Big Bunny Boom

we3: written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant (2004, collected 2005): Bandit the dog, Tinker the cat, Pirate the rabbit: 1, 2, and 3 of we3. They were pets. They were stolen. A secret American military project turned them into super-soldiers -- heavily armed, heavily armoured, trained to work as a team, and with a boost in intelligence from the machines grafted to them.

But after a final test run, they're to be 'put down.' The next phase of the program will involve larger animals specially bred and trained to replace soldiers on the battlefield. Weapon 4 already waits in its pen, too dreadful to be deployed anywhere near non-hostile civilians. there are kinks to work out.

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely riff in unusual ways on things like the Jason Bourne books, 'lost-animal' novels that include The Incredible Journey, Japanese manga, and funny-animal comics with their talking animals. We cut between the humans and the animals for much of the narrative. The animals have developed a rudimentary language derived from English. They've also maintained their survival instincts: once they hear they're about to be killed, they escape in search of a nebulous and mostly forgotten 'Home.' They don't remember their names, but one sympathetic scientist does.

Funny, affecting, and not completely improbable, we3 also pointedly comments on both our mistreatment of animals and our dehumanization of soldiers in a quest for the perfect killing machine. The animals, already gifted by nature with reflexes and senses superior to human beings, make human super-soldiers like Captain America or Jason Bourne look like amateurs. With a dog as a tank, a cat as a fast-striking assassin, and a rabbit as a mine- and poison-gas-laying version of the Cadbury Easter Rabbit, we3 stages a battle that escalates until the powers that be deploy the terrible fourth weapon.

It's a thrilling ride, beautifully illustrated by Quitely and movingly written by Morrison. Moments of humour erupt throughout the carnage, as do moments of sadness. The dog still wants to be a good dog in relation to people. The cat just wants to get the Hell out of there. And the rabbit, the rabbit keeps saying, 'Uh oh' and blowing stuff up. Highly recommended.

Two out of Three are Bad

Book:

The 13th by John Everson (2009): Everson's first novel, Covenant, was an interesting horror novel with a bit too much sexual violence for my tastes. His second, Sacrifice, was something of a bollocks -- the characters were paper-thin and annoyingly giggly and coy at the most inappropriate points in the narrative, and it seemed like the only two constants in the novel were increasingly grotesque yet oddly perfunctory scenes of sexual atrocity, and the construction of protagonists who were as banal as they were incompetent. 'People who get hit in the head a lot' seems to be Everson's second-favorite trope, right after 'Every female character will get sexually assaulted.'

There were enough flashes of originality in the first two novels (and especially the first) that I figured I'd give Everson a chance when his next novel came out. And for the first 200 pages of this 320-page novel, it seemed like I'd made the right choice. Oh, the heightened level of sexual violence was still there, but it at least seemed to be hitched to an interesting story that justified the events, if not the lengthy descriptions of some of them. And then, around page 200, The 13th went off the rails as completely and spectacularly as any novel I can remember reading.

The 13th is a gobbledegooky, supposedly Babylonian ritual meant to incarnate the Babylonian god Ba'al in human form. To do so requires human sacrifice. A lot of human sacrifice involving mothers and babies. Fun stuff. 25 years before the main narrative of the novel, a cult in a small town tried and failed to complete the ritual. Now, the cult is back, kidnapping and impregnating women in order to try again. And only a callow, Olympic-level bicyclist and a plucky but inexperienced female cop can, maybe, stop the ritual.

What threat does a completed ritual pose to the world? I have no idea. The novel never lays out the stakes. I have a feeling that it may guarantee a good corn harvest, but beyond that, your guess is as good as mine. And I READ the fucking novel.

Everson's most annoying tics throughout his three novels are that no major female character can be anything less than spectacularly alluring, male protagonists have great difficulty controlling their libidos, and the heroes, perhaps in a nod to realism gone horribly wrong, generally prove to be amazingly incompetent by the time the novel ends. The 13th adds a new toy to Everson's toybox: the 120-page climax.

