Legion: Secret Origin by Paul Levitz, Chris Batista, and Marc Deering

Legion: Secret Origin

Collection published: 2012
Contents originally published: 2011-12
Acquired: May 2019
Read: October 2021

Writer: Paul Levitz

Penciller: Chris Batista
Inker: Marc Deering
Colorist: Wes Hartman

Letterer: Dezi Sienty

I haven't read much of the so-called "deboot" era of Legion of Super-Heroes, when the continuity was reset to be as it was in the 1980s because nothing screams "teenagers of the future" like "making it like it was thirty years ago." Whenever I do read something from this era, I am kinda baffled. Never bad... but always pointless.

This, I think, is supposed to recap the Legion's origin for new readers but also fill in some background for old readers. Unfortunately, none of it is interesting. The origin we've seen a million times by now, and Levitz tries to make it interesting by putting it in the background while putting the machinations of the United Planets' secret police and the Time Trapper in the foreground. It doesn't work. The origin is such a background element that one doesn't really get a sense of why anyone would care about the Legion; it has nice roles for Phantom Girl and (less so) Brainiac Five, but the rest of the characters feel like they are barely there.

What is put into the foreground is even less interesting; I never cared about any of the new(?) characters, and there's less a plot and more bits of a plot arbitrarily strung together with some foreshadowing. It's deadly dull stuff, and the story never takes off.

The idea of this kind of way of doing a Legion origin is okay—the Bierbaums, Giffen, and Al Gordon did a great one during the "Five Years Later" era by focusing on Marla Latham—but the execution makes it clear that these were "secrets" no one needed to know about.

The best part of the book is the damning-with-faint-praise back cover blurb someone at DC picked for the back cover:

It explicitly says it doesn't give good background to the characters, but they slapped it on the cover anyway! Note that in the actual review, the first sentence is "I'm not 100% convinced 'Legion: Secret Origin' would be the perfect introduction to the 'Legion of Super-Heroes' in general." so it's a pretty unethical use of ellipses as well. But given the quality of the book, this is probably the best blurb they could find. It's not even so bad it's good, it's the kind of thing you'll forget about a few days after reading it.

I read a Legion of Super-Heroes collection every six months. Next up in sequence: Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes: The Early Years

The Adventures of Alan Scott--Green Lantern by Roger Stern, Ron Marz, Dusty Abell, Jim Balent, Andrew Pepoy, et al.

While reading Justice Society of America vol. 2, I learned from the lettercol that at the same time, Alan Scott had his own feature in the short-lived Green Lantern Corps Quarterly series. I don't necessarily track down every solo appearance of every JSA member, but these seemed to have some focus on Alan's family life, which meant appearances by Jade and Obsidian of Infinity, Inc., plus Alan's marriage to the original Harlquin, also an Infinc concept. So I went ahead and tracked it down. (I skipped the final issue, #8; it featured Lobo, so it goes for $20 at least these days. No thanks.)

GLC Quarterly was an ongoing anthology comic about various members of the Green Lantern Corps; each issue had 54 story pages. Typically, there was a short frame story, an eighteen-page lead story about a new Green Lantern character, a twelve-page Alan Scott story, a twelve-page G'nort story, and a short story either about a preexisting character ("Whatever Happened to...?") or a previously unknown Earth Green Lantern ("The History of Sector 2814"). Issue #7 switches things up somewhat, and features two Alan Scott tales. (In issue #8, the Alan Scott story is actually a flashback tale, so I feel justified in excluding it.)

from Green Lantern Corps Quarterly #3
(script by Roger Stern, art by Dusty Abell & Mark McKenna)

The first four stories are written by Roger Stern, and mostly feature art by Dusty Abell and Steve Mitchell. Roger Stern is one of those comics writers who I wouldn't call "great" but you can depend upon to turn in a satisfactory story, in my experience, and that's exactly what he does here. Across his four tales, we get an origin recap, a family reunion, a visit to the grave of Dinah Drake Lance (the original Black Canary), a battle with Solomon Grundy, and a visit to Doiby Dickle's adoptive home planet.

