29 September 2021

Review: Doctor Who: Sonic Boom by Robbie Morrison, Mariano Laclaustra, Rachael Stott, et al.

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2016-17
Acquired: March 2020
Read: July 2021

Doctor Who: The Twelfth Doctor, Vol 6: Sonic Boom

Writer: Robbie Morrison
Artists:
Mariano Laclaustra & Rachael Stott, with Agus Calcagno & Fer Centurion

Colorists:
Carlos Cabrera, HernĂ¡n Cabrera & Rodrigo Fernandes, with Juan Manuel Tumburus

Letters:
Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

I had some initial issues with Robbie Morrison's earlier contributions to The Twelfth Doctor series, but his final volume shows that he's totally worked out the kinks. This contains two stories, one three issues long and one two. The first is "Terror of the Cabinet Noir," with another between-Clara-and-Bill temporary companion, in this case Julie d'Aubigny, a real seventeenth-century opera singer-- among many other things. I don't remember taking much notice of Mariano Laclaustra's art before, but this is gorgeous and well-suited to the story. Both the twelfth Doctor and Julie sparkle in their repartee. The plot isn't going to set your world on fire, but I really enjoyed reading it.

The second is kind of goofy, and not as good as it probably should have been; the Doctor confronts the writer and artist team behind Time Surgeon, a comic series based on his own exploits (mentioned back in vol 4). I wish it had been a bit more meta and playful. Still, Morrison and artist Rachael Stott effectively communicate Twelve's dripping disdain for the entire set-up, and he gets some good jokes you can imagine Peter Capaldi nailing.

from Doctor Who: The Twelfth Doctor: Year Two #12 (art by Mariano Laclaustra, with Fer Centurion and Agus Calcagno)

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The Twelfth Doctor: Ghost Stories

27 September 2021

Review: Doctor Who: Heralds of Destruction by Paul Cornell and Christopher Jones

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2016-17
Acquired: June 2021
Read: July 2021

Doctor Who: The Third Doctor, Vol 1: Heralds of Destruction

Writer: Paul Cornell
Artist:
Christopher Jones
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

This was a delight. Easily the best of Titan's various Doctor Who miniseries, and probably the best of all its Who comics with the exception of the Eleventh Doctor ongoing. It's really just a loving pastiche of the Pertwee era, but one filled with nice little touches and deft characterization, exactly the kind of thing one (sometimes) wants from one's tie-in comics. Cornell's skill at this kind of writing is far and above most of Titan's writers, knowing exactly how to blend the familiar and the new in such a way as to warm the heart of even readers who aren't Pertwee fanboys. Christopher Jones is new to me as an artist but does solid work; clear likenesses and good action.

At the end, Cornell claims this is his last Doctor Who tie-in, but he's subsequently returned to the fold three times, which seems about right.

I read an issue of Titan's Doctor Who comic every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: The Twelfth Doctor: Sonic Boom

24 September 2021

Gummies

Last week, Son One began requesting that we "make gummy worms." I think they had then at school, as part of the finale to the two weeks where they did all the colors? He even had a way of making them in mind—just mix chocolate icing with food coloring!

I suggested to Hayley that we just do Jell-O jigglers or something, but he was so insistent we needed to make gummy worms that I wondered if it was really that hard. A minute of googling got me to this article, which has a pretty simple recipe for gummies: basically just Jell-O powder with extra gelatin.

So when we went to the grocery store on Saturday, we picked up the ingredients and set to it that evening. We don't have any gummy worm molds, but I had remembered that his grandma had given him a Pampered Chef beach-themed cookie mold; I think we used it with Play-doh once.

It was pretty easy to make, and easy for him to participate in: mix the Jell-O and gelatin, whisk into water, heat up, put in mold, cool in fridge. The recipe suggested using a syringe to put the liquid in the mold, which was a good idea, and I was surprised by how quickly he figured out the syringe. He basically did all of them himself.

The result, I would say, is not really like a gummy you get at the store: it's basically just denser Jell-O, and it tastes like it. But every day when he wakes up, he asks if he can eat some gummies; every day when he gets home from daycare, he asks if he can eat some gummies. He clearly likes them. And he tells you which ones you get to eat—he likes that you like them too!

22 September 2021

Review: Doctor Who: Father Time by Lance Parkin

Published: 2000
Acquired: January 2021
Read: March 2021

Doctor Who: Father Time
by Lance Parkin
 
Reading this shortly after another "caught on Earth" arc novel, I could see that one of the real benefits of this storyline was how it let you see Doctor Who from the outside. This happens in three ways. One is that, since the Doctor is spending a century on Earth, and the stories are spaced decades apart, each can use a new, outsider viewpoint character. Some of my favorite Doctor Who stories are ones that introduce you to the Doctor from a new character's perspective: "An Unearthly Child," "Rose," The Harvest, "Smith and Jones," certainly others I am forgetting. The premise of this arc means that literally every story can take this approach! Here, we follow Debbie, a schoolteacher who takes refuge at the Doctor's house after a car accident, and becomes enraptured by him and his world. She's a well drawn character; Parkin makes her and her world feel very real, and we get the sense of an ordinary person seeking an escape that Russell T Davies would often use to excellent effect on screen.

It also is Doctor Who from the outside in that the Doctor himself doesn't know who he is. Now, amnesia has become a bit of an overused trope in Doctor Who tie-ins, especially for the eighth Doctor, but it's put to good effect here. He's Doctorish... but not exactly the Doctor. Here, he's a man who settles down with a daughter and does business consulting in the 1980s! But the kind of business consulting he does is pretty amazing.

