Batgirl was a separate character from the one who appeared a few years earlier (if that’s not what Dauber meant, he wrote it poorly). So I’m even happier that I didn’t bother to go through it all.

GARAN THE ETERNAL is an oddball Andre Norton collection that includes two Witch World shorts; her first published story, “People of the Crater”; and it’s prequel, written years later, “Garin of Yu-Lac.” Comparing the two Garin stories shows how much Norton improved as a writer. The first one is an A. Merritt-style Lost World story but while Norton knows the elements it should include, she can’t make it sing. The second story is bigger and better but the characters are still stick figures.

The short story “One Spell Wizard,” by contrast, is a fun story about a shapeshift matching wits with a mage. It’s odd in that the magic seems like real magic rather than the more psi-oriented powers of the series. Still, it’s fun, and the other yarn, “Legacy of Sorn Fen,” is pretty good.

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

SCOOBY-DOO TEAM-UP: Doomed by the usual team of Sholly Fisch and Dario Brizuela has Scooby and friends help Supergirl when she’s haunted by the ghosts of Argo City, assist Dyno-Mutt when Blue Falcon goes off his rocker and in my favorite story, assist a small town threatened by DC’s gorilla villains, from Monsieur Mallah to Pryemaul the Nazi vampire gorilla (that’s him on the Brizuela cover). The line “It’s the Gorilla Boss of Gotham City and the Mod Gorilla Boss, together!” for some reason had me convulsed with laughter. A shame there’s only one TPB of this series left.

CAITLIN KELLY, MONSTER HUNTER by Theresa Glover has a Vatican-sanctioned Slayer looking to vacation in New Orleans with her nerdy best buddy, Matt. However the local counterpart is dead and a demon dog is eating the Big Easy’s ghost population so Caitlin’s vacation gets postponed. Plus she has to work with her handler Sister Betty, a nun lesbian Caitlin has an intense crush on. This was competent but not much beyond that (though I might have liked it better if I were a bigger urban fantasy fan), and counting Warrior Nun it’s the third Catholic-sanctioned demon-slayer I know of (which has prompted me to start a story with a Jewish slayer sneering at the Catholics as mere parvenus).

My friend Sherry Harris has branched out from her Sarah Winston garage sale cozies with FROM BEER TO ETERNITY: A Chloe Jackson Sea Glass Saloon Mystery. Chloe is a Chicago librarian honoring a request by her late BFF to move to Emerald Cove — a fictitious community just east of Destin, where I used to be a reporter — and help her friend’s grandma, Vivi, running her beachfront bar, the Sea Glass. Vivi doesn’t want Chloe there but when it looks like Vivi stabbed an annoying local eccentric through the throat, Chloe starts digging … I honestly can’t evaluate this as a mystery because for me revisiting my old home was a lot of fun. We have white sand beaches, pine woods, tourist traffic, development squabbles, oddballs … it’s like revisiting home without the suffocating heat. HEROIC FANTASY, edited by Gerald W. Page and Hank Reinhardt, was a sword-and-sorcery collection from the late 1970s, selecting from what I think of as a talented B-list rather than the big names such as Fritz Leiber or Michael Moorcock. That’s not meant as an insult because the results are very good, including an Andre Norton Witch World fantasy, a Cyrion story by Tanith Lee, one of Charles Saunders’ Imaro tales and a story of the Voidal by Adrian Cole. The last was particularly fun to reread because at the time I had no way to find the small-press volumes in the series but now, in the Internet age, it’ll be easy. This collection does tend toward the grim, and the heroes are overwhelmingly white (except for Imaro) and male (except for Norton’s), but I like it nonetheless. There are also good, informative essays on swords, armor and heroism that I enjoyed rereading.

#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders, book cover art is uncredited.

In her Witch World books Norton has always been keen on female characters charting their own paths, which makes the sexism of HORN CROWN an unpleasant surprise. The book opens with humans arriving in the empty land (the Dales, the setting of her past few books) after fleeing their own world for unknown reasons (there’s been some mindwiping). Despite being The Early Years it’s really just like the Waste or Estcore in earlier Witch World books, a seemingly empty land stuffed full of evil places and wouldn’t you know, the dumb new arrivals start stirring the dark powers back to life. When a chieftain’s daughter, Iwynne, unwittingly taps into the power of an ancient shrine and vanishes, the warrior Elron sets out to find her. So does Gathea, a witch frustrated that Iwynne has stolen the power Gathea thought would be hers.

While the book is well-done and some of the magical scenes have real power, Gathea is a flaw. Like witches in past books she’s dead set on her course to the point of being a complete jerk about it. Instead of respecting her quest or having Gathea develop a connection with Elron and try to balance love and magic, the ending has Gathea having to put her own goals on hold so that she can be Elron’s wife and mother to his child. It comes across more coercive than romantic (as Judith Tarr says, we get the Maiden/Mother/Crone triad but  the Mother is the only acceptable role model). I enjoyed the book even so, but YMMV.