This is solid stuff. I always like seeing a superhero's family, and though twelve pages don't leave a ton of room for it, we get a good sense of the affection Alan has for his found family. The best story was, to my surprise, the Doiby Dickles one, which treats this goofy character with enough affection that I found myself charmed: Alan and Molly visit his new planet, and discover that he's remade it into a tribute to the place and time he's left behind. Dusty Abell is an artist I don't have much experience with—I do remember a solid turn on the "Five Years Later" Legion of Super-Heroes—but he proves himself well-suited to the classic heroism of a Golden Age character. All in all, enjoyable stuff. I was pleased also to see the whole JSA paying tribute to Dinah, who died while they were in limbo; it's a nice touch that keeps these characters feeling real.

from Green Lantern Corps Quarterly #7 (script by Ron Marz,
art by Mark Tenney & Wade Von Grawbadger)

With issue #4, though, Jim Balent and Andrew Pepoy take over the art, and with issue #5, Ron Marz takes over the writing. The result is an immediate, jarring change in style and tone: overwrought, angsty, verging on the 1990s "xtreme" aesthetic stuff. There's a new Harlequin taunting Alan; later, Alan is de-aged, and in issue #7, we learn this is because of the power of the Starheart, the ejected magic core of the Power Batter on Oa that gave Alan his powers. Alan becomes the new "Sentinel," abandoning his Green Lantern identity. It was all rather rushed and under-explained, even though issue #7 gives us two Alan Scott stories, and makes his story the frame narrative.

This is all because, I think, of the impending Emerald Twilight storyline, the end goal of which was to make Kyle Rayner the only Green Lantern in the universe; if Alan was to go on, he needed a new superhero identity. I am not a fan, but I guess I'm glad he wasn't killed off. However, this material doesn't feel rooted in the life and history of Alan Scott like Stern's; it's much more generic action-adventure with a dose of darkness that feels gratuitous.

I thought the Harlequin here was the same new one who bedevilled Infinity, Inc. back in the day, Marcie Cooper, but the DC wiki tells me that she's a new character who only appeared in two more issues a few years later (Underworld Unleashed #1 and Green Lantern vol. 3 #71), and who we never really learn anything about. It seems to me it would make more sense for her to be Marcie, based on what she knows about Alan's personal life.

This could make a nice little trade if anyone was ever so motivated, but I doubt anyone ever will be. Still, the first four issues are worth picking up if you are into the JSA legacy elements, and I assume the last three will be important for understanding future Alan Scott stories if nothing else.

(It's not my focus here, but I did read all the stories in this title. Some were quite good! There's a charming Mark Waid/Ty Templeton collaboration in issue #2, I really liked the story of the woman who turned down the Guardians in issue #4, Elliot S! Maggin has a neat one-off about an alien GL in issue #5, and so help me, I even liked the G'nort feature at times.)

The Adventures of Alan Scott--Green Lantern were originally published in issues #1-7 of Green Lantern Corps Quarterly (Summer 1992–Winter 1993). The stories were written by Roger Stern (#1-4) and Ron Marz (#5-7); pencilled by Dusty Abell (#1-3), Jim Balent (#4-6), Darryl Banks (#7), and Mark Tenney (#7); inked by Steve Mitchell (#1-2), Mark McKenna (#3), Andrew Pepoy (#4-6), Terry Austin (#7), and Wade Von Grawbadger (#7); lettered by Bob Lappan (#1-3), Bob Pinaha (#4-5, 7), and Albert DeGuzman (#6); colored by Anthony Tollin (#1), Matt Webb (#2-5, 7), and Stuart Chaifetz (#6); and edited by Kevin Dooley (#1-7) and Eddie Berganza (#6-7).

