Jessie Sima Does It Again

A friend of mine recently asked on facebook for children's board books recommendations, and I recommended Three Grumpy Trucks by Todd Tarpley and Guy Parker-Rees, which is a favorite of mine that I haven't seen people discuss elsewhere, so I often recommend or buy it when the opportunity arises. One thing I couldn't recommend in this context, though, was the work of Jessie Sima, which skews a bit older than the asker was looking for.

Last week, I was at Barnes & Noble with our two kids, looking for a book: Son One had been invited to the birthday party of a classmate, and we needed a present. We ended up buying Joseph Kuefler's The Digger and the Duckling, the sequel to The Digger and the Flower (both great books, very charming), but in the back of my mind I had the idea that we'd grab a book for ourselves as well.

What book this would be was foreordained the moment I saw that Jessie Sima had a new book out, and that it was just $10 if you bought it with any other kid's book. I am fairly certain that our first Jessie Sima book was Not Quite Narwhal, gifted to us by our friends Kim and Mike when Son One was due. It's about a unicorn who lives under the ocean with narwhals and feels like he doesn't fit in; eventually, he discovers there's a group of creatures like him on the surface... but maybe he doesn't quite fit in with them either. Double consciousness in children's picture book form!

It quickly became a favorite of mine for reading aloud. Good message about accepting yourself and difference, but also I think Sima has an incredibly strong sense of visual storytelling. I felt quite certain they must have had some background in comics or film or something, because all of their books do interesting things with "camera angles" and pacing, using them to emotional effect. I feel like even well-illustrated picture books often "shoot" everything from the same angle, like a tv show that doesn't have the time to do the interesting camera set-ups you see on film. Sima goes high or low as needed. Not too much, but enough to translate the feelings of their characters in illustrated format. But nope, no comics background... they didn't even go to, say, art school. Entirely self-taught!

Here's another one of my favorite pages from Not Quite Narwhal...

In this interview, they talk about the importance of the page turn, and that's certainly my favorite moment in Not Quite Narwhal. Kelp goes back into the ocean, but feels sad he is away from his new surface friends. Does he have to choose? We get a three-page sequence that explains how he does not:

1. On the first page, there's a lot going on (you would say it has three "panels" if it was a comic), but it ends with the words, "But then he realized that maybe..."
2. Then you go to the next page, which is a big two-page spread. On the left, Kelp is riding on the back of one of his narwhal friends, going toward the beach, which is on the right, with the unicorns waiting. The camera is placed high, looking over Kelp's shoulder down at the beach. The only words here are "just maybe..." The image is mostly empty, filled with the surface of the sea.
   
3. Then there's a final, busy two-page spread of a beach party, joined by unicorn and narwhal alike. The book ends with the words, "he didn't have to choose."

To me, the "just maybe..." page really captures the emotion of anticipation; almost four years later, I still get shivers every time I read it. Just a masterpiece of visual storytelling. It's not flashy, I don't think, but it is supremely effective.

Since then, we've kept an eye out for new Jessie Sima books, and have enjoyed every one of their books we've gotten. Harriet Gets Carried Away is about a girl whose tendency to be distracted accidentally sends her to Antarctica (an incidental detail is that her parents are a mixed-race, same-sex couple). Like Not Quite Narwhal, it has a great anticipatory two-page spread at the end as some penguins carry Harriet back to New York City. Spencer's New Pet is a largely textless book, a humorous story about a boy and his balloon dog. It has a twist that made me jump and laugh on my first read. Love, Z is my favorite other than Not Quite Narwhal, about a young robot who discovers the word "love" and when his family tell him the word "DOES NOT COMPUTE," goes on a quest to discover its meaning. It has a great two-page spread where Z is drifting aimlessly on a boat, despairing that he will ever learn the meaning of the word.

...a page quite cleverly echoed by Perfectly Pegasus.

I see now, looking them up on LibraryThing, that a couple Jessie Sima books have actually passed us by, but in B&N last week, prominently displayed on a shelf was their newest one, Perfectly Pegasus. This is actually a sequel to Not Quite Narwhal, thematically complementary to the original, as well as borrowing its structure; it's about a pegasus named Nimbus who grows up in the sky... all by herself, but her pursuit of a wishing star takes her down to the Earth, where she meets Kelp.

It echoes the original without being derivative, and even Son One realized this. Before I read him the book, he paged through it himself in his carseat on the drive home, and he provided a running commentary, and noted some similarities in structure/technique with Not Quite Narwhal. Plus, he was totally delighted when Kelp made his reappearance. It has a great "just maybe..." moment, a heartwarming message, and a nice sense of humor.

No one ever asks me this, but were they to do so, I would tell them that Jessie Sima is my favorite working picture book author/illustrator. So yeah, they've done it again! (Hold on, gotta go add Hardly Haunted and Jules vs. the Ocean to my kids' Amazon wishlist.)

These books are just a tad too big for the bed of my scanner, so they are cut off and blurry... and it is totally impossible for me to get a scan of any of the two-page spreads I discuss here.

The Age of Chaos (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 22)

 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.

Collection published: 2021
Contents originally published: 1991-2001
Acquired: December 2021
Read: January 2022

I debated a bit where I should read this. By my usual rules, it would clearly go much later, as the one DWM strip it contains was published in 2001, among those reprinted in the Oblivion collection. But that seemed silly. Given I was skipping The Age of Chaos itself (having already read it on its own between The World Shapers and A Cold Day in Hell!), I decided to violate my usual rules and read where it made the most narrative sense: as the other strips collected here are all seventh Doctor ones in the New Adventures era, I read it as the coda to that run, prior to the transition to "past" Doctors that would come with the strips collected in Land of the Blind.

