30 December 2022

Reading L. Frank Baum's Queen Zixi of Ix Aloud to My Son

Queen Zixi of Ix; or, the Story of the Magic Cloak
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by Frederick Richardson

My son and I tend to read "borderlands of Oz" books when we're stuck waiting for Oz books. Unfortunately, it took much longer than I expected to get The Hungry Tiger of Oz, and The Master Key alone was not enough to cover the gap. After not particularly enjoying Master Key or The Enchanted Island of Yew (which we had read to cover the gap between Grampa and Lost King), I wasn't looking forward to reading a third borderlands book in quick succession.

Originally published: 1904-05
Read aloud: July 2022

I only had two more borderlands book: Dot and Tot of Merryland (1901) and Queen Zixi of Ix (1904-05). I don't really remember either from my own childhood, but I knew Dot and Tot is short, but not considered to be very good, while Queen Zixi was longer, but many consider it one of Baum's best. Did I want to read a bad book and get back to Oz quickly? Or take longer to get back to Oz, but potentially enjoy the experience more? Eventually I decided I was tired of reading books I didn't enjoy very much, and picked Queen Zixi.

Queen Zixi was one of Baum's last attempts at a non-Oz fantasy, but you can tell by the title how he was attempting to cash in on Oz's success, with a country name not too far off Oz in form. Like some of Baum's other early work (e.g., Magical Monarch of Mo) it feels less American and less modern. It opens in the Forest of Burzee (previously established in Life and Adventures of Santa Claus), where a group of fairies under Queen Lulea weave a magic cloak that can grant a mortal bearer one wish; one fairy is then sent into the country of Noland to give it to someone sad.

Meanwhile, a pair of children named Timothy and Margaret (but usually called "Bud" and "Fluff") are orphaned, and travel with their Aunt Rivette to the capital city, Nole. There, the king of Noland has recently died without heir, meaning the forty-seventh person to come through the city's east gate will become the new monarch. On the way, Fluff is given the magic cloak and she wishes to be happy; Bud ends up being the forty-seventh person, making him king and Fluff princess. The book has three distinct parts: 1) Bud and Fluff becoming and settling into the roles in the palace, 2) Queen Zixi's attempts to steal the magic cloak from Princess Fluff, including war, and 3) the invasion of Noland by the strange Roly-Rogues.

I don't think Noland and Ix quite have the sparkle of Oz, they are pretty generic vaguely medieval magic kingdoms, but overall this book might be Baum's most successful non-Oz fantasy. Two ordinary children (I used country accents for both) becoming rulers of a country is fun idea. There's some good fantasy humor when the magic cloak is passed through the various denizens of the palace who, ignorant of its power, keep wishing for different things, meaning that Bud and Fluff's aunt gets wings, and the lord high general (who has a short man complex) ends up ten feet tall, and the lord high executioner obtains an extendable arm, and so on. This is pretty fun stuff, and it's nice to have protagonists for whom something is actually at stake—arguably the biggest difference between Baum's good fantasies (e.g., this, Oz, Sky Island) and his ones I have not enjoyed (e.g., Master Key, Yew, Sea Fairies).

Similar things go for Queen Zixi's attempts to capture the magic cloak and the invasion of the Roly-Rogues. The latter are nicely imaginative creatures, and they pose a real threat to Noland. Zixi is one of Baum's more interesting witch characters: she's given herself a long life and ruled wisely, but in a mirror, she looks her real 683 years, and thus when she hears of a magic cloak, wants to wish for being able to deceive mirrors, too. So the normally kind ruler becomes a harsher one, but by the end of the novel she learns her lesson.

(That said, like in a lot of Baum novels, there are a lot of hinted-at geopolitics. Zixi has lead her people in hundred of battles, and there is some kind of preexisting enmity between Noland and Ix that means Zixi can't just ask for the cloak. On the other hand, Zixi has never lost a battle, so surely all those hundred battles can't be against Noland. Later maps would place Ix between Noland and Ev, the country where Ozma takes place, so has Ix fought a number of wars with Ev? Or maybe Ix has faced sea raids from places like Regos and Coregos; this novel does establish that Ix has a merchant fleet of some kind. In my reading, I turned Queen Lulea into Queen Lurline, the fairy queen from Burzee mentioned in many Oz novels. It's interesting to note that this novel establishes that fairies have a dislike for witch magic, given how much in the Oz novels the fairy Ozma depends on the magic of Glinda, a witch.)

I think my son liked it; he was particularly into the comedy about what the people did with the cloak, while he as usual didn't like hearing about bad things like Zixi stealing the cloak. Overall, I enjoyed it. It doesn't quite have the sparkle of weirdness than an Oz novel does, but it's fun, it has good jokes, and if it doesn't have a unified plot, it does have three individual ones. Baum never returned to any of the lands he established in his non-Oz fantasies, and this is one of the rare times I wish he did. I'd like to see King Bud grow up a bit, and for him, Fluff, Aunt Rivette, Zixi, and their various advisors face down some other kind of threat—and this time with no magic cloak to help!

Next up in sequence: The Hungry Tiger of Oz

28 December 2022

The Origins of the Black Panther by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Roy Thomas, Frank Giacoia, et al.

from Fantastic Four vol. 1 #52
A couple years ago, I picked up a number of Black Panther comics for free from comiXology in the wake of Chadwick Boseman's death. I tend to read digital comics over breakfast when I don't have some kind of hard copy comic to hand, but at the time I was already reading Titan's Doctor Who comics, and then I moved onto The Wicked + The Divine. Now that I'm done with both of those, I'm turning my attention to the Black Panther comics. They aren't comprehensive, but they are pretty close, and it gets even closer if I supplement with what's available on Hoopla. I'll be reading and reviewing in publication order, though moving things around slightly so that I read series in chunks when two series were released simultaneously.

from Black Panther: The Sound and the Fury #1
The three earliest comics in the sale were Fantastic Four #52-53 from 1966, which introduced the Black Panther and provided his origin, and The Avengers #87 from 1971, which recapped and expanded on his origin, and it's those I'll be reviewing in this post. The two Fantastic Four stories, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, have the Black Panther luring the Fantastic Four to Wakanda and then battling them; it turns out he did it as a final challenge to himself. He then recaps his origin, where his father was killed by the villain later known as Klaw, and then Klaw turns up and everyone battles him. (In between all this, one is subjected to pages featuring the Inhumans.)

It's Lee and Kirby at their peak, so it has potency and power—and excess. You can see there's a lot here to run with, but I don't know that I enjoyed it so much as I appreciated the inventiveness of it all. Lots of crazy ideas, but also lots of exposition, and no one ever accused Stan Lee of being elegant. I also have these issues in a Fantastic Four Omnibus that I haven't got around to reading, and I wonder if I'll appreciate them more in their original context whenever I get around to that.

from Marvel Tales: Black Panther #1
The issue of the Avengers is from when the Black Panther was a member of the team; in classic Roy Thomas fashion, he decides to tell everyone a very detailed version of his backstory. This expands on what was told in Fantastic Four #53, adding more details to how T'Challa grew up partially outside of Wakanda, and giving him a friend who (of course) ultimately betrays him. Again, it fills in a lot of backstory for T'Challa (sometimes since FF #53, he'd gotten that name too), and I'm sure there will be a lots of future callbacks to it, but it's not so much a story in itself.

