Reading The Tin Woodman of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Tin Woodman of Oz: A Faithful Story of the Astonishing Adventure Undertaken by the Tin Woodman, assisted by Woot the Wanderer, the Scarecrow of Oz, and Polychrome, the Rainbow's Daughter
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

After the sprawling cast of The Lost Princess of Oz, Baum gave the next book a much more focused set of characters. Indeed, of the last four books, The Tin Woodman of Oz is the only one to have nothing like an Oz-in-peril narrative. Instead, it's a personal quest and a story of personal values. I didn't have much memory of this story going in. I mean, I remembered it was about the Tin Woodman questing to find his lost love, and I remember the Tin Soldier and Chopfyt and Nimmie Amee, but I didn't remember anything about the actual plot, and I didn't remember if I liked it or not.

Originally published: 1918
Acquired: April 2022
Read aloud: May 2022

To be honest, post-Tik-Tok my memories from childhood have been much vaguer. I have two theories. One is that from Lost Princess on, I had Del Rey mass market paperbacks, and those shrunk the art down, and I have tended to find that the less spectacular the art, the less clear and less positive my memories. My other is that I was a chronology-focused child as much as I am a chronology-focused adult—if not moreso. So I do wonder if I would plan to reread them all, but not make it all the way through every time, with the end result that I have read the early ones many times but the later ones not as much.

In any case, I might not have many memories of this book but ended up really enjoying it reading it to my three-year-old son. It has a real unity of character and theme that is honestly kind of surprising for Baum. Woot the Wanderer wanders to the Tin Castle of the Tin Woodman in the Winkie Country, and upon being told that the Tin Woodman's whole reason for wanting a heart way back in book one was so that he could love a specific woman, wonders why the Tin Woodman never actually actually got together with her! So together with Woot and the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman sets out on a quest to find her again.

The thing that runs through the book is that the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow have been made somewhat arrogant by their years of adventures and the exalted statuses. They keep blundering into places where they don't belong and aren't wanted because it doesn't occur to them that they wouldn't be wanted—even when Woot points out there's a "KEEP OUT" sign! In some Oz novels, the visits to weird communities feel like padding, but here they highlight what going on with the Tin Woodman's character. When, in the middle of the novel, the Tin Woodman meets up with Dorothy and Ozma, they are both a bit skeptical about his mission to find his lost love... but he goes on anyway. When he finds his own head in a cabinet (more on that here), not even it wants anything to do with him! And then he finds out that Nimmie Amee has no desire to marry him, as she is happily married, and just wants him, like everyone else, to go away. She hasn't been sitting around pining for him; she forgot about him just like he forgot about her. It's a novel about finding joy in what you have already, and not presuming that you are needed where you are not.

There's lots of good stuff here. I liked Mrs. Yoop, the giantess who practices transformation magic, and the cleverness the protagonists need to show in escaping him. Baum thinks through things interestingly as always; Mrs. Yoop has a magic apron that opens and closes doors, which Woot steals, and when he uses it outside, it opens a hole in the ground! Polychrome has a nice substantial appearance, and again as she was in Sky Island, is much less air-headed than she seemed in Road and Tik-Tok, demonstrating a lot of intelligence, and demonstrating some very good fairy magic. The challenge of what to do with the green monkey transformation that Mrs. Yoop saddles Woot with is an interesting one. All this plus an appearance by my favorite minor recurring character, the former general Jinjur, as forceful as ever. (What happened to her husband, though?)

Lastly, this novel shows Baum working through the implications of his worldbuilding, especially the way it had changed over the years. When Baum wrote Wonderful Wizard, people in Oz could die, so there wasn't really any question about the body parts that Nick Chopper had lost. By the time of Tin Woodman, though, Baum had established that people in Oz don't die (and never had*)... even when chopped up into little bits! So why hadn't someone just reattached the lost pieces of Nick Chopper? And what had become of them, if they were still alive? Baum establishes you need "meat glue" to connect body parts, and no one had any... and that Nick Chopper's head has been sitting in a cabinet for decades! It's a perfectly logical outcome of all the (slightly contradictory) worldbuilding, and it could be macabre or disturbing, but Baum, as always, just presents it matter-of-factly. To a kid (I can attest from reading it aloud), it's more funny than anything else.

The creation of Chopfyt, made of leftover "meat" parts of the Tin Woodman and the Tin Soldier, is maybe slightly more disturbing, but there's a real "leave it be" moral in place by that part of the story. If he's who makes Nimmie Amee happy, who is anyone else to complain? Baum was always sort of fascinated by combining people to make other people; it's an idea we saw back in Sky Island, and right now (I am writing this back in mid-June) we are reading one of his other early borderlands fantasies, The Magical Monarch of Mo, where there's a woodchopper who ends up with a king's head glued on his body.

As I (re)read through these books, I'm always thinking about what characters never went on to star again. I quite liked the Tin Solider, the second tin man created by the same tinsmith as the Tin Woodman, who fell in love with the same woman, and ended up rusted in the same forest! At the end of the novel, Ozma assigns him to patrol the (seemingly) lawless Gillikin Country... and he promptly never appears again, aside from a brief cameo at Ozma's birthday party in Magic of Oz, even though the next two novels both largely take place in the Gillikin wilds! I liked his personality (I gave him a not-very-good-I'm-sure-working-class-English accent), and also I really want to know, exactly what army would a Munchkin soldier have been in around the time of Wonderful Wizard? The Tin Soldier of Oz, here we come, I guess!

* This book establishes that people in Oz have been immortal for a long time, clearly contradicting many aspects of Wonderful Wizard and other early novels (though Baum does contort to explain how the Wicked Witches could be killed). It also strongly implies that Ozma has been ruling Oz for a long time, and tells us that she's a fairy, a pretty blatant contradiction of the events we read about in Marvelous Land.

Burning Brightly: 50 Years of Novacon

Burning Brightly: 50 Years of Novacon
edited by Ian Whates

Novacon is a British science fiction convention that first occurred in 1971. Since 1980, most of the guests of honor at the convention have supplied original works of fiction to be distributed at the convention. This anthology collects many of them, alongside some original fiction (though I think all the suppliers of original fiction were also Novagon GOHs). As a result, this anthology features fiction from many luminaries of British sf: Stephen Baxter, Peter F. Hamilton, Geoff Ryman, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and the late Iain M. Banks all have stories here, among many others.