Under Pressure, from Doctor Who Yearbook 1992
story by Dan Abnett, pencils by Vincent Danks, inks by Cam Smith, colour by Louise Cassell, letters by Glib

The seventh Doctor tells Ace a story of the time the fourth Doctor (on a submarine) secretly helped the third and Jo (on a surface vessel) avert a crisis with the Sea Devils. It's pretty charming: Abnett captures the voices of both past Doctors pretty well, and the ways the fourth Doctor helps the third are fun. There are some good moments, such as the fourth ingratiating himself with the submarine's captain. My main issue is the Sea Devils never feel like much of a threat, as we barely see them. I did really like the panel of them all swimming around the sub, the kind of thing you could never afford to do onscreen, but it comes after they've been neutralized. But it's enjoyable enough.

from Doctor Who Yearbook 1993

Metamorphosis, from Doctor Who Yearbook 1993
story by Paul Cornell, art by Lee Sullivan, colour by Louise Cassell, letters by Annie H.

The seventh Doctor and Ace battle (spoiler) Daleks on a space freighter. As Cornell says in his notes, this is pretty generic action-adventure stuff, but it's good anyway, lifted by some cool ideas (there's a reason Steven Moffat stole the "eggs" bit, and the Doctor becoming a Dalek is good, too), some horrific ones (human embryos mutated into Daleks!), and some excellent artwork from Lee Sullivan. Sullivan draws great Daleks, but also a strong Doctor and Ace, capturing their facial expressions well, and clear action sequences. Generic... but solid. The last line is a groaner, in the most delightful way.

from Doctor Who Magazine #305

The Last Word, from Doctor Who Magazine #305 (June 2001)
story by Gareth Roberts, art and colours by Lee Sullivan, lettering by Roger Langridge

And here, the comic strip adventures of the seventh Doctor, Ace, and Benny come to an end. For reasons I didn't understand, this is framed as the Doctor writing up an account (in the third person) of a recent adventure the TARDIS crew had. The adventure itself is somewhere between a parody and a pastiche of the Virgin New Adventures: Gareth Roberts lists all the tropes in the notes at the end, but I picked out most of them myself. Journeys into 1970s pop culture, overcomplicated plots, a voyage into "puterspace," and the Doctor being mentally tormented by all the people and planets he's let die. I had fun, and it mostly comes across as good-spirited. It's funny, though, that despite being a DWMification of the VNAs, it doesn't feel anything like the actual DWM strips that tied into the VNAs! I feel like it makes a better finale to this era than Cuckoo/Uninvited Guest, so I'm glad I read it here. With a wink and tounge-in-cheek, it's time to switch to something completely different!

Stray Observations:

• Since all these are outside of the usual DWM context, there's no clear chronological placement; what I can see online (from the "Interweaving with the New Adventures" article and various fan sites) disregard the clues in the stories themselves. Under Pressure's Ace seems to be pre-Spacefleet, while Metamorphosis's is afterwards (though Benny is not around). The Last Word could go pretty much anywhere during Ace and Benny's travels, as long as enough time has passed for Ace and Benny to become aware of the clichés of their own lives.



from Doctor Who Yearbook 1992


• I found Vincent Danks and Cam Smith's art on Under Pressure kind of flat, but looking at the uncolored pages in the back, it seems that this is down to the coloring eliminating some of the finer linework.
• Gareth Roberts in the notes: "imagine a world where you could not even know what a minority of random noisy strangers were saying on the internet, and where nobody cared about them, took them seriously, or reacted to them." Gee, why would you hope for such a thing, Gareth?

This post is the twenty-second in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers Land of the Blind. 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
    

The Sleeze Brothers File (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 21)

The Sleeze Brothers File

Collection published: 1990
Contents originally published: 1989-90
Acquired: November 2021
Read: December 2021

Masterminds: John Carnell and Andy Lanning*

Writer: John Carnell
Blueprints: Andy Lanning, with Dave Hine and Stephen Baskerville

Colour-Man: Steve White

Calligraphic Crimes: Helen Stone and Bambos

Now that I've finished (mostly) tracking Death's Head's trajectory out of Doctor Who Magazine, I wanted to follow a different Marvel UK spin-off, the Sleeze Brothers, the shady P.I.s introduced in Follow That TARDIS! back in A Cold Day in Hell! At the time, I wrote, "The Sleeze Brothers went on to have their own comic series from Marvel. The Tardis wiki doesn't count it as part of the Doctor Who universe, but who knows why. [...] You can get it pretty cheap on the secondary market, but I am not sure I am motivated to do so..." And yet, I was! I am not sure if I could explain why, except that I found something charming and uniquely Marvel UK-ish about the whole thing. The pastiche-heavy future world of these strips struck me as being very much of a piece with Russell T Davies's "New Earth" setting, and thus something that fit into the Doctor Who universe in spirit, if not in continuity. (Though, having read them all now, they totally could be part of the Doctor Who universe.)

This contains six single-issue stories, plus an eight-page prologue establishing how the Sleeze Brothers—formerly minor criminals—became private investigators. If you read interviews about this series, it's often stated that despite the fact that though it seems like a Blues Brothers rip-off, it's really not; this is totally belied by this story, which opens just like the film, with El Ape Sleeze (or "El'ape" in some of the stories) meeting his brother Deadbeat after he's released from the penitentiary, following by a gratuitously destructive car chase. So who knows.