Overall, these three issues make a useful foundation, and I'll be curious to see where we go from here.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

"The Black Panther!" was originally published in issue #52 of Fantastic Four vol. 1 (July 1966). The story was scripted by Stan Lee, illustrated by Jack Kirby, inked by Joe Sinnott, and lettered by Sammy Rosen.

"The Way It Began..!" was originally published in issue #53 of Fantastic Four vol. 1 (Aug. 1966). The story was scripted by Stan Lee, illustrated by Jack Kirby, inked by Joe Sinnott, and lettered by Artie Simek. It was reprinted in Black Panther: The Sound and the Fury #1 (Apr. 2018), which was edited by Mark Basso.

"Look Homeward, Avenger!" was originally published in issue #87 of The Avengers vol. 1 (Apr. 1971). The story was written by Roy Thomas, illustrated by Frank Giacoia and Sal Buscema, lettered by Mike Stevens, and edited by Stan Lee. It was reprinted in Marvel Tales: Black Panther #1 (Nov. 2019), which was edited by Jennifer Grünwald.

Fantastic Four #52 was the only one of these three offered in its original format; the other two were in reprint comics. Note that The Sound and the Fury #1 also contains an original story, but I'll read that when I get up to 2018's comics in this readthrough. I have the other three issues in Marvel Tales: Black Panther #1 in other forms, so this is the only comic from it I'll be reading directly.

26 December 2022

The Wicked + The Divine, Vols. 3–6 by Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, et al.

The Wicked + The Divine, Vol. 3, Commercial Suicide
The Wicked + The Divine, Vol. 4, Rising Action
The Wicked + The Divine, Vol. 5, Imperial Phase Part 1
The Wicked + The Divine, Vol. 6, Imperial Phase Part 2

Collection published: 2016
Contents published: 2015
Acquired: June 2020
Read: July 2022

Collection published: 2016
Contents published: 2016
Acquired: June 2020
Read: July 2022

Collection published: 2017
Contents published: 2016-17
Acquired: June 2020
Read: August 2022

Collection published: 2018
Contents published: 2017
Acquired: June 2020
Read: August 2022

Writer: Kieron Gillen
Interviews: Leigh Alexander, Dorian Lynskey, Laurie Penny, Mary HK Choi, Ezekiel Kweku
Artist: Jamie McKelvie
Guest Artists: Kate Brown, Tula Lotay, Stephanie Hans, Leila Del Luca, Kevin Wada
Colourist: Matthew Wilson
Guest Colourist: Mat Lopes
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Flatter: Dee Cunniffe

I read these four Wicked + The Divine collections in rapid succession in between cycles of my JSA marathon (after JSA by Geoff Johns, before JSA Presents Green Lantern), so I'll be reviewing them all in one go.

The first collection, Commercial Suicide, feels like a side-step at first, in that we seemingly move away from the ongoing story of Wicked + The Divine to see what other gods are up to, in issues drawn by a variety of guest artists. This turns out to be kind of a trick, because a couple of these issues are set in the present day, and develop the evil plan of Ananke. I think if you were more into these characters, you would get more out of them than I did, though I did appreciate the beautiful art of Tula Lotay in the very depressing Tara focus issue.

After this, events kick back into gear... and you know, do I care? Ananke has to be stopped—and then once she's stopped, what do gods do with no one to restrain them? That's what's chronicled in Rising Action and the two-part Imperial Phase. Kieron Gillen clearly puts a lot of work into these comics, and there's some clever misdirects and detailed hint-laying and complicated long-term gambits, but fundamentally, I find it hard to care about these characters. I am decently interested in Laura and Cassandra, but there are so many other gods who I often forget about or do remember but don't care about. 

Gillen and McKelvie are always trying to do interesting things. There's an issue entirely made up of things McKelvie drew for previous issues of Wicdiv. There's an issue which is the form of interviews in a magazine about the gods—and Gillen even got real magazine writers to interview him in character, and then they wrote up the interviews themselves. Which is all very neat, and I'm sure devoted Wicdiv readers got a lot out of it... but I found myself skimming.

Even my interest in those characters feels more intellectual than emotional; Laura is a fangirl who became what she idolized, and I like the process of her decay... but I don't really feel it. I can't help but feeling that this story about the "darkness" and secret, ancient pacts doesn't really have anything to do with what the series's hook was: what if popstars were literal gods? I guess I want to read a comic about the power of idolization, using godhood as a literal and metaphorical take on it. Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie don't have to make this comic if they don't want to of course; that's clearly not what they're doing here now that I'm six volumes into it, but it's what I thought I was getting at first, and I think I would have been more into that than whatever we're getting instead. Like yes it's shocking who Woden really was... but I also didn't really care, and I kind of rolled my eyes because he was barely even a character anyway. He could have been a great way to engage themes—how does academia perceive this phenomenon versus fandom?—but once you get to the reveal, you realize the character was only there to be in the reveal, he doesn't have any significance on his own, and that's why his early appearances were so fleeting.

So it's all a shame because it feels like a waste of the clear talent of everyone involved. But anyway I have all the volumes and I got them for free and there's only three to go and they read pretty easy and Jamie McKelvie's art is always nice to look out, so I will keep on going until the end.

I read an issue of The Wicked + The Divine every day (except when I have hard-copy comics to read). Next up in sequence: Mothering Invention

23 December 2022

The Uncollected Doctor Who Christmas Short Trips

Over the past decade, I've had a tradition of reading a Doctor Who Christmas book every Christmas. (Scroll down on this page to see the complete list.) Last year, I reached the endpoint of that tradition when I read the last one I hadn't read, Dave Rudden's The Wintertime Paradox.

Except that there are a number of Doctor Who Christmas short stories only available on the Internet or in various periodicals that have never been collected or reprinted. Once I finished The Wintertime Paradox, I spent some time tracking them all down, and this Christmas I read that "book." Here is a handy guide to all of them, along with my thoughts. (This is an expanded version of a GallifreyBase post; thanks to the commenters there for cluing me into an extra one.)

Doctor Who Magazine

Somewhat surprisingly, I think DWM have only ever done just one prose Christmas story.

  • Prelude to The Left-Handed Humminbird by Kate Orman (Doctor Who Magazine, no. 207, 22 Dec. 1993). Most of Virgin's The New Doctor Who Adventures had exclusive preludes published in DWM; this one happens to be set on Christmas. It's very much scene-setting for the novel, and the Christmas elements are incidental. But, you know, it's by Kate Orman, so it's well-written and horrific. Someday I'll read the book. Like all the preludes, it's been copied out on the unofficial Doctor Who Reference Guide, so it is easily accessed.

