31 October 2022

Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes: The Early Years by Paul Levitz, Kevin Sharpe, et al.

Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes: The Early Years

Collection published: 2011
Contents originally published: 2010
Acquired: May 2019
Read: August 2022

Writer: Paul Levitz
Pencillers: Kevin Sharpe, Eduardo Pansica
Inkers: Marlo Alquiza, Marc Deering, Eber Ferreira
Colorist: Blond
Letterers: Sal Cipriano, Travis Lanham, Steve Wands

I am working my way forward chronologically through all the Legion of Super-Heroes collections I own but have not read; that brings me to this, which (mostly) takes place during the Legion's early years (duh) but was written much later, during the so-called "deboot" era, when the continuity of the Legion was reset to circa 1989. (As Mark Waid once said, the creative impetus here seems to be, "Why can't comics be good the way they were when Mommy was still alive?") This collects five issues of Adventure Comics vol. 1, which jump around a bit chronologically. This is the order they are actually set in:

  • Legion Year One
    • #517: "Saturn Rising" (shortly after the foundation of the Legion, during events chronicled in Legion: Secret Origin #1)
    • #515*: "Playing Hooky" (young Clark Kent's second trip to the future, shortly after the Legion's original appearance in Adventure Comics #247)
  • Legion Year Two
    • #518: "Whispers of Doom" (some time before Adventure #300)
    • #519: "Playing Hooky II" (shortly after #518, still before #300, I think)
  • Legion Year Three
    • #520: "Tragedy: The Death of Lightning Lad" (immediately after Adventure #304, the story where Lightning Lad dies)
  • Legion Year Fifteen (?)
    • #516: "Brande Speaks" (the frame is set during what was the Legion's present day as of 2010, though most of the story is a flashback to the Legion's early years; Superboy appears in the frame, but he's out of his normal sequence relative to the Legion)

(Thanks to Cosmic Teams for helping me figure this out; it's the only website that cares about this miserable period of Legion history enough to do a detailed breakdown for it. Once I have every Legion comic, I plan to read them all in order; maybe I'll go a little nuts and read these where they take place, not where they were published.)

I'm a big fan of Dream Girl... but was her appearance here in any way meaningful except to foreshadow something that happened in a comic from 1964?
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #518 (art by Kevin Sharpe & Marlo Alquiza)

Like a lot of stuff from this era of the Legion, I have to wonder who it's really for. Part of the marketing makes it seems like a way for new readers to get caught up (the back cover calls it "The Secret Origin of Superboy and the Legion!") but it also really requires you to already know your Legion history to comprehend it. I was very confused about the chronological placement of issue #516, for example, and only looking the book up on Cosmic Teams explained it was set much, much later than everything else here. There are bits of the stories that don't seem to go anywhere (a mysterious ghost in Legion HQ in #518, for example), and only by looking them up on-line did I realize they're there to foreshadow things that happened in comics published fifty years prior (the ghost is Mon-El, trapped in the Phantom Zone). In a lot of the stories, the Legion is after someone called Zaryan, and I didn't realize he was the guy who killed Lightning Lad until I got to the last issue; that would have made the foreshadowing work better, to be honest, because I couldn't figure out why were so focused on this seeming non-story. I know my Legion history pretty well, but my earliest Legion of Super-Heroes Archive is volume 3, meaning my knowledge really begins with Adventure #318, and so all this mucking about with the Legion's early days is pretty confusing.

I would have liked more culture clash, to be honest. Cut the Brainiac Zero stuff.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #519 (art by Eduardo Pansica & Eber Ferreira)

Which is a shame, because there is some good stuff here: young Clark getting a time and place where he can just cut loose and have fun and not hide himself, but which also contains dark hints of his own future; the Legion coming back to Superboy's own time and having to goof around. 

I like a bit of Brainiac Five being awkward...
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #519 (art by Eduardo Pansica & Eber Ferreira)

On the other hand, most of what is here is fragmentary and uninteresting, or plain misguided. I don't think adding a secret Saturn Girl/Cosmic Boy one-night stand is a very good idea; it all comes across as slightly skeevy. #518 isn't really a story, just hints at other stories, and thus provides no reward to the reader. #520's impact is muted by the fact it needs to be told as flashbacks in order to fit continuity. The story of R. J. Brande given here totally contradicts the history the character received in L.E.G.I.O.N. and the "Five Years Later" era of the Legion... which is totally fine, retcon away, but my rule of retcons is the new version must be at least as interesting as the old one, if not more... and this is considerably less interesting. The old Brande was fascinating; this one is a generic inspirational guy.

Is this supposed to vaguely justify why this isn't consistent with previous accounts?
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #516 (art by Kevin Sharpe & Marlo Alquiza)

So, alas. Thankfully this and Secret Origin are all I have to catch up on from this era from now; I'm next jumping ahead a bit to read a new collection of a classic Legion story...

I read a Legion of Super-Heroes collection every six months. Next up in sequence: Legion of Super-Heroes: The Millennium Massacre

* Technically, this is Adventure Comics vol. 3 #12. In 2009, DC relaunched Adventure Comics with a new #1, but each issue also had a secondary number, continuing the numbering of Adventure Comics vol. 1 from where it had left off in 1983, #503. So, this issue was both Adventure Comics vol. 1 #515 and Adventure Comics vol. 3 #12. But with #516, they dropped the vol. 3 numbering, and used only the vol. 1 numbering. Totally straightforward. (The intervening vol. 2 was a one-issue revival in 1999, part of The Justice Society Returns, fact fans!)

28 October 2022

Star Trek Adventures: Playing "Decision Point"

Like with our previous episode (see complete list at the bottom of this entry), I had a slot I had no particular plans for. I picked one at random from my list of published adventures; this ended up being an episode of the "Living Campaign."

The Living Campaign was an undertaking where Modiphius would post Star Trek Adventures episodes to their website monthly-ish, telling a continuing story that gaming groups could play along with, from 2017 to 2019. This resulted in sixteen missions you can download from free from the Modiphius. A set of write-ups on Reddit resulted in me adding four that sounded particularly interesting to my list of possibilities when I first assembled it, and the one that came up this time was "Decision Point."

As I dug into it, I could see how it would fit into our campaign, and so it became the next episode of...

“Captain’s Log, Stardate 48299.9. After our recent travails in the micro-verse and with the Atlantis wormhole, the Ayrton is in need of an overhaul at a Federation starbase. However, Outpost 8B has ordered us to search for SS Hypatia, a civilian science vessel exploring beyond the Rim of the Starlight that has been missing for six weeks. Eighteen hours ago, we picked up a plasma trail, likely from a damaged ship, in a system marked as the Orgun system on the Haradin charts of this region. We are about two hours out. I have recently learned the crew of the Hypatia has a personal connection to a member of my own crew…”

Episode 8: "Stare Decisis"

(based on "Decision Point" by Ian Lemke)

Orgun II (foreground) and Orgun III
(Internet wallpaper, original source unknown)

Planning the Mission

The premise of this mission is that the player vessel finds a crashed Federation science ship on a pre-warp planet. The planet is geologically unstable, and will explode in a matter of weeks. The civilian scientists have decided to help the planet's inhabitants evacuate to a sister planet... but not only is this a Prime Directive violation, the sister planet has a sapient species of its own, at a lower level of technology.