Published: 2021
Contents: 1989-2021
Acquired and read: December 2021

It's the kind of sf anthology that one might cruelly describe as "perfectly competent." There are few terrible stories here; I found Iain Banks's "The Spheres" (2010) fairly inscrutable and Peter Hamilton's "Softlight Sins" (1997) a somewhat unlikely implementation of a plausible idea, but on the whole the stories here are well put together and certainly not terrible.

On the other hand, there wasn't much here that jumped out to me, nothing that really grabbed me or wowed me the way the best sf does. Everything here is... just fine. One kind of wonders if that's because if there's a story a big-name author if willing to give an sf convention for free, it's because it's not their best work.

The big exception was Ian R. MacLeod's "The God of Nothing" (original to this volume), a neat story about a government functionary forced to invent things like counting in order to satisfy the increasing demands of his king. Neat idea, well done, about technologies we take for granted. I did also like Jaine Fenn's "The Ships of Aleph" (2012), though it was one of those stories where one wants to know what happens next! (It's set in the world of Fenn's Hidden Empire series but I don't think it has any narrative links to any other stories.)

So an okay anthology, but you've almost certainly read better, and you've almost certainly read worse.

Hugos 2022: She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

This was my antepenultimate Hugo novel for 2022; in fact, my antepenultimate piece of Hugo reading altogether, since I ended up leaving a bunch of novels for the end this year. She Who Became the Sun is a piece of historical fantasy, a fictionalized depiction of Zhu, the person who would go on to be the Hongwu emperor and found the Ming dynasty; Parker-Chan suggests that he was actually a she in disguise, and adds some mild fantasy elements, mostly that Zhu can see ghosts.

Originally published: 2021
Acquired: June 2022
Read: July 2022

I can see why people really like this. I wanted to like it more than I did. It begins very arrestingly, with young Zhu a member of a starving family of peasants. A fortuneteller promises her brother will acquire greatness, but that she will amount to nothing. When the rest of her family succumbs to hunger, she assumes her brother's identity in a desperate bid to live, and in hope of acquiring her brother's fate as well; she lives in fear that she will do things her brother could not or would not have done, and thus no longer be able to lay claim to his fate of greatness. These early parts of the novel, foregrounding Zhu's desperation and deception, are the strongest.

As the novel goes on, it widens its cast of characters, and unfortunately, spends much time on various male warlords who I found it difficult to invest it or even distinguish in terms of personality. They are all nasty, conniving people working to undermine one another, and these sections were much less interesting than the sections focused on our protagonist, who seemed to vanish from the narrative for annoyingly long periods of time. I found it hard to follow the politics here; whether that was because I didn't care about the people, or if my inability to follow the politics made it hard to care about the people, I couldn't say. I think Parker-Chan was trying to depict a species of toxic masculinity, but it soon grew repetitive, and her take on it wasn't very insightful.

There is a very striking moment at the end, harsh and terrible, that really worked for me, though; Zhu is a very interesting character. The triumphalist tone to the marketing around this book is very wrong; at least one blurb I read compares it to Mulan, and it is nothing like Mulan. This is not a story of female empowerment. This is a story of awful people doing awful things to accumulate power, and even if we understand why Zhu does them, she is still awful.

So, decent enough, and I can see why other people might gravitate toward it, but it's a two-book series (at least?), and I can't imagine myself picking up book two unless it also becomes a Hugo finalist.

Hugos 1963: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

Four Novels of the 1960s by Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik
edited by Jonathan Lethem

Whenever I finish my Hugo reading for the year, I complement it by also picking up the oldest Hugo-winning novel I haven't previously read. For the 2020 Hugos, I read the winner for 1958, The Big Time; I actually have already read all of the winners from 1959 to 1962, so for the 2021 Hugos, that brings me to the winner for 1963, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. Dick is an author I'm not as familiar with as I'd like; basically, prior to reading this, I'd only read three things by him, all ones that got turned into movies! (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, A Scanner Darkly, and "The Minority Report") Though I guess this got turned into a tv show, albeit one I never saw. (My dad was a fan.) Anyway, for many years now I've owned a Library of America box set of fourteen of his novels, and I was happy to have the motivation to dip in.

Collection published: 2007
Novel originally published: 1962
Acquired: August 2014
Read: January 2022

Since reading this but before writing up this review, I've gone on to read five more Philip K. Dick novels, and by the standards of many of his later ones, The Man in the High Castle is positively subdued. About a world where the Axis won World War II, and set mostly in Japanese-occupied California, there's not much in the way of a sfnal elements beyond that. I can see why it captured the Hugo electorate (it was one of only two of his many novels to be a Hugo finalist): it's a triumph of worldbuilding. We get a real solid sense of what this new world is like and how it functions, on the most local of levels: people in highway diners, people in factory jobs, people eating dinner together. From this, we can infer and understand the big political stuff that underlies the story and drives it in the background. The whole idea of the Japanese being obsessed with American pop culture, and Americans supplying obsessive collectors with counterfeit American artifacts was quite fascinating.

Dick also demonstrates a real solidity of character; these are ordinary people, both admirable and despicable in their ordinariness, which drives them to do things they often don't understand. I particularly liked Juliana Frink.

The novel is also quite well put together thematically: it's all about people placing value in things based on the extent to which they perceive them to be true, even when they are not actually true. Things mean only what we believe them to mean. When a pair of counterfeiters try to make their own jewelry, no one likes it because it doesn't carry the aura of authenticity, even though it is much more authentic than the fakes they have been making. Does the counterfeit become real if we believe in it enough? This all reaches a thematic climax at the end: many of the characters have been reading a novel about an alternate timeline where the Axis lost World War II, and they have been inspired by it. What the ending makes clear is that this novel-within-a-novel is not "real," as it does not depict our world, the real world where the Axis lost; its author imagines a completely different, and wrong, alternative history. So the book that has been inspiring resistance is utterly fake! But everything else the novel has told is would indicate this doesn't matter, because everyone in the novel believes it is real.

