Helium

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 Helium (Rebellion, 2015).


One of the most interesting things that I've read recently is the latest story by Ian Edginton for 2000 AD. It's called Helium, and it launched in July with a twelve-part opening serial illustrated by D'Israeli.

Helium takes place in the future, when chemical warfare has rendered all low-lying lands poisoned by chemical warfare. Survivors built new civilizations on higher ground, above a toxic cloud that instantly kills. Three hundred years of peace and trade and progress later, and airships start disappearing. Something is active underneath that cloud, with its own technology.

Edginton does his usual job creating a unique and awesome lead heroine. Her name is Constable Hodge, and she's a no-nonsense officer who puts the safety of her community first, and, as the story unfolds, is revealed to have a pretty interesting rogue's gallery from prior arrests. She's accompanied by a very curious cyborg called Solace and there's a lot we still have to learn about him, and I can't wait. On the other hand, I was really disappointed that Edginton fell back on an old trope of having the heroine's warnings that something really needs to be investigated falling on the deaf ears of a council obsessed with orthodoxy and not wanting to cause panic. If I never read such a thing again, I'd be grateful, especially since the structure of this story would barely change if the government had said this was worth investigating.

I really enjoyed the first serial despite this, thanks in part to D'Israeli's amazing artwork. He's an artist who doesn't take shortcuts, and this time out, he gets to use a beautiful color palette. I love his designs for absolutely everything - the homes, the staircases, the cyborgs, the big floating ships, the tanks, and the lightweight aircraft. It's a gorgeous series and I can't wait for more of it.

That brings me to the other flaw. Unfortunately, as he often did in some of his other series, especially The Red Seas and Brass Sun, Edginton ends this first 12-parter on a cliffhanger, but these are never the best structured cliffhangers. Since, by 2000 AD's design, each individual episode ends on a shock or a revelation, I wish that he'd always move the story to a good place to leave it. There's clearly a lot more going on in Helium that we've not learned yet, and I'm very keen to know more, but building each published chunk of the saga as a story in its own right, to a defined conclusion to each part of the narrative, will make each chunk much more memorable. Especially since the vagaries of 2000 AD's publishing schedule means that it will probably be quite a few months before this cliffhanger is resolved. Dang it!

Trifecta

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free (but not this week), 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 Trifecta (Rebellion, 2012).


Many years ago, some 2000 AD readers were having a game of "what ifs" on one of the message boards or newsgroups, and talk got onto one of the occasional huge events in the pages of Judge Dredd. See, there are dozens of spin-off series that are set in the same world as the hero, and tell stories about other judges in other departments, or plainclothes detectives in other cities, or gay vampire occult investigators in the employ of the Vatican's black ops program, or what have you, but the cataclysmic events in one series are rarely ever referenced in the others. Wouldn't it be lovely if a major, world-shaking thing actually was shown to rock the protagonists of several series at once? The idea was cherished, nurtured, considered, and, as things happen on message boards, quietly filed away and forgotten in favor of new conversations.

The twist in "The Cold Deck" is integral to discussing what happens, so here goes: right under everybody's noses, after a few weeks of thinking three separate series were every bit as separate as 2000 AD series typically are, the three were all suddenly shown to be beautifully interlinked. The twist itself was cute, but the execution was more flawless than any ever seen in comics. Nearly forty years I've been readin' funnybooks, and I've never seen it bettered. The three writers, Al Ewing, Si Spurrier, and Rob Williams, have absolutely blown away every antecedent in the genre, from every time the Avengers have fought the X-Men, or DC's Superman learned that it was Marvel's Galactus that destroyed his home planet, of course it has taken the architects building the world's best comic book to show everybody else how to do it best and make it matter.

