Faster than a DC Bullet: Jessica Jones, Part V: Young Avengers

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2008 (contents: 2005-06)
Borrowed from the library
Read April 2012

Young Avengers

Writer: Allan Heinberg

Pencilers: Jim Cheung, Andrea Divito

Inkers: John Dell, Mark Morales, Drew Geraci, Dave Miekis, Rob Stull, Dexter Vines, Livesay, Jay Leisten, Matt Ryan, Jaime Mendoza, Jim Cheung
Other Artists: Michael Gaydos, Neal Adams, Gene Ha, Jae Lee, Bill Sienkiewicz, Pasqual Ferry
Colorists: Jose Villarrubia, Justin Ponsor, Art Lyon, June Chung, Dave McCaig
Letterer: Cory Petit

My previous experience with the Young Avengers was Paul Cornell's Dark Reign tie-in. It was okay. I didn't pick up this volume for any of its intrinsic qualities, however; I picked it up because it includes Jessica Jones.  Now, I imagine she pops up in a lot of Marvel stories nowadays, but she's the viewpoint character for much of the story.  Even better: Michael Gaydos returns to do the art for some of her bits.

It's nice that Jessica Jones finally looks like Jessica Jones again; making the right kind of faces goes a long way to making her dialogue seem right. Allan Heinberg writes a pretty good Jessica Jones on the whole.  She spends more time palling around (and seems a little too familiar with) Captain America and Iron Man for my liking, but within the confines of how Bendis changed the character for The Pulse, it works.  Jim Cheung draws the majority of the book, and his Jessica is a little too smooth-faced and skinny and demure and just overall young-looking. It is neat to see her in her Jewel costume again, though.

As for the non-Jessica Jones components of the book: I was surprised by how much I liked them.  Heinberg and Cheung create an instantly-likeable group of teenage protagonists here, with good backstories and good banter.  The first arc especially kept me completely engrossed, and the story never stops moving. (From a narrative standpoint, anyone. From a physical one, they stand around a whole lot in the middle.) My favorite characters were probably the girls. Hawkeye has all the sass, and Stature has all the insecurity. Oh, and poor Iron Lad!  What a dilemma. But they're all good characters, and I already plan to someday do a readthrough of their adventures now.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Jessica Jones, Part IV: The Pulse: Secret War

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2005 (contents: 2004-05)
Borrowed from the library
Read April 2012

The Pulse: Secret War

Writer: Brian Michael Bendis

Artists: Brent Anderson & Michael Lark

Inker: Stefano Gaudiano
Colorist: Peter Pantazis
Letterer: Cory Petit

I was excited to see that Michael Lark was one of the artists working on the second volume of The Pulse; he was the principal artist on Gotham Central, and judging by that series, his sensibilities ought to match that of Jessica Jones better than Mark Bagley's ever did.  And indeed it does, though he's still not Michael Gaydos.  (Not really his fault, admittedly.)

However, the story of Secret War might be better than that of Thin Air, but it still doesn't feel right.  We get here The Pulse's perspective on a strange series of attacks across New York, and Jessica Jones is desperate when Luke Cage is kidnapped.  If I bought into their relationship, I might care more. A lot of details here are purposefully withheld-- the reporters at The Pulse never find out what's going on, and so neither do we.  While this fits the powerless ethos of the Alias stories, something about this never quite clicks.  Maybe it's because Jessica is too close to the center of the superhero universe?  Wolverine shows up for some reason.

The Pulse has a potentially interesting premise, but it keeps on squandering it. These are neither good superhero stories nor good inversions of superhero stories, leaving you with pretty much nothing.

One! Hundred! Demons!