As I said above, I read this in an LOA edition. Editor Jonatham Lethem does a good job on notes throughout the whole volume, but in particular the end notes for this novel are very useful in explaining what German figures were real historical persons, and what their real roles were.

I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik by Philip K. Dick

Hugos 2022: Ballots for Novella, Novelette, and Short Story

Here is my first set of ranked Hugo finalists; the short fiction was the first stuff I finished. Can't lie; I always approach short fiction a bit trepidatiously these days, because I don't think my tastes are strongly aligned with the nominators', and the same authors and venues tend to come up again and again. (Three stories are from the same issue of Uncanny!) But that's unfair, because I actually do come across a lot of good, new-to-me short fiction!

Things I Nominated

I nominated just one thing across all three short fiction categories, the short story "Lena" by Sam Hughes, an indie short story writer better known by his screen name (do we say "handle" these days?) of "qntm." It's a fictional Wikipedia entry about the first person to have their mind simulated via computer, and I think I will be teaching it in my "life extension"–themed college class. Anyway, no surprise to not find it on the ballot; Hughes comes out of the SCP Foundation, which I don't think has a lot of Hugo-nominator overlap.

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Best Novella

7. A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

Dex realized with a stomach-souring thud that they were standing on the wrong side of the vast gulf between having read about doing a thing and doing the thing.

A "tea monk" spends a bunch of time in the wilderness and meets a robot. Felt like this was about twice as long as it needed to be to make its point. Also for some reason I find Chambers's use of "fuck" jarring. It's not the word in prose in general, just her books. Anyway, bafflingly dull.

6. Fireheart Tiger by Aliette de Bodard

Eldris, after all, is the kind of princess who gets rescued.

Like a lot of de Bodard that I have read, this read less interesting than it would sound if described to me. A young princess in a fantasy world must navigate false friendships and a fire spirit. Felt to me like the story could never quite focus on what it was actually about.

5. Across the Green Grass Fields by Seanan McGuire

She chose this world, where she could never be normal, over the world she had been made for.

The Wayward Children novellas will continue until the morale improves.

Seriously, though, this was one of the better ones, probably because the twee narrative voice McGuire affects in most of these is largely absent here. It's about an intersex kid who finds belonging in a fantasy world of centaurs and unicorns. I am not convinced the twist made a ton of sense, but I mostly enjoyed it up until that point. Probably better put together than Fireheart Tiger, though I wouldn't rush to recommend either.

4. No Award

If the Hugo electorate will insist on only nominating Tordotcom novellas, then I will insist on using No Award to separate the worthy from the unworthy. (Most of the time I don't bother using it unless I think something is really bad.)

3. A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow

Maybe the universe doesn't naturally bend toward justice either; maybe it's only the weight of hands and hearts pulling it true, inch by stubborn inch.

I've read a number of pieces by Harrow for the Hugos the past few years, and this is definitely the best of them. This is a sort of postmodern, feminist, ("hopepunk"?) take on Sleeping Beauty, which moves quickly and does some interesting things: a recent college grad with a degenerative disease finds her degree (from OU!) in folklore comes in useful when she's plunged into the world of her favorite fairy tale. It didn't totally grip me, and Elder Race was more in the area of what I find interesting, but a solid entry overall.

2. Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I have lived a long, long life and it has meant nothing, and I'm on a fucking quest with a couple of women who don't understand things like germs or fusion power or anthropological theories of value.

An anthropological observer from an advanced but lost culture must team up with a princess from a more primitive one who insists on seeing him as a wizard. Pretty enjoyable but I never found it as arresting as I did, say, The Past Is Red. I think it had some interesting things to say (how different cultures process the same things), but I also felt like it could have been richer thematically. I kept comparing it unfavorably to Le Guin.

1. The Past Is Red by Catherynne M. Valente

“Have you been running a quality assurance test on me all this time, Tetley?” she teases, laughing.
     But I keep eating snap peas and I don't say anything back because when you really think about it, it isn't funny. When humans meet other humans, that's all they do forever.

This is a postapocalyptic novella about a young girl, and then a young woman, who lives in a place called Garbagetown after the seas have risen so high there's no land left anywhere. It has a strong narrative voice, and a strong sense of theme: it's a great story about the places we look for hope, in each other and in stories, and about the ways we're often let down. Obviously it's a Tordotcom novella, but it's not one of the ones that reads like a pilot for a streaming show, it's an actual piece of prose.

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Best Novelette 

7. "O₂ Arena" by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

Now the merchants of death sold life and oxygen because death was now in abundance, and life was the commodity in demand. You had to pay to breathe. O₂ credit was life. 

Set in the near future where oxygen is scarce; the narrator is a law student in Nigeria who ends up battling in the "O₂ Arena" for more O₂ credits. I kind of felt like the whole story was constructed based on that pun. I thought this was pretty bad, to be honest. It spends a lot of time on things that don't matter (how law school works) and not much time on things that do (the narrator's decisions). The writing is clumsy: it consistently implies a thing but then in the next sentence, tells you the thing anyway.

6. No Award

I don't think "O₂ Arena" is not to my taste (as, say, "Unseelie Brothers" is); I think it's outright bad. Sometime after I originally wrote this post, I realized that meant I should rank it below No Award, so I came back and added that to it. Also I guess I am hedging: this won the Nebula somehow!

5. "Unseelie Brothers, Ltd." by Fran Wilde

Inside, the machines—old Singers, new 3-D printers, and everything in between—waited, surrounded by fireflies and shadows.

A girl in fashion design discovers a magic dress store. It felt pretty aimless at first, and I was like, why am I not enjoying it? Then I remembered that an unseelie is a fairy, and nothing interests me less than a fantasy story about fairies. But I guess it was fine for what it was.

4. "Bots of the Lost Ark" by Suzanne Palmer

As unfathomably alien as humans were, that at least made sense to 9. The Mantra of Perseverance was clearly fundamental to all thinking units.