Here's the part that I liked the most: the story took advantage of last year's excellent Dredd movie to pull it off. As the film was released, the sister comic Judge Dredd Megazine devoted two of its three slots for new comics to a pair of Dredd episodes, and the other to the movie's co-star Anderson, leaving all the many other recurring Dredd-universe series temporarily homeless. For example, the Meg had been the traditional home of a series called The Simping Detective by Spurrier and, in this new story, artist Simon Coleby. At the same time, it also made sense for 2000 AD to beef up its Dreddworld content to take advantage of moviegoers' curiosity. At most, there might be a second story in any given issue set in Dredd's Mega-City One, such as the popular Low Life by Williams and artist Matt "D'Israeli" Booker.

So everything was announced with the happy understanding that the extra Dredd-world content was scheduled because of the movie. Everybody likes Low Life, which features a somewhat deranged and hygiene-challenged undercover judge named Dirty Frank. And everybody likes The Simping Detective, back in action after a few years away, which features another undercover judge, Jack Point, who poses as a private eye. And everybody has been very pleased with the Dredd episodes by Al Ewing, who's frankly considered to be that strip's heir apparent to its main writer, John Wagner, when the day of his retirement comes, and especially when fan favorite Henry Flint is on art duties. There has never been a time when readers have been lulled into such a false state of security.

Here's the thing: Marvel and DC learned ages ago to hype and promote the bejesus out of their big events stories. They send out the press releases, they let everybody know that nothing will ever be the same again, they provide retailers with checklists to pass out to customers, because a new big event, usually built around the temporary "death" of a major character, will cross over from one main title into sixteen or more subordinate ones. I'd like to think that readers know it's a shell game and don't really appreciate it, but deal with it all the same. I suffered through the intrusion of heaven knows how many crossovers into the American titles that I wished to read, for decades, and enjoyed exactly one of them, One Million. That's not a good batting average. (As I'm writing this, incidentally, I'm enjoying a long reread of the 1980s Legion of Super-Heroes, and I'm right at the point between the last of several intrusions from Crisis on Infinite Earths and a two-part intrusion from Millennium. None were welcome.) The point is: the hype is the key. They start excited arguments at comic news and fan sites, even the good ones like The Beat, and they get the comment threads humming and the advertisement views rising, so the fan media keeps covering new hype projects, because - good Lord! - this time, when Professor X dies, he might stay dead for a whole seventeen issues instead of sixteen. This is serious business! Keep talking about it! Surely, if 2000 AD wanted to get more coverage, they'd announce a crossover and promote it, so everybody on every comic fan site can get excited and get the ad views and clicks, right?

No, they'll just print part two of a Dredd episode that ends with our hero kicking down the door of an apartment and then begin the very next page, starting part four of the Simping Detective story, with the occupants of that apartment seeing their door being kicked down by Dredd.

Wait, what?!

I don't know where to begin with it. The visual itself is amazing: it really looks like Judge Dredd has just broken into somebody else's strip. Of course Jack Point and the criminal that he's grafting are unhappy to see him: they're trying to have their own damn adventure.

In retrospect, there were lots of clues that Dredd and Point were actually working on the same case, but nobody noticed them because, over in Low Life, Dirty Frank had woken up a few issues previously with his memory wiped, and he's on the moonbase city Luna-1 and he's very deep undercover as a billionaire about to have an important board meeting with a half-man half-shark. All of the readers' investigation circuits were so engaged trying to puzzle out the tantalizing clues and hints in that strip that it just flat out did not occur to anybody that we should also be looking for anything unusual anywhere else. So when a transmission from Point is received by Dirty Frank on the moon later in the same issue, it's the second forehead-slapping jawdropper in one week. We've got an insanely large corporation led by a shark-dude on the moon, some sort of Maltese McGuffin business in Point's neck of the woods, and ugly politics within Justice Department with an attempted coup, and all these are the same case?!

