Science's Less Accurate Grandmother: January 2023

30 January 2023

The Stories between the Stories: JSA Classified

In 2005, the Justice Society reached a new milestone: two ongoing series at once. JSA Classified lasted thirty-nine issues, from Sept. 2005 to Aug. 2008, which means it overlapped with both JSA (which ended Sept. 2006) and Justice Society of America vol. 3 (which began Feb. 2007).

Those other ongoings were clearly the "main" ones. JSA Classified featured rotating creative teams on shorter stories that focused on one or two or occasionally a couple more JSA members at a time. There are two four-part stories; the rest are usually two- or three-parters, with the occasional one-off. No writer or artist works on more than one storyline, with the exception of Alex Sanchez (who illustrates two stories for a total of five issues) and Jimmy Palmiotti (who inks two stories for a total of eight issues, making him the series's most prolific contributor).

Very little of the series has been collected. Issues #1-4, a Power Girl story by Geoff Johns and Amanda Conner, have been collected a few times; I previously read them in The Sequential Art of Amanda Conner. #5-9 were collected as Honor Among Thieves, the only JSA Classified–branded trade. A couple more issues have been chucked into collections here and there: #21-22, by Walter Simonson, were included in Hawkgirl: Hawkman Returns and #25 and 32-33 were part of JSA Presents Green Lantern. Rather than track down the floppies, I decided to read the whole series on DC Universe Infinite, except I skipped the issues in JSA Presents Green Lantern, since I had just read that trade.

As you might expect for an anthology series, some stories are better than others. I'm not going to go blow by blow, but I will give you some highlights.

When I first read Power Trip (#1-4, by Geoff Johns, Amanda Conner, and Jimmy Palmiotti), I didn't like it; rereading it made it even worse. It's a story focused on continuity with nothing to say about character... except it doesn't even really say anything about continuity, either, as the story is just a series of fakeouts about things that are not Power Girl's origin. Amanda Conner's art is brilliant, though, and it made me decide to incorporate her Power Girl ongoing into this project.

On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised by Honor Among Thieves (#5-7, by Jen Van Meter, Patrick Olliffe, et al.). This is about the Injustice Society planning a heist in JSA headquarters, and I have found most modern takes on the Injustice Society, from Roy Thomas on, gratuitously violent. But Jen Van Meter produces a charming story about underdogs who have to work together to do something that's, well, if not the right thing, not the worst thing either. I liked it a lot, and I'm excited to see that Van Meter returns to some of these characters in a backup she writes for Justice Society vol. 3.

Another villain-focused story did have the problems of gratuitous violence: "The Fall & Rise of Vandal Savage" (#10-13, by Stuart Moore, Paul Gulacy, and Jimmy Palmiotti) just went on and on and on, and had little of interest. Similarly, I didn't like the two Doctor Mid-Nite stories, "Skin Trade" (#19-20, by Scott Beatty, Rags Morales, and Michael Bair) and "Nightfall" (#23-24, by J. T. Krul, Alex Sanchez, and Jack Purcell). Both had lots of squicky stuff. Worse, "Skin Trade" mutilates some minor characters from other series just to prove the situation is serious, one of my least favorite superhero tropes. (On the other hand, it did pick up an interesting loose end from Ultra-Humanite's backstory.)

But when the series is great, it's really great. One thing I didn't like about Geoff Johns's JSA run is that the actual people of the JSA often seemed lost in the way the series lurched from massive event to massive event. Here, we get a lot of nice character-focused stories about the people who make the world's first superhero team also its best. I am not a Scott McDaniel fan, nor a Bane one, so I was pleasantly surprised by "The Venom Connection" (#17-18, by Tony Bedard, Scott McDaniel, and Andy Owens), where Bane comes to Hourman and his son Hourman, seeking help with Venom... which it turns out might be related to the drug that gives them their powers, Miraclo. It's a great focus on the younger Hourman, Rick Tyler, and also Bane himself, with some good (if comic-book-level) discussion of addiction.