This is a sequel to Palmer's "The Secret Life of Bots," which was a finalist (and won) in 2018. Like that story, it was entertaining and engaging... but I don't know that I would give it award. Still, not boring like "Unseelie Brothers" nor actively bad like "O₂ Arena."

3. "Colors of the Immortal Palette" by Caroline M. Yoachim

“An art collector is hoarding time. Time spent by the artist applying paint to the canvas, yes. But there is more to it than that. Each successive painting contains something of the time that went into all the previous canvases, not to mention the time spent studying, practicing. And the art holds other time as well—the model that sits for the painting, holding a pose for hours on end. Time that she has devoted, perhaps, to keeping a certain figure, or creating an appealing hairstyle.”

An immortal Japanese woman who has always been known as a model for painters seeks to become a painter herself. Pretty good, with some great observations on gender, race, and art. Nothing wrong with it; just not my favorite.

2. "L’Esprit de L’Escalier" by Catherynne M. Valente

Marriage isn’t what he thought it would be.

She didn’t even thank him for making her breakfast. He doesn’t want that to annoy him the way it does, but he can’t shake it.

A modernized retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, where they're both contemporary celebrities, following their attempts to re-acclimate to normal life after Eurydice's resurrection. If you know my tastes in fiction, you'll know it's quite a compliment for me to say this almost read like it was by Jeanette Winterson.

1. "That Story Isn't the Story" by John Wiswell

Anton knows he doesn’t have a work ethic. The helplines have taught him better. He has a habituated trauma that requires him to do something or face consequences he’s too afraid to think about.

Very clever, well put together, moving story about a gay man escaping the thrall of a vampire, a very unsubtle but very effective metaphor for escaping the pull of an abusive relationship. This one did a great job of putting you in the protagonist's mindset, and of making you unsure what was magic and what was just the protagonist's damaged way of thinking.

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Best Short Story

7. Magic: The Gathering: "Tangles" by Seanan McGuire

[T]rees had no gender as such, but dryads did, and upon discovering the concept in her mind, he had considered his choices and decided he preferred the masculine...

I believe that, with the possible exception of one or two Best Graphic Story finalists, this is the first ever piece of tie-in fiction to be a Hugo finalist. The occasional complaints of a tie-in author with whom I was LiveJournal friends with back in the day aside, I am certain that you could count the number of Hugo-worthy tie-in works ever produced on one hand. This confusing, mediocre story is not among them. How ever did it get nominated? (Oh, Seanan McGuire wrote it.)

6. No Award

I think I would wail in despair if a tie-in to a card game won a Hugo Award.

5. "Mr. Death" by Alix E. Harrow

I can’t quote the Book of Death line and verse the way Raz can, but I’m pretty sure there’s a policy somewhere against playing catch in broad daylight with a doomed two-and-a-half-year-old, surrounded by the green hum of summer.

A reaper who when he was alive lost his toddler-aged son is assigned to recover a toddler's soul himself. I liked it most of the way through but found the final turn obnoxiously saccharine, and it ruined the story for me. If it hadn't been for that false moment, it would have ranked much higher.

4. "Unknown Number" by Blue Neufstifter

if you're asking if I named myself after Xena's girlfriend I think you probably already know the answer

Told as a Twitter thread of a series of screenshots of a text conversation, this is about a trans woman being contacted by an alternate universe self who never transitioned. Neat idea well told, but feels more like an exhortation than a story.

3. "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather" by Sarah Pinsker

>@BarrowBoy all you ever do is mark stretches and shoot down other peoples’ theories without ever offering any yourself. Do you care about this ballad at all?–Dynamum

>I don’t even like this song. The melody’s okay, but it needs a bridge. –BarrowBoy

>Argh. If you don’t like the song, why are you here? –Dynamum 

>For those sweet sweet LyricSplainer level badges. U?  –BarrowBoy

This story is a (fictional) English folk ballad, annotated by commenters on a lyrics-explaining web site. Pinsker has a real mastery of both the ballad form and the culture of Internet commenters, and manages to tell something pretty creepy despite the distanced form. Not as emotionally affected as Pinsker's best work, but middling Pinsker beats most other short story writers' best. I could have gone either way between this and "Sin of America," but there's a clear separation between this and everything I ranked below it.

2. "The Sin of America" by Catherynne M. Valente

The Blue Bison Diner is a ghost’s living room and it is serving the sin of America.

Creepy, literary, effective story about a woman eating "the sin of America" at a crappy diner. Sort of a latter-day "The Lottery" or "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," but was it really even science fiction or fantasy? Felt more "literary" than that. (By which I mean, I guess there's magic in it, but the magic seems more metaphorical than actual.) I really hated how Valente wrote Space Opera, but her prose on the short fiction ballots this year was great. (Three of them, one per category!) Anyway, neat story I was happy to read.

1. "Proof by Induction" by José Pablo Iriarte

“Don’t you feel anything at all?” He couldn’t remember if his father had ever had a feeling in his damned life.
     “Would it change anything?”

Enjoyable story about a mathematician who uses a simulation of his dead mathematician father to both solve a proof and work through his father issues. Good idea, well told, though that no one else had thought of using mind simulations this way before didn't really ring true to me.

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Overall Thoughts

I know I complain every year about Tordotcom and the novella category, but I found this a much better set of novellas than we've seen in a while. Literally none of them felt like streaming show pilots! And The Past Is Red in particular was very strong. On the other hand, Best Short Story felt a bit weak this year; I feel like I placed "Proof by Induction" at the top largely by default.

I find it a little tricky to predict short fiction winners—especially without Murderbot in the mix. This is McGuire's sixth sequential nomination for a Wayward Children novella, but she only won for the first one, so I don't think she'll win it this year. Who'm I kidding, though? It'll be Becky Chambers. But for the other categories, I don't any inkling at all.

JSA, Book One by Geoff Johns, David Goyer, Stephen Sadowski, Michael Bair, et al.