Newspaper Stories

Two times Paul Cornell published a Doctor Who short story around Christmas time. This sort of became a trilogy; see below under Unofficial but Interesting.

  • "Deep and Dreamless Sleep" by Paul Cornell (Sunday Times, 24 Dec. 2006). The tenth Doctor encounters a five-year-old boy who hijacks the TARDIS in search of a perfect Christmas. It's by Paul Cornell, so it's pretty good. The ending in particular is great. It has some bits that made me think he had to condense it to fit the newspaper's space, but overall you can't go wrong with Paul Cornell doing Doctor Who at Christmas. (His anthology Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury is a thing of beauty.) [Link takes you to an archived copy of part 1 of 6. To get all six part, I think I signed up for a Times account and cancelled before the free trial ended.]
  • "The Hopes and Fears of All the Years" by Paul Cornell (Daily Telegraph, 22 Dec. 2007). Another story of the tenth Doctor at Christmas; this one is about him popping in to see a single family at multiple Christmases across the course of a boy's life. I really liked this one: sentimental without being mawkish, and I'm always a sucker for a bildungsroman, even in miniature.

Adventure Calendar

From 2006 to 2017, the BBC's official Doctor Who web site always promoted the upcoming Christmas special with the "Adventure Calendar," where every day from December 1st to Christmas Day, you could go to the official site and receive some kind of treat: desktop wallpapers, Flash games, interviews, commentary tracks, artwork, and fiction. Not all of this fiction was seasonally themed, but I've included here a list of all the stories that have Christmas or winter links. (Someday I'll do another post looking at the others.)

  • "The Frozen" by Rupert Laight (2 Dec. 2007). The tenth Doctor takes a graduate student from the future back to the February 1814 frost fair, the last time the River Thames froze over. (Luckily he doesn't bump into the first Doctor or the twelfth; see Frostfire and "Thin Ice.") A lot of these Adventure Calendar stories are, to be honest, pretty mediocre. No characterization to speak of, just dialogue and actions, like a television script, with often awkward prose.
  • "The Advent of Fear" Part One and Part Two by Mark B. Oliver (6 & 10 Dec. 2009). The tenth Doctor encounters a girl with an advent calendar that keeps sending her through time. To be honest, I was into this one at first, but in the end I found it rather confusing and disjointed. This is the first one to have a juvenile companion stand-in, which is true of most of these.
  • "The Doctor on My Shoulder" Part One and Part Two by Daniel Roth (17 & 23 Dec. 2009). The Doctor gets shrunk down and ends up wrapped in someone's present. To be honest, that's a lot more interesting sounding than the story actually is. Again, a pedestrian runaround without a prose style, and I didn't find the alien plan very believable even by Doctor Who standards.
  • "Snowfall" by Gavin Collinson and Mark B. Oliver (9-10, 17, 20, & 23-24 Dec. 2010). This is actually two short stories with a frame; they feature the eleventh Doctor with Amy and Rory in the frame. It was released across several days (each of the embedded stories was divided in half), but then collected as a complete novella. In the first, Mark B. Oliver's "Cold Snap" the Doctor bumps in a couple kids he met before in a previous web exclusive story (a Halloween one, so not relevant to this project) and also meets a guy named "Big Jack." They work together to stop a heat-draining alien on Christmas. The second, "Vampire Hurricane" by Gavin Collinson, is about the Doctor and a guy named David working together to stop a toy magnate from accidentally creating a vampire army on Christmas. The frame, also by Collinson, is about Big Jack and David—estranged brothers—reconciling... on Christmas. The embedded stories are fine, if a bit shallow like all the other Adventure Calendar tales. I didn't find the estranged brother thing worked at all.
  • "Attack of the Snowmen" by Mark B. Oliver (20-21 & 24 Dec. 2011). The kids, Louie and Millie, from "The Night after Hallowe'en" and "Cold Snap" are back, this time facing evil killer snowmen with the eleventh Doctor, a year before Moffat did evil killer snowmen on tv. Once again, it has the same issues as all the others of these.
  • "Behind You" Parts One, Two, and Three by Mark Williams (19-21 Dec. 2014). Original fiction took a few years off, but returned with this twelfth Doctor story. Again, par for the course in terms of quality, but enlivened by a couple good jokes about how Peter Capaldi's Doctor hates panto.
  • "Haunted" Parts One, Two, and Three by Joseph Lidster (21 & 23-24 Dec. 2015). The Adventure Calendar continued a couple years after this, but without original fiction, alas. But! The last of these stories was undoubtedly the best of them. Of course it was—it's by one of my favorite Doctor Who writers, Joseph Lidster, who gives us a child protagonist with meaningful struggles, a sparky twelfth Doctor, and some good twists.

That was it for Doctor Who advent calendars, I guess because that was also it for Doctor Who Christmas specials. And also that was it for the BBC web site doing anything interesting, and that was also it for the producers of Doctor Who being interested in promoting the show. (Actually, we got a lot of cool web content during 2020 in Lockdown, but I don't think any of it was Christmas-related.)

BBC Studios Web Site Stories

We did, however, get two Christmas stories from the BBC Studios Doctor Who web site, in 2016 and 2020.

  • "Christmas Special" by Cavan Scott (23 Dec. 2016). This ninth Doctor and Rose short story ties into Titan's then-ongoing comic series, also featuring the original companion and a recurring character from that series. (It's set between the two stories collected in Official Secrets.) The story is pretty minimal, and it's a tie-in to a series I found pretty ho-hum. If this was meant to promote the comic series to a wider audience, maybe Tara should have been given any indication of being interesting at all.
  • "Canaries" by Dave Rudden (15 Oct. 2020). Okay, not released seasonally at all, but it is set on Christmas. It was a tie-in to both Time Lord Victorious and the anthology The Wintertime Paradox—and indeed, doesn't quite count as "uncollected" because it was added to Wintertime Paradox for its ebook and paperback releases, and thus I have read it already. It's a prequel to Wintertime Paradox that sets up the book's villains.

Unofficial but Interesting

Lastly, this category is made up of things that are not officially licensed (so they are technically fan fiction) but have some kind of claim to quasi-official status, usually based on who wrote them.

