Four!

America's Best Comics, written by Alan Moore, Peter Hogan, Steve Moore and Rick Veitch; illustrated by Art Adams, Sergio Aragones, Jim Baikie, Kyle Baker, Hilary Barta, J. Scott Campbell, Zander Cannon, John Cassaday, Claudio Castellini, Frank Cho, Dame Darcy, Jose Luis Garcia Lopez, Melinda Gebbie, Michael Golden, Adam Hughes, Phil Noto, Kevin Nowlan, Kevin O'Neill, Jason Trent Pearson, Humberto Ramos, Alex Ross, Eric Shanower, Rick Veitch, Al Gordon, Chris Sprouse, Karl Story and John Totleben (2001-2003; collected 2004): This collection is essentially a portmanteau of stuff that doesn't fit into any of the other collections of Alan Moore's America's Best Comics universe, anchored by a lengthy dimension-hopping adventure of Tom Strong's daughter Tesla. The shorter stories are all pretty solid; of greatest interest, probably, is the bizarre but appropriate League of Extraordinary Gentlemen board game. Sketches and early design work fill out the volume. It's all good, mostly clean fun. Recommended.




The Helmet of Fate, written by Steve Gerber, Steve Niles, Gail Simone, Tad Williams and Bill Willingham; illustrated by Scott Hampton, Shawn McManus, Duncan Rouleau, Peter Snejberg, Phil Winslade and others (2007): One of those odd non-miniseries miniseries that DC occasionally plays around with -- as originally published, this was five one-shots with different writer/artist teams, and really worked best as an adjunct to the Day of Vengeance miniseries and the subsequent ongoing supernatural team series Shadowpact.

Having been pummelled by the Spectre in a suicidal (and successful) gambit to get that loony, near-omnipotent supernatural avenger back under control, longtime DC mystical hero Doctor Fate has been reduced to its essence -- a magical helmet without a human partner/host -- and flung into space by Captain Marvel to let fate find it a new, um, Fate. It meets up with a handful of DC's supernatural heroes, some of them newly rebooted 'legacy' heroes (Ibis the Invincible and Sargon the Sorcerer), some of them just new (Black Alice), some their old loveable selves (Detective Chimp and angel-on-assignment Zauriel).

And that's about it. The helmet and the heroes have an adventure; the helmet moves on. Nothing is really resolved, as Steve Gerber's subsequent Fate stories in the Countdown to Mystery miniseries would reveal who the new Doctor Fate would be. Still, the writing and art are for the most part top-notch; it's a shame that none of these spun off into at least a miniseries (so far as I know). Recommended.

Fantastic Four Visionaries: Walt Simonson Volume 2, written by Walt Simonson and Danny Fingeroth; illustrated by Walt Simonson and Rex Valve (1990-91; collected 2008): Marvel pushes the acceptable lower page limits of comic-book collections here with a volume that collects just five of writer/artist Walt Simonson's early 1990's run on the Fantastic Four. And one of those is a fill-in issue that basically reiterates the point of an earlier John Byrne FF, complete with a reference to that earlier, better story.

We do, however, get the FF's loopy adventures in an alternate reality in which Stalin is still running the Soviet Union in 1990 (shades of Command and Conquer!). Simonson does shine here doing the fast-paced science-fantasy stuff that's been his strongest suit as a writer/artist ever since he did Thor in the mid-1980's. The reconstituted FF takes a bit of getting used to (at this point in their history, Ben Grimm isn't the Thing, but his girlfriend Ms. Marvel is the (a) Thing. But she's not the original Ms. Marvel. And female Things look pretty much identical to male Things, though she wears a top for modesty's sake so we don't really know how anatomically correct she is). Short but fun. Recommended.

Fantastic Four Visionaries: Walt Simonson Volume 3, written by Walt Simonson; illustrated by Walt Simonson, Art Adams and others (1991; collected 2009): Walt Simonson's FF run continues, or possibly ends...Marvel really isn't big on supplying context in its reprint volumes. Marvel's first family of superheroing battles Doctor Doom and a time-controlling adjustment bureau angered by the FF's meddling in history.

Cosmic shenanigans proliferate, Reed Richards shows once again why he's the most dangerous member of the Fantastic Four, and Ben Grimm goes through yet more mutations and permutations of his rocky, orange self. Hopefully there's a timeline out there somewhere in which Simonson wrote and drew a Superman comic for several years -- the combination of lightheartedness and the cosmic is pretty refreshing, much like a Junior Mint. Recommended.

You're All Alone

Book:

The Sinful Ones (a.k.a. You're All Alone) by Fritz Leiber: It sometimes seems as if science fiction exists partially to repeatedly ask the question 'What is reality?' and then offer a nearly endless variety of possible answers to that question. Fritz Leiber's short novel starts off in the 'One ordinary day...' mode before quickly veering off into one of the more disturbing examinations of 'reality' ever put to paper. You're All Alone, Leiber's original title for the novel, sums up this paranoid fantasy about whether or not a person can ever be certain of the reality of the people and things around him or her. In a very vague way, this is a vacuum-tube era version of The Matrix, but without kung fu or computers or any easy answers. Or a Messiah, for that matter. Highly recommended.