I often feel like Wildcat gets a bit flanderized: ooh, he talks funny and he gives Power Girl crap and he drinks beer. So again, I was pleasantly surprised when I ended up enjoying all three of JSA Classified's Wildcat stories: "Fight Game" (#26-27, by Frank Tieri, Jerome Moore, et al.), "Forward through the Past" (#35-37, by B. Clay Moore and Ramon Perez), and "Body and Soul" (#38-39, by Mike W. Barr and Shawn Martinbrough). Each story does a good job focusing on his history, and tying into his interest in wrestling without making it contrived. He uproots a gambling ring, takes on criminals using his old gyms in Gotham, and stops people from stealing the mental patterns of retired wrestlers. Each story is solid, but I particularly enjoyed "Forward through the Past," which has some great character-focused writing and, especially, great art. I don't know that I've ever really registered either B. Clay Moore or Ramon Perez before, but I will look out for more by them. Their depiction of the relationship between Wildcat and Catwoman intrigued me, so now I plan to circle back and read a couple stories about that as well.

The only other stories I found particularly bad were the Justice League Detroit one, "Double or Nothing" (#14-16, by Steve Englehart, Tom Derenick, et al.), and the Mr. Terrific one, "Mr. Horrific" (#29-31, by Arvid Nelson and Alex Sanchez). The former was confusing and poorly explained—and also I'm totally over stories where villains force heroes to fight each other for gambling purposes. Maybe I'll like it more when I reread it in the Justice League Detroit omnibus? But I kind of doubt it. "Mr. Horrific" was just awful: nonsensical leaps in the writing, ugly impenetrable artwork.

Beyond that, you have a number of solid, enjoyable stories. If I have an overall complaint, it's that I wish we'd seen more JSA members. Some more focus on the younger members would have been good; Stargirl's only story was the terrible "Double or Nothing," and Jakeem Thunder just gets a one-parter (#28, by Fabian Nicieza and Steve Uy). Or, it would be nice to open the series up some more so it's not so focused on the present-day JSA: give me a good Atom story, or a good World War II–era one, or whatever.

But on the whole I liked it a lot, more than I expected. I kind of though it was a series to burn off bad fill-ins by mediocre creative teams, but it was nothing like that at all. To be honest, I wish the regular JSA series had been more like this: nothing overdramatic, just good character-focused stories drawing on these people's long histories.

This post is thirty-ninth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers JSA: Ragnarok. Previous installments are listed below:

All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)

The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)

All-Star Squadron (1981-87)

Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)

Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)

Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)

America vs. the Justice Society (1985)

Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)

Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)

Infinity, Inc. #11-53 (1985-88) [reading order]

Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)

All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant (1999)

Steel, the Indestructible Man (1978)

Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two (1977)

Wonder Woman: Earth-Two (1977-78)

Secret Origins of the Golden Age (1986-89)

The Young All-Stars (1987-89)

Gladiator (1930) ["Man-God!" (1976)]

The Crimson Avenger: The Dark Cross Conspiracy (1981-88)

The Immortal Doctor Fate (1940-82)

Justice Society of America: The Demise of Justice (1951-91)

Armageddon: Inferno (1992)

Justice Society of America vol. 2 (1992-93)

The Adventures of Alan Scott--Green Lantern (1992-93)

Damage (1994-96)

The Justice Society Returns! (1999-2001)

Chase (1998-2002)

Stargirl by Geoff Johns (1999-2003)

The Sandman Presents: The Furies (2002)

JSA by Geoff Johns, Book One (1999-2000)

Wonder Woman: The 18th Letter: A Love Story (2000)

Two Thousand (2000)

JSA by Geoff Johns, Book Two (1999-2003)

Golden Age Secret Files & Origins (2001)

JSA by Geoff Johns, Book Three (1999-2003)

JSA by Geoff Johns, Book Four (2002-03)

JSA Presents Green Lantern (2002-08)

