The Hipster Dad's Bookshelf

Love & Rockets: New Stories #4

2012-01-24T00:08:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Love & Rockets: New Stories # 4 (Fantagraphics, 2011).

Admittedly, I am very, very far behind in covering some new releases, but one particular problem kept me from writing a few words about the most recent edition of the Hernandez Brothers' Love & Rockets anthology: everybody else beat me to it. I'd like to bring my readers something a little original or insightful when I have a new Bookshelf entry for you, but as the months wore on and the conclusion of "The Love Bunglers" was annotated and dissected by dozens more reviewers and critics than me, every darn time I tried to come up with something, it was nothing new.

Then the year-end "best of" lists started coming out. This comic sat atop every one of them worth a spit, giving more and more praise for it. I found it tougher and tougher to find something new to say. Then it hit me: yes, "The Love Bunglers" is certainly the best comic of the year, but Love & Rockets # 4, all hundred pages of it, is certainly not, because it also contains, alongside this masterpiece by Jaime Hernandez, about fifty pages by brother Gilbert, and they are horrible.

(Yeah, that's my big, insightful revelation. Go negative.)

No, seriously, Gilbert has been losing me for years, and this is despite the fact that, by and large, his "Palomar" stories were, once upon a time, more engaging to me than any of Jaime's concurrent Hopey and Maggie stories. Gilbert's still doing "adaptations" of sex-filled sci-fi B-movies. If these were real movies, nobody would watch them. They're dumb, grindcore garbage. There's about thirty pages of one of Luba's brain-dead movies, this one about vampires, and about fifteen pages of Killer - I think - talking and talking and talking with some guy. I find it interesting, the way reviewers are sort of glossing over just how bad Gilbert's writing has become, dismissing the work here as being just a mere distraction in as few sentences as possible, probably because reviewers, rightly, want everybody to stop what they're doing and read "The Love Bunglers," and don't want to suggest to any potential new readers that there may be some deeply subpar material in the book with it. For fifteen bucks, you don't want wasted pages.

When a collected edition of "The Love Bunglers" is eventually issued, it, on the other hand, will be worth every penny. It's a masterpiece, even if it doesn't end the way anybody really wanted it to. I'll agree with everybody else that if this is the conclusion of Maggie's story, then it reached a fine one. There's that double-page montage that everybody's talked about. My family is used to me laughing and occasionally exclaiming aloud when I read - awful habit, I know - but I apparently made such an unpleasant choke when I hit this thing that my wife rushed around the corner to see whether I was okay. It's that amazing. And this is after Jaime already smacked me upside the head with a baseball bat by filling in a much older plot and explaining, in an explanation as blunt and tragic and terse as comics can get, what happened to an old supporting player in his large cast.

I really, really like how Jaime chose to defy readers' desires for the characters. The last time that I dipped into their story, rereading the stories in the Penny Century volume, I was reminded of how Hopey, mostly loyal, just patiently waits for her flighty soulmate. I would expect that many, many readers have felt the same way that I have, that when Maggie finally did get her shit together and stopped letting her demons ruin her happiness, the series would naturally conclude with she and Hopey together. Not, I have to say, that anybody wanted this story to conclude. It's in part just how brilliantly Jaime uses the medium to jump from a moment of pointless violence and stupidity into that montage, and in part the sudden, emphatic upending of our expectations and wants. It is an argument-halt as firm as any I've ever seen, it definitively ends any debate, it breaks your heart and leaves you completely fulfilled. We were wrong. Hopey would have been settling. How the hell did that happen?

"The Love Bunglers" is amazing and magical and so incredibly sad. It's been one of the very best stories I've read in the comic medium in years. I wish I could recommend it without any reservation, but, in its present form, I can't. When it gets repackaged in some better format, I certainly will. As for this particular volume, approach with caution, and maybe you'll leave the Gilbert stories thinking that they're not that bad, and that I don't know what I'm talking about.

Hey Look!

2012-01-17T01:44:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Hey Look! (Kitchen Sink, 1992).

When I was still writing Reprint This!, I learned about Harvey Kurtzman's very silly comic page from the late 1940s. It was called Hey Look! and it ran sporadically in whatever humor or romance or funny animal comic published by Timely that needed an additional page of story that month. Kurtzman just churned the heck out of these filler pages for about three years. There were a few sample strips included in the wonderful Art of Harvey Kurtzman (Abrams, 2009) and I found them silly and charming. I was all set to scan those pages and write up a feature about it, when I got bored with Reprint This! and I learned that Kitchen Sink had already compiled all the material anyway.

A few months ago, I found the Kitchen Sink book. You know why I love used bookstores? I paid two dollars for this. The cheapest copy on Amazon right now is going for $40. Sure, it's in demand and out of print from a defunct publisher, but there are limits, you know?

Speaking of limits, despite only having a page for each feature, Kurtzman didn't seem to feel that he had any. This is only rarely laugh-out-loud funny, the humor having been blunted by time and by imitation, but it is wildly clever and inventive. As early as February 1948, Kurtzman was having his characters - principally a nameless "big guy" and "little guy" who dress in plain white T-shirts and suspenders - acknowledge their medium, break the fourth wall, and, in one really memorable gag, end a strip by ripping the final panel away. There are meta-gags that reference Charles Addams and incredibly novel panel layouts. Even if readers don't find this funny, they're certain to be surprised by the command that Kurtzman has over his medium.

Kitchen Sink's reprint, in black and white, starts with an unbelievably hyperbolic introduction by John Benson that, sensibly, references Ernie Kovacs and Stan Freberg as peers who were, similarly, stretching the boundaries of comedy. Some of these strips really did remind me of Kovacs' weird and surreal humor in the best way. By the time it wrapped up, it didn't feel tired or exhausted yet, but very fresh and promising.

The book concludes with a selection of other material that Kurtzman was also prepping as fillers for Timely from 1950-52. These include the single-page features Genius and Egghead Doodle, which star little kid protagonists, and the longer Pot-Shot Pete, a character that reappeared in an early issue of Mad. The little kid strips are more conventional than anything that happened with the big guy and the little guy, but one particular Genius, in which the little menace, Sheldon, safely bullies an older kid only to have his backup plan falter at a critical moment, really is hilarious.

The material is great, and I love the way that Kitchen Sink compiled it, with full credits and unobtrusive notations. It is apparently all of the original work, and certainly worth hunting down until some other publisher dusts off these pages and gives them another airing. That said, considering how many times Dark Horse has delayed and delayed their proposed collection of Kurtzman's Trump, that could certainly be a while. Highly recommended.

James Bond: Nightbird

2012-01-13T01:22:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of James Bond: Nightbird (Titan, 2010).

The James Bond newspaper strip is unique among the many classic reprints that Titan has released, in that it's the only one that's been collected in book form out of order. This is a little confusing, but, even though they lack volume numbers, the seventeen books do, in the end, reprint the entire run of the strip and in order, but they were not published in a beginning-to-end sequence. In perhaps the weirdest moment, the effective "book thirteen" of the run was published last. This is Nightbird, a book that contains three stories from 1976-77: "Nightbird," "Hot Shot" and "Ape of Diamonds."

It's possible that Titan skipped around sometimes in the hopes of finding the best quality material possible, and did not wish to publish before firmly knowing that they'd done their very best. After all, there are several strips in "Ape of Diamonds" which really do suffer from quite poor reproduction. This is the tradeoff for having these strips reprinted at all, in any format. Searching through newspaper archives looking for the original masters did, in many cases, turn up some incredibly neat gems, such as the Ron Embleton samples seen in another volume, and this one collects a never completed, and never printed, series of twelve strips of an abandoned strip from the early 1980s. If a few rough panels of a subpar story were the tradeoff to find that kind of rarity, then I'll take it.

On the other hand, maybe this book was published last because the stories are, and let's be charitable, pretty horrible? The 1970s Bond stories by Jim Lawrence and Yaroslav Horak - assisted in the final story by Modesty Blaise's Neville Colvin, who ghosts several strips in a quite remarkable pastiche of Horak - have a tendency towards grandiose plots that are just about this side of believable, but only if you're willing to believe the comic book supervillain trappings. "Nightbird" could have been a decent enough story about high-profile kidnappings, but with a criminal gang that uses "alien" costumes and a getaway ship shaped like a gigantic bird, it gets sillier by the panel. And by the time the trained super-gorilla shows up and Dr. No returns from the dead, you're waiting for Bond to don a cape and mask himself. Not recommended.

The Book of Human Insects

2012-01-09T04:44:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Book of Human Insects (Vertical, 2011).

The household budget crunch of 2011 meant that I had to curtail my purchases of Vertical's growing library of Osamu Tezuka comics, but that publisher sent a representative to Anime Weekend Atlanta, and I'd have been remiss in leaving without a copy of their most recent release at the time: a hardcover collection of the quite obscure Book of Human Insects. Originally serialized in 1970-71 in the pages of Play, this story didn't even merit a mention in Helen McCarthy's delightful The Art of Osamu Tezuka, which helps shine a light on how badly a complete, extensive and annotated English language resource and bibliography is needed.

So I had the pleasure of reading this story without any background whatever, not knowing what to expect. Sadly, I can't provide even one of my half-baked reviews without giving you good readers at least a hint of what you might find in this volume. The story begins with a young writer, Toshiko Tomura, enjoying the accolades and awards for her debut novel, The Book of Human Insects, following very short and very successful careers as a designer and an actress, leaving behind a wake of very bitter and angry men toasting her celebrity from the depths of their obscurity or ruin. But the suicide of another young, hopeful writer suggests that there might be more to Tomura than anyone suspects, one of bold, superhuman plagiarism and predatory, bizarre sexuality, including a deeply strange relationship with a statue...

Some reviewers have compared this to Tezuka's 1968 serial Swallowing the Earth, which is also available in English through the publisher DMP. There are certainly some similarities. Both serials are set in the present day and are political-minded thrillers with only elements of fantasy grounding their character-driven plots. Tezuka, throughout most of the 1960s, had masterminded several family-friendly, plot-driven series with television or film adaptations in mind, and one reason that most of his 1970s work is comparatively obscure to American readers is that he made a deliberate effort to engage with older audiences through work that is, on the one hand more challenging and more adult, but also much shorter and never intended to provide the fodder for TV cartoon series and merchandising. American audiences, who came to know Tezuka via his TV cartoon series and merchandising, were unfamiliar with works like Swallowing, and the earlier Vertical releases Apollo's Song and MW until very recently.

The investigation into Tomura's past, and focus about what she will do next, takes a remarkable detour in the third chapter, when she finds herself involved in a world of high-finance boardroom intrigue. Shortly after her new position, one of the men from her past resurfaces and things take a really weird turn. Her actions don't leave the character in any way sympathetic, but it remains a tight and fascinating read because her game is so astonishing. My questions about how she's able to pull off her plotting are not really answered as fully as I thought Tezuka was going for, but they don't really need to be, either. It's not that sort of story.

The artwork is, as ever, utterly amazing, with one very curious exception. Tezuka and his studio used his distinctive character styles to create a realistic, solid world. There are no artistic shortcuts or cheats, and the places in his stories look real, and lived-in, and breathe like no other environment in comics. Rugs, pillows, jail cells, tower blocks, everything feels solid, with an attention to detail that nobody else in the medium ever quite matched. The characters stay on-model, without the frequent trope in Japanese comics of changing shape or form to indicate high emotion. But then Tomura disrobes - the script finds reason for her to on several occasions - and she turns into the least erotic being in comics. She is wildly off-model, all graceless, soaring curves, with hips like a horse and a torso six feet long. I thought this a very neat touch, Tezuka drawing attention to the character's nudity by making her, naked, every bit as inhuman and alien as her actions. I never claimed that this was a beautiful or life-affirming story; there's far too great a body count for that.

I wish that I was better able, financially, to support Vertical's commitment to releasing Tezuka in English. I know that there's more coming; the first of two volumes of his popular 1960s Princess Knight is out now, and the early '80s Adolf is coming in two volumes later this year. Still no news about the much-requested Ambassador Magma, Barbara or Vampire, but maybe if all you good readers go order The Book of Human Insects, they'll reward us with some good news for 2013. How about it, guys? This book is recommended for older readers.

Some Buried Caesar

2012-01-02T22:02:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Some Buried Caesar (Farrar & Rhinehart, 1939).

I began rereading Rex Stout in early November, and while I don't intend to regularly feature (or, in many cases, re-feature) these books on this blog, I thought that I'd like to have the chance for a note or two when I stumble upon a neat trick or two that surprised me the second time around. Frequently, you find things that you missed the first time through.

In Some Buried Caesar, the sixth Nero Wolfe novel, the normally house-bound eccentric is in upstate New York to exhibit orchids at a county fair to show up a rival, and circumstances have led him and Archie Goodwin to a large farmhouse, where they are enjoying the hospitality of the wealthy owner of a chain of inexpensive restaurants. He has purchased Caesar, a prized Guernsey bull, for $45,000 and intends to have the bull butchered and served to a hundred guests at a barbecue for the publicity, outraging a cattlemen's association that wants to continue Caesar's bloodline.

So Wolfe is on Pratt's back patio and Pratt introduces a nephew, almost with the words "This is my nephew, WHO HAS A MOTIVE TO KILL ME." Almost immediately, furious representatives of the cattlemen's association show up and express their displeasure with his publicity stunt, pretty much saying "WE'VE GOT MOTIVES TO KILL YOU." Then Pratt's neighbor's son stops by with a friend, for not much other reason than to tell Pratt "I'VE GOT A MOTIVE TO KILL YOU." It's contrived and, had Pratt ended up the corpse, it would have felt as artificial as Agatha Christie. Pratt doesn't die. The neighbor's son does.

It's also interesting to see Archie's long-running flame, Lily Rowan, in her first appearance. She's introduced through the eyes of other characters and not at all flattered by their descriptions. As she develops into a sympathetic recurring character, the judgments expressed about her here seem very harsh and very strange.

The book is just great fun from start to finish, with Wolfe finding something to appreciate in the chicken fricassee at the Methodist tent to Archie-the-Agitator starting a labor movement in the county jail. That there's a murder to solve is just frosting on a very entertaining cake. Highly recommended.

Welcome to the Nerd Farm!

2011-12-31T01:56:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Welcome to the Nerd Farm! (Andrews McMeel, 2007).

At last, I have purchased the only outstanding hole in my Doonesbury library. I put it off because I was just completely certain that somebody was going to announce the incredibly long-overdue comprehensive reprint program that I have been hoping to see around the time of the 40th anniversary celebrations this year, but, well, as 2011 comes to a close and we still don't have one...

(We do have two more recent collections than this. I received 2009's Tee Time in Berzerkistan as a gift when it was released. Red Rascal's War, the latest collection, is quite new and on my to-do list to pick up sometime.)

It took me a long time, but I recently reread all of Doonesbury that is in print, which is about 70% of it. I had been keeping a blog which detailed what strips were missing, but man alive, did that ever turn into a chore. It's much more satisfying to just read without letting it turn into work. Around 2002, the books entered their sixth design incarnation - oh, my poor, ugly shelves! - and at least seemed to finally start collecting every strip without skipping any. These are easily picked out as the large format books, about 8x11, with black spines.

The principal storylines in this collection, which is set during George Bush's second term and cover all the empire-crumbling shenanigans around it, include Alex's first hectic year at MIT, BD's PTSD, and Mike attempting to convince his mother to come live in Seattle with him and his wife Kim. As always, the cast grows, and there's plenty of self-aware humor in the reader mail. Creator Garry Trudeau never goes for the easy answer, and keeps complicating things for his characters. It's a terrific, and very funny read. Recommended.

Brideshead Revisited

2011-12-27T00:14:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief, and, in this instance, spoiler-laden review of Brideshead Revisited (Chapman and Hall, 1945).

It is very difficult to embrace a book when you spend pretty much the entirety of the narrative wanting to punch at least one of the major characters in the snoot. Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited came across my radar after an unusual fashion. I had finished reading Jill Paton Walsh's The Attenbury Emeralds and wondered just how big these gigantic aristocratic country houses were meant to be. My take on things, having read a little about them, is that between the wars, Great Britain had better than a hundred of these gigantic Biltmore-sized estates, to use a scale that Southerners like me will recognize, which is an awful lot of great freaking big, ungainly houses in an awfully small area. In the same sized area here, we've got Biltmore and the RJ Reynolds Estate, I think, and that's it.

Anyway, Brideshead came recommended as a book that dealt with the decline of the country estates. I knew of the 1980s TV serial, of course, but mainly how it came to epitomize, in the US, the culture snobbery that informs perceptions of PBS's Masterpiece Theatre, despite the fact that it never actually aired on that anthology program. I checked out the novel and was, initially, taken with things. It starts during World War Two, and an officer named Charles Ryder's unit is billeted at the decrepit and crumbling Brideshead, prompting him to remember how well he remembered his time as a visitor here.

When Ryder was first introduced to Brideshead, it was as a guest of his college chum, Lord Sebastian Flyte, in the 1920s. They met at Oxford, and how Ryder failed to kick the drunk sissy in the tail, I can't guess. I don't know that I can recall a less sufferable character in fiction than Sebastian. Waugh, writing with a discreet and polite edge, masks their friendship in words and code that leave it to readers' interpretation of how close these two are. I understand that the more recent feature adaptation of the novel just goes full bore and depicts them as lovers, which is the most likely reading. Particularly after Lord Sebastian, the younger son of Lord Marchmain, the Marquess of Marchmain, later makes his way, embarrassingly, across Europe and North Africa in the company of other effeminate drunks, usually under the patient, understanding, tutelage of some priest or other, only the determined would insist there's no hanky panky going on here. Even without actually seeing the TV serial, you can still visualize how all these urbane, sensitive, blow-dried dimwits, as played by Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews influenced the New Romantic movement. I don't actually need to watch the TV Brideshead when a single Spandau Ballet video will do.

But Sebastian... well, he carries around a teddy bear named Aloysius. At college. He tells his barber that he needs a brush with extra-thick bristles for when Aloysius misbehaves and needs a jolly good spanking. What a pathetic, humiliating child. Did Morrissey read this book before he went onstage with a pocket full of gladiolas?

Charles ends up being asked by Sebastian's mother to leave Brideshead and never return after he goes well out of his way to enable Sebastian's drinking. So he goes off, continuing his burgeoning art career, marries another classmate's daughter, lovelessly, spends months in South America drawing things and preparing for a show, reacts to the news that his wife had a daughter, conceived the night he left, with all the interest one might give a rubber ball, and, just like that, I was ready to punch his snoot pretty viciously as well. But his wife Celia's not faithful - naturally, it would make things difficult if Charles was seen to be cruel - and Charles takes up with, of all people, Lady Julia, who is Sebastian's younger sister. And she's also in a marriage of convenience for some idiotic reason.

Let me go back to Walsh. One of the many things that she caught when she took up the characters of Lord Peter Wimsey and his family is that Dorothy L. Sayers made Helen, the Duchess of Denver, a completely awful shrew by virtue of her devotion to duty over love. This book is full of upper-class imbeciles who, like Helen, care more about duty than anything else, forcing them into situations where they excuse their awful, hideous behavior. Waugh puts an interesting twist on things by having the family feel very strongly about their responsibilities as Catholics. It guides their behavior in unexpected ways, particularly as Julia plans to marry the dumb cluck of her life, only to learn quite late in the day that he was divorced some years previously in Canada. It also sets up the climax, when Lord Marchmain comes home to die, taking for-bleeding-ever to do so, and the rules of Julia's faith suddenly throw everything in the air, ruining even the last salvage of something happening in this book that I wanted to see happen. And, just like that, I was ready to take a strong-bristled hairbrush to Lady Julia's rear.

If you can stand any of these idiots, you might be intrigued and interested in how Waugh constructs the novel, and be impressed by his use of language. On the other hand, I found it agonizing and downright exasperating, watching jerks treat each other contemptuously and without connection for years and years. I think most of them got the fates they deserved, but I couldn't even muster any reason to care. Not at all recommended.

Embroideries

2011-12-20T01:09:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Embroideries (Pantheon, 2005).

About the best that I can say about Embroideries, which I suppose you could label a "graphic novella" by Marjane Satrapi, is that I don't think I've ever read anything laid out in this fashion before. It has elements of being a comic to it, but if the artist's simple and endearing artwork in Persepolis occasionally threatened to dissolve into unconnected lines and polygons, this goes further to the edge. This book doesn't even have panel borders, and while most of the pages have two or more drawings on them, connected by the narration and dialogue, it doesn't look at all like any comic I've ever seen. I like this a lot.

The story is about little kaffeeklatsches that Satrapi and her grandmother enjoyed in Tehran, "ventilations of the heart" where they gossiped behind all the absent friends' backs about sex. It is an occasionally amusing look at the sex lives of Iranian women, from the ones in control to the so hopelessly conservative that they've never seen their husbands naked.

Briefly, then, it is an unusual topic, told with frank candor and in an agreeably unusual format. It's probably not a book that I will return to very often, and not one that really generated much enthusiasm or inspiration, but certainly a book that I enjoyed reading. Recommended with minor reservations.

Penny Century

2011-12-17T00:40:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Penny Century (Love & Rockets Maggie Series vol. 4) (Fantagraphics, 2010).

Love & Rockets is the only series that I don't mind purchasing and repurchasing in multiple editions, although a much, much tighter budget of late has left me far behind with this series. I like the way that Jaime Hernandez's stories read in different configurations. Approaching his little slices of life through flashback or in different sequences lets little details, the sort of which most readers probably miss the first time around, take new shapes and new levels of importance. I really love these paperback editions, about seven and a half by nine, and I even like that the books are unnumbered. This is probably the only book series about which I'll ever say such a thing.

Design nerd that I am, Jacob Covey's packaging on these books is so incredibly appealing, and it honestly doesn't matter in which order people read them. The stories certainly move forward, but at the same time making several looks back. When the two-part "Election Day" climaxes with Hopey learning that there has been a big, important development in Maggie's life that she's missed entirely, it's a punch in the gut that gives Hernandez the chance to turn time back and show what happened. He does this better than darn near anybody else in comics.

Although, while I'm on the subject of design, the only failing of these books is not enumerating where these stories originally appeared. I think that these are all the stories from the graphic novel Whoa Nellie!, the one-off comic Maggie and Hopey Color Fun, and the six or seven issues of Penny Century, in which the characters appeared between the two separate volumes of the ongoing Love & Rockets anthology, along with at least one story from a few issues into volume two.

I think that almost all of it was previously reprinted at least twice before, including in the large hardcover Locas II, a celebrated coffee table book which also contained other, later, material. The design nerd in me cares, and I suspect that budget-minded readers who don't wish to duplicate their purchases might want to know. Small, italicized subscript on the table of contents would answer anybody's questions.

You know, Judge Dredd: "Midnight Surfer," originally appeared in progs 424-429. It's not hard.

Anyway, the "Whoa Nellie!" story lets a couple of the series' minor supporting characters take center stage as Hernandez indulges in his fetish of women's wrestling. It's astonishingly well-drawn, and I love the way he chooses to let pages and pages of combat go on without any dialogue or sound effects, focusing exclusively on the fighting. "Maggie and Hopey Color Fun," presented here in black and white, returns to the main characters, apparently several months after the stories at the end of the previous volume in this series, Perla la Loca. There's a brief allusion to Maggie being missed at home, something revealed in greater detail later in the book, but otherwise, things are back to what passes for normal with our heroines. Hopey waits impatienly, but understandingly, for her flighty soulmate to get her shit together, and tempers her hormones in the meantime by trying to break up her brother and his current squeeze.

They remain on the periphery of Penny Century's life, as they attend a pool party thrown by one of billionaire HR Costigan's other ex-wives, Norma. As ever, the cast grows and swells with new additions. Norma and her daughter with Costigan end up on the lam at one point, trying to avoid an army of attorneys and policemen as Costigan hovers near death. Penny drives Maggie's former lover Ray crazy, does Hopey's hair, sends Maggie down a "horror highway," which is precisely where the flighty Maggie doesn't need to drive, and, either to hide out or to help Izzy with her anxieties, she moves in and mandates that they won't wear clothes anymore. We might accuse Hernandez of giving into another fetish in stories like "Inquiritis!," but, with art this nice, who'd be so churlish?

Actually, though, despite the prurient fun of stories like that, my favorite part of the book is the surreal "The Race," in which Maggie finally meets the little beast inside her "that makes ya fuck up every day of yer shit life," and finds herself woefully unable to cope. As ever, there's just a tiny hint of extra-normal fantasy at work in the stories, just enough for readers to accept that there's something very strange over the horizon or in Izzy's psyche, but never enough to overwhelm the wonderful, human reality of these beloved characters. Highly recommended for older readers.

Rumpole and the Reign of Terror

2011-12-13T01:47:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Rumpole and the Reign of Terror (Viking, 2006).

I didn't actually intend to read this book. I felt that after suffering the disappointments of three volumes of John Mortimer's lackluster short stories about Rumpole, none of them a patch on the television scripts, I was pleased to end on the very high note of his terrific novel Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders. So I had to bite my lip a little when my friend David offered to lend me this 2006 novel, worried that it might spoil the very happy memory of the very good book that I'd finished. Since I'm certainly not quite so tacky as to reward a friend's generous thought that I should enjoy it with a negative review - it's not like this is some infernal Harry Potter book here, and the lender a fangirl blind to its faults - you dear readers have probably guessed that I did enjoy this novel a good deal in the end.

This time out, Rumpole is again defending one of the members of the extended Timson family when a niece of the present accused asks for his help. Her husband, a doctor born in Pakistan, has been arrested as a terrorist and, because the security of the nation is at stake, not told what the evidence against him is; indeed, not even told specifically what he's meant to have done. Attempting a defense is one of Rumpole's greatest challenges to date; because of the classified nature of the intelligence, even he can't find out where he's supposed to begin.

Britain's draconian laws meant to protect its citizens from terror attacks had clearly got under Mortimer's skin. There was actually a lot of outrage from very good writers about just how oppressive things were getting at this time. A 2005 John Wagner-scripted episode of Judge Dredd, illustrated by Phil Winslade, was written from a similar perspective of disgust and distrust. Poor Rumpole is finding the evolving basics of courtroom behavior enough of a struggle - judges with word processors? - and to have the laws amended so that hearsay can be entered into evidence is almost too much to bear. And now this.

Things are also as bad as ever on the home front. She Who Must Be Obeyed and her eternal ally Dodo are not at all pleased with Rumpole sinking so low as to defend a terrorist, despite Rumpole's insistence that, in the first place, the government hasn't even started to make a formal case proving that he's anything of the sort, and in the second, he's just "an old taxi," obliged to represent anybody who asks for him. But his intransigence costs him his standing with his best-paying clients, the Timsons, who want nothing to do with either their errant niece or anybody who defends terrorists, and, now that his wife is writing her own memoirs to set straight the record about their tumultuous marriage, it will probably give him a blacker eye there than he thought possible. Then when "the Mad Bull," Lord Justice Bullingham, starts calling around after his wife, you start to wonder just how much an Old Bailey Hack is meant to bear.

