Books:
The Tower by Simon Clark: More horror goodness from Clark. A nascent rock band gets a gig house-sitting "the most haunted house in England" for a month. I'm pretty sure you can figure out the basics of what happens next. Yes, everything goes swimmingly and everyone goes for punch and pie at the end. Well, no. Clark's flair for sympathetic characterization pretty much carries the day here -- it's that more than anything else that causes people to compare him to Stephen King. Recommended.
Penguin American Supernatural Tales edited by S.T. Joshi (c. 2006): As one-volume horror survey volumes go, this is probably the best I've ever read. As always, one notes omitted authors (no Edith Wharton, for example), but in this case Joshi does a terrific job of juggling great but much-anthologized works by major writers (Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" and Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" to name two), lesser-known works by well-known writers ("Night Surf" by Stephen King and "The Events at Poroth Farm" by TED Klein, to name another two), and fine work from semi-obscure major writers (it's always a pleasure to see work by Thomas Ligotti and Karl Edward Wagner, especially work I haven't read before, and a terrific tale by Caitlin Kiernan closes the volume). The whole thing will run you about $13 in trade paperback for over 400 pages of stories and notes, so I'd say highest recommendation.
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (2nd. edition) edited by August Derleth and somebody else (c. 1980): This anthology of tales by H.P. Lovecraft and others originally appeared around 1970 and then got released again after Derleth's death in the late 1970's with a handful of stories added and some subtracted. The volume gives one a pretty good overview of the growth of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos (not named by him but by Derleth after Lovecraft's death in 1937) from its early 'shared world' status to a veritable cottage industry in the horror world by the late 1970's. The selection here is a bit wonky, primarily because somebody decided we should see the whole literary game of oneupsmanship between the young Robert (Psycho) Bloch and Lovecraft in the 1930's, as first Bloch killed a thinly disguised Lovecraft in "The Shambler from the Stars" and then Lovecraft returned the favour in "The Haunter of the Dark" and then Bloch added a coda in the late 1940's with "The Shadow from the Steeple."
With those two stories and the excellent "Notes Found in a Deserted House", Bloch gets three entries in the collection -- one more than Lovecraft! Clark Ashton Smith's "The Return of the Sorcerer" is another odd choice, though I do love the inclusion of Frank Belknap Long's "The Space-Eaters", wherein yet another thinly disguised Lovecraft gets killed off in a story that only an Evil-Dead-era Sam Raimi could probably do justice to. The inclusion of Philip Jose Farmer's "The Freshman" is nice, as is the decision to include a Fritz Leiber novella I'd never read before, "The Terror from the Depths." All in all, highly recommended for those who like their horror cosmic and occasionally quite verbose.
Comics:
John Byrne's Compleat Next Men Volume 2 by John Byrne with Mike Mignola (1995-96; collected 2008): By the time Byrne created Next Men, then published by Dark Horse and here reprinted by IDW, he already had career-defining runs as artist and co-plotter on the X-Men, and as writer/artist on the Fantastic Four and Superman, on his resume among a variety of other projects. The speculator-fueled comic-book collapse of the mid-1990's ended Next Men two-thirds into its story, though this volume that completes the run does have an ending of a sorts.
This may be Byrne's best work, and it bears comparison with the revisionist superheroic stories like Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns that preceded it. With Next Men, Byrne creates a world of plausible superheroes played out within a world of government conspiracies and time-travelling super-villains. Powered individuals are created by a genetic 'trigger' in all humans, intentionally triggered under lab conditions and then uncontrollably spreading through sexual contact. By the year 2112, humans and 'mutates' are at war -- and that's just the beginning of the story (or maybe the end), as we then move back to the 1990's and the liberation of the Next Men from the virtual world their creators have kept their minds trapped within for entire generations of mutates.
The story moves like an angry train towards its (sort of) conclusion -- this is probably Byrne's most tightly plotted comic-book work -- but Byrne finds plenty of time to develop his characters both foul and fair, and to speculate on just how much fun it would be to be invulnerable at the price of losing all physical feeling, or super-strong when that strength makes it almost impossible for you to touch another person. Highly recommended.