JSA #46-87 (2003-06)

JSA: Strange Adventures (2004-05)

27 January 2023

Reading The Gnome King of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Gnome King of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill

Since reading Kabumpo in Oz, I've felt that Thompson has a good handle on the former Nome King, Ruggedo—even if she does insist on calling him a "gnome"—and the appearance of the new Gnome King, Kaliko, in Hungry Tiger showed that she had a good handle on him, too. I've seen some complaints about how childish Ruggedo is in Thompson's portrayal, but to me that seems fairly logical. He started out a very serious, very dangerous figure in Baum's Ozma of Oz, but he was fundamentally a bully all along... just a bully with political and magical power. Take away both of those, and you're left with an impotent child. (Indeed, it occurred to me while reading that that an @realNomeKing Twitter account would make for a good Trump parody. Imagine it: "A vote for Kaliko is a vote to extinguish and eradicate your country’s mining industry. Kaliko is a corrupt politician who SOLD OUT the Nome Kingdom to OZ. Kaliko is the living embodiment of the decrepit and depraved political class that got rich bleeding the Nome Kingdom Dry!") We see this decay across the the course of Baum's Ruggedo novels: by the time of Magic of Oz, he's little more than a huckster dreaming of past glories and revenge, and Thompson just takes that a step further in Kabumpo, with Ruggedo's pathetic underground "kingdom" which consists of himself, a rabbit, and a wooden doll in a cave. Ruggedo running around in this book constantly exclaiming "I hate children!" is delightful.

Originally published: 1927
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: August 2022

So I was looking forward to this book. I didn't realize until reading it, though, that it also has a key role for my favorite Oz character, Scraps the Patchwork Girl. Again, she's a character that I think Thompson has done well by. Thompson likes nonsense verse, and Scraps has always been a good vehicle for that, but she also captures Scraps's impudence and skewed sense of thinking well, such as when she suggested to the Cowardly Lion that if he wanted courage inside him, he just needed to eat a courageous person. So when I saw this novel had a big role for her, I was even more excited, and indeed, it follows her for several chapters before we even get to the Gnome King.

This is the sixth Thompson novel to begin the same way: someone in a small magical country somewhere shouting at someone. In this case, it's the country of Patch, home to the Quilties who grow all the patches of Oz. When they wear out, Quilties literally fall to pieces. Don't worry, they come back together... but it takes time, and so when the Queen of Patch falls to pieces, her ministers end up impressing Scraps as the new Queen of Patch. At first she's delighted, but then she realizes that the Queen of Patch does more work than any of her subjects, including all the cooking and cleaning, and begins to plot her escape. Thompson handles Scraps perfectly; she's at first delighted to be put in such a position... until she realizes it entails responsibility!

After several chapters, we finally jump to... Philadelphia. This book's protagonist is Peter Brown, who is Thompson's first real child addition to Oz. (Cowardly Lion gave us Bobbie "Bob Up" Downs, but even though he settles in Oz at the end, he's never really seen again, and he's also narratively subordinate to Notta Bit More.) Peter is kidnapped by a balloon bird to be an "airand boy" in a balloon country (Thompson used this exact same pun in Hungry Tiger, fact fans); he escapes and lands on the island where Ozma stranded Ruggedo at the end of Kabumpo. I often feel like Thompson's novels are a bit too breakneck, but the first few chapters of Peter's adventures feel nicely methodical and Baumian: instead of plunging from place to place, Peter has to work out how to survive and how to escape. He forms an uneasy alliance with Ruggedo, clearly excited by the idea of being a general, but nervous about what Ruggedo might actually do. I like that his main motivation is to get back home in time for his team's next baseball game.