This is certainly not a good entry point to the series, as there are quite a few subplots and supporting characters and tightly-drawn continuity by this point, but I would certainly recommend it first to anybody familiar with the character from TV, and secondly to readers not necessarily interested in how it reads as one book in a series, but how well the angry Mortimer handles the controversial subject matter. Not as air-punchingly awesome as The Penge Bungalow Murders, but definitely worth a look.

Cardboard Gods

2011-12-05T23:40:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Cardboard Gods (Algonquin, 2010).

I really do love the 1970s more than that decade deserves. Heaven knows why, but I get a real thrill from anything that captures the era as well as this book does.

I contend that the very best sources for understanding the decade are all comics: Doonesbury, Howard the Duck and Oh! Wicked Wanda. The first is, bafflingly, still not available in a complete edition, and the last of the three is, criminally, unlikely to ever be available in any kind of legal reprint. But Josh Wilker's Cardboard Gods belongs to a solid, large and respectable second tier of sources that includes Ellen Forney's Monkey Food, Spike Lee's film Summer of Sam, that documentary about Patty Hearst from a few years ago, and the terrific Big Book of the '70s from Paradox Press.

So this is a memoir about a sensitive, night-terror-troubled kid who spent the seventies on the broken end of one of those unsuccessful experiments in marriage that people attempted in those days, and, with his older brother, moved with his mom and her boyfriend, whom she met on a bus to go protest something in DC, to rural Vermont, near the town of East Randolph. Hoping to live off the land and barter blacksmithing services with the locals, young Josh found comfort and solace in a passion for the Boston Red Sox and in his growing treasure box of Topps baseball cards. Each short chapter begins with a reproduction of an old card, which launches a memory, either about the player and his stats, or what might have been happening in his life when he obtained the card.

There are some great stories here, but a lot of them are pretty painful. Until Josh ends up in one of those oddball schools where kids "learn" at their own pace, it's a constant stream of bullying about his hippie home. Things get a little better when he and his brother try to spend some quality time with their hapless, in-over-his-head father, and, at one point, attempt to see a Ted Nugent concert from nosebleed seats in New York, only to realize shortly afterward that they left after the opening act.

Honestly, the book started to lose me as Wilker left the 1970s about two-thirds of the way into it. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but even his pained memories of the decade seem so vibrant that I wanted it to continue. Talking about how they couldn't pick up NBC programming in this area struck a specific "yes! the seventies were like that!" chord with me, even though I never had that experience myself in suburban Atlanta, and in the end, I selfishly wanted the memoir to be more about the decade than about its author.

The only flaws, in the end, are the ones that the reader projected onto the text. Recommended, but, owing to some pretty explicit details about how The Big Book of Teenage Answers impacted his fantasies of Cheryl Tiegs, not for younger readers.

Persepolis 2

2011-12-03T01:21:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (Pantheon, 2005).

The second of three Satrapi books that I have read this year, Persepolis 2 was originally published in France as two separate 92-page albums and a dividing line between the two couldn't be more clearly shown without a big flagging caption reading "CONTINUED NEXT ISH!!" underneath the climactic splash page of teenage Marjane donning her veil again, her four years in Europe coming to an ignoble end and preparing to return home.

I'm not sure why I had trouble relating to the material in the first collection, but I really enjoyed this a good deal more. I like Satrapi's artwork a lot, and I like the occasional off-model breakdown into completely wonky anatomy to indicate anger or frustration, such as at the bottom of page 78. I like how she occasionally uses solid black panels, with faces pasted in and outlines of bodies drawn with white-out. As a frustrated, deeply mediocre artist myself, I see in Satrapi the same solutions to artistic problems that I had tried, only with greater success here, and I'm pleased to see that in my own failed comic-world past, I was on the right avenue.

The first half of the book follows Marjane's European misadventure, starting out with high hopes but ending up homeless and spending all day riding trams and getting incredibly sick. She grows up a lot in Austria - addressing a comment left in my article on the previous book, I don't believe that her nihilist punk friend Momo turns into a jerk so much as Marjane, maturing, becomes able to see through his crap.

It all ends in tears, but even back in Iran, Marjane still has a lot of growing up to do. I enjoyed this segment, and the look at how women's lives in public were nothing like the lives they led away from the prying eyes of their police "brothers" who enforced public dress and conduct. An incident where Marjane, needing a distraction, fingers some innocent dude to get away with some lipstick, and initially finds it hilarious, thanks to some enabling by her boyfriend, is really horrifying, considering what that poor guy probably suffered at the hands of armed thugs. The stark black and white silhouettes of a later section with simple shapes of guards chasing students from rooftop to rooftop is over in a flash, but it packs a punch.

Her story comes to an end that's every bit as inevitable as her time in Vienna, and I was caught up the whole time. It's a very good story, and one told well. Recommended.

Batman: Contagion

2011-11-29T01:26:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Batman: Contagion (DC, 1996).

There might be two ways to look at this book, but the question of why in the world I own it should probably be raised. When I lived in Athens in the late 1990s, I would occasionally visit the J&J Flea Market a little north of town. There, one vendor had a very impressive room full of very inexpensive comics. Most of them were three-for-a-dollar and probably worth even less, but he also had several boxes of more entertaining 1970s books - Superman Family, Metal Men and the like - for not more than two bucks each. Occasionally, a trade paperback or graphic novel would slip in for the same very low price, and I would usually snap it up, thinking $1 a quite fair price to sample a very long story from comics with which I was unfamiliar.

I also suffered from that foolish malady common to collectors where I wished to have shelves full of books. The quality could come later; first, I wanted the shelves to look impressive and full. This sometimes meant that I would spend an occasional dollar or two on books that I normally would not, just to swell the shelves. You know the greatest thing about swearing off the bloat of my material world a year and a bit ago? I'm no longer tempted by dumb things like that.

At any rate, I suspected that I wouldn't enjoy the book, and I was proved right. I disliked it from the start, as the designer evidently chose to blow his budget on a long lunch. The very first page of the book is the first page of story, and it opens very abruptly, without any kind of scene-setting or even credits. Parsing out who wrote and drew what, and where this material originally appeared, is like a jigsaw puzzle. On the inside back cover(!), there's a list of comics where these chapters were originally serialized. I count twelve, but there are thrteen chapters inside. The twelfth episode is labeled "part ten." The original covers of these twelve comics are reproduced at the size of postage stamps. Alan Grant is credited as one of the five writers on the inside front cover, but because some of the interior credits are edited out, I'm unable to tell what pages he actually scripted.

In other words, this is yet another slapped-together, thought-free, half-assed cash-in to rip off as many Batman readers as can be suckered in by it. Having said that, it is certainly possible that the $19.99 edition presently in print might have addressed some of this volume's deficiency. That is, after all, a price 50% greater than the $12.95 that DC originally charged for this book. We know that DC is capable of so much better - see their astounding series of Starman Omnibus volumes - and so it's just pathetic seeing how they can just crap out books with the barest minimum of work and get away with it.

But really, all the tinkering in the world couldn't turn these comics into anything readable. DC, like its principal rival, often creates "crossover" stories which wind their way through several loosely-related titles over the course of a couple of months. Indeed, "Contagion" was a management-decreed storyline, mostly (apparently) written by Chuck Dixon, and given to the comics' regular creative teams to tell. For my readers unfamiliar with this practice, it would mean that on one week, you could read part one of the story in Batman # 529, and parts two and three the following week in Catwoman # 31 and in Azrael # 15, and so on. There is, bluntly, no way in the universe that this could ever result in a satisfying read for anybody. It never has worked, and it never will. The closest that it has ever come was in a Grant Morrison-led crossover called One Million, and that worked because DC suspended its normal operations for a single month and let the story, as directed by Morrison, take over its entire line through individually-labeled and designed titles, and even that epic was fraught with pointless, unnecessary moments and melodramas that fell on their faces.

Well, maybe it worked somewhere else. Sometime soon, I'll try looking at a similar Superman crossover event from the period and see how well it reads.

This time out, the five writers attempt to tell a story where a lethal, no-known-cure plague called The Clench is brought to Gotham City and many of the city's wealthiest are trapped with it in a luxury high-rise. They send word to the city's underworld that they will pay five million for a cure, leading Robin, Catwoman and a bounty hunter in a race to find one of the only known survivors of the disease. Meanwhile, Batman, Huntress and Nightwing try to keep order in the city after the Clench escapes into the population, and the untrustworthy Poison Ivy, who is immune to all diseases, is recruited to help.

The patchwork story, with its artificial cliffhangers, just does not engage in any way. Dixon's installments are the most energetic, and Denny O'Neil's the most somber and humorless. At one point, Robin starts to succumb to the Clench, leaving no doubt as to how quickly this plague will be cured. Unresolved subplots from these books wander through and just confused me. Commissioner Gordon has been outed from his job when the book opens, and his replacement is a dim buffoon. The Clench has evidently been dumped into the population, deliberately, by a gang of Azrael's old enemies. I'm sorry to spoil that, but telling you that the rogues' gallery of an already-forgotten C-list supporting character is behind this allegedly important story might best explain why this book is not recommended at all.

The Attenbury Emeralds

2011-11-22T01:19:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Attenbury Emeralds (Hoddard & Stoughton, 2010).

I used to keep a blog about Lord Peter Wimsey, but it turned into work. A chore without pay. Reading Dorothy L. Sayers' novels and stories have always been just about the greatest pleasure imaginable - Gaudy Night, firmly, is my favorite novel of the 20th Century - but I didn't enjoy keeping that blog, and shelved it, and let the books rest for a while longer.

Eventually, happily, my wife finally picked up the first book and started reading. I returned the later Sayers books to my own reading pile to refresh my memory of things so that we could discuss them. I fell in love again so much that I decided to give the fanfic of Jill Paton Walsh another try. When Thrones, Dominations was released in the nineties, I read it without enthusiasm, appreciating the effort but not able to embrace it. I never picked up the second continuation, A Presumption of Death. Each of these were built from, rather than being based on, existing material - an unfinished novel and some magazine articles about how the Wimseys were coping with the war - and it is perhaps discordant and rude of me to use a word as dismissive as "fanfic" to describe Walsh's very hard work, but that's just how I perceive it.

Thing is, though, I love Peter and Harriet so much that, as I reread Have His Carcase and Murder Must Advertise to discuss them with my wife, and we watched the BBC adaptations together, I found myself not only willing to give Walsh another try, but excited. Thrones, Dominations was much improved after collecting dust for so long on my shelf, while A Presumption of Death felt a little long-winded and didn't really inspire either of us to talk much about it. I ordered The Attenbury Emeralds, but Presumption didn't leave me very optimistic. Fortunately, I was very pleasantly surprised.

Set in 1951, with Peter now a striking sixty years old(!), it's a story that begins with Peter telling Harriet the story of his first case, in 1921, eight years before they met. As a personal aside, Walsh chose, unwittingly, to debunk my own theory, unfounded, that Peter had met his close friend, and future brother-in-law, Charles Parker while Peter was still engaged to a woman named Barbara, based on the familiarity with which the two speak of her in Clouds of Witness. One must, grudgingly, concede that Walsh is almost certainly correct, and that Barbara had to be history before Peter had any reason to ever meet Charles. Peter was still yammering about her in 1926, seven years after she dumped him, because that is simply what men, unguarded, will do. The silly ass waited around for Harriet for six years, so we should know full well he lets his romantic fantasies lead him through heartbreak, no matter how long it takes.

Anyway, Peter brings up this first case after they read of the death of Lord Attenbury, whose prized emeralds vanished during an engagement party. The complex story takes quite some time to tell, and when that adventure had concluded, Peter had found his standing and command, and was mostly over the shellshock that had laid him low for most of his first two years back from the war. But there is still a great deal more book to cover, as Attenbury's heir turns up with a curious problem. He needs to sell the emerald, which is stored in a bank, to cover the very high death duties set in place by the government after World War Two, but the bank will not return it, as they have been told that Attenbury was not the actual owner.

As with the best of Sayers novels, the actual detective fiction is equally important to the development of the characters and the very keen sense of social observation. I do regret that Walsh did not take the opportunity to write further adventures set during wartime rather than skipping so far ahead, but this allows her to really get into the disintegration of the aristocracy, its sons and heirs killed in action and the survivors hit with crippling, estate-shattering death duties and the subsequent changing social strata.

Peter and Bunter's relationship is an anachronism in 1951, and events within the family - which, incidentally, absolutely blindsided me - put further strain on their place in the bold new world of the 1950s. Getting to the bottom of the curiosity of the emeralds, and identifying the series of accidents that have been plaguing the family for thirty years as murders, is exciting on one level and might have made for a good read; wondering what will happen next to the Wimseys makes for a spectacular one. Recommended with pleasure, and the hopes of more to come.

(In a perfect world, of course, based on how she handled Peter's fantastic cameo in A Letter of Mary, Laurie King would be writing stories of the 1920s Peter, while Walsh continued in the 1950s. And we would have one novel from each writer in alternating years. And ponies. And ice cream wouldn't make us fat.)

Bite Club

2011-11-19T00:28:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Bite Club (DC/Vertigo, 2007).

When Bite Club, a miniseries written by Howard Chaykin, first appeared in the mid-2000s, I dismissed it out of hand because it looked like pandering. Sexy vampires. If they're in YA prose books, then they're brooding, misunderstood young males, and if they're in comics, then they're aggressive females, usually naked. Make no mistake, Risa, the usually naked central character of the two miniseries, is every bit of a stereotype as Edward in Twilight. It just depends on your target audience. If you're writing for eleven year-old girls curious about sex, your vampire is Edward, and if you're writing for sexually frustrated twentysomething boys, your vampire is Risa.

I paused after I found a very, very cheap collected edition of the eleven issues of Bite Club when I realized David Hahn was credited with the art*. Hahn had, at that point, shown up a surprising number of times in some Bookshelf entries over the summer. I really do like his art quite a lot, and I'd probably enjoy looking at the work even beyond all the bare comic book boobies. Unfortunately, I chose to read it as well.

Oh, most of the original series covers were drawn by Frank Quitely. Some of them are cheeky and silly and those are worth looking at. Just not the text.

Bite Club is every bit as tired and tedious as I felt it would be when I first heard of it, and a lot of it is down to the protagonists who circle around Risa. The premise is that in this world, vampires are treated as an ethnic minority and have been running organized crime in Miami for decades. Just to show how much originality and thought went into this production, the family consigliere is an old Jewish lawyer who calls the young male leads "boychik." Well, of course he does.

But if no thought at all went into coming up with a Sopranos-with-vampires comic, even less thought went into crafting this thing so closely to the Vertigo template that it's practically a parody. Of course Risa is gorgeous, and a lesbian, and gets naked a lot, because this is a Vertigo book! Of course she comes onto the male protagonists, who are unsure and lack confidence about a) sex and b) vampires, who are just a metaphor for sex, because this is a Vertigo book! This hews so closely to the Vertigo stereotype that I think Chaykin spent more time seething about his contempt for the audience than he did developing the characters.

Put another way, when Risa is finally sent to jail early in the second story, above the objections of the rookie detective who has fallen for her aggressive, untouchable charm - and Lord, it's infuriating, the way the "nice boy" becomes so smitten with the idea of Risa as she makes the first move - anyway, when the narrative tells us that Risa is heading for jail, anybody who is unable to guess that Hahn will soon be illustrating an expansive naked girl fight in the prison shower has not read any fiction since kindergarten. It's that obvious, and that tiresome, and, really, not at all sexy and certainly not recommended.

*Note that, owing to poor reading of the credits on the part of this reviewer, the original draft of this review credited co-writer Tischman with pencils and Hahn with inks. I regret the error.

Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale

2011-11-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale (2nd edition, BBC, 2010).

This was a little exhausting. It was also a pain in the rear to read! At 704 pages, no paperback will be long for this world without putting only one half of the book down on your reading desk or table at a time while holding the rest gingerly. Since a book as compelling as this will be sending fans and researchers back and forth to their bookshelf constantly, I suspect this was a ploy of BBC Books to sell more copies - one to keep in as-pristine-as-possible condition, and one to have its spine destroyed by constant rereading.

Anyway, it's a lengthy, exhaustive, incredibly engaging back-and-forth correspondence between Doctor Who's executive producer and head writer from 2005-2009, Russell T. Davies, and journalist Benjamin Cook. It starts just before transmission of the 2007 season with David Tennant and Freema Agyeman, while Davies was prepping for the fourth season, which co-starred Catherine Tate, and goes right through the end of Tennant's time in the lead role. It is huge fun, because Davies is so incredibly effusive, candid and indiscreet.

There's a fair amount of celebrity gossip, but it's all much more interesting than trivia. The remarkable stardom of Kylie Minogue will probably leave most American readers, unaware of her really amazing run of British hit singles, baffled, but the genuine affection that Davies has for the actors that the show employed - especially the great Bernard Cribbens, whose real-world wartime experiences became the fictional Wilf's - was great to read.

The best experience is just understanding how Davies somehow managed to function at all in such an incredibly high-stress job. British television drama places far more of the load on one person - Doctor Who, unlike American shows, doesn't have a writers' room - and the amount of rewriting that Davies did on most of the stories will probably have you questioning why on earth he didn't just write every episode himself. I didn't always agree with Davies's choices on Who - despite so much to enjoy and embrace, four of his five super-big endings just fell flat for me - but there's no question that his work is the living definition of a labor of love. Recommended for anybody who enjoys the show, or anybody who wants to write.

Persepolis

2011-11-08T01:33:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Persepolis (Pantheon, 2003).

This was an entertaining, albeit occasionally frustrating experience. Marie and I saw the film version ages ago when it was playing at Cine Athens, and we kept intending to pick up the comics from which it was adapted, but just never found the time or pennies to do so. Fortunately, the market took care of that for us. Since the books have been assigned in so many college courses - probably that recent wave of "Graphic Novels 101" that comp lit departments have been offering - there are second-hand copies all over the place now.

You can see why this material really appeals to academics. If you're unfamiliar with Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it is a memoir of a young girl's childhood in Iran in the mid-1970s, as the Islamic Revolution begins the overthrow of the Shah. Autobiography! Important recent world events! A female writer! Graphic novels! This thing ticks just about every conceivable box of the lit department's diversity checklist. In the defense of the hundreds of undergraduates who have dumped their copies of this book, I can see why it might not appeal to audiences who really want to believe that comic books are synonymous with superhero action.

Like Art Spiegelman's Maus, this is a work that has found so much academic and critical approval that other peoples' opinions get in the way of forming your own. Frankly, it's a book that I wish that I could love, but I really do find it quite cold. I do love her art style, and the bold, clean lines and the stark black and white. I like the simplicity of the flat character designs, but at the same time, they are so simple and so without depth that all of the art is just a breath away from dissolving into random polygons on paper. There were moments where the simplicity got in the way of really connecting with the emotions; young Marjane's immature rant at, and rejection of, God really did not resonate with me.

There are certainly elements and anecdotes that I liked a lot. I love the little tween rebellion that goes on with young Marjane embracing western pop music like Michael Jackson and Kim Wilde and getting grief for it from grown-ups, and I love her character's ongoing naive hero-worship. But after finishing it, I was left with a feeling of curiosity rather than satisfaction. I would like to read more Satrapi, and certainly will, but the elevation of this slight, often whimsical tale into the award-winning juggernaut that it became leaves me utterly baffled. It is cute and charming, but probably not a book that I'll be diving back into any time soon. Recommended with reservations.

Lenny Zero and the Perps of Mega-City One

2011-11-05T03:47:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Lenny Zero and the Perps of Mega-City One (Rebellion / Simon & Schuster, 2011).

I really don't envy anybody's job in trying to introduce Americans to the sprawling world of Judge Dredd. (This collection is among the titles co-published with Simon & Schuster for the American market.) Start anywhere in the present day, and much of the subtleties of such long-running subplots are lost. Start at the beginning and you're looking at something that really takes a lot of effort, primitive stories told in a visual language with which most Americans are unfamiliar. Dredd is always a work in progress, and his stories have leaked out into dozens of other short-run series with other lead characters, set in his universe with rules most familiar to readers who already know Dredd fairly well.

The godawfully titled Lenny Zero and the Perps of Mega-City One collects two of these short series, along with three installments of Dredd that feature a recurring criminal, wrapping up with a fourth memorable character starring in a two-part Dredd tale by Robbie Morrison and Henry Flint. There is some very good stuff in this collection, but as a book, it is really difficult to embrace.

First up are the three stories of Lenny Zero by Andy Diggle and Jock. These are hugely fun little adventures about a clever undercover judge who decides that a life of crime is too darn appealing and sets about taking down the assets of a gangster. They're followed by the first three of four stories for Bato Loco by Gordon Rennie and Simon Coleby. Our "hero" here is a weaselly little con artist and very minor link in various organized crime chains who manages more last-second lucky breaks than anybody deserves.

Unfortunately, while these are both fun little series and, as they are too short to be realistically collected any other way, it's good to see them finding space in an anthology like this, they are also the clear standouts of the material, and the rest of the book just doesn't measure up. Three Dredd episodes featuring the villain Slick Dickens follow these, and it won't take a very trained eye to realize that they all have the same plot, and not a particularly good one. The less said about "Street Fighting Man," with its sentimental underpinning and risible, out-of-character climax, the better, although it's certainly drawn well by Henry Flint.

The problems are just huge, across the board, despite the quality of the ten or so episodes that form the six Lenny Zero and Bato Loco stories. These are good stories, but this presentation doesn't make any sense to me. 160 pages simply isn't enough to really dig into the fun of Mega-City One's criminal culture. Slick Dickens is stunningly out of place among the violence and mayhem, and would have worked better as a single episode coda, suggesting how the criminal class of the city would like things to be. A larger book that incorporated, say, some of the classic Mega-Rackets of the early 1980s, or the completely brilliant "Flood's Thirteen" caper from five or six years ago, would have fit much better thematically.

While 160 pages were not enough to really dig into the material that could have been included, most of the stories here are still entertaining, and they're presented with Rebellion's expected attention to detail and excellent reproduction. Curiously, this book retains the interior design elements of the rest of their extensive line, but neither the front cover nor the spine match anything else from the publisher, an aggravating oversight that will annoy completists, most of whom probably have most of this material in other editions already. Recommended, therefore, for new readers only.

Devil in a Blue Dress

2011-11-02T01:24:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Devil in a Blue Dress (Norton, 1990).

Publisher's Weekly, strangely, described Walter Mosley's debut novel as "jaunty." That is not at all the word I would use for Devil in a Blue Dress. Set in 1950, it is the first in a cycle of novels featuring Easy Rawlins, a veteran recently fired from his job at an airplane manufacturing plant. Needing money, he takes a commission to find a lady recently seen in the company of a gangster. If you know your Chandler, then trying to find people who don't want to be found, in the presence of people who don't want anybody to find them, invariably leaves violence and corpses as the story progresses.

Plotwise, there isn't anything new at all in this book. Even the sex scene, once a bruised and beaten Easy falls into the arms of his femme fatale, proceeds with a weary sense of inevitability. But what I had never seen before in earlier work in this genre is the strong characterization and sense of place. Mosley's ability to build a 1950 that audiences have rarely had chances to see - the poor black neighborhoods of postwar Los Angeles - is downright amazing. It's a world where the bigotry and secrecy are natural and uncompromising, and where nothing is really left buried.

Violence is just an expected ingredient in hard-boiled, or California-based, detective fiction, but the sheer brutality of this book is nevertheless eye-popping. DeWitt Albright, the man who hires Easy, is revealed early on to have a sadistic, cruel side that overpowers everything and leaves our hero very uncertain about continuing, but then we meet Mouse. Oh, man. Mouse is a violent former associate of Easy's who stays in Texas most of the time. Dropping him into the proceedings is like lobbing a grenade into a burning building. Yeah, the force of the explosion might blow out the nearest flames, but at one hell of a cost.

In the end, the book is most satisfying if the reader is watching how this events affect Easy. The heroes of Ross McDonald or Raymond Chandler novels are wired to handle these kinds of escalating messes of lies and emotion. Easy isn't. While the outcome of the plot is fairly obvious from about thirty pages in, the impact on his character is less certain. Readers will be confident that he'll make it out in one piece, but the cost might be a little higher, and a little more honest, than what earlier writers have doled out on their casts. Recommended.

Indigo Prime: Everything and More

2011-10-26T14:36:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Indigo Prime: Everything and More (Rebellion, 2011).

Of all the deliciously high-concept series and serials that have appeared in the pages of 2000 AD, John Smith's Indigo Prime, which weaved its way in and out of its own and a few other stories from 1986-91, is just about the wildest. Briefly, it's about an organization located at the nexus point of all the countless parallel universes and is responsible for policing them from the reality-altering damage caused by things like time travel or breaking-the-laws-of-physics experiments. Basically, if the scientists of your world have split enough atoms to cause jackbooted reptilian Nazis from the Earth's core to emerge and conquer the Roman Empire, these are the guys who come and fix things. For a price.

The original run of Indigo Prime, despite one or two stories that rank among my favorites told in the medium of comics, was a mindbender of a series, with its high concepts frequently told in a deliberately obscure and challenging way. Part of the thrill was guessing what was happening one or two minutes away from the action, learning the background of the action and the relationships of the handful of characters that we met. A much, much larger cast was always hinted at, and even higher stakes suggested, but as Smith retired the concept in 1991, these were left to readers' imaginations. (I discussed the series in much greater detail over at my Thrillpowered Thursday blog a few weeks ago.)

A 2008 Smith-written serial called Dead Eyes revealed, stunningly, that agents of Indigo Prime were still at large. It's been far too long a wait, but September saw the formal return of Indigo Prime in a new four-part adventure that, as patiently as the mercurial and restless Smith can manage it, eases new readers into the incredibly weird and thunderously wild world of this bunch. This reintroduction - actually, it's the closest thing to an introduction that the series has ever seen, as they originally just sort of snuck in like infiltrators and weirded up the place - ran in 2000 AD issues 1750-1753. A second story began in issue 1756 and, at the time that I am posting this blog, is a couple of weeks into its run. Digital copies of these comics, as PDFs or CBZs, can be purchased from Clickwheel or from better comic shops.

Smith's way of easing us into things is to show us the cataclysmic destruction of one reality as a result of Science Gone Wrong. Agents Winwood and Cord, whom we met in the original run, arrive, but this time they are accompanied by a first for the series, an audience identification figure, to whom the characters can explain what the heck is going on. Unfortunately, the in-at-the-deep-end approach is not working for Indigo Prime's newest recruit, and so a gentler way is called for, courtesy of a curious old friend of the new recruit, and two agents who can manipulate dreams.

Settling the new fellow in is just one of the agency's problems. Two agents have just returned from one universe that has been decimated by a planet-killing fungus, and in a prison at the heart of a star, there's some old villain cunningly plotting his escape, and talking directly through the fourth wall to the reader. If this doesn't thrill you and leave you wanting more while simultaneously ordering you to reread every page, something's just downright wrong with you.

