Fin Fang Four Return!

Here's how this works. I read a book or two and tell you about them and try not to get too long-winded, and maybe you'd like to think about reading them as well. This time, a review of Fin Fang Four Return! (Marvel, 2009).



Hey, have I mentioned how Roger Langridge is one of my favorite comic artists? I have? Several times? Well, let me mention it again. Fin Fang Four is an occasional project he and his former Doctor Who collaborator Scott Gray have released for Marvel, in which four former threats to humanity have been shrunk to more manageable size and get menial jobs in New York City. On those rare occasions that new installments arrive, they are the best thing that Marvel Comics releases these days.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Marvel released these silly and fun giant monster comics, in which the human race was faced with doom at the hands of beasties like Gorgilla, or Googam, the son of Goom. These were later incorporated into the company's superhero universe - I believe that they further aped the Godzilla concept by even giving them all their own "Monster Island" - but more often than not, they were wheeled out whenever it was necessary to protect the trademarks.

In the Fin Fang Four continuity, Gorgilla, Googam, the robot Elektro and the Chinese dragon Fin Fang Foom have all been shrunk by Reed Richards and the courts have ordered them to do community service. They have group therapy with Marvel's resident shrink, Doc Samson, and when they're not parking cars, they're scheming to get adopted by pop stars who collect orphans. And poor Elektro, mistaken for somebody else with the same name, finds out what becomes of D-list criminals from Spider-Man comics...

The Fin Fang Four books are just terrific. They're really funny reads which play with the sillier concepts of both modern pop culture and with the rules of the Marvel Universe. I know Langridge has a Muppets comic due every month now, but hopefully he'll have enough spare time to work a little on the side with these characters, and we'll see them again before too much longer. I certainly recommend you ask your local comic shop about getting a copy of this. Marvel needs to get the word that more lighthearted, fun books like this are what we'd like to see!

Muhyo and Who

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of Muhyo & Roji's Bureau of Supernatural Investigation volume one (Viz, 2007) and Doctor Who: Oblivion (Panini, 2006).



I was mentioning last week about how I bought lots of stuff from the AWA dealers' room. This was one; I spotted the cover and figured, correctly, that my eleven year-old son would enjoy it. Muhyo & Roji's BSI, which concluded a seven-year run in Shonen Jump earlier this year, is simply perfect for his reading bracket, but it really failed to gel with me. Detailing the reasons why the drama failed for me would be like kicking a Goosebumps book for not providing a really good resolution to its teenage wolfman story, or a Harry Potter book for any one of its tedious moments. This isn't intended for grown-ups.

The stories by Yoshiyuki Nishi reach their high points with the revelation of the horrific beast-of-the-week, a critter which will then be instantly and effortlessly dispatched by Muhyo. The art isn't at all appealing, although Nishi has a fine sense of pacing the horrific buildup to each episode's new monster. I won't be continuing with the series, although my son has expressed an interest in picking them up himself. Recommended for middle schoolers.



Continuing to work my way through the complete comic adventures of the Eighth Doctor, I was very pleased to reread this third volume, which starts with one of the best bait-and-switches that Doctor Who has ever pulled, when a new character who seems to be the obvious new companion pulls the twist that you should have seen coming, but then there's a follow-up to that which is still, after all this time, chuckle-inducing in its audaciousness.

"Oblivion" is a really good set of excellently-told stories, ably mixing plot threads from both the earlier comics and the original TV series and presenting a Doctor that we never got to know as well as we should have. And I tell you, if there's a finer Doctor Who moment than when the ghost of Frida Kahlo's father menaces the Doctor's companion, while he's in a graveyard with Diego Rivera on the Day of the Dead fighting aliens, I can't think of it. Highly recommended.

(Originally posted November 03, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

The Two Doctors

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of Doctor Who: The Glorious Dead (Panini, 2006) and Doctor 13: Architecture and Mortality (DC, 2007).