(Like Betsy and Trot, Peter knows of Oz before he arrives because he's read about it. Specifically, he's read one Oz book. But which one? He knows Ozma and Dorothy live in the Emerald City, so it's post-Emerald City, but he doesn't seem to know Scraps, so it must not have been one with a big role for her. He has read about gnomes (though not necessarily in an Oz book, I guess), but he doesn't know who Ruggedo is. He knows who the Wizard is, too. Commenters on the "Book of Common Focus" discussions archived at Pumperdink indicate this narrows the candidates down to Rinkitink, Tin Woodman, Royal Book, Cowardly Lion, and Grampa. To me, Rinkitink feels like the best fit, as it has a small-but-key role for Dorothy and the Wizard. I don't think you would finish, say, Tin Woodman and ask after Dorothy and Ozma but not the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman.)

Once Peter and Ruggedo make it to Oz, and Peter escapes from Ruggedo's company into Scraps's, the book gets a bit breakneck, but it features only two of Thompson's trademark wacky communities, a town where everyone is made of soap, and a town where everyone must sing and dance. The first I can take or leave, like a lot of the wacky Thompson communities (the image of Peter and company sailing on a giant bar of soap is pretty great, though), but Tune Town is very well done, and it ends with an absolutely divine pun from Thompson that the Patchwork Girl uses to escape.

Shortly after reading the soap chapter, my son was eating yogurt, leading to the following exchange:

SON: Is there a town in Oz where everything is yogurt?
ME: Hmmm... if there is, everyone there would be very... cultured! [much self-satisfied chuckling]
MY WIFE: You are very proud of that pun.
ME: Ruth Plumly Thompson wishes she could have come up with it! It practically writes itself!

This one has some nice side characters, too, Grumpy the Bear and Ozwold the Oztrich, and it all comes together pretty nicely when Peter's baseball skills save Oz. (Though Ozma herself comes across as pretty pathetic, as per normal for a Thompson novel.) Ruggedo is nicely threatening but also childish; the idea that he gets a cloak of invisibility and uses it to just go around the Emerald Palace pinching people and laughing at them is perfect.

Ruggedo plans to put everyone in Oz at the bottom of the Nonestic Ocean; this didn't bother my son. What did bother him is a bit where Ruggedo states that his philosophy is that if you want something, you should just take it! That he declared was not very nice. But overall, he quite enjoyed this one, though he was a bit nervous before we started reading it, due to its focus on the Gnome King, enhanced by the cover picture of him up to something malevolent by flying over the Emerald City. He's getting better and better with stories; during this one he often asked me questions that was clearly the question the story wanted him to ask, because the text itself immediately answered it.

One recurrent feature of Thompson's novels are magic workers who are largely off-screen but leave their artifacts behind for others to find, such as Wam in Cowardly Lion, Glegg in Kabumpo, and Gorba in Grampa. This book features two, actually Soob the Sorcerer and Wumbo the Wonder Worker. Soob never shows up, but we discover that Wumbo is one of many magic workers who, when Ozma banned magic, went underground in the remote Gillikin country of Zamagoochie, and have one brief chapter from his perspective. I like the idea of an enclave of secret magic workers.

We get a brief mention of Wumbo going to school to learn magic, the first time any such thing has ever been alluded to in an Oz novel—the only other magic worker's education we know anything about is the Wizard's, who was tutored by Glinda. Was there a magic school in Oz in the old days, before the witches? One imagines that it could have been where many of these one-off magic worker characters were educated: Wam, Glegg, Soob, Wumbo, Dr. Pipt from Patchwork Girl, Bini Aru from Magic, Ugu the Shoemaker's ancestors from Lost Princess, the Adepts at Magic from Glinda. One also imagines something like the four wicked witches shutting it down once they deposed Pastoria and divided up Oz, in order to stop any competitors from arising. I always like these glimpses of Oz prehistory! (We also learn about a magic emerald that can take away someone's power of speech for seven years; the ancient emperors of Oz used it on their wives when they wanted to go to war!)

Like Hungry Tiger, and as will be true for our next six Oz books, we read this in a Del Rey edition. I noticed fewer typos in this than Hungry Tiger, but I still mourn the fact that we don't even get black-and-white reproduction of the color plates. Several of the illustrations are in odd places relative to events they describe from the text, but apparently that is true in the first edition as well. Neill goes back to two-page chapter openers here, which yields a large number of great-looking illustrations of the events of the book.