Justice League of America: A Midsummer's Nightmare by Mark Waid, Fabian Nicienza, Jeff Johnson and Darick Robertson (1996): This miniseries kicked off the mid-1990's revival of DC's Justice League of America title, a revival which would see Grant Morrison, Waid and primarily artist Howard Porter make JLA a top-selling book again, in part by having it focus on DC's big names (Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman chief among them) rather than the revolving-door, increasingly minor hero lineups that always seem to be the fate of any book involving the League. The Justice League confronts a villain old (Doctor Destiny) and new (Know Man) in what reads like a blueprint for the rebooted regular JLA title that would follow. About the only off-putting thing about the whole enterprise is that Superman is still in his ridiculous post-Death of Superman mullet, which he puts into a ponytail when he's Clark Kent. Seriously. It's like DC was gearing up to have a grunge Superman but balked at the last moment, leaving us with early 1990's Jaromir Jagr Superman.
JLA Classified: Kid Amazo by Peter Milligan and Carlos D'Ensa (c.2007): Amazo is one of those JLA-specific villains who's almost impossible to write well. But everyone eventually writes an Amazo story. Amazo is an android designed with all the powers of the Justice League, which begs the question of where this thing is getting all that power from. I don't think anyone's ever answered that question satisfactorily, though better post-Silver-Age writers have either limited Amazo's powers in some way or, in Mark Millar's case, used them to set up a fairly funny superhero joke, as superhero jokes go.
Milligan here goes the route of Amazo possessing the powers of the JLA's big 7 (Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman, Green Lantern, Flash, Aquaman and Martian Manhunter) while Amazo 2.0 -- or 'Kid Amazo' -- is a cyborg who has all those powers too but also possesses the ability to think exactly like all the members of the JLA. This all pretty quickly degenerates into a standard issue grim-and-gritty JLA story that seems as if it were penned in the late 1980's, as the heroes squabble and Kid Amazo (who didn't know who he really was for several years) finds out he's been screwing his 'mother' for several months...and she knew about it. Fun stuff! Amazo's creator gets away at the end and all the heroes act really pissy for much of the story. Milligan's a fine writer on a lot of stuff, but standard superheroes really aren't his forte. Really, really not recommended.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Sunday, December 13, 2009
When Adults Attack
Book:
Blood Crazy by Simon Clark: This novel is a dandy apocalyptic thriller, equal parts Stephen King and John Wyndham with a little New Agey cuckoobanana psychology thrown in. One fine day, everyone everywhere over the age of 18 starts trying to kill everyone 18 and younger. Yikes! The narrative follows protagonist Nick Aten as he first tries just to survive, and then tries to figure out what's going on and why.
The problems of organizing teenagers into viable survival groups allow for some Lord of the Flies-style shenanigans, while the travails of various survival groups in combatting the increasingly organized but ant-like adults also allows for much angst and action. The explanation for the situation reminds me a lot of group and mass psychology tropes from 60's science fiction, especially Dune, Quatermass and the Pit, and a Doctor Who serial called "The Daemons." All in all, a dandy, compulsively readable novel from Clark, whom I grow more fond of with each new novel.
Comics Collection:
Essential Doctor Strange Volume 4 by Roger Stern, Chris Claremont, Gene Colan, Marshall Rogers and several other writers and artists (c.1976-1981, Collected 2009): The relatively brief Stern/Rogers run on Doctor Strange was one of the good Doctor's career highlights. Well, actually anything written by Stern is a career highlight -- he's Doc's second-best writer after Stan Lee. Claremont (long-time X-Men writer) takes Doc a bit too far into the realms of self-pity, but Stern gets him back again.
My only real complaint about the volume (other than the non-ending to the year-long Dweller in Darkness story, caused, I assume, by Stern being replaced by Claremont for a couple of years) is that it features the semi-famous Marvel House Ad from 1981 that promised us Frank Miller taking over the art chores on the book. Now there's a fascinating 'What if?' scenario, as Miller never did make it over to Dr. Strange.
Blood Crazy by Simon Clark: This novel is a dandy apocalyptic thriller, equal parts Stephen King and John Wyndham with a little New Agey cuckoobanana psychology thrown in. One fine day, everyone everywhere over the age of 18 starts trying to kill everyone 18 and younger. Yikes! The narrative follows protagonist Nick Aten as he first tries just to survive, and then tries to figure out what's going on and why.