Smith is ably assisted by one of the best artists with whom he's ever been teamed. Edmund Bagwell, in turn, has been possessed by a spirit of Jack Kirby the likes of which all of that great artist's many acolytes have just been trying to grasp. With planetary extinctions, crazy phantasmagoria, double-page spreads of impossible technology crackling in the void between stars and a sense of bewildering excitement, Bagwell has knocked this work completely out of the park. His design sketchbook must be twelve inches thick by now.

With a mix of older characters and new ones for new readers to meet - one of whom, in a moment certain to cause double-takes, is a notorious criminal from our world - this first story is certainly busy and full of things to demand readers' attention. But, and I say this as honestly and as objectively as I can, the payoff is completely enormous. The last time that I looked so forward to seeing what would happen next in an ongoing series, it was Grant Morrison's celebrated run on DC's JLA more than a decade ago.

2000 AD's editor has been characteristically tight-lipped about what the future holds for the series, and whether we can expect far more cosmos-exploding fun in 2012 after the second story of this too-short return wraps in December, but I've got my fingers crossed. The story's title, "Everything and More," is remarkably apt. It is truly everything that I wanted from Indigo Prime's return, and a whole lot more. Highly recommended, and I hope it runs forever.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1969

2011-10-25T02:40:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of the latest freaking League of Extraordinary Gentlemen story (Top Shelf, 2011).

Have things really become this awful? Honestly, the best that I can say about the latest, interminable, bloodless exploit of the restless and bored adventurers of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is that it's not quite as bad as I thought it was when I first read it. It did improve markedly on a second read, but I still didn't like it at all.

I was not expecting much; Kevin O'Neill, whose work stopped thrilling me at some point between Metalzoic and Marshal Law many years ago, has always had trouble hitting deadlines, but the amount of time he spends drawing these comics only for them to emerge looking so darn ugly just leaves me baffled. It's not as though he's phoning it in; the amount of detail that he packs onto the page really is amazing, but it all looks so flat and it doesn't serve any damn purpose whatsoever other than to give Jess Nevins something to annotate. There's not a point in the world in agonizing over putting caricatures of the actors who played Steptoe and Son into the crowd scenes of your pages when they don't serve the story, slow you down, and, oh, look like they've been run through the ugly machine. Well, not that those guys were winning beauty pageants in the real world, but still.

So, I was predisposed to dislike this comic because I greatly dislike Kevin O'Neill's art, which is certainly heretical in many of the quarters in which I visit, and because I'm amazed that he keeps getting a pass from a fandom for taking such an absurd time to finish the work. I know that sounds like a reverse Woody Allen complaint, but, really, when artists whose work I enjoy more could have illustrated this story in far, far less time, it really feels like a story that I (once) wanted to read is being held up by substandard art. I've given previous editions of the book a break because I was willing to overlook the art that I find unappealing in order to get to the story. Alan Moore often gets that kind of a pass, but often, lately, he's lost me. I'm not about to spend money on, to use a beacon-bright example, Lost Girls, because, while I've no objection to comic book porn, that doesn't sound like the sort of porn that I want to read, and worse, it's just about the most awful art that I have ever seen in any comic, ever, and is, by consequence, the least erotic thing imaginable. Johnny Ryan and Sam Henderson could have made a sexier comic.

But anyway, the flat reality, now that we're into the "Century" cycle of stories, is that I no longer want to read about Mina and the boys, and this art that I can't stand is just making matters worse. Mina's stiff and grouchy exterior played well as a supercilious Victorian, but what the hell is she still doing stomping around with a Victorian-era chip on her shoulder in the nearly-modern day? Socially, the world has become so much brighter and more effervescent since her time, but she's absolutely joyless when not hateful; she's given up, and her malaise infects the story. Orlando and Quatermain seem to want to move on and enjoy life, but they're stuck, loyal and subservient, for some mad reason, to her. When the climax sees Mina separated from her associates, I was left with relief. Soon, Orlando and Quartermain will be able to hang out with Jason King and have some fun for once.

It's always been amusing to watch Moore just get down in the dirt and mess with perceptions and expectations about how the great and the forgotten characters of fiction really would interact with each other. Seeing the not-James Bond-for-trademark-reasons James Bond get such a comeuppance for his vulgar chauvinism in The Black Dossier was a scream, for instance. But Moore has Adam Adamant so utterly backwards in his cameo that it drives home how unpleasant Mina has become, and how there is no longer any reason to read about her. The televsion Adamant was trapped in suspended animation from 1902 until 1966, when he was unfrozen and began solving the sort of cases that John Steed and Emma Peel would normally handle, and, much like Steed, he loved life. Swinging London confounded him for a few moments before he jumped in and took the city and the 1960s by storm. Well, as much storm as a cheap 1960s BBC videotape drama would allow.

So Moore takes a character, who, cut adrift from his stodgy old morality and culture, adapted to the 1960s with wild enthusiasm and abandon, and then lets the unpleasant and bored Mina undermine him and play him for laughs? It's long been suspected that Moore just doesn't like modern life at all, but perhaps more was revealed here in the telling of the joke than was intended. The old crank has lost me. Not recommended.

Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

2011-10-22T02:18:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (Norton, 1997).

I thought that I'd try a few things by Walter Mosley. I enjoyed his Black Betty some years ago and am looking forward to rereading it, and so I picked up a pair of his many other books. Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned introduced a new character named Socrates Fortlow, who was played by Laurence Fishburne in a TV-movie adaptation of this set of short stories. Fortlow is a thoughtful but rage-filled ex-con who let his temper run away with him only once, at entirely the wrong time, and since his release, he's been eking out a tough existence in a two-room apartment in Watts.

While this is a collection of short stories, it's not a simple anthology. Each of these tales builds on the events of the previous story, and certainly reads as well as any deliberately-constructed novel. Fortlow is a fascinating character, and it's illuminating to see the directions that his wounded pride takes him. At one point, it gets him a needed job, but it also gets him in confrontations that really should have been avoided.

This was a very unpredictable and satisfying read, with moments where it gets really sad and touching. I think this goes a long way towards cementing Mosley's status as one of the most important authors of the last twenty years. Recommended.

The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack

2011-10-20T01:45:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack (Pyr, 2010).

It's curious that I should now be writing about this book just after my best mate Dave linked to an article where SF author Neal Stephenson called for an end to all this backwards-looking steampunk SF and a return to actually writing books about the future. Dave's never had any time for or interest in steampunk. Neither have I, for that matter, but one must admit that some of those cosplayers dress pretty well.

At any rate, The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack is the first in a series of novels - the third is due to be published in the spring - featuring two adventurers in an alternate timeline where Queen Victoria was assassinated early in her reign by a time-traveling lunatic. Time has gone off the rails, eugenics has taken hold, very quickly, and phantasmagorical science has led the empire into a technological revolution at the cost of an even greater underclass of poverty than our world had in the 1890s. It's a very fun read, if you're willing to really, really suspend some serious disbelief, and it sparked some interesting questions about how time travel works in this world.

It is, however, quite painfully flawed in places. It is the debut novel from Mark Hodder, and there are bits where it's painfully apparent that he's a novice with this. At one point, our hero meets with a police inspector who was just a rookie on patrol the day that the Queen was shot, and who saw the bizarre apparition of Spring-Heeled Jack in the area. This sequence was just painful to read, as the inspector relates events to Sir Richard Francis Burton that Burton assuredly already knows, in an awkward and fumbling way to get this information to the reader. There's a lot of this in the book, with weird inventions and the results of odd experiments launching alternate London into its bold future, and the book repeatedly stops to explain what the heck some gadget or messaging service does.

I enjoyed considering the ramifications of the rules of time travel that Hodder employs. Apparently, you only get one shot at altering time, and once you're done, you can't change it again. You certainly can't change it back, but everything else that the hapless villain of the piece tries has already been done, and he just learns about it too late. I wonder why. It certainly sparked an entertaining discussion about all the "time-wimey stuff," as Doctor Who terms it, with my wife, who brought the book home from the newspaper after it made its way to an employee sale. She was less taken with it than I was, though I confess I was more taken with the book's promise, and the curious questions that it raised, than by the nuts and bolts of the world that Hodder created. It seems that somebody went to an awful lot of unbelievable trouble in genetics and breeding to create the far-out messenger bird communication when just letting Alexander Graham Bell have his run of things would have been a whole lot simpler. Recommended with reservations.

The Bendatti Vendetta

2011-10-18T00:23:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Bendatti Vendetta (Rebellion, 2011).

I must admit that I was very surprised to see a complete collected edition of The Bendatti Vendetta, a series that first appeared in the pages of Judge Dredd Megazine about a decade ago. It's not very long - 12 episodes, comprising three stories, over just 96 pages - but with its creators, Robbie Morrison and John Burns, quite popular from their work on other properties, notably Nikolai Dante, a collection has a hook upon which to hang a little publicity.

While many of Morrison's scripts emphasize character, this is a neat exercise in going plot-first and seeing whether readers will wish to follow. The first episode has all the appearance of the most exciting pre-credits sequences of any action film from the seventies. We don't know who the characters are, but some people have slipped into some mob boss's party and caused almighty havoc, with fisticuffs and bullets flying every which way.

I say this is perfectly suited for John Burns because I perceive him, rightly or wrongly, as an artist most comfortable in the modern age. No matter how well he paints the adventures of Judge Dredd or Nikolai Dante, something about his work on those strips never completely gels for me, particularly in conveying a sense of place. His Mega-City One is rarely more than dark alleyways, and his future Russia is often just bombed-out war zones. But The Bendatti Vendetta is clearly set in the humdrum of our world, and when Burns brings this to life, it's vastly more vivid and exciting. Well, it's less our world than our recent history - it doesn't appear that Burns has updated his reference material in many years, but since the violent iconography within the script screams "seventies action film," it doesn't matter, he's still exactly right for the artwork. Put another way, I keep expecting Ian Hendry and Britt Ekland to make supporting appearances.

We never learn very much about them, despite scenes and sequences set in their headquarters, but the Bendatti are sort of a reverse Mafia, handling personal cases of vengeance and retribution. Each of the stories is incredibly satisfying, but despite the inclusion of the full series, it still feels incomplete, like these tales were setting up something involved and intricate that never came. Or perhaps it just hasn't come yet. Who knows, maybe with Nikolai Dante coming to an end in early 2012, there will be a chance for Morrison and Burns to return to this and give it the teeth it seemed like it really wanted to show. Recommended.

Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders

2011-10-11T00:18:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders (Penguin, 2005).

Sometimes, I find myself really disliking Law & Order because Sam Waterston's character is so insufferably smug and perfect, and sometimes because the defense attorneys hired, fruitlessly, by the clearly guilty criminals on that show are just a bunch of shysters and thugs, weasels every bit as crooked as the men on trial. The police never make errors on that show, except for the occasional errors in procedure which could possibly put a monster back on the street to kill again.

So it's honestly a little refreshing to have John Mortimer's Rumpole of the Bailey stand up to defend people who were on the receiving end of police incompetence or corruption. It is coincidental that I'm writing the first draft of these paragraphs two days after Georgia executed Troy Davis, but it would, occasionally, be nice to see that before a man's life is ended, somebody would stand up for him and point out, as in Davis's case, that the majority of the witness statements were obtained by pressure. I don't think anything of cop killers, but I also don't think anything of suppressing the concept of reasonable doubt.

Throughout the Rumpole television and radio series, and into the print adaptations and later short stories for prose, Horace Rumpole would constantly refer to his first, and greatest triumph, defending something ominously called The Penge Bungalow Murders. This is such a wonderful concept, to have the man borne aloft by the nostalgia of something that, thirty-plus years later, the newer, junior members of his chambers only know because the fat, grouchy cigar smoker won't shut up about them. Before the actual details were lost to time, Rumpole elected to finally give the gruesome facts in a short novel. It is a treat, and far better than the disappointing adaptations and subsequent short stories that disappointed me so much.

In Rumpole's world, the Penge Bungalow Murders really were a cause celebre at the time. Two RAF veterans were killed, and the estranged son of one, who foolishly threatened his drunk father with a revolver earlier in the evening, is charged. In a nation only a few years past World War Two, venerating its veterans and hanging every murderer, it looks really bad for the young man. Rumpole, then just a junior barrister in training, is the only man who wants to listen to the boy's claim of innocence. The lead barrister is more concerned with not causing a fuss and aggravating the judge assigned to the case. Scheduling circumstances leave Rumpole in court alone on the second day of the trial, and he goes against his lead's instructions and gives a withering, impulsive cross-examination to a witness. The accused, finally seeing that somebody wants to believe him, dismisses his counsel and asks Rumpole to defend him, alone. If you can put the book down for an evening after that development, something's just wrong with you. I punched the air. Mortimer builds up this moment so well that it's no wonder the character spent the next three decades bragging about it. You would, too.

At the same time, a young woman named Hilda, daughter of his chambers' head, decides to take an interest in this scruffy young firebrand, seeing a promise in him that nobody else does. Hilda's motives are a little delicious, and it's just as satisfying to watch how She Who Must Be Obeyed started out. But what I really like here is how some of the material about the Rumpole household is left for the reader to infer. Hilda had high hopes and aspirations, and Rumpole never really came through for her on that point, did he? His win in this case was so much more important to him than networking and getting fatcats and aristocrats out of trouble.

Rumpole wanted to be the voice of the unjustly accused and the railroaded, and the high life was never his goal. A life of doing the right thing, and protecting the rights of the innocent, was to be his, with the occasional glass of Pommeroy's Plonk. I really don't believe that his creator and writer ever did him quite the justice in print that he did on television, but man alive, in this novel, he came through for Rumpole. Highly recommended.

Coffee and Beer Money

2011-10-08T04:28:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Coffee and Beer Money (French Toast Comix, 2011).

Becky Hawkins was kind enough to let me know about her fun little journal and autobiography comics, which she publishes online and sells at conventions under the banner "French Toast Comix." Honestly, they're a little outside my present interests, but in Coffee and Beer Money, her latest 24-page mini-comic, she tells some pretty funny stories.

I think that the seeds are here for better, more assured work down the road. There are some undeniably funny episodes - an uncle shrewdly observing that she's doomed her self-caricature to the role of unromantic lead, a passerby misinterpreting her criticism of quad bikes and their turning power - but they lack context, in longer stories where the punch lines might mean a little more. I love Hawkins' sense of timing. Both the page where she gets yelled at about the bike and the first page of the longer story about her accident upon one of them feel very Pete Bagge to me, and I can't make a more complimentary comparison, but Bagge would include these hilarious moments as beats within a longer story, with less omniscent narration and more dialogue between established characters, and the moments would be even more memorable. There would also be less waste of negative space. The quick story about the uncle is a simple, two-panel observation, crying out for more context and more information.

I like her character designs, but her inking is sporadically rushed and blotchy. One page, regarding high school girls dressing trampy at cons, is particularly troubled by this. I understand the desire to use the medium as a journal, but when this results in work as uneven as that can be, perhaps the art should be redrawn before publication.

Still, when Hawkins nails it - a one-page story about the best-laid plans of putting on a good table at a con falling apart before the weekend wraps, a longer, hilarious story about an ex who phones with an aggravating new job - it's very good work indeed. She doesn't completely succeed all of the time, but when she does, it is great, and the misfires at least suggest better material could be drawn from it. There's enough to enjoy and consider to certainly make this worth the price. Recommended.

A PDF of this comic was provided by the author for the purpose of review.

Zatanna: Everyday Magic

2011-10-04T01:14:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Zatanna: Everyday Magic (DC, 2003).

So I was talking the other day about Paul Dini's Madame Masque. Coincidentally, I pulled out an old DC project of his from the many boxes of comics that I no longer want, to give them one more airing before moving them along.

They don't seem to publish them very often anymore, but DC used to release these longer-than-usual comics, 48 pages in this case, under a heavier card cover and a spine binding. They're called "prestige format." There isn't anything prestigious about the story. It's an uninvolving entry from the publisher's Vertigo imprint with art by Rick Mays, an artist with whom I'm not familiar.

It's really in-one-eye and out-the-other stuff. Zatanna, a stage magician and superhero, is shown to be playfully promiscuous in a way that superhero ladies usually aren't. An old boyfriend, the popular character John Constantine, shows up for help removing a hex, leading Zatanna into conflict with another sorceress. It's all really unimaginative; drawn without the occasional bare butts, then the comic could have been an all-ages book published by DC's regular imprint.

I'm not sure why I bought it at all. Maybe Brian Bolland's cover swayed me, or maybe I was, then, hopeful of a regular Dini-scripted Zatanna series from Vertigo? I don't remember. Based on the evidence, this might have made an acceptable $3 comic, but not $6, and certainly not the $30 and up that some Amazon sellers want for their copies. Not recommended.

Madame Mirage

2011-09-27T01:35:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Madame Mirage (Top Cow, 2008).

Can't help but envy Paul Dini just a little bit. He's worked his way up from the grind of the writer's rooms at Warner Brothers animation department, where he gained name recognition on the 1990s Batman cartoon, into enough of a known quantity to be in demand whenever anybody needs a comic book about a sexy brunette in fishnets, lingerie or evening wear. Take Madame Mirage, for instance, a comic book that looks so incredibly obvious that, when I first saw it on the racks at Marietta's Great Escape, I genuinely said, "Hey, a Paul Dini comic" before even seeing his name on it.

Years later, I cashed in some store credit at a shop in Chattanooga for a very low-priced collection of the title, firstly because it was cheap and secondly because I'm a rather idiotic male who occasionally gets distracted by comic books about sexy brunettes in fishnets, lingerie or evening wear.

So the heroine of this book has boobs like basketballs and wears this anachronistic fetish-wear dress in the same sort of bleak, angular technopolis as Witchblade and Aphrodite IX and all these other Top Cow heroines with long legs, giant boobs and large foreheads. This time out, the world is one where the superheroes have been outlawed, and so the villains have formed some sort of corporate conglomerate to control all the new technology. The baddies thought they killed off two sisters who invented some hologram mcguffin, but one of them - the stacked one - shows up again with a gun and bod for sin.

The artwork, by Kenneth Rocafort, is serviceable enough for this sort of material, but this is scarcely very challenging work. He draws Madame Mirage well enough to be considered for any fill-in work on Witchblade or the other Top Cow titles, but this really looks like nothing more than a standard Top Cow house style, with emphasis on babes and weapons and a little gore.

All the elements are here for a really terrific comic book for a fifteen year-old boy without access to the internet, basically. I think I would have liked it a lot in 1986, but then again, I liked the similarly titillating DNAgents back then. It's kinky without being vulgar, but also unimaginative, dull, plays its one plot twist about two chapters too early for it to impact the climax, and lives up to every stereotype about Top Cow comics and their monotone interest in the restraint of "good girl art," where it all seems to be about tease without payoff. Not recommended at all.

Popeye: Wha's a Jeep?

2011-09-20T01:42:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Popeye: Wha's a Jeep? (volume five) (Fantagraphics, 2011).

Fantagraphics is very nearly finished with their complete reprint of E.C. Segar's run on Popeye, with just one more volume to go after this. It's a breathless, surreal and ridiculous collection of fisticuffs and wonderfully funny violence, and every home should own it.

As before, the format is broken down between the daily continuity strip in the first half and the unconnected color Sundays in the back. Some of the Sunday strips have their own storyline - there's a "gold rush" story that runs for a few weeks - but mostly, each stands alone and, as before, shares a page with Segar's other strip, Sappo. Unfortunately, Segar completely lost interest in this little strip, but rather than retire it and give the main strip a few more panels, he oddly decided to have the character do a weekly lesson in silly art, like drawing a letter A and adding enough lines around it to turn it into a person's face. This went on for many, many months. Clearly, Segar was saving all his might for Popeye. There's one where Olive decides to disguise herself as a male suitor to make Popeye jealous. This was a terrible, terrible idea. I don't know whether anything funnier than this page appeared in print, anywhere, for two or three decades.

The daily strips start with Popeye having started an island nation of men who've grown tired of wives bossing them around and this goes on for quite a few entertaining months before the characters, having won a south Pacific war, return home for the introduction of Eugene the Jeep, a prized and coveted weird animal who, living partially in the Fourth Dimension, is able to predict the future and escape any confinement. Confronting a salt-of-the-earth fellow like Popeye with a high concept like that is a work of genius. The Jeep leads Popeye on a quest for his long-lost Poopdeck Pappy, so's he won't be an orphink no more, only to find Pappy a coarse and rough old salt who's not interested in his ugly kid. Pappy, of course, looks exactly like Popeye, just with a couple of extry whiskers.

The disappointment of the once-cute Sappo deteriorating into a waste of space knocks this down just a peg from the previous volumes, but the half-hour I spent guffawing over that strip with Olive dressed as a guy probably makes up for it. Highly recommended.

Fletch Won

2011-09-17T02:32:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Fletch Won (Warner, 1985).

Well, here's a pleasant surprise. I've kept slogging through Gregory Mcdonald's novels despite several back-to-back losers. I figured that he completely peaked in the 1970s, but Fletch Won is not at all bad. It's not as good as the first couple of Fletch novels, nor the first Flynn book, but it's a pretty good read, and the first seventy pages are just one laugh after another. It's a very intelligent and funny book.

This is the earliest Fletch case that Mcdonald penned, with our hero being bounced from one newspaper department to another. He doesn't make a good obituary writer, for example, because of his tendency to truthfully note that some of the recently deceased never actually accomplished anything in their life. So he gets moved to the society page, ideally to interview a wealthy tycoon who plans to make a huge donation to an area museum, only the tycoon gets murdered in the newspaper's parking lot, and nobody other than the paper or the museum seems to know a thing about this donation.

Fletch begins investigating, angering the paper's actual crime reporter, and finds himself shot at, doused with gin, and stripped naked, all before noon. He's supposed to be getting married in a couple of days, and somebody else at the paper has an idea that he should be looking into an escort agency that wrangled its way into free advertising on the paper's sports page.

It's a dense, ridiculous book with lots of competing plot threads jamming against each other. It's so much more fun than the dull Carioca and Moxie, which each had just a single, tawdry plot that the inventive, decisive Fletch of the earliest novels could have handled in his sleep. Our hero is at his best when complications from every possible angle pile up. It's not always successful - the liquor store shooting isn't resolved in any satisfying way, and the climax requires the police to move very, very slowly so that a house of cards can be coherently constructed from all the random aces that Fletch has been given - but it's a pretty fun book overall. It gave me hope - dashed, as it turned out - that the next couple would also entertain. Recommended.

Rumpole Rests His Case

2011-09-13T02:01:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Rumpole Rests His Case (Penguin, 2002).

When Columbo returned to television in 1989, on ABC after a twelve-year absence, it was a shadow of its former self. It was pretty good for the most part, and even brilliant a couple of times, but not a patch on the consistent quality of the 1970s NBC series. People debating why usually focus on the pacing, the light comedy padding, or the really awful guest stars. Seriously, Columbo had the best rogues gallery of anybody on TV in the 1970s, and in the new series, they gave him Fisher Stevens? Rip Torn? Greg Evigan? George Wendt?!

But the real problem with 1990s Columbo was that the writers had completely lost touch with how to connect to a general audience. In the 1970s, the series was watched by audiences of all ages and demographics, and the writers respected their intelligence. There's a 1976 episode where a Betamax is used to fake an alibi. Video recording was still mostly unknown to most of Americans then, but it's treated very matter-of-fact and no fuss is made of it. Compare that to what happened fifteen years later when a fax machine was used for a similar purpose. A forensic scientist has to explain what it is to Columbo, and the late, great Peter Falk then spends four minutes doing his "How about that? Gosh, I've got a cousin in Long Island. He sells used cars, and, gee, I bet he really could use a machine like this. Wait 'til I tell my wife, etc." schtick. See, 1990s Columbo was written for Matlock's audience. The producers never made any attempt to connect in any way with modern, urban viewers, just the Centrum Silver crowd, and assumed that they wouldn't understand technology unless some other old fogey joked about it. And from there, it's just a short hop to the "dancing Dick Van Dyke" animation, some six years after that idiotic baby was on Ally McBeal.

I mention all this because there's a short story in one of John Mortimer's last collections of Horace Rumpole stories that absolutely blew my mind with its clueless fogeyness. I figure he wrote this story in 2001, by which time even the last of those brain-dead "You've! Got! Mail!" aol.com zombies that we spent the 1990s fighting with had been, at last, assimilated into internet culture. Email should not have been a mindblower anymore, and yet here we still have "Rumpole and the Teenage Werewolf," in which the spectacular courtroom twist is that, wait for it, somebody else sent emails from the accused's computer! Look, I understand that you've got to make the protagonist the hero in detective fiction, but the reader should be safe to assume that the story in front of the protagonist is one that reached him for reasons that include nobody else, prior to events reaching the hero, has been able to make sense of them. This? The first question anybody should have asked is, "Who else had access to your computer?"

There are other, similarly predictable twists in some of these stories - it will stun nobody to learn that an Afghan refugee is not who he claims to be - but nothing really sinks to the bottom like that email story does. At least, unlike the previous collection that I detailed for this blog, this collection does have a few interesting subplots that work through the stories. The best of them concerns Rumpole's grouchy war against his chambers' new ordinance against smoking indoors. Rather than admit defeat and taking his cigars outside, he attempts to blackmail his head of chambers, Soapy Sam Ballard. Rumpole has learned that, many, many years before, Ballard had sung in some pub rock Doors cover band. Watching this backfire on Rumpole as the stories continue, with Ballard embracing his rock star past, is every bit as satisfying as the ongoing war of attrition with She Who Must Be Obeyed. It's only in the courtroom where Rumpole's victories are more than just moral, but it's in the courtroom where the plot is the least satisfactory.

Why in the world are these so incredibly inferior to the TV series? Admittedly, there, you had the pleasure of remarkably consistent casting and some excellent performances by so many terrific actors, but I don't think that I was overlooking slipshod plotting just to be wowed by the guest stars. There's just a depth to the television Rumpole that the short stories don't convey at all. I'm looking forward to trying one of the novels, where, presumably, a much deeper and involved main plot is required. There are three, and I'm hopeful that finally finding out what happened with those Penge Bungalow Murders will be a pleasure. This collection, however, I don't recommend.

The Cardboard Valise

2011-09-06T00:04:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Cardboard Valise (Pantheon, 2011).

Oh, I've got a lot of time for Ben Katchor, and it's always very well rewarded. I haven't enjoyed a comic as much as I did his latest work, The Cardboard Valise, in ages.

In his previous books, Katchor has created a sort of skewed version of New York City and its environs. This time out, he really broadens his view in a story - really a series of interconnected strips that can be read in any order - that links three travelers from a big city to the island nation of Outer Canthus.