 

This post is twenty-third in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Damage. 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)
• Wonder Woman: Earth-Two (1977-78)
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)
    

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow

I read this as part of my ongoing exploration of life-extension technology sf for a class I am eventually going to teach. (As of the time I write this in October 2021, this class has finally been scheduled... for Spring 2024! I guess I have a lot of  time to read prospective texts.) I know of Cory Doctorow, of course, as both an sf writer and a cultural critic, but I have never actually read anything by him before aside from a single short story in a Lou Anders Fast Forward collection, so I was curious to see what I thought. I picked up Walkaway because I had read it was, in part, about mind uploading, and specifically I was intrigued by what I had read, that "[p]art of the process is altering the simulation's mental state into something that will be psychologically okay with being a simulation of a dead person."

Published: 2017
Read: July 2021

This idea is indeed intriguing; unfortunately, you have to read the whole rest of the book in order to read about it. This book starts out okay, but then you soon realize that it's a bunch of people giving other people lectures about what an ideal society looks like, repeat for over 350 pages. It's clearly in dialogue with Le Guin's The Dispossessed... it's clearly also so so inferior to The Dispossessed as a utopian text as to be insulting. I dragged myself through to the end of its relentless mediocrity out of some sense of obligation (it's more a series of novellas than a novel, and maybe I would find that one of them worked on its own in a teachable way), and it took me weeks to do it. The actual society is interesting; the characters and a plot are not. The mind uploading thing is barely even a significant component of the book, and not really relevant thematically. Dull and rambling. I will not be teaching it!

Reading The Emerald City of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Emerald City of Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

Since The Wizard of Oz, my elder son and I pretty much plunged from Oz book to Oz book, a chapter most days, if not two or more. In September, having finished The Road to Oz, we went straight into The Emerald City of Oz.

Originally published: 1910
Acquired: September 2021
Read aloud: September & December 2021

And about halfway through, we just stopped. I don't know what it was exactly; he's grasping narrative more and more, but articulating this I guess was beyond him. But he suddenly stopped asking if we could read Oz, and started rejecting my offers to read it. Eventually, I stopped offering; I did bring it with us on a trip to New Jersey to October, and one time he picked it as his bedtime book, but other than that, nothing, no interest. Was this the end of our great experiment? It sat forlorn on an end table for months.

No, because totally unprompted one December day, he said, "I want to read Oz!" And so it was back on, in a consistent run that has pretty much gone straight through to February, though he shows signs of slowing down again as of late.

Was it just general Oz burnout? Or did he dislike this Oz book in particular? Or was my own disdain for it influencing my performance? Because it is by my count, the weakest of the original six books.

I do know that it seemed as though he wasn't into any of the chapters detailing what the Nomes were up to; this is the first Oz book to use a device that Baum would periodically return to, of switching between different groups of characters in different places, instead of staying with a single person or group the entire time. Exactly what General Guph was doing with what set of would-be Nome allies seemed to be something he never really grasped the importance of.

The problem is, though, that nothing really happens in this book. While the Nomes plot their invasion of Oz, Dorothy and her family move to the Emerald City... and then just go on a pleasant tour of the Land of Oz. They are literally not trying to accomplish anything! And without that sense of forward progress, there's no interest to the individual encounters, Baum introduces no new characters of note. The defeat of the Nomes is almost by accident. I didn't much enjoy reading this one aloud, and it seems that my son didn't either. No wonder he gave up, and I am pretty grateful he reversed his decision!

As always, the Books of Wonder facsimile looks pretty nice. The green ink is a cool touch... that said, I don't really remember any standout illustrations.

Doctor Who: The Good Companion by Nick Abadzis and Giorgia Sposito

Doctor Who: The Tenth Doctor: Facing Fate, Vol. 3: The Good Companion

Collection published: 2018
Contents originally published: 2017-18
Read: October 2021

Writer: Nick Abadzis
Artist: Giorgia Sposito
Colorists: Adele Matera & Arianna Florean
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

This was pretty good! I think when it works, it's when it focuses on the characters of the tenth Doctor, Cindy, and especially Gabby. Slightly too late, but I felt like I finally understood their dynamic here, and the story was all the better for it. I was prepared to declare this great, but in the last couple issues, the stakes got a bit too abstract, and once again, Abadzis anticipates the Chibnall approach by piling on the characters in any given scene, to its detriment. Do I care about this dude's wife who got replaced by a Time Sentinel? No not really. But the ultimate outcome of Gabby's story is pretty great, and you can see how this leaves the tenth Doctor in a good place for his last few screen adventures. Shame this series ended as it finally regained its footing, though I feel like it might have regained its footing because it was ending.