Which leads me into the last way these stories really work. They are not traditional Doctor Who stories, but they still feel like Doctor Who stories. As a friend said, paraphrasing Elizabeth Sandifer, there are Doctor Who stories that "speak[ ] Doctor Who fluently, but with a charming accent you haven’t heard before." These "caught on Earth" stories are among them, and Father Time is particularly good at it. This has a lot of Doctor Who tropes you'll recognize, but in a new, unfamiliar context. How does the Doctor deal with evil aliens from the far future attacking the Earth to find another alien who's in hiding... when he lives on the Earth and lives with the alien? I've read four of the six caught on Earth books (five of the seven if we count the retroactively inserted Past Doctor Aventure Wolfsbane), and, except for the utterly mediocre finale by Colin Brake, they all do this successfully to varying degrees... but I think Father Time does it best of all. There's a particularly great bit where, when the Doctor realizes his daughter has been kidnapped into Earth orbit, he basically just shrugs and goes, "Well, I guess we're off to Cape Canaveral to steal a space shuttle." It's the kind of audaciousness you can imagine a Russell T Davies or Steven Moffat story having on screen... but the way the Doctor steals the shuttle is very different than what they might do because this is a Doctor without his usual technical resources.

The issue I have with the book, however, is that it's not long enough. It's divided into three sections: 1980, 1986, 1989. The first section runs about a hundred pages, and it is the best of them: strongly atmospheric and character driven. But the last two sections thus only get half the book between them and must be squeezed into fifty pages apiece; I felt the character work suffered as a result. Debbie, who really drives the first section, fades into the background. (Imagine if, having been the focus of "Rose," Rose spent the rest of series one just standing there and asking questions like a Chibnall companion. Why do all that set-up and do nothing with it?) And though there's a lot of focus on Miranda, the Doctor's daughter, the one thing I didn't quite see enough of was her relationship with the Doctor. They are usually separate in the actual novel; most of their time together happens off-page between the 1980 and 1986 sections. But if the 1986 and 1989 sections had got 100 pages apiece just like the first, I think this would have gone from a verging-on-great Doctor Who novel to surely one of the greatest of them all. The potential is all there in the first part, but the rocket doesn't achieve the heights it could.

Still, this is a blast. I always enjoy a Lance Parkin Doctor Who story. He knows how to blend cool concepts with over-the-top storytelling, and I wish we heard more of his voice these days.

Also, this is one of a few pre-2005 Doctor Who novels to get an official ebook release, for which I am immensely grateful. It seems to average $13-20 on the secondary market, but you can get it for $7 on Amazon.

I read an Eighth Doctor Adventure every three months. Next up in sequence: EarthWorld

20 September 2021

Review: We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinsker

Published: 2021
Acquired: July 2021
Read: August 2021

We Are Satellites by Sarah Pinsker

Sarah Pinsker is one of my favorite writers of short sf&f, but this is the first of her novels (she has written two now) that I have picked up. It's set in the near future, and weaves in perspectives from four different family members on the Pilot, a brain implant that allows people to multitask. Of the two parents, one wants it for work and the other wants no part of it; of the two children, one gets it but it never works quite right, and the other can't have it because she is seizure-prone.

Pinsker does a great a job inhabiting the third-person limited perspective of all four characters, and her skill as a short-story writer really comes through here in the way that the very short chapters always end at just the right moment, a sharp line of emotional observation that recasts what has gone before in the scene. Since I have become a parent, books about parents have struck me differently; it's not so much reading about kids in danger (as I know some people say, such as my wife), but parents trying to figure out what is right for their kids. I got very anxious reading the scenes of Val and Julie trying to make these decisions. Pinsker is quite skilled at depicting people making bad choices for bad reasons while making it totally understandable, something she has in common with one of my favorite writers, George Eliot. Val and Julie want to be good parents and good spouses, but just like all of us, they do not always succeed.

I do have some quibbles. I would have liked to have seen more of the wider social impacts of the Pilot technology; specifically, it bothered me that there were only Pilots. I felt certain that such a technology would inspire a raft of imitators, which would bring its own problems that would fit well into Pinsker's story. Second, why does each chapter have the name of the viewpoint character up top? I can tell who it is by reading!

But overall, this is great. I was liking it all along, but I knew it had won me over when the end of one chapter made me cry, not just little tears, but being on the verge of sobbing! Maybe I am a soft touch, but hey, touching us is what fiction is supposed to do.

17 September 2021

2021 Hugo Award for Best Related Work Ballot

In past years, I grouped my ballots together by theme. But this year, I have much more time to get them all up, so I'll be doing a single post for each category in which I am voting. First up is Best Related Work, that increasingly weird catch-all category. (The titles of works link to either full reviews I did, or where you can freely access the work in question on the Internet.)

Things I Nominated

I am not a very systematic nominator, but I did nominate one thing in this category: Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century by Sarah Cole (Columbia UP), which I reviewed for the SFRA Review (not that the review has actually been published yet even though I turned it in in February 2020). I'm not very surprised it did not make the ballot, however, as it is the kind of book not really in the orbit of sf&f fandom. But I didn't read much sf&f nonfiction from 2020!