I found myself eventually reading just a few pages a day and, when finished, I put it back on the bottom of my pile for a reread as soon as it's feasible. It's a book where the odd angles at which Katchor stages the action work in tandem with the strange revelations of the text. Everything is revealed in such a natural way that readers might have to stop and question whether something mentioned in passing is a real occupation or restaurant, or another of Katchor's only-a-little implausible fictions. It's an amazing example of world-building, and the sort of place I could easily lose myself. Highly recommended.

The Cooler

2011-08-30T02:52:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Cooler (Bantam, 1974).

I wish I could tell my readers a bit about this book without spoiling it for you all. Unfortunately, I can't, so I'm breaking the spoiler-free part of the goal in the introduction this time. Sorry about that.

I found a well-loved paperback copy at McKay in Chattanooga for a quarter. You remember those breathless 1970s Bantam paperbacks, all white, with the text on the back cover separated by the horizontal lines, and the front cover that seems like a random assemblage of found objects? I just love the design of those things. (The image above is a later reprint.) I recognized the author, George Markstein, as one of the writers and producers of the classic TV series The Prisoner and figured, rightly, he was worth the gamble of a quarter.

You remember The Village from The Prisoner, right? Well, this book asks whether that facility might have been inspired by something that the British had to consider during World War Two. What if you've got an officer or two, or more, with a head full of classified intelligence, do something stupid and prove themselves unreliable? You can't really discharge them, and you can't send them to a civilian prison, and you can't risk them turning if they're that dangerous.

The book's structure is almost as compelling as the premise. I completely missed the pretty obvious clue of the book's title - well, it's a World War Two novel; operations would often have names that don't correspond to reality, or to expected slang - and started following a Captain Loach, who is frustrated because his mission to France has just been scrubbed after a perceived intel failure. The book goes on for quite some time setting up Loach as a hero, and introducing supporting players including one whom, we assume, will be serving as the story's romantic lead once he gets to France, and a plausible villain. Then, long after I had become comfortable with the pace of a conventional pulp spy thriller, Loach does something completely unexpected. He ends up in jail after he takes a riding crop and beats the unholy hell out of an escort that his superiors had sent him.

I was left quite baffled by this turn of events. I know that it's kind of expected in these clunky 1970s he-man thrillers to read some dated misogyny, but the brutality of this guy really disqualified him as being a hero. What a neat turn of events to learn that he is not one at all. Suddenly, the hero becomes an unsympathetic supporting player in somebody else's story. That's when it turns from conventional into something quite interesting. Recommended, and for more than a quarter, too.

Mister Miracle # 1-5

2011-08-27T01:17:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Mister Miracle # 1-5 (DC, 1989).

I love the little box on the front cover of this comic. It reads "DC Comics Aren't Just For Kids!" The perception, among many funnybook readers at the time, was that other publishers were releasing more mature fare than DC, who insisted on turning out pablum for little kids. Ah, the late eighties. I guess that you kind of had to be there, and maybe kind of had to be a defensive adolescent.

Anyway, I believe that this was the second resurrection of Mister Miracle, a really fun character with an awesome costume who was created by Jack Kirby in the early seventies. This time out, the comic was written by J. M. DeMatteis, who was using the character in the lighthearted Justice League International, and drawn by Ian Gibson, one of my favorite comic artists. The premise is that Mr. Miracle, a superhero - slash - celebrity stage magician and escape artist, and his wife Barda are trying to live a normal life in a quiet New England town, but the alien menaces of their home worlds of New Genesis and Apokalips keep interfering with the peace and tranquility they were looking for. It's done with the same whimsical, never-very-heavy touch as JLI, and a similar lack of imagination. The first five issues tell one story arc, and the first three parts each end with the exact same cliffhanger. "Golly! The sudden surprise appearance of another character from Jack Kirby's original run of comics that introduced all these characters!"

I've got a lot of time for Kirby's "Fourth World" creations, and think that many of the follow-ups crafted by other writers and artists have been pretty good, if not essential. These, I really only tracked down for Gibson's artwork, and I didn't have trouble finding them for less than cover price. I like his layouts and the fun expressions and body language of his characters a lot, and he can certainly draw beautiful women, but I don't think anybody sent Gibson the memo that Barda should look at least a little bit like Lainie Kazan. When you go as far off-model as Gibson does here, you can't really celebrate the results.

The comic is inoffensive and bland, basically. It doesn't suffer quite as badly as JLI did with its forced humor and funny-because-we-insist-that-it-is tone. In fact, DeMatteis attempts a little character drama between Mr. Miracle and his estranged father that's almost touching, but Oberon's one-note grouchiness is boring, and the safe, predictable plot is not challenging. Worth a glance for Gibson's fans, but otherwise not recommended.

Rumpole for the Defence

2011-08-23T01:00:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Rumpole for the Defence (Penguin, 1982).

Somehow, I have been aware of Rumpole of the Bailey for decades without really being aware that the character was created for television, and his adventures were novelized as short stories by his creator, John Mortimer. I guess because just about all the other British TV series that made their way to PBS's Mystery! anthology were adaptations, I assumed that Rumpole was as well.

The third of the books, Rumpole for the Defence, is actually a novelization of a series of radio episodes that starred Maurice Denham as the belicose barrister Horace Rumpole. Were these half-hour stories? I've recently watched the twelve (hour-long) episodes of the first two seasons of the TV series, and those are much denser and rich with subplots and supporting characters than these flimsy little tales. These are nothing more than the coziest of cozies, simplistic and short, the outcomes never in doubt because in almost every story, there's either an honest prosecution of a genuinely guilty party, or Rumpole's defense will hinge on the one and only extra possibility given in the text. That's why I think these might have been half-hour radio episodes; there's just no room for subplots, for anything more that might prove important to the plot, and certainly no subtlety.

The usual Rumpole rules are followed: there are regular references to She Who Must Be Obeyed and the Penge Bungalow Murders, and the character's grouchy disrespect is contagious and fun, but I certainly wouldn't recommend these adaptations for anybody looking for something meaty. Stick with the television series, or possibly the short stories and novels that Mortimer penned after the TV series ended.

Big Nate: From the Top

2011-08-16T02:28:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Big Nate: From the Top (Andrews-McMeel, 2010).

Part of me likes this book a lot, but another part is really unsatisfied with it. I had quite forgotten about Lincoln Peirce's Big Nate, a newspaper strip that used to appear in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution but was dropped by that paper in the late nineties. I'm glad to see that it's still running. Sort of a slightly older Calvin (of and Hobbes) with more friends and a larger rogues' gallery of teachers, Nate is a sixth-grade menace with big plans and a loud mouth. It's quite an amusing comic, and I enjoyed rediscovering the character, most especially a bizarre week-long series where Nate shows his friends and classmates the therapeutic power of being gently bopped in the head with an empty plastic soda bottle.

From an editorial standpoint, this book's a real treat. Unlike just about any other mass-market paperback collection of comics, this purports to include a complete run of about seven months of comics, from late August 2006 into the following April, and even notes that in the opening indicia. Andrews-McMeel certainly never gave FoxTrot or any of their other reprinted strips that kind of attention to detail.

On the other hand, the book's design is a complete disaster. Apparently hoping to evoke the feel of the classic Peanuts paperbacks, this reprints a single strip per page, despite being a considerably larger (taller and wider) book. There's a lot of wasted space on each page, and simply reducing the size of the art would have allowed two daily strips per page and nearly twice the content. Perhaps the size is meant to attract young buyers who'd like to shelve it alongside the similarly-themed Diary of a Wimpy Kid series? As far as value for money goes, I simply can't back the $10.99 retail price at all. It's a quality strip, but not a quality reprint. Recommended if you can find it on sale.

Quick statement of policy here at the Bookshelf

2011-08-09T01:29:00.000-07:00

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Fantastic Four # 1, I will be honoring the memory of Jack Kirby by pledging to never again purchase or review any comic book published by Marvel Comics until they do right by Kirby's heirs. Which is kind of a shame, as I had started rereading a pretty good 1980s book before Kirby's family lost that summary judgment thingy, and now I won't be talking about it here.

More details on this boycott by the artist Steve Bissette: http://srbissette.com/?p=12761

Flynn's In

2011-08-09T01:03:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Flynn's In (Mysterious Press, 1984).

I don't think there's any getting around it anymore. Gregory Mcdonald's powers definitely waned as his career continued.

Flynn's In is the second novel to star Mcdonald's other recurring character, Boston Inspector Francis X. Flynn, and while the character and his family and his interactions with his short-tempered, unhappy Sergeant "Grover" Whelan are as amusing as ever, this time the plot isn't very fun at all. It's only when Flynn is distracted, by telephone, to deal with his regular players that things really spark. The supporting cast this time out really requires some work.

In this novel, Flynn is summoned out of state on a secret assignment by the police commissioner. He arrives at an exclusive, hidden resort for the rich and powerful, called simply The Rod and Hunt Club, where one of the members has apparently killed himself in a shooting accident. Flynn quickly determines that he was killed elsewhere and his body moved. The club has decided to cover up a murder, and they've got the full support of the police in this isolated community. Flynn has merely been called in so the members can mete out their own justice. It won't come as any surprise to learn that somebody's got their own ideas of justice for the club.

The problems are just huge with this one. In an unhappy echo of Fletch's Moxie, Mcdonald has populated a cast of eccentric, unpleasant idiots who mostly speak with a single voice. Beyond "the old nudist" and "the cross-dressing judge," I couldn't tell any of these jerks apart. Mcdonald also made the remarkably bad choice of making Flynn by far the most intelligent and witty member of his cast. It really just becomes tedious and aggravating to continue. As the body count grows, it's impossible to tell whether Mcdonald is parodying a plot that was boring when Christie ran it into the ground, or if he's just plain lazy. Funny in places, particularly where Flynn's children are concerned, but a drag otherwise. Not recommended.

The Complete Peanuts 1979-1980

2011-08-02T00:56:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Complete Peanuts 1979-1980 (Volume 15) (Fantagraphics, 2011).

I have to say, my enthusiasm for this series is not as high as it was two or three years ago, but the arrival of each new volume is still a wonderful thing. Fantagraphics has passed the halfway point, and their choice of celebrities to write the forewords is as weird as ever. Al Roker, of all people, introduces this one, and he doesn't seem to have anything to say about the actual content of Peanuts at the end of the 1970s.

There's still an agreeable edge to the series at this point - Peppermint Patty's resigned acceptance to a life of D-minuses is really kind of savage - but Charles Schulz was relaxed enough to enjoy a few in-jokes and celebrity shout-outs to the likes of Bill Mauldin and various tennis stars. Most of the supporting cast have drifted completely offscreen by this point, and he hasn't found much to do with any of his new characters. There's a girl named Eudora in several strips in this book, and she only seems to function as somebody who silently stands around while Snoopy's World War One Flying Ace speaks French, badly, towards her. Woodstock picks up four fellow birds - Beagle Scouts - who don't accomplish much beyond a recurring punch line about angel food cake.

Still, when Schulz was on, which was most of the time, there's still enough surreal moments and beautiful artwork to make up for the feeling of complacency among the cast. Taking a few moments to study just how Schulz would draw Lucy at her crabbiest always results in me laughing out loud, and there's a sequence where Schroeder, hoping to attend a music camp, allows himself to be "flown" by doghouse, which is revealed to be extremely funny when we learn that Schroeder's the only one who is not in on the joke. Each time that Schulz started one of his longer, weirder stories like this, readers will find themselves wondering how in the world he resolved it. He succeeded every single time. Surely not the best of the Peanuts volumes, but nevertheless happily recommended.

Death of a Ghost

2011-07-26T00:18:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Death of a Ghost (Doubleday, 1934).

Many years ago, when I first started tackling detective fiction - principally British detective fiction from the first half of the 20th Century - Margery Allingham was the author who broke my interest. I tried two of her novels about the weird, secretive Albert Campion and just plain gave up. In time, I came to realize that wasn't fair; what had actually killed my interest in the genre was that run of a dozen Agatha Christie stories that I labored through before I started Allingham. Frankly, twelve of those things and you need to set the task aside for a while, and not chase it.

I realized that I never gave Allingham a fair shake. I tried to make it up to her - I gave her name to a character in a comic that I published for several years - but I never got back to actually reading the Campion stories. Finally, I picked up two of them, cleared my throat and started again. Death of a Ghost has an appealing name. Published in 1934, it promises some unpleasantness in the art world.

It didn't begin well. Sixty pages in, all I had to say to myself was "Oh, Lord, it's worse than I remembered them." A mob of supporting characters, none of whom I could begin to sympathize with or understand, half of whom are deliberately unpleasant and vulgar, talked piffle about egotistical blowhards who died two decades earlier, and all of these bohemian idiots are suffered silently by the almost characterless Albert Campion, a bespectacled, secretive oddball who, thanks to the BBC, we now know looks like Peter Davison in horn rims.

Sixty pages in, mercifully and very, very pleasantly, a plot appears. There's the curious and cunning murder of a middling artist, and then something thunderously weird happens. The work of the dead middling artist just flat out vanishes. Somebody has gone to an awful lot of trouble - even for a period British mystery, where a crime's execution is usually really overwrought - to erase any evidence of Thomas Dacre's art.

Where this story leads isn't really very surprising. Perhaps in 1934, the term "ghost" was obscure and uncommon, but I had the perpetrator pegged ages before Campion did. Normally, that bothers me a little, as I prefer not to speculate about whodunnit in this sort of book, but the construction of this plot remained really fun and kept my attention. I'm looking forward to the next Allingham novel that I bought, and recommend this one with the caveat that the first sixty pages are an unfortunate slog.

Private Beach # 1-5

2011-07-19T01:40:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Private Beach # 1-5 (Slave Labor, 2001-02).

Many years ago, I was looking for a new comic to try and had read a good review or two of Strangers in Paradise by Terry Moore. I asked some friends whether they'd ever read it. I'll never forget what my pal, the artist Patrick Dean, said about it. He called it "Hopey & Maggie fanfic." A few weeks later, the girl I'd end up marrying let me borrow some of her run and I gave it a try anyway. Patrick, as is almost always the case, was right.

I was reminded of that when I reread the first five issues of David Hahn's Private Beach. This was a comic that I enjoyed when it was released, but I never came back to it. Bumping into a couple of Hahn's more recent efforts like Suicide Girls recently reminded me of these and so I retrieved them from storage to give 'em another try. Well, as Hopey & Maggie fanfic goes, it's not at all bad. It's certainly well drawn.

The format is slice-of-oddball-life stories centered around Trudy, a brunette in her mid-to-late twenties whose community has more than enough weird coincidences, and distantly-glimpsed UFOs, than many other communities. There's nothing thunderously weird here; it evokes David Lynch without the violence or sex, just the feeling that something unusual is around the corner. There are roaches, and short-term memory loss, and peculiar nightclubs, but nothing really tawdry.

It's interesting to see just how much Hahn has improved over the years. The artwork here is pretty good, but stiff. Not a patch on how I remembered it, nor on how vibrant his current The All-Nighter looks, it's still very interesting to see how his work has developed. I appreciate how he seemed willing to draw everything, without many shortcuts, early on, even if he occasionally found cheats to get around skylines or bus terminals. Trudy, Sharona and the rest of the cast communicate so much more in facial expressions than they do body language. It's really a more interesting comic to follow visually than verbally, if that makes sense.

In the end, it does suffer from the giant impact that Jaime Hernandez's work has over everybody that has followed him. There's a letters page in the second issue; two of the first three letters reference Hernandez. There really is a lot of the same visual language, like quiet panels and long, empty streets of small towns, plus engaging, female leads who feel directionless and longing. When you add in the flying saucers that seem to hover behind the buildings of Private Beach and recall the superheroes always fighting battles far away from Oxnard in the Locas stories, it really does feel too familiar. It's a pretty good comic, but not one that I can recommend with any great enthusiasm.

Mean Machine: Real Mean

2011-07-15T01:59:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Mean Machine: Real Mean (Rebellion / Simon & Schuster, 2011).

I have previously noted that Rebellion, the British-based publishers of 2000 AD, have teamed up with Simon & Schuster for a line of comic collections aimed at the American market. A small majority of these are revamps of their existing line, but some of the titles are exclusive to the US. Real Mean, an introduction to the immortal, villainous Mean Machine, is one of these. Mean is one of Judge Dredd's recurring antagonists, an incredibly bad-tempered, foul-mouthed and small-minded petty criminal who can take one heck of a lot of abuse before he goes down.

I wrote this about Mean some time back: "One of Dredd's most popular returning foes, Mean Machine Angel was one of the nasty Angel Gang - a crowd of outlaws in the Cursed Earth who made life hell for muties and anyone fool enough t' venture too far afield from Texas City. Pa Angel and his sons Junior, Mean and Link were introduced in a 1980 serial called "The Judge Child," wherein Dredd killed them all. Mean, a giant man with a huge metal claw and a dial on his head which regulates both his temper and the power of his head-butting, was later resurrected by the Judge Child. Despite spending the bulk of the last twenty years in psycho-cubes and undergoing various lobotomies, hypnotherapies and surgical implants to curb his psychotic anti-social ways, Mean Machine remains an ornery, upitty cuss with an intense hatred of Dredd."

Over the years, writer John Wagner has gone back to this well, principally to exploit the character's huge comedic possibilities. More than once, some big-dreaming psychiatrist schemes to build his reputation on curing Mean. Since the character is as volatile as an atomic bomb, extremely wacky hijinks usually ensue.

This collection reprints seven stories of varying length, and is built around the ridiculous and wonderful "Son of Mean," a pretty long story from 1994-95 wherein Mean's previously unmentioned son, a sweet and good-natured boy who loves his dollies, is sent by his criminal mother into the city for some proper learning in the art of being rotten. Mean has no real idea how to go about doing this - he had no real idea how it was that he came up with a son in the first place - but it's a hilarious story which asks the immortal question: Can love triumph over stupidity and extreme violence? The story is painted by Carl Critchlow and the reproduction is a little dark - as seen in the story illustrated by Richard Dolan that opens the book, many of 2000 AD's artists in the early 90s had taken to painting with mud in a misguided effort to hitch a ride on Simon Bisley's coattails - but it's a story that still has me giggling after several rereads.

This is not a complete collection of Mean's adventures - such a beast would be phonebook-sized - but it's a very fun introduction. You get four stories written by Wagner and two, shorter tales by Gordon Rennie. The artists featured are Critchlow and Dolan, along with David Millgate, Steve Dillon, Kev Walker and Paul Marshall. The Rennie and Walker episode, wherein a captive Mean finds himself at the mercy of some even smaller-minded environmentalists, is an absolute treasure. Mean might have actually received some closure and been retired in the pages of Judge Dredd a few years ago. Time will tell, I suppose, but until he's seen again one day, this is a great book to celebrate his over-the-top silliness. Recommended.

Hey, readers! I have reactivated my long-dormant Thrillpowered Thursday blog for a short trial run. This will be the last 2000 AD-related review here while that's going on, and also, content will only appear here once a week during this experiment. I certainly appreciate your reading!

She-Hulk # 22-30

2011-06-30T01:55:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of She-Hulk # 22-30 (Marvel, 2007).

Here's a run of a title that I never really treated fairly. Some time back, I subscribed to a few books at an area comic shop to get a discount on a miniatures game. I was enjoying Dan Slott's run as the writer of Marvel's She-Hulk, but lost interest towards the end. Before I knew it, issues were piling up unread, then Slott left the title and, several months after Peter David replaced him as writer, I realized I had a small stack of Marvel superhero books that I didn't want to read.

I came back to them after several years and was pleasantly surprised. While never compelling, David threw some very interesting and neat threats towards our hero. No longer working as an attorney, as she did with such amusing results under Slott, but as a bonding agent, She-Hulk racks up some serious property damage while tracking down fugitives. I was really amused when the villainous Absorbing Man's references to his girlfriend, "the little woman," turn out to be literal, and there's a pretty interesting look at what happens when the authorities don't believe the only survivor of an alien attack foiled by our hero.

I'm not really all that familiar with David's work other than a run on DC's Supergirl that I enjoyed. Equally well-known among comic fans for his provocative, controversial and popular blog as his fiction, David's been doing this long enough to buck the slow-burning trend of taking forever to get to a story's climax. There are one or two misuses of splash pages in this title - at one point, artist Val Semeiks devotes an entire page to Iron Man casually sauntering into a courtroom - but David handles everything with confidence and wit, and apart from some terribly telegraphed plot "twists," this was not a bad read at all. Most of these issues are available in a trade collection called Jaded to which I'd give a mild recommendation. Not essential, but not at all bad for what they are.

Time for another short break here, friends! I have been rereading Sayers, along with some lengthy titles that I have already reviewed in these pages, and so I don't have anything new to share right now. I'll be back in a couple of weeks, and in the meantime, remember that I'm always happy to review your own work. PDFs are fine. I tend to focus on adventure or humor comics, detective fiction and food writing. See you later in July!

Essential Captain America Volume One

2011-06-26T03:30:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Essential Captain America Volume One (Marvel, 1995).

I don't think that I'll be able to give a better short review of this book than the one that my son provided. See, his mother gave him a copy of it several months ago, and it sat unread for an awfully long time. The boy's fourteen; he really has to be in the right mood to tackle something as big as this 520-page book. I don't know about your fourteen year-old, but mine spends his life in a constant state of restless boredom, and never wants to take on a project as big as this without the stars being lined up just right. Then, it's damn the torpedoes because he's going to read the entire book from cover to cover if he can. He gets along great with some friends that I have in Nashville, who would sleep for 48 straight hours in the buildup to the release of a new Harry Potter book, and then read the thing in one big marathon session starting at about 12.03 in the morning of its release.

So it was that I noticed my son crack this book not long after supper one evening, and he continued working through the book, changing from one couch to another for several hours. Lord knows how he did it. The first 160 pages of this book are very repetitive and episodic, featuring simple ten-page action stories without depth or feeling, just the remarkable artwork of Jack Kirby driving them. Other artists, including George Tuska in a really silly story about "sleeper" Nazi super-robots, will occasionally pencil over Kirby's layouts. In time, Kirby and scriptwriter Stan Lee begin introducing more subplot and structure to the stories, which start driving through a maze of grandiose villains and wild technology, but the first chunk of this book really was not meant to be read in a single sitting.

Captain America was not a character that I enjoyed as a kid, but he became one of my favorites when I grew up and began to appreciate Kirby. This is because he has the singular super-power of being able to beat the living daylights out of everybody. Not one at a time. Cap is a marvel when he's confronted by ten suited mob thugs, or twelve Nazi soldiers, or fourteen Hydra operatives, or sixteen oddly-helmeted agents of A.I.M. When that happens, Cap beats the tar out of everybody in a whirlwind of kinetic energy, blurring from one foe into the next in a dazzle of fists and boots and his mighty shield knocking bad guys down like tenpins.

My son's conclusion, when he finally emerged from the spectacle: "I did not know that Captain America was such a beast."

I can't do better than that. Recommended at the rate of one chapter a night for two weeks, and then the remainder of it in one mind-bending, jaw-breaking, skull-splitting session, but definitely recommended.

The Taxidermist

2011-06-20T17:31:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Taxidermist (Rebellion, 2011).

Well, I am very happy to see this book finally out. There are so few comics available to star a protagonist as elderly as this one - in the first story of three collected here, taxidermist Jacob Sardini is in his seventies - and I am all for any feature that bucks the trend of dashing macho, he-man lead characters quite the way this one does. Sardini is an aging, overweight widower who figures that his glory days are all behind him, but sometimes events have a way of sweeping even the elderly up in their wake.

This is one of several collections that the publisher Rebellion has recently released that shows just how wonderful the world of Judge Dredd is for launching new characters and ideas. In the weird future of Mega-City One, human taxidermy is not only legal, but accepted enough that it's become an Olympic sport, along with some other downright ridiculous pastimes, as the stories reveal as they unfold. In the opening story, we meet Sardini, who had brought home the bronze for taxidermy twenty years previously, as he is contacted again by a mobster to whom he owns a favor. The mobster's son was killed in the first step of a new gang war, and he wants Sardini to stuff his boy, and the fellows that he brought down, without the law learning about it.

This story originally appeared in 1987, and it was six years before Sardini returned. This much longer tale is one of the finest stories that writer John Wagner and artist Ian Gibson have so far produced, a ridiculous and epic farce that sees Sardini representing his city in the Olympics again, with ugly politics shaping up behind the scenes. Wagner has always enjoyed mocking the world of sports - his and Gibson's brilliant takedown of the World Cup in a 1982 Robo-Hunter story is something that everybody should read - and everything about the Olympics, from the gaudy opening ceremonies to the competitions to the inane commentary by the television crews, is wonderfully and hilariously skewered. I think about this story quite frequently, as every single instance where I am consciously aware that I am blinking, I think of Agnes "Laser Gaze" Boulton, who features in just about the funniest thing I have ever seen on the printed page. Rebellion could probably charge the same price for a reprint of just her short subplot and I'd end up recommending it.

Rebellion's design team has done its by-now-expected excellent work. The book contains all of Sardini's appearances, along with a short cover gallery. Reproduction is just about flawless, on good, heavy paper. Overall, it's a very funny and occasionally touching story that goes off in unexpected directions and it's in a terrific package. What more could anybody want? Very highly recommended.

Feeding a Yen

2011-06-17T01:50:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Feeding a Yen (Random House, 2003).

I'm glad that I chose to save this one for a rainy day and not rush through it like I did Calvin Trillin's first three books about eating well. I loved the feeling of coming back to some of his cast of characters after they were introduced 25 and 30 years previously. Trillin's daughter Abigail no longer requires a bagel be brought with her to whatever new restaurant her dad has found, but he still plays on her loyalties to New York bagels in an attempt to get her to move back to the East Coast.

The focus of this book - insofar as there can be said to be a focus, Trillin's books being as magically rambling as it is possible to be while remaining coherent and compelling - is on local specialties, on foods that you can't get anywhere else, or, in the case of Kansas City-styled barbecue, you would not want to try. Whether he's tracking down ceviche in South America or taking advantage of a diverted flight to drive from Albequerque to Santa Fe for posole - might as well, he was in New Mexico already - he tells his stories with equal parts silliness and love.

The longest section of the book concerns a ridiculous restaurant - so outlandish that I found myself questioning its existence - in New York whose eccentric owner will come up with bizarre specials based on an in-joke, forget how he intended to make them, and then serve them anyway. It is a very funny and very inspirational set of writings - I would not be enjoying the fun of my food blog without Trillin, obviously - and it sure will make you want to eat. Highly recommended.

Fletch's Moxie

2011-06-13T09:40:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Fletch's Moxie (Warner, 1982).

I'm afraid that, as I saw with the downward quality trajectory of Harry Kemelman, the 1970s were kinder to Gregory Mcdonald than the 1980s. I'd already been very disappointed with Carioca Fletch; 1982's Fletch's Moxie is nowhere as bad, but it is bloated and very dull for much of its page count.

This time out, Fletch, still claiming to be writing the biography of some obscure painter, is in Florida on the set of what sounds like a terrible motion picture. The star, a childhood flame, is suspected of the murder of her manager. Fletch, Moxie and her father decamp to Key West, and the Hollywood glitterati follow them, leading to chaos and race riots as events spiral out of control.