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: A Confusion of Angels

The Daleks (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 19)

 The Daleks

Collection published: 2020
Contents originally published: 1965-67
Acquired: September 2021
Read: October 2021

Written by Angus Allan, Alan Fennell, Terry Nation, David Whitaker
Illustrated by Richard Jennings, Eric Eden, Ron Turner

The Daleks was a sequence of one-page strips that ran in the anthology comic TV Century 21 from 1965 to 1967. It was reprinted in restored form as a "bookazine" by Doctor Who Magazine in late 2020; I added it to my DWM marathon, placing it between Evening's Empire and Emperor of the Daleks by virtue of the fact that some of the strips were reprinted in DWM at around that time, in issues #180-93. A flimsy excuse, but hey, it's my marathon.

These stories do not feature the Doctor; they are usually told from the perspective of the Daleks themselves, though occasionally other characters become the protagonists. It begins with the beginning of the Daleks—at least as it was envisioned in 1965, with the Daleks being mutations due to the war between the Daleks and the Thals. There are no Kaleds or Davros here. The stories then move forward through time, following things like the Daleks exploiting a crashed spaceship to develop space travel, their first invasion of an alien world, their battles against the mutations of their own world, an attempted uprising by a Dalek named "Zeg," their war with the Mechanoids, their discovery of a planet called "Earth," a new Dalek fad of protecting beauty, and so on.

from TV Century 21 #20
(script by David Whitaker, art by Richard Jennings)

The plots kind of don't matter; the science is often (always) nonsensical. But there is a pure delight to be find in a story that causes you to root for the Dalek Emperor or hope that the Daleks do invade a planet. The Daleks might be metaphors for fascism in other stories; in these, they're just pure force, and the joy of the stories is in seeing them sweep up their enemies in all forms. Nothing stops a Dalek!

The art is amazing. We have two distinct styles. Richard Jennings's is more painterly and more detailed, more traditionally "British comics" in its appearance. A Dalek being destroyed from the inside by a malevolent flower is an amazing sight! He's later succeeded by Ron Turner, whose more abstract style communicates the pure power of the Daleks, layouts bursting with energy. I was particularly taken by the set of strips focusing on Agent 2K, an android dispatched by aliens to prevent a Dalek-Mechanoid war from breaking out.

from TV Century 21 #66
(script by David Whitaker, art by Ron Turner)

It's definitely aimed at seven-year-olds, but I found it the exact kind of read I needed when stuck at home sick, and I appreciated getting to read these for historical reasons: the Dalek Emperor originally appeared here, and this is also the source of the Dalek lettering later used across numerous Doctor Who tie-ins (though it's only actually used in about a dozen strips, curiously).

This post is the nineteenth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers Emperor of the Daleks. 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
    

Potty Training Troubles

People joke that when you become a parent, you start spending a lot of your time thinking about poop, but it's the kind of thing that one doesn't really understand until one lives it. When your kid wears diapers, of course there's a lot of poop, but I found it really took over our lives when potty training came along. When your kid just poops in a diaper, it's easy if unpleasant to deal with; when your kid can poop in their underwear, you spend so much time and energy thinking about this.

We've been potty training since the summer. Son One sometimes has good patches, sometimes rough. There was a point, I swear to God, where he would just stop doing what he was doing and go off to go "pod." At some point, he stopped doing this, and just started going in his underwear again. Now, he's much better at holding it than he once was. So if you get him on the potty periodically, things can be fine, because he'll just go then.

In fact, he seems to put superhuman strength into holding it, especially his poops. When we traveled home for Christmas, he didn't poop for days, because he didn't want to poop in an unfamiliar environment. He would just sit on the potty and do nothing. "I am trying," he insists. "Trying means not pooping." "No," I say, "trying means doing your best to make the poop come." "No!" he screams. "I don't want to do my best!"