  • "The Last Doctor" by Paul Cornell (13 Dec. 2009). Cornell posted this story on his blog. It's about what seems to be the last incarnation of the Doctor, at the very end of the universe, as the last humans experience the last Christmas. It's by Paul Cornell, so it's good—really captures that Doctor Who at Christmas vibe of hope in the face of the coldness of the universe. I really liked it, and it nicely caps off an emotional trilogy continuing from Cornell's two stories above, about the Doctor's emotional engagement with people.
  • "Mrs Wibbsey's Festive Diary" by Paul Magrs (21-27 Dec. 2013). Across seven blog entries in 2013, Paul Magrs serialized a Christmas story about Mrs Wibbsey, who was the fourth Doctor's companion in his Nest Cottage Chronicles series of audio dramas; in 2014, he rereleased it as a single post. It's told in the form of Mrs Wibbsey's diary as she waits for the Doctor to come back one Christmas in Hexford, but gets a very different Christmas visitor instead... It's by Magrs, so it has some good jokes, and is a bit meta about storytelling in a way that worked for me, especially at Christmas. (Some day I must actually listen to my Nest Cottage Chronicles box set!) Magrs collected this in an anthology of original fiction, but edited it to be about characters and situations not copyrighted to the BBC, so it became "Mrs Frimbly's Festive Diary."
  • "Who the Dickens...?" by Juliet E. McKenna (Paul Cornell's blog, 14 Dec. 2019). This third Doctor and Jo adventure was intended for Paul Cornell's Short Trips: A Christmas Treasury in 2004. However, it got cut because it conflicted with an episode of the upcoming screen revival: it features the Doctor going back in time and meeting Charles Dickens for the first time! So it was cut at the last minute, and posted to Cornell's blog fifteen years later. It's a cute story that I enjoyed reading; good handle on the Doctor and Dickens.

And that's it! It runs almost three hundred pages if formatted like the BBC's own anthologies. I have to say some of the stories are better than others—I tended to prefer ones that actually were Christmas stories rather than stories with Christmas trappings—but on the whole it makes for a nice Christmas treat to read them all.

21 December 2022

The Cruel Sea (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 30)

The Cruel Sea: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Robert Shearman, Mike Collins, Gareth Roberts, Steven Moffat, et al.

Collection published: 2014
Contents originally published: 2005-06
Acquired: December 2014
Read: September 2022

I've always been a bit salty that this book exists. Well, it would be more accurate to say that I am salty that the DWM Special Edition The Ninth Doctor Collected Comics exists. I dutifully bought that, expecting that no such graphic novel would ever come out—there just weren't enough strip adventures to justify such a collection! Eight years later, and the size of these collections had been halved, and so I bought those stories all over again, with just one addition—a prose story that I already had! Well, that and the as usual excellent extras.

So this was a reread again for me, but the added context of the extras was new. I appreciated in particular that were get to hear a lot from Mike Collins, who illustrated every DWM strip of the ninth Doctor; this is one of those eras where we have a consistent artist but not a consistent writer. I've opined before that you need one of those two, otherwise the strip doesn't feel cohesive because you don't have an actor's performance to unify the various voices as the tv programme does. And Mike Collins does good work; he's been with DWM since 1987 as a writer, and since 1991 as an artist, but I knew him first from his work on Star Trek comics for Marvel and Wildstorm and Babylon 5 comics for DC. He's good at likenesses, great at storytelling—exactly the artist you want, I reckon, when you're suddenly producing a tv tie-in strip to an actual tv programme for the first time in over fifteen years!

It's funny, in the extras to both this and the next volume, The Betrothal of Sontar, editor Clay Hickman talks about how they felt they had to a go a bit more kid-friendly now that the tv show was back... but I would hesitate to call any of the DWM strips here notably kid friendly, especially Rob Shearman's! But overall, I remembered this era as a bit of a shambles, and rereading it I didn't find that true at all. It's not perfect, but this is a solid slice of Doctor Who comics. Certainly it's much better than what DWM was putting out last time the tv programme was still on!

from Doctor Who Magazine #356
The Love Invasion, from Doctor Who Magazine #355-57 (Apr.-June 2005)
script by Gareth Roberts, story by Roberts/Hickman, pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by Dylan Teague and James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge
The ninth Doctor and Rose debut with a very solid piece of Russell T Davies pastiche. There's a lot of running back and forth in 1960s London as the Doctor and Rose must piece together what links some overly helpful young women, the death of several prominent scientists, and a woman who keeps killing aliens. There's solid humor, a decent alien motivation, and a strong sense of the voices of both Eccleston and Piper. The main thing I didn't like was that there's sort of a fake-out double ending, which felt tacked on.
Art Attack, from Doctor Who Magazine #358 (July 2005)
story & pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by Kris Justice, colours by Dylan Teague, lettering by Roger Langridge
This is a decent story with a good ending, about the Doctor and Rose coming to a futuristic art gallery, and getting caught up in an evil piece of performance art. That said, I felt like there's a better version of this story somewhere in the multiverse: a comics story about art written by an artist seems like it could have done more fun stuff than the story does, and there's surprisingly little made of the fact that both the Doctor and the alien are the last of their kinds—that would have been the emotional center of the story on tv, I think.
from Doctor Who Magazine #359
The Cruel Sea, from Doctor Who Magazine #359-62 (Aug.-Nov. 2005)
story by Robert Shearman, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge
I was pretty surprised when Mike Collins noted this as one of the best comic strips he's ever illustrated—because to me it was the weakest story in this volume. It has striking visuals—a cruise ship on the red oceans of Mars, Billie Piper in a skintight spacesuit, a woman whose face looks like a fractured mirror—and some neat uses of the medium—the conversation between the two Doctors—but even though I'm a big fan of Robert Shearman's audio work for Big Finish and his original prose fiction, I found something deeply unpleasant about reading this story. Some of the visuals struck me as inappropriate for the Doctor Who of 2005, and some I just didn't like. Well rendered, but genuinely unpleasant to think about. It's the kind of thing Shearman makes work in prose or audio, I guess (there's some gross stuff in Scherzo), but when you have to actually see it, it's very different. The characters generally are unpleasant, too—this story is very much the epitome of something that's well-crafted but just did not work for me.