It sounds like the recipe for a story that I would enjoy greatly, but it's done with no passion for the plot, and a lot of really obnoxious characters. Moxie doesn't do anything to inspire Fletch's loyalty in this book, and there are passages where the prurience level gets so ridiculous that it all seems like the author is working out some squicky fantasies.

To be fair, Mcdonald very nearly pulls it off at the end, with a very satisfying resolution to the murder and a very clever twist showing how Fletch was also working on another mystery that I wasn't sure was actually something I was supposed to be following. Maybe this is a case of a very good writer getting distracted; I hope that it doesn't mean subsequent adventures are as tawdry and navel-gazing as this one. Not recommended.

Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam! # 1-4

2011-06-08T19:15:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam! # 1-4 (DC, 2008-09).

I'm not really sure what happened and what went wrong with this comic book. DC announced Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam!, written and drawn by Mike Kunkel, as part of their kid-friendly, all-ages line - and you can draw your own conclusions as to what the hell is wrong with that publisher that they have to have a separate, kid-friendly, all-ages line when they are in the business of selling superhero funnybooks - but it fell off the rails almost immediately. It appears that it took Kunkel the better part of seven months to complete four issues, so DC took him off the title and it continued for another 17 issues without him. DC canceled the book at the end of 2010.

Kunkel's take on Captain Marvel is following in the footsteps of Jeff Smith. A couple of years prior to this, that artist, best known for his cute Bone series, did a really fun Captain Marvel adventure for DC, updating the classic "Monster Society of Evil" storyline and bringing a fresh redesign to the classic hero. Smith's eye was exactly what Captain Marvel needed, and he did a perfect job using the character as a timeless hero of kids' fiction, totally divorced from the last several decades of navel-gazing superhero continuity.

Kunkel starts his ongoing story a few days after the events of "The Monster Society of Evil," drawing equal parts inspiration from Smith's take and from the Pixar film The Incredibles. He just has a brilliant eye for movement and posing; his Captain Marvel is a shoulder-heavy dynamo of power, and little sister Mary is an explosion of energy and speed. Frankly, you could fill his word balloons with solid black and this would still be a very fun comic to look at.

The story of these four issues concerns the return of Theo Adam, an evildoer with Captain Marvel's powers, given them centuries ago as a champion of Shazam but who went bad and has been in suspended animation ever since. Now reincarnated as a kid in Billy and Mary Batson's school, he instantly becomes an antagonist bully, intent on learning the Marvels' magic word.

I liked everything about this storyline, from the fun, kid-friendly setting of an elementary school to the mass destruction and calamity of these characters matching wits and quickly learning they can't hurt each other. Theo has just the right mix of classic villainy and modern obnoxiousness, and it's all drawn with a style and flair that's often missing from contemporary comics. It's a real shame that Kunkel only managed to contribute four issues; this should have been an ongoing winner. Recommended.

Someday the Rabbi Will Leave

2011-06-07T01:04:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Someday the Rabbi Will Leave (William Morrow, 1985).

I think at this point I can safely say that I'm done with Harry Kemelman. I mean, for an average cost of a buck apiece, I've made worse investments, but the guy had maybe five pretty good Rabbi Small stories, at the start of the run, and then they petered out.

This one, at least it's not as awful as 1992's The Day the Rabbi Resigned, but it's still a chore. This time out, the rabbi's nemesis is the new temple president, a shrewd and tough businessman who wants Rabbi Small to perform his daughter's wedding to an up-and-coming politician who isn't Jewish. The rabbi says that they can have a civil ceremony, but not one in the temple, and if the president insists on bringing in some other rabbi to do it, then he will have to resign as president.

So the temple politics get loud and cantankerous, and literally half the book passes by before Kemelman remembers that he's meant to be writing a mystery and kills somebody. Unfortunately, he's chosen to kill somebody with absolutely no connection to the rest of the plot save one conceivable suspect. Look, I understand that detective fiction of the "cozy" school isn't really meant to challenge anybody, but even the lady who writes those The Cat Who books never crafted anything so lazy.

I finally looked up a Kemelman bibliography and compared it to all these books on my shelf. I'm missing the last one. I thought the one where Small resigned was the last, but he did another one, three years later. Maybe if I find it for a dollar, I'll buy it, but I'm in no rush. Not recommended.

Adventure Comics # 525

2011-06-05T03:06:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Adventure Comics # 525 (DC, 2011).

Time flies if you're a Legion of Super-Heroes reader. I remember when Power Boy and Lamprey were passed over for Legion duties - "better no new Legionnaires than another dead one" - when I was in middle school. With Paul Levitz back at the helm as scriptwriter, maybe only three years have passed since that story. DC wasted an awful lot of time telling stories set in an eye-rolling three separate discarded continuities before getting Levitz out of his old corporate desk job and back to work writing the Legion from about where he left off.

Since his return in 2009, the feature - overlapping stories between the monthly LSH and Adventure Comics titles - has really not been essential reading, much as I'd wish it was. It's nevertheless quite good for what it is. Levitz does a great job juggling a cast of hundreds, introducing new characters and spotlighting old favorites. Sadly, poor Lydda Jath - Night Girl - is once again wearing a variation of that damn ugly beehive that she had in the 1960s.

At least it's a very well-drawn ugly beehive. Adventure's current format has two stories, and the lead is drawn by Phil Jimenez, who evidently wants to be listed among the Legion's all-time best artists. I love the way that Jimenez is willing to draw everything, from wild perspective shots of future technology and architecture to big crowds of distinctively-dressed people.

Anyway, the main story in Adventure for the last few months has been spotlighting the Legion Academy, with trainee heroes misbehaving and figuring out their place in the world. I'm not sure that we really needed a new character with the same nebulous, restrictive powers as Chemical King, but I like how this balances nostalgia with something that feels quite new. It's a little wooden, and it clicks intellectually more than emotionally, but it's been a pretty good ride, and I like the way that Levitz is using the shorter stories in Adventure to fill in subplots and details from the main storyline in LSH. Recommended, if not too loudly.

*Actually, hold that thought. Since I wrote this review, DC Comics has indicated that they'll be revamping, remaking, remodelling and rebooting their continuity yet again, at the end of the summer. It is possible that Legion, set a thousand years in the future and therefore not bound to the events of every other damn fool DC Comic, might be spared whatever the hell the publisher is planning, but if the publisher is known for anything, it's taking a pretty good thing and absolutely wrecking it. You might want to hold off on spending any money on LSH comics until we know for sure whether they'll be continuing with Levitz beyond August. Better no new Legion comics than another discarded continuity.

The All-Nighter # 1

2011-06-03T00:06:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The All-Nighter # 1 (Image, 2011).

The All-Nighter? That was the movie where Susanna Hoffs from the Bangles danced in her undies in front of the mirror, right? Some things you see as a teenager and just don't forget.

Well, anyway, after I bought a copy of the first issue of Suicide Girls but before the review went up, artist David Hahn sent out word that he has a new comic from Image, also called The All-Nighter, and asked whether reviewers would like to check it out. Happily, this is a much better bit of work than the Suicide Girls funnybook.

This story's about a twenty year-old art student called Kit who is trying to get out of a life as the lookout for a petty criminal - hey, art supplies are pricey! - and not having very much luck. Hahn plays a pretty tough balancing act to keep his protagonist sympathetic with home, roommate and romance issues while not going overboard with the pathos and turning this into something derivative of Jaime Hernandez. He doesn't quite pull it off from my perspective, but that's mainly because, extreme pinko liberal I may be on just about every issue, I kind of side with Ted Nugent when it comes to breaking and entering. Making Kit sympathetic to me is going to be a thankless task.

The artwork is just superb throughout, and while Suicide Girls, which was inked by Cameron Stewart, left the artist no challenges with its giant panels and boring settings, Hahn gives himself a hell of a lot to draw in this comic. When an artist is writing a script, he can cheat and get away from depicting the sweep of, for example, an incredibly busy and packed diner, or the very different interiors of multiple homes, but Hahn doesn't cut any corners. The comic simply looks great.

I enjoyed David Hahn's earlier series Private Beach, which really did veer too close to Hopey & Maggie fanfic, and am glad to see him still working in the medium. I wish that this story could have begun with Kit already putting the boyfriend she is trying to leave and crime behind her, but it's a very well-drawn tale with promise behind it. I'm curious what will happen next, and I owe a shop in the area a purchase, so I might just follow this one up. Recommended with reservations.

A PDF of this story was provided by the artist for the purpose of review.

2000 AD's Free Comic Book Day Prog

2011-06-02T00:39:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of 2000 AD's Free Comic Book Day Prog (Rebellion, 2011).

Here's a book that, if I may say so, is long overdue. Every year for about the last decade, the principal comic book distribution company, Diamond, has sponsored this event where retailers order a bunch of comics to be given out freely to customers. The idea is that the comic shops will promote a big event at their store and guests will arrive to reacquaint themselves with how great it was to read funnybooks, and established customers will pick up a couple of new titles. 2000 AD, despite being the most consistently entertaining and rewarding comic book published over the last three decades, has never joined the party until this year. At last, there's a free 2000 AD comic to promote in the US. Free Comic Book Day has come and gone, but it's possible - in fact, it's almost likely, considering the leftover stock that I see in some stores - that there may be a copy or two floating around for new readers to try.

2000 AD is an anthology book, and this issue gives people a reasonably good idea what to expect from any given issue, with a quibble or two. Judge Dredd, as always, is the star of things, and the rest of any given issue is taken up with a mixture of recurring series, serials and short one-off stories. Here, Dredd is ably represented by a short story written by his creator John Wagner and illustrated by Val Semeiks and Cliff Robinson. It's a good introduction, letting people know that Dredd lives in a world where life is violent and technology is downright weird.

The principal backups are Slaine by Pat Mills and Clint Langley, Kingdom by Dan Abnett and Richard Elson, and Shakara by Robbie Morrison and Henry Flint. Kingdom and Shakara are each very recent and popular series - Shakara actually reached its bug-eyed, mad, memorable conclusion earlier this year - and they are each represented by their initial installments. Kingdom is the lyrically paced (if that makes sense) story of a dog soldier called Gene the Hackman, who, with his pack, is defending Antarctica from huge insectoid aliens. Shakara tricks readers into thinking that it's the story of the very last human, an astronaut who was in space when bizarre aliens destroyed Earth, but then it swerves, magically, and shows off that it is not about that at all. Both are completely terrific, and collected editions of each are already available in England. American editions, distributed by Simon & Schuster, will be arriving in a few months' time.

The Slaine story is a pleasant surprise. Slaine has actually been running since 1983 with a dozen different artists illustrating Pat Mills' scripts. The episode here is the first in a series of adventures called "The Books of Invasions" that was painted / photomanipulated by Clint Langley. Langley's tenure on the strip is available in three hardback editions, with a fourth scheduled for later in the year, but I don't believe that these are planned for separate American release (and, presumably, promotion) at this time.

The comic is bookended by a couple of short one-offs, a Tharg story from 1977 illustrated by Kevin O'Neill that introduces readers to the concept of this comic having an alien editor who programs robots to write and draw the features, and a one-page Zombo short by Al Ewing and Henry Flint which is just violent and ridiculous and wonderful. Frankly, 2000 AD should run silly little single pages like this more frequently.

As an introduction, I think this does a pretty good job, although I might quibble that it emphasizes the over-the-top, hyperviolent side of 2000 AD perhaps a little more than I might like. This led at least one store in Atlanta to restrict the freebie to adults only. (I protested that all Earthlet children should be exposed to thrillpower at the earliest possible age.) While 2000 AD, it must be said, isn't for everybody - and a regularly-scheduled, stereotype-avoiding, female-led series is long overdue and would help there - many of its best series are nowhere as dementedly gruesome as the offerings suggested here, and I'm not sure that this really gives readers a feel for how broad the scope of 2000 AD is.

Another eight pages could have introduced readers to the classical pirate adventure of The Red Seas or the weird Victorian crime drama of Stickleback or the Western-in-Hell Ichabod Azrael or the brand new cops vs. demons Absalom, all of which are certainly violent, but not quite as visceral and outlandish as what's on offer here, and I think that might have been a bit more of a balance. Well, now we know for next year! Certainly recommended.

Flynn

2011-05-28T23:03:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Flynn (Avon, 1977).

Inspector Francis X. Flynn was introduced in the second Fletch novel by Gregory Mcdonald and he got a book of his own the next year. He's a terrific character, a laconic, sarcastic weirdo with a musical family, who treats the theft of his son's violin as every bit as important as the passenger plane that explodes almost atop his house as it's lifting off from Boston's airport.

With a federal judge on board along with several other notable celebrities, there could be any number of motives for the mass murder, including a local cult that preaches killing as the only way to curb the planet's population, but the real question for Inspector Flynn is who is this detective, and why does the captain assign him to work with the feds on the case when the Boston police department does not actually recognize the rank of inspector?

This is just a hugely fun book. I love Flynn's relationship with his suffering sergeant. At one point, Flynn sends his teenage sons undercover to do a little work for him, and sends the sergeant to chase them around to make it look good. It goes exactly as Flynn planned it, but not at all like how his sergeant did. His recounting of what happened is just about the funniest thing I've read in months. Highly recommended.

Fargo Rock City

2011-05-27T02:52:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Fargo Rock City (Scribner, 2001).

Chuck Klosterman is only about six months younger than me, but he sure liked heavy metal more than I did. I won't try and hide it; I was totally a middle school metal maniac at the same time that he was. Quiet Riot, Iron Maiden, makeup-free KISS, they were all awesome for a few months there. I'm not sure what happened next; I don't know that I bought any music at all in the eighth or most of the ninth grade, and then I was a hippie and I could probably still tear the shit out of "Incense and Peppermints" at karaoke, assuming that you could ever find anything as unlikely as "Incense and Peppermints" at a karaoke bar.

Hell, even when I was a-warbling in karaoke bars, awfully, I couldn't even find "Wichita Lineman."

ANYWAY, while I lost interest in glam metal, and spent my high school years wishing MTV would play the Bunnymen or New Order just a third as much as fucking "Sweet Child of Mine," Klosterman never gave up on his retarded obsession with glammy hair metal, no matter how ridiculous it got. Mixing memoir and celebratory history, Fargo Rock City dissects the fun of growing up with such a singular hobby, and, with a damn-the-torpedoes sense of not caring how uncool his favorite music is, he just talks about it, intelligently, wittily, and at great length. It's a blast.

The thing that impresses me most about Klosterman's writing is his ability to accurately nail archetypes down to the last detail. Speaking about Def Leppard, he correctly notes that their fan base consisted of more girls than any other metal group's fan base, and all those girls were named Danielle and wore Espirit tank tops. This is true. She was in your fifth period English lit class.

I learned a lot from this book, none of it really important, but most of it amusing. All that I knew about Guns N Roses' Use Your Illusion duo-LPs is that the idiots released both records the same day, thereby denying one of them the # 1 slot on Billboard. Releasing the second one seven days later would have been brilliant marketing. Apparently, GNR did something noteworthy and ridiculous with the videos from the LPs, which were meant to form a twenty-minute mini-movie. At least they would have, had Axl Rose and Stephanie Seymour not split up after they shot a couple of them, meaning that she had to be replaced by some other supermodel in the last video and it stopped making sense. That is so weird, but, apparently, par for the course where anything about Axl Rose is concerned.

Klosterman's writing might not be for everybody - Mark Ames' legendary takedown of him is both brutal and mostly accurate - but I smiled my way through this and only ended up with a single song maddeningly stuck in my head - Def Leppard's "Photograph," which, sadly, I'm probably going to have to buy off iTunes now, even if that mean Danielle in fifth period wouldn't let me copy her lit notes. Recommended.

Suicide Girls # 1

2011-05-25T02:05:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Suicide Girls # 1 (IDW, 2011).

Most of the time, when a comic shop clerk recommends a book to me, I've got enough of a sense of decency to actually purchase that book from them, instead of doing something scummy like buying it off Amazon or the like. But a couple of weeks ago, I stopped by the Titan store in Woodstock to say hello to the manager, whom I dated some years ago, and - in front of my kids! - she tells me that she had thought about me when the shop received the first issue of a new Suicide Girls miniseries, and that I'd certainly enjoy all the nude pin-ups in the back drawn by Cameron Stewart.

So I probably should have bought it from that store, but, try as I might, I just don't know that it's right to go around buying smut from anybody you used to smooch. So I bought it from the shop where we always visit for Free Comic Book Day, since you can get more free stuff there if you spend some money, and couldn't decide what else I wanted to actually buy to get the desired amount of free swag.

We'll draw a polite veil on why the manager in question instantly thought of me upon seeing this comic, but we'll agree that I should probably buy something else from her to make up for being a bad customer. At least I have an ex who recommends me girlie mags; there's this one girl I once dated who has taken to pretending she's not white so she can "win" racial arguments on the internet.

Anyway, unfortunately, Cameron Stewart only inks the actual comic, which is penciled by David Hahn and scripted by Brea Grant. Stewart does contribute four pin-ups in the back, and the artwork is generally very good throughout. The story, however, really needs an electric charge to get moving. I know that it seems that critiquing the story of a Suicide Girls comic book is like kicking small, defenseless animals, but while this wasn't a very good comic by any measure, I've seen far, far worse from Marvel and DC lately. The plot suggests a world where, rather than being a fun soft-porn-led online community, the Suicide Girls are a very old, Illuminati-styled secret society of ass-kickers. The scenario's genuinely not far removed from Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. Seriously. The execution is, surprisingly, not quite so good.

I'm willing to accept the very silly rules of the narrative for its own sake. This is a world where a murderer - one of the heroes of the story - tattoos the names of her victims on her body, which is something only a very, very stupid killer would do. But okay, they do that sort of thing in Suicide Girls-world. There's a big multi-national religio-techno-conspiracy based around privatizing the prison system and so it's okay to kill the executives behind it. As with The Invisibles, the morality of the protagonists is shifty and their actions are ethically questionable but it's given a pass because the baddies are allegedly bad enough to deserve it.

I don't have half the problem with the narrative as I do the slow, deliberate presentation. Twenty big-paneled pages breeze by and damn near nothing happens in them. Brea Grant, an actress just beginning her comic-writing career, is sadly taking lessons from modern American superhero comics. All that happens in these twenty pages is that a small group of Suicide Girls break their new recruit out of prison and they give each other a little backstory. Maybe two of the six ladies get a little memorable characterization, but for the most part, it's paced in a similarly glacial style as almost everything I've read by Brian Michael Bendis and his imitators, with long establishing shots and lengthy internal narration from the imprisoned recruit, when picking up the pace and using more panels per page could have seen so much more story in this issue. Nothing happens across any six pages that a better writer couldn't have managed in one.

This leads to very disappointing results from Hahn, whose figure work, as I recall from his old series Private Beach, is really excellent, but, forced to only draw four or five panels a page, he's got no choice but to emphasize too much negative space. This is a story that mostly takes place in a dark prison and in a dimly-lit underground base.

I'm willing to be a little kinder to Grant, and give her points for trying, than I was to Joe Casey and Frazer Irving, whose Iron Man book I mentioned here a few weeks ago, because those two have been in this business a while and really should know better. I've got no objection to this book's concept, and am not going to dismiss it out of hand just because it's fashionable among comic book snobs to mock the Suicide Girls for being naked or having a booth at San Diego or whatever, but while it's not very good, at least it's different and it's drawn very well. I can't recommend it, but I appreciate the effort. And that pin-up of Radeo in the back. My.

Conversations with Rabbi Small

2011-05-22T04:15:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Conversations with Rabbi Small (Fawcett, 1982).

Most used bookstores will file a copy of this in with their mysteries, and why shouldn't they? If the store is worth a shuck, they probably have a few of Harry Kemelman's rabbi novels there already, and any clerk who's doing their job has seen them filed in that section. I thought that this was another detective story, too. I was quite mistaken.

In this novel, a young woman goes to Rabbi Small hoping that he will convert her to Judaism. He apologizes that he does not "do" conversions. She, a Christian, plans to marry a non-practicing Jewish scientist and gain the approval of his parents. Rabbi Small asks to meet the fellow, and over the course of the rest of the book, they spend several evenings just talking about Judaism and what sets it apart from Christianity. The book is a couple of hundred pages of philosophical and theological discussion, which will either try your patience or keep you engrossed in a study of Jewish culture. Eventually, it becomes clear that the crafty Rabbi Small has an ulterior motive: he has no interest in converting the bride-to-be, but he does want the scientist to learn that their faith is as based on logic and reason as his studies.

I didn't enjoy it. I kept waiting for something to happen. I kept flipping ahead twenty or thirty pages and exclaiming "They're still talking?!" If you can handle a book in which three characters do nothing but converse, then you might enjoy the experimentation, but I'm not one of them. I am, similarly, disinterested in reading two hundred and fifty pages of Inspector Morse talking about real ale, Father Brown talking about the priesthood, Sherlock Holmes talking about bees, Nero Wolfe talking about saucisse minuit, or even Lord Peter Wimsey talking about collecting first editions, just in case anybody had any clever ideas.

John Stanley's Summer Fun

2011-05-20T03:01:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of John Stanley's Summer Fun (Drawn & Quarterly, 2011).

Drawn & Quarterly might want to be a little careful with these annual collections, lest they explode their carefully-constructed myth about the genius of John Stanley a little earlier than they'd planned. Don't get me wrong; the publisher's John Stanley Library remains a remarkable set of books and I'd like to own more, because when Stanley was on fire, which was most of the time, he was writing or illustrating better kids' comics than anybody else. Stanley's best work in the sixties seemed effortless, just a casual understanding of what made kids and teens tick, and scripts that just bounced with clever and silly gags that followed a logical progression.

There's a great story in this book, the third assembled for the annual Free Comic Book Day event, in which Judy Jr. schemes to steal a sandwich and manipulates her usual target to get it. Every panel just clicks with energy and a zippy irreverence. Even once the reader figures out where the story is going, watching it get there is a guaranteed joy. There are certainly other good stories in this collection as well. Even though you know going in that anything that Tubby tells you about a giant sea monster will either be a dream or a lie, watching the very construction of the story is great fun. Speaking as a sometimes wannabe writer, I'm just amazed at how easy Stanley makes this look.

Sadly, though, it's not all that good. Some of it reminds me, for the first time reading Stanley, of those horrible flat 1960s Hanna-Barbera cartoons. You remember all that crap like Huckleberry Hound and all those exactly-the-same cartoons that kept reusing all the same gags from each other? I couldn't stand those things when I was a kid, even though I watched them out of frustration with nothing else being on, and was reminded of them while reading a Choo-Choo Charlie installment about a physics-defying runaway ferris wheel. The absolute worst kind of kids' humor is the sort that relies on impossible things happening and everybody being stupid about them. Nancy and Rollo show up in a story in which Nancy lands on an "island" which is clearly a whale and I don't remember whether she and her summer camp buddies ever figured it out, because I got bored waiting for them.

A lot of this might seem like arbitrary decisions of taste, but I'm not so sure. Nobody's going to agree that Looney Toons were at their best in the 1960s when you had team-ups with Daffy Duck and Speedy Gonzales; everybody knows that Tom & Jerry were only any good when they were trying to kill each other. The long, crappy decline of Hanna-Barbera didn't merely come because they cut corners for TV animation, but because the scripts were terrible.

It's sad to learn that Stanley was just as capable of everybody else in the period of making eye-rollingly stupid kids' entertainment, but it's also sad to see that Drawn & Quarterly has already started unearthing and publishing some of it. About half this book is uncommonly clever, and about half is like the Gold Key comics that you quickly threw away as a child, wishing that your well-meaning aunt had bought you something with fights and monsters in it. As such, the book is a very poor choice to introduce anybody to Stanley. Recommended only for Stanley completists.

The Essential Amazing Spider-Man Volume Two

2011-05-18T00:26:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Essential Amazing Spider-Man (Marvel, 1998).

I suppose that I could be struck, reading this collection, as to how vibrant and wonderful Steve Ditko's art is. This collection of 25 issues of Marvel's Amazing Spider-Man contains the second half of Ditko's run as artist and co-plotter on the series, along with the first six issues of John Romita's run. I suppose that I could also be struck to learn just how steep Romita's learning curve was. Romita has been my favorite Spider-Man artist for as long as I can remember, even, heretically, surpassing the wonderful work of Ditko, but his first two issues are just stiff and awkward. Perhaps it's the inking, by Mike Esposito, not quite in sync with the pencils, but his first two issues look really sloppy and ungainly for one of Marvel's best-known creators.

But no, the main thing that strikes me about reading this collection is how utterly insane teenagers were in the 1960s. Oh, sure, they're insane now, but either scripter and co-plotter Stan Lee was coming up with laughable, flatly unbelievable elements to these stories, or they're reasonably accurate portrayals of deeply, utterly bugnuts, highly-strung freaks that are having complete meltdowns every other month. Oh, yeah, and a kid bit by a radioactive spider beats up on guys who dress like scorpions and rhinos.

You get the usual accounting of completely histrionic women that you expect in boy-targeted comics, just dialed up to eleven. Peter Parker, here aged around 17, has a few suitors, like Daily Bugle employee Betty Brant. Betty, also being wooed by a guy named Ned Leeds, flies completely off the handle, and into Ned's arms, when she learns that one of Peter's elderly neighbors has a niece around Peter's age. I mean, she flips totally out of control just hearing that somebody named Mary Jane Watson might exist. We don't even actually meet Mary Jane for many months, by which time Betty has exited the series, chased out by a possibility.

Then there's Peter's fellow classmates at Empire State, who have way too much time on their hands. During one protracted segment, Peter's Aunt May, not for the first nor the last time, is gravely ill. Peter is so upset by this that he does not talk to anybody about anything, and just goes through the day with his head hung low under a forest of thought balloons. His classmates conclude that Peter's intentionally freezing them out, prompting class hottie Gwen Stacey to alternately come onto him like a va-va-voom girl or an ice queen, with consistently weird results. Nothing anybody does in this comic has any relation to modern teenagers, who, for starters, would be blogging and Facebooking the bejezus out of how bummed they are that their aunt is in the hospital. Hell, my teenage son made a federal case out of his inability to convince his wicked stepmother to drive him twenty miles to an Apple Store. On Easter Sunday, when it was closed.

This is deeply, deeply dated stuff. I have a collection of Archie newspaper strips from twenty years prior to this, and its teen leads might be jealous, easily offended weirdos, but they're more believable than the teen attitudes depicted here. This is a shame, because the superhero stuff is really first-rate, with some impressive plots and even more impressive artwork and fight scenes, but one of the selling points of 1960s Marvel books is supposed to be how they're "realistic," and match the highwire melodrama with issues that normal readers can understand. Unfortunately, everything faced here by Peter Parker is just so utterly ridiculous, and played out with such overbearing hysteria, that it overwhelms everything around it. When it's good - when Ditko gets a dialogue-free page to show Spider-Man and the baddie of the month smacking the daylights out of each other, when Lee depicts a hero who can out-talk and outwit anybody - it is almost transcendent, but when it is ordinary, it is excruciating. Recommended for very patient readers.

