Dodgem Logic # 1

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 Dodgem Logic # 1 (2010)



Well, I'm certainly willing to shell out four bucks to see what Alan Moore's up to while he's waiting for artists to finish illustrating his comic scripts. Turns out that he's had a long-standing pipe dream about being the editor and publisher of his own magazine. So he licensed a few tunes for a CD and sold some ad space and got some friends and wrote some articles.

The resulting hodgepodge, Dodgem Logic, resembles an APA more than a professional magazine, although it is nicely printed, on good paper. There isn't any sense of uniform design, which really makes it unfriendly to readers' eyes when they can't tell where articles stop or start. Moore's lead feature, a six page article on the history of underground newspapers, looks like three separate stories, with different fonts and background colors, but it's full of really interesting facts all the same.

The first issue comes with a free CD called Nation of Saints, which is a compilation of Northampton-based music from across the spectrum, with not-quite-getting-it country (if your country song is more than six minutes long, you're not quite getting it) to hip-hop. It's got that terrific Jazz Butcher song "She's on Drugs" which I hadn't heard for many years, and the lead track has that noted duck marcher and warbler Moore returning to the studio for the first time in a while. And it's got something by one of those guys from Bauhaus who isn't Peter Murphy, if you like that sort of thing.

The magazine features health articles, recipes and accessorizing tips, and illustrations by regular Moore cohorts and spouses like Kevin O'Neill and Melinda Gebbie. It's all done with a playful, lighthearted touch, like a bunch of buddies who know their stuff cobbling something together in the hopes that you might get a kick out of them. I can just see Gary Ingraham as an eager sixteen year-old offering to do the local music reviews and a short history of rock bands who've played Northampton. Maybe the magazine lacks focus and defies categorization ("lifestyle," maybe?), and while I don't think this will become essential reading for anybody not already curious about Moore's projects, since it's done with such enthusiasm and lack of pretension, it's impossible to begrudge the gang behind it. Some of the artwork is child-unfriendly, but otherwise it's recommended for older readers.

The Lighthouse

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 The Lighthouse (Faber & Faber, 2005).



I read this last week and I'm still pretty aggravated that I had foolishly looked at Wikipedia months beforehand and had a crucial plot point spoiled. Then again, it's the sort of thing that I can see most reviews mentioning. Usually, we like to see the heroes in our fiction overcome strange and unwelcome obstacles, but the one that Commander Dalgliesh runs into during the course of The Lighthouse is really, really outre, and one of the most satisfying left-field turns that P.D. James has yet concocted.

So, with that minor disclaimer in place, in the thirteenth novel in the series, Dalgliesh and his special team are sent to a remote island off the Cornish coast which has functioned for decades as a getaway for the rich and powerful. A body is found hanging from the lighthouse: a very successful author, loved by millions but hated by everybody who knew him. All of the genre's tropes are established early on, especially the trick of having the victim offend practically everybody he comes across during his last day alive, and the extremely isolated setting is an English cozy standard, although done with one eye on 21st-Century politics.

I was a little disappointed that, once again, James can't quite escape some of her own tropes. Very, very old motives are once again at work, with pensioner-aged characters unable to get past what happened to them during the events of World War Two. I sort of wish she had reread Original Sin before embarking on this tale, and decided that she probably shouldn't go that route again.

This is definitely a book that I enjoyed much more while I was reading it than after the fact, as I'm having trouble coming up with any reasons to recommend it to anybody. It's possible that, after doing this for forty years, James is having trouble making her stories really stand out, but then again the previous two novels, Death in Holy Orders and The Murder Room, just crackled with a modern feel and genuine excitement. Despite the very contemporary trappings and politics, this just somehow feels too old-fashioned by some measure. I say that even with the remarkable twist that keeps Dalgliesh out of the action for a good chunk of the story and lets DI Miskin and DS Benton-Smith take a welcome turn at center stage. Recommended with reservations.

Essential Avengers Volume 7

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 Avengers Volume 7 (Marvel, 2010)



It took me six months, and I'm not saying I deserve a medal or anything, but I just finished reading (or rereading) every Avengers comic that Marvel published in its first eighteen or so years. It's a little difficult to say exactly when; Marvel doesn't include any proper publication information in the pages of their Essential series. Even when they decided to be complete dicks and redesign their books in a nose-thumbing at geeks like me who like to have matching spines on our bookshelves, they didn't take that opportunity to give their books page numbers, much less anything helpful in the table of contents. It really doesn't make all of those breathless Roy Thomas annotations like "*See the current ish of Cap's own mag!" any easier to understand.