As originally designed, it has five scenes:

  1. investigate from orbit, scope out the crashed ship
  2. meet the native species and locate the missing scientists
  3. crawl through a mountain cave in search of mysterious power readings
  4. discover ancient alien equipment that can help stabilize the planet and fix it
  5. talk about the Prime Directive issues

It seemed like a good framework, but it also felt a bit hollow. I wasn't convinced there was enough for my usual 5-6 players to do, especially in scenes #3-4. It's very linear. And the end is kind of an anticlimax; really, the big focus of play is on scene 4, and then in scene 5, the players make their choice, and the episode just ends. I also took on a point from a review I read of the mission (maybe this one or this one from RPGNet, or a comment on one; I can't find the specific comment if so) that the endangered species (the Lormeans) are barely in the adventure, and thus kind of hard for the players to empathize with.

On the other hand, it was a good fit for my ongoing story. One of the things my players' ship is searching for is a race of "pyramid aliens" who millennia ago battled the mind-control fungus they fought in their first five episodes; they hadn't encountered any sign of either for a while, so it seemed like a good time for a return to that plot. In the mission as written, ancient aliens moved the planet's orbit and the machinery designed to compensate for the geological stress this caused is breaking down. I just made those ancient aliens the pyramid aliens, and added the idea that they moved it to battle the fungus (the fungal spores don't survive long outside a host if it's too hot, so they moved the planet closer to the sun to impede its spread). This gave an impressive new dimension to the powers of the pyramid aliens!

So I decided to go with the mission, just flesh it out a bit. I had the Lormeans request the away team come and inspect the facilities where they were building the evacuation fleet, so that in scene 3, I could parallel a couple crewmembers doing this while the rest crawled through the cave. A tremor would then force the away team to help the Lormeans in this facility. The Living Campaign missions (unlike the ones published in hard copy I've largely been doing until now) don't come with art, and when flipping through the Core Rulebook to see if it had any pictures could use, I found a picture of a volcano threatening a village. It's clearly a Federation colony, but it immediately gave me an idea for a parallel encounter for scene #4: while half of the away team worked to repair the ancient equipment, the other would help evacuate a group of Lormean villagers threatened by a volcano. This would give the players more of a connection to the Lormeans, and highlight the dilemma a bit: why was it okay to save these specific villagers, but not their whole society?

Here's my write-up for those two side scenes:


the crashed SS Hypatia
(Star Trek: Voyager screen capture)
The mission also suggests that one of the scientists have a connection to a player. I made one an old mentor for Ensign Carver, my science officer. I wanted him to push her (and thus the players) in the opposite direction of wherever their stance on the moral dilemma seemed to be going. I know a couple of my players, as real people, find the Prime Directive morally unjustified, and I suspected they would lean in favor of helping the Lormeans. (It was funny to read comments from other GMs who had the exact opposite situation!) So my plan was to use him to push reasons the crew should not help the Lormeans evacuate to the other planet; as a botanist, he saw them as an "invasive" and worried what kind of effect they might have on the native species, both literally and more metaphorically.

Lastly, I tweaked the fifth scene and added a sixth. Since my characters are all lower decks, the decision really isn't up to them, so scene 5 would end with them needing to convince the captain to do what they wanted. That would be the big climax of the episode, not fixing the equipment. Then, I didn't like that the players made the decision, and that was it, so I added a sixth scene where they would have to do what they decided: help the Lormeans, stop the Lormeans, whatever. Or, if they (say) wanted to help the Lormeans but failed to convince the captain, that would be their opportunity to do something like help them covertly. Whatever they chose, I wanted to see some consequences.

Oh, and like last time, I retitled it to be more pretentious. "Stare Decisis" is a legal term about precedent literally meaning "to stand by what is decided," and it was in the news at the time I wrote the mission because of Roe and Dobbs. It seemed apt: the crew would have to decide if they wanted to stand by what the civilian scientists had decided.

Playing the Mission

The episode's six scenes ended up breaking down into two three-hour sessions. I had five players during the first session:

  • Hayley as Liana Carver, human science officer
  • Cari as Jor Lena, Bajoran security officer
  • Andy as Gurg bim Vurg, Tellarite medical officer
  • Céline as Seleya, Vulcan engineer
  • Keith as Vivik, Arkarian pilot

Lormean Central Headquarters
(commonly reproduced picture, original source unknown)
And for the second, our sixth joined us:

  • Claire as Mooria Loonin, Trill command officer

We have a good stable crew right now: Hayley, Cari, and Andy have been in every episode, and this was Céline and Keith's third in a row. This made Claire's fourth, though hers haven't been sequential.

Céline was my only player to never command a mission, so I put her in charge; I also felt a Vulcan would be less likely to make their decisions emotionally. I made Hayley the character with a personal connection to the Hypatia crew, since she was a scientist, and had a good backstory hook for it.

The first half, I would say, played pretty straightforwardly, which I think is typically the case with STA missions—as long as the rolls are good. In the first act or so, players typically just go around figuring out what is going on. My players investigated the crashed science vessel easily, talked to the Lormeans and scientists, and then headed off on their two separate ventures. I suggested as GM that two should go check out the assembly line, and three should go to the cave; I wasn't sure who would go where exactly, but Seleya and Vivik decided to check out the assembly line, leaving Carver, Jor, and Gurg to investigate the power readings. Seleya and Vivik had a good time dealing with the catastrophes I'd set up in the assembly plant, and made good use of their Focuses and Values; at one point, Vivik tossed the unconscious Lormean chief minister to someone else, and argued that this was an appropriate use of Conn! I allowed it. The cave stuff was not as exciting, to be honest.

The second session was where things picked up. I ran the two locations simultaneous to each other, and did turn order for them, like we were in combat: the players in the cave would all get to do their moves (a Task and a minor action) and the players dealing with the volcano the same. Whenever we went back to a location, I would spend some Threat to do something like drop a fireball or make a console explode, giving a good time element to things. The actions being simultaneous had positive repercussions: when the cave group got the geology stabilized, the volcano stopped spitting out fireballs. On the other hand, I wonder if I should have put an actual time limit for when the lava was going to hit the village: I always worry when I pick these things that I might make it so short there's no way for the players to succeed. But I guess I could always intentionally go slightly longer than I think the players need, and then spend Threat to tighten the time limit if it becomes clear the players are doing well. (And they could spend Momentum to expand it, I guess? Actually, I think this would be a good use of the Extended Consequences mechanic from the Gamemaster's Guide; I will have to give it a go in a future mission.) The players rolled very well, almost too well: they generated almost no Threat from complications, and even got (if I recall correctly) three natural "1"s!

phosphorescent caves on Orgun II
(photograph from here)
But overall, I think it really worked. Both groups were pretty strategic about their actions, and Gurg's player was torn because he wanted to investigate stuff (he has a Value about the pursuit of knowledge) but was needed to help with Carver's Tasks. I expected the players at the volcano to just try to evacuate the villagers onto a Lormean flyer, but they came up with a whole plan: Seleya transformed an engine component from the flyer into a bomb, and placed it so that it would expand a fissure to make it big enough to swallow up the lava flow. (This was apparently inspired by Avatar: The Last Airbender!) I gave a series of actions they would have to perform to do this... and they succeeded, so they saved the village! I always like it when my players surprise me, and here they did so by going above and beyond in true Starfleet fashion.