I've been rereading the complete run of Eighth Doctor adventures (sidelining, for now, the most recently released World Shapers), and grudgingly have to admit that this one is the weakest of the four collections. That's not to say it's without a great deal of charm, as two light-hearted one-offs, each illustrated by Roger Langridge, demonstrate. Langridge also got to tackle a three-part story called "The Autonomy Bug" which concerns a hospital full of incarcerated robots who might be demonstrating sentience, and this brilliant little lump-in-the-throat story is as good as Doctor Who ever gets. Scott Gray handles cliffhangers amazingly well; there's a moment where the same guy that we've been thinking is an alien time traveller wakes up in bed with his friend Grace Holloway having dreamt the whole thing, and that's just flooring. But heavens, the titular epic, all ten agonizing parts of it, evokes the worst of bloated Marvel storytelling, with two opponents locked in a battle of wills for some nebulous, reality-shaping MacGuffin. Even without the specifics, it feels overly familiar and unsurprising. Recommended with reservations.



DC Comics has published thousands of stories featuring thousands of characters over the decades, but every so often they revise their internal continuity into one squished order of things, and some worlds, tales and oddball characters devised by creators no longer actively working don't find favor, and therefore don't find a place in the new scheme of things. Doctor Thirteen was one of these guys, a short-tempered loudmouth ultra-skeptic, sort of what you'd get if James Randi started acting like Sean Hannity. But he was trying to tell a world of Phantom Strangers, Supermen and Sandmen that there were no such things as ghosts, aliens or other-dimensional superbeings, and that simply stopped making sense a long time ago.

Brian Azzarello's weirdly compelling little story receieved enough positive reviews for me to want to read it, and I'm glad I did, even if I knew too much about it going in. Heaven only knows how much more I would have enjoyed it had I been following its original appearance in 2006-07 in a miniseries anthology with the top-billed The Spectre, a comic I still have no interest in reading. Suffice it to say that over the course of the series, with the assistance of several other timelost fictional properties who are also on the losing end of the argument as to whether they should "exist," Dr. Thirteen learns a lot more about his odd place in his even odder universe, and Azzarello doesn't mince words letting the "architects" of the current DC Universe know that whatever hard-and-fast rules they'd like to nail down for their playthings, they'll just be rewritten by somebody else in fifteen years. The art by Cliff Chiang is just gorgeous; I wish they'd get that guy on a book that I'd like to read. Highly recommended.

(Originally posted September 22, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Doctor Who and Hembeck

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews of Doctor Who: Endgame (Panini, 2005) and The Nearly Complete Essential Hembeck Archives Omnibus (Image, 2008).



That eyepopping cliffhanger from the end of the last Doctor Who season evoked an earlier stunt that the comic had pulled. The time was 1997, and conventional wisdom, much as people (like me!) who enjoyed Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor would prefer it to be otherwise, was that the '96 TV movie was a franchise-killing failure. Nevertheless, when the comic took the massive, unannounced step of regenerating the hero, and giving us a new, Ninth Doctor, one "played" by actor and producer Nick Briggs, it was a big shock. There was an accompanying photo feature of our new, balding, tea-obsessed leading man in his eccentric costume with a toothbrush in his jacket pocket. Since the wheeze wasn't revealed for four months, during which the real Doctor had been busy behind the scenes disrupting the plans of the villainous Threshold, there was plenty of time for an outraged fandom to fill the letters page and the old Usenet group with angry screeds.

Those were great times, and these are great comics. Most of them are scripted by Alan Barnes, and I suppose my only quibble is that the Threshold bunch are pretty obnoxiously snide, but I guess they wouldn't be decent baddies if you weren't sneering when you read them. Martin Geraghty's pencils are inked by former 2000 AD art editor Robin Smith, and while I've never been a fan of Smith's solo work, he really pulls off some great work here as part of a team. But the nicest thing about the Eighth Doctor's comic life - as convoluted and/or expensive as the other options, it's the one that I choose to think that matters most - is that the later volumes, to be reread soon, are even better. Recommended.