JSA by Geoff Johns, Book One

Collection published: 2017
Contents published: 1999-2000
Read: April 2022

Writers: Geoff Johns, David Goyer, James Robinson

Artists: Stephen Sadowski, Michael Bair, Buzz, Scott Benefiel, Derek Aucoin, Marcos Martin, Keith Champagne
Colorist: John Kalisz

Letterer: Ken Lopez

In this series of posts, I've been tracking an impending Justice Society renaissance. After the brief flurry of JSA-related material from 1991 to 1993 or so, the JSA was largely left behind... and then it exploded in 1999. That all culminated in JSA, a new ongoing series, the Justice Society's first in six years, and also its longest; it lasted eighty-seven issues, beating out the original All Star Comics run's fifty-seven. Plus, as we'll see going forward, it led to any number of spin-offs and tie-ins.

It seems weird to me that this series of reprints is branded "JSA by Geoff Johns," as he works on just ten of this collection's fifteen issues, and the five he doesn't work on are the first five, which set up what this new team is and how it works. David Goyer is the only one of this volume's contributors who works on every issue. But, I guess if you're Chief Creative Officer and President of DC Comics, you can make sure your name is displayed prominently wherever you like.

I felt like this series was pushing a Dinah/Jack thing. Am I reading in too much? Kind of weird, if so, because their parents had an affair!
from JSA #12 (script by David Goyer & Geoff Johns, art by Buzz)

Basically, this volume sees the reestablishment of the JSA, and like Paul Levitz and Gerry Conway's 1976-79 revival, it makes it into a multigenerational team, leaning into the idea of heroic legacy that Roy Thomas laid the foundations of over in Infinity, Inc. By now, though, we are up to three generations of heroes: we have members of the original team like Alan Scott (formerly Green Lantern, but still ghettoized as "Sentinel" here), Wildcat, and the Flash (Jay Garrick); immediate descendants and sidekicks like Atom-Smasher (formerly Nuklon of Infinity, Inc.), Sand (formerly Sandy the Golden Boy, sidekick to the Sandman), Doctor Fate (Hector Hall, formerly the Sandman, formerly formerly the Silver Scarab of Infinity, Inc.), and Black Canary (Dinah Lance, daughter of the original, Dinah Drake); and then brand-new heroes like the new Starman (Jack Knight), Stargirl (Courtney Whitmore), and the new Hawkgirl (Kendra Saunders). Plus there's a new new Hourman who is some kind of android, and a new new Doctor Mid-Nite who is a white dude.* It's a neat idea, a team composed of mentors and mentees... but I found the book didn't actually do very much with it.

Always up for a Director Bones appearance, but this was a pretty pro forma one.
from JSA #11 (script by David Goyer & Geoff Johns, art by Michael Bair & Buzz)

Overall, this is an approach to team superheroics that wasn't very much to my liking. The book moves from apocalyptic event to apocalyptic event with no time to breathe; I would have very little sense of any of these people as characters if it wasn't for the fact I know them from other books. There are a lot of shock events—deaths and people going evil and people being plunged into terrible universes—but there is little sense that any of it matters, and I found it difficult to care. Geoff Johns always gets a lot of praise for his handling of history and continuity, but I feel like this is only true if you are a character Johns is nostalgic for from his youth. Obsidian from Infinity, Inc., for example, makes a comeback here just to become a villain so that his father, Alan Scott, can angst about its for a few panels. Hector Hall is resurrected... but I'm not really sure why, as once he comes back to life, he exhibits as much personality as a lamp-post. We do hear a lot from Sand... and I would quite frankly like to never do so again. What a poorly conceived, uninteresting character. Has any Golden-Age-kid-sidekick-turned-lead ever worked out except for Robin?

You can tell me he is connected to much more interesting characters... but you can't make me care.
from JSA #1 (script by James Robinson & David Goyer, art by Stephen Sadowski & Michael Bair)

I recently reread my very first post in this series, where I wrote, "I'm not going into the Geoff Johns era because, really, a little bit of Geoff Johns goes much too far in my experience." Over two years later, I actually don't remember thinking that, nor do I remember when I changed my mind and added all the Geoff Johns stuff to my list. There is quite a lot of it: seventy-two more issues of JSA, the spin-off JSA Classified, and the soft reboot of JSA as Justice Society of America vol. 3, plus myriad miniseries. I feel committed at this point—how can I follow the JSA from 1977 to 1999, but not the one more decade it would take to get me up to the end of the "original" JSA with Flashpoint?—but I can't claim to exactly be excited about it all based on reading this.

* Roy Thomas introduced a new Wildcat and a new Doctor Midnight, both women of color, during Infinity, Inc., but I see they were both killed off to prove the situation was serious in an issue of Eclipso back in 1993, paving the way for white dudes to reclaim the mantles. Of course.

 

This post is twenty-ninth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Wonder Woman: The 18th Letter: A Love Story. 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)
23. The Adventures of Alan Scott--Green Lantern (1992-93)
24. Damage (1994-96)
25. The Justice Society Returns! (1999-2001)
26. Chase (1998-2002)
27. Stargirl by Geoff Johns (1999-2003)
28. The Sandman Presents: The Furies (2002)
    

Hugos 2022: The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik

The Last Graduate: Lesson Two of The Scholomance
by Naomi Novik

One of the most effective moments I've ever witnessed in fantasy worldbuilding comes in Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass. The book does such a good job with the concept of the dæmons, especially the idea that they are inseparable from their humans, that a mere 150 pages after you learn about this, it viscerally feels like a violation when you discover people out there are separating humans from their dæmons.

Originally published: 2021
Acquired: May 2022
Read: July 2022

Similarly, The Last Graduate has a moment in it that builds on the extensive worldbuilding done here and in the series' first book, A Deadly Education. Our protagonist, El, realizes that the world does not function the way she thought it does. The rules of how the world does work have been so enmeshed in the mind of the reader, that the idea they could work differently feels as disruptive to you the reader as it does to her, a person who actually lives in this world. And it's not just that the world doesn't work the way she thought: it means something for what she will have to do.