This is from the prologue, which if I understand correctly, was made specially for this collection. The inker credit is an informed guess. The usually reliable Grand Comics Database for some reason lacks detailed information on this series...
from The Sleeze Brothers File (art by Andy Lanning & Stephen Baskerville)

The six stories here are fine. None are works of genius, though by the end of the volume, I found there was a certain weird charm. Blues Brothers may have been a starting point, but it was never this weird. They get involved in gang wars, in attempts to use holotelevision to brainwash the city, in attempted presidential assassinations, in Clueesque murder mystery dinners, in behind-the-scenes shenanigans at award shows, in intergalactic peace conferences. Most of the time, they are almost gleefully unaware of the stories unfolding around them, not understanding why anything has actually happened.

I am always a sucker for detective parodies for some reason.
from The Sleeze Brothers vol. 1 #4 (art by Andy Lanning & Stephen Baskerville)

 I wouldn't say I loved any of these stories, but there was only one I didn't like, the presidential assassination one, which seemed to have little panel time for the ostensible main characters, and was too much on the convoluted side. (I think the cases should be beyond their understanding, but not mine!) Most of the time, I was enjoying the inane details and strange pastiche that makes up their universe. I mean, it's not high art, but it's so completely itself that I couldn't help but be charmed by it. 

Holding the book open flat to scan this page caused a 44-page section to detach itself from the binding! The things I do for blog posts no one will ever read...
from The Sleeze Brothers vol. 1 #3 (art by Andy Lanning & Stephen Baskerville)

As you watch the Sleeze Brothers going up against a two-headed pig police sergeant, crawling through sewers, ending up in an Alien pastiche, satirizing the sexual intrigues of the Kennedy administration, revealing the killer is a parasitic life-form living on his brother's back, encountering an army of ninja cats, it's clear that no one made this comic book to appeal to a preexisting trend or perceived gap in the market. No one here was out to make a quick buck, because this is not the comic that could make anyone one. This exists because John Carnell and Andy Lanning wanted it to exist, and because they loved it. And I think that comes through at its best moments.

I mean, it's not even clever parody!
from The Sleeze Brothers vol. 1 #2 (art by Andy Lanning & Stephen Baskerville)

I also tracked down the 1991 Sleeze Brothers one-shot, "Some Like It Fresh." This was a double-length story about the Sleeze Brothers going undercover at a temperance convention. It's nuts, in a delightfully madcap way; it was probably my favorite of all their stories, as it does that slapstick thing of just escalating throughout every time its protagonists make a bad decision. Shame that this was the last Sleeze Brothers tale, aside from an eight-page in Epic #2 I haven't yet tracked down, because it seems like they were beginning to perfect the whole thing.

* The credits in this collection are actually given narratively on the first page in the form of a police report. For example: "Up until the start of the second case (the so called 'Real to Reel' scam) it is believed suspect HINE, DAVE collaborated with LANNING on the blueprint work. After that point we believe BASKERVILLE, STEPHEN took over and was connected to the affair until the end." So I've done my best to convert this back into credits you can understand... sort of.

This post is the twenty-first in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Age of Chaos. 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
    

Reading Tik-Tok of Oz Aloud to My Son... and He Devises His Own Oz Book!

Tik-Tok of Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

Tik-Tok of Oz is an odd book, though I knew none of it when I was a child. Baum adapted Ozma of Oz into a stage musical, just as he had Wonderful Wizard and Marvelous Land. But the stage rights to any characters who appeared in those musicals still belonged to those musicals' producers, so the new musical couldn't feature any of those characters. Thus, while Ozma of Oz is about Dorothy and her pet chicken Billina washing up on the shores of a land near Oz after a shipwreck, The Tik-Tok Man of Oz is about Betsy Bobbin and her pet mule Hank washing up on the shores of a land near Oz after a shipwreck. Princess Ozma of Oz's army of many officers and one private becomes Queen Ann of Ooogaboo's army of many officers and one private. Ozma herself, though, becomes Ozga the Rose Princess. The Shaggy Man and Polychrome the Rainbow's Daughter (from Road to Oz) are added to flesh out the cast of characters; in Ozma of Oz, the characters seek to liberate the Royal Family of Ev from captivity by the Nome King, while here the Nome King holds the Shaggy Man's brother as prisoner. Dorothy finds Tik-Tok abandoned in a cave; Betsy finds Tik-Tok abandoned at the bottom of a well. Plus one incident from Dorothy and the Wizard is adapted as well.

Originally published: 1914
Acquired and read aloud: January 2022

The resulting musical was evidently different enough that Baum, always looking to take shortcuts while writing, adapted it back into a novel! Yes there are quite a lot of similarities to Ozma of Oz... but I actually don't think I noticed as a kid! What I did notice was that the Shaggy Man clearly meets Polychrome for the first time here, even though the two were travelling companions in Road. As I sometimes do, I edited it while reading it aloud to my son to make it clear that they did know each other. (Beside, the whole meeting scene is a set-up for a torturous bow/beau pun that would have gone right over his head.)

That said, as a kid it never was one of my favorites. I might blame the fact that it's one of two Oz books where my edition was an illustration-less Puffin Classic, but I didn't get much more out of it this time around. It has its moments: I like Queen Ann, especially at first, the Nome King and Kaliko are always fun.