This just made the next four issues completely wild and exciting, putting all these pieces together along with our heroes, finding connections and seeing a grandiose and huge conspiracy that somehow lives up to the attention. Put another way, two other very good series were running alongside these three in 2000 AD: Brass Sun, an extremely promising new series written by Ian Edginton, and a long-overdue ABC Warriors story in which Pat Mills, brilliantly and masterfully, starts tying together some thirty year-old loose ends, and "Trifecta" - to call this crossover by the name of the issue-length episode, co-scripted by all three writers and drawn by Carl Critchlow, that concluded it - outshined them both.

Everybody involved can take a bow. Between all this, and the conclusion of Nikolai Dante, and the amazing "Day of Chaos", and the Dredd movie, 2012 was simply one of the finest years in the Galaxy's Greatest Comic's 35-year history. If you read any other comic - any - last year, then you were reading second-rate material. The medium just doesn't get better than this.

Leviathan

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.

Kingdom of the Wicked and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

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 Kingdom of the Wicked (Dark Horse, 2005) and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (Bloomsbury, 2004).



Kingdom of the Wicked, a stand-alone novel by the Leviathan / Stickleback team of Ian Edginton and D'Israeli, has much in common with their other joint works, featuring dreamlike recreations of an England long passed into fiction. It concerns an author of children's books who has recently been suffering from terrible seizures and awakening in a fairytale dreamland that he had constructed as a boy. But the land is at war with a powerful enemy, and the imaginary friends with whom he'd once played have been hardened by decades of brutality and ugliness.

This is not much of a complaint, but I found the book to be much more thrilling before the mystery of what is happening in Castrovalva was revealed. It never becomes by-the-numbers, apart from some ponderous "final confrontation" threats between the villain and the hero, but there is a feeling of inevitablity which Edginton and D'Israeli have periodically subverted (notably in Scarlet Traces and the first series of Stickleback) with more success than here. They are much more successful in capturing and subverting the feel of A.A. Milne and Great War-era fiction in establishing a sense of place to ground Castrovalva, and D'Israeli's art is, as ever, masterful. Recommended.



"It is the task of the Book to bear the words. Which I do. It is the task of the Reader to know what they say."
"But the last Reader is dead!"

If you are like me, you've probably seen this book a few times and heard a good word about it here and there, but never quite made the jump to buying it. I was not completely certain what to expect in this alternate history of magic in the period of the Napoleonic Wars, but within fifteen pages, I was completely captivated, and when I realized one morning last week that my reading had taken me past the halfway point of the book, I was briefly saddened to learn that my time with these people and places would soon be finished.

Susannah Clarke plays with the conventions of period novels with a real sense of wit and joy. Jane Austen is evoked in some gushing quote on the cover, but there's a sense of Dickens as well, especially when you hit chapters in which minor characters from much earlier in the narrative resurface for what feels on its face like a fill-in episode in this month's edition of a serialized novel, but readers will quickly learn how elements from these chapters will become important later on. Also, Clarke uses footnotes - hundreds of them - to fill in the great backstory of England's magical past, refer to books that we cannot quite read and, from time to time, hint towards future developments.

I do love an author who can foreshadow as well as Clarke does while simultaneously drawing reader's attention away from the slight-of-hand she is using. About fifty pages from the end, I finally realized something which chould have been as plain as the nose on my face about six hundred pages previously in the hands of a lesser author, setting me up for a tremendously thrilling and satisfying conclusion. This was certainly a book I didn't object to staying up very late to finish.

Those popular booksellers Barnes & Noble offer a $7 edition of this mammoth book in their discounted section. Since I can be every bit as fussy about books as Mr Norrell himself, I find it disagreeable to hold this edition, which evokes nineteenth-century printing with its ever-so-uneven paper width. If you are less of a nitpicker than me, then I assure you that the investment shall be amply rewarded with this highly recommended volume.

(Originally posted January 14, 2009 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

New 2000 AD Books

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 Button Man: The Confession of Harry Exton, Nikolai Dante: Sword of the Tsar and Stickleback: England's Glory (all Rebellion, 2008).