Next up in sequence: The Giant Horse of Oz

25 January 2023

Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes Tabloid Edition by Paul Levitz, Mike Grell, Vince Colletta, et al.

Legion of Super-Heroes: The Millennium Massacre

Collection published: 2021
Contents originally published: 1978
Acquired: March 2022
Read: November 2022

Writer: Paul Levitz

Artists: Mike Grell and Vince Colletta, James Sherman and Jack Abel
Letterered by Gaspar
Colors by Jerry Serpe & Tony Tollin

DC has been taking its "tabloid editions" from the 1970—massive oversized comics—and reprinting them as high-quality hardcovers. I previously read the Suerpman vs. Wonder Woman one; most recently, they've reprinted All-New Collectors' Edition #C-54, which depicts the marriage of Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad. This story was previously collected in Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes, Volume One, but I wasn't passing up the chance to see some Mike Grell and Vince Colletta art at jumbo size.

Thankfully it looks great because as a story it's not up to much. Superboy travels to the future to see the wedding, only the timeline has changed, so everyone is mean. He still manages to convince the Legion to look into this; the team splits up into three groups to handle different aspects of a crisis. It has its moments—I do always like some Saturn Girl—but even by the standards of comic-book time travel, I don't think it really makes sense, and the Legion in twentieth-century New York doesn't seem to be worth getting Mike Grell to illustrate at enormous size. Give me something cosmic and epic! Still, I'll take Mike Grell drawing Dream Girl any day, and the new afterword by Levitz providing background and context is nice.

I read a Legion of Super-Heroes collection every six months. Next up in sequence: Before the Darkness, Volume One

23 January 2023

The Child of Time (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 34)

The Child of Time: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Jonathan Morris, Martin Geraghty, Dan McDaid, et al.

Collection published: 2012
Contents originally published: 2010-11
Acquired: December 2013
Read: November 2022

So, Doctor Who is back on screen. David Tennant regenerated into Matt Smith on New Year's Day, and the show once again has regular episodes and a regular companion; the strips reprinted here span from "The Eleventh Hour" to "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe," the entirety of series 5 and 6.

You might expect the strip to return to its pre–Crimson Hand format, which was well honed by the time of The Widow's Curse: unconnected stories featuring the tv TARDIS team, by a rotating group of writers and artists. But, surprisingly, the strip opts to go for the Crimson Hand format again: a single writer and linked stories. It seems to be that off the back of the success of The Crimson Hand, they must have wanted to try that approach again.

But it's not exactly the same. The strip using a single writer with continuing story threads hadn't been done while the tv show was on since Steve Parkhouse's run (#53-99, June 1981–Apr. 1985)!* As writer Jonathan Morris notes, this did cause some issues: when Rory became a regular companion during series 6, the strip couldn't accommodate this, as the entire run was set during series 5 when Rory had been erased from time. (Steve Parkhouse, of course, solved this kind of problem by pretending there were no such people as "Adric," "Tegan," "Nyssa," "Turlough," or "Peri.")

So while The Crimson Hand was a success, the run of strips collected in The Child of Time is a bit hamstrung in a way its predecessor was not.

from Doctor Who Magazine #423

Supernature, from Doctor Who Magazine #421-23 (May-July 2010)
story by Jonathan Morris, pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

Indeed, it gets off to a rocky start. I remember this one from its original appearance in DWM... and I remember not liking it. The usually strong Mike Collins once again pencils the DWM debut of a new Doctor, but he seems to struggle with the faces of Matt Smith and Karen Gillian in a way that wasn't true of Eccleston, Piper, Tennant, and Agyeman. On top of that, while the introductory stories for all the previous new series companions do a good job of highlighting them, this sidelines Amy quite a lot, complete with a very Colin Baker–era transformation into a hideous creature. The story never really engaged me, and neither did the side characters.