But on the other hand, it has a lot of characters who don't do anything; I imagine Ozga and Private Files had some romantic duets on stage, but here they just stand around. Even more unfortunately, Tik-Tok is barely in it. I'd guess he made a great spectacle on stage, but again, he's just here most of the time. The main characters don't really do anything to defeat the Nome King; it's Quox the dragon sent by Tititi-Hoochoo who does all the work there. Betsy is pretty much a nonentity compared to Baum's other child protagonists like Dorothy and Trot and Ojo.

(Betsy knows what Oz is and that Dorothy is a princess there, indicating she must have read the Oz books. This fits with the conceit Baum introduced a couple books back, most notably Emerald City, that he was an historian receiving updated from a real place that he published in book form. However, Betsy doesn't know who the Nome King or Shaggy Man are... yet the only two books where Dorothy is a princess already are Emerald City and Patchwork Girl, and the Nome King appeared in the former and the Shaggy Man the latter!)  

For the first time, my son expressed some aesthetic opinions on an Oz book. After the first couple chapters, all about Queen Ann wanting to conquer things, he told me he didn't want them to conquer anything. He doesn't like things to be broken! And once it was over he actually said it wasn't his favorite Oz book!

And yet... after we finished, he had a brief period of wanting to make his own Oz book, and he drew pictures for it, and enlisted me and Hayley to do it too. What was this Oz book called? Hank of Oz! Inspired by the recent Sea Fairies, we had to draw Hank underwater, and inspired by the next book we went on to, Sky Island, we had to draw Hank flying in the sky. So it seems the book made a positive impression after all...

Hayley's cover for Hank the Mermule of Oz, definitely the best of the lot.

My cover for Hank above Oz, where I messed up by first doing the overlapping "OZ" element, then Hank's balloon, meaning it looks like "ZO" from a distance. Also pictured: a sky island, a sky snake, Button-Bright on his Magic Umbrella, and some kind of wizard tower.

My son's three "Hank in Oz" images, with some explanatory captions from me. The first is "Hank in the sky" (I think the "putter-inner" is what put Hank in the air-ship?), the second "Hank underwater,"and the last is just "Hank outside." Definitely a master of drawing mules!

Doctor Who: The Many Lives of Doctor Who by Richard Dinnick et al.

 Doctor Who: The Thirteenth Doctor: The Many Lives of Doctor Who

Published: 2018
Acquired: March 2020
Read: November 2021

Writer: Richard Dinnick

Letterers: Sarah Jacobs and John Roshell
Artists: Mariano Laclaustra, Giorgia Sposito, Brian Williamson, Arianna Florean, Claudia Ianniciello, Iolanda Zanfardino, Neil Edwards, Pasquale Qualano, Rachael Stott

Inker: Fer Centurion

Colorists: Carlos Cabrera, Adele Matera, Dijjo Lima, Enrica Eren Angiolini

This story (which is a volume 0 to Titan's Thirteenth Doctor series) takes place while the twelfth Doctor is regenerating into the thirteenth. As this happens, they think about various aspects of their life, leading to a series of mini-stories about all the previous Doctors. I will be honest, I pretty much hated it, mostly thanks to the narration of the Doctor. The twelfth Doctor's speech at the end of "Twice Upon a Time" was ponderous enough; it didn't need this added to it. "Earth. You have a fondness for it. Especially London," they'll think to themself, and then we get a third Doctor adventure. No shit! "Remember Gallifrey. Your home planet?" As the book goes on, they seem to get increasingly strained. "You're not ill all that often. And human medicine isn't really your thing." Is this really stuff intrinsic to the Doctor that they need to be reminded of?

The mini-adventures are fine, but pretty insubstantial, and kind of over-stuffed with continuity callbacks. I get that Titan was trying to capitalize on the thirteenth Doctor hype, and needed some stuff to draw attention to its new offerings, but both this and The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor seemed pretty pointless. The best way to introduce a new Doctor is just to introduce a new Doctor! They don't need all this palaver.

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 Thirteenth Doctor: A New Beginning

Doctor Who: The Year of Intelligent Tigers by Kate Orman

Doctor Who: The Year of Intelligent Tigers
by Kate Orman
story by Jonathan Blum & Kate Orman

Following on a few books from EarthWorld, this is another adventure for the amnesiac eighth Doctor with Fitz and Anji. Like Jacqueline Rayner, Kate Orman is a deft hand when it comes to characterization, especially Anji; I also really liked Orman's eighth Doctor, who you can imagine as being played by Paul McGann, but who also does the kind of things that are unique to this prose version of the Doctor, a man obsessed but who also doesn't know his own past. I liked him on the music-obsessed space colony, trying to figure out a piece of music he could remember; the visual of the Doctor literally curling up with tigers and adopting cat body language is something one can't imagine the tv show actually being willing to do, but fits beautifully.

Published: 2001
Acquired: November 2009
Read: November 2021

The story is a good one, with a human space colony discovering that native "tiger" life-forms they'd thought benign and nonsentient are actually intelligent and possess their own agenda; the Doctor and his friends must work to minimize loss of life and bring two sides together. Some good jokes, some beautiful prose, well written throughout. In general, I've picked and chosen from the post-Burning Eighth Doctor Adventures, but every one I have read shows off Doctor Who prose fiction at its best.

I read an Eighth Doctor Adventure every three months. Next up in sequence: The City of the Dead

It's a Citation. But Probably Not the One You Were Expecting.