Numbercruncher

2011-05-15T05:12:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Numbercruncher (Rebellion, 2011).

I have a lot of time for writer Si Spurrier, provided - as I mentioned in a recent column on this page - he isn't wasting my time and his doing trademark protection garbage for Marvel Comics. With Numbercruncher, he's back at work with Rebellion on a creator-owned project told across ten episodes, and back doing the things I like best from him. There's lengthy first-person narration, a jerk of a protagonist who should be unlikeable but manages to be completely loveable anyway, a remarkably complex, yet believable world, and a concept that couldn't be much higher and still make any sense.

The protagonist of this story is a big East End-looking thug called Bastard Zane, and he's the enforcer and dogsbody of what we might have named God before this series reveals to us that He is actually a weedy-looking, bespectacled accountant called the Divine Calculator. Every so often, He balances the scales and crunches the numbers and makes deals with humanity in exchange for services to be rendered. Enforcers like Bastard Zane remain in His employ until they find a mortal soul willing to render those services. Zane is looking forward to a well-deserved retirement after a mathematician agrees to come on board after some more time on Earth with the chance to be with the woman he loves.

What the mathematician doesn't know is that the Divine Calculator is an incredible cheat, and screws him on the deal. What the Divine Calculator doesn't know is that the mathematician anticipated the possibility of Him cheating and put a loophole in the contract, leaving the karmic ledger sheets unbalanced as the wheel of reincarnation continues to turn, and Bastard Zane is forced to pop backwards and forwards in time to see accountancy prevail and get the retirement that he craves.

Illustrated with a breezy flair by PJ Holden, Numbercruncher is an incredibly fast-paced and very surprising comic, utterly original and very funny. Spurrier is able to tell melodramatic action stories with a great sense of wit and irreverence, and what he's developed here is one of his best creations. It began in issue 306 of Judge Dredd Megazine and is scheduled to continue to issue 315. Clicking the image above will take you to Clickwheel, where you may purchase low-priced digital copies of the issues, and they're packed with all sorts of other great comics. Highly recommended!

Love is a Mix Tape

2011-05-13T10:12:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Love is a Mix Tape (Three Rivers Press, 2007).

What an absolute heartbreaker of a book! It's probably not possible for a sap like me to talk about it without evoking Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, so I'll get that out of the way. Hornby proved, to thousands of us, that we were not alone in obsessing over music and hoping to bond with some girl over it. Rob Sheffield was one of those who successfully pulled it off, and married a firebrand named Renee thanks to a shared interest in Big Star bringing them together.

Five years later, however, Renee was dead, killed almost instantly by a pulmonary embolism. So yeah, this book gets a little heavier than Hornby.

It's an absolutely engrossing memoir, and I love the way that Sheffield tells it, bouncing around his unlucky past and up through his mostly happy marriage, filled with fights about money and pets and his admiration for everything that Renee does. The circumstances of her tragic death will knock readers on the head as thoroughly as it must have been for him; he tells the story of her funeral that well.

Somehow, the story remains otherwise upbeat, geeky and silly despite the dark incident at the book's core. Sheffield's self-deprecating humor and his and Renee's love of music on cassette keeps the story invigorating and fun. He provides fodder for a hundred arguments among record collecting types - I'm with Renee on XTC, and Sheffield's just flat out wrong about the R.E.M. LP Document - and the feeling of optimism and hope in the book's final sections just made my day. Absolutely readable and compelling, although possibly not for people who never made mix tapes.

Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry

2011-05-11T01:29:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry (Crown, 1966).

Since I've been reading these books in entirely random order - whenever I happen to find one - I've unwittingly allowed myself the pleasure of popping back and reading some of the earlier, better books in the series. This comes after already seeing how Harry Kemelman, out of touch with any but his Centrum Silver-aged readers, had let his Rabbi David Small series descend into mediocrity and, in the end, awfulness.

However, in 1966, he was still at the height of his powers, and building the rules for his fun little detective adventures. Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry, like the later books, is certainly not going to be essential reading for more devoted fans of hard-boiled fiction. It's a cozy, cute story about community politics and backstabbing, touchy members of the rabbi's temple, and well over halfway through the book, the characters finally figure out that a death is neither a suicide nor an accident, but murder.

Actually, I really enjoyed the pace, reflecting the confusion about the death. The initial investigation is just for insurance purposes, with a hefty settlement waiting on confirmation that the deceased took his own life. Reading a book like this, from the perspective of the present, the audience is certainly going to know that the fellow was deliberately killed, but the leisurely pace around this point is actually kind of charming, and I really liked how the question suddenly gets the rabbi in trouble with one of the more powerful members of his temple. With the deceased already buried as an accident, and the sudden possibility of him having to be exhumed and moved as a suicide after the rabbi's made a tough ruling elsewhere about whether fasting includes medicine, and the resulting withholding of medicine being suicide, Kemelman might well have tricked his 1960s audience into thinking that this was the principal conflict.

Dated, of course, and not for everybody, but I enjoyed it, and I wonder whether the next couple of Kemelman novels that I've found will prove as amusing.

Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea

2011-05-08T05:10:00.001-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea and Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang (Gallery, 2008 / 2010).

I'm really not familiar with comedian Chelsea Handler, but I think I might have fallen for this book when I first saw the title a couple of years ago, and I finally read it and its follow-up. I haven't got around to finding her first book, My Horizontal Life, yet, but it is on the agenda. I settled in with Vodka, not completely knowing what to expect, and had a blast reading these stories of her completely ridiculous antics, tall tales and screwball love affairs.

I am not entirely certain I can believe some of the tales in this wild memoir; Chelsea's remarkably vulgar father is just an amazing piece of work. Dirty but never disgraceful, these are great stories of drink and debauchery and I love the self-deprecating tone that she takes. In one hilarious moment, she gets dumped by a red-haired fellow while another guy is hiding under her bed.

Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang isn't quite as complete a success, mainly because it seems rushed and confused in places. The opening chapter, in which elementary school-age Chelsea discovers masturbation and just won't quit, for weeks, is a knockout, and a very long and detailed practical joke involving an ostensibly dead dog is very amusing, but I was completely lost in a story about a drunken trip to an island and the shenanigans on the beach that followed. Vodka is definitely the better of the two, so I do recommend it for older readers, with mild reservations about its follow-up.

Iron Man: The Inevitable

2011-05-06T02:22:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Iron Man: The Inevitable (Marvel, 2006).

Now here's a book that's just all kinds of terrible. I don't actually own any Iron Man comics other than this one; even as a kid, Iron Man was never much more than The Boring Avenger, and his was a comic book that I studiously avoided. I thought the first movie was a heck of a lot of fun, but we never got around to going to see the second one. But here's a book that I bought - all six issues - because I really do love the artist Frazer Irving, and this was, I believe, his first job for one of the big American companies.

I knew Irving from his exceptional work for 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine in the early part of the decade. Apart from some occasional one-offs and fill-in jobs, he illustrated series and serials like The Simping Detective, Storming Heaven and A Love Like Blood. He kind of got saddled with a lot of strips that were too short to make any real impact other than the visuals, which were usually quite amazing. And then he got poached.

I think that now, I've been burned enough by creators leaving 2000 AD and going to write and draw massively inferior garbage for American companies. As far as I can see, it's only been Grant Morrison and Andy Diggle who've gone on to genuinely better things for DC and Marvel. Even Alan Moore. I own a stack of Alan Moore comics that reaches about up to my chin, and not one of them is better than Chronocops. So, as part of my scaling back on everything, even if an extremely high-paying job were to land in my lap and I become able to resume buying comics at the volume that I did at my peak, I'm not touching any of this trademark-protection crap that my favorite creators keep spinning for American superheroes. None of it. This could be the greatest Iron Man comic ever, and it would still stink, and while I'm certain that Frazer Irving and his family greatly enjoy the larger paychecks that Marvel and DC can offer him, supporting this work means purchasing deeply mediocre, stupid comic books for far too much money just to see some good art. You have to read this dumbass story to look at it. We should quit applauding creators acting like they've been called up to the majors when they get a six-issue miniseries about the Living Laser, and instead support the infinitely more creative fields where they have been succeeding enough to make THOSE the financial goal.

In a perfect world, in other words, 2000 AD should sell enough for Rebellion to be able to pay its creators so much money that the idea of leaving to illustrate a comic book as moronic as this would be laughable. If creators were taking a pay cut to do work like this, the work would not have happened.

This Iron Man comic, like damn near everything I have seen from Marvel in the last ten years, is an overlong, bloated bore of continuity and characters that don't develop. Scripted by Joe Casey, the story might have made for an acceptable two-issue fill-in back in the Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan days, but in 2006, it somehow required the services of a separate six-issue miniseries running alongside the regular monthly Iron Man comic. The plot concerns two of Iron Man's enemies teaming up to take him down, while, in his civilian identity of billionaire industrialist Tony Stark, our hero has hired a new ladyfriend, a psychoanalyst, to try and make contact with a third enemy. In a previous storyline, this baddie had been converted to pure energy, and now Stark has invested squajillions on some new technology to entrap the energy-baddie and have some way for the ladyfriend to communicate with his weird new energy form. Six issues. Remember when that meant, "Whoa, this is an epic"...?

Like a lot of melodramatic comics - and 2000 AD's not immune to this - some of the ostensible high points come with last-page revelation cliffhangers. Part one ends with the big arrival of The Ghost, redesigned by Irving to look much more awesome than his solid, caped Heroclix incarnation and more like the weird, insubstantial outline of that anti-matter fellow in the Doctor Who serial "Planet of Evil." Part two begins, however, with countless pages of the two villains talking. It turns out that one of the villains is actually the third to take the name of Spymaster and wear his armored suit. He yammers a lot about being a "legacy" villain. I suspect that Casey is a clever enough writer that this is a parody of the ridiculous continuity-obsessed comics scripted by Geoff Johns, where evidently insane people punch each other over who will have the right to be the next Star-Spangled Kid, but it's still five pages of people in silly costumes talking about what it means to be the new Spymaster.

I confess that I did not actually read this comic when it was first published. I saw that Irving was drawing this book and went ahead and ordered it from Bizarro Wuxtry, Earth's finest comic book store, because I (then) wanted to support the artists that I enjoyed. I never actually found the time to read it, figuring that it could wait until I had all six issues. And then... I just never found the hour or so I needed to do it, until, purging comics, I decided to give this a try before I give it to Scottish Rite for some sick kids to read.

I suppose about 45,000 people bought this comic. For what it's worth, I regret that I shoulder 1/45,000th of the blame for this being successful enough for Marvel to offer Irving more work and steal him away from drawing more Simping Detective, which is 45,000 times more entertaining than this dull, boring and stupid but well-drawn comic.

Killing Yourself to Live

2011-04-29T01:11:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Killing Yourself to Live (Scribner, 2004).

I really enjoy Chuck Klosterman's writing, and I really envy him the assignment that Spin sent him on some years back, basically driving from New York to Seattle through the South over the better part of a month to visit the sites of infamous fatalities in the history of rock. Not that I particularly care to see where the Big Bopper or Randy Rhoads were killed, or visit the place in Rhode Island where a crowd of a hundred was burned to death in a club, but given the chance to just drive and eat and think about life and write it up, I'd leap. I'd hope the resulting book would be a third as entertaining.

That said, it's really not a book about death, or death sites. Seeing the site of the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash might prompt some people into writing something profound, but not me, and not Klosterman, either. There are a few amusing or notable anecdotes that emerge from the actual places visited, but none really resonated with Klosterman more than the trip to Rhode Island. The funniest, for what it's worth, had to be the trip to the Chelsea Hotel, where the owner, politely but firmly, tells him to get lost.

No, this is a book about girls. Readers might get more out of it if they went through a hopelessly romantic and heartbroken phase in their late twenties and early thirties and memoired the hell out of the affairs that they wish they had, but basically, Chuck's got girl troubles, chiefly caught between two women that he's either seeing and loving too much and one whom he has not seen in some time and has not got over, and whom he's going to visit when he gets to Minnesota.

I think it's damn well written and very resonant of how I used to feel. If you don't attach any import to this kind of heart-on-your-sleeve yearning, this book will probably try your patience. On the other hand, if you've longed to either get back the love you put into something, or to drive across Montana and wish to have a vivid, funny writer tell you what that's like, this is definitely the book for you. Recommended for road trippers and romantics.

Death is Now My Neighbor

2011-04-27T01:27:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Death is Now My Neighbor (Macmillan, 1996).

There's an interesting rhythm to the later Inspector Morse novels. By this stage, with the television series a global success and author Colin Dexter a wealthy man, it really does feel like he's coasting, but the previous four books had all been so good that it doesn't feel like it matters very much. If this was a reader's first Morse novel, I can imagine it being hugely satisfying, but after so many of these tropes had been mined by the earliest books - many of them, sadly, inferior in both structure and design to this - what remains feels very repetitious. It will surprise nobody to learn that a major plot arc in this story involves subterfuge and chicanery among jealous Oxford dons. At various points, Chief Superintendent Strange will obliquely hint that he knows that Morse is working outside the letter of the law to collect his proof. Much as it is tedious to read a PD James novel wherein Adam Dalgliesh's holiday is spoiled by some pensioner killing an octagenarian over a betrayal during World War Two, this is by-the-numbers stuff, no matter how well it is told.

Well, before it starts down well-worn avenues, this case opens up with an apparently motiveless shooting in a quiet Oxford street. Turning the dead young woman's life upside down in search of an angle attracts the attention of a neighbor, Geoffrey Owens, who is incredibly curious, even for a journalist looking for a story. Morse's after-hours investigation into Owens turns up evidence of blackmail and all sorts of conspiratorial connections throughout the community, including the deceased. But what if she wasn't the target at all...?

If the preceding paragraph gave away too much of the plot, or what Morse turns up, don't be put out with me. Anybody with more than six or seven works of detective fiction under their belt is going to figure out these connections very quickly in a work of this nature. What makes Dexter's novels of the 1990s so appealing is how well he draws the characters within the framework of the plot. By this point, Strange and Morse are both nearing retirement, and Morse's loneliness has become almost painful to read. There's a wholly unexpected turn of events when Morse becomes ill and checks himself into a hospital, and learns that he's going to have to make some major life and health changes if he's going to retire at all.

As detective fiction, it really doesn't stand on its own two feet, and as something original within the series, it doesn't stand at all, but it's an extremely well-written book, and it's most likely that by this point, readers were picking up Morse more for the character and his friendship with Sergeant Lewis than for anything much deeper than that. Disappointing, but still recommended with a gram or two of enthusiasm.

Greysuit: Project Monarch

2011-04-22T01:58:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Greysuit: Project Monarch (Rebellion, 2011).

I end up writing an awful lot about Pat Mills' comics in this blog, because there are so darn many of them and they're so darn good. Also, the older ones keep getting reissued in nicer new editions which I keep buying, that too. But Greysuit is one of the newer ones. Two stories of this brutal super-agent have appeared in the pages of 2000 AD, the first in 2007 and the second in '09. Issue 1540 of that comic was one of its high-water marks, because that featured the debuts of two brand new Mills series, this and the excellent Defoe, which has proven more popular, but that shouldn't be taken to mean that Greysuit is anything less than special, too.

Greysuit is a pretty wild amalgam of secret agent fiction. The protagonist, who goes by the handle John Blake, is a superhumanly powerful agent for Great Britain, his mind and memories wiped to serve as a very brutal enforcer of whatever Her Majesty's government has sent him to do. In many places, it's incredibly brutal. Artist John Higgins doesn't shy from illustrating what would really happen if somebody with this kind of strength punched somebody in the jaw. Oooh, it is a nasty comic. While he's out on a mission, some of Blake's programming and mental blocks break down, and when he subsequently learns that a senior member of the government is responsible for some heinous crimes, Blake hunts him down.

Obviously, this is a comic with lots of obvious sources and influences, even down to the main character's initials (James Bond, Jason Bourne). But none of it is played for laughs or parody, as this is a mean-spirited and inventive storyline with the usual Mills trope of bouncing new and wild ideas at readers as often as the plot will allow it. They don't always work - there's a subplot about a character known as "the ginger ninja" which is just so darn weird that it beggars description - but for sheer volume of wild ideas in a compact space, Mills is in a class by himself.

Rebellion's new collection contains the entire series - two stories - of Greysuit to date. A third story has been suggested but not yet confirmed, and sadly the book leaves a heck of a lot of subplots open for one. There's still a pile of wild ideas that Mills can develop further and readers certainly hope that we'll see it again, and new readers will definitely want to be caught up when that time comes. Definitely recommended.

The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History

2011-04-20T02:09:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History (Faber & Faber, 2009).

This is an interesting story, but I can't swear that I enjoy the way the author told it. It's an "oral history" of The Simpsons, in which many of the behind-the-scenes figures open up for a warts-and-all discussion of the series. Jon Ortved got several of the writers and producers to go on the record about the show. Others, notably Matt Groening and Jim Brooks, declined, and old interviews from other sources are used in their place. It's structured to let the sources do almost all of the talking, without much in the way of narrative interruption.

When Ortved does impose some authorial weight on the story, it didn't come across well at all. The tone in the book's earlier chapters is overly cloying, just lavishing praise on how allegedly important The Simpsons has been to comedy and to television. By the end, with far fewer comments from writers on the record, he is dismissing more than half of the series and devoting pages to praising the program's descendants, including the Fox-dominated Family Guy, which is sort of like buying a book about Monty Python and finding three or four pages towards the end about how that series they did without Cleese was a little disappointing, but isn't that Benny Hill Show funny? In the end, this was an interesting book, but not one that I can really recommend with enthusiasm.

Besides, surely everybody knows that the only really good Simpsons stories of the last six or eight years have been the ones that Evan Dorkin and Sergio Aragones have done for Bongo Comics. They're much better than Family Guy too. Much. Hmph.

Star Wars Tales # 20

2011-04-15T01:32:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Star Wars Tales # 20 (Dark Horse, 2004).

As much as everybody has enjoyed Marvel's recent Strange Tales anthologies, which open the company's characters to a gang of unexpected creators, none of them really known for drawing superheroes, it is strange that the 20th issue of the old Star Wars Tales hasn't been mentioned more often. This is the spiritual ancestor of the Marvel books, in which the outgoing editor, Dave Land, commissioned many of the same people to have fun with the Star Wars universe. In most cases, this involves making fun of Jar Jar Binks.

Tony Millionaire has a good time with his story about Jar Jar's despairing father, George*. Peter Bagge, who has written some very entertaining political cartoons in his time, shows us how Jar Jar's time on the intergalactic senate is managed by some long-suffering handlers who have to explain exactly what the heck the upcoming votes are about. James Kolchaka, while not among my favorite artists, contributes a fun short story about an incompetent member of the Fett family. Assigned to kill Jar Jar, he finds a Jawa with a talking novelty cup from 7-11 and figures that must be him. Nobody really likes Jar Jar, but he certainly fires up some unexpectedly funny stories!

In non-Jar Jar tales, the often reliable Gilbert Hernandez has a short about Young Lando Calrissian acting like a rogue and passing as a Jedi to scam some naive locals, and Rick Geary plays it straight, unlike most of his peers, with a great Luke Skywalker story that turns into a clever piece of detective fiction. Best of all, however, is Bob Fingerman's six-page contribution that shows a Jawa turning away from the business of ripping off farmers to become a consumer advocate.

I really enjoyed the twinkling sense of fun with this comic, and the goofy willingness to poke fun at sacred cows, and Gungans. Possibly not for the humorless, but otherwise recommended. It's long out of print, but better comic stores may be able to source a copy for you. Shop around!

(*Astonishingly, Millionaire just reposted this tale at his blog. Somehow, possibly because I'm a shortsighted idiot who needs to be hit over the head to notice a clever pun, I failed to catch the deliciously good pun that is the name of Jar Jar's father, George R. Binks.)

Confess, Fletch

2011-04-13T00:32:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Confess, Fletch (1976).

I have to tell you, following Gregory Mcdonald's Fletch series has proven more of an interesting challenge than I thought it would be. McDonald did not write the series in chronological order, and I love that. The first of the novels, written, turned out to be the fourth in the series. The second written, Confess, Fletch, is the sixth. I picked up a hardcover omnibus that contains stories four, five and six - these would be the books written first, seventh and second. You with me so far, or did you drop out to follow something sensible?

Well, book five - slash - seven, Carioca Fletch, was a huge disappointment. Set in Brazil after Fletch found himself incredibly wealthy at the end of story four - slash - one, it seemed to be a case of the character caught up in other peoples' events and never affecting the outcome of anything himself. Fortunately, Confess, Fletch proved to be a massive treat, almost as good as Fletch's introduction.

In this story, Fletch returns to the States claiming to be researching a painter for an art history biography, but finds a body in the apartment that he's rented. This would be a pain in the neck had Fletch caught any fictional detective to give him, and his unlikely story, the once-over, but he has the great misfortune of having a real bulldog called Frances Xavier Flynn assigned to the case. Flynn would prove popular enough to get his own series of four novels. Watching the cat and mouse game that these two play is a complete joy, because Fletch doesn't want anybody to know the real reason he's come to Boston to talk about paintings, or why he left California in such a rush two years previously.

I really love the way that Mcdonald structures this story. Fletch has a very complicated scheme in mind, and it requires lining up an awful lot of pieces to make it work. Mcdonald carefully and deliberately puts all these pieces together without giving anything away, or letting the audience know what the hell Fletch is up to. The payoffs are beautiful in every way, and with an adversary like Flynn opposing him, he really doesn't get off easy. I enjoyed this tremendously and recommend it wholeheartedly.

Charley's War: The Great Mutiny

2011-04-08T07:13:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Charley's War: The Great Mutiny (Volume 7) (Titan, 2010).

Overshadowing the release of this seventh collection of Charley's War has been some interesting commentary by the strip's writer Pat Mills. First, I was pleased to learn that Titan intends to release the entirety of his run on the series, which originally appeared in Battle Picture Weekly in the early '80s. Drawn by the late Joe Colquhoun, Mills wrote the first 300 or so episodes before stepping down, leaving Scott Goodall to take the helm for another few years. It is apparently Titan's intention to issue all of Mills' run across ten hardbacks. That's wonderful news, because this really is the finest comic about war ever made, and even simply sitting down to marvel at Colquhoun's artwork without taking the time to engage with the story is a terrific pleasure.

But I was also very sorry to read that Titan is not paying any royalties from their releases to either Mills or to Colquhoun's family. That's a ridiculous and stupid shame; I can't freaking believe that this is the 21st Century and publishers are still acting like that. I understand that, especially with a pleasantly reasonable $20 retail price for such a nice hardcover, the profit margin for these books must be slim - the audience, sadly, must still be very small - but seriously, guys, charge an extra five bucks a book and send Joe's family a little check, would you? It puts a damper on all the other, long overdue Battle reprints that are allegedly coming out. I hear that the first Johnny Red book is finally out in some places - it was reviewed over at The Comics Journal - but Diamond hasn't delivered a copy of that to the comic shop where I buy them.

Nor, for that matter, did Diamond ever deliver volume six of the series, which is why I begged off buying this for a couple of months, fingers crossed in vain that I would get to read it before volume seven. Eventually I caved and really enjoyed this book. It's titled "The Great Mutiny" and about the first half of the book covers that interesting incident at Étaples, and I have had a great time reading background to that. It was a much smaller rebellion than I realized, but what made it remarkable was that it happened at all. (I've also learned that William Alison and John Fairley's infamous Monocled Mutineer was really playing fast and loose with the historical record by placing Percy Toplis in Étaples in time for the uprising, but I can grudgingly forgive it, since Paul McGann was so good as Toplis in the miniseries.)

Anyway, after Étaples, Charley goes back to the front and wants to make up for some of his earlier actions by volunteering as a stretcher bearer, and then things go completely to hell. It really is remarkable that Mills was able to sustain the energy and drama in Charley's War for as long as he did. At this point, we're something close to 200 episodes into the series - the only failure of these reprints, other than compensating the creators, is the lack of original credits and dates, as seen in other recent Titan collections - and, apart from a three-month break in the original publication as Colquhoun recovered from a heart attack, there was a new episode of Charley's War damn near every week for six years. I don't know how in the world they managed it. Recommended, but with some newly-found distaste about the publishing biz.

Showcase Presents: Legion of Super-Heroes Vol. 4

2011-04-06T02:54:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Showcase Presents: Legion of Super-Heroes Volume 4 (DC, 2011).

Every so often, reading Legion of Super-Heroes in this period (1968-1972), you get some real gems, but they sure can be ugly. This latest edition in the Showcase Presents series collects another 500 pages of LSH action and futuristic melodrama, and most of it's pretty entertaining, but it's not very easy on the eyes. I was reminded of a 1993 newspaper review of a twenty year-old Doctor Who serial, dusted off and run in prime time on BBC1, which summed up just how dated the garish, glam rock production was by noting "Sometimes, Doctor Who doesn't time travel well at all."

That's certainly true about the late '60s Legion. DC Comics, in the period, was confused and frustrated and throwing everything at the wall, desperate for something to stick. Sometimes they found something that really worked well; giving teenage writer Jim Shooter a crack at humanizing the characters and bringing a vital, modern energy to the old-fashioned plotting was among the best things that corporation did that whole decade. But then they shot themselves in the foot by letting some guy with the awesomely rock-n-roll name of J. Winslow Mortimer illustrate some of them. Eventually, Jack Abel is brought in to ink this artist's work and made it look competent, but until Abel arrived, DC was publishing some of the ugliest, blockiest, dullest, sloppiest artwork imaginable. Here's a rare example of me speaking against the Showcase series' black-and-white reproduction: My own collection of old comics where these originally appeared had long told me that these were ugly comics. Stripped of color, they are revealed as flat, unimaginative and hurried as a Whitman coloring book.

In this period, the Legion is still hamstrung simply by virtue of DC being DC. There's a good two-part story about several Legionnaires learning that they have been fatally poisoned, and you can really feel that unreal, Silver Age attempt at pathos. Characters want to tell their parents farewell, but they end up standing around stoically, weeping a silent tear and not saying anything, but thinking a gigantic thought balloon choked full of long sentences of what they wished they could say. On the other hand, Shooter does make progress in giving characters more human motives. Duo Damsel's unrequited love for Superboy is never really heart-wrenching, but it means well and feels real. Karate Kid's decision to spend his dying days tracking down the Fatal Five and bringing them to justice is the sort of thing that DC Comics just never did before Shooter. It was too aggressive, too proactive a tactic for such a reactionary publisher.