Well, clearly.

He clearly doesn't like it when he pees his pants or gets poop in his underwear, but he is also often unwilling to actually do anything proactive about it. We've tried different reward systems: candy with his after-dinner snack if he has no accidents all day, now we're doing stickers every time he goes in the potty, with Paw Patrol toys every fourteen stickers.

The first day stickers went great. He actually looked at the sticker chart once, said, "I have to pee," then ran into the bathroom and did it. 

Nothing like that has ever happened again. We're back to having to make him go in to the bathroom, though at least the stickers sometimes reduce the resistance. Sometimes. Other times, he adopts his usual obstinate mode. "Don't you want a sticker?" I'll ask. "You'll get a Paw Patrol toy." "I don't want a Paw Patrol toy! I don't like Paw Patrol!" This past Saturday, where he managed to poop in his underwear four times by 10am... well, to say I felt frustrated would be a massive understatement. I think that if the morning starts off bad, alas, the rest of the day struggles to recover from it, and he stays stuck in a negative mindset. Sunday was not too bad; he got a lot of stickers, though he still had one accident.

On the other hand, I remember feeling much more frustrated last semester. I don't remember exactly when it was, but I remember venting to Hayley that I felt like a prisoner in my own home. We couldn't go anywhere and do anything because the chance of an accident was too high, and I was starting to feel a lot of resentment. Now, I don't feel that so much, and we've had a number of successful outings with minimal problems. Like I said, he can devote superhuman strength to holding in his pees and poops—the issue more seems to be when we're at home, and he's just playing with magnetic tiles, then he doesn't bother.

I guess I feel like there's a light at the end of the tunnel, which upon reflection seems a bit irrational because I also feel like we've largely plateaued. But if being irrational keeps me going through this, then I will be a bit irrational. At least I am not as irrational as he is! (Seriously! If you could just reason with a three year old, how nice would that be.)

(If your kid was a dream to potty train, please do not let me know. If you have advice, I guess I would listen, but I feel like I have almost certainly heard it before. If you want to commiserate, or tell me that after nine months of pooping in his underwear, your kid did figure it out, that would be all right.)

Capitol by Orson Scott Card

Capitol: The Worthing Chronicle

by Orson Scott Card

When I was discussing my life-extension technology class with the professors I am co-teaching with, the sociology prof mentioned issues of inequality; only rich people can afford things like Alcor right now. That caused Orson Scott Card's The Worthing Chronicle to pop into my head. Worthing Chronicle was a rewrite of Card's first novel, Hot Sleep, which had a companion book, a collection of short stories called Capitol, which gave the backstory for it. Capitol is the Trantoresque (now we would say Coruscantesque, I guess, but not in 1979) center of a galactic empire, where the elite spend much of their time in suspended animation; the richer you are, the more you can afford. This only multiplies the power of the elite. I had read a selection of stories from Capitol in The Worthing Saga, a collection from Tor that republished Worthing Chronicle along with some related short fiction, but I had never read the book itself. So I tracked it down to see if there were any stories in it that would be worth teaching in our class.

Collection published: 1980
Contents originally published: 1978-79
Acquired: January 2021
Read: March 2021

There is indeed some good stuff. "Skipping Stones" is a decent tale about two boys, one rich and one poor, who grow increasingly separate thanks to use of somec (the drug that creates the suspended animation). I also really enjoyed "Second Chance," which deals with some issues of memory manipulation as well; those are the two that seemed particularly worth teaching in the context of our class.

Outside of that theme, there are some other solid stories here. "Lifeloop" is a trifle obvious but well written, about a person whose whole life is broadcast (we would now say "streamed") such that the self has become a performance, even more relevant now, I suspect, than it would have been in 1979. "And What Will We Do Tomorrow?" delves into the psychology of Mother, the ancient ruler of Capitol, who uses somec so much she's only awake for a day every five years.