Every now and again when bored (usually when I should be grading) I search my own name on Google, Google Scholar, and Google Books to see what comes up. Are people talking about me? More specifically, are people citing me and I don't know about it? Google Scholar indexes some of this, but it doesn't catch everything, especially if your name is spelled wrong. If you have a more common name, this is probably a waste of your time, but I am one of exactly two Steven Mollmanns who has ever existed, so there aren't really any false positives, except for "Steve Mollman," who probably wonders why people ask him about his Star Trek books from time to time.

The most recent time I did this, I was surprised to find that I had been cited in a work of science fiction scholarship... surprised because the work of mine that was cited was not a work of sf criticism, but one of my Star Trek novels! Google Books' snippet view didn't yield much insight, so I requested the book from ILL.

Gary Westfahl's book is called The Rise and Fall of American Science Fiction, from the 1920s to the 1960s, but its last chapter is actually about the present day. Westfahl's point is that those who invented the genre of sf, and those scholars who study it, see it as a genre of endless possibilities, but that the sf that actually gets sold and read the most is formulaic: "science fiction today has finally become what Gernsback, Campbell, and others vigorously resisted, a genuine form of popular fiction, as an overwhelming majority of its works now rigidly follow some standard conventions" (243).

He decides to document this by going into a Barnes & Noble in January 2012 and cataloguing every single sf book on the shelf in the "New" area. There are 75 books in total... and one of them was my and Michael Schuster's own Star Trek novel, A Choice of Catastrophes. What dismays him is that 75% of the books are in series; what interests him is that the majority of authors are ones that are "unknown to scholars" (243). (He seems to take "in a series" as shorthand for "formulaic," which seems a bit unfair to, say, N. K. Jemisin.)

He does not mention A Choice of Catastrophes specifically; it only appears in an end note giving the complete list of books he saw (266-7n18). He does, however, say this:

However, optimists might continue, one cannot dismiss all series fiction as derivative junk until one has read it, for talented writers may find ways to stimulatingly stretch generic boundaries even within such confines.... It does seem more probably, though, that all of these novels are no better or worse than others of their kind, despite the best efforts of their writers. (As evidence, I note that I once began reading a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel, Warchild [1994], written by the iconoclastic fantasy writer Esther M. Friesner, hoping to find a fresh and original approach to the franchise; however, I abandoned the book when I found that the book utterly lacked Friesner's trademark humor and was just as dull as all of the other Star Trek novels I had read.) (244)

Ouch! I, actually, really like Warchild and think it's one of the better "numbered" DS9 novels, but the things that appeal to me about the book are, I think, pretty unlikely to appeal to him, which is how well it captures the characters and world of the series, but with the added depth you can get from prose. Is it "fresh and original," does it "stretch generic boundaries"? Kind of, but in the somewhat limited way of Star Trek novels at their best.

That said, I do kind of agree with this:

Writers in earlier generations shared certain ideas about science fiction..., that they endeavored to apply when writing.... [M]ost contemporary writers grew up without any exposure to the genre's traditions, having learned their trade almost exclusively from watching Star Trek and Star Wars, and they never even attempt to write anything exceeding those expectations.... (245)

He phrases it pretty uncharitably, but whenever Hugo season comes around, I do end up feeling like there's a subset of contemporary sf writers (especially those writing Tor.com novellas) who learned everything they know about writing from watching Joss Whedon television shows. Which, okay, fine, whatever... but prose sf can do something else and something different, and I am sympathetic to Westfahl's desire for more of that. Maybe someday I will read the whole book. (Who am I kidding? It's due back to the library May 1, and probably at that point I will forget all about it.)

As my friend Cari pointed out, though, a citation is a citation. Though Google Scholar doesn't seem to have scraped it, of course, and I have no idea how to inform it that Steve Mollmann the Star Trek writer is also Steven Mollmann the sf critic in any case!

"His eye may be on you or me, who will he bang? We shall see": The Man with the Golden Gun

The Man with the Golden Gun was Roger Moore's second film as Bond, but in our weird, book-based sequence, it's his last, not to mention the second-last film to use a book as its basis... at least hypothetically, anyway. This is one of those Bond films that uses very little from its literary antecedent: the idea that there's an assassin out there with a golden gun is basically all the comes over. Which makes sense, because the book is pretty small-stakes, even for a Bond novel. Bond just shuts down a money laundering operation on Jamaica.

The film makes Francisco Scaramanga into an international assassin, and shifts the action to Lebanon, Hong Kong, and China, as Scaramanga works with an evil Chinese corporation to exploit the energy crisis by monopolizing the ability to use solar power.

It doesn't hang together entirely. At the beginning, it seems as though we're watching a personal conflict between Bond and Scaramanga; Scaramanga has seemingly dared Bond to come and get him, and M pulls Bond off the the energy crisis because he doesn't want the increased liability of someone coming after Bond when he's on his missions. So Bond goes after Scaramanga on his own, without authorization. This is the kind of move a lot of later Bond films would make, but I think this is its first use. Roger Moore doesn't really pull it off here; he doesn't seem like he's off the books, pursuing his own agenda, he's just Roger Moore-ing it up like usual. He does have the range to do it because he does it in For Your Eyes Only, but maybe he didn't know how to stretch the character yet on what was only his second outing.

Then, halfway through the film, we learn Scaramanga does have a connection to the whole energy crisis thing, but because we only heard about the energy crisis thing in one tossed-off line over an hour ago, it's like, "wait, what?" and suddenly we're watching a different movie and having to absorb a lot of exposition. It's not a very effective transition.