When I posted the above on GallifreyBase, Rob himself popped up to opine, "I absolutely agree with you! I'm so grateful to Mike Collins for his amazing art and lovely support, but I don't think I got this story right at all. I've never been a big comics fan, and so misunderstood the particular demands of the medium - and yeah, I think I got the tone wrong completely." Phew!
from Doctor Who Annual 2006
Mr Nobody / What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow, from Doctor Who Annual 2006
stories by Scott Gray and Steven Moffat, art by John Ross and Martin Geraghty, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge
These two stories, one comics, one prose, are both from Panini's only Doctor Who Annual, and are both more child-focused than the average DWM strip. But they're still both solid. You can of course count on Scott Gray for a well put-together done-in-one, and Steven Moffat's story is a fun time travel loop. We should meet this Sally Sparrow again!
from Doctor Who Magazine #364
A Groatsworth of Wit, from Doctor Who Magazine #363-64 (Dec. 2005–Jan. 2006)
story by Gareth Roberts, pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge
The ninth Doctor's DWM tenure comes to a quick end with this, a decently fun story with some good jokes and a nice last scene. Obviously this ended up a dry run for a David Tennant episode, like some many stories in this volume, but it's different enough to be worthwhile.
Other Notes:
  • The Love Invasion, despite being three issues long, spans the entirety of Christopher Eccleston's on-screen tenure.
  • The behind-the-scenes stuff about Mike Collins trying to get Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper's likenesses down was great. On the one hand, Eccleston kept shooting down images that were too heroic and good-looking and muscular, too American comics! On the other hand, Piper just said, "Ooh, he's given me hips and tits, I like it!"
  • After all the talk of likenesses, it thus becomes very noticeable when Rose has a dream in The Cruel Sea about marrying Mickey, but we never actually see his face, presumably so the story could avoid an extra set of approvals just for a one-page sequence.
  • Elements of The Love Invasion, The Cruel Sea, What I Did on My Christmas Holidays, and A Groatsworth of Wit arguably all ended up on screen. The latter two are obvious, but Clay Hickman makes the case that The Cruel Sea influenced "The Waters of Mars." Is this an offshoot of the Flood? A GallifreyBase commenter pointed out to me that the scene in Love Invasion where the Doctor counteracts being poisoned by eating random foods was lifted for "The Unicorn and the Wasp."
  • Rose is the first companion to spontaneously appear in the strip since Benny, and only the second to ever do so. Every other previous companion was introduced, even if (as in Peri and Ace) it was a reintroduction. Between this and the Doctor's regeneration, the illusion of the DWM strip as a standalone continuous narrative is shattered. We're in for a lot of that over the next couple years...
  • Rob Shearman is, I think, the first tv writer to work on the strip since Marc Platt. (Though one other strip writer here would go on to be a tv writer, as is the case with a couple past writers.)
  • It's pretty mind-boggling to learn about the ninth Doctor strips we didn't get from the extras: Russell T Davies and Bryan Hitch writing the ninth Doctor's debut! Russell T Davies and Dave Gibbons writing his final episode!! It's a shame we've still never gotten an RTD Doctor Who comic. I don't know if comics would play to his strength like tv, but I'd certainly be interested to see it.
This post is the thirtieth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Betrothal of Sontar. Previous installments are listed below:
  1. The Iron Legion
  2. Dragon's Claw 
  3. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume One
  4. The Tides of Time
  5. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Two
  6. Voyager
  7. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Three
  8. The World Shapers
  9. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Four
  10. The Age of Chaos
  11. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Five
  12. A Cold Day in Hell!
  13. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 1)
  14. Nemesis of the Daleks
  15. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 2)
  16. The Good Soldier
  17. The Incomplete Death's Head
  18. Evening's Empire
  19. The Daleks
  20. Emperor of the Daleks
  21. The Sleeze Brothers File
  22. The Age of Chaos
  23. Land of the Blind
  24. Ground Zero
  25. End Game
  26. The Glorious Dead
  27. Oblivion
  28. Transformers: Time Wars and Other Stories
  29. The Flood

19 December 2022

James Bond 007: Permission to Die by Mike Grell et al.

There have been a lot of James Bond comic books from the 1990s onward; I don't have the inclination to pick up most of them. After his adaptation of Licence to Kill, though, Mike Grell wrote and illustrated a three-issue miniseries for Eclipse Comics and Acme Press, and that, I thought, had to be interesting. Grell is, of course, the writer and illustrator of Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters, and he excels at stories about the brutality of masculine men. How could his take on Bond not be worth picking up?

I think that technically this is only based on the novels. Certainly Grell's Bond is a generic one, not based on any specific actor, and he does have the facial scar from the novels. When Felix Leiter shows up, he has a hook for a hand, so we know Live and Let Die happened. There are also a number of reference to From Russia with Love. There must, however, be some timeline sliding akin to the films, as it's definitely 1989 in this story (a newspaper about the fall of the Berlin Wall appears on the last page of issue #3), and those novels were both published in the 1950s, and nothing gives the impression that over thirty years have passed.

Indeed, stylistically, the whole thing is clearly patterned after the films. It begins with an action-focused teaser that's not relevant to the overall story; it ends with an enormous action set piece in a villain's underground lair that's about saving the world from destruction. Bond sleeps with four different women, I think, which is more of a film thing; in the novels, it's usually just one per book.

from Ian Fleming's James Bond 007: Permission to Die #2
Grell does a great job of it, on the whole. His artwork, combined with Julia Lacquement's coloring, is lush and detailed. The action is usually excellent, and I often don't care for big action sequences in comics, but Grell really makes them work. If in 1991, someone said this was going to be the basis for the next James Bond film, I would be pretty delighted, I think. The villain is a good one, a Phantom-of-the-Operaesque fellow who plays organ in a cave underneath a mountain from which he is launching a nuclear bomb. He comes across as deadly earnest in a pretty compelling way. Some elements feel a bit rushed, especially Bond's relationships with some of the women in issue #3; one does wonder if a fourth issue could have helped. (The issues are, though, double-length, so it's equivalent to a six-issue miniseries.)

I couldn't track down any firm release dates for these issues, but the first two have 1989 copyright dates and the third a 1991 one. There is a bit of a wonkiness to the plotting that makes me wonder about the original plans here. The first two issues almost work as a complete story; they're about Bond having to extract a woman from the other side of the Iron Curtain, smuggling her out through Hungary, while the communists desperately try to stop him. Despite their filmic touches (the teaser, how big some of the action gets), those two parts feel more Fleming on the whole with their emphasis on the details and logistics of spycraft. The main thing that stops them from working on their own is that the woman's backstory is somewhat too elaborate: if that was all the story was, we wouldn't need to know so much about her uncle.

from Ian Fleming's James Bond 007: Permission to Die #3
The third issue changes locale to America and focuses on her uncle and his plot to end nuclear war, which wasn't a thing at all in the first two issues. It's set up a little, but not very much, and so feels like the climax to a different story than the one we were reading. A solid revision could smooth it all out, I reckon, but given the apparent two-year gap between issues #2 and 3, was Grell hedging his bets in case there wasn't a third issue?

Like many post-1989 Bond writers, Grell has to reckon what you do with Bond if there's no Cold War anymore. I did really like the ending moment of the story where Bond thinks about the fact that his purpose in the world is coming to an end; it's the kind of masculine angst Grell did so well in The Longbow Hunters, and to be honest, I wish we had seen more of it here. Grell never did any more Bond comics, but I would have been all over them if he had.

Ian Fleming's James Bond 007: Permission to Die was originally published in three issues (1989-91). The story was written and illustrated by Mike Grell, with art assists by Dameon Willich (#1-3), Mark Jones (#2-3), and Rick Hoberg (#3); colored by Julia Lacquement; lettered by Wayne Truman; and edited by Catherine Yronwode and Richard Hansom.

16 December 2022

Reading L. Frank Baum's The Master Key Aloud to My Son

The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale, Founded Upon The Mysteries Of Electricity And The Optimism Of Its Devotees. It Was Written For Boys, But Others May Read It
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by Nick Bruel

After we finished The Lost King of Oz, my son and I once again hit a gap; our copy of The Hungry Tiger of Oz hadn't even been shipped yet. So I showed him my three remaining non-Oz fantasies by Baum, and he picked this one.