The problems of organizing teenagers into viable survival groups allow for some Lord of the Flies-style shenanigans, while the travails of various survival groups in combatting the increasingly organized but ant-like adults also allows for much angst and action. The explanation for the situation reminds me a lot of group and mass psychology tropes from 60's science fiction, especially Dune, Quatermass and the Pit, and a Doctor Who serial called "The Daemons." All in all, a dandy, compulsively readable novel from Clark, whom I grow more fond of with each new novel.
Comics Collection:
Essential Doctor Strange Volume 4 by Roger Stern, Chris Claremont, Gene Colan, Marshall Rogers and several other writers and artists (c.1976-1981, Collected 2009): The relatively brief Stern/Rogers run on Doctor Strange was one of the good Doctor's career highlights. Well, actually anything written by Stern is a career highlight -- he's Doc's second-best writer after Stan Lee. Claremont (long-time X-Men writer) takes Doc a bit too far into the realms of self-pity, but Stern gets him back again.
My only real complaint about the volume (other than the non-ending to the year-long Dweller in Darkness story, caused, I assume, by Stern being replaced by Claremont for a couple of years) is that it features the semi-famous Marvel House Ad from 1981 that promised us Frank Miller taking over the art chores on the book. Now there's a fascinating 'What if?' scenario, as Miller never did make it over to Dr. Strange.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
King, Conan, Bat, Spider
Books:
Under the Dome by Stephen King (2009): At 1072 story pages, Under the Dome is King's longest novel since the complete and unexpurgated Stand came out in 1990 and his third-longest novel overall, also trailing It (1986). King originally started writing the novel back in the 1970's, abandoning it twice before finally starting over to write this one. Thus, the concept of a city trapped under a dome (really more of a capsule extending 47,000 feet up and down) predates The Simpsons Movie (2008). But there were also a number of science-fiction stories and novels that also dealt with such a predicament prior to the Simpsons.
As he did in such novels as The Stand and Salem's Lot, King deploys a large cast of characters for the roving eye of the third-person narrative to examine. The entire town of Chester's Mill, Maine, population about 2000, gets enclosed within a mostly impermeable dome (it allows a small amount of air and water flow, along with all forms of radiation) one October day. Over the course of the next week or so, life under the Dome becomes more and more fraught with problems as the power-lust of a Christian fundamentalist town selectman and the brain-tumour-enabled madness of his son lead to a large-scale reenactment of Lord of the Flies.
King's characters are more well-rounded here than they often are -- the nominal villain, "Big Jim" Rennie, is loathsome but understandable. Small towns and big towns are always afflicted by people like him. The rapid descent of Chester's Mills into chaos and then malign reordering has been especially well imagined by King. For all that, the town's survival or lack thereof remains in doubt until the last few pages, when a human-created wild card combined with the air-retaining qualities of the Dome put the town into the Final Jeopardy round.
For a near-1100-page novel, Under the Dome moves quickly and assuredly to its climax. You'll probably end up liking a number of characters, which makes the ruthlessness of King's narrative -- this is not a novel where all the 'good guys' survive, or even most of them -- all that much more appealing. Perhaps most appealingly, none of King's major characters are writers or artists. After Lisey's Story, Duma Key and Cell, that's something of a relief.
The Essential Conan: The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard, edited by Karl Edward Wagner: Even though there are hundreds of Conan books and comic books both new and out-of-print, finding unexpurgated, un-'improved' versions of Robert E. Howard's original stories from the 1930's isn't easy. The successful paperback packagings of the Conan stories from the 1960's edit out the saltier parts along with the most overt sexism and racism.
Beyond that, the editors of the Conan stories for Ace Books also needed to fill as many paperbacks as possible. That's not easy -- there actually aren't that many Conan stories relatively speaking, though in total they probably equal about one Lord of the Rings. Not bad, given that Howard committed suicide when he was 30 and that he wrote more than a hundred stories about characters other than Conan. The editors of those Ace Books 'retrofitted' a lot of non-Conan Howard stories to be Conan stories, changing names and place names, and they also finished up some story fragments and wrote entire stories based on Howard's notes. Howard's original barbarian would eventually be buried under all these additions.