I thought A Deadly Education was pretty good, but that it began climaxing at a point where it should have begun escalating. Well, this book really does escalate things. I don't know if A Deadly Education needed to be exactly the way it was, but The Last Graduate takes an expert turn in plot, world, and character that needed the detailed foundation laid in the first book. I said that the first book felt like an interesting Harry Potter riff; this one moves beyond that to be about something. When I read Last Graduate, I felt that Novik was capable of more because I'd read Spinning Silver; now I see that she is up to more, actually something similar to what she was up to in Spinning Silver. That book contains this line that has stayed with me:

There are men who are wolves inside, and want to eat up other people to fill their bellies. That is what was in your house with you, all your life. But here you are with your brothers, and you are not eaten up, and there is not a wolf inside you. You have fed each other, and you kept the wolf away. That is all we can do for each other in the world, to keep the wolf away.

The world of the Scholomance is a brutal one: you have to keep yourself alive at the cost of others because if you don't, you will die. The Last Graduate begins to interrogate that assumption in a way that moves toward an impressive ethic of care. (And, incidentally, reads as a pretty compelling analogy for climate change—or any other entrenched, generational problem.) A Deadly Education was a pretty good novel; The Last Graduate was a great one, and the best Hugo-nominated* novel I've read thus far this year.

* Well, technically, Lodestar-nominated.

Ground Zero (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 24)

Ground Zero: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Scott Gray, Martin Geraghty, Alan Barnes, Gareth Roberts, Adrian Salmon, et al.

Collection published: 2019
Contents originally published: 1995-96
Acquired: December 2020
Read: April 2022

This volume continues the "past Doctor" focus of Land of the Blind, but with a more unified approach otherwise. Bar two fill-ins, every story in the volume is illustrated by Martin Geraghty; the strip hasn't had a unified artistic vision since John Ridgway went from primary artist to one of many back in 1988, so around seven years prior! I like the unity of approach, but even better that it's Geraghty, who is great both with likenesses and storytelling, the combo you need—but don't always find—in a tie-in artist. There's also a new unity of vision behind the scenes; the commentary in this volume by strip editor Gary Gillatt is great stuff, showing how he decided to totally change the approach of the strip.

Curse of the Scarab / Operation Proteus / Target Practice, from Doctor Who Magazine #228-34 (Aug. 1995–Jan. 1996)
stories by Alan Barnes and Gareth Roberts, art by Martin Geraghty and Adrian Salmon, lettering by Elitta Fell

We open with a three-part fifth Doctor and Peri story, a three-part first Doctor and Susan story, and a one-part third Doctor and Jo story. They are all pretty competent. Curse of the Scarab is a decent adventure runaround, with some fun ideas and some more implausible ones; like a lot of Alan Barnes's Big Finish work, this involves plunging the Doctor into a certain moment in historical pop culture, and Barnes is a good pop culture historian, so it works. Some lush artwork from Geraghty helps. Operation Proteus is okay; again, there's some good stuff and some other stuff I found harder to buy, such as the way the cure is deployed. Target Practice is the DWM main strip debut of Adrian Salmon (I guess he was already doing the Cybermen strip, but I won't get to that for some time), and he is one of my favorites. His style is well suited to the subject matter.

from Doctor Who Magazine #235

Black Destiny, from Doctor Who Magazine #235-37 (Feb.-Apr. 1996)
story by Gary Russell, art by Martin Geraghty, inks by Bambos Georgiou, letters by Elitta Fell

Martin Geraghty may be a good artist, but he's not a good enough artist (yet, anyway) to save us from Gary Russell's confusing transitions; there were several moments in this story where I didn't know what was going on or who was who. The resolution is total nonsense, introducing a whole idea never before mentioned in the story.

from Doctor Who Magazine #238

Ground Zero, from Doctor Who Magazine #238-42 (Apr.-Aug. 1996)
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by Bambos Georgiou, letters by Elitta Fell

It feels different this time...

This story does a lot of things to change it up, to signal that the comic strip as you knew it is at an end. There's an ongoing story in DWM for the first time since, I think, The Mark of Mandragora way back in #169-72... five years prior! Ground Zero picks up on hints dropped in three of the previous four stories in this volume, paying off why a mysterious a voice accosted Peri, Susan, and Sarah Jane.

It's also our first story with more than three installments since Final Genesis in 1993. It uses its five parts to good advantage, twisting and turning through a complicated plot; it has powerful cliffhangers. Obviously the death of Ace, but the reappearance of the old companions and the TARDIS plunging into the human collective unconsciousness are also great moments, well executed. The story uses its space to good advantage.

It also feels very now for the first time in a long time. This is the Doctor of the tv movie, not the show, not just in costume, but in attitude, and in an indication that both he and Susan are part human. The death of Ace adds to this: the strip is an ongoing concern, able to change its own narrative in a way that hasn't been true since the introduction of Bernice Summerfield. But it's not just the death of Ace. The story builds off what has come before and sets up what is to come.

On top of all that, it's a dang good story. I will say it runs a bit intense for my tastes—Peri is put through the wringer in a way I don't quite like—but it's engaging, it's interesting, the identity of the narrator is a good reveal, it has great concepts, it has great visuals. The empty streets, the Threshold, the TARDIS straining itself, the console room exploding, and of course Ace's death. Tremendous stuff, and I devoured it. Though I have enjoyed the strip more than I have not since A Cold Day in Hell!, it really does feel like something special is back.

from Doctor Who Magazine #243

Doctor Who and the Fangs of Time, from Doctor Who Magazine #243 (Sept. 1996)
story + art by Sean Longcroft, lettering by Elitta Fell

This is a neat little semiautobiographical story about writer and artist Sean Longcroft's on-again off-again love affair with the show, peronified by him interacting with Tom Baker as the Doctor. Well done, I found it amusing and heartwarming in equal measure. "[Y]ou can't be four years old forever, you know. But part of you always will be."

Stray Observations:

• Gary Gillatt says in the commentary that around this time, strips by Colin Baker, Barry Letts, and Andrew Cartmel all fell through. We've seen good stuff from Cartmel, but the other two leave me a little more apprehensive. Did we dodge a bullet or miss works of artistic genius? We'll never know, I guess.
• It took a few posts of explanation from friendly GallifreyBase posters for me to get the last-panel joke in Curse of the Scarab that Barnes is so proud of in the notes. A bit belabored.
  