Comic trade paperback, 216 pages
Published 2002 (content: 2000)
Acquired January 2012
Read April 2012

One Hundred Demons

by Lynda Barry

I think I would like this more had I not also read The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Fun Home, and Persepolis of late; I think I'm done with semiautobiographical female comics memoir for the time being. I'm not saying One Hundred Demons is like the others completely-- it has a sense of humor that none of those books do-- but after reading them (not to mention American Splendor, Jimmy Corrigan, and Ghost World), I get it. The literary establishment likes its comics to be literary memoirs of tortured people. Now can we do something else? Why don't we like literary fiction at least? Thankfully Barry is less tortured than most. (Though in the seminar I read this in, at least one person criticized Barry for not being tortured enough. She demanded to know why race was more explicitly discussed. Maybe because nonwhite writers are allowed to write about things other than their own nonwhiteness?)

Faster than a DC Bullet: Prose Fiction #2: Batman vs. Three Villains of Doom

Normally, I'd review the next three volumes of Jessica Jones next, but ILL is taking its time with getting the last of those to me, so I'm stepping out of sequence next to witness another exciting encounter in prose:

Mass market paperback, 128 pages
Published 1966
Borrowed from the library
Read May 2012

Batman vs. Three Villains of Doom

by Winston Lyon

Nearly thirty years after Superman received his first novel, Batman receives his... and it's based on the Adam West TV show! So not exactly laced with psychological realism, then. What can you say about a book whose premise is that the Penguin, the Joker, and Catwoman take turns fighting Batman in a tiebreaker for the "Tommy" Award, for the best criminal of the decade (it is a gold-plated tommy gun)?  Nothing, except that it does exactly what it wants to.

There's one bit where Batman explains to Robin how he predicted the Penguin's last crime:

"The Penguin's clues are obscurely planted, Robin. You have to put yourself into his evilly twisted mind to figure out what he means."

"Is that how you knew he would strike at the auction gallery?"

"It wasn't hard to figure out that an emerald statuette shaped in the form of an ancient bird, the ibis, would be a natural target for the Penguin."

"That's one thing you said back there that did surprise me, Batman. How did you know the tear gas bomb would be planted in the autioneer's hammer?"

Batman shrugged. "That was easy, Robin. The news item mentioned that the statuette of Thoth would be put up for auction--and the auctioneer would use a yellow hammer that been used in the days of Louis Quatorze. The yellowhammer is a kind of bird. It was an irresistible pun pattern for the Penguin."

"Holy hummingbird," Robin exclaimed. "The Penguin substituted his own yellow hammer, complete with gas bomb, for the original."

"Precisely."

Robin looked at the newspaper. "And the front page of this paper has another clue, you say? Let me see . . . 'Famous Mimic to Appear at Universe Room' . . . That seems the only possible item that would be of any interest, yet how . . . ?"

"Remember, Robin, you must try to think like the Penguin. He sees bird analogies in some unlikely places."

Robin frowned. "A mimic . . . hmm. What does a mimic do? He imitates other people's voices. . . . In a way, he might be said to mock them. Can that be it? A mockingbird?"

"Exactly, Robin."

"But what possibility for profitable crime does a mimic have to offer? There has to be something else," Robin persisted.

Batman nodded. "Elsewhere on the front page there's a notice of a gold shipment that will be carried by blimp from a bank in Gotham City to Fort Knox."

"But is that a bird clue?"

"A blimp is called a Dodo by Air Force pilots--because the dodo was a wingless bird. That's the Penguin's target. And there's still a further irony to whet the Penguin's villainous appetite for bird-puns."

This time Robin got the point at once. "Both items appear on the same page of the Gotham Daily Eagle. Right, Batman?"

"You're thinking on sixteen cylinders, Robin. I'm proud of you."

If you're okay with that, you're okay with the book. If you're not, then at 128 pages, you haven't exactly wasted a lot of time.

Next issue: I find out whatever happened to Jessica Jones! (for real!)