Howard's Conan is indeed the supreme fighter of the movies and short-lived TV series. However, he's also extremely bright, a master of dozens of languages and dialects by his mid-20's, and a highly competent military tactician and strategian. The pre-last-Ice-Age Hyborian world he wanders through is a crazy quilt of countries that resemble historic countries from across the breadth and span of human history -- essentially, dynastic Egypt, 19th-century Afghanistan, Golden-Age Greece and 1000 AD Scandanavia are all contemporaneous. And magic, of course, works.
In this collection, Conan combats a number of menaces human, natural and supernatural. The stories are superior adventures for the most part, and one recognizes certain scenes that the makers of the first Conan movie cherry-picked for that movie, most notably the crucifixion of Conan in "A Witch Shall Be Born." Conan can take punishment with the best of adventure heroes -- in the story, he apparently recovers from being crucified without the aid of magic as he does in the movie.
Howard's prose style is also quite interesting, much moreso than that of most of his imitators. While Howard was relatively young when he wrote about Conan, he was a voracious reader who also apparently swallowed a thesaurus, thankfully after checking the definitions contained therein. The result is prose that moves from the descriptive to the baroque, along with a sense of story structure that grows by leaps and bounds over his short career. If you enjoy fantasy but have only experienced Conan through other media or through various new Conan novels, I'd recommend looking up Karl Edward Wagner's attempt to bring the real Conan back from the 1930's.
Comics:
Secrets of the Batcave by about 100 writers and artists (1940-2001; collected 2007): A fun collection of predominantly Golden Age Batman stories involving the Batcave, its development, and the various trophies found inside. Of primary geek appeal are the stories detailing the origins of the giant Lincoln penny and the robot T. Rex seen literally hundreds of times in the background of hundreds of scenes set in the Batcave over the last few decades. The filmmakers really should get around to giving Batman a trophy room. Because giant pennies are cool.
Essential Spider-man Volume 4 by Stan Lee, John Romita, Jim Mooney, John Buscema and others (c. 1969-1970): The evolution of Spider-man into the most tormented superhero of them all continues apace here as the book zips ever closer to Stan Lee's retirement as a full-time writer. The legendary John Romita does a lot of design and layout work here, though he pencils relatively little of this collection, leaving Jim Mooney and others to ape his style as best they can.
Where original Spidey artist Steve Ditko's Spider-man actually looked like a gawky teenager (well, at least for awhile) and his characters looked at least nominally realistic, Romita's Spider-designs are slick, action-oriented work -- really, the defining Marvel art-style of the 1970's. Spider-man's popularity exploded under Romita's pen, but I much prefer Ditko's art (and his often wonky plots and villains). Still, quite enjoyable, though Peter Parker's angst does get grating after awhile. Subsequent writers would tone this down a bit -- there are times where Parker sounds as tortured and whiny as Lee's Silver Surfer, also being published at roughly the same time as this version of Spider-man.
Under the Dome by Stephen King (2009): At 1072 story pages, Under the Dome is King's longest novel since the complete and unexpurgated Stand came out in 1990 and his third-longest novel overall, also trailing It (1986). King originally started writing the novel back in the 1970's, abandoning it twice before finally starting over to write this one. Thus, the concept of a city trapped under a dome (really more of a capsule extending 47,000 feet up and down) predates The Simpsons Movie (2008). But there were also a number of science-fiction stories and novels that also dealt with such a predicament prior to the Simpsons.
As he did in such novels as The Stand and Salem's Lot, King deploys a large cast of characters for the roving eye of the third-person narrative to examine. The entire town of Chester's Mill, Maine, population about 2000, gets enclosed within a mostly impermeable dome (it allows a small amount of air and water flow, along with all forms of radiation) one October day. Over the course of the next week or so, life under the Dome becomes more and more fraught with problems as the power-lust of a Christian fundamentalist town selectman and the brain-tumour-enabled madness of his son lead to a large-scale reenactment of Lord of the Flies.
King's characters are more well-rounded here than they often are -- the nominal villain, "Big Jim" Rennie, is loathsome but understandable. Small towns and big towns are always afflicted by people like him. The rapid descent of Chester's Mills into chaos and then malign reordering has been especially well imagined by King. For all that, the town's survival or lack thereof remains in doubt until the last few pages, when a human-created wild card combined with the air-retaining qualities of the Dome put the town into the Final Jeopardy round.