Props, though, to the excellent joke about the gun held together with screws, that made me laugh, and Morris does a good Moffat pastiche in the recurrent glimpses of the colony's emergency message. (Oh, and in the gratuitous Amy nudity.)

Planet Bollywood!, from Doctor Who Magazine #424 (Aug. 2010)
story by Jonathan Morris, art by Roger Langridge, colours by James Offredi

Somewhat surprisingly, I would argue, screen Doctor Who has never given us a musical episode. Morris delivers a fantastic one here: the lyrics are good fun to read, the technobabble excuse for it all is actually convincing (enough), and of course Roger Langridge was born to draw it. (His stylized art is also the perfect fit for Matt Smith's chin.) I particularly liked the "Technobabble" song but they're all good. Might be the best story in this volume, except for the next couple.

from Doctor Who Magazine #426

The Golden Ones, from Doctor Who Magazine #425-28 (Sept.-Dec. 2010)
story by Jonathan Morris, pencil art by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

Sometimes the strip very much tries to pastiche the kind of thing Moffat was doing on screen (see: Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night). At other times, though, it does its own thing: this is a fast-paced contemporary sci-fi thriller, the kind of thing Moffat wasn't interested in, but Russell T Davies gave us on screen in Aliens of London/World War Three or The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky. Or, to put it in DWM referents, it's like The Flood or The Age of Ice. It's very well put together, and I really enjoyed it. Good twists, quick jokes (you can tell Morris has got the hang of the Eleventh Doctor), nice moments for Amy, amazing visuals. The whole thing looks excellent; Martin Geraghty just ups his game every time he comes back. It's neat seeing the eleventh Doctor and Amy in a slightly different genre, and this is a good example of it.

from Doctor Who Magazine #429

The Professor, the Queen and the Bookshop, from Doctor Who Magazine #429 (Jan. 2011)
story by Jonathan Morris, art by Rob Davis, colours by Geraint Ford, letters by Roger Langridge

This is, I think, the first comic strip you might call a Christmas special, but there will be more to come over the years. It's a good tradition to start, and who could draw it better than Rob Davis? There's not much of a story, to be honest: C. S. Lewis tells the Doctor and Amy a story about two kids meeting a man with a bookshop that leads to another world, with lots of references to Narnia and other children's fantasy stories; the story is a bit simple, though it has a pretty clever resolution. But it looks brilliant and feels evocative, and well, this is a comic strip after all. Davis's bookshop interior is in particular amazing, and the thing is shot through with the chilliness of winter.

from Doctor Who Magazine #431

The Screams of Death, from Doctor Who Magazine #430-31 (Feb.-Mar. 2011)
story by Jonathan Morris, art by Dan McDaid, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

Dan McDaid is back! And what a story for him. Again, it oozes with creepy atmosphere; it's like a better version of The Vampires of Venice. The villain's plan is convolutedly great in a way that makes perfect sense. Well, except for the bit where he uses flying hypnotized opera singers in their nightclothes as his minions! But all the time travel lark is a well-thought-through twist on a common trope.

from Doctor Who Magazine #432

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night, from Doctor Who Magazine #432 (Apr. 2011)
story by Jonathan Morris, art by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

If I was feeling a bit mean, I might say that as a writer, Morris can sometimes be better as pastiching other's styles than having his own. But again, this is one of those stories that feels like it could have been on tv: it's straight out of the show that gave us, say, Night Terrors to have creepy ghosts in a retirement home. It's got some good stuff, but it all wrapped up a bit too easy: basically the Doctor and Amy find out what's up, and then the story is over.