The whole book is like this, taking baby steps towards becoming energetic and lively and slipping away from the (sorry) Silver Age shackles. E. Nelson Bridwell contributes some pretty good scripts before Cary Bates drags the property kicking and screaming into the 1970s with some really fun stories and great characterization, and the drab Mortimer / Abel team eventually gives way to Dave Cockrum, who, finally, seems to have a desire to make the 30th Century look futuristic. The last 60-odd pages of this book are really fun, and I'm left feeling quite hungry for the fifth volume, which should be full of the stories that I grew up reading and loving. Recommended with reservations.

The Way Through the Woods

2011-03-30T02:07:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Way Through the Woods (Fawcett, 1994).

This one isn't merely masterful, it's incredibly fun. One of the recurring tropes in PD James's novels is that Commander Adam Dalgliesh repeatedly stumbles into a murder when he's meant to be on holiday. In Colin Dexter's The Way Through the Woods, the author playfully subverts that convention. Here, Chief Inspector Morse insists that while he's on vacation, he will not interfere with a police investigation of a missing woman, and flatly refuses to come back from his furlough early. Yet he does contribute to the case, in a gleefully amusing way...

Huge fun from start to finish, and with a confident use of cerebral ratiocenation and crossword clues, this is further evidence that Morse, in the 1990s, was a much more interesting character than the one who begun this series. Recommended.

Starman Omnibus 6

2011-03-28T06:47:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Starman Omnibus Volume 6 (DC, 2011).

If my spirits sagged just a little with the contents of the fifth Starman Omnibus, it wasn't for long, because I knew that the sixth and final collection would be one to remember. Good heavens, did this series ever go out on a high note. I really admire the way that James Robinson constructed the epic "Grand Guignol" storyline, with its team of trapped heroes struggling against impossible odds and a city of villains. I like the way that he uses alternating chapters to first advance the story and then step back and show how the situation got to this point, elegantly and effectively dotting all the Is and crossing all the Ts across some 2500 pages of the adventure up to that point. It really is a damn fine bit of writing.

One of my happiest memories of reading comics came with the climactic episode of that story. I had moved from Athens back to the Atlanta area and returned to town to collect my monthly books and visit my pal Dave Prosser, who now lives in Idaho. He, also buying Starman every month, hadn't found time to read the issue. Damned if I was going to wait until I returned home the next day to find out how this epic was going to wrap up, so while he fed and played with his menagerie of pets after a day's work, I curled up in a recliner to read it, and found cause to exclaim aloud three times as it unfolded. "Shut up! Don't spoil anything!" he would bellow back. I'm still not able to read one character's wildly unexpected, out of the blue demise without my eyes popping out of my head.

And as good as it is, I'm not sure that the last adventure, a three-parter set in 1951, isn't even better. There's a painfully mawkish episode of sentimentality to get through before it, but it's really worth it. There's an elegant grace to the way Robinson and artist Peter Snejbjerg finish up the saga and answer the series' final mystery. It's got another moment that retains its power to punch readers in the gut. You'll know it when you read it: when a character lets Jack know that he can hear music, a lump comes right up in my throat every stinking time. It's just excellent.

DC has really done this series right. The $50 price point for each of the six books has often been tough to swallow as my belt has had to be tightened, but the editor behind this series can definitely take a bow, because this is easily one of the best reprint jobs that the company has ever done. It compiles everything that Robinson wrote for the series, in proper order, with nothing skipped. The uniform design, the supplementary material, the commentary by Robinson, everything just shines with love and sincerity and the very rare case of this company putting somebody in charge who is determined to see it done well, and done right. When Grant Morrison finally ends his run on Batman, I want editor Anton Kawaski to be in charge of putting all that into an equally sensible run of books. That way, I'll finally read the dang thing.

Starman was one of the two or three best American comics of the 1990s, and its reproduction here is faultless. Loudly recommended.

Fletch

2011-03-25T08:11:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Fletch (Bobbs-Merrill, 1974).

I can only conclude that either none of my friends have read this book, or that none of my friends have read a darn thing I've ever written. I have written, repeatedly, that one of the reasons I love John Wagner's Robo-Hunter comic so much is the way that writer keeps ratcheting up the chaos, piling a teetering, inverted pyramid of plot complications on his protagonist. Reading these stories is a treat because there just seems to be no way in the world for our hero to either get out of this mess, or for the problem to get any worse. And yet the problem keeps getting more and more ridiculous and gigantic and messy. That's my favorite kind of escapist fiction.

I was aware that there was a silly Chevy Chase movie based on this novel by Gregory McDonald, and aware that people like Kevin Smith have been raving about the books, hoping to make more movies about the character, and finally got around to seeing what the fuss was about. It turns out that there are several novels in the series - I have two more, just waiting for me to finish a second read of the debut - and I was long overdue for looking into this.

Fletch, an investigative reporter in California with a disastrous personal life of debt, drugs and divorce, is deep undercover researching the drug trade on the beach when he's approached by a man about a job. He wants Fletch to murder him and flee the country. He claims that he has inoperable cancer, does not wish to suffer, and cannot take his own life because his family will lose a three million dollar insurance policy.

Fletch decides to investigate his new acquaintance's story just as the beach deal gets heavier and his two ex-wives and their lawyers start complicating matters even more. It's an amazing balancing act, watching the plot strands spiral faster and faster until McDonald puts all the banners into one hand and, masterfully, executes one of the most satisfying payoffs I've read in ages. This was one of the most fun experiences that I've ever had reading a book. Damn right I recommend it!

The Many Worlds of Tesla Strong

2011-03-22T02:55:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Many Worlds of Tesla Strong (DC, 2003).

Going through my boxes of comics that I have not read since I bought them, I've found several that I wanted to give one more thumb-through before sending them off to new homes. One of them is this 64-page spinoff of Alan Moore's wonderfully fun Tom Strong series written by Peter Hogan. In it, Tom's adventurous daughter Tesla tries, unsuccessfully as ever, to save the day before her mom and dad get home from an important mission. This sees her hopping from dimension to dimension in search of her family's loyal and beloved assistant, Solomon, who's gone missing in a parallel universe.

About a dozen artists contribute to the story, each in charge of a few pages that illustrate the different worlds that Tesla visits while looking for Solomon. Some of the artists are given assignments tailored for their talents, most memorably J. Scott Campbell, who drew the cheesecake Danger Girl, gets a few pages in a nudist universe. In keeping with the rules of the genre, each world has parallel versions of the Strong Family, and all of them are missing their world's version of Solomon.

I seem to recall that this was released around the time that Alan Moore started growing bored with Tom Strong. It looks like Moore stepped down from the series after 22 issues, the last two of which were terribly delayed, in 2003, and several guest writers, including this title's Peter Hogan, carried the book to its conclusion. Despite the good art throughout, with contributors including Frank Cho, Chris Sprouse, Art Adams and Michael Golden, this is just an incredibly lightweight and fluffy bit of popcorn, with none of the excitement and unexpected twists that Moore and company brought to those four terrific years of the main title. Cute, but not really recommended.

The Jewel That Was Ours

2011-03-18T15:54:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Jewel That Was Ours (McMillan, 1991).

I don't know whether any of Colin Dexter's many fans are going to appreciate me saying this, but the best thing that ever happened to that man's novels was the arrival of Central's television adaptation of them. I've been reading them in sequence, and found each and every one of the Inspector Morse stories to be a disappointment in one way or another, until The Wench is Dead, which was the first novel that Dexter wrote after the series began production. I can't account for this shift in quality beyond ill-informed speculation; all I know is that each of the novels let me down in one way or another until the eighth book.

In the second TV season of Inspector Morse, the producers began writing original teleplays for the characters in addition to adapting Dexter's novels. One of these, "The Wolvercote Tongue" by Julian Mitchell, served as the basis for The Jewel That Was Ours, the ninth book in the series. I imagine that it's a bitter pill for Dexter's fans to read me suggest that of these first nine books, the best two are one that has the same plot device as a Josephine Tey novel and one that's a novelisation of somebody else's story. I'm not trying to be an ass, honestly.

Anyway, this time around, Morse and Lewis are called in when an old artifact is stolen from the hotel room of a visiting American who, touring the region with a large group, has died of a heart attack. Shortly afterward, the body of one of the professors who was conducting lectures for the tour group gets pulled from the river. They have a busload of suspects who are keen to leave the country, a baffling number of links to old crimes and grievances, and a really disagreeable old lady who has constant opinions to interject about every stage of their investigation.

Even with the most disappointing of the early Morse novels, there was always a thing or two to keep me reading. Watching Morse grumpily go way too far in the wrong direction of an investigation, insistent that he's correct, keeps the character interesting and vibrant. I like the high wire act that Dexter plays, allowing us to cheer for a character who is wrong as often as he is right and not let him seem incompetent. This very human, deeply flawed construction really drives this story. If I may be allowed to heap further indignities on the notion of Dexter's originality, I also found echoes of P.D. James' better novels, before she started repeating herself, anyway, with the use of decades-old vengeance coming back to haunt survivors of an old tragedy and betrayal. It may be following in other writers' footsteps, but it's a hell of a good story, with a really cerebral and tantalizing mystery at its core, and I enjoyed the devil out of it. Recommended with gusto.

One Or Double

2011-03-16T02:55:00.000-07:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of One Or Double (Rumic Theater, volume two) (Viz, 1998).

Rumiko Takahashi is one of my favorite comic creators, and that's despite having spent the last decade writing and drawing some pretty subpar material. In the eighties and nineties, however, she and her studio were responsible for some really interesting and entertaining comics. Several of the short stories that she released during the mid-eighties are available in some long out-of-print collections from Viz. These were released in their older line of books, larger than the contemporary size of digests, with the artwork flipped to the English standard.

Takahashi drew Urusei Yatsura for the first part of the decade. This appeared weekly in the pages of Shonen Sunday, but, if I understand correctly, it was never a year-round series. It would run for 36 or 40 weeks of the year, allowing the creator to fill the rest of her time with various one-offs, and the short stories that would introduce the sporadically-scheduled horrific adventure Mermaid Saga. The unrelated one-offs got the umbrella title of Rumic World, and she has continued working with these short stories. Apparently, apart from the episodes that get slotted into Shonen Sunday in between installments of her ongoing series, a new one-off by Takahashi appears annually in a special edition of Big Comic.

Most of the stories in this collection feature Takahashi's signature blend of high melodrama competition and a (mostly) real-world experience with the supernatural. Everything's done with a light, winking touch, and the foregrounding of plot over character lets Takahashi try out weird incidents without bending her existing characters to fit them. The most interesting installment in the One or Double book is a 1985 story called "Excuse Me for Being a Dog!" which is, effectively, the pilot for her long-running Ranma 1/2, except in this story of martial arts mayhem, the hero turns into a white dog whenever he gets excited and, in keeping with a Japanese art trope, his nose bleeds. "One or Double" itself is a 1994 story set in a kendo school in which the ghost of a much-hated, ultra-competitive trainer takes over a young student's body in order to keep pressuring his students into training harder. "Winged Victory" is a rugby story from 1989 with an inept victory spirit urging the team captain to keep playing after 999 consecutive losses. Sports, ghosts, it's the same ingedients blended together into different combinations.

I tend to really dislike collections like this. The stories themselves are very fun, but It was apparently assembled at random, with no context or notes about the original publication. On the other hand, it's actually a little relieving to read a complete story by Takahashi and know that she is indeed capable of ending a story. When you get to volume forty-odd of the agonizingly long-winded InuYasha, you start to wonder. Recommended with nitpicky reservations, with the hopes that a better, comprehensive collection of this material might one day emerge.

Chopper: Surf's Up

2011-03-12T23:46:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Chopper: Surf's Up (Rebellion, 2010).

The good droids at Rebellion are really doing a great job issuing big, chunky, color reprint volumes lately. Hot on the heels of the Al's Baby doorstop comes this complete collection of Chopper, an antagonist of Judge Dredd who graduated to his own solo series after finally eluding capture, for what we hope is for good. He first appeared as a teenage cut-up in three different Dredd adventures in the 1980s, galvanizing the city's bored youngsters with his exploits as a graffiti artist and, later, as a skysurfer, before escaping all the way to the Australian wilderness. These earlier exploits, reprinted within three volumes of Rebellion's Complete Case Files of Dredd, are summarized in an introduction to this book. This definitely starts this collection off right; I can't tell you how many other books I own that would benefit from pages like this.

Chopper returned in a four-week adventure that first ran in 1988, written by his creator, John Wagner, and illustrated in black and white by Colin MacNeil. This proved to be very successful, and paved the way for a really remarkable follow-up, "Song of the Surfer" in 1989-90. Legendary among 2000 AD's fan base, this serial, again by Wagner and MacNeil (but this time in color) truly is a damned incredible piece of work. In it, Chopper follows his destiny back to another skysurfing competition, this one with the stakes raised to absurd levels by a promoter who has decided to return the sport to the dangerous days of its early, illegal years. He has chosen to make it a blood sport again, and, despite the outrage, still finds enough surfers to make it a reality.

It's a terrific story that touches on the tricky subjects of fate and destiny with an assured hand, wrapping them in a brilliant parody of the absurd world of sports (and, perhaps more accurately, sports commentary, prefiguring Wagner's crowning glory of the form in The Taxidermist, due for a reprint from Rebellion in a couple of months). It's a drama of the highest caliber, with a masterful use of pacing as the stakes are raised and the race begins, but the way that Wagner is able to deftly insert moments of comedy and satire as the story rockets forward is just amazing. This would be a very good story even without the parody; that Wagner was able punctuate it with moments of gleeful, sick absurdity like the smiling sports reporter announcing his own injuries without derailing everything, that's proof that Wagner is one of the very best writers in the medium. Of course, the artwork is completely sublime throughout. Twenty-plus years later, and not one artist in comics has stepped forward to paint exit wounds as frightening as what MacNeil managed here.

"Song of the Surfer" reaches an inevitable and tragic conclusion that definitely knocked thousands of readers on their head and still maintains a visceral power. That, arguably, really should have been the end for the character, but the comic's editors wanted to keep a good thing going. Garth Ennis and John McRea took over the character for a story that appeared later in 1990 in the debut issues of Judge Dredd Megazine.

These and some other stories by noteworthy creators, including the late Martin Emond, Alan McKenzie, John Higgins and Patrick Goddard, have appeared every few years until Chopper's final appearance to date in 2004. None of these stories come close to "Song of the Surfer"s power and energy, but they're all quite good in their own rights, and it is very, very nice to see them all packaged so comprehensively in one book. McKenzie's story is perhaps the weakest by comparison, but even it has a good deal to recommend it, from the vibrant art by Higgins to the curious subplot of the Japanese mega-city rebuilding and repopulating the Californian mega-city, which had been destroyed in a previous Judge Dredd epic story. This was evidently intended as part of the groundwork for a planned storyline in Dredd that, with McKenzie's departure from 2000 AD, was abandoned.

In all, it presents a genuinely fun look at a character aging in real time, from his early twenties and full of fire, to his late thirties and ready to turn down the volume and relax. It was great fun to revisit the character, and Rebellion certainly did him right with this splendid collection. Happily recommended.

Note: I've built up enough of a backlog to resume posting again, but entries will be a little sporadic for a while, probably no more than 2-3 a week. Thank you for reading!

Gone Fishing

2011-02-22T04:13:00.000-08:00

I'll be taking a short break from posting, this time because I have run out of things to read. That's not completely true, but I'm about a third of the way through several different and quite long books, most of which I'm not rereading with the intent of writing about them afterward. (Howard the Duck, for example. It holds up brilliantly, but I've been saying the same things about it for twenty-odd years.)

But fishing has a dual meaning this time, because I am also in the market for review copies. If you'd like me to consider your work, PDFs or CBR files are fine, or post me a copy at 572 Hidden Hills Court, Mayyyyyyrietta Jeorgie three double-oh six-six. My focus, if you haven't guessed, is on action-adventure and humor comics and on detective fiction.

Posting will resume in two or three weeks. Y'all go look at Comics Worth Reading while I'm out taking walks around the park and figuring out the best place to buy cheap baby clothes in town. Credo!

Reid Fleming: World's Toughest Milkman Volume One

2011-02-21T03:05:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Reid Fleming: World's Toughest Milkman Volume One (IDW, 2011).

Okay, so I probably shouldn't have indulged in this book with cash being tight these days, but I just could not resist the package. I'd only read a little of David Boswell's Reid Fleming before - it's sort of a stream-of-consciousness, comically violent runaround with the sort of tone of the Three Stooges starring in The Big Sleep - but that package! IDW made it impossible for me to resist.

It's a gorgeous, oversized, 224-page hardcover. Really nice paper, excellent reproduction... this just leapt off the shelf at me. I was kind of kicking myself for the indulgence later, but the comics are really ridiculous and entertaining, and I sure did enjoy reading them. Reid is an unkempt bully who somehow maintains a job delivering milk - for a while, anyway - while terrorizing the city, getting into fights, wrecking trucks and stopping everything to watch his favorite TV show.

The series was originally released in annual 28-or-so-page comics, and you can occasionally detect a shift in what Boswell wanted to do between chapters. It's not miles removed from the wonderful Freak Brothers, and while I think it's a bit of a stretch to call Reid a "counterculture icon," there's certainly some similarity between what Boswell and Gilbert Shelton were doing. It's a malevolently playful comic and I had a ball reading it. Recommended for older readers.

The Wench is Dead

2011-02-20T04:55:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Wench is Dead (McMillan, 1989).

Many years ago, I tried reading Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, the book to which everybody compares this short Colin Dexter novel. I didn't enjoy it, and thought the plot, in which a modern detective in a hospital bed decides to solve the murders of Edward IV's two sons, popularly believed to be the work of Richard III, was just a really peculiar, contrived way to write a story.

Perhaps I should give it another try, because The Wench is Dead is more than a little similar to the Tey novel, and yet it's my favorite among the first eight Inspector Morse books. In this one, Morse is convalescing and reads a monograph about a murder a hundred years previously and figures that there must be more to it. He suspects that the two men hanged for a woman's murder must have been innocent, and sets about proving it, with nobody to interview. To accomplish this from his hospital bed, Morse charms a librarian into helping him, and bullies the long-suffering Sergeant Lewis to do the same.

Perhaps I really enjoyed this because, without any other characters hogging the spotlight, it really becomes much more of a study of Morse himself than any of the previous adventures. It's just a treat spending a couple of hundred pages watching Morse being alternately gracious and grouchy, without any high stakes. Plus, it's got me ready to reevaluate that Tey novel. Huge fun, and gladly recommended.

Archie: Complete Daily Newspaper Comics 1946-1948

2011-02-18T05:05:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Archie: Complete Daily Newspaper Comics 1946-1948 (IDW, 2010).

Friends and readers, the wallet's been getting tighter, and I genuinely didn't need to shell out for another forty buck hardcover, even with a nice discount from Bizarro Wuxtry, America's finest comic shop. And Archie, well, I could take or leave. But I do like newspaper comics, and I really love the excellent work that IDW puts into their collected editions. They're the only company I would rank as good as Rebellion in that regard, and I wish that I enjoyed more of their releases, because they are, across the board, a fantastic company doing a terrific job with reprints.

My daughter is a huge fan of Archie, though. More accurately, she's a huge fan of Betty and Veronica. I asked whether she had any interest in archival stuff like this and, in a pleasant surprise, she was, and asked me to please order it. I guess that I shouldn't have been too surprised; the little digest comics that she buys will often be stuffed full of reprints, and she is savvy enough to recognize that an old Dan DeCarlo story is superior to the book's lead feature (usually, these days, penciled by Stan Goldberg and inked by a high schooler with a box of Sharpies), and that a Joe Edwards Li'l Jinx is almost inevitably the high point of any package. My daughter is entering the age of middle school stupidity and cliques and mean girls; any chance we have to bond over classic Archie artwork is probably one of the few available, sadly.

Unfortunately, though, my daughter really didn't enjoy this very much. I thought it was pretty good fun and had a few good chuckles, but she couldn't get into it, and, with a grumble of disappointment and disinterest, gave it to me to read.

I shouldn't have been surprised. I'm interested in what small town life was like in this period, when my parents were teens and going to high school football games, and this, very much a book of its time, is a great look back at what life might have been like back then. I think that my daughter might have been discouraged by the treatment of Betty in its pages, though. Here, Archie only has eyes for Veronica. Betty is a sweet and innocent naif, not really Veronica's pal at all, who has to con and pester Archie to get any attention. In one eyebrow-raising strip, which really shows its age, she has to tell Archie that six other girls will be at her house to persuade him to visit. The girls are revealed to be the sort of mutant uglies that Brian Bolland would later draw in Judge Dredd's Cursed Earth.

Other strips show the quite remarkable evolution in American slang. In this example, I don't think the characters are talking about the sort of party that I am hearing them describe:

Honestly, it's a fascinating curiosity and museum piece, but it's not the sort of series that I can see myself continuing with without my daughter's interest. Recommended for fans with slightly deeper wallets than me.

The Day the Rabbi Resigned

2011-02-17T02:15:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Day the Rabbi Resigned (Fawcett, 1992).

I really, really hate to say it, but this book was damn difficult to finish. Actually, to be perfectly accurate, it was difficult to continue past around page 80, by which point Harry Kemelman had presented three of the most unrealistic, dated, braindead depictions of new marriages and burgeoning relationships of any book from its period. It felt an awful lot like Kemelman, who was in his early eighties when he wrote this one, hadn't been anywhere near any young couple in decades. The depictions of relationships presented here would have been a little aggravating in the 1950s, but in 1992, I was married and I never heard of anybody remotely like the newlyweds in this book.

As a parallel, consider a book that I keep using as a comparison point, the Rex Stout novel Too Many Cooks, which is dated, uncomfortably so, in its treatment of race in America. But that is a book from the late 1930s; it might make us uncomfortable to read that seventy-odd years ago, attitudes towards race were often repugnant, and that otherwise intelligent (white) detectives would be fooled by shoepolish blackface, but it was honest at the time. Had the same novel been written years later, it would have been utterly out of place and wrongheaded. So here, Kemelman presents a marriage which falls apart almost instantly because the husband actually wants to have sex. It's followed up by a relationship where a woman who enjoys sex is depicted as a malevolent harpy who cannot be trusted, and a relationship which is condemned by parents because it is "serious" without an engagement. This book was written when Bill Clinton, not Eisenhower, was winning primaries.

Readers who can suffer through the antediluvian attitudes of the book might find some pretty good stuff after it. Like the rest of the series, it's a Father Dowling / Murder, She Wrote cozy of a puzzle with no aspirations to anything other than a simple intellectual challenge. This time out, Rabbi David Small is getting ready to retire after 25 years and hopes to find a position on the faculty of an area university. The temple's board of directors, as ever, doesn't understand the rabbi's simple wishes, and one of the area universities that Rabbi Small is considering is having a problem with professors looking to find tenure at whatever cost.

As with most of the Kemelman novels, the actual construction is a treat; watching the author tie several apparently unrelated groups together into one story is fascinating and surprising. The temple and university and police politics are amusing, and the rabbi's humility in the face of people who want to give him unnecessary rewards results in a really funny meeting, so it's not completely awful. There's a murder somewhere in the middle of all this, but it's not very important. The book doesn't even feature the hallmark beats of Small breaking apart the problem and finding the killer by means of Talmudic arguments and reasoning. Even absent the dated look at sex in 1990s America, this would be one of the lesser books in the series. Not recommended.

Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits

2011-02-16T01:51:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits (DC/Vertigo, 1996).

I've occasionally had discussions with people who just don't like black and white comics, and have spent their lives conditioned to think in terms of four-color spectacular super-fights. They don't like the look of color-stripped collections like Marvel's Essentials or DC's Showcases. The harsh reality of godawful, half-assed color comics like the old Marvel Further Adventures of Indiana Jones are lost on them. However, I'd read and reread the absurd, day-glow world of solid hot pink backgrounds and assorted flat yellow and green characters of those Indy books a dozen times before suffering through the eye-punching "Dangerous Habits," a pivotal, excellently-scripted storyline that saw writer Garth Ennis bring his mindset to the world of John Constantine for the first time. I received a copy from somebody on paperbackswap.com a couple of weeks ago, and my retinas are still hurting.

The real tragedy is that it looks like artist Will Simpson really did try his best on this book. The design and pacing are excellent, and it appears that Simpson and his inkers balanced the pages in anticipation of having them colored. Then colorist Tom Ziuko went to work on them and utterly, absolutely, ruined them. A random flip opens the book to page 82, where the entire page is purple. This is, from start to finish, the laziest coloring job that I've ever seen, with giant chunks of solid, dull colors dumped over Simpson's linework with no attention paid to what the hell is being colored. Simpson's a fine artist, and good Lord, this is an amazing script, but the book is absolutely ruined by the unbelievable hack job that Ziuko pulled.

And this is a huge shame, because "Dangerous Habits" turned out to be one of the best Hellblazer stories that I've ever read. It's a tossup between this, "Rake at the Gates of Hell" (also by Ennis) and that unbelievable one-off that John Smith and Sean Phillips did about the laundromat. I've always enjoyed John Constantine in theory, but the unreliable artwork and DC/Vertigo's unbelievably dopey job of collecting the series in book form - mercifully and at long last on its way to being corrected with the forthcoming reissue of Original Sins - has had me loathe to really dig into it. This, artwork aside, was definitely worth the wait.

This story opens with Constantine coughing up chunks of his lungs and seeing a doctor, who confirms that he's got terminal lung cancer and only a few weeks to live. Seeing the rogue trying to make amends with old friends and family while desperately looking for a way out of this mess, and really, really pissing off the devil along the way is amazing. Cheating death is Constantine's specialty, but the way he manages to step out of this nightmare - for now - really is a treat.

Obviously it's not spoiling anything to note that he doesn't die here - the comic has continued for about another hundred monthly issues since this story - but the resolution to this is just about the most audacious and beautiful idea that Ennis has ever come up with. I'd recommend this wholeheartedly and loudly, if only it didn't look so hotdamned horrible.

DC's mature readers line, which evolved into Vertigo, was always marked by bad coloring. The Jamie Delano/Steve Pugh run on Animal Man was similarly hideous, and a flip through this own book's odds-n-sods Rare Cuts collection shows many more poorly-executed color choices, including some more of Ziuko's wince-inducing work. The other day I was talking about how the filthy rich me of a parallel Earth has been hiring better artists to redraw Grant Morrison's comics. In that same alternate reality, Simpson drew "Dangerous Habits" balanced for black and white, nobody ruined his linework with this garish, dimwit color, and it's the best horror comic book that money can buy. So, recommended, but with reservations.

At Wolfe's Door

2011-02-15T02:46:00.001-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of At Wolfe's Door (James A. Rock, 2003).

Before I said goodbye to Nero Wolfe in these reviews, I did want to let any of my readers who are following my detective fiction reviews or are curious about the character know about this neat little book. Written by J. Kenneth van Dover, a professor of English at Lincoln University and published by a small company in Maryland, it's a guidebook to the series, with spoiler-free synopses, details and analysis of all the Wolfe novels and short stories, and handier, to my mind, than using Wikipedia to track down information. It also contains material about Rex Stout's other detective characters and critical essays, including a really fascinating piece looking at connections between Stout's corpus and that of Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason.