After they solved the problems on the planet, the players beamed back up to the Ayrton to meet with the captain. (It was here that I added Claire's character back into the narrative; I felt a bit bad that she had sat out so much, but there wasn't really a way to get her character involved earlier. She seemed okay with this, and did chime in with ideas during the planetary escapades.) The captain told them she wanted their input on the decision she needed to make. (My narrative justification for Loonin's presence was that the captain valued an opinion from someone who knew the other players but didn't have firsthand experience with the Lormeans, so they could be more objective.) The Ayrton's options were:

  • actively aid the scientists in helping the Lormeans evacuate to Orgun III
  • do nothing at all, letting the scientists proceed
  • stop the scientists from helping the Lormeans

A couple NPCs laid out their take, and then the captain and other NPCs left the room to take care of something, giving the characters a chance to talk as a group about what their recommendation would be. I told them I wanted to have an in-character debate to the extent that was possible, and asked that they draw on their Values and backstories in thinking about what their answers would be. I then leaned back and let them at it. (Though I did chime in with clarifications and such occasionally.)

They knocked it out of the park!

It went on for over thirty minutes, and it was hard to get them to stop. A couple—most notably Carver, Jor, and Loonin—were in favor of helping the Lormeans resettle on Orgun III. Vivik feared that the Lormeans would become hostile to Orgun III's native sapient species, the Slithar, and wondered what could be done to stop that from happening. Carver wanted permission from the Slithar, but they were medieval-level and thus didn't have a centralized world government. Could an empty continent be found? Lots of idea were bandied about, both about what should happen and how it could be done.

volcano threatening Lormean village
(from the Core Rulebook)
Gurg's player drew on his Value of "Rigorous Debate" to disagree with the emerging consensus: this was a Prime Directive violation, and thus the right course of action was to remove all Federation technology and let the species die. (It's called the Prime Directive for a reason he kept insisting.) Seleya's logical approach accorded with this, too. Gurg kept making an argument about the "settled law" of the Prime Directive, while Claire pointed out precedent from Prime Directive events in TOS and TNG would favor intervention. So, a nice unintentional tie-in to the title I gave the episode! (Claire even mentioned Roe/Dobbs in her arguments, tying into the very thing that had inspired my name change.)

Eventually a fourth idea emerged: giving the Lormeans warp drive and other technologies that would let them construct an evacuation fleet that could leave their solar system, so they could settle an uninhabited Class-M planet instead. (It was even suggested they could go to Optera IV from "Biological Clock.") This Vivik was in favor of, swaying most of the group... but how could it be justified? The players came up with the argument that the Lormeans were already a post-warp society: their species had been interfered with by the pyramid aliens and the fungus, who must have gotten to the planet via FTL technology. Just as the Bajorans could be Federation members without having developed warp drive themselves, couldn't the Lormeans also receive aid from the Federation? If the pyramid aliens hadn't moved the planet, none of this would have happened at all.

They took a vote: it came out three-two in favor of the give-them-warp-drive plan. (Hayley had to go nurse our son, so she didn't get to vote, but she told me later she would have accorded with this plan.) Seleya reported the group's consensus to the captain, but she and Gurg both noted to the captain they disagreed with it.

Everyone shined in the debate, everyone had at least one great well-argued in-character moment, so I awarded everyone an extra point of Determination. (I always forget you can do this, but read something after we played the previous episode that reminded me.)

Knowing my players, I had expected them to want to help the Lormeans, and had noted in my mission notes that convincing the captain of this would be Difficulty 6 Task—the hardest Task they had ever encountered. But since the plan had escalated to "give them warp drive," I raised it to Difficulty 7! I then made an allowance for the quality of their "already-post-warp" argument and dropped it to D6 again. Seleya didn't want to make the argument herself, though, and not hearing it from the mission leader increased the difficulty (back to D7); Loonin suggested that she could make the argument as an unbiased observer, who hadn't met the Lormeans herself, and I took it back down (so, finally, D6). Claire bought a perfect D20 with Determination, more dice with a mixture of Momentum and Threat, and was aided by anyone who wanted to (so, Jor and Vivik). I did give Gurg and Seleya's players the options to work against the roll, but they declined, perhaps naturally. (Gurg, however, made a comment like, "I hope you've enjoyed your career, captain.") 

USS Ayrton orbiting Orgun II
(art by David Metlesits on DeviantArt)
They rolled, I think, seven success altogether! So the captain was convinced. But the Ayrton had scheduled repairs coming up; the ship could only stay at Orgun II so long or arouse suspicion. They couldn't spend six months helping up until the moment the planet would explode. ("I'll have to file some very vague log entries," Captain Vizcaino murmured.)

This left us with not much time for the last scene (they kept on wanting to debate!), so I made it simple. I asked each player what they would do to help the evacuation effort, and then asked each of them to make an unassisted Difficulty 2 roll to do that. (They could be helped by the ship, though, if it made sense.) For example, Vivik said he would train the Lormean pilots, so I gave him a Presence + Conn Task. If they all succeeded, then the evacuation would go smoothly. Everyone agreed to help—even the naysayers, now that the captain had made her decision. Some used Determination, so they built up some Momentum; I wondered if I made it too easy and should have made them all Difficulty 3? Or I actually had a couple Threat tokens left; I should have increased the difficulty of a couple of the Tasks with that.

That said, though, they got a nice triumphant, if indeterminate ending. Are the Lormeans actually going to be okay? The Ayrton is on its way to Deep Space 8 for repairs and has no way of knowing for now... (Clear sequel hook here once six months have gone by in-universe.)

So overall, I think this one came out great. A couple of my players were very enthusiastic about it when it was done, and it totally felt like an actual episode of Star Trek when they had their debate. My players have made tricky calls before, but never before had they disagreed on one to this extent. Since we've gotten into "Season One," every episode has been strong, but this is definitely one that really shows off the potential of the game at its best.

Beyond the Rim of the Starlight:

26 October 2022

The James Bond Film Comic Adaptations

As I read the James Bond novels and watch the James Bond films, I've also been reading the James Bond comics. I've previously discussed the Daily Express strips, but there are also the comic book adaptations of the films, of which there have been four (and a third).

The very first James Bond film comic was of the very first James Bond film. An adaptation of Dr. No was intended to be a Dell Movie Classic according to the Grand Comics Database, but I don't know why it wasn't. It was published in 1962 as part of the Classics Illustrated series in the UK. Though the UK series mostly reprinted the American one, they published (Wikipedia tells me) thirteen original stories, including this one. It seems a bit of an odd fit between Goethe's Faust and Tolstoy's Master and Man! Perhaps for this reason, it wasn't picked up by the American Classics Illustrated, and eventually found print in Showcase, DC's anthology series, in 1963. Again, it's an odd fit between stories about the Metal Men, Tommy Tomorrow, and Sergeant Rock.