Audio Catchup: Professor Bernice Summerfield Season 5

written by Jacqueline Rayner
directed by Gary Russell
released July 2004

starring
Lisa Bowerman as Bernice Summerfield
Stephen Fewell as Jason Kane
Steven Wickham as Joseph the Porter

Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Grel Escape (#5.1)

After the harrowing events of Life During Wartime and Death and the Daleks, it’s apparently time for some lighthearted events in the life of Bernice Summerfield. And so Jacqueline Rayner makes a welcome return to the range, having previously penned most of the (almost) uniformly excellent adaptations in the first season, not to mention the novels The Squire’s Crystal and The Mirror Effect. And even better, it brings back the Grel!

The Grel originally appeared in Paul Cornell’s New Adventures novel Oh No It Isn’t!, but truly obtained life in Rayner’s audio adaptation of that novel. They’ve been chronically underused since, though they are the only (I am pretty sure) monster to originate in a spin-off and make it into the parent series, having fought the Doctor and Charley in The Doomwood Curse. They’re simply a delight to listen to (so good choices for audio, then) as they travel the universe looking for facts. “Find facts! Find facts! Find facts!” It’s a nice change of pace to the run of four “monster stories” that preceded this one; we have a monster from Bernice’s own history, rather than an attempt to boost sales by pulling in something from the parent show.

( Read more... )

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written by Simon A. Forward
directed by Edward Salt
released August 2004

starring
Lisa Bowerman as Bernice Summerfield

Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Bone of Contention (#5.2)

Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Bone of Contention is the sixth Bernice Summerfield audio drama in a row to feature a “monster,” but like The Grel Escape before it, Bone of Contention switches things up by not featuring a monster that appeared in the classic Doctor Who television series. Rather, The Bone of Contention features one of the alien races Big Finish created itself: the Galyari, who previously appeared in The Sandman with the Sixth Doctor and Evelyn. Bone of Contention is even written by Simon A. Forward, who created the Galyari for The Sandman.

Bone of Conention sees Bernice hired by the Perlorans to visit the Clutch, a convoy of ships traversing interstellar space, on their behalf to recover a precious artefact from the Galyari. Of course, the Galyari claim to not have the artefact, and Bernice soon ends up sidetracked by Griko, the deformed son of Commander Korschal of the Security Directorate. In a move that surprises no one that has ever experienced another Bernice Summerfield story, the plight of Griko turns out to be related to the artefact, and Bernice is quickly brought into conflict with the Galyari.

( Read more... )

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written by Stephen Cole
directed by Edward Salt
released November 2004

starring
Lisa Bowerman as Bernice Summerfield

Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Relics of Jegg-Sau (#5.3)

Okay, so this season, Benny has faced two monsters from the spin-off media: the Grel and the Galyari. For the third release of the fifth season, it’s a monster from the parent show, but perhaps not one you’d expect: K-1, a.k.a. the Giant Robot. Appearing in just Tom Baker’s debut Robot, the titular character was not one of a race of evil conquerors, but a lone and lonely creation, destroyed at the story’s end. Nevertheless, Stephen Cole brought back the Robot for Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Relics of Jegg-Sau, where she runs afoul of one after crash-landing on an alien planet.

Despite its seemingly-goofy premise — the Robot’s limp wrists and skinny legs didn’t exactly put it at the top of the monster pantheon — The Relics of Jegg-Sau is actually a fairly grim story. It opens with Bernice imprisoned by the Robot, as she tells the story through flashbacks. And those flashbacks begin with her crashing on an alien planet, rescued by two very strange people: the explorer Kalwell and his daughter Elise. Despite have been trapped on the planet for years, neither is in a hurry to be rescued.

( Read more... )

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written by Stewart Sheargold
directed by John Ainsworth
released March 2005

starring
Lisa Bowerman as Bernice Summerfield
Harry Myers as Adrian Wall

Professor Bernice Summerfield in the Masquerade of Death (#5.4)

“You can’t have a good climax without some effective shouting!”