• Gary Russell admits he can't actually write comics in the notes, but he only realized this after being punted off IDW's Doctor Who comic after six issues of its eighteen-issue run. I agree, to be frank (his IDW story was terrible), and I admire his honesty. Despite this self-realization, he's evidently writing an upcoming comic for Cutaway...
• I understand the reasoning behind jettisoning the Bernice Summerfield era from the strip's history (#193-208), maybe even all the way back to the first VNA allusion (The Grief in #185). But by showing the classic tv console room being exploded, the strip lops off a bit of its own history, as the new console room was its invention, in The Chameleon Factor (#174).
• It's particularly a shame, as the strip had made this "yes our own history does matter" move before, with the sequence leading up to The Mark of Mandragora. As the new-era strip will do in its next installment in End Game, that storyline even referenced the very first ever DWM story to make it clear that yes, the ongoing story you have read since The Iron Legion is back! But that is gone, along with the VNAs, even though I don't think it had to go with them.
• When logging this collection in LibraryThing, I realized that my children already own a book by Sean Longcroft... he is the illustrator of Usborne's First Book about the Orchestra, a "noisy" book I read them many times until the circuitry shorted. Now that I know, I can actually see it in the style.

This post is the twenty-fourth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers End Game. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Iron Legion
2. Dragon's Claw 
3. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume One
4. The Tides of Time
5. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Two
6. Voyager
7. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Three
8. The World Shapers
9. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Four
10. The Age of Chaos
11. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Five
12. A Cold Day in Hell!
13. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 1)
14. Nemesis of the Daleks
15. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 2)
16. The Good Soldier
17. The Incomplete Death's Head
18. Evening's Empire
19. The Daleks
20. Emperor of the Daleks
21. The Sleeze Brothers File
22. The Age of Chaos
23. Land of the Blind
    

Reading The Lost Princess of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Lost Princess of Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill

After the one-two punch of The Scarecrow of Oz and Rinkitink, I felt like I was missing the Oz characters. Sure, they showed up in those massive celebrations at the end of each book (by now a traditional way for Baum to squeeze in all your favorite characters) but I missed all those folks, you know? Baum must have felt the same way (or, rather, known his readers would) because Lost Princess of Oz contrives to include a large number of familiar characters.

Originally published: 1917
Acquired: April 2022
Read aloud: May 2022

The premise here is that overnight, a number of things vanish: Glinda's Great Book of Records, the magical tools of both Glinda and the Wizard, Ozma's Magic Picture, (in the far-off Yip Country) a Magic Dishpan... and Ozma herself! Our characters must search the country without any of their customary powers at their disposal. They divide into four search parties, one for each of the four quadrants of Oz. Without any actual leads, their plans are apparently to just wander around looking for stuff; it seems to me that had Ozma been in the Gillikin Country, being searched by the Shaggy Man, his brother, Tik-Tok, and Jack Pumpkinhead, she might be lost still. Thankfully, she turns out to be in the Winkie Country, which is (wow what a coincidence) being search by the largest group, consisting of Dorothy, Trot, Betsy Bobbin, Button-Bright, the Wizard, Scraps the Patchwork Girl, the Cowardly Lion, the Woozy, the Sawhorse, and Toto. As they go, even more join the group: the Frogman, Cayke the Cookie Cook, and the Lavender Bear.

For the most part, Baum does an okay job by this large cast of characters. The Wizard gets some good problem-solving moments, and Scraps's sideways logic also comes in handy at times. Button-Bright's ability to get lost actually turns out to be a key plot point. The animal characters don't contribute much to the plot, but there are a couple scenes where they talk to each other a lot; in fact, Toto talks an unprecedented amount here, a marked contrast to his reticence to speak in Tik-Tok. The Woozy never really does anything, though; I have a feeling that Baum included him just because Neill like drawing him. (In many of the books, Neill includes the Woozy in crowd scenes where he is not mentioned in the text; this book has an illustration of the Woozy wearing an apron and doing dishes in the Magic Dishpan! Not a thing that actually happens but a delight to look at.)

The main issue is that having all three girls in the group is pretty pointless: narratively Dorothy, Trot, and Betsy are the same, and thus Trot and Betsy end up largely not doing anything. I think if Baum wanted to flesh out the relationship between the three girls (which would be a fun thing to do), he would have had to do something like make it be just the three of them. Or if he wanted to give Trot and Betsy something to do, he should have sent them out with other search parties (and given those search parties something to do). The working title was Three Girls in Oz, but reading the finished book, you can see why he dropped it.

Anyway, the whole thing is good fun. It does sort of beggar belief that Dorothy's search party finds Ozma in the third place they look after setting out in a totally random direction, and some of the rules Baum imposes on this "mystery" don't really make any sense (the characters conclude that Ozma must be in Oz because no one can cross the Deadly Desert... two books ago, Trot herself flew into Oz over the Deadly Desert!), and Baum seems to forget how the Magic Belt works (but if it did work here as it had in Ozma of Oz, the book would end around chapter five).

But it does the thing I like an Oz book to do: interesting places to visit, weird problems for the characters to reason their ways out of, good interactions between the characters. The misdirection of the clues about where Ozma is according to the truth-speaking Little White Bear are pretty cleverly done. I like any Oz book with Button-Bright comedy. I don't know what's up with the "Toto loses his growl subplot" but it is entertaining. The Frogman is an interesting character... though my favorite new character was Corporal Waddle, the little toy brown bear soldier who takes himself and his useless popgun very seriously. Stay tuned for Corporal Waddle in Oz?

My son seemed to enjoy it: lots of characters doing fun things. When I asked, he said, "I liked it the same as Rinkitink. I liked the good parts but didn't like the bad parts." The "bad parts" turned out to be the passage detailing how Ugu the Shoemaker traveled around Oz stealing all the magical implements and kidnapping Ozma. He also began telling me about his own oz book, [His Name] in Oz, which is exactly the same as The Lost Princess of Oz, except that he presses a button that defeats Ugu the Shoemaker so no one gets kidnapped! But more on that book in future installments...