I actually haven't read this comic: it goes for hundreds of dollars usually in any version. It has never been reprinted or officially digitized, though you can find scans if you poke around a bit.

In the 1980s, Marvel adapted two James Bond films into comic books. An adaptation of For Your Eyes Only was published as a 1981 issue of Marvel Super Special, a series that mostly consisted of adaptations of films. (For example, the previous issue adapted Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the following one, Dragonslayer.) It was then later reprinted as a two-issue miniseries of its own, which is the version I read. This one has an impressive creative team: Larry Hama scripts, Howard Chaykin pencils, and Vince Colletta inks. Surely if any comics illustrator was made to draw Bond, it's Chaykin, and surely if any illustrator was made to draw Bond girls, it's Colletta. But it's a pretty typical film-to-comic adaptation, in that it doesn't really breathe like it ought.

In 1983, another issue of Marvel Super Special contained an adaptation of Octopussy. This one is interesting to me as it was clearly the work of Marvel UK going by the creative team: Steve Moore, Paul Neary, and Annie Halfacree are all names I know from Doctor Who Magazine, Transformers UK, and Death's Head. I haven't ever found anything on the Internet to indicate why this arrangement might have come about. Again, it's a strong creative team, but again it's a pretty perfunctory adaptation.

The last complete James Bond film comic was an adaptation of Licence to Kill from Eclipse Comics. This was published as a standalone graphic novel, apparently in both trade paperback and hardcover (I have the former). It's oversized, as I think a lot of early graphic novels were. The cover trumpets it as being by Mike Grell, but it actually has a large number of contributors. Grell just did the breakdowns, while the script was by Robert Ashford, the pencils by three different artists, and the inks two.

Despite that, it's definitely the best of the three Bond film comics I've read. Grell, like Hama/Chaykin, seems like a creator born to do Bond, and this one does breathe as a comic book even if it has a lot of compression to fit the page length. (This is most notable in the very brief climax.) The art is strong and atmospheric, even if it seems to me that sometimes Bond looks like Timothy Dalton, sometimes he looks like Roger Moore, and sometimes he looks like the sort of generic, idealized Bond from the Daily Express strips. I assume the use of three different pencillers is responsible for this. Interestingly, he's often drawn with the facial scar he had in the books, but which was never used on screen! The painted style is a good fit for the atmosphere of Bond.

from James Bond 007: Licence To Kill:
The Official Comic Book Adaptation

The last Bond film comic was a three-issue adaptation of GoldenEye from Topps... the first issue of which was the only one to appear. I don't really feel motivated to track this down, to be honest.

I don't know what the rights issues are with any of these; it seems to me you could get a nice trade paperback out of bunging them all together. It's certainly the kind of omnibus I could imagine, say, Dark Horse or IDW doing. Boom has the Bond comics rights these days, and I don't know if they are interested in that sort of thing even if it is feasible. But if it meant I got to read "Doctor No," I would get it!

"James Bond: For Your Eyes Only" was originally published in issue #19 of Marvel Super Special (1981). It was republished as James Bond: For Your Eyes Only #1-2 (Oct.-Nov. 1981) The story was written by Larry Hama, pencilled by Howard Chaykin, inked by Vince Colletta, colored by Christie Scheele, lettered by Jean Simek, and edited by Dennis O'Neil.

"James Bond 007: Octopussy" was originally published in issue #26 of Marvel Super Special (1983). The story was written by Steve Moore, illustrated by Paul Neary, lettered by Annie Halfacree, and edited by John Barraclough. 

James Bond 007: Licence To Kill: The Official Comic Book Adaptation was originally published in 1989. The story had breakdowns by Mike Grell; a script by Richard Ashford; pencils by Chuck Austen, Tom Yeates, and Stan Woch; inks by Tom Yeates and Stan Woch; colors by Sam Parsons, Sally Parsons, Mel Jöhnson, and Reuben Rude; lettering by Wayne Truman; and editing by Dick Hansom and Cat Yronwode.

24 October 2022

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

I've been reading a Dickens novel over winter break every year for a few years now, working my way through the ones I haven't read in order of descending popularity on LibraryThing. I think I have five to go, so I look forward to 2027. This winter break, I was a bit behind in my reading due to prioritizing 2021 Hugo finalists, which meant that I didn't start this book until January... and it took me two whole months to read!

Originally published: 1855-57
Acquired: December 2021
Read: March 2022

This is a shame, because it starts out pretty good. "Little Dorrit" is really Amy, a girl born in debtors' prison where her father has languished for over twenty years; one could bring one's wife and children along if one desired. All the stuff about how Dorrit came to the prison, and his life there, and Amy's life there, is fantastic stuff, that usual Dickens mixture of the comic and the real. Meanwhile, a man named Arthur Clennam has come home after decades overseas, now that his father is dead, and he soon meets Little Dorrit and aims to help her. His visit to the Circumlocution Office, a government department devoted to stopping the government from doing anything effective, is Dickens at his savage and comic best.

The problem is, every time the narrative moves away from Little Dorrit, it becomes bogged down in some of the dullest characters I can ever remember from a Dickens novel. Who cares about the Meagles or all the rest of them? And yet the novel just goes on and on and on.

Little Dorrit herself is one of Dickens's best psychological portraits: the chapter about her after her family has finally been released from prison and achieved riches once more is utterly devastating. Yet the novel keeps going and going after that point for hundreds of more pages, mostly neglecting its title character, and I lost all interest, even in characters like Clennam who had initially held my attention.

I am wondering if descending popularity order is a mistake, as it means I am going from the good ones to the less good ones! 

(This is my first new-look Penguin Classic. Just different enough to make the whole redesign seem pointless, and now my Penguin Classics don't all match anymore.)

I read a Charles Dickens novel every year. Next up in sequence: The Old Curiosity Shop

21 October 2022

Reading The Cowardly Lion of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Cowardly Lion of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill

I continue to be fascinated by what differences Ruth Plumly Thompson introduces to Oz storytelling. In both Baum and Thompson books, characters often have to get from point A to point B, and on the way keep bumping into what some Oz fans call IEs (which I think stands for "irrelevant enclaves"): random weird communities that the characters briefly interact with, and then leave, but which don't affect the actual plot of the novel. (I kind of reject this characterizations of "IEs," and thus the concept of them, but that's not really my point here.)

Originally published: 1923
Acquired and read aloud: June 2022

They each handle this basic concept very differently, though. In a Baum book, the characters will usually travel sedately for a bit, come to a community, interact with its inhabitants, then leave and travel sedately some more until they come to the next one. Road to Oz, Emerald City, and Lost Princess are all good examples of Oz books that use this format. In a Thompson novel, though, the characters plunge from place to place; it's very manic. You might escape one, but on a vehicle you can't control, so you're immediately in another, and then another, and then another. And the people in each community almost always want to do something to you: slam doors on you, throw you off the edge, put you into jars. In a Baum book, you would visit three communities in three days; half a Thompson book can take place on a single day in which the characters visit three communities. It's a very different tone, and sometimes I felt like my son struggled to keep up with the action in this one. I don't know that it's a problem per se, but it gives Thompson's Oz a less peaceful tone: at any place you visit, there's liable to be something dangerous you need to get away from.