7. CoNZealand Fringe by Claire Rousseau, C, Cassie Hart, Adri Joy, Marguerite Kenner, Cheryl Morgan, and Alasdair Stuart

I don't like Hugo finalists that are about things that happen at Worldcon (more on that for #6 below) and I don't like Best Related Work finalists that I don't think are "works" in a conventional sense (more on that for #5 below). CoNZealand Fringe was a set of supplementary programs to last year's Worldcon, so it in fact falls into both buckets, making it everything I do not like to see. This is no judgement on the CoNZealand Fringe itself; it's just not the kind of thing I think the Hugos should be awarding. (Not everything that can happen in the sf&f space needs a Hugo Award; see also this year's special Best Video Game award.)

6. "George R.R. Martin Can Fuck Off into the Sun, or: The 2020 Hugo Awards Ceremony (Rageblog Edition)" by Natalie Luhrs

This is a blog post about how bad a job George R.R. Martin did hosting the 2020 Hugo Awards ceremony. I did not watch it, so I have no opinion on how he did, but it seems pretty widely agreed that he didn't do a great job (though also some of the fault clearly rests with the 2020 Worldcon events team), and it's one of many that circulated at the time, and I seem to recall I enjoyed reading it then. Anyway, one of the things I hate about Hugos are Hugo Awards for things about Hugo Awards and/or Worldcon. It's so insular. One of the six best things related to science fiction and fantasy was about the awards devoted to recognizing such things? Bleh. It would have been an easy last place if not for CoNZealand Fringe combining two of my Hugo peeves.

5. FIYAHCON by L. D. Lewis (director), Brent Lambert (senior programming coordinator), Iori Kusano & Vida Cruz (FIYAHCON Fringe co-directors), and the Incredible FIYAHCON Team

"Best Related Work" was previously called "Best Non-Fiction Book" and then "Best Related Book"; the category definition has become increasingly broad over the years in an attempt to encompass things people may do that are about sf&f, but are not themselves sf&f; I agree with the broadening in the sense that I think there have been a number of very worthy finalists that would not have made it with a more restrictive definition (e.g., 2020's Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin documentary, 2019's Hobbit videos from Lindsay Ellis)... but I don't really buy the argument that though putting on a convention is "a work" even if it is clearly "work."

4. No Award

Everything beyond this point I would be fine with it winning a Hugo Award, even when it's not my favorite. Really, my preference for this category is nonfiction books about sf&f, though other things have interested me in the past (as I stated in #5 above). But this year we got just one of those!

3. A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler by Lynell George

This book is based on George's time going over the Butler papers at the Huntington Library. It's not a biography or anything; it's meant to give you insight into Butler's working mind and thought process. How did she perceive herself as a writer? Unfortunately, I felt like there wasn't enough of Butler and there was too much George, who seemed to be getting in the way of her subject. Those papers will be the basis of a really good book someday, but this isn't it.

2. "The Last Bronycon: a fandom autopsy" by Jenny Nicholson

This is a YouTube video about the rise and fall of My Little Pony "brony" fandom, through the lens of the last BronyCon, a convention held from 2011 to 2019. I thought it would be documentary-style, like Ellis's Hobbit videos, but it was more like an extended (70 minutes!) vlog; Hayley and I watched it while folding laundry. I enjoyed it, especially the digs into some of the weirder aspects of brony fandom (the body pillows, ugh, but also the idea of being "horse famous," and the weird Netflix brony documentary), but some of it felt poorly sourced (I wouldn't be surprised to find homophobia in brony fandom, but I found her discussion of it unconvincing). Fundamentally, though, an enjoyable look at an aspect of fandom I am only peripherally aware of.

1. Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley

The award rules are that fiction is eligible in Best Related Work if "noteworthy primarily for aspects other than the fictional text, and... [if] not eligible in any other category." This book is noteworthy for its translation and apparatus, and as it was originally published c. 1,000 C.E., it certainly is not eligible in any of the fiction categories! It's not exactly the kind of thing this category was designed for, I must admit, but I enjoyed it best of the three works I experienced, and I think it will surely have the most lasting impact of any of them. (It does seem odd, though, to grant an sf&f award to an edition that downplays the fantastic elements. I mean, there's still a dragon of course, but in Headley's version, Grendel's mother is not a supernatural monster.) Anyway, I don't know if I want this category to become "Best Translation" but this is definitely a worthy winner.



Overall Thoughts

My first year voting, 2017, this category was made up of five nonfiction books and one series of blog posts; in 2018, it was six nonfiction books. Since then, it's gotten weird. Though I like the occasional oddity, the category containing just one nonfiction book is a swing too far away from what I find appealing, and what it was originally designed to recognize. I don't have a good solution, though. What is a definition of "work" that would admit things I like and keep out things I don't? If this is what the nominators want, this is what we'll get, and all I can do is rank them on the final ballot.

15 September 2021

Review: "Man-God!" by Roy Thomas and Tony DeZuniga

The Young All-Stars was not the first time Roy Thomas had adapted Philip Wylie's Gladiator for comics. In 1976, he scripted a 52-page adaptation of the novel that was illustrated by Tony DeZuniga in atmospheric black and white. Despite the fact that the story was published by Marvel, it's easy to imagine it fitting into the continuity Thomas established in Young All-Stars. In fact, DeZuniga draws Hugo Danner with a white streak in his hair, evidently patterned after how Joe Shuster drew "The Superman" on the cover of an otherwise lost 1933 comic book (you can see a copy of the cover here), though probably on that cover the white is just meant to indicate a glare from a light source. It's fitting: a proto-Superman drawn to resemble a proto-Superman. The artists on Young All-Stars would draw Hugo Danner and his son Arn "Iron Munroe" Munroe the same way. (DeZuniga actually drew a couple issues of YA-S, but not, I think, any that Hugo Danner actually appears in.)