Bernice and Adrian are in Spring, where there’s been a murder. Only the Queen of Spring can’t quite tell who’s been murdered. Also Bernice and Adrian are sleeping together. And a mysterious Player has decided to dissect Bernice to prove to everyone that’s she’s fictional. And the dialogue is strange.

The last instalment of Professor Bernice Summerfield’s fifth season, Professor Bernice Summerfield in the Masquerade of Death by Stewart Sheargold, includes not a single returning monster and makes up for it by being one of the most original releases in the series ever. Unfortunately, “original” seems to largely translate into “completely baffling”. I mean, you eventually find out what’s going on on a macro level, but there are lines of dialogue and whole scenes even that still don’t seem to mean anything by the time you get to the end. I don’t mind working to enjoy something, but I do want to know why I’m working, and I don’t think The Masquerade of Death ever gives me a reason.

( Read more... )

Large-Scale Star Wars

Trade paperback, 373 pages
Published 2011
Acquired March 2012

Read May 2012

Star Wars: Darth Plagueis

by James Luceno

Darth Plagueis was mentioned in a parable in Star Wars, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith told by Chancellor Palpatine. Though not directly stated, it was implied that Plagueis was actually Palpatine's own Sith master, killed by his apprentice. In the wake of Episode III, a Plagueis novel by Luceno was announced-- and then cancelled.  I was thankful for this, because I had my doubts that any novel about young Palpatine and his master could be as cool as my imagination.

Well, it was uncancelled, and here it is.  Darth Plagueis begins with the death of Plagueis's own Sith master, and covers the next several decades, as Plagueis recruits an apprentice and plots the downfall of the Republic and the Jedi.  Palpatine is recruited to be Darth Sidious fairly early in the book, and it moves between the perspectives of the two Sith as they both learn about being a Sith Lord and manipulate galactic affairs.

Maybe I was set up for it by my own biases, but I was disappointed. Some of it is definitely Luceno making choices that I wouldn't make.  According to this take on events, Plagueis is active well beyond the point where I would have thought, meaning that Palpatine is but an apprentice during the vast majority of the time the groundwork for the prequel films is being laid.  As someone who considers Palpatine (at least as depicted in Episodes I, II, and VI and Dark Empire) one of the coolest villains of all time, this is completely lame!  Palpatine should be the top man, not some guy's lackey.

Furthermore, the book weaves in and out of established Star Wars events too much. We see Jedi Council: Acts of War, Darth Maul, Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter, Cloak of Deception, and much more told from the Sith point-of-view, but without seeing the actual events, meaning far too much of the action happens out-of-sight. Having the Sith say that cool things are happening somewhere else is not terribly interesting in and of itself. Also, Lucenopedia overload! Also, they're usually fighting mooks, which stops you from being impressed; outmanipulating Nute Gunray is not exactly the act of a genius, and even potentially intelligent characters like Chancellor Valroum come across as a bit thick.

Worst of all, though, is that the book doesn't really communicate what it is to be Darth Plagueis or Palpatine, at least not in a way that's really satisfying.   Luceno has ever exactly had a gift for character, and though we see a lot of what the two Sith Lords think, we never get to experience what they feel for the most part... and when we do, it's kinda lame.  "Oh, I just hate the Jedi so much!" We see them make decisions, but I don't feel like I understand why they do what they do, or how it is for them to do it.  Even manipulating Dooku's fall, which should be completely fascinating (I love Dooku), turns out to be deadly dull.  Going by this book, being a Sith Lord is actually fairly blasé.

Small-Scale Star Wars

Comic digest, 76 pages
Published 2010
Acquired January 2011
Read April 2012

Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Deadly Hands of Shon-Ju

Script: Jeremy Barlow
Art: Brian Koschak
Colors: Ronda Pattinson
Lettering: Michael Heisler

This is an okay little story featuring Aalya Secura coming into contact with a Force cult that has forgone the lightsaber in favor of using their Force-amplified hands in combat: they punch rocks to break them, and so on.  A neat idea, but not fully explored because in a twist that will surprise no one, this non-Jedi group is EVIL.  As are all the bad guys, actually, none of whom who do things for reasons beyond getting their EVIL on.  Barlow has done better.

Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Trilogy of Novellas

Hardcover, 212 pages
Published 2004
Acquired January 2012

Read April 2012

Professor Bernice Summerfield V: A Life in Pieces

by Dave Stone, Paul Sutton & Joseph Lidster

Not yet satisfied by her domination of audio dramas, novels, and collections of short stories, Bernice Summerfield now moves into a new format: the trilogy of novellas. A Life in Pieces is made up of three novellas that interlink to make a complete story.  Given the series's success with the interlinked short story format in Life During Wartime and A Life Worth Living, I was looking forward to this, but I actually ended up being somewhat disappointed.  Nothing is bad, but the book never forms a cohesive whole, either.  It doesn't have to, of course... but I think it might want to.

The first story is by Dave Stone, who I always remember as writing the weird stuff.  That's as true as ever here: Bernice and Jason go on vacation... only it turns out they're secretly on reality television?  There's not so much a plot here as a series of jokes, some of which are funny.  Not all of them, unfortunately, and maybe not even most of them, but there were a couple good ones, and one belter. (When Bernice figures out how to circumvent the reality TV cameras, if you're interested.) As a story, it's kinda there: it wants you to laugh, but you don't want to, so everyone is just standing around awkwardly most of the time.

The next is by Paul Sutton, one of my favorite Big Finish writers, as he's penned Arrangements for War, Thicker Than Water, and No More Lies.  His contribution here is very different from those big, emotional stories, but it's still very character-driven.  It follows Adrian Wall, Bev Tarrant, Irving Braxiatel, a couple cops, and a host of criminals on Earth as everyone tries to get their hands on the Purpura Pawn, a valuable artifact from an alien planet that's recently been stolen... by Jason Kane?  It's a dark, tangled story, but Sutton's knack for character strikes; it's perhaps the most insightful story about Adrian and Bev we've ever had, and there's other good stuff, too, especially with the cop character.  Dark and ominous; I'd call it noir if I knew enough about the genre to feel confident enough to make such an assessment.

Finally, there comes a story by Joseph Lidster about Jason's trial for stealing the Purpura Pawn.  It's the flipside of the events in Sutton's tale, told as a series of reconstructed documents a couple generations later. It's an interesting idea, and I like the narrator of the piece, a very likable and driven fellow who is completely and utterly wrong. The thing is, I think I'd prefer to get into Bernice and especially Jason's heads more than the format allows.  Intellectually admirable, and with some good stuff to say about how we try to uncover truth, but it left me kinda cold in the end.

The three stories are all decent at least, but the book feels lopsided. Stone's story is so goofy compared to the other two dark ones, and its tale is completely irrelevant to the later ones, making it feel like it doesn't even belong in the same book.  I like the idea of the book, and I liked the book itself more than I didn't, but I feel like it could have been done better.

Professor Bernice Summerfield in an exciting adventure with some Academics

Hardcover, 183 pages
Published 2004
Acquired January 2012
Read April 2012

Professor Bernice Summerfield IV: A Life Worth Living

edited by Simon Guerrier

This is the fourth Bernice Summerfield anthology, but it's the first to be edited by Simon Guerrier instead of the usual mainstay, Paul Cornell.  But just like all of Cornell's anthologies (bar the first one), it's an intelligent, charming, literate, thoughtful collection of sf stories.

The premise of A Life Worth Living is that, in order to help obscure the memory of the Fifth Axis Occupation from the minds of the Collection, Braxiatel opens it up to students-- and then asks Bernice to not go offworld for a year so she can live up to her teaching and other academic duties.  Of course I would be sold on it right away: it has to be the only sf book I've ever read that revolves entirely around the doings of academia!  But there's more than that.  Though the book involves a lot of academia, it could involve a lot of anything. It's a book about picking up the pieces, figuring out what you're doing and who you are, and getting back to work. Because even if giant, awful things have happened to you, life really does go on.