Yes, more than a third of this novel can justifiably be called the climax. That's a lot of climax. And almost all of it takes place in basement of the evil hotel where an evil stem-cell researcher is attempting to finish the ritual of the 13th with the help of the evil cult which turns out to comprise pretty much everyone in the stupid small town the novel is set in.

During those 120 pages, which take place over the course of about 6 hours, the heroes get knocked out and imprisoned at least twice; they pretty much fail to save any of the imprisoned women and babies from being tortured, mutilated and killed; and the disembodied gods Ba'al and Astarte show up to spout dialogue that sounds like rejected wacky-god dialogue from Season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And the heroes run around in circles a lot, in the nude (don't ask), getting sexually assaulted by incorporeal gods and demons, while various awful things are described at great length. But really, once you get to the third or fourth sacrifice scene, not only is the power to shock gone, but the whole megilla starts to feel more like an outsized parody of your typical torture horror film than it does like serious horror.

Everson also gives us another relatively new trope that I reflexively blame on Buffy, specifically Season 7 -- that's the obligatory Half-Assed Internet Search Scene. Certain horror stories once relied on forbidden occult knowledge that one at least had to go to a library to access. Unfortunately, the age of the Internet has brought us the scene in which a character learns everything he or she needs to know by typing in a few terms on Google. I realize that if The Necronomicon existed it would be available for download on Project Gutenberg, but the search scene here rivals Buffy's Season 7 Google of 'evil' for 'search least likely to yield the results you need without further clarification.' Give me a moldy set of the Revelations of Glaaki any day.

On the bright side, the hero now drinks a lot of Guinness. Everson's protagonists in his first two novels spent so much time ordering Miller Genuine Draft that I began to wonder of the Miller Brewing Company was a sponsor. So I guess that's a step up. Really, not recommended at all except as a study in how a horror novel can go horribly, horribly, horribly, horribly, horribly, horribly wrong.


Comics:

Essential Captain America Volume 2 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Jim Steranko, Gene Colan, John Romita, Frank Giacoia, Joe Sinnott and others (1967-70): Captain America becomes increasingly Spider-man-ized in this second collection of his early post-1960's-resurrection adventures. Translation: he's plagued by various self-doubts and woefully hung up over a woman. Thankfully, he also has a number of cool adventures with great art by Kirby, Steranko and Colan, though if you're like me, you're starting to wish Modok and the Red Skull would take a vacation for several years, and that the Cosmic Cube, one of Marvel's all-time Ultimate Plot Devices, would never, ever, ever appear in a comic book again. No such luck. Fun, though occasionally a bit grating.


Onslaught: The Complete Epic Volume 4 (2nd edition) by everyone at Marvel and their dogs (1996): Onslaught was meant to be the Marvel crossover to end all crossovers (well, at least for a year), as a villain born in the X-Men books would ultimately threaten the entire Earth. Part of the editorial mandate of the crossover was to set up Marvel's 'Heroes Reborn' titles, with new adventures of non-X-men Marvel heroes to take place on a new Earth sans X-Men. Marvel's top-selling books (basically the Spider- and X-titles) would steam along on their own in the regular Marvel universe along with all those Marvel characters deemed too minor to reboot (hey, Dr. Strange!).

Sometimes one can only evaluate a megacrossover constructed as much by marketing and sales decisions as by artistic decisions the same way Samuel Johnson evaluated a dog that can walk on its hindlegs -- one isn't amazed that it does it well but that it does it at all. The plot mechanism that creates two different Marvel universes doesn't make a lot of sense, and has the added misfortune of setting up a final battle that would be completely incomprehensible without an awful lot of captions to explain what's going on.

Oh, yeah -- Onslaught is an evil psionic being created when Professor Xavier's evil impulses collide with Magneto's evil impulses. So he's sorta like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, only nigh-omnipotent. As ultimate comic-book villains go, he makes the Anti-Monitor look and sound like Milton's Satan. Not recommended.