I checked the contents of Capitol against the ISFDB's entry for Worthing Saga as I went, and I have to say, I think Card absolutely made the right call on which stories he kept in print, and which ones he did not. Many of the stories here, especially earlier in the book are bad, clumsy vehicles for exposition about Capitol and somec that don't make any sense, especially "A Sleep and a Forgetting." So Capitol is more an interesting curio than something worth tracking down on its own merits; if you want the good stuff, you can already get that from The Worthing Saga.

Doctor Who: The Lost Dimension by George Mann, Cavan Scott, Rachael Stott, Mariano Laclaustra, et al.

Collection published: 2018
Contents originally published: 2017
Read: September 2021

Collection published: 2018
Contents originally published: 2017
Read: September 2021

Doctor Who: The Lost Dimension, Book One

Writers: George Mann, Cavan Scott & Nick Abadzis
Artists: Rachael Stott, Adriana Melo, Cris Bolson, Mariano Laclaustra, Carlos Cabrera, Leandro Casco, & I. N. J. Culbard, with Pasquale Qualano, Mony Castillo, Klebs Jr, JR Bastos, & Fer Centurion
Colorists: Rod Fernandes, Marco Lesko, Dijjo Lima, & Hernán Cabrera

Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

 

Doctor Who: The Lost Dimension, Book Two

Writers: Gordon Rennie, Emma Beeby, George Mann & Cavan Scott
Artists: Ivan Rodriguez, Wellington Diaz, Rachael Stott & Mariano Laclaustra, with Anderson Cabral, Marcelo Salaza & Fer Centurion
Colorists: Thiago Ribiero, Mauricio Wallace, Rod Fernandes & Carlos Cabrera, with Mony Castillo
Letters: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

 

Titan's Doctor Who crossovers got bigger every year. This one is eight issues and two collected editions, and crossed through its ongoings (instead of just featuring characters from them), taking in issues of The Tenth Doctor: Year Three, The Eleventh Doctor: Year Three, and The Twelfth Doctor: Year Three. It also features the ninth Doctor, Rose, Jack, Tara, Madame Vastra, and Jenny; Jenny, the Doctor's daughter; the fourth Doctor and second Romana; and River Song in a set of specials. Plus every other incarnation of the Doctor puts in at least a one-scene cameo. Is that enough already?

 

It is, in fact, too much. It follows the Big Finish model: the characters are mostly separate for most of it, which means they undertake pretty generic adventures, and then the characters come together at the end, which means the narrative doesn't have room for anything other than simple solutions and generic Doctor sniping... something we've seen twice in the past two years! I have posited in the past that Big Finish's nostalgic crossovers are pointless because they bring together characters we see in ongoing adventures all the time already, and the same is true here. There is no novelty to bringing "back" the tenth Doctor, Gabby, and Cindy when I read their adventures already. The only characters we don't already see all the time in Titan adventures are Jenny, the fourth Doctor and Romana, and River, but the first of those I had no desire to see come back, and the others I listen to the adventures of already via Big Finish. (Plus, I didn't find the stories or dialogue very good; the River story in particular was confusingly written and poorly illustrated.)

 

If we aren't getting nostalgia, then we're not getting anything, because this story isn't really about anything. A dimension turns people into mindless zombies... as Doctor Who threats go, it's definitively bottom tier and generic. Does this story have any interesting themes or clever characterization? Basically, no. The one exception is the Eleventh Doctor issue, which isn't by any of the regular Eleventh Doctor writers but is at least by regular Eleventh Doctor artists Leandro Casco and I. N. J. Culbard. It's a decent tale of the eleventh Doctor and Alice being trapped on ancient Gallifrey and becoming inadvertently involved with the Time Lord's early TARDIS experiments. The rest of it all is sound and fury, signifying nothing. I'm glad that after three goes, Titan finally abandoned these annual events; I had mixed thoughts about Four Doctors, but it was overall pretty interesting. The latter two have been exercises in tedium.