On the other hand, this approach lets her do what I am realizing is one of her key moves: the bonding through adversity. This was at the forefront of both Cowardly Lion and Kabumpo, and it's there to a lesser extent with Sir Hokus in Royal Book. But let me step back a bit. Despite the title, the initial protagonists of Cowardly Lion are two Americans: Notta Bit More, a circus clown, and Bobbie "Bob Up" Downs, an orphan from Philadelphia. When a magic Oz rhyme pops into Notta's head, both he and Bob are whisked to the country of Mudge, a desert community in a corner of the Munchkin country. The king of Mudge, Mustafa, is mad for lions, but Ozma has forbidden his people from leaving Mudge because they steal too much, on pain of losing their heads. (I guess this isn't as bad as it sounds when you remember no one in Oz can die.) Every lion in Mudge has been captured, so Mustafa uses his magic to force Notta and Bob to travel to the Emerald City and capture the Cowardly Lion for him. The first several chapters thus chronicle their adventures.

Meanwhile, the Cowardly Lion is having one of his period bouts of self-doubt over his cowardliness; I liked the comparison to the Soldier with the Green Whiskers. (The Lion is always afraid but never runs; the Soldier is never afraid because he knows he can always run—and he always does!) Scraps makes a joking suggestion that if he ate a brave man, he'd have a lot of bravery inside him, so he runs off to the Munchkin country to find a brave man to eat. In a complete coincidence (though honestly it didn't bother me very much), he runs into Notta and Bob. Notta and Bob keep secret that they intend to capture him, but the Lion keeps secret that he almost ate Notta, and they all go adventuring together. Eventually, though, they meet Nick/Snorer, the bird with the telephone beak, and Notta confesses the truth to the Lion, and they have to come up with a plan to escape that fulfills the requirements of the magic Mustafa has placed on them. It's through their adventures that Thompson portrays a real sense of bonding between the group, especially when the Lion must fight dozens of Feathermen to prevent Notta and Bob from being tossed of the "skyle" (a sky isle) of Un in what is really a tremendous sequence showing how courageous the Lion is despite his ostensible cowardice. As I said when I reviewed Royal Book, I think Thompson has a great handle on the Cowardly Lion.

Overall, I enjoyed the book. The excursion to Un is good; I particularly liked a very belabored set-up for a very bad pun about a dog they meet in the sky. Some commenters don't seem to like Notta, especially his habit of wearing weird disguises (across the course of the book, he disguises himself as a lion, a bear, a hunter, and a fish, and it's always the wrong disguise for the situation), but it seems to me that it plays into a theme of embracing who you are: Notta finds in Oz a place where he can be a clown all the time, and everyone likes him for it, while the Cowardly Lion comes to realize that the only way to not be afraid is to not be alive. Both have to be who they are.

This latter bit, though, I felt could have been handled slightly better; another character forces the Lion to become a statue so that he will no longer feel fear, but I think it would have been stronger if the Lion had chosen it, and then found out that he didn't actually want what he thought he wanted. Instead, he's reached this realization sort of anticlimactically earlier, and then he gets turned into a statue.

Like Sir Hokus at the end of Royal Book, Notta and Bob find a place where their very oddness means that they fit in perfectly. (Unlike Sir Hokus, though, I don't think Notta and Bob ever appear in any other Oz books, though, even though the narrator tells us Bob became good friends with Button-Bright.) I liked that Thompson remembered the Wizard had been a circus man himself, and it's a very charming conclusion as Notta establishes Oz's first circus. 

Even if you don't otherwise like the disguise aspect, it's all worth it for a part where Notta decides that the people of the Emerald City are so magic that they won't accept him unless he's magic, so puts on a witch disguise before entering the city. In a humorous sequence, Dorothy is the first to see him and promptly dumps a bucket of water on his head!

My son wanted to know why Notta disguised himself as a wicked witch, not a good one, and I explained that in most stories, the only witches are wicked, and so Notta didn't know about good witches. He said he would give Notta a copy of Wonderful Wizard so he would know about good witches. When I reminded him that even in the first book, Dorothy didn't know about good witches, he said he'd give her one too; I pointed out that she knew all about them now, so he asked what kind of book she needed. I suggested that since she's lived in Oz over a century, she might benefit from one about our world, and so his idea is to give her a book about Florida. "Do you know what my book about Florida is called?" he asked my wife as I retold her this story. "No," she said. "It's called Florida," he said proudly.

We've also had good fun reciting the magic rhyme that can be used to send yourself or other people to Oz: "Udge! Budge! / Go to Mudge! / Udger budger, / You're a Mudger!" Though then he wanted to know why it doesn't work when we do it!

Cowardly Lion of Oz entered the public domain in 2019, and none of the major Oz publishers have done an edition of it. The best extant edition (short of paying $150+ for a vintage Reilly & Lee, which my wife vetoed for some reason) was I able to find was from SeaWolf Press. SeaWolf has done print-on-demand editions of the first nineteen Oz books, which they confusingly and inaccurately call the "Illustrated First Editions." The text is reset (so my edition of Cowardly Lion runs 199 pages as opposed to the original's 291), but it purports to contain all the original illustrations; the color plates are reprinted in black and white. I think the text was probably sourced from Project Gutenberg, and there are occasionally some errors when it comes to turning Gutenberg's "straight" quotation marks into “curly” ones. In addition, one picture is included twice, and there's one spot where there's a random blank line between paragraphs. (Plus, there are typos, but given there are often a lot of typos in the actual Reilly & Lee books, these may be "accurate" in a sense!) So it could be slightly better, but for a $9 copy of a book that has barely ever been reprinted, you could do a lot worse! (I do dislike that they put Baum's name on the spine, though, and not Thompson's.)

Next up in sequence: Grampa in Oz

19 October 2022

The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, Part 1: The Warrior's Apprentice

The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold

My friend Christiana has been after me to read the Vorkosigan books for some time and, indeed, she did get me to read the Baen collection of the two Cordelia novels over a decade ago. But I never got around to reading anymore; you lot know how many books are on my reading list! Recently, my sister's voice has joined her. I was finally spurred to action by the fire that destroyed Uncle Hugo's Bookstore in Minneapolis during the Black Lives Matter protests. Posts on File 770 drew my attention to the fact that the store, as it was being rebuilt, was selling signed copies of special editions of the Vorkosigan novels that had been released by the New England Science Fiction Association.

Originally published: 1986
Acquired: January 2022
Read: March 2022

These editions were nice hardcovers, with better art than what graces the Baen editions. You can see them on the NESFA site here, and on the Uncle Hugo's site here. I think they look nice, and they have definitive texts and extra critical apparatus, and I suspected they would look nice on a shelf together. The whole series hasn't been done, but they would match the fact that the one Vorkosigan book I do own (the sixteenth! someone got it for me as a present) is in hardcover, too. So I put them on my wish list, and my sister got me signed NESFA editions of the two Cordelia books for Christmas. Me being me, however, I had come up with my own reading order for the Vorkosigan novels that was neither chronological nor publication (more on that in a future post), and I had decided to start with The Warrior's Apprentice (second in publication order, fourth in chronology). Thus, I picked that up from Uncle Hugo's myself, and off we went!