Originally published: 1901
Previously reread: April 2009
Read aloud: July 2022

Unlike all of Baum's other fantasies, this is not what Farah Mendelsohn would call a portal-quest fantasy, but an intrusion fantasy: the protagonist does not travel through a magical world, but instead, magic intrudes into our world. A boy named Rob accidentally assembles a complicated electrical circuit that strikes the "master key," summoning the Demon of Electricity, who grants him three electrical devices a week for three weeks, which he's supposed to use to reveal the powers of electricity to the world. One of them is a machine that uses electrical currents to let him fly, and so Rob makes a couple journeys around the Earth, and gets into various shenanigans and dangers.

As a result, it's Baum's only fantasy novel that actually does not link into the Oz expanded universe (though the Demon of Electricity here has some ideas in common with Electra, the maiden of electric light, in Tik-Tok of Oz). With all the other non-Oz books, I've very carefully emphasized their links to Oz, which is usually easy to do if the countries in question appear on the International Wizard of Oz Club map of the Oz continent, or if the characters have appeared in the Oz books. But here there is actually no such link.

On top of this, one of the places Rob visits is an island of cannibals off the coast of Africa. My edition is a reillustrated Books of Wonder one from the 1990s, and thus not visually offensive (Nick Bruel draws the cannibals like comedy cavemen, and gives them fair skin), but still the text is unaltered.

So I decided to solve two problems at once: I changed the island into a magical one "near Regos and Coregos in the Nonestic Ocean" (causing my son to excitedly exclaim, "I know that place!"), and the islanders into magical creatures that eat humans.

Still, this is just a small incident of a couple chapters in a much longer book, and as we were nearing its end, my son asked when Rob was going to "visit a country near Oz," and seemed unsatisfied when I pointed out he already had. I don't think he found Rob's real-world adventures very compelling: foiling monarchist plots in republican France by giving secret information to the president just isn't the thing to spark the enthusiasm of a three-year-old boy in the year 2022.

Overall, in fact, it's a pretty downbeat book, and it has the purposeless that's common in many of Baum's early non-Oz fantasies, like Enchanted Island of Yew. Rob has no real reason to go adventuring, and most of his problems are self-inflicted; a multi-chapter incident where he ended up involved in a Turk/Tatar battle in the city of Yarkand (in western China) would not have happened if he hadn't made the mistake of falling asleep in the open and consequently getting robbed.* Also like Baum's early non-Oz fantasies (Enchanted Island again, and also King Rinkitink), it's much more violent than the Oz books, with clashing armies killing one another, and I found it unpleasant.

I once wrote and presented a paper on this book, and though it's interesting in many ways, I don't think it's anywhere near as strong as the Oz books, or even as most of Baum's other fantasies, and more of it went over the head of my son than in the other Oz/Baum books we've read recently. This had me dreading the fact that when our next Oz book still hadn't arrived by the time we finished it, that we would have to read two non-Oz books in a row, but more on that next time...

I did generally like Nick Bruel's illustrations; simple stuff, but generally effective. Clear, dark lines, and a good sense of design. He dramatizes some of the more exciting moments very well.

Next up in sequence: Queen Zixi of Ix

* I did think about changing the Turks into Mudgers, and then the Tatars into some other residents of Oz, but this seemed like it might make things a bit too complicated for me to keep track of on the fly, and as if it would raise more questions than I could answer.

14 December 2022

“During the days of World War II, a group of costumed mystery men gathered together to form the first and greatest super-hero team of all time. Now, fighting alongside the surviving original members, a new generation of heroes has been born.... Today, the JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA lives again!”

DC's JSA by Geoff Johns collections stalled out after four volumes, going up to issue #45. But JSA ran for another forty-two issues beyond that. I ended up deciding the best way to read issues #46-87 (May 2003–Sept. 2006) was through DC's digital comic service, DC Universe Infinite, where for a monthly fee you can access a vast collection of back issues. It doesn't have a Kindle app, but it worked perfectly fine in the browser on my tablet. Some of this run I had read before; specifically, I had read #56-67 and 76-81 as part of my Sandman spin-offs project, as those issues had significant developments for Lyta Hall, mother of the second Dream.

I think there are clearly two big influences on this run of JSA, which is mostly, but not entirely, written by Geoff Johns. (David Goyer departs after five issues; Keith Champagne writes some fill-ins around the time of Infinite Crisis; the series is closed out in a five-issue arc by Paul Levitz.) The first is Paul Levitz's All-Star Comics, which was the first ongoing run to do the thing Johns does here (as signalled in the first-page blurb I've used in my post title): mix original JSA heroes with a new generation. Levitz's series co-starred WWII-era JSA members like Wildcat and Green Lantern with descendants and legatees like Huntress and Power Girl. Johns very much takes that approach; Jay Garrick co-exists with Jakeem Thunder. The other influence is Roy Thomas's Infinity, Inc. That comic wasn't a JSA one, but focused on the JSA's legacy. Thomas's comic evolved the status quo of many JSA characters, giving them children and marriages and new life developments. Put both of these approaches together and, I would argue, you have the major influences on Geoff Johns's approach to JSA.

JSA even features a variety of one-time Infinc stars: Al "Nuklon" Rothstein is now the JSA's Atom-Smasher. Rick Tyler, son of the original Hourman, is one of three different Hourmen to serve during this run. Alan Scott's daughter Jade puts in a few appearances, his son Obsidian does so as well. Hector "Silver Scarab" Hall is the new Doctor Fate, and his wife Lyta "Fury" Hall is brought out of the Vertigo universe. Northwind and Brainwave Jr. show up, as well, and though Yolanda "Wildcat" Martinez is dead, her cousin is a recurring character. Power Girl wasn't a big Infinc player outside of its opening arc, but she's here too. The Star-Spangled Kid is dead, but of course JSA member Stargirl inherits his legacy, and his sidekick. Basically the only Infinity, Inc. members to not show up or influence JSA are Helena "Huntress" Wayne, who was eradicated from continuity, and Beth "Doctor Midnight" Chapel, who was dead (and is never even mentioned because she was replaced by a white man).

But if you are an Infinity, Inc. fan there is little to enjoy in the callbacks. Of the original Infinity, Inc. members, Atom-Smasher, Obsidian, Northwind, and Brainwave all become villains during JSA. So does Wildcat's cousin. One or two could be interesting, but when it happens to four-or-five of them, it begins to feel repetitive and obnoxious. Part of the joy of superhero comic universes is to see characters you like again and again... but it brings me no joy for Northwind to be reduced to a snarling animal without any dialogue and turn evil for no readily apparent reason. (And let's not linger on the optics of this happening to a character coded as Native American.) Same goes for Obsidian, for Brainwave, for Atom-Smasher. I liked these characters in Infinity, Inc.; my reward for that is to see Brainwave assaulting people. Rick Tyler is killed off so his father can be brought back. Hector and Lyta do okay, at least.