This is such a huge, fun book. It's funny, but you sort of know going in that it's a 900-page monster, about as thick as two of Marvel's earlier Essentials combined, and still it's a surprise just to see the thing. And since Hembeck can fill a page with lettering better than anybody else in the industry, you will definitely get your money's worth from this book.

But what is it? Well, if you know American comic fandom, then you'll surely know Fred Hembeck, who's been lampooning and celebrating the medium for about thirty years in the pages of various fan publications and APAs, by way of mini-histories, interviews with fictional characters and recreations of classic moments from comics, all done in his inimitable style. This is an exhaustive collection of damn near everything that can be collected, in one mammoth book.

It's tremendous fun, but certainly not the sort of thing you can breeze through. When Hembeck gets on a joyous rant, with his cartoon alter ego and Dr. Strange, for instance, trading tales of Steve Ditko highlights, the page can become unbelievably dense with dialogue, with more words appearing on a single page in this book than in an entire issue of Brian Bendis's Avengers. And the reproduction is smaller than in the larger magazines where these originally appeared, so you'll want good lighting and possibly a lens to read some of this stuff!

What makes this a winner all the way through is Hembeck's genuine love and respect for the medium and its creators. There are certainly books he's enjoyed less than others, but you really get the impression reading this of a guy who wants to share his enjoyment, and toast the often unsung creators behind comics. It's very Ameri-centric, unsurprisingly, but it's far more than mainstream superheroes; everything from Little Lulu to Preacher gets some page time within these covers. That brings me to my only real complaint: it's absurd that a book this thick should be published without page numbers! It's also a sad reality that a book this thick will soon have livid cracks running up its spine, but a two-volume slipcased hardcover probably wouldn't sell as well... Well, until the day my volume falls apart, it'll have a place of pride on my shelf. You won't be able to miss it; I don't know that I have any other books this thick!

(Originally posted August 04, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Doctor Who: The Flood

Here's how this works: I finish reading a comic collection, and I tell you about it, and I try not to go on too long.



The fourth and final collection of Panini's Who comics (the ones that predate the BBC kids' comic I mentioned earlier), this covers the final two years of the Eighth Doctor stories in Doctor Who magazine. Absolutely wonderful work from a host of talented creators, with some additional "director's cut" pages filling out two of the stories, and detailed commentary, including the abandoned plans to have the Paul McGann Doctor regenerate into Christopher Eccleston in the comic!

It's about 250 oversized color pages on nice paper, and is highly recommended.

(Originally posted August 9, 2007 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Doctor Who: Oblivion

I've mentioned before - I'm sure I have - how much I enjoy the excellent Doctor Who comic. Well, I started reading the third of four collections of the Eighth Doctor strips, and however good it had been, it kicks into overdrive in this set. While Paul McGann only got a single shot at playing the Doctor on TV, Scott Gray was the principal writer, helming a nine-year run of really great comics starring the character. Gray and his artists do a simply amazing job pulling the rug completely out from under you. I couldn't put the book down for a good while, and left it with a cliffhanger in a story where the ghost of Frida Kahlo's father is swatting the Doctor's companion Izzy across the room, and the Doctor's stuck in a cemetary surrounded by space aliens that look like skeletons.

There's an absolutely beautiful bait-and-switch in the first story. There, we meet this girl who couldn't have been more obvious a NEW COMPANION if that was her name and she was wearing a HEY, DOCTOR, PICK ME shirt. Except, no. Not even close. I'm still chuckling about how audacious a move that was, and how it's going to play out. Well, damn.

Anyway, the book's called Oblivion and you can order it by clicking the picture.

It cheered me up a good deal - good, surprising fiction tends to - and I got a good night's sleep and as I'm typing this sentence, I see that the customer who failed to get something I needed in has just done so. Well, now I can get that finished and then continue getting ahead of this month like an awesome little drone.

(Originally posted May 1, 2007 at hipsterdad's LJ.)