Bill Clinton vs. Captain America: The Road to Victory

Book:

The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions by H.P. Lovecraft and others: H.P. Lovecraft made a portion of his meagre living editing other people's stories. This Del Rey edition of the revised Arkham House volume collects 'primary' revisions -- in which there's very little of the original writer's work left in the finished story -- and 'secondary' revisions, which are closer to being collaborations. While some of the stories here are pretty minor, there are also some solid stories ("The Night Ocean" is an evocative and subtle secondary revision) and works as good as many of Lovecraft's 'own' ("The Mound" and "The Horror in the Museum" are fine additions to the Cthulhu Mythos, while "The Loved Dead" is a creepy bit of Poesque necrofetishism). Technically, the oft-collected "Abandoned with the Pharoahs" could be included here for the sake of completism -- it's the novella Lovecraft ghost-wrote for Harry Houdini -- but this is such a giant collection that it's hard to fault any omissions. Highly recommended for Lovecraftians; recommended for anyone else.


Comics:


Unknown Soldier: Haunted House, Between Here and There, Easy Kill and The Way Home by Joshua Dysart, Alberto Ponticelli and Pat Masioni (2008-2009; collections ongoing): The original Unknown Soldier was a Silver Age DC World War II hero who was a master of disguise, his real face always covered by Invisible-Man-type bandages. That hero's adventures ended in the early 1980's with the cancellation of most of DC's war titles. Subsequent attempts to resurrect the character have usually erred on the side of almost self-parodic grim-and-grittiness.

In this adult-oriented Vertigo title, Dysart and Ponticelli wisely throw out pretty much everything of the original character, keeping only the bandages and the overarching idea of 'one man's war.' The primary setting is now Uganda in the early oughts, where an African-born, American-raised doctor and his wife are attempting to raise global awareness of the terrible violence of Uganda's civil war. But the doctor's having nightmares about becoming violent himself, about something or someone living inside his own brain who's pretty much an expert at killing. And pretty soon, the doctor's part of the conflict, his self-scarred face hidden behind a mask of bandages.

Reductively speaking, the new Unknown Soldier is part Jason Bourne, part Jeckyll and Hyde. However, the setting for the series -- war-torn, divided Uganda -- gives us a milieu for a war comic that's rarely been even nodded at, ravaged post-colonial Africa. The stories and sub-stories are heart-breaking, and Ponticelli's art stands firmly in the tradition of Harvey Kurtzman's great war comics for EC in the 1950's, meticulously realistic and realistically bloody. There aren't many works in any medium that manage to make violence both thrilling and nauseating, sometimes at the same time. One of the things that highlights the quality of the series for me is that after 15 issues, we still know very little of what's made the doctor into some sort of pre-programmed killing machine with a conscience, and the slow pace of the revelations seems perfectly natural to the story. We aren't dealing with a puzzle piece. A great on-going title that deserves all the accolades it's getting. Highest recommendation.


The Greatest Shazam! Stories Ever Told by Bill Parker, Otto Binder, Denny O'Neil, Martin Pasko, Jerry Ordway, C.C. Beck, Kurt Schaffenberger, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Curt Swan and others (1940-2008; collected 2008): DC's editorial policy on its line of 'Greatest...' collections has never seemed more political and less quality-oriented than on this volume. Fawcett published the original Captain Marvel of the 1940's and early 1950's -- he who said Shazam! to change from young teen Billy Batson to Captain Marvel and back again.

For a time in the early 1940's, Captain Marvel outsold Superman. Why? Because it was the best superhero book in a still-young sub-genre, with crisp art and lively, fantasy-heavy stories pitting Captain Marvel against a terrific rogue's gallery of such weirdos and grotesques and Thaddeus Bodog Sivana, IBAC, King Kull the Beast-man and Mr. Mind, a hyper-intelligent worm (though he was drawn to look more like a fuzzy green caterpillar with eyeglasses and a little mechanical voicebox to translate his worm-language rantings into audible English). These were comics for children that an adult can read and enjoy now, and the imminent DC collection of the +20-part WWII Captain Marvel epic, The Monster Society of Evil, makes me feel all tingly inside.