At first I struggled with it. It's a bit jumpy at first. As I texted my friend when I was partway through, "Like he's failing out of school, now there's a party, now he's on Beta Colony, it wasn't clear to me what the book was actually about. But now that he is on his smuggling run with his weird crew it is super fun."

And indeed, groups of weird people who must work together to run a spaceship is basically my favorite genre of science fiction, and this is a particularly well-executed example of it. I like how Miles bluffs his way into a situation, and then is forced to escalate his bluffs again and again, and soon he supposedly runs a massive mercenary organization... and then he does run a massive mercenary organization! I loved his "inspection" of the mercenary ship he captures. Forward momentum! Miles himself is the kind of character I love, of course: logical, honorable, cunning, clueless. Basically Hornblower in space, how could I not like him?

I had some niggles, aside from the opening—a romance subplot didn't convince me too much, the stuff about a certain character felt a bit too icky but not handled sufficiently well—but on the whole this was a highly enjoyable book, one that gave me exactly what I want. I am writing this in August, when I have not yet got to my next Vorkosigan book, but I hope to do so soon!

Next up in sequence: The Vor Game

17 October 2022

The Wicked + The Divine, Vols. 1–2 by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie

The Wicked + The Divine, Vol. 1, The Faust Act
The Wicked + The Divine, Vol. 2, Fandemonium

Collection originally published: 2014
Contents published: 2014
Acquired: June 2020
Read: May 2022

Collection published: 2015
Contents published: 2014-15
Acquired: June 2020
Read: May 2022

Writer: Kieron Gillen
Artist: Jamie McKelvie
Colourist: Matthew Wilson
Letterer: Clayton Cowles
Flatter: Dee Cunniffe
Guest Colourist: Nathan Fairbairn

Back in 2020, the final volume of The Wicked + The Divine, a nine-volume comic series by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story. Generously, all nine volumes were included in the Hugo voter's packet but I only had the time to read the one actually under consideration, and I completely bounced off it: not the comic's own fault, but it was incomprehensible to someone who hadn't read the previous eight volumes. So I left it off my ballot, and I resolved I'd come back to it someday, when I had finished working my way through what I was reading at the time, Titan's Doctor Who comics. Well, I've finally done that, and thus The Wicked + The Divine has taken its place as the comic I read on my tablet when I'm between installments of other projects; I was able to read volumes 1 and 2 back in May, between DC 2000 and JSA by Geoff Johns, Book Two.

The idea of the comic is that the pantheon of gods is real, and groups of them are periodically reincarnated every ninety years, but die within two. In the 2010s, the gods are pop stars, giving magically charged performances across Britain that result in enormous crowds of admirers. The first couple volumes follow an ordinary human girl named Laura, aged seventeen, who is a hardcore fan of the Pantheon. Laura ends up involved with the gods, and when the god Lucifer is accused of murder, she tries to prove Lucifer's innocence, alongside cynical journalist Cassandra, and discovers there's a dark conspiracy afoot, and a dark side to both pop idols and fandom.

Like a lot of Kieron Gillen that I've read, I admire it more than enjoy it. I liked Laura, but I struggled to keep track of the large cast of god characters; I really liked the art by Jamie McKelvie, but still didn't feel emotionally connected to anyone. There's a lot of technical proficiency here, but not a lot of heart. And yet, clearly, other people love it. I wonder if it's because they care about music in the way that I don't; the literalization of the pop-idol-as-god metaphor is clearly where a lot of this story's power derives from, and I've just never felt that way about a musician. And the style of fandom it evokes is often a more modern one, I think, the kind that thrives on Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram, whereas I am a guy who still mostly participates in fandom via what used to be called BBSes!

Still, I am interested enough to keep reading. Jamie McKelvie really brings these characters to life. I look forward to the day I finally get around to reading something like Young Avengers by him, which I think will have a much lower level of buy-in for me, given I like superheroes a lot more than pop stars. There are good twists and neat layouts here, and maybe (as often happens with ongoing comics) the cumulative effect of reading this will end up grabbing me over time.

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

14 October 2022

Hurricane II: The Revenge

Okay, this is a bit late! But if you follow the news, you will know a big hurricane recently came our way in Tampa, Florida. Hurricane Ian was actually our second; months after we first moved here, we experienced Hurricane Irma.

We evacuated for Irma, staying with our friends Jared and Angela in Columbia, South Carolina, but in the end, it had been kind of unnecessary. We live fairly far inland, in a suburb of Tampa. The advice they give is "run from the water, hide from the wind." That is to say, if you don't live in a flood zone, your best bet is to stay at your home, and just be ready for wind, moving to a safe interior room if you get hit by hurricane-force gusts.

Evacuating for Irma not only turned out be totally unnecessary, but kind of risky. When we came back, there was no way to get off the interstate once we got on it for much of Georgia:

The drive home was much less smooth: for the last forty miles of I-95 S in Georgia, every exit was barricaded by the state highway patrol, sometimes supplemented by the armed forces! As far as I could tell, there was no advance warning of this. Thankfully we'd gassed up in Augusta despite having over half a tank, or we might have been in some trouble. We later found out that the entire county was basically without power, so they just kept all the returning refugees on the interstates.

If I hadn't had the forethought to gas up in Augusta, we could have been stranded on the side of I-95! By the time we got back, it was clear our power had been out, but it was not actually out anymore, and our home was fine.

So we decided to not evacuate this time. Or rather, really, Hayley and I never even talk about evacuating at all; we just set to doing what we needed to do. We don't have storm shutters or anything, so mostly that came down to clearing the yard of the kind of stuff that could be hazardous debris, stockpiling canned goods in case we lost power, filling the tub with water for flushing the toilets, preparing a cooler, and so on.

pre-Ian gummy making
Ian was incoming over the weekend and due to arrive around the evening of the Tuesday the 27th; pretty quickly, the public schools called off Monday through Thursday because some of them get used as shelters. I actually woke up on the Saturday before horrendously sick. Incredibly achy and tired, so I could do little other than lie on the couch or in bed as Hayley did a lot of the prep. I was still pretty bad Sunday, but I was due to have student conferences on Monday, so I powered through a bunch of papers Sunday evening, only for UT to call the whole week of school off at 7:30pm Sunday. UT usually doesn't make calls that quickly in my experience, but it was certainly handy. Most of our students are from out of state, and so many of them were flying back home, so there was no way to hold class on Monday. UT's dorms are in mandatory evacuation zones A and B, both of which the county called, so students couldn't remain on campus once evacuations started.

I did feel a bit better by Monday, and began to pitch in, but it was clear by that point that the hurricane wouldn't really arrive until Wednesday. And as everyone now knows, by Wednesday morning, it was clear that the hurricane's track was turning steadily east, meaning it would make landfall nowhere near Tampa, and thus any wind impact on us would be pretty minimal.

So our Wednesday was pretty chill. I made a meal I had planned as a dinner for lunch, in case we lost power—but this turned out to be unneeded, as we never did, though there were a number of flickers off and on across the course of the late afternoon and evening. We had a family movie viewing (The LEGO Movie, which I had never seen) in the afternoon, which isn't something we've done very much, so again that was nice. The Internet went out in the evening, but other than that there was some strong-ish wind and consistent but rarely heavy rain.