Long-time DWM inker David A Roach (by the time this came out, he had inked 85 strips) makes his pencilling debut here. He's good at likenesses, and it's interesting to note that I think he uses finer lines on his own work than others'. I did sometimes find the action less fluid.

from Doctor Who Magazine #433

Forever Dreaming, from Doctor Who Magazine #433-34 (May-June 2011)
story by Jonathan Morris, art by Adrian Salmon, lettering by Roger Langridge

I don't have much to say about this one, except that Adrian Salmon does great both by Amy in a 1960s minidress and probably the creepiest-looking villains I can ever remember from DWM. The story is a bit of a confusing jumble of mental states; feels like it needed one more draft to sort it out.

from Doctor Who Magazine #435

Apotheosis, from Doctor Who Magazine #435-37 (June-Aug. 2011)
story by Jonathan Morris, art by Dan McDaid, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

And here, the plot arc all comes to a head.

Plot arc? Indeed, I haven't mentioned any plot arc because there's not really a plot arc. In some individual stories, people would disappear between panels when touching the TARDIS: the TARDIS had been infected by the spores from the planet Basingstoke way back in Supernature. I don't think I noticed at the time, and I wouldn't have noticed now without the hints in the commentaries. This might be what you want with the show on the air: a viewer who picks up a random issue because they liked "Closing Time" doesn't want to be confused by a Glorious Deadesque epic, or even something like Uroboros or Mortal Beloved. So I would say there's not much of a plot arc to grab on to here, but I'm not sure there should be one.

As for its reveal in the story, it's done very well. It reminded me of that way that "Flesh and Stone" wrong-foots the viewer halfway through. You know, as a viewer of the revival's first four series, that series-long plot arcs never matter until the twelfth episode, so when the crack in time suddenly starts mattering, it really throws you for a loop. Similarly, you know that there's no plot arc at all in the strip when the programme is on tv, so the reveal about the TARDIS itself being the cause of problems is a great twist. What a cliffhanger! And the story has a lot of other stuff to like, both courtesy of Dan McDaid and Jonathan Morris. The nun warriors are well-handled: very Moffat but good fun.

from Doctor Who Magazine #439

The Child of Time, from Doctor Who Magazine #438-41 (Sept.-Dec. 2011)
story by Jonathan Morris, pencil art by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

The problem with the arc, however, is that it's not really about anything. By which I mean, there's a bunch of events that have happened, but they don't really matter to the characters. This was very much not true of Majenta in The Crimson Hand, or Izzy and the Doctor in Oblivion. That means this story, aside from the fact that its villain Chiyoko had appeared before, is pretty much like any other one. Nothing is at stake here for the Doctor and Amy... even though the story arc means that the Doctor has been inadvertently responsible for a number of deaths! The story ends with an emotional climax, as the Doctor convinces Chiyoko to stand down... I wish we had seen more of her as a person throughout the arc, because I found this kind of unconvincing on its own. It felt like a lost opportunity to do something more.

That said, this is a pretty fun story on its own terms. The cliffhanger ending to part one is amazing, as is its resolution. (On the other hand, the resolution to part two is rubbish.) Alan Turing is a good temporary companion, and the Doctor flirting with him is great. The take on the Brontës is pretty delightful. I like that the backstory to Apotheosis is picked up and explained here, deepening the DWM universe. The Back to the Future shenanigans are fun. Overall, fun, but I am not sure it feels like the climax to a run of twenty in the same way Crimson Hand did.

Stray Observations:

I'm not being mean, but as I said when I reviewed The Widow's Curse, I'm a bit surprised Jonathan Morris was picked. Morris had done some solid strips, but they had all been one-offs, with the exception of a single two-parter. It seems a big leap from that to twenty!
Mike Collins draws the colonists in Supernature wearing jumpsuits pretty similar to the one Rose wore in The Cruel Sea.
It probably wouldn't have been to the story's benefit, to be honest, but it might have been nice to work the UNIT crew from The Age of Ice into The Golden Ones.
In the extras, Morris talks a lot of rejected concepts. One of his ideas for Apotheosis was a story where the Doctor and Amy find frozen versions of what they assume to be their future selves, but are in fact their past selves. Editor Scott Gray rejected it for being a