DC would eventually exhaust Fawcett in court over similarities between Marvel and Superman, with Fawcett ceasing publication pretty much contemporaneous with the near-death of super-hero comics in the 1950's. Marvel would eventually publish its own Captain Marvel in the 1960's, hence DC's use of Shazam! on covers and promotional literature, despite the fact that their hero is still called Captain Marvel within. DC relaunched the good Captain in his own book in 1974, originally with pivotal original artist CC Beck drawing the book. But Beck would soon leave, and the book would soon become most notable for the reprints it ran of vintage Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel Family stories during a period when Shazam! was a 100-page Giant. Once DC decided that Marvel should exist within the same universe as their other super-hero titles, most post-1980 attempts to revive the title either made the character far too realistic or, somewhat bizarrely, oafishly and naively dim.

And so what we get here are about 80 pages of original Captain Marvel goodness, somewhat compromised by a lengthy 1940's Joe Simon/Jack Kirby Captain Marvel story that is, frankly, not all that good. Then we get about 120 pages of various Captain Marvel stories spanning the various DC reboots of the character up to the present day. The best of those reboots, Jeff Smith's recent Shazam and the Monster Society of Evil, can't be included here because of length. A Jerry Ordway/Peter Krause story from the most recent ongoing Shazam title, Power of Shazam from the 1990's, is nice and earnest and heart-warming and pretty much entirely lacking in the zing and zip of the character at its 1940's best. The other recent stories are also exceedingly minor.

The one stand-out from the post-1950's material doesn't technically star Captain Marvel at all. "Make Way for Captain Thunder!" is a standalone story from the early 1970's Superman title by Martin Pasko and Curt Swan. DC was already publishing Shazam by this time, so I assume having Thunder stand in for Marvel was either a rights issue or an editorial decision related to when and where DC wanted an official crossover between the Marvel Family and DC's mainline universe of heroes. In any case, this story -- in which a dimension-lost Captain Thunder and Superman battle before the Man of Steel figures out how to cure Thunder of his villain-created madness and send him on his way back home again -- is a fairly light-hearted delight. It also demonstrates that Curt Swan drew the best-looking 'realistic' Captain Marvel of them all, regardless of name. Alex Ross's hyper-realistic Captain Marvel, so creepily effective in Kingdom Come and used for the cover here, has always looked sinister and not a little bonkers to me. Cartooning doesn't necessarily translate to more realistic forms of representation without a lot of reworking.

In any case, my recommendation of this volume is highly qualified -- you do get some vintage 1940's and 1950's Captain Marvel along with the Pasko/Swan story, but that's still less than half the volume. If you ever see the Harmony hardcover Shazam! from the 40's to the 70's, snap it up. Well, unless it's $200, which is what it sometimes goes for. But you'll also find equally good or better selections of vintage Shazam! reprints in back issues of those 1970's 100-page giants. So hit the back-issue bins!


Captain America: Operation Rebirth (2nd edition) by Mark Waid and Ron Garney (1995-96; coll. 2008): Marvel re-reprints the mid-1990's 'Death of Captain America' storyline with six more issues of context before and after that storyline (entitled 'Operation Rebirth'). Writer Waid and penciller Garney are one of the three or four great Captain America creative teams, and this storyline is a lot of fun. Not only do we get the Red Skull and the Cosmic Cube, staples of Captain America stories for decades, but we also get what must be the lengthiest appearance of a real-world American president in a super-hero comic prior to Marvel's various Obama projects. Seriously, Bill Clinton appears in multiple issues here. It's like some bizarre Marvel sequel to "Superman's Secret Mission for President Kennedy." Highly recommended.


Sebastian O by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell (1993; coll. 2004): Zany postmodern shenanigans from Morrison and Yeowell. In a high-tech, fin de seicle Victorian England, dandy assassin/aesthete Sebastian O battles to discover a sinister conspiracy while remaining witty and impeccably dressed. Weird fun. Highly recommended.