Anyway, how is the actual comic? Roy Thomas is, you know, gonna Roy Thomas. Obviously the premise prevents him from packing the page with continuity, but one definitely gets the feeling that Thomas is more interested in Hugo's superpowers than he is Hugo as a character. In the novel, Hugo's college years especially are a source of deep emotion, as he struggles to find his place as a young man; here, it seems like Thomas is trying to speed through them so he can show off Hugo doing super-things during the first World War. The way Hugo left his girlfriend was sad and tragic in the novel, but she barely resonates here.

What does work is Tony DeZuniga. DeZuniga has long been a favorite of mine, since I first came across his work in DC's 1970s horror comics; his lavish work on The Secret House of Sinister Love especially impressed me. Those comics were originally color but presented in black and white in the Showcase Presents editions I read them in, and my guess was they probably looked better in moody black and white than their actual original appearances. All that is to say that though his color work is always good, black and white is definitely DeZuniga's métier, and a comic designed to be in black and white is even better than ones that only ended up that way inadvertently. He makes great use of shading, and the lack of color is especially effective in the sequences set during the Great War, lending them a grimness despite Thomas's focus on the vaguely superheroic antics.

The adaptation was, alas, incomplete; the second half of the novel was promised for a later installment of Marvel Preview but it never came to pass even though the title lasted another four years. If you have an interest in Gladiator, though, and/or if you like Tony DeZuniga as an artist, this is worth tracking down. (I got a used copy for $3.60, so it's not exactly hard to come by.)

(I could be mistaken, but I actually think that with this story, I say goodbye to Roy Thomas. As far as I know, The Young All-Stars and Secret Origins were his last JSA/Earth-Two works for DC Comics, except for All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant, which I already read out of publication order. For a decade, he shaped the JSA's role at DC, and even though he will never be in the pantheon of great writers of dialogue, and his continuity predilection sometimes annoyed me, his contribution to the idea of the JSA as a heroic legacy shaped the JSA's role in the DC universe for the next two decades, and is what made me want to undertake this whole project to begin with. He might be the man who had to kill the JSA off, but he also gave them a way to maintain their relevance even in a post-Crisis universe. Go Roy!)

"Man-God!" originally appeared in issue #9 of Marvel Preview (Dec. 1976). The story was written and edited by Roy Thomas and illustrated by Tony DeZuniga.
 
This post is a supplement to a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers volume 2 of Justice Society of America. Previous installments are listed below:
  1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
  2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
  3. All-Star Squadron (1981-87)
  4. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)
  5. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)
  6. Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)
  7. America vs. the Justice Society (1985)
  8. Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)
  9. Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)
  10. Infinity, Inc. #11-53 (1985-88) [reading order]
  11. Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)
  12. All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant (1999)
  13. Steel, the Indestructible Man (1978)
  14. Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two (1977)
  15. Secret Origins of the Golden Age (1986-89)
  16. The Young All-Stars (1987-89)
  17. Gladiator (1930)
  18. The Crimson Avenger: The Dark Cross Conspiracy (1981-88)
  19. The Immortal Doctor Fate (1940-82)
  20. Justice Society of America: The Demise of Justice (1951-91)
  21. Armageddon: Inferno (1992)

13 September 2021

Hugos 2021: Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley

Translation published: 2020
Acquired: May 2021
Read: August 2021

Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley

Finally, here it is, the first of my 2021 Hugo Award posts! Normally, of course, I'd be all done posting these by now, but because Worldcon 79 has been punted to December, I can stretch out my reading over the summer and the fall, instead of cramming it all into a couple months of the summer. This book is a bit of an oddity, in that it is a finalist for Best Related Work despite being a work of fiction, but more on that when I get to the actual rankings for the category.

I've read Beowulf twice before: once in high school (no idea what translation) and once in grad school (Seamus Heaney). Headley's new translation (in?)famously updates the language, using constructions like "Hashtag: blessed" (l. 622) and "Previously prone to calling bullshit" (l. 980) and rendering the opening hwæt as "Bro!" (l. 1) It's that latter choice that I think is the most interesting; Headley plays up the boasting. This is a story of men telling stories about the prowess of men, both their own and that of others. I read a review by a medievalist that said Headley "insists on its emptiness and bullying element" but though that might be true in the paratext, I don't think it comes across in the actual text. Beowulf is a braggart, but Beowulf can do what he says he can do-- and more!

Here's a sample passage of bragging (I basically opened the book at random and hit one), from when Beowulf is introducing himself to King Hrothgar:

"Every elder knew I was the man for you, and blessed
my quest, King Hrothgar, because where I'm from?
I'm the strongest and the boldest, and the bravest and the best.
Yes: I mean—I may have bathed in the blood of beasts,
netted five foul ogres at once, smashed my way into a troll den
and come out swinging, gone skinny-dipping in a sleeping sea
and made sashimi of some sea monsters.
Anyone who fucks with the Geats? Bro, they have to fuck with me.
They're asking for it, and I deal them death." (ll. 414-22)

These were the passages that sung the most for me, and are incredibly fun to read aloud. I'm no poet or even an analyst of poetry, so I can't tell you much about why it works for me, but I think Headley captures the way men talk about their accomplishments. There's some excellent alliteration, and also I like the way the register changes. Lines 417-20 may use some modern language, but they have a poetic, slightly archaic feeling (it's the long sentence, I think), and then you're suddenly thrown into the very unpoetic boast of line 421, which could come straight out of, I dunno, hip-hop lyrics.