One other thing to note: this is the first set-in-Oz novel Baum wrote after the publication of Tik-Tok, which included for the first time detailed maps of Oz. You can tell, because the descriptions of Oz geography suddenly become much more detailed and consistent here; Baum talks about rivers in the Winkie Country are, and what characterizes different regions of it. He continues to pay attention to geography in this way over the remaining three of his Oz novels, unlike the somewhat ad hoc way he had described things previously.

The James Bond Daily Express Newspaper Strips, Volume 2

The James Bond Omnibus, Volume 002

Collection published: 2011
Contents published: 1964-68
Acquired: January 2022
Read: April 2022

Adapted by Henry Gammidge & Jim Lawrence

Art by John McLusky & Yaroslav Horak

Beginning in 1958, the Daily Express ran a daily comic strip adapting the James Bond novels, which has been collected into a series of omnibuses by Titan. I reviewed the first volume a few years ago, and now that I've read all the novels adapted in the second, I've read that one, too. This collects adaptations of the last few James Bond books—On Her Majesty's Secret Service, You Only Live Twice, The Man with the Golden Gun, and Octopussy & The Living Daylights—and then it circles back to adapt some stuff skipped over before—"The Hildebrand Rarity" from For Your Eyes Only and The Spy Who Loved Me.

The first two stories here are written by Henry Gammidge and illustrated by John McLusky; McLusky illustrated every story in volume 001 and Gammidge wrote most of them, and as there, they are perfectly serviceable adaptations. Gammidge doesn't make a lot of tweaks to the stories, usually just streamlining them a bit, e.g., long passages about Bond learning about Japanese culture in You Only Live Twice just don't make the cut. He does make the biggest change I can recollect from him in YOLT; in the novel, Bond infiltrates Blofeld's Japanese base alone, but here, Kissy Suzuki sneaks in with him. The story also has a weird discontinuity; at its beginning, Mary Goodnight is introduced as Bond's new secretary, but at its end, when Bond is thought dead, we're told she's so sad because she had been Bond's secretary for years. He does also massage the way one story leads into the next; we see Mary get reassigned to Station J after Bond dies, setting up her role in The Man with the Golden Gun.

from The Man with the Golden Gun (ser. 3, no. 194)
script by Jim Lawrence, art by Yaroslav Horak

With The Man with the Golden Gun, Jim Lawrence takes over the writing and Yaroslav Horak the art. Horak's art is more exaggerated and even sometimes grotesque than McLusky's more realist style; the women are more apt to pose suggestively. I did sometimes find it harder to follow, but I also found it more immersive.

from The Living Daylights (ser. 3, no. 255)
script by Jim Lawrence, art by Yaroslav Horak

Lawrence is much more likely to take liberties in his adaptations. He adds a whole subplot in The Man with the Golden Gun before Bond goes to Jamaica; Bond is recuperating from his brainwashing at the same clinic where one of Scaramanga's victims is recovering, and is turns out the victim's nurse is a Russian spy who tries to seduce Bond, and then whom he foils. The Living Daylights is a pretty straight adaptation, but Octopussy adds a lot. The short story is told from the perspective of the villain; Bond comes to see him, tells him he's been caught, and the villain ends his own life. But here, we see Bond's investigation play out in Austria, aided by (of course) a young woman, and then in Jamaica, aided by both her and Mary Goodnight, picking up from TMWTGG. Chinese gangsters try to kill Bond; the whole thing is much more elaborate.

from Octopussy (ser. 3, no. 271)
script by Jim Lawrence, art by Yaroslav Horak

This, then, becomes the go-to method for the last two adaptations. There's no spy plot in the original of "The Hildebrand Rarity"; Bond just bumps into some rich American jerk collecting wildlife specimens while on vacation. Here, the rich American jerk is also working with the Soviets to steal an experimental NATO unmanned submarine. Many people seem to praise these strips for capturing the feel of the novels, but in this one, I felt the influence of the movies a bit; the strips began before the films did, but by the time of this strip, the first four or five films were out, and it feels a bit Thunderball to me in particular. The Spy Who Loved Me is also quite different; the first two thirds of that novel don't feature Bond at all, but tell the life story of Vivienne Michel, whose life Bond saves in the final third. The novel replaces all this with a completely unrelated story about Bond trying to stop a recently revived SPECTRE from stealing technical data on a new stealth airplane. This expands massively on a very brief story Bond tells Vivienne in the novel. Again, it feels more film Bond than novel Bond.

from Octopussy (ser. 3, no. 428)
script by Jim Lawrence, art by Yaroslav Horak

But it also works. I like adaptations best when they bring something new to the table; Gammidge and McLusky did solid work, but it often didn't add much. Lawrence and Horak's work is at its best when they are adding their own stuff, and I look forward to seeing where they go in future volumes, when the strip's adventures became (with one exception) wholly original, because based on this, they know how to spin an entertaining Bond tale even without Fleming as a basis.

---

I became curious: On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the longest Bond comic story so far, clocking in at 274 strips. On the other hand, The Living Daylights is the shortest, at just 54. But volume 001's Thunderball was 64, and adapted an entire novel, while this volume's The Hildebrand Rarity is 174 strips but is adapting a short story. So which strips were the most expanded/condensed? To work this out, I counted out how many strip installments each comic story took up, and counted how many pages each corresponding story ran in my 2006 Penguin editions of the Bond books.

Blue indicates stories by original artist McLusky and his various collaborators, yellow stories by Horak and Lawrence, and red is for averages.

The average compression is that one page of prose becomes 0.65 strips; if you remove the short stories from that, it drops to 0.53, because the average page of a short story becomes 2.24 strips! It's quite a difference, but even the two Horak/Lawrence novel adaptations are the only novel adaptations to have more than one strip per page of prose. The later McLusky/Gammidge ones were trending longer, though, with You Only Live Twice and On Her Majesty's Secret Service the only two of their novel adaptations to be above the average compression. Were they expanding the stories as the grew closer to running out of Fleming stories to adapt?

Astoundingly, the 48 pages of "Octopussy" can become 167 strips (3.48 strips per page), while the 336 pages of Thunderball become just 64 strips (0.19 strips per page).