I think this film's problem is that it's frequently dull; the serious stuff isn't serious enough to care about, the goofy stuff (often the strength of the Moore films) isn't goofy enough to be truly enjoyable. The climax especially is not very interesting. The duel between Bond and Scaramanga isn't very intense, and the threat of the giant solar beam and the energy complex being in danger of exploding is blatantly tacked on.

Still, when it leans into the ridiculousness it gets it right. The best part of the film is probably the chase sequence where Bond contrivedly bumps into the yokel sheriff from Live and Let Die, who accompanies him on an extended chase sequence that culminates in Bond's car doing a corkscrew jump across a river and Scaramanga converting his car into an airplane in a secret hangar. Why is the sheriff guy in the movie? I don't know but I came to love it.

Really, its biggest fault is the waste of its villain and its title character. Scaramanga is played by Christopher Lee, and Christopher Lee ought to play a delectable Bond villain... but why cast someone with such an amazing voice and then have him barely speak? Scaramanga is a silent thug for most of the film, and when he finally does get some good dialogue sequences, it's too little, too late.

Other Notes:

• This film introduces an MI6 agent named Mary Goodnight. (This is the name of Bond's secretary in the books, but she's never appeared before in the films, what she does usually being merged into Moneypenny.) The film never seems to be able to decide if she's a competent agent or, you know, a woman. She gets trapped in a car trunk trying to bug it; she accidentally triggers the self-destruct of the solar energy facility; she almost kills Bond by bumping a switch with her butt. The Roger Moore films would do somewhat better with women agents in The Spy Who Loved Me and (especially) For Your Eyes Only.
  
• Other genius moments:
• Bond tries to get a golden bullet turned into a piece of jewelry out of a woman's navel with his teeth, and inadvertently swallows it, meaning the scene ends with him rushing off to the pharmacy. Can't believe they never got Daniel Craig to do something like that!
• Bond is about to sleep with Mary Goodnight when Scaramanga's girlfriend turns up, and Bond needs to sleep with her to get information. So first Goodnight has to pretend to be pillows under the sheets, and then Goodnight must hide in a cupboard for hours while Bond and the woman have sex!
• MI6 turns the wreck of the Queen Elizabeth liner in Hong Kong harbor into a base, so a bunch of scenes take place on an askew ship.
• For reasons that aren't clear, Bond is at one point dropped into a martial arts school by the villains. What does work is a sequence where two schoolgirls beat up all the martial artists while Bond mostly just stands there.
  
• There is a lot of delightful technical nonsense about the solar energy facility that we got a big kick out of.
  
• Apparently Lee was suggested by Ian Fleming as a candidate to play the villain in Dr. No. How good would that have been!
  

 Film Rankings (So Far):

1. Casino Royale
2. Dr. No
3. From Russia with Love
4. For Your Eyes Only 
5. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
6. Thunderball 
7. The Living Daylights
   
8. Spectre
9. You Only Live Twice
10. Goldfinger
11. The Spy Who Loved Me
12. Moonraker
13. The Man with the Golden Gun
    
14. Octopussy
    
15. Never Say Never Again
16. A View to a Kill
17. Live and Let Die 
18. Diamonds Are Forever

Doctor Who: The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor by James Peaty, Iolanda Zanfardino, Pasquale Qualano, Brian Williamson, et al.

 Doctor Who: The Road to the Thirteenth Doctor

Collection published: 2019
Contents originally published: 2018
Acquired: March 2020
Read: November 2021

Writers: James Peaty, Jody Houser
Artists: Iolanda Zanfardino, Pasquale Qualano, Brian Williamson, Rachael Stott

Colorists: Dijjo Lima, Enrica Eren Angiolini
Letterers: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

This volume seems pretty pointless. Do new incarnations of the Doctor need "roads" to them? What does that even mean? How can you set up a new incarnation of the Doctor? What it turns out to mean here is three standalone stories about the three previous incarnations of the Doctor, the three who had ongoings from Titan for the previous three years. So we get a tenth Doctor, Gabby, and Cindy adventure; an eleventh Doctor and Alice adventure; and a twelfth Doctor and Bill adventure. Each is fine, but I found the reveals in the tenth Doctor one not very convincing (the monsters look cool but that's it) and the story in the eleventh Doctor one confusing. I don't even remember the twelfth Doctor one. Some Titan writers have done impressive single-issue adventures (mostly the writers on the Eleventh Doctor series), but these are not of them.

Each story is followed by a short back-up featuring the same Doctor, but by the creative team of the upcoming Thirteenth Doctor book and set during an episode of the tv show. In each case, the Doctor sees a hand coming through a time portal, and then does nothing about it, continuing about his business. Having already read the first volume of The Thirteenth Doctor as of this writing, it's pretty pointless set-up, and I don't entirely buy that the Doctor would just ignore each of these time portals and go about his business. Sure, we know it has nothing to do with the events of "The Girl in the Fireplace" or "The Power of Three" or whatever, but how does he? But I do like some Rachael Stott art.

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 Thirteenth Doctor: The Many Lives of Doctor Who

Reading L. Frank Baum's The Sea Fairies Aloud to My Son

 The Sea Fairies by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

After he ended the Oz books (unsuccessfully) with The Emerald City of Oz, Baum tried to begin a new series of children's fantasies, about Trot and Cap'n Bill, a young girl and a retired sailor who go on adventures. These only lasted two books before Baum gave up, gave in, and gave his public what they wanted by returning to Oz in Patchwork Girl. Later, though, he would bring Trot and Cap'n Bill to Oz in The Scarecrow of Oz, making Trot an Oz princess like Dorothy and Betsy Bobbin.