Another review I read talks about how the last third of the poem (where Beowulf fights the dragon) has much less modernized language. I don't know if that's right per se, but it does have a lot less boasting. But I think that's on purpose: Beowulf is an old man now, and an old king. All his friends and enemies are dead; his renown was such that there hasn't even been a war for him to fight because everyone is afraid to attack the Geats while he rules. So who does he have left to boast to or boast of? He goes out killing a dragon, but it's almost tragic, in the sense that one feels like Beowulf deserved better! He comes across as a tired old man grateful for a fight that will kill him, so he doesn't have to die in his sleep, but it's not a fight that would have rated had it happened when he was in the prime of life. As he embarks to kill the dragon, the narrator portrays him as missing old friends and enemies:

The old king fell to his knees on the cliff point
[...].
Stricken, suddenly unsteady, he foresaw his fate
in the fog, shrouded but certain. For a moment,
he felt for his old foes, fen-bound, embarking alone.
Soon, soon, his own lease would expire,
evicting him from hall, hearth, and home. (ll. 2418, 2421-25)

That said, I agree, it's much less fun to read that part of the poem, even if there's good reason for the shift in tone.

There's a lot you can talk about here; (as the review I quoted above says) Headley's lasting influence will probably be her insistence that most of the language that is usually translated as indicating Grendel's mother is a monster is, when used to describe men, not translated in such a way; the phrase others have translated as "inhuman troll-wife" or "monstrous hell-bride," she renders as "formidable noblewoman"! (pp. xxiii-xxv) I really enjoyed reading it, and it makes me want to dig into Beowulf again, and makes me miss hanging out with medievalists as I did in grad school.

Speaking of which, this is surely the first Hugo finalist to thank someone I went to grad school with in the Acknowledgements!

10 September 2021

Reading Roundup Year in Review 2020/21

As always, I treat my "reading year" as running from September through August, so it's now time to do my annual statistical analysis. Keen followers may recall that last year was the worst reading year of my adult life, by a pretty strong margin. (65.3% of my previous low.) So how did I do this year?

Not that bad! I mean, it's definitely on the low end (my mean is 148), but it's not even my second-worst year.

Here's how my reading this year broke down by category: (I typically only break out a series or author if I read more than one in the past year)

SERIES/GENRE/AUTHOR # OF BOOKS BOOKS/ MONTH % OF ALL BOOKS
Doctor Who1 42½
3.5
33.2%
Star Trek 12
1.0
9.4%
Media Tie-In Subtotal 54½ 4.5
42.6%




The Expanse14
0.33.1%
Oz 3
0.3 2.3%
Octavia E. Butler1,2 2
0.2 1.6%
Other SF&F 35 2.9 27.3%
General SF&F Subtotal 44 3.7 34.4%




The Transformers
5
0.43.9%
Justice Society of America
2
0.21.6%
Other DC Universe Comics3
0.32.3%
Marvel Universe Comics
0.2
2.0%
Avatar: The Last Airbender
2
0.21.6%
Other Comics 4
0.3 3.1%
Comics Subtotal 18½ 1.5 14.5%




James Bond by Ian Fleming 2
0.2 1.6%
Victorian Literature 2
0.2 1.6%
Other Literature 3
0.3 2.3%
General Literature Subtotal 7
0.6
5.5%




Nonfiction Subtotal
4
0.3 3.1%


1. Comic books relating to series or authors that are predominantly not comics I don't count under my "Comics" category, but under the main designation.
2. Nonfiction about a particular author I typically count under that author.


Huge amount of Doctor Who books this year. That's because I read a comic book every day over breakfast, and this year, I've been working my way through some Titan Doctor Who trade paperbacks. At 4-6 issues per collection, you can rack up some good numbers fast! At the same time, I've been reading through my Doctor Who Magazine graphic novels.

Here's how those breakdowns have changed over time:

Apparently, I haven't read a Star Wars book in over two years! As always, the thing I regret is that I don't seem to be reading much non-sf... but you can't read more of everything, I guess!

This year, I can do more graphs than normal, since LibraryThing recently upgraded its visualization tools. Here, for example, is how my books break down by original publication date:

I find some of their visualization choices odd, and the charts don't always interpret the original data correctly (I did not read a book published between 10 and 19, nor did I read one from the 1630s).

I enjoy the author ones especially... though my gender one isn't so hot this year! (I blame all the tie-ins.)

I don't know if they mean to, but I hope LT develops this stuff more—I'd love to see a way to graph some of this data over time, for example. But for now, it is pretty neat.

You can compare this to previous years if you're interested: 2007/08, 2008/09, 2009/10, 2011/12, 2012/13, 2014/15, 2015/16, 2016/17, 2017/18, 2018/19, 2019/20. (I didn't do ones for 2010/11 and 2013/14.)


08 September 2021

Review: Armageddon: Inferno by John Ostrander, Luke McDonnell, Bruce N. Solotoff, et al.

I debated about reading this. I knew it was the story where the Justice Society returned from Ragnarok, the limbo they'd been in since 1986's Last Days of the Justice Society, so it was important, but I was also pretty sure the actual return was perfunctory, and there has never been a good Armageddon 2001 tie-in except for Justice League Europe Annual #2. I suffered through Countdown: Arena, okay? Surely I could go straight from The Demise of Justice to the JSA's present-day adventures in Justice Society of America vol. 2?