 

(If, like me, you are curious about what issues are collected where, the collected editions give incomplete information, and the Tardis wiki is flat-out wrong. Book one collects what was originally published as parts 1-4 and 7: The Lost Dimension: Alpha #1, Ninth Doctor Special #1, The Tenth Doctor: Year Three #9, The Eleventh Doctor: Year Three #10, and the Jenny and Alice stories from The Lost Dimension Special #2. Book two contains parts 5, 7, 6, and 8 in that order: the fourth Doctor story from The Lost Dimension Special #1, the River Song story from The Lost Dimension Special #1 and 2, The Twelfth Doctor: Year Three #8, and The Lost Dimension: Omega #1. Thanks to a friendly Gallifrey Base poster for working this out for me. Not confusing at all! I also have a feeling the credits are incomplete or inaccurate.)

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 Tenth Doctor: Facing Fate: The Good Companion

What Happens Next

One thing that's been interesting to me as a parent, given my academic interests, is seeing Son One develop an increasing understanding of narrative. When I first started reading him the Oz books, he was a pretty passive recipient of the story.

Now, though, he tells me when he doesn't like things that are happening: characters that he dislikes, especially people that he thinks are bad, or turns of events he wishes would be reversed. We're reading Sky Island, one of Baum's Oz-adjacent fantasies (yes, I am way behind on writing up our Oz readings), and every time the villain pops up, Son One suggests that he ought to turn into a statue. (This happens to a couple characters in The Patchwork Girl of Oz.) The villain has taken Button-Bright's magic umbrella, and every time this is mentioned, Son One says he ought to get it back. Similarly, my wife is currently reading him Charlotte's Web, and Son One is not a fan of the idea that Wilbur could be killed and turned into bacon. Pretty natural reactions, all—but not ones he was having back in July when we first started reading chapter books out loud.

I've also notice that this is happening with movies, too. This weekend we watched the original Disney One Hundred and One Dalmatians. When the Badduns appeared on screen, he declared, "I think they are bad guys!" Good deduction. Though, then when they came up to the door of Radcliffe home and announced they were there to fix something, he said, "Oh, they're not bad guys."

He is making inferences, but they are not always accurate ones. This sequence doesn't explicitly show the puppies being kidnapped; Nanny goes down to the puppy bed and finds it empty. I explained to him what had happened, and he replied, "No, I think the puppies went for a walk." When we finally see the puppies again in Hell Hall, Son One exclaimed, "Oh, that's where they went. They moved to a different house!" Well, kind of.

It has made for a more enjoyable experience all around; he is now much more likely to laugh at things that happen in the books he listens to, and react positively or negatively. I am curious to see how this keep on developing!

The Expanse: Origins by James S.A. Corey, Hallie Lambert, Georgia Lee, and Huang Danlan

The Expanse: Origins

Collection published: 2018
Contents originally published: 2017-18
Read: July 2021

Story by James S.A. Corey, Hallie Lambert, and Georgia Lee

Written by Hallie Lambert and Georgia Lee
Illustrated by Huang Danlan

Colored by Triona Farrell and Juan Useche

Lettered by Jim Campbell

I have read an Expanse story every eighty-one days since February 2018. At the time I plotted out this plan, only the first seven novels were out, but projections were that by the time I hit book nine in August 2021, all of them would be. Book eight was ready in time, but the final novella and final novel both ran afoul of substantial delays; up until now, Expanse novels have averaged thirteen months apart, but the gap between books eight and nine is thirty-two months! So to fill the spot that I would have read the eighth ebook short, I decided to read The Expanse: Origins, a comic book prequel from Boom that was co-plotted by James S.A. Corey, even though they left the actual writing to someone else.

Origins consists of five stories, one for each of the Rocinante characters plus Detective Miller, and is actually a prequel to the television program, though I think that in the case of every story except the Alex one, there's nothing that would prevent them from fitting into the book universe, too. The art is fine; Huang Danlan has a style that does a decent job of capturing the actors from the tv program, but it also didn't pull me in. You've seen worse art on tv tie-in comics, but you've probably seen better too.