Originally published: 1911
Acquired and previously read: February 2017
Read aloud: January 2022

What confused me as a child was that the author's note at the beginning of Scarecrow indicated Trot and Cap'n Bill were being brought to Oz by popular demand... but how did any of Baum's readers know who these characters were if they hadn't yet appeared in a book? It wasn't until much later that I learned about The Sea Fairies and Sky Island (I think maybe when I was in high school), and even later than that when I finally got around to reading them (I was in graduate school).

So I wondered if I could construct my son's Oz journey in a way that would avoid my youthful confusion, and create the kind of demand for Trot and Cap'n Bill going to Oz that Baum's contemporary readers experienced. In strict publication order, these would be read between Emerald City and Patchwork Girl, but I wasn't about to delay getting to my favorite Oz book, so I decided to work them in slightly later: after finishing Patchwork Girl, I gave him the choice of Tik-Tok of Oz or The Sea Fairies, and he picked The Sea Fairies, even with my explanation that it was not an Oz book per se, but one that took place near Oz. (The fact that we had already read The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus gave some precedent for this.)

Unfortunately, I think this book is not up to much. It's one of those Baum books where no one has a goal; Trot and Cap'n Bill are sort of kidnapped by mermaids and made into mermaids, then they spend a hundred pages just being taken on a tour of what's underwater. Halfway through, a plot finally turns up, but it's one in which they play very little role, as most of their problems are solved by other characters. That said, I do like Cap'n Bill (a gruff sailor voice is exactly the kind I like to make), and this time I had an appreciation of Baum's worldbuilding. He wasn't always great at coherent extrapolation, but the explanation he offers for how mermaids work is one he explores all the implications of. Mermaids are surrounded by thin pockets of air which let them breathe, and keep their clothes from getting wet; this also lets them do things like cook. Trot and Cap'n Bill meet other humans underwater, who were kidnapped by an evil sea creature and given gills, and these ones have to wear wet clothes all the time and don't get to eat good food.

I don't know how much my son liked this one, but he seems to like Trot and Cap'n Bill themselves because he was game for returning to them with Sky Island.

The Expanse by Corinna Bechko and Alejandro Aragon

As part of my holding pattern waiting for Book Nine of The Expanse to come out, I picked up this comic miniseries, which ties into the tv show, taking place between seasons 4 and 5 (and thus between books four and five, though there are some pretty big divergences from the books' canon; I haven't got this far in the show). There wasn't a digital collection at my library, but they did have the four individual issues on Hoopla. Weirdly, it seems to have no title beyond "The Expanse," which isn't confusing at all.

Most of the main cast put in only cameo appearances; the focus here is on Chrisjen Avasarala on the moon and Bobbie Draper on Mars working two different ends of a conspiracy. Some of what happens here sets up what, in the books at least, are the events of Nemesis Games, with Bobbie finding that someone is draining away Martian resources and personnel. The big difference is that here, Avasarala has somehow lost political power and ended up in an administrative position on the Moon (something with no parallel in the books), so she's being very mopey. I have to say, I found the idea of a mopey Avasarala unconvincing; I don't doubt that she could experience depression, but I do doubt that this is the form it would take.

from The Expanse #3

It's a pretty simple, quick-reading thriller on the whole, though some elements I struggled to understand. (Why does Avasarala get in that airlock? How could the bad guys have anticipated that plan at all?) Neat, I guess, as another peak into a familiar world, but it felt pretty inconsequential; Avasarala and Bobbie don't really learn anything, and we don't really learn anything about them. Alejandro Aragon's art looks nice, but I sometimes didn't realize that the character we were looking at was Bobbie until a couple panels had gone by. It was always clear who Avasarala was meant to be, but the likeness was occasionally pretty wonky. So, I would say, "get it free on Hoopla" is pretty much the exact quality level this was at. Thankfully, as I write this in December 2021, Leviathan Falls just showed up and I have already begun to read it.

The Expanse was originally published in four issues (Dec. 2020–Mar. 2021). The story was written by Corinna Bechko, illustrated by Alejandro Aragon, colored by Francesco Sagala, lettered by Ed Dukeshire, and edited by Jonathan Manning.

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

Reading Roundup Wrapup: March 2022

Pick of the month: The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold. My friend Christiana has been after me to read the Vorkosigan books for ages; my sister joined the chorus some time ago as well. Finally I have taken the plunge... and I enjoyed the first volume a lot as they both knew I would. More anon.

All books read:

1. Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
2. Chase by J. H. Williams III, Dan Curtis Johnson, et al.
3. Sky Island: Being the Further Exciting Adventures of Trot and Cap’n Bill after Their Visit to the Sea Fairies by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
4. The Transformers: Best of UK: Time Wars by Simon Furman et al.
5. The Warrior’s Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold
6. Stargirl by Geoff Johns by Geoff Johns, Lee Moder, Scott Kolins, Dan Davis, et al.
7. The Scarecrow of Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
8. The Sandman Presents: The Furies by Mike Carey and John Bolton 

Not my best month... but certainly not my worst, either, almost three times as many books as February! Spring Break helped, of course, as did my conference flight. I read two Philip K. Dick novels, too, but as they're in an omnibus volume, they don't get counted on their own.

All books acquired:

1. The Scarecrow of Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
2. Legion of Super-Heroes: The Millennium Massacre by Paul Levitz, Mike Grell, Vince Colletta, et al.

That's it! 

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 686 (up 1)

Doctor Who: Operation Volcano by Andrew Cartmel, Christopher Jones, Ben Aaronovitch, et al.