Anyway, the completist in me won out. Obviously!

I don't even know why this book exists. Armageddon 2001 was a crossover that ran through all of DC's annuals from May through November 1991. Was it really such a good seller that DC needed to follow it up with two different miniseries, this and Armageddon: The Alien Agenda? The hook of Armageddon 2001 was that the characters in every DC series got a vision of themselves ten years in the future; the stuff about Waverider and Monarch was just a vehicle to justify that. The only link between 2001 and Inferno is that Waverider is in it again, and boy I do not care about Waverider.

At first, though, I was like, "This isn't so bad!" Waverider has to gather heroes to battle some cosmic evil entity. The set-up is all quite dumb, and obviously it can't work: there are sixteen bad guys, all new characters, and there are four different teams of good guys in four different time zones. Like, how could you ever focus on any of them enough for this to be satisfying? But even a bad John Ostrander comic is better than a good Keith Champagne one, and there are some small bits of characterization and dialogue that lift this above the usual event comic dreck. Ostrander picks good characters for his out-of-time teams, even if the dialogue is often painfully clear about continuity. "Oh this guy comes from one year ago but this guy comes from five years ago." In a nice touch, though, Katar and Shayera of Hawkworld, which he was writing at the same time, are in it. It's not great-- Mark Waid would do this kind of thing much better during his run on The Brave and the Bold-- but hey it definitely could be worse.

from Armageddon: Inferno #2
(art by Walter Simonson)
And I had been worried about the fact that it has nine different artists for four issues, but the story actually does okay by this; the artists do different segments that correspond to different time periods, so there's no jarring mix of styles. Some artists just do single pages in an issue, but this is because they are splash pages that give you a quick sense of something that's happening somewhere, and usually quite atmospherically done. I mean, hey, if Walt Simonson draws a single page, it will be a good one even if it is a single one, right?

Actually it all goes downhill once the Justice Society is introduced! I don't know anything about the behind-the-scenes circumstances of this comic, but it actually reads to me like the idea of using at as a JSA revival was made up after issue #2 was written. In #3, Waverider and the Spectre decide to pluck the JSA out of time between moments in Ragnarok so that they can attack the master villain directly in his home dimension. (Waverider has already taken as many people as he dares out of time, but since the JSA is already out of time, they can be used without endangering anything as long as they are put back when it's all over.) And suddenly, the myriad characters introduced in the first two issues basically disappear! Like, why even bother? From then on, the comic focuses on the JSA battling Abraxis, where their abilities are enhanced by their participation in Ragnarok-- and eventually they pass the powers on to others. 

from Armageddon: Inferno #4
(art by Luke McDonnell & Bruce N. Solotoff)
So issues #3 and 4 focus on the JSA, who weren't really even alluded to in #1-2. The dialogue goes downhill in the JSA issues, as suddenly it's a bunch of cheesy quips. But what kind of personality could a battle with Abraxis ever express anyway?

But then the JSA has to go back, because otherwise Ragnarok cannot continue and the universe is doomed, so they get returned. But then literally on the last page in an aside, it's revealed that Waverider was able to swap their locations in time with Abraxis's minions. So they will fight in the battle, and the JSA can return to the normal flow of time. Like, if Waverider could move the bad guys in time... why didn't he just drop them all in a sun or something? So not only does it read like the JSA was added to #3 at the last minute, it reads like once they were added, the idea of their return was a last last minute change to #4!

This isn't good, and I shouldn't have read it. Like many superhero comics, what happens is noteworthy, but how it happens is not.

Armageddon: Inferno was originally published in four issues (Apr.-July 1992). The story was written by John Ostrander; pencilled by Luke McDonnell (#1-4), Art Adams (#1, 3-4), Mike Netzer (#1-2, 4), Walter Simonson (#1-4), Tom Mandrake (#1, 4), and Dick Giordano (#4); inked by Bruce N. Solotoff (#1-4), Art Adams (#1), Mike Netzer (#1-2, 4), Walter Simonson (#1-4), Tom Mandrake (#1, 4), Terry Austin (#3-4), and Frank McLaughlin (#4); colored by Gene D'Angelo; lettered by John Costanza; and edited by Dennis O'Neil.
 
This post is twenty-first in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment is a supplement covering "Man-God!" Previous installments are listed below:
  1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
  2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
  3. All-Star Squadron (1981-87)
  4. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)
  5. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)
  6. Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)
  7. America vs. the Justice Society (1985)
  8. Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)
  9. Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)
  10. Infinity, Inc. #11-53 (1985-88) [reading order]
  11. Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)
  12. All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant (1999)
  13. Steel, the Indestructible Man (1978)
  14. Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two (1977)
  15. Secret Origins of the Golden Age (1986-89)
  16. The Young All-Stars (1987-89)
  17. Gladiator (1930)
  18. The Crimson Avenger: The Dark Cross Conspiracy (1981-88)
  19. The Immortal Doctor Fate (1940-82)
  20. Justice Society of America: The Demise of Justice (1951-91)

06 September 2021

Review: Justice Society of America: The Demise of Justice by Len Strazewski, Grant Miehm, Mike Parobeck, Tom Artis, Rick Burchett, et al.