This is set up right from the beginning with Paul Cornell's lovely "Misplaced Spring," which is a series of moments across the Collection as the new students arrive and Bernice tries to remember what it's like to be in love again.  There are a lot of stories about relationships, actually, and most of them are quite good: "Welcome to the Machine" by the improbably-named Sin Deniz is about a desperately lonely woman being stalked, and it feels all too real. "A Summer Affair" is a charming but dark tale by (of course) Joseph Lidster that gives another romance to Ms. Jones. Man, that "woman of a certain age" gets around!

Probably the most fun of all these was Philip Purser-Hallard's "Sex Secrets of the Robot Replicants," where Bernice discovers that not only has Jason taken up writing xenoporn again, but that it's attracting rather a lot of academic criticism!  Hilarity ensues, of course.  I also enjoyed "Against Gardens," an Eddie Robson story about Hass the new Martian (not an Ice Warrior, honest!) gardener on the Collection, who turns out to be rather a fascinating character.

My favorite story, though, has to be "Final Draft" by Cameron Mason.  Here, Bernice has to write a keynote address for a conference in three hours when Hass tells her she's made a basic mistake.  And the closer the conference comes, the worse the situation gets.  Funny and it includes nice character moments for every member of the cast, what else could you want?

There's only one flat-out bad story in the collection, Richard Salter's goofy and far-fetched "Nothing up my Sleeve," where Bernice squares off against the Brotherhood of Magicians.  Good joke if you've seen Tomb of the Cybermen (I have, unfortunately), but little else.  Also, I think the Collection plays host to three conferences in the course of the book, which seems rather a lot for an institution that small.

Honestly, though I'd miss Lisa Bowerman, I wouldn't be upset if Big Finish chucked the novels and the audio dramas and just did Bernice as a series of anthologies. These are where the characters and writers really get their chance to shine.

I read this after Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Bone of Contention, which was the release order, but it appears that it actually goes before that story. This means that the order of the past few Bernice stories is:

• Audio 4.3. The Poison Seas: Bernice is summoned back to the Collection.
• Anthology III. Life During Wartime: Bernice returns to find the Collection occupied.
• Audio 4.4. Death and the Daleks: The Collection is liberated.
• Novel #6. The Big Hunt. Bernice takes a vacation after the recent stress.
• Audio 5.1. The Grel Escape: Bernice comes home to find that while Jason has been watching Peter, he's been playing with the Time Rings.
• Anthology IV. A Life Worth Living: Bernice spends a year on the Collection without leaving.
• Audio 5.2. The Bone of Contention: Bernice takes her first offworld trip in a year, to the Clutch.
• Anthology V. A Life in Pieces: Jason persuades Benny that they should take a trip together, as they have each had one of their own recently.
• Audio 5.3. The Relics of Jegg-Sau: You tell me, I'm only halfway through it!

I enjoy the fact that this series crosses media, but it can be tricky to stay on top of without a central numbering system!

Professor Bernice Summerfield and the Hardboiled Detective Novel

It's been fifteen months since I read Ghost Devices.  My catch-up-on-the-Bernice-New-Adventures plan is not exactly working out, is it? (It's okay; I've got a new one!)

Mass market paperback, 248 pages
Published 1997
Acquired January 2011
Read April 2012

The New Adventures: Mean Streets

by Terrance Dicks

Well, I suppose Justin Richard is glad a book came along to dethrone Dragons' Wrath from its status as worst Bernice Summerfield New Adventure.  The dialogue is bad, the plot is dumb, the characterization is not even trying.  At least the bits where the book is narrated in the first person by an Ogron private eye are fun, but we're talking like a dozen pages in an interminable novel...