The stories vary in quality. The only one I didn't care for was the Amos one, which was just told in this really weird, experimental format that didn't ring true for the character of Amos. The conceit that he was somehow reliving his life through the lens of a game show just went on and on and on, and didn't reveal much about him. To be fair, though, pretty much everything you could want to know about Amos was already covered in the novella The Churn.

Most of the others were fine. Holden's tells the story of how he was discharged from the Earth military; this I thought was less interesting than what I had imagined from the hints in the show. Miller's is about a case he was on shortly before the events of the show; I kind of wanted to see him as more of a screw-up than this story indicated. (He does fail, but it's not his fault.) What he does in Leviathan Wakes should be a last chance at redemption. The Naomi one was pretty neat; again, Naomi's "origin" was already pretty well covered in books, so this focuses on how she became friends with Amos, and it is nice to see.

In the books, Alex is a divorcee without kids. In the show, though, he has a wife and kid back on Mars that he never goes back to. (Though, between book six and seven, Alex remarries, has a kid, and gets divorced, seemingly another example of Corey synchronizing the book characters with the show ones.) In here, we learn why he would be willing to go off into space and basically never go back home and see his family again. Some art issues aside (I found two female characters difficult to distinguish), it's an effective and depressing piece of backstory that I found helpful for deepening my understanding of show Alex.

So I don't know that I would pay the $15 retail for this, but if you can get it off Hoopla like I did, it's worth the hour-ish it will take you to read it.

I read an Expanse story every eighty-ish days. Next up in sequence: The Expanse

Reading Roundup Wrapup: January 2022

Pick of the month: Four Novels of the 1960s by Philip K. Dick. I've had this for ages, but finally got around to reading it because The Man in the High Castle was the oldest Hugo-winning novel I hadn't read. It turned out to be great stuff, so I plowed on through and read everything in the book, which all turned to be great stuff. (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was a reread, but all the others were new.) Even when they fizzle out a bit (as I felt Ubik did), they're captivating, fascinating reads. I am going to go on and read through the other Dick LOAs as soon as I am able!

All books read:

1. The Age of Chaos: Collected comic strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Colin Baker, John M Burns, Barrie Mitchell, Paul Cornell, Gareth Roberts, Lee Sullivan, et al.
2. Transformers: Space Pirates by Simon Furman, Dougie Braithwaite, Bryan Hitch, Dan Reed, Lee Sullivan, et al.
3. The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
4. The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 5 edited by Neil Clarke
5. Doctor Who: The Wintertime Paradox by Dave Rudden
6. Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor: Hidden Human History by Jody Houser, Roberta Ingranata, and Rachael Stott
7. Four Novels of the 1960s: The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik by Philip K. Dick
8. Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor: Old Friends by Jody Houser, Roberta Ingranata, and Rachael Stott
9. The Sea Fairies by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
10. Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor: Time Out of Mind by Jody Houser, Roberta Ingranata, et al.
11. Doctor Who: A Tale of Two Time Lords: A Little Help from My Friends by Jody Houser and Roberta Ingranata
12. Tik-Tok of Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
13. Land of the Blind: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by W. Scott Gray, Lee Sullivan, Gareth Roberts, Martin Geraghty, Dan Abnett, et al.
14. Doctor Who Comic: Alternating Current by Jody Houser and Roberta Ingranata 

A lot of low-effort stuff I usually think of as "background reading" (my daily Titan Doctor Who comic, the Oz books I read to my son) while in the foreground I am still working through this winter's Dickens novel, Little Dorrit. Pray I finish it this month... only 400 pages to go!

All books acquired:

1. Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold
2. Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold
3. The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold
4. The Vor Game by Lois McMaster Bujold
5. The Transformers: Best of UK: Time Wars by Simon Furman et al.
6. Tik-Tok of Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
7. The James Bond Omnibus, Volume 002 by Jim Lawrence, Yaroslav Horak, et al. 
8. The Hopes and Fears of All the Years and Other Doctor Who Christmas Short Trips
9. The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 2 edited by Neil Clarke
10. The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 6 edited by Neil Clarke

#1-2 were belated Christmas presents, and #3-4 were my own acquisitions to match.

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 680 (up 2)