While it doesn't touch on ancillary material like the A&E series or the Robert Goldsborough novels beyond quickie lists in an appendix, it accomplishes its modest goals very well and is penned in a light, engaging tone that's perfect for either study or briefly finding facts. If you enjoy Rex Stout's world, I'd certainly recommend you give this a look. I just wish Wolfe was more popular with a modern audience to warrant a more intensive study guide.

Leviathan

2011-02-13T06:58:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Leviathan (Rebellion, 2010).

Leviathan was a surprisingly short serial - only 55 pages - that ran in 2000 AD some eight years ago, but it was such an extraordinary and outre work that it has resonated with the readership ever since, and is often hailed as one of writer Ian Edginton's best stories. It concerns what happens a couple of decades after a city-sized ocean liner leaves England in 1928 and vanishes without trace. At least, that's how the outside world sees it.

From the perspective of the tens of thousands of souls lost on the enormous ship, it's the rest of the planet that has vanished, and Leviathan drifts in an endless ocean with no wind and no land. Years pass, and the toffs in first class think that they have a handle on things by keeping the anarchy contained to the hellhole of the steerage class, but a rash of gruesome and unnatural murders finally forces them to ask a detective sergeant named Lament in the second class to investigate.

There's a lot more that I could say about the plot of Leviathan, and there's plenty of it out there, spoiled, if you want to go and look for it. Knowing more than the basics, though, ruins a remarkably unpredictable and brilliantly constructed story. DS Lament is one of my favorites of Edginton's many wonderful characters, an intelligent career copper whose mind may be the only thing on the ship that has not deteriorated over the last twenty years adrift. Even his personal life has fallen apart, thanks to the incompetence of the first class and the ship's staff. I will say that getting to the bottom of the hideous murders does reveal the mystery of what has happened to Leviathan, and it's a lot more than DS Lament was ready to learn.

Leviathan is gorgeously illustrated by Matt Brooker ("D'Israeli"), who uses a remarkable stylistic choice to convey the harsh and clinical world of the first class. There's a sense of gritty reality to the sequences outdoors and in the overwhelming world of steerage, but an unreal, angular sense of artifice to the dark interiors of the first class world that leaves the characters almost popping out of the page as though desperate to escape it. Edginton and D'Israeli have collaborated on many really excellent comics, but I don't know that any of them have required quite the commitment as the climax of this story does. Frankly, what D'Israeli has to draw at the end of this story, with no room for shortcuts, is the sort of thing that would have me running screaming from the studio, and it's one of the most amazing art sequences that I've ever seen.

The series, which spawned three one-off "prequel" episodes set before DS Lament's case, had previously been collected in a hardcover edition with a substantial bonus section that featured some of D'Israeli's sketches. Newly reissued in paperback to match the rest of Rebellion's line, the collection now includes a further six-page feature, not quite a comic, but an interesting additional look at the puzzle. It is a thin book, still under 100 pages, but a very entertaining one. I have enjoyed dipping back into the hardcover edition many times before, and while I don't know that anybody who owns that version really needs the paperback for its six new pages, anybody who doesn't have Leviathan at all certainly needs to order a copy. Recommended.

The Invisibles: The Invisible Kingdom

2011-02-12T06:32:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Invisibles: The Invisible Kingdom (volume six) (DC, 2000).

This book remains a massive disappointment to me. About two-thirds of it are absolutely blinding, some of Grant Morrison's very best work. And then we reach the climax and it is a complete mess. Most of the time, Morrison handles his finales incredibly well. This is one of those rare instances where he fumbles at about the two.

This last book of The Invisibles is the longest, reprinting the series' final twelve issues. It's set a year after the events of volume six, and starts with the three operatives of Division X, last seen in book three, finally making a break in their investigation of Sir Miles and the royal conspiracy. However, what these super-agents don't know is that Mr. Six is in league with the opposing, Invisibles conspiracy. Things spiral crazily out of control as King Mob, Jack Frost and Lord Fanny return to England and one member of Division X - the one who bases his persona on John Thaw's character from The Sweeney - is kidnapped and wakes up in a burning wicker man...

Actually, that this incident is set almost two and a half years after the last Division X episode just drives home what an amazing, parallel, series we missed while the focus was on the main characters. If Grant Morrison and Philip Bond, who illustrated these four episodes, would reteam for a good twenty issue run with Division X, I would buy the hell out of that series. Forget the conspiracy and the metanarrative, I just want to see these guys busting heads and having weird adventures.

So the first third of the book, drawn by Bond, is amazing, and the middle third, drawn by Sean Phillips and centered on 99 year-old Edith Manning, is transcendent. The installment where Edith, having come to India to die, spends her final hours with King Mob, is one of the most brilliant things that Morrison has ever written. Reading it again brought new tears. It's absolutely heart-hammering work, and the tiny flashes from ten years previous, with a younger, twentysomething King Mob looking for some kind of meaning, looking at the river with The Smiths on his walkman, about to have his life upended by an eighty-nine year-old lady who met his future self in the 1920s, suggest just how wild and amazing Doctor Who could be in Morrison's hands. (You think time is wibbly-wobbly when Moffat writes it?)

And then things fall apart.

A big part of the problem is Morrison's decision to let a freaking pile of artists jam on the climactic issues, resulting in a schizophrenic mess, and key, critical moments undermined by huge shifts in style. The absolute worst moment comes when King Mob phones the old girlfriend that we met briefly in book five. She gradually realizes that he's been very badly injured as, going into shock, he starts reliving a childhood memory of the last episode of a kiddie puppet show. Steve Yeowell draws the sequence, and does it brilliantly. I'm a huge fan of Yeowell's, and this might be one of the best things he's ever done. But then it's completely ruined by giving the climactic page of the sequence to Rian Hughes. Normally, I'm a big fan of Hughes, but this splash page is so jarring a shift in style that it doesn't look like it belongs in the same comic at all. It looks like an ad for British Telecom.

This keeps happening, with key moments either interrupted by a change in artist, or assigned to artists who make a complete hash out of things. Characters change their appearance every few pages, even in the middle of scenes. Yeowell and John Ridgway are the only participants in these pages who seem like they have a handle on even how to stage some of the action. There are others who don't look like they should have been let near a mainstream adventure comic at all, let alone one as challenging as this. There's a parallel universe where I'm filthy, stinking rich, and in that reality, I've commissioned Yeowell to redraw everybody else's bungled work and make it look consistent and good. (Parallel-me has also hired Cameron Stewart to redraw all the godawful art of Morrison's JLA, and hired Tony Harris to do the same to Morrison's run on Batman. Don't you wish we could have those comics?)

But while the art jam is a big problem, the script really is a bigger one. On the textual level, the villains' plans have completely stopped making sense - it all seems to be built around coronating a squishy tentacle monster as the new King of England, for some reason - and the Invisibles are going to stop it by doing something, and Sir Miles has been disavowed but suddenly he's back at the reins of things. Divorced from the subtext, it's just a rotten piece of drama, with confused motivations, and once a reader puts the fractured narrative into a linear sequence to understand it, it still doesn't resonate because it's incomprehensible sludge with too many characters.

But the subtext, the suggestion that there's much more to this work of fiction than we can see, completely overwhelms what's going on, and that's why The Invisibles fails right at the end. It's been previously hinted that the events of books one through six were the events that Ragged Robin wrote in a book, and then, rather than traveling back in time to experience as we were told, she actually entered her own fiction and interacted with her characters. By the end, we've added another layer of metatext and pseudoscience, that even Robin's participation was just part of a larger game, that basically people ten or twelve years in the future who read New Scientist every month have built a video game called The Invisibles which features a character who thinks that she wrote The Invisibles, who participates in the events described in her fiction, and, through the use of fiction suits (which people used to just call "writing yourself into your story," and sneered at), other... people... do... too?

The narrative is lost in this. Fiction, even complicated fiction, is most effective when the reader can enjoy the narrative at one level without being sledgehammered by the complex ideas of the other levels. The big climax here is one where both the structure and the meaning are intentionally obscured by the subtext, by the fractured style of storytelling, and by the poor mix of artists, who mishandle the material. It is a massive disappointment as well as a breathtaking experiment, and honestly, while having the whole thing drawn by Yeowell would improve things, as long as we're fantasizing, I think I'd still rather see a Philip Bond-drawn Division X series than bother. Recommended, but only because the first two-thirds are completely amazing, and readers can stop reading when the Sean Phillips artwork wraps up and have a fine experience.

The Secret of Annexe 3

2011-02-10T12:36:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Secret of Annexe 3 (St. Martin's, 1987).

This is very interesting. If I'm reading things correctly, The Secret of Annexe 3 was the only one of Colin Dexter's thirteen Inspector Morse novels that was not adapted for television. Noting this going in, I kept wondering what it was about the novel that prevented Central TV from commissioning a version of it. Perhaps they didn't want to suffer the trouble of filming in the snow for a festive New Year's Eve bash at an upscale hotel, or maybe the evidence that an unidentified man was killed after attending a costume party in blackface as a Rastafarian was felt to be just a little dodgy.

This book felt really strange to me, like I was reading the series out of order. The previous novel, Riddle of the Third Mile, was dense with cryptic clues and textual allusions, and the overall feel of the series to that point had been an increasing movement towards more cerebral detective fiction. This one, however, is an oddball throwback to 1930s plots and tropes, with a distinct Agatha Christie feel. Even the confusion about whose body has been discovered, with manufactured alibis and fancy dress, is something from the Poirot playbook.

I always enjoy the little glimpses at other cultures that you get reading books from other countries. This one's central location, a hotel, is just so strange and odd to me. All the business of writing for a room reservation and the prissiness of the management in confirming exactly who the guests are and what sort of hanky-panky that they think they'll be up to is just so amazingly alien to me. Even before I started using Travelocity, I don't know that I ran across any motels that were so uptight about this. Even odder, my son rented a DVD of Fawlty Towers around the time I was reading this. I can't recommend this book very highly, but I certainly don't recommend that anybody read it with Basil Fawlty in mind.

Captain America: Bicentennial Battles

2011-02-09T01:09:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Captain America: Bicentennial Battles (volume two of Jack Kirby's 1970s run on the title) (Marvel, 2005).

When I was a kid, I got one of those three-packs of Marvel Comics, and I got it many times. Some company would occasionally repackage some returned comics in a little bag together and you would see it at KMart or someplace where you didn't normally see comics. It would be three for 79 cents or something, and between my mother and well-meaning relations, I got this same package four times over the course of a year. It had an issue of Spider-Man where his car - yes, once, he had a dune buggy - tried to kill him, and an issue of Red Sonja with some crocodile men in a sewer, and Captain America & the Falcon # 201, in which the heroes exclaimed, breathlessly, on the cover, "It's them, Cap - The Night People!" "And if we don't stop them, they'll destroy the world!" I was very, very much a DC reader in the late seventies when I received this treasure - four times - and had not yet "got" Kirby, and for a good while there, unable then to throw anything away, I was completely convinced that this was the worst comic book in the world. And I had four damn copies of it.

It is reprinted in this collection. I was mistaken. But it's still nowhere near Kirby's best work. Taken as a whole as the middle chunk between the wild, fun lunacy of the Madbomb storyline of the first volume, and the ongoing, breathlessly insane fight with Arnim Zola and the Red Skull in the third, this stuff can't help but feel a little bit ordinary in comparison, yet it is still entertaining.

The issue that caused me such consternation when I was small remains a little baffling and odd, but also really mundane. It concerns a really big gang of homeless weirdos who have a teleportation device and access to other bizarre technology, but they just don't seem like a credible threat to anybody this side of the Three Stooges. Finishing up that episode, it's easy to be charmed by Kirby's pacing and amazing storytelling, but impossible to find it really compelling. Nine year-old me wasn't interested in it, and I doubt any adult would be, either, if we're completely honest.

The remainder of the storyline does ramp things up and makes it all pretty worthwhile in the end, thankfully. It turns out that the eccentric oddballs are all the former residents of an insane asylum who built a device to send their hospital into another dimension, where it's under constant attack from weird, silent monsters. Okay, now that should get your attention.

Apart from the five issues of the series reprinted here, there's also an oversized, "tabloid edition" 72-page story that Kirby somehow also found time to write and draw while doing the regular book. It's also pretty ordinary, and kind of typical of a particular 1970s Marvel trope that you sometimes saw in books like Man-Thing, where some cosmic powerhouse insists on making the hero live and relive some wild and unimaginable experience for some nebulous reason, to teach him some kind of lesson or other.

Maybe I need to reread this one, because in between all the business of Cap fighting with General Washington's army and against the Red Skull and Hitler, if I'm picking up castoff Steve Gerber vibes, either the King was desperately trying to maintain an air of relevance in the face of a younger, weirder Marvel bullpen, or I wasn't paying all that close attention. Not really recommended in the face of the two other, far superior books in the series, but a reasonable purchase for Kirby devotees.

True Believers

2011-02-08T02:53:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of True Believers: The Tragic Inner Life of Sports Fans (Picador, 2004).

My mother got me a pair of Joe Queenan books for Christmas. The first of them, If You're Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble, I did not enjoy very much, because I have little interest in mediocre films starring the sorts of mediocre talents that Queenan spotlighted in it. He went on for twenty pages about Melanie Griffith, and all I could find to note was that, yes, I had seen her in Something Wild and certainly agree with the author that she possessed a remarkably fine rear end at that point in her career. He later made a similar point about Susan Sarandon's rack. Other than Rocky Horror, which I don't really remember, and Thelma & Louise, I have never seen any of Susan Sarandon's movies. I'm sure you're pleased that I did not try and review this book. Not without illustrations anyway.

True Believers, on the other hand, I really enjoyed reading, because I know much of what Queenan speaks. He grew up in Philly, and still supports the four major professional home teams despite what he perceives as their poor performance. Actually, strike that, I live in Atlanta and Queenan's a whiny bitch. I just looked up his teams on Wikipedia, and at the time he wrote this book, those four teams had one World Series win, two Stanley Cups and three NBA championships. What the hell is he complaining about? We've got one World Series and a championship by the Atlanta Xplosion in whatever the heck league they play in. Look them up and then whine about poor Philly and see what a chump you look.

He does raise some interesting questions, and while it's fun to consider them, I don't know that he answers them. Why do people support the San Diego Padres, who never win anything? Well, probably the same reason why I like the Hawks and the Thrashers: because this is where I live and these are the teams for whom I can cheer and these are the teams that I can take my children to see. It's a little amazing that Queenan could write a book as long as this and not really get the point of that idiotic "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" song. As much as I enjoy the spirit of competition, and the occasional burst of amazing athleticism, and the always soul-filling burst of schadenfreude when some overhyped celebrity like Dwight Howard or a turncoat punk like Ilya Kovalchuk comes to town and gets whipped, I genuinely love the sense of community pride and a little bit of local history. I like seeing Joe Johnson and Mike Bibby playing in Dominique Wilkins' house. (Well, okay, they don't, because Wilkins played in the long-demolished Omni, but you know what I mean.)

This is a great book for anybody interested in fandom. Sports fans aren't that much different from any others; boorish idiots are common in any crowd and so are the people who will live and die based on what happens in what they are observing. There are people who take the Celtics too damn seriously and people who take Harry Potter too damn seriously. It's much more fun to just like the game and pretend to take it too damn seriously. Unless you're a Gators fan. You, I can't stand.

Now, I did have one objection to Queenan's observations. While witty and amusing throughout, I just can't agree with his grumbling about people having loyalty to teams not naturally theirs by either geography or inheritance via a father. I like the Toledo Mud Hens quite a lot. I don't know why I still do; I picked a team to have an amusing, safe point of argument with my first wife after she moved to Louisville and some outlet for good-natured trash-talking around the children was thought a good idea. Yet my first wife can, now, fall through a hole in the earth's crust and that'd suit me just fine, but I still adore the Mud Hens. I think they're silly and ridiculous, but they've got a better ball park than darn near any in Major League Baseball and the one time (so far) I've had the chance to see them at home, I had a terrific time. I enjoy the simplicity and the relaxation of minor league baseball - and the prices - wherever I go and whichever league I am watching, and Toledo exemplifies everything I love about the fun distraction of sports. Bafflingly, while I have no real business being a Mud Hens fan, according to Queenan, it's okay for my son to be one. Good. Just so long as he hates the Louisville Bats, right?

On the other hand, people who bandwagon-jump for the Lakers or the Yankees just because of their records, those guys and fair weather fans both, they can both get out of sight. You're not a true believer unless you really know about the agony of defeat. This is a sparkling, hilarious book, and absolutely recommended.

The Invisibles: Kissing Mister Quimper

2011-02-06T06:39:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Invisibles: Kissing Mister Quimper (volume six) (DC/Vertigo, 1999).

So the sixth book in Grant Morrison's The Invisibles wrapped up the series' second "volume" of publication. This was a twenty-issue run that saw King Mob and his cell in the United States, working both with and against the hierarchy of their conspiracy and in opposition to the American military and a, frankly, dull as dishwater shouty general. He had employed a small man named Mr. Quimper - unlike the general, a fascinating villain - and Quimper had been slowly performing psychic manipulation on the protagonists, twisting the team leader, Ragged Robin, and influencing her behavior.

The artwork for this last run of eight installments was provided by Chris Weston, and while I normally really enjoy his work without reservation, this is not quite his best material. While it is certainly terrific, I found myself really disliking his depiction of King Mob, who wears such giant earrings that it actively distracted me! Otherwise, the work is just amazing, with wild dreamscapes and excellent figure work. I especially found myself liking the realistic way that he draws the characters to not look like standard comic book supermodels.

Overall, it's more wild, brilliantly constructed material, full of twists and turns and amazing surprises. Unfortunately for readers of the collected edition, a thoughtless bit of layout editing leaves a whacking huge and pivotal moment splash-paged on the right side of the book, instead of on the left so readers could turn the page and be shocked by it. Every so often, I'd like to have a word or two with DC Comics' collected edition department. Spoiling that twist by laying out that way, well, that's just criminal. Recommended, of course.

The Missing Chapter

2011-02-04T02:35:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Missing Chapter (Bantam, 1994).

I briefly had a Wikipedia username and was interested in contributing edits to that worthwhile project. I soon learned that the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia editors are self-obsessed lunatics, not worth association, and consequently almost never edit or update Wikipedia pages any longer. I made an exception with Robert Goldsborough's The Missing Chapter, which some wag had previously claimed on the Nero Wolfe page had been the last "and least" of the author's seven novels. I spent the whole book waiting for some evidence that would back that claim, but, happily, I enjoyed it thoroughly. Then I went and edited the Wikipedia page. If you're going to make an NPOV claim, you'd better be able to back it.

This book is about the definition of "meta." In it, Wolfe is hired to find out who killed a grouchy novelist with an impossibly high opinion of himself and his hackwork. He'd been hired to write continuation novels in the successful series of "Orville Barnstable" mysteries. These have been much loved by millions of readers, including a fan group called PROBE, the Passionate Roster of Orville Barnstable Enthusiasts. Perhaps the wag on Wikipedia who didn't like this book was a member of "The Wolfe Pack" and thought the comparison was unflattering. Anyway, after the original author passed away, Charles Childress took the reins, and made a few enemies, but enough people think that there is more to his apparent suicide for Nero Wolfe to be hired.

It did feel a little different from the rest of Goldsborough's novels. There's an obvious, twinkling affirmation of the author's own tropes and interests, but it never really feels like he is saying goodbye to the characters, not in the same, torch-it-all-down way that Rex Stout bid them farewell in A Family Affair almost twenty years previously. It felt more like he was saying goodbye to the readers, and Nero Wolfe's many fans, leaving the brownstone intact for the next continuator hired to work on the series. Actually, Goldsborough left the brownstone somewhat improved. In a series that was punctuated most amusingly by heaping aggravations upon Nero Wolfe, the installation of a new elevator, and the attendant demands on Wolfe's patience while the crew disrupts his schedule, is one of the funniest.

It's a shame that there has been nothing since. Strangely, despite the evident success of Bantam's series, no new novels have emerged since 1994. As for that Wikipedia editor's thoughtless commentary, The Missing Chapter is certainly not the least of Goldsborough's books - that would be either The Bloodied Ivy, or, possibly, Silver Spire - and while it was not his best, it was a good enough capper for the author's time in charge. I was glad to have had the extra few weeks with Archie and Wolfe, and look forward to rereading the corpus in a couple of years' time. Recommended.

Meltdown Man

2011-02-02T02:52:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Meltdown Man (Rebellion, 2010).

You want proof that we live in a platinum age of comics? Freaking Meltdown Man is available in a single, big edition. If you told me, five years back, that such a thing would exist outside of privately-licensed small press editions, I'd have said you were nuts. Then again, I'd have said the same thing about Rip Kirby, and what are IDW up to now? Four hardcover $50 volumes of that? Heaven.

Odds are, casual readers have never heard of this series, which originally appeared in a record-setting, unbroken fifty-week run throughout 1980 and 1981 in the pages of 2000 AD. It's a collaboration between writer Alan Hebden, who did not work often for the comic, and the late, great Italian artist Massimo Belardinelli, whose work is still mostly unknown to the American comic media. He was overlooked at the time in favor of better-known, frequently-reprinted, fan-favorite artists like Bolland and Gibbons and only came up for a long-overdue reappraisal from fandom long after he'd retired.

Anyway, like a lot of 2000 AD series from the period, it starts with a really convoluted premise and then goes to work with a magical, wild touch. This time out, an ex-SAS officer named Nick Stone is blasted into a bizarre world after a nuclear explosion, where he finds a few pockets of lazy, bored humans who have created gigantic populations of anthropomorphic animal-people called "Yujees" to do all the work. Stone is instantly outraged by the backhanded cruelty displayed by these idiots and resolves to topple the order of things here. He's allied with a catgirl called Liana and a wolfman named Gruff in his battle with the corrupt human Leeshar, who commands an army of predators, weird technology, and a psychic, mind-controlling cobra in his bid for control of the planet, and steps up his scheming once Stone looks like he's going to be a problem.

Back in the eighties, when 2000 AD's publisher licensed its reprints out to third parties, Meltdown Man never resurfaced. Belardinelli was not a favorite of Titan Books' Nick Landau, and while a series that ran this long could have filled four of those skinny, black-spined albums that Titan used to release, neither Titan nor Eagle / Quality Comics wanted to reprint it. Of course, at the time, the perception of 2000 AD that other marketers wanted to emphasize was that the comic was the home of weird, freaky heroes unlike anything else in comics, and Nick Stone himself is a square-jawed, inventive hero of the classic tradition, despite the trappings of his wild world.

Actually, wild doesn't even begin to cover it. As I slowly amassed a piecemeal collection of back issues, Meltdown Man was the one strip, dipping into at random order, that I could not follow at all. That's because the serial is one of the most entertaining roller coasters in comics, with several parallel-running plotlines and a host of recurring characters who show up after weeks away. The story doesn't reach any natural breaks, and it isn't a collection of several short adventures, and it doesn't fall into any kind of predictable structure like comics of this sort do, where you know that, for example, at some point, the Harlem Heroes will get back into an arena to play another game. I finally read the thing start to finish across my back issues some years ago and was really stunned by how brilliantly constructed it is. A reread of this volume confirms it: this is a terrific, badly underrated comic. It's the sort of anything-goes, surprising adventure that the more recent The Red Seas feels like, but with a straight run of fifty weeks, Hebden and Belardinelli were able to accomplish so much more than The Red Seas' creators can, with so many aggravating breaks of so many months in their narrative.

As for the art, Belardinelli had drawn some pretty great pages before, for plenty of strips, and his greatest triumph, Ace Trucking Company, was yet to come, but I think that this was the point where he really nailed damn near everything. About the only grumble I have with the art is that Leeshar doesn't look like much of a threat with his ridiculously obvious costume, complete with "baddie cape" like a faux Germanic count or something. Other than that, this is a gorgeous, over-the-top book, full of gigantic waterfalls, massive explosions, armies of animal-people armed with freaky guns and lavishly illustrated extreme violence, and Belardinelli's pacing is just amazing. As events rush to a climax and Stone, in an uneasy alliance with a villain who's switched sides for his own interest, is caught on a frozen lake with a barrage of explosives around him, I don't think a reader's eye can keep from rushing from panel to panel, and the inevitable, grisly end to that turncoat villain is guaranteed to leave that reader punching the air. Plus, Belardinelli drew himself into the action in cameo appearances at least three times, which is always funny.

And as for the reprint itself, Rebellion have done another splendid job. I think I'd quibble about the cover, which is a recolored take on an old Dave Gibbons pin-up from the period. While I'd agree that there were no better images from the period to sell this book, there's a stodgy, macho, po-faced feel to that image that totally belies how weird and exciting the story actually is. That said, this is clearly a barely-known property and sales are going to be pretty low, so I can understand why the publishers went with this, rather than bend the budget to buy a new, better representative image from somebody like Boo Cook, who, it's been observed, has a style clearly influenced by Belardinelli. It really is a shame that this is going to be a low-selling book, because it's really fun and unpredictable and needs to be seen. I had a blast with it, and certainly recommend it highly.

Roadstrips

2011-02-01T00:59:00.000-08:00

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Roadstrips: A Graphic Journey Across America (Chronicle, 2005).

This was a curious book that purports to have a focus but it really takes a lot of hammering to get all of the stories within it to reveal that focus. I found a used copy for three bucks at McKay Books in Nashville and was very surprised to see the original retail price was an oddly high $23. For three bucks, I'll happily buy a book with original work from Gilbert Hernandez, Pete Bagge, Peter Kuper and Jessica Abel.

I usually have trouble figuring out a way to review anthology books and this is no exception. Like many similar projects, some work here is going to be more appealing than others, but what disappointed me about the whole project was that many of the contributors didn't really sell me on the ostensible thread that tied it all together. If you can bear this pompous product description from Amazon, the book sets out to explore "identity on both a micro and a macro level, [illustrating] today's post-modern patchwork with bilious narratives, thoughtful tales, and hilarious memoirs. Taken together, their powerful and thoughtful stories create a composite national portrait like few others." But I didn't get a sense of any regional identity or character from most of these stories. Megan Kelso's story about life in the time of the Green River Killer didn't really tell me anything about living in the Pacific Northwest, though it was very well drawn. Matt Kindt's entertaining contribution was a good story about family vacations, but didn't fit that description either.

Since my wife and I love road tripping, this seemed like it would be an exciting and fun read, but I was left feeling a little confused by the whole thing, and jarred by the massive differences in the contributions. I'm not talking just about different styles, but the feeling that each of the 22 artists was given a different set of instructions regarding what the editor was hoping from them. It also appears that the editor was either confused as to what constitutes "the south" (it ain't Arizona, friend) or he did not feel like contacting anybody from this region. True, the best stories in this book were worth reading, but they were not very long. Recommended if you like any of these artists, but for a lot less than the retail price.