I've learned a few things from this reread. Among them: The Avengers chews up and spits out writing talent. Everybody who started on the title came to it with enthusiasm and clever ideas, but it took about twenty issues for the shine to dull. Stan Lee, Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart each had almost two years of really fun stories in them, but by the time each writer petered out, you can feel the words dying on the page. Lee's last ten or eleven stories, which lead Volume 2, are arguably among the worst things he wrote for Marvel, but they're the highest of art compared to what Thomas, who started really well and probably better than Lee, turned into by the end.

I've written in previous reviews how, one by one, all those legendary mammoth Avengers storylines were revealed to be little more than B-movie trash, but "The Kree-Skrull War" really took the cake the second time around. That's the one where, instead of focusing the melodrama on the Mighty Thor flying through space and smashing the bejezus out of an alien battlefleet, Thomas built the climax around Rick Jones, the teen sidekick character who never got the memo to just go the fuck away, locked in a closet with a talking turnip remembering a bunch of old funnybooks from the 1940s. It's the worst thing ever, at least until Englehart's "Celestial Madonna" story, every page of which screams to the heavens with a misbegotten insistence of self-importance as Mantis, raised from birth to be Little Miss Perfect, use the phrase "this one" instead of "I," and, well, marry a tree, ascends to a higher plane of consciousness. If you ever thought this saga was ever worth reading, it's because you read it when you were twelve. And wrong.

On the other hand, there's some far better art to be found here than people think. Don Heck doesn't get a lot of praise, but his mid-sixties work is beautiful, just effortlessly contemporary. There are so many artists in the biz who never update their fashion references, and so Heck's zippy LBJ-era suits, cocktail dresses and cigarettes, emphasizing the now so casually, just shine with period cool. Admittedly, a lot of the work that came after him was simple Sal Buscema journeyman stuff, but Neal Adams' hyperdramatic posing and agonized faces in Volume 5 even make "The Kree-Skrull War" worth looking at.

But George Perez... now, there's a guy who has a deserved reputation for drawing terrible books, but man, could he ever draw them well. Volume 7 includes some of his early professional work and it's so terrific that I got actively aggravated whenever he missed a deadline and some inventory story or fill-in artist showed up. In this volume, Englehart finally winds up his increasingly tedious tenure with another big, overrated epic called "The Serpent Crown," in which, for reasons I never understood, the former teen comedy star Patsy Walker insists that Hank McCoy, the Beast, make her into a superhero and she gets a supersuit that lets her become "the happy-go-lucky Hellcat!" I guess that's a good thing; I adored another Marvel team book, The Defenders, in which she starred, when I was a kid, and those rereads don't depress me nearly as much as these do.

Well, at least the art in "The Serpent Crown" is nice, but the story, in which the Avengers are trapped on a parallel Earth - a cute, in-jokey version of DC Comics' Earth, with stand-ins for their Justice League - in which... well, a crown with serpents on it mind-controls everybody to... well, I never figured out what was going on. Replace "serpent crown" with "antelope codpiece" and you've got the same story, basically.

Gerry Conway and Jim Shooter take over script duties from there and things improve massively, although not really to the point that I was ready to tell everybody I knew about these great funnybooks I was reading. There's a four-part crossover with the dementedly, lovably silly Super-Villain Team-Up in which the team gets caught in the middle of a war between Dr. Doom and the Atlantean archvillain Attuma, and Ultron shows up again, and the Grim Reaper, a deeply silly bad guy who can honestly take credit for being one of the few genuinely, believably insane characters Marvel came up with, shows up again, because his brother Wonder Man got brought back from the dead, but his brain patterns had already been used by Ultron to program the android superhero the Vision and Grim Reaper has a complaint with that... I swear it makes more sense when you read it.

It is nice on those occasions where the writers stopped feeling obliged to pay lip service to the comic's mountain of continuity. It's hard to create lasting escapist entertainment when you can't even escape from the stories that preceded you! Creating new characters and villains, like a really odd guy called Graviton who's the director of a scientific think tank and notably older than the rest of the cape-clad cast, made for much more fun stories than the backward-looking ones. Having said that, George Perez could draw almost any superhero comic and I'd be willing to give it a look. As for Essential Avengers, volume one is probably worth it for the early Stan Lee / Jack Kirby / Don Heck material, and volume three for Roy Thomas's best work, and volume seven for George Perez, but "essential" really is pushing it, to be honest.