Comic:


Essential Fantastic Four Volume 5 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, John Romita, John Buscema and others: Jack Kirby's last twenty or so issues of his original Fantastic Four run appear here, along with a handful or issues illustrated by other hands. We again do a lot of revisiting of villains and situations, including Mole Man, the shape-changing alien Skrulls, the Submariner, Doctor Doom in what may be the best Doom story ever, and the antimatter Negative Zone and its bizarre inhabitants.

The most pivotal storyline included is that of the birth of Franklin Richards, first child of Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Girl. He'll undergo some serious rapid aging over the course of about twenty issues, going from birth to what appears to be two years old, prior to settling back into the more sedate 'normal' world of superhero aging. Highly recommended.

Shall Earth Endure?

Books:


The Eternal City, edited by David Drake, Charles Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg (Collected 1990): Solid but unspectacular Baen Books reprint anthology of fantasy, horror and science fiction stories that deal in some way with the Roman Empire, including a classic Time Patrol story by Poul Anderson and stories by such stalwarts as Gordon R. Dickson, C.J. Cherryh and David Drake himself. The cover art confirms that Baen Books has had the worst cover art in genre publishing for 20 years and counting. Man, they're terrible.


The Ceremonies by T.E.D. Klein (1984): Klein's one-and-only novel is not just a great horror novel -- it's a great novel in any genre. What he pulls off here is extraordinarily rare, creating a text that manages to work what can be seen as metafictional commentary on, in this case, the entire history of horror fiction into a structurally elegant and compelling horror novel populated with flawed but sympathetic characters. Stripped to its basics, The Ceremonies tells the story of a 30ish New York City grad student in English literature whose thesis is on Gothic and horror literature, and whose life suddenly starts to resemble some of the works he's reading over the course of a summer.

Klein comes up with one of the most innovative reworkings of the "forbidden book" trope in horror fiction that I can think of. Normally, the forbidden book (say, H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon) is a text invented for a work of fiction which, within the world of that fiction, reveals in whole or in part the secret workings of the universe. Generally, a forbidden text is rare, dangerous even to read, and filled with knowledge that undermines all cultural norms when it comes to religion. For example, the Necronomicon reveals that all human religion is a comforting lie that obscures the true, horrifying and precarious state of humanity in a universe that is consciously hostile towards us.

But as the malign Old One muses in the novel, forbidden knowledge never stays hidden. As a character in another Klein story notes, if the Necronomicon really existed, it would be available in paperback in any book store. What Klein posits here is that the real forbidden knowledge of the world (which includes the malevolent and world-threatening ceremonies of the title) is, like Poe's purloined letter, hidden in plain sight: an off-kilter tarot deck here, a strange Eastern European folk dance there, and, most significantly, the real Victorian-era horror writer Arthur Machen's sinister tale "The White People" right in the middle of it all. And what the Old One -- a deceptively jolly looking old man turned into a psychopathic apostle of an invader from Outside back when he was a boy in the 1870's -- can do is reassemble the ceremonies from a variety of sources and, when the stars are right, usher in what will be a really, really, really, really bad New World Order, at least for human beings and, in fact, every living thing on the planet.

There are a lot of delights both light and dark in the novel -- Klein's always fascinating evocation of New York; the grad student's often hilariously apt musings on the strengths and deficiencies of various classic Gothic and horror texts (he finds Henry James a big fat bore and "The Turn of the Screw" the most over-rated ghost story in history, an observation I wholeheartedly agree with); the odd rural reality of the Brethren, a vaguely Amish religious group whose settlement in New Jersey is the backdrop for much of the novel; and the horrifying inner life of the Old One, possibly the least romanticized hyper-intelligent serial killer in the history of horror fiction. The novel fairly hums along, dense enough to reward second and third readings but compelling enough to work almost entirely on the level of ever-tightening suspense.

Terrible things happen to good characters here, all of it justified by the text, and while the storyline is dead serious, Klein manages to slip in enough parodies and inversions of classic tropes to keep one intellectually occupied (the novel's gender-inversion of the traditional Lovecraftian Vagina Dentata Invader from Outside is a real pip; so, too, is what happens to the one good character who knows exactly what's going on and has been charged by Something with the task of halting the ceremonies).

In any case, out-of-print and highest recommendation. Existential terror at its most entertaining.


Comics:


Essential Fantastic Four Volume 4 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (1967-68; collected 2001): Here we enter the beginning of the homestretch for the Lee/Kirby team on Marvel's first family of super-heroes. Intentionally or not, plotter/artist Jack Kirby here begins to rein in his innate tendency to create new characters ever ten pages, contenting himself instead with working variations for the most part on existing villains (Galactus, the Wizard, the Mad Thinker) and supporting characters (Wyatt Wingfoot, Crystal of the Inhumans). Nonetheless, this is still top-notch superhero melodrama in the Mighty Marvel Manner, and does feature the game-changing birth of Franklin, son of Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman. Time had indeed started to pass in superhero land, for all the good and ill that would later prove to bring. Highest recommendation.