When we woke up Thursday, the power was still on and the Internet still out. Our main impact was that a number of the screens on our pool enclosure tore, and the pool had a bunch of leaves in it. I, like an idiot, had forgotten to turn off the pool pump's automatic timer, so the leaves jammed up the pump and it lost prime, but I was able to fix it. And that was it! We had a pretty lazy couple of days of slowly putting back everything we had locked up. Lots of our neighbors had lots of branches in their yards, but we don't really have any trees, so that wasn't much of an issue for us. Of course we were lucky—south of us you had trees falling on houses and massive flooding. One of my students commutes from Anna Maria Island, and wasn't able to make it to class for a week.

We watched some friends' kid (our older son's best buddy from pre-K) on Saturday, since they had a fence come down in the storm and needed to make repairs.

We didn't get Internet back until Tuesday the 4th, almost a week since it went out! It's kind of understandable, but it was very frustrating because the damage to our area was so minimal, and calling Spectrum support was useless, as they wouldn't even give us estimates. In 2022, I basically can't do any course prep even without being online, so on Saturday, I had to go to a Panera in order to edit my syllabus and prep my Blackboard site and organize lesson plans and e-mail my students about what to do. Meanwhile, back at home, Hayley and I were burning through data on our phones!

12 October 2022

Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel

Many years ago, I read Bechdel's Fun Home, and now I've finally gotten around to picking up the follow-up, Are You My Mother? Fun Home was about Bechdel's father, a closeted gay man who committed suicide; this volume is (obviously) about her mother, a woman Bechdel has never quite figured out nor gotten beyond.

Published: 2012
Read: August 2021

Though I found this effectively composed, I also found it somewhat diffuse. It tries to weave together a number of different elements (Bechdel's childhood, Bechdel in therapy, discussions of the history of psychology, Bechdel writing the book itself), with the effect that I felt Bechdel's relationship with her mother got kind of lost, to the extent that it wasn't actually clear to me what Bechdel's beef with her mother was. What had she done that cast such a long shadow? The mother is an interesting character, but I also felt like she was not quite seen in this book. Which is appropriate, one supposes, as one of this book's points is that Bechdel doesn't really know her mother... but makes for frustrating reading. I guess I would say Bechdel is a skilled graphic memoirist, but I didn't really feel like this made the best use of those skills. Glad I read it, but nowhere near as strong as Fun Home, and it doesn't make me want to seek out her most recent effort, which is apparently about fitness fads?


10 October 2022

The Glorious Dead (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 26)

The Glorious Dead: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Scott Gray, Martin Geraghty, Adrian Salmon, Roger Langridge, et al.

Collection published: 2006
Contents originally published: 1979-2001
Previously read: January 2008
Reread: July 2022

If you have a consistent writer, does the strip have a natural tendency toward story arcs? The backmatter here explains that after the Threshold arc, editor Gary Gillat promised fewer arcs... but in his very next multi-part story, scripter Scott Gray introduced the elements of a new story arc. Just can't be avoided, I guess? Like the stories in End Game, this arc draws on the strip's long history, but it feels less beholden to it, as instead of lots of returning strip elements, we just have one in the form of Kroton, and also unlike End Game, I don't have the feeling that the strip is trying to ape the storytelling style of the Mills & Wagner/Gibbons/Parkhouse era. Rather, I feel like it's forging its own identity a bit, trying to figure out what the shape of a late 1990s DWM story is on its own terms.

Throwback: The Soul of a Cyberman / Ship of Fools, from Doctor Who Weekly #5-7, 23-24 (Nov. 1979 & Mar. 1980)
story by Steve Moore, art by Steve Dillon
Just as the McCoy-era strips picked up a character from the Tom Baker–era back-ups and brought him into the main strip in the present, we have that here with Kroton the Cyberman with a Soul, and so the collection helpfully reprints his original appearances. Throwback is basically fine; I think what I struggle with is that even before Kroton breaks away, none of the Cybermen feel particularly Cyberman-y. I mean, I guess there's no reason Cybermen can't chat about things, as long as they do so logically, but they don't feel like the impassive, unstoppable telos of humanity here. But, you know, I would never say no to some Steve Dillon art, and Kroton's interventions on behalf of the human resistance are well done. Ship of Fools is a great spooky sf tale, but Kroton himself could pretty much be any random traveler in it. If someone picked it up because of issue #23's "A NEW CYBERMAN COMIC STRIP!" cover blurb, I imagine they were kind of disappointed.
from Doctor Who Magazine #272
Happy Deathday, from Doctor Who Magazine #272 (Dec. 1998)
story by Scott Gray, art & lettering by Roger Langridge
This is DWM's special contribution to the... ah, 35th anniversary? Is that a thing? It's a deliberately goofy multi-Doctor story, and I have to say, deliberately goofiness is probably better than deadly earnestness when it comes to these things, as the Doctors team up against the Beige Guardian, and there are references to Dimenions in Time, and it all turns out to be a videogame that Izzy is playing. There are some good jokes, and the art is fun.
from Doctor Who Magazine #274
The Fallen, from Doctor Who Magazine #273-76 (Jan.-Apr. 1999)
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by Robin Smith, lettering by Elitta Fell and Peri Godbold
This is DWM's sequel to the TV movie: Grace, since its events, has been using DNA she recovered to try to create a human/Time Lord hybrid, that will fulfill her desire to hold back death. But the DNA didn't come from a Time Lord, because he was in the body of a Skarosian morphant, and so Grace and the MI6 scientist she's been working with have inadvertently created a horrendous monster. Meanwhile, the Master is back... even though no one knows it. What I realized while reading it is that it's really the only sequel to the TVM ever made! BBC Books kind of edged close to it a couple times (and I know authors wanted to use Grace in novels but couldn't), while Big Finish totally ignored it except for using McGann himself (up until they got Eric Roberts, anyway). But this is a full-fledged sequel, following on from its scenes and character beats, even. The Doctor makes big impacts on people's lives, and this has repercussions he's not always thinking about. There's a strong focus on the characters of the Doctor and Grace here, and Martin Geraghty does a great job with big action and character close-ups alike. Overall, a good one, and the beginning of a good direction, I think.
from Doctor Who Magazine #277
Unnatural Born Killers, from Doctor Who Magazine #277 (May 1999)
story & art by Adrian Salmon, lettering by Elitta Fell
If you say, "Adrian Salmon, draw a story about Kroton the Cyberman beating up Sontarans," of course he will draw the hell out of it. And it turns out he can write, too! It took a bit for me to adjust to the more irreverent, human Kroton of the 1990s, but it was the right call for sure.

from Doctor Who Magazine #281
The Road to Hell, from Doctor Who Magazine #278-82 (June-Sept. 1999)
story by Scott Gray, pencils from Martin Geraghty, inks by Robin Smith and Fareed Choudhury, lettering by Elitta Fell