For a near-1100-page novel, Under the Dome moves quickly and assuredly to its climax. You'll probably end up liking a number of characters, which makes the ruthlessness of King's narrative -- this is not a novel where all the 'good guys' survive, or even most of them -- all that much more appealing. Perhaps most appealingly, none of King's major characters are writers or artists. After Lisey's Story, Duma Key and Cell, that's something of a relief.
The Essential Conan: The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard, edited by Karl Edward Wagner: Even though there are hundreds of Conan books and comic books both new and out-of-print, finding unexpurgated, un-'improved' versions of Robert E. Howard's original stories from the 1930's isn't easy. The successful paperback packagings of the Conan stories from the 1960's edit out the saltier parts along with the most overt sexism and racism.
Beyond that, the editors of the Conan stories for Ace Books also needed to fill as many paperbacks as possible. That's not easy -- there actually aren't that many Conan stories relatively speaking, though in total they probably equal about one Lord of the Rings. Not bad, given that Howard committed suicide when he was 30 and that he wrote more than a hundred stories about characters other than Conan. The editors of those Ace Books 'retrofitted' a lot of non-Conan Howard stories to be Conan stories, changing names and place names, and they also finished up some story fragments and wrote entire stories based on Howard's notes. Howard's original barbarian would eventually be buried under all these additions.
Howard's Conan is indeed the supreme fighter of the movies and short-lived TV series. However, he's also extremely bright, a master of dozens of languages and dialects by his mid-20's, and a highly competent military tactician and strategian. The pre-last-Ice-Age Hyborian world he wanders through is a crazy quilt of countries that resemble historic countries from across the breadth and span of human history -- essentially, dynastic Egypt, 19th-century Afghanistan, Golden-Age Greece and 1000 AD Scandanavia are all contemporaneous. And magic, of course, works.
In this collection, Conan combats a number of menaces human, natural and supernatural. The stories are superior adventures for the most part, and one recognizes certain scenes that the makers of the first Conan movie cherry-picked for that movie, most notably the crucifixion of Conan in "A Witch Shall Be Born." Conan can take punishment with the best of adventure heroes -- in the story, he apparently recovers from being crucified without the aid of magic as he does in the movie.
Howard's prose style is also quite interesting, much moreso than that of most of his imitators. While Howard was relatively young when he wrote about Conan, he was a voracious reader who also apparently swallowed a thesaurus, thankfully after checking the definitions contained therein. The result is prose that moves from the descriptive to the baroque, along with a sense of story structure that grows by leaps and bounds over his short career. If you enjoy fantasy but have only experienced Conan through other media or through various new Conan novels, I'd recommend looking up Karl Edward Wagner's attempt to bring the real Conan back from the 1930's.
Comics:
Secrets of the Batcave by about 100 writers and artists (1940-2001; collected 2007): A fun collection of predominantly Golden Age Batman stories involving the Batcave, its development, and the various trophies found inside. Of primary geek appeal are the stories detailing the origins of the giant Lincoln penny and the robot T. Rex seen literally hundreds of times in the background of hundreds of scenes set in the Batcave over the last few decades. The filmmakers really should get around to giving Batman a trophy room. Because giant pennies are cool.
Essential Spider-man Volume 4 by Stan Lee, John Romita, Jim Mooney, John Buscema and others (c. 1969-1970): The evolution of Spider-man into the most tormented superhero of them all continues apace here as the book zips ever closer to Stan Lee's retirement as a full-time writer. The legendary John Romita does a lot of design and layout work here, though he pencils relatively little of this collection, leaving Jim Mooney and others to ape his style as best they can.
Where original Spidey artist Steve Ditko's Spider-man actually looked like a gawky teenager (well, at least for awhile) and his characters looked at least nominally realistic, Romita's Spider-designs are slick, action-oriented work -- really, the defining Marvel art-style of the 1970's. Spider-man's popularity exploded under Romita's pen, but I much prefer Ditko's art (and his often wonky plots and villains). Still, quite enjoyable, though Peter Parker's angst does get grating after awhile. Subsequent writers would tone this down a bit -- there are times where Parker sounds as tortured and whiny as Lee's Silver Surfer, also being published at roughly the same time as this version of Spider-man.
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