Collection published: 2020
Contents originally published: 1951-91
Acquired: January 2021
Read: June 2021

Justice Society of America: The Demise of Justice

Written by Len Strazewski, John Broome, and Paul Levitz
Pencils by Rick Burchett, Grant Miehm, Mike Parobeck, Tom Artis, Frank Giacoia, Arthur Peddy, and Joe Staton
Inks by Rick Burchett, Grant Miehm, Frank McLaughlin, Frank Giacoia, Bernard Sachs, and Joe Staton
Colored by Tom Ziuko, Robbie Busch, and Adrienne Roy
Lettered by Janice Chiang and Ben Oda

Roy Thomas's work in the DC universe came to an end in 1989, with the publication of the final issue of The Young All-Stars. (On a regular basis, anyway; he would return for one-offs like All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant and DC Retroactive: Wonder Woman over the years.) Less than two years later, one of his long-term dreams would finally come to fruition: fifty years after their debut, the Justice Society of America received a self-titled comic!

Justice Society of America vol. 1 was an eight-issue miniseries consisting of Vengeance from the Stars!, a story set during the Golden Age. Just this year, in a bit of fortuitous timing for me, it was collected in a nice hardcover edition under the title The Demise of Justice, along with two extra stories, both "final" adventures for the JSA: their last Golden Age appearance from 1951's All Star Comics #57 and the retconned story of their disbanding from 1979's Adventure Comics #466. Justice Society #8 actually sets up Adventure #466, and Adventure #466 mentions All Star #57, so the whole thing reads pretty well. (The book also contains a foreword by Mark Waid, where he gives exposition on ten JSA members... six of whom do not actually appear in the main story... but doesn't give any background on one who does... the woman one... hmmmm...)

A writer who has Black Canary rock up to a crime scene on her motorcyle is a writer who gets it.
from Justice Society of America vol. 1 #2 (script by Len Strazewski, art by Grant Miehm)

Vengeance from the Stars! is a great little story, using its somewhat broader canvas to good effect. The first four issues focus on, in turn, the Flash, Black Canary, Green Lantern, and Hawkman, each reacting to a crisis as America's power grid is dismantled by a shadowy figure, and as they come under attack by living constellations. Then #5 is a Flash and Hawkman team-up, #6 is a Black Canary and Green Lantern team-up, and #7-8 bring together all four characters along with Starman. It's a really pleasing structure, ensuring that each JSA member gets some great moments in the spotlight, and also giving you the fun of them teaming up together; it feels triumphant when all five of them come together at the end because the anticipation has been building for six issues.

This artist is good at giving the Flash those heroic eyebrows.
from Justice Society of America vol. 1 #1 (script by Len Strazewski, art by Rick Burchett)

I didn't think I'd ever read anything by Len Strazewski before (I just checked, and it looks like only his Phantom Lady feature in Action Comics Weekly), but this shows him to be a solid, un-pretentious writer. The story takes the sensibilities of the Golden Age JSA and updates them without losing what made them charming to begin with. There are a lot of fight scenes, which in the hands of a lesser writer would annoy me, but each issue's fight is distinct, and there's a lot of focus on how each member of the JSA thinks their way out of the problem using their unique abilities. The eight issues give each encounter space to breathe. There are a lot of nice touches here, like Hawkman's Native American archaeologist friend or the way Solomon Grundy is woven into the story. Strazewski has a great handle on Black Canary, who's my favorite of the five characters spotlighted here.

Sorry for the gutter loss.
from Justice Society of America vol. 1 #4 (script by Len Strazewski, art by Tom Artis & Frank McLaughlin)

I was a bit worried by the fact that the eight issues feature four different pencillers and three different inkers, but there are no hasty fill-ins here. Each artist does a great job of capturing character and action, and the style is the late 1980s/early 1990s, pre-computer coloring one that is my favorite. If all comics looked like this I wouldn't complain!

This comic might contain the only appearance of Doiby Dickles I haven't hated.
from Justice Society of America vol. 1 #6 (script by Len Strazewski, art by Tom Artis & Frank McLaughlin)

After this, Strazewksi, along with Parobeck (who pencilled #3 and 5), put out a short-lived Justice Society ongoing, and on the basis of this, I am looking forward to reading it. It did strike me that I don't think there are any references to any post-Crisis retcons; this could be set on pre-Crisis Earth-Two without any issues.

I know I'm putting too much thought into it, but surely the criminals would expect "English [detective] methods," and so it would make more sense for the JSA to use methods that don't match the countries they've been assigned to?
from All Star Comics #57 (script by John Broome, art by Arthur Peddy & Bernard Sachs)

The bonus issues are nice. All Star #57 is dumb, of course, like most Golden Age JSA stories, but I appreciate its inclusion. The JSA put on a detective exhibition (!?) featuring the world's four greatest detectives; a villain kidnaps them right from under the JSA's noses, and so the JSA has to substitute for them back in their home countries. Adventure #466 has a frame set in the then-present featuring Huntress and Power Girl; I skipped the frame (I had read it before, in Only Legends Live Forever) so that I was immersed in the 1950s for my reading experience.

This post is twentieth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Armageddon: Inferno. Previous installments are listed below:
  1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
  2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
  3. All-Star Squadron (1981-87)
  4. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)
  5. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)
  6. Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)
  7. America vs. the Justice Society (1985)
  8. Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)
  9. Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)
  10. Infinity, Inc. #11-53 (1985-88) [reading order]
  11. Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)
  12. All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant (1999)
  13. Steel, the Indestructible Man (1978)
  14. Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two (1977)
  15. Secret Origins of the Golden Age (1986-89)
  16. The Young All-Stars (1987-89)
  17. Gladiator (1930)
  18. The Crimson Avenger: The Dark Cross Conspiracy (1981-88)
  19. The Immortal Doctor Fate (1940-82)

03 September 2021

Welcome to the New Normal, Not Quite the Old Normal

On Monday of this week, I stepped into a classroom of 22 for the first time since March 2020—almost eighteen months ago. After half a semester of fully on-line, and then a full school year of hybrid teaching at half capacity, we are back in the classroom, completely and totally.