Vworp Vworp! # 1

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 Vworp Vworp! # 1 (2010)



Doctor Who Magazine has been running its tie-in comic for more than thirty years now, and it's usually been a terrific read. There have certainly been patches where it hasn't been as consistently entertaining as the TV show, but frankly, anybody who'd rather watch "Destiny of the Daleks" than read "The Star Beast," or watch "Terminus" over reading "The Stockbridge Horror" just needs their head examined.

It's for people who know that the comic is as vital and engaging a part of Doctor Who's canon as anything else in the fiction that Vworp Vworp!, a fanzine co-edited by Colin Brockhurst and Gareth Kavanagh, is intended. The first in a planned periodic series, the zine is a loving tribute and analysis of the comic. Just like British newsstand comics from the 1970s, it even comes with a free gift - a set of rub-on transfers of the Eleventh Doctor, Amy and some Daleks, drawn by Paul Grist!

Inside, I quickly realized that the writers really know their target audience. The writing, like the best work in Doctor Who Magazine, expertly strides the line between "academic analysis" and "huggingly enthusiastic." The story of "The Iron Legion," the magazine's first serial, is told via interviews with Pat Mills, Dave Gibbons and original editor Dez Skinn, and would not be at all out of place in the professional magazine that they're praising. The writers also turn their attention to the final Eighth Doctor strip, "The Flood," and to Adrian Salmon's thunderously weird "Cybermen" serial. There's a tribute from the magazine's archivist, Andrew Pixley, and David J. Howe resurrects his early '90s "Collectors Corner" feature, designed to look like it came right from an old issue.

There are three new comic strips as well. None of them are necessarily essential, but I enjoyed all of them just the same. "The Master's Life on Mars," by the zine's co-editor Kavanagh and John Daiker, was my favorite of the three. It's a clever little runaround that fiddles with the resume of the last actor to play the Master on television. Daryl Joyce's "Clash of Empires" and Christian Cawley and Justin Abbot's "Time Leech" are also very fun. I think that Joyce has been doing professional work for some time, but there's no reason why the other creators couldn't be doing work for the big leagues pretty soon as well; it's all high-quality stuff.

Overall, it's a really good-looking package, very slick and professional. (It's easy to forget just how terrific fanzines can look these days!) Brockhurst's design work is really impressive, and they're able to cram buckets of entertaining and insightful material into the eighty pages. I enjoyed it all very much and will certainly return to it frequently. Very highly recommended to all Doctor Who fans.

Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 14

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 Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 14 (Rebellion, 2009)



Judge Dredd isn't always the easiest series to follow, or for new readers to appreciate the complexities of the storylines. Most of the early material - particularly the stuff in black and white, often drawn by Bolland, McMahon, Smith, familiar to Americans through well-worn collections - stands alone very well, but while most of the color episodes - and there are a lot more of them - stand alone just fine, there's so much more pleasure to be found when you get used to all the lingering subplots that build through them. Case in point: "Necropolis," a simply amazing 26-part epic from 1990 by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra. This story's been collected a couple of times before, but to get the best effect, it needs to be read with the three months' worth of episodes which preceded it. Happily, this giant story is finally available in one collection. The fourteenth edition of The Complete Case Files compiles 38 episodes in one incredibly satisfying chunk of a book, and it's one everybody who loves comics should track down. It's one of Wagner's finest moments.

I think there's a strong influence from Chris Claremont in Wagner's writing at this time, particularly in the way that his 1980s work on The Uncanny X-Men would let subplots and background details grow over the course of several issues. Wagner, in time, became the master of this style of storytelling, and reworks it today better than anybody else in the medium. It's fascinating the way he finds old details from much older stories and brings them to vibrant life in his contemporary tales. About five years before "Necropolis," during the events of Judge Death's third attack on the city, there was a brief incident where the Dark Judges were teleporting throughout the city blocks, evading capture. Wagner revisits that, briefly, revealing that one woman was left in a partial coma by Death, his malignance influencing her behavior, and setting the stage for his powerful allies to break into this dimension.