After the material in the first Beanworld Omnibus, Larry Marder’s series went on a long hiatus due to publisher Eclipse Comics closing, then taking other jobs for a couple of decades. The three graphic novels he eventually wrote to follow up are collected in BEANWORLD OMNIBUS Vol. 2. The baby beans introduced in the first volume are growing up and figuring out their destiny; Beamish continues his pursuit of Dreamish; and the other denizens of Beanworld engage in their own adventures. As quirky and unique as the first collection (and just as hard to synopsize), which makes me regret we haven’t seen anything from Marder since 2017. I hope there’s more soon.

THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF THE SULTAN SALADIN by Jonathan Phillips is an excellent book on one of those figures I knew of but not about. As Phillips details, Yusuf Salah al-Din rose to leadership as an ally of Nur-al-Din, leader of the powerful Zengi clan but after replacing his relative as vizier of Egypt decided to assert his independence (and that of his own clan), eventually building enough power that he could take on the Frankish occupiers of Jerusalem; part of Saladin’s fame is that he managed to unite the many factions of the Middle East (divided by sect, ethnicity, clan and personal ambition) and make fighting the crusaders a holy war rather than a war for territory.

Phillips shows how Saladin’s history mixed great successes (retaking Jerusalem) with dismal failures (the siege of Acre) and great mercy with occasional acts of brutality, but maintaining power throughout by diplomacy and financial largesse. This helped build his legend in the West, where the image of him as the Satan Spawn Who Took Jerusalem From Us was gradually overwhelmed by his obvious qualifications as a chivalric knight. This made him a fit subject for fiction, where he could be the mighty adversary Crusader heroes such as Richard the Lionheart required for their adventures (to say nothing of stories about Saladin’s secret and entirely fictitious love affair with Eleanor of Aquitaine)! In the Middle East, Saladin has been invoked as a symbol by everyone from Bin Laden to Gamel Abdel Nasser, being usable as a model of Kurdish independence, opposition to Western imperialism or pan-Arabism. A very good book.

#SFWApro. Covers by Michael Whelan (top) and Larry Marder, all rights remain with current holders.

GRYPHON IN GLORY is Andre Norton’s follow-up to The Crystal Gryphon wherein Kerovan, having won Joisan’s heart in the first book, decides he doesn’t want it. Or more truthfully he does want it, but he doesn’t want Joisan shackled to a freak such as himself (a standard disability cliche). So when Lord Imgry (who first appeared in the chronologically later Year of the Unicorn) needs someone to enter the Waste that borders the Dales and seek mystical help against the invaders, Kerovan volunteers. Too bad for his plans Joisan is determined to get him back and rides after him.

This is very much a crossover book. We have the Were-Riders from Year of the Unicorn, plus Elys and Jervon from Spell of the Witch World who gives both Kerovan and Joisan an example of mismatched outcasts who’ve become a couple. The Dales setting is looking more and more like Estcarp: the Waste, like Estcore, is pocketed with powers of light and dark who’ve retreated from the world but can easily be stirred up again. The invaders from Alizon are definitely backed by the Kolder, who are seeking their own allies or tools in the Waste. On top of which the subterranean Thals (featured prominently in Sorcerer of the Witch World) show up this side of the ocean. It feels very much like having wrapped up Estcore’s struggles in Sorceress of the Witch World, Norton’s giving herself a do-over — but it works. Better than the previous installment, in fact, as the magic, while pushing Kerovan and Joisan around, leaves them room to decide their own fate at the climax.

DEVIL TAKE THE HINDMOST: A History of Financial Speculation by Edward Chancellor does a great job with the topic, starting with what, exactly makes speculation different from investment, or from gambling (Chancellor’s view is that it’s much closer to the latter). Chancellor looks at the famous bubbles of history including Tulipmania in Holland, England’s South Sea Bubble, France’s Mississippi Bubble, railroad bubbles in the U.S. and England in the 19th century (one of the books points is that shiny new tech always attracts speculators) and Japan’s 1980s speculation bubble (which I only knew about vaguely, from reading about the film Bubble Fiction for Now and Then We Time Travel). Chancellor looks at the shifting role and perceptions of speculation in between the big event; following the Crash of ’29 and the Depression, the U.S. tightly regulated and generally disapproved of it, but that faded with the “greed is good!” attitudes of the Reagan presidency. While some economists argue for a perfectly rational economy in which speculation must therefore be equally rational, Chancellor makes a good case that this view ignores reality in multiple ways. While the book came out in 1998, both the dot.com bubble and the real estate bubble of 12 years ago fit his arguments perfectly. Very good.

PATSY WALKER, A.K.A. HELLCAT: Hooked on a Feeling by Kate Leth and Brittney Williams is the first TPB of a now-ended series. Patsy Walker was Marvel’s A-lister in the 1950s, a female Archie-type teen whose adventures sold well until the mid-1960s; Steve Englehart then turned her into the superhero Hellcat in his run on Marvel’s Avengers. In this incarnation, she’s somewhat burned out on superheroics and hoping to put together a temp agency providing gigs for metahumans who similarly don’t want to participate in clashes of titans. Unfortunately the Asgardian sorceress Casiolena is trying to recruit the same sort of folks for her evil plans — and meanwhile Patsy’s former bestie, Hedy, is exploiting the rights to the Patsy Walker comic books (which exist within the Marvel Universe too). The results got overly cute at times, but by the end it won me over.

#SFWApro. Top cover by Lawrence Schwinger, bottom by Brittney Williams.