Initially we were supposed to be mask free, but a couple weeks ago, the spiking case numbers here in Florida—blamed on that insidious delta variant—caused a reversal. So I am still wearing a mask in the classroom. It is amazing how much I forgot the extent to which I hated it in just three months of summer. If things die down, they will reverse that. One wonders if things ever will die down, especially here in Florida, where our governor—busy running for president—recently enacted a law saying that asking for proof of a COVID vaccine is a $5,000 fine.

I wanted to believe things were getting better when the vaccine came along. It is nuts to me, absolutely nuts, that in a state that currently has three times the national death rate, we are stopping people from putting in place measures that could reduce deaths.

I went to a wedding two weeks ago, back in Ohio, with Son One. We scheduled this back in July, when it seemed like things were getting normal again. By the time I went, I was second-guessing myself on the wisdom of it all as I sat at the wedding reception. I got tested once we got home, though, and I was fine.

Even having half of my students in class at a time last year wasn't like real teaching. They weren't supposed to get closer than six feet to each other, so there was no group work, and frequently several were quarantined or otherwise absent, so you could have just four or five students. I had group work in all my classes, and there was something really reassuring about that babble of 22 people all talking at once. I haven't heard it in a long, long time! Real teaching is back. (Our administration often lacks backbone, I feel, but I am grateful for our Dean, who at every college meeting admonishes us, "Don't teach on Zoom! Even if you're sick! That's not why we're here.")

I am not one of those people who gets anxious about COVID exposure, I don't look at a crowd of people and shudder. (I don't trumpet this as a point of personal pride; it's just not how my personality is built. My anxieties are different!) But looking out at 22 people crammed into my tiny UT classrooms, I would feel so much better—for me and them—if I knew they were all vaccinated. I know that doesn't stop delta completely, but it brings things down to a level where I feel reasonable. But who knows what percentage of my students is vaccinated?

But then, cynically, I wonder if it all paid off. Here in Florida, we had much less strict, and much shorter lockdowns and mask mandates than other states, and here at UT, we have much less strict COVID protocols than other universities. Plenty of people criticized both. But, do you know what? We had a record high freshman class this year. Way more students took admission than predicted, causing some problems. Is it because these students thought they could go to a school where they would have a "normal" college experience? Were my governor and my provost "right"? It does give me some short-term job security at a time when many universities faced an enrollment crash.

I actually am not exposed to much anti-vaccine stuff. I have a pretty strong filter bubble at this point in my life; my facebook circle is mostly either academics or Star Trek fandom people. My family leans conservative, but (by and large, as far as I know) are not the type to buy into this bullshit. So it's not something I have much personal experience with. There's a family friend, though, who does; I haven't talked to her about it directly, just heard about it from my parents. She's a smart woman, college educated, clever and thoughtful. I just don't get how someone could end up like this, and it makes me doubt, well, everything. What's the point of college, of education, of media, of science, of religion, if this is where we end up as a society? If we have people so divorced from reality—and of course they think we are the ones divorced from reality.

And anyone could be one of them. My students, certainly. My childrens' daycare teachers. My wife's co-workers. Hayley and I are reasonably safe by virtue of being in our thirties and vaccinated, and the kids are reasonably safe by virtue of being younger, but none of those things are absolute. Nothing is, of course, but a little bit more relative safety wouldn't go amiss.

For a while it seemed like we were getting out of this. It's dumb, but two days ago I was listening a  Wait Wait Don't Tell Me! from a couple weeks ago (I am behind), their first in-person live show since last year. And I actually got a bit emotional hearing a real audience roar and cheer for them for the first time in so long. This is how things were meant to be, and they are coming back. But sometimes it feels like "normal," not even a new normal, will never get here.

Last May, I posted to facebook a quote from Bob Garfield, late of On the Media, about the timelessness of the pandemic:

Not knowing what the passage of time will yield has left me unmoored, spinning in space as if my inner gyroscope were on the fritz. We all know about sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. But there is that often unmentioned sixth sense, proprioception, the unconscious awareness of our body position and movement. Could there be, I wonder, a seventh sense? A proprioception of time? If so, it's gone missing. Not just that I can't fathom what the world will be like in a year or a month. It's that in losing a sense of future, I've also all but lost the present. Ambitions, duties, desires, even the sense beyond hunger and fatigue of life itself. I cannot be alone in this because time isn't just a metric, it's a gravity that keeps us tethered to the world. By anticipating future seconds and minutes and days, we're able to fee; traction and trajectory. But without those hidden comforts of time comes this vertigo, this loss of chronological bearings.

He was talking about the perils of lockdown, how staying in your home all day removed your sense of time. I thought we were getting out of this—and what a miracle that was—but it just keeps going on. It's a different kind of timelessness, I think. It's like Narnia's eternal winter: always winter and never Christmas. The long winter of COVID is here, and even though the snow might be melting, it seems to me that we're being a bit rash in putting away the shovels when half the country is opposed to using rock salt.

(That was not a great metaphor.)

I will take my normalcies where I can get them, and I know the risks will never be zero, but I would be quite delighted to stop having to do risk calculations all the time—and I would be even happier to know that there aren't masses of people out there dying for an absolutely preventable reason.