"Necropolis" itself is just plain amazing. It starts with some very odd pacing, with the two Sisters of Death tormenting Kraken, a rookie who is entrusted (he sais, hedging his bets against spoilers) with Dredd's role while our hero is otherwise indisposed. The first two episodes are all action with very little plot development. But as events build, and Kraken comes under the Sisters' influence as well, the story becomes a taut, epic, page-turner. It's genuinely horrific - as events spiral into unbelievable carnage, some of the citizens' desperation will make your skin crawl - and it's all visualized in gory detail by Ezquerra, who, I believe, sets a 2000 AD record with 31 straight weeks of color artwork without missing a deadline.

This was the last hurrah for the Dark Judges as fabulous, frightening villains for the strip. Fear, Fire and Mortis were brought out of mothballs for a crossover between Judge Dredd and Batman about eight years later, and Death was periodically seen in ill-advised cameos and black comedy roles that turned him into a joke, before Wagner and Frazer Irving rehabilitated the character and gave him a great sendoff in 2004. When you read this story, however, you really wish they'd all been retired permanently, their impact undiminished.

Perhaps in retrospect, "Necropolis" did more harm than good, first by giving 2000 AD's editors at the time the idea that the characters of the Dark Judges could stand up to repeated (mis)use, and also by giving incoming writer Garth Ennis the idea that Dredd's big epic storylines needed to be bleak, carnage-filled apocalypses, leading to 1992's misbegotten "Judgment Day" saga. But taken on its own, it really was a triumph, and Rebellion's terrific reprinting in their Case Files series is one that every fan of British comics should own. Very highly recommended.

And Be a Villain

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 And Be a Villain (Viking, 1948).



I wonder whether future generations will still be able to make any sense of this novel at all. The murder that gets Nero Wolfe involved happens live on the air during a radio talk show, during a sponsor's segment where the hostess, Manhattan socialite Madeline Fraser, and her guests drink some cola called Hi-Spot and tell the audience how wonderful it is. That's such a strange little relic of the past that even I have difficulty imagining it. Amazingly, the murder - poison slipped into one of the bottles - wouldn't have worked had the patient guests not played along, rather than insisting they be served a scotch and soda. It's radio; who'd know the difference?

Yet the book has a timeless zing anyway, thanks to the presence of a teenage fangirl who adores Miss Fraser, talks a mile a minute in some remarkably entertaining late '40s slang, and who quickly drives Wolfe to distraction with her firecracker attitude and surly petulance. Sixty years later, this same character could be dropped into a murder mystery about Twilight fans with minimal alteration. Highly amusing, entertaining, and recommended.

Exit Wounds

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 Exit Wounds (Drawn & Quarterly, 2008)



Here's a story about life in contemporary Israel that came wrapped in "book of the year" blurbs and hype and breathless praise from many writers whom I trust. It turned out to be an enormous letdown. Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds spent a week on the review stack in limbo before I decided to return it to my reading pile and give it another chance, certain that I missed something. A reread didn't persuade me that I missed anything, or, if you like, that there was anything to miss.

Exit Wounds is the story of a cab driver who is told that an unidentified body in a recent terrorist attack might have been his estranged father, who has been missing since the bombing. Alternately, it's the story of a young woman who concludes that her secret, older lover must have died in an explosion and searches out his estranged son to have a DNA match done.

It sounds like something gripping and heartrending, but it feels like Modan couldn't find any drama from what could have been a plot without a single complication, so she has to concoct a book's worth of artifice in order to keep the duo from finding closure. At one point, she throws in the unbelievable obstacle of a gravedigger's strike, for pity's sake, to keep a DNA test from going through. Yet I can't remember whether that comes before or after she spends about three pages having a possible witness demand a bribe before he will tell them whether he might have seen Koby's father that day. It's the depth of Koby's estrangement which provides the most frustrating obstacle, though. It doesn't matter how long Koby's father has been dead to him, since the book's not going to progress until he gets over it.

The most obnoxious obstacles, however, are the two protagonists themselves. Koby and Nuni are simply unlikeable, aggravating, bad-tempered jerks. Nuni, depicted in the dialogue as rather plain but drawn with the same lumpy, thin-lined appearance as all the other characters, is thoughtless and offensive and Koby is a surly, judgmental bore who does not have a single positive relationship with anybody, from co-workers to family. If only these two could just get along, the narrative suggests, then they could find closure. Yet the characters are simply so unpleasant that I simply could not care less whether they ever do, making the hackneyed, literal "leap of faith" conclusion one which meant nothing. Not recommended. Avoid.