I felt that this was the weakest story of the volume, though it got better as it went. At the beginning, I found it hard to track the different groups and characters, who were introduced thick and fast. But once the relationship between Izzy and Sato Katsura came into the foreground, I found the story worked a lot better. There are some great moments here, such as Izzy making the future of Japan manifest as her knowledge of manga, anime, and Power Rangers, but then the cliffhanger being the reveal of the atomic bombing of Japan. Some neat concepts here, and one thing I appreciate about Gray as a writer is his peppering of the dialogue with small moments of humor, especially between Izzy and the Doctor.
TV Action!, from Doctor Who Magazine #283 (Oct. 1999)
story by Alan Barnes, art & lettering by Roger Langridge
It's DWM's 20th anniversary! Alan Barnes's notes in the commentary give the whole thing an air of desperation, but I thought it was a blast... even though, as an American, most of the cultural references go over my head. They bring back one of DWM's first original villains, Beep the Meep, but have him and the TARDIS cross over into a different universe... ours. The Doctor and Izzy chase Beep through BBC Television Centre on the day DWM debuted, culminating in a scene where the real Tom Baker pretends to be the Doctor to cower Beep. Magnificent! The real Tom Baker quotations used in his dialogue are priceless.
from Doctor Who Magazine #286
The Company of Thieves, from Doctor Who Magazine #284-86 (Nov. 1999–Jan. 2000)
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Adrian Salmon, inks by Fareed Choudhury, lettering by Elitta Fall and Roger Langridge
This was good fun: the Doctor and Izzy arrive on a ship being hijacked by pirates, and when a Cyberman is found belowdecks, everyone misunderstands the situations... because it's Kroton, his path intersecting the TARDIS's at long last. Like I said above, the interplay between the Doctor and Izzy really works; I enjoyed her putting on her glasses and spouting Star Trek bafflegab to confuse a bunch of pirates about the status of their engines. This does a great job of escalating a complicated situation, and then exiting it. It's filled with delightful moments, such as a "high" Kroton, Izzy's idea to stop the bad guy, the TARDIS team flying through the void of space, and the two pirates who don't trust each other drifting apart in space on the final page. The Glorious Dead is great, of course, but this might be Scott Gray at his best, and Adrian Salmon's work is as delightful as always... or maybe even moreso.
from Doctor Who Magazine #291
The Glorious Dead, from Doctor Who Magazine #287-96 (Feb.-Oct. 2000)
story by Scott Gray, pencils by Martin Geraghty, additional pencils by Roger Langridge, inks by Robin Smith, lettering by Roger Langridge
The biggest DWM story ever! Ten whole months! It could be a grind, but Gray stops it from being so by switching things up every so often. The first three parts play out relatively normally, with the Doctor, Izzy, and Kroton trying to figure out what's up with this alien planet and the strange religion coming to it. But then the part three cliffhanger is marvelous: the Doctor hears the words "WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP" and suddenly finds himself waking up... in bed with a Grace who called him "honey?" It's the kind of cliffhanger I can imagine Steven Moffat doing.

Part four then does something I can't remember any DWM story doing before (corrections welcome): jumping forward away from a cliffhanger, in this case about three weeks. The installment entirely focuses on what Izzy and Kroton on the occupied planet Paradost, told almost entirely via her narration (as a letter to Max). The jump forward again feels very Moffat (e.g., "Day of the Moon"); the choice to focalize the installment via the companion feels very Russell T Davies (e.g., "Doomsday"). And then in part five, we're doing something else entirely yet again! Here we have a masterpiece of surreal comics storytelling, as the Doctor tumbles from universe to universe, and thus from storytelling style to storytelling style. It starts out ordinary-ish, with the Doctor in a world where he did stay with Grace, but soon he's in a western, he's a cartoon tiger, he's in Peanuts getting advice from the Rani. I guess it's all a bit Steve Parkhouse—it reminds me of Once Upon a Time Lord—but it's so well done, and it's striking for coming in the middle of what has seemed like a pretty straight DWM space epic up until this point. Bits of it are drawn by Roger Langridge, which works well.

So with part six, things settle down... a bit. But we still get massive surreal landscapes of the omniverse, and the reveal that the alien planet the enemies come from is actually Earth, and the return of Sato, and Izzy shrunk and put in a test tube, and the reveal that the Master is behind it all! Again, it feels a bit RTD, akin to the reveal in Last of the Time Lords that the Toclafane are actually humans, and that the Master has been manipulating the entire series. It's all a bit mad, but in the best DWM way, and Gray and Geraghty's focus on the Doctor and Izzy and Kroton as people keeps it anchored. I do tune out a bit whenever we get one of those multi-page sequences of someone explaining the History Of All Time or whatever, but on the whole, this really works, and I like how it subverts the seeming prophecy about a Doctor/Master battle. Kroton gets a great end. Izzy's discussion of her parents and her relationship to them works well this time out. I think this does a good job of taking the kind of Parkhouse/Gibbons-y space epic and marrying it to the sensibilities of contemporary, character-focused storytelling—similar to what Big Finish was about to do in its own Paul McGann stories, and foreshadowing the approach the new series would take under Russell.
from Doctor Who Magazine #299
The Autonomy Bug, from Doctor Who Magazine #297-99 (Nov. 2000–Jan. 2001)
story by Scott Gray, art & lettering by Roger Langridge
I was going to say this was cute, but it's not; like the New Eighth Doctor Adventure The Cannibalists, it uses cuteness to disguise how horrifying it really is. The Doctor and Izzy come to an institution for deranged robots, and realize they are being pretty awfully mistreated. I didn't love it, but it's an effective serious story from Roger Langridge, and has a great moment of cartoon logic, and a nice conclusion. The stuff with the robots painting their faces is pretty good.
Other Notes:

  • Roger Langridge will go on to be a McGann-era mainstay of the strip as an artist, so much so that he illustrated the eighth Doctor installment of IDW's 50th anniversary series. But I, weirdly, know him from the fact that he illustrated special installments of the short-lived Shaenon K. Garrity webcomic Smithson (2004-8, I think? previously known as More Fun).
  • Unnatural Born Killers is one of only a few Doctor-free main strips... and actually the last one featured the Sontarans, too!
  • The Doctor is said to have defeated Beep twice before; the second time was in the story Star Beast II, published back in 1995, but this was collected with some twelfth Doctor strips, so I haven't read it yet. Big Finish would later add another Beep encounter, a direct follow-up to Star Beast II, inconsistent with this story. Which is, you know, as canon as anything. In IDW's era, they'd even do another story about the Doctor crossing over into our universe!
  • from Doctor Who Magazine #283
  • Barnes was inspired by a Star Trek short story he only vaguely remembers; it would be "Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited" by Ruth Berman from the anthology The New Voyages.
  • The only thing to dislike about Kroton being in the TARDIS crew is how little his time was! His departure story immediately follows his introduction. I demand missing adventures set between The Company of Thieves and The Glorious Dead. Another one to go on the the-tv-show-gets-cancelled-and-the-strip-becomes-a-nostalgia-fest list, I guess.
  • I kept comparing The Glorious Dead to something Russell would do, and it really is, in a number of ways... and then I learned from the commentary that Russell actually wrote DWM after part four!
  • Did the readers at the time know The Glorious Dead was going to be ten parts? Or did they just come to the end each month and read "TO BE CONTINUED..." every time instead of "TO BE CONCLUDED..." and wonder if it would ever end?

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

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