Rebellion's been continuing a program of about two reprint collections a month. I buy almost all of them, and these are some of the latest ones. The second Button Man book reprints the second lengthy story of this sporadically-published tale by John Wagner and Arthur Ranson. It first appeared over four months in 1994, and the third wouldn't appear until 2001. In it, the mercenary Harry Exton, whom we thought dead at the end of his first adventure, wakes up in upstate New York, having been rescued and conscripted by a wealthy benefactor to serve as his new hired gun. Genuinely thrilling and full of sharp, unexpected plot twists, I still think the first two Button Man stories will make one hell of a great movie one day.

The seventh Nikolai Dante book features several shorter adventures, 26 episodes in all, published sporadically over an eighteen month run from 2005-06. It wraps up the long run which had Dante, the most wanted man on Earth, hiding out with his mother, the most notorious pirate queen of the Pacific, but there, as always, working both sides of a con. The downside to this book is that almost all of it features John Burns on art chores. Burns is a superb artist, but I simply don't enjoy his work on Dante. The character's co-creator Simon Fraser returns for the final storyline, which sees Dante pulled out of what looks certain to be the worst scrape he's ever been in and dumped in one that's even worse - a new job in the tsar's employ - and sets up a pile of new subplots and problems that are driving the strip in its current run in 2000 AD. It's very good, but Dante is at his best when he's dealing with ugly politics in the Russian court, and there's not quite as much of that in this book as I'd prefer.

I think most American readers have not yet heard of Stickleback, and, good Lord, are you ever missing out. The brainchild of Ian Edginton and D'Israeli, this misshapen, vulgar gentleman with the hunchback, hideously deformed and visible spine and long nose is the Pope of Crime in Victorian London, a place beset by Lovecraftian nightmares, secret societies, ancient evils, Chinese dragons and undead cowboys. He's appeared so far in two series, starting in 2007. These are compiled here along with supplemental material from D'Israeli's sketchbook, and if there was any justice in the world, I could take myself an apple to work in a Stickleback lunchbox. To be fair, I was pleased but not blown away by the first series when it initially ran; the creators made the unusual decision to frame Stickleback and his world through the eyes of his antagonist, Detective Inspector Valentine Bey, and several episodes passed with only the briefest glimpse of the villain. But it gels perfectly in the end, and the second series is just thunderously weird and wonderful, with a new, left-field jawdropper every five pages or so, as Stickleback and his crew match wits with Wild Bill Hickock and his travelling freakshow. Absolutely essential stuff - now when the heck do we get a third series, Tharg?

(Originally posted November 10, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)

Scarlet Traces and Mandroid

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 Scarlet Traces (Dark Horse, 2001) and Judge Dredd: Mandroid (Rebellion, 2008).



A very cool murder mystery, set a decade after the Martian invasion of War of the Worlds, in an England which has reverse-engineered the alien war machines into a technological great leap forward. It's written with panache and style by Ian Edginton, who creates some very memorable characters and an unlikely detective duo to investigate missing women who have come to London in search of employment. The art's by the great D'Israeli, currently illustrating The Vort in 2000 AD. This might have been their first collaboration, and it's been followed by several other memorable ones.

You know how adventure stories usually climax with the hero held captive at the heart of the villain's technological superconstruction and waits until just the right moment to escape and start the self-destruct or something? That's not what happens here. Highly recommended!




Make no mistake, "Mandroid" is one of the Dredd team's great recent achievements, two 12-part serials detailing the sad events around a desperate man, a former soldier, who can't find any peace in Mega-City One, a world that's even tougher and less compromising than himself. It features one of John Wagner's most poetic and evocative scripts to bring this police procedural to life, and it's beautifully illustrated, with Kevin Walker tackling the first serial, and Simon Coleby and Carl Critchlow working on the second.

That said, "Mandroid" is almost unremittingly bleak, and genuinely rough going in places. I certainly think this downbeat change of pace will thrill any readers familiar with the typical Dredd tropes, but it's possibly not a very good recommendation for first-timers.

(Originally posted June 06, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)