As an undergraduate, I read a little bit of—or, to be honest, maybe just about—the "anxiety of influence" in a class on performativity in Victorian drama. That was twenty years ago, so I cannot claim to be au fait with the ideas of Harold Bloom. But I seem to recall that the later writer is anxious about the influence of the earlier writer, and thus in many cases seeks to destroy or undermine him. Does Geoff Johns destroy Roy Thomas's characters as a way of attempting to eradicate Roy Thomas's influence on him? I don't know enough about Bloom to say... but it was a pretty obnoxious pattern to see play out in this title again and again.

When JSA isn't involved in multi-part storylines about mass murder, which is unfortunately most of the time, it's a pretty good comic book. I usually liked the done-in-ones the best; there's a fun Thanksgiving issue, and a great Christmas issue about the JSA protecting Santa Claus. There's a nice Stargirl story about what she's up to during Infinite Crisis. But I found much of this run an unappealing slog, with little of the sense of fun or brightness or character that makes me enjoy a superhero comic. The basic premise here is good—a multigenerational superhero team where the characters can evolve and change—but little about the execution was ever enjoyable.

This post is thirty-seventh in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers JSA: Strange Adventures. 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) ["Man-God!" (1976)]
  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)
  22. Justice Society of America vol. 2 (1992-93)
  23. The Adventures of Alan Scott--Green Lantern (1992-93)
  24. Damage (1994-96)
  25. The Justice Society Returns! (1999-2001)
  26. Chase (1998-2002)
  27. Stargirl by Geoff Johns (1999-2003)
  28. The Sandman Presents: The Furies (2002)
  29. JSA by Geoff Johns, Book One (1999-2000)
  30. Wonder Woman: The 18th Letter: A Love Story (2000)
  31. Two Thousand (2000)
  32. JSA by Geoff Johns, Book Two (1999-2003)
  33. Golden Age Secret Files & Origins (2001)
  34. JSA by Geoff Johns, Book Three (1999-2003)
  35. JSA by Geoff Johns, Book Four (2002-03)
  36. JSA Presents Green Lantern (2002-08)

12 December 2022

Library of America: The Kairos Novels by Madeleine L'Engle: A Wrinkle in Time / The Arm of the Starfish / A Wind in the Door / Dragons in the Waters

The Kairos Novels by Madeleine L'Engle
The Wrinkle in Time Quartet
: A Wrinkle in Time / A Wind in the Door / A Swiftly Tilting Planet / Many Waters
The Polly O'Keefe Quartet: The Arm of the Starfish / Dragons in the Waters / A House Like a Lotus / An Acceptable Time

As a child, I was a big fan of Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time trilogy, as I thought of it. I didn't learn about the existence of the fourth book of the so-called "Time Quartet" until high school, and I had a dim awareness that there were books about Meg and Calvin's children (I think I had a cousin who owned Arm of the Starfish), but never read them. At some point as an adult, I became aware that L'Engle actually wrote a massive amount of interconnected fiction, and I even wrote out a chronology, but I have never gotten around to reading them.

Collection published: 2018
Novels originally published: 1962-73
Acquired: July 2021
Read: August–September 2022

I've become a bit obsessed with Library of America editions of classic science fiction and fantasy. I got into them with Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin, but now I get basically every one that comes out; when I realized there was a Library of America box set that contained all four Meg novels and all four novels about her daughter, Polly, I put it on my birthday list, and my wife was kind enough to buy it for me. (I assume this was put out to capitalize on the Disney film, which I've never seen. It would be nice if LOA put out another volume with the Austin family novels, but I assume that will never come to pass at this point.)

Something I hadn't realized until I sat down to read these was that L'Engle actually wrote the Polly books concurrently with the Meg one, essentially alternating, even though the Polly ones take place a generation later. Thus, I decided to read through the series in (mostly) publication order, so I could see how L'Engle developed her ideas over time; that would also break up the novels I'd already read. Here on the blog, I'm going to review them in two chunks.

A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
The original novel seems to be most people's favorite, and certainly I had fond memories of it from when I was a kid. It's filled with great concepts: Mrs Who, Mrs Which, and Mrs Whatsit; the Happy Medium; the tesseract; the dystopia of Camazotz including IT the giant brain and the CENTRAL Central Intelligence building. Meg is a great character, and Calvin is basically the best boyfriend in all literature as far as I'm concerned. 

I found myself somewhat unmoved this time. I liked the early stuff in the book, about Meg, Calvin, Charles Wallace, the family in general. Meg's a great character for capturing what it is to feel weird and alone and unaccomplished. (That said, one scene I remembered really liking turned out to actually be from A Wind in the Door.) Once the characters move into traveling through space/time, though, it felt like a succession of events more than a story: oh now they're here, oh now they're here. And I don't think it's a fault of L'Engle, but Camazotz was frightening and fascinating to me as a kid, but a lifetime of reading dystopian fiction later, and I felt like I'd seen it before, even if L'Engle was one of the first. I like that Meg saves the day by embracing her own faults, but eh, I dunno. When I got to the end, my reaction was, "I can see why I liked this as a kid, and I can definitely imagine giving it to my own kid, but I didn't find much to get out of this as an adult."

The notes here by editor Leonard S. Marcus are interesting: he has a lot to say about the varied manuscripts of Wrinkle, and also there are some good cultural insights. In particular, the fact that the CENTRAL Central Intelligence building is a comment on the CIA had never occurred to me. Clearly it would be easy to read Camazotz as a Cold War–era commentary on communism, but L'Engle was also criticizing her own country's actions.

The Arm of the Starfish (1965)
Though I never would have read it otherwise, I think packing this novel as part of "The Polly O'Keefe Quartet" does it a disservice, because it is not remotely a Polly O'Keefe novel. This was clearly not intended as the start of a series about Polly, nor even really thought of as a continuation of a series about Meg and Calvin.

Rather, I feel like L'Engle wanted to write about book about a boy named Adam Eddington and needed a marine biologist character, and thought to herself, "What if the marine biologist was Calvin from my other book? It would be neat to see what Calvin and Meg were up to." So it's more like a fun cameo for people who read A Wrinkle in Time than anything else. (I can't find it now, but while reading these books I came across a tweet that went something like, "Forget the MCU, I only want the MLCU: The Madeleine L'Engle Cinematic Universe." Her books really do use that modern comic book–style of storytelling where it's like, why invent a new character when you can cross things over by including an old one?)