  Doctor Who: The Seventh Doctor: Operation Volcano

Collection published: 2019
Contents originally published: 2018
Acquired: March 2020
Read: November 2021

Writers: Andrew Cartmel, Richard Dinnick, John Freeman, Paul Cornell
Artists: Christopher Jones, Jessica Martin, John Stokes

Colorists: Marco Lesko, Charlie Kirchoff

Executive Producer: Ben Aaronovitch
Letterers: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

This is Titan's first and last The Seventh Doctor volume (they have by this point stopped optimistically putting "Vol 1" on every title page), collecting a three-issue miniseries. The miniseries is written by Andrew Cartmel and illustrated by Christopher Jones (who illustrated Titan's Third Doctor series); Ben Aaronovitch is credited as "executive producer" but there's no indication of what this might actually mean even though he gets first billing on the cover! Anyway, I went into this not quite sure what it would be like. On the one hand, I suffered through Cartmel's attempt to recapture this era in his execrable Big Finish Lost Stories; on the other hand, I recently read Cartmel's early 1990s DWM comics for the first time, and found them really interesting and striking.

This is somewhere in between. Cartmel's not interesting in pushing the boundaries of Doctor Who or comics like he was thirty years ago, but this does a much better job of pastiching his own era than the Lost Stories did. It's a fun, if somewhat underdeveloped and simple story, about the Doctor, Ace, and the Intrusion Counter-Measures Group (of Remembrance of the Daleks fame) dealing with a crashed alien spaceship in the Australian outback. It has a sense of scale tv wouldn't have attempted in the 1980s, but I did feel that something thematically interesting could have been done that didn't happen here. Christopher Jones does a lot to enliven the material; he's a good tv tie-in artist, in that he can do both likenesses and action well.

The collection includes some other things, foremost among them the "Hill of Beans" back-up strip about the Doctor and Ace meeting Mags the werewolf from The Greatest Show in the Galaxy again... with the gimmick that the story is illustrated by Jessica Martin who played Mags! Since her acting days, she had actually become an independent comics artist. It's okay; it's a bit jumpy and incomprehensible at times, which I blame on both writing and art. My guess is that sci-fi action does not play to Martin's strengths as an illustrator. But hey, I do like Mags, and this probably does better by her than her incompatible reappearances in Big Finish's trilogy.

Finally, it contains two things I've reviewed elsewhere, so I won't go over them again: the Seventh Doctor strip from 2018's Free Comic Book Day issue and the First Doctor story "In-Between Times." Except that I will complain that the FCBD issue is a prologue to Operation Volcano but for some reason collected all the way at the end of this volume!

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 Road to the Thirteenth Doctor

Reading The Patchwork Girl of Oz Aloud to My Son

 The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

This was my favorite of the Oz books as a child, so I approached it with some trepidation. Would my son like it?

Originally published: 1913
Acquired: ???
Previously reread: September 2016
Read aloud: December 2021–January 2022

I think he did; we made pretty rapid progress in it. To me, it recaptures the formula that made the first book work so well: it opens with a child in a difficult status quo, the child loses their parental figure and is forced to go on a journey to get them back, the child picks up a variety of strange companions as they travel, the group works together to overcome difficult problems, the group moves from strange location to strange location. Unlike in some of the mediocre Oz books, there's a clear goal and real tension; unlike in some of the mediocre Oz books, the characters solve their problems by thinking clever.

My main complaint would be with the ending: it's not clear to me why Ozma let Ojo go on his quest at all given that the Wizard can just solve all his problems for him. But one of the benefits of reading aloud is that things like this bother you less, because you're treating the story episodically. Yes, the ending doesn't entirely satisfy... but that's only one chapter out of about thirty. One thing I noticed reading aloud is that Ojo is always re-explaining who he is and what his quest is; something that's very useful when the book is stretched out across weeks to someone with the memory of a three-year-old.

Sometimes I verbally edit the books to fix continuity problems as I read them aloud, but I did not make any changes to this one despite the fact that in Marvelous Land we're told a Doctor Nikidik made the Powder of Life, who is dead according to Road, and here it's a Doctor Pipt who is very much alive. I just didn't care! (And really, it would be the earlier books one should edit.) On the other hand, the characters encounter a magical race called the "Tottenhots"; I edited the name out of my reading, just calling them creatures. Usually I read the Books of Wonder facsimile editions, and the Patchwork Girl facsimile controversially removed some of illustrations of the Tottenhots and revised some of the textual descriptions. However, in this case, I had the Dover, which makes no such changes, so I had to do it myself. (I've been upgrading my Del Rey and Puffin editions to Books of Wonder ones as we read, but the Dovers are almost like the originals except for different covers, and reproducing the color plates in black and white.)

When I finished, my wife asked if Scraps, the "patchwork girl" of the title, actually did anything... the answer is, honestly, not much; she's always there, but the plot driver is Ojo. I don't think Scraps really solves a single problem, though she does prove to be a great friend to Ojo when he is in trouble for stealing the six-leafed clover. But she's a delightful character to read aloud, especially the songs, and I gave her the same voice I gave Pinkie Pie when I used to read the My Little Pony comics aloud to my son. On other hand, this book showed up the limitations of my range of voices, as the Scarecrow and the Shaggy Man share some scenes! (When they are together, I pitch the Scarecrow a little higher, but otherwise they're the same voice.) My wife didn't think the "southern belle" voice I adopted for Bungle, the Glass Cat, was a good choice, but I liked it.