If you approach Arm of the Starfish that way, it's a fine book if not a great one. I really like the beginning, actually. Adam is a young man discovering himself and the world when he's thrust into a complicated situation beyond his control. While Wrinkle in Time is science fantasy, Arm of the Starfish is sf thriller: the maguffin is the idea that human could regenerate limbs akin to starfish, but that's not directly relevant to the story. The story, rather, is about learning how to do the right thing even when the right thing is difficult and dangerous. L'Engle keeps you on your toes at first, but I did find that as the novel went out, it slowed down for me. The thriller elements begin to feel a bit contrived, and Adam's uncertainty becomes harder to believe in.

As I read these novels, I read Mari Ness's thoughts at the Madeleine L'Engle Reread over on Tor.com; she was particularly helpful for discussing the many other L'Engle novels that connect to the so-called "Kairos" ones. I really enjoy Ness's thoughts on the Oz novels (that I am reading with my son), but found her thoughts on Arm of the Starfish a bit frustrating. I can see that Arm would be an annoying book if you read it as the next novel after A Swiftly Tilting Planet: Polly isn't really a focal character, Meg isn't even directly called "Meg." But in its original context, that's clearly just not what it's trying to be. Ness even acknowledges this, but it still seems to taint her reading of the book. She complains that Polly is not a good protagonist character... but Polly clearly was not designed to be a protagonist character. Despite the collection I read this in, it's not a Polly O'Keefe novel, it's an Adam Eddington novel with a supporting character named Polly O'Keefe.

Similarly, Ness complains, "This book contains no hint that two of its major adult characters traveled through time and space." But this is typical for L'Engle, and for the era—we're long, long before YA series become de rigeur, and each of L'Engle's Murray/O'Keefe books, especially the earlier ones, is clearly designed to work as a standalone, to the extent that they are all possible to read and not know that other books about these characters even exist. Yes, there's no hint of what Meg and Calvin did here... but there's also no hint that they previously traveled through time and space in A Wind in the Door, the second book in their actual series!

Something that came to fascinate me about these books is the (very wonky) chronology. I think A Wrinkle in Time has nothing that would lead us to believe it's not set when it was written, in the 1960s. Arm of the Starfish must be set a generation later, and indeed, there's a small comment from Calvin (highlighted by editor Leonard Marcus) about how back in the 1960s scientists created human fetuses in a test tube, but "their development went awry" and they became deformed monstrosities. Marcus points out that there were no "test tube babies" when this book was published; IVF first succeeded in 1978. Other than that, there's no attempt at futurism from L'Engle here, but the book must take place sometime after the 1960s.

A Wind in the Door (1973)
Something I hadn't realized reading these books as a kid is the long time period they were released over. This came out over a decade after A Wrinkle in Time. No wonder there are no direct references to Wrinkle in it, not even very obvious ones (surely the Echthroi are somehow related to the Black Thing?); anyone who had read Wrinkle in Time as a kid when it was released would have been an adult by the time of A Wind in the Door. She would have been chasing a whole new audience!

As a kid, this was always my least favorite of the original three novels. Other than the story about Calvin's plant and his home life, it did nothing for me at all; in particular, I found all the stuff about the farandolae inside Charles Wallace's mitochondrion tedious in the extreme.

To my surprise, this was my favorite of all eight Kairos novels. As an adult, the challenge of Meg figuring out who was the real version of her obnoxious high school principal, and who was the Echthroi impersonator, resonated much more with me. I really liked the idea of Naming, that to Name someone is to love someone, and therefore in order to Name Mr. Jenkins, Meg needed to figure out a way to love him. I liked the way this headed in the climax of the story, which features a particular audacious act of Naming—and thus of loving—from Meg. As someone who takes his responsibilities seriously (I hope, anyway), I liked that the villains were merely beings who wanted to avoid theirs. It was a natural but tragic path.

Above all else, I liked this conversation between Meg's parents. Mrs. Murry is despairing about both the state of her son Charles Wallace and the state of American society in general:

[H]er father reach[ed] across the table for her mother's hand. “My dear, this is not like you. With my intellect, I see cause for nothing but pessimism and even despair. But I can’t settle for what my intellect tells me. That's not all of it.”
     “What else is there?” Mrs. Murry’s voice was low and anguished.
     “There are still stars which move in ordered and beautiful rhythm. There are still people in this world who keep promises. Even little ones, like your cooking stew over your Bunsen burner. You may be in the middle of an experiment, but you still remember to feed your family. That's enough to keep my heart optimistic, no matter how pessimistic my mind. And you and I have good enough minds to know how very limited and finite they really are. The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.”

In a time where it feels very easy to give into despair, I found here a little bit of hope to cling onto, and that's the real power of this book—for all her fault, Meg can save the world through love.

This is the first book to indicate that the Murray novels take place sometime in the future. Meg's mother is old enough to remember the moon landing... but young enough that another character thinks she might not remember the moon landing. So born in the early 1960s? (My parents were born in 1963 and '64, and my father remembers the moon landing but my mother does not.) I don't think we ever get a specific age for Dr. Kate Murry, but given she's old enough to have a teenage daughter, that would seem to put these novels in the late 1990s at the earliest, probably the early 2000s. (If the Murrays are about the same age as my own parents, it makes me want to think of Meg as the same age as me, which would put this book in the year 2000. If the Murrays waited longer to have children, then it takes place even later.) There's also a reference to humans landing on Mars. Similarly, the Wall Street Journal article that teaches Calvin about the emotional lives of plants is said to be very old (it's wrapping up china in the O'Keefe attic), but it's a real article that actually came out in 1972, the year before the novel.

Collection published: 2018
Novels originally published: 1965-76
Acquired: July 2021
Read: September 2022

Dragons in the Waters (1976)
Like Arm of the Starfish, this is not a Polly O'Keefe book, just a book that has Polly O'Keefe in it, even if she does get some viewpoint scenes, and we also learn a bit about her little brother Charles, too.

It's a Simon Renier novel. Simon is, like Adam, a young man on the cusp of adulthood trying to figure out his place in the world. The novel has a somewhat complicated plot; it takes place on a freighter heading to Venezuela, which has taken on passengers that include Simon, his cousin, Calvin and his two oldest kids, a pair older women academics, and some others besides. There are shenanigans on board (a missing portrait, an attempted murder, and eventually an actual murder), and we follow mostly Simon.

What I liked was the tone. Simon is young but has lived a melancholy life; he's an orphan who grew up with an elderly great-aunt in a decaying house. That sense of melancholy pervades the novel. We occasionally cut to the other characters, and they all have their reasons to feel melancholy.

On the other hand, though, the novel eventually begins to enter a holding pattern. The cuts to those characters start to feel repetitive. Yes, they all feel sad about their lives, I get it. The plot on the ship seems to move as slowly as the ship itself. Eventually, it gets where they are going, and things heat up again, but as Simon embraces his destiny among the natives of Venezuela, it gets a bit wacky. Yes, it's a book about dealing with and accounting for past mistakes, but I'm not persuaded that this needed to happen generationally. This is a theme L'Engle will come back to in her next book, though. More on that when I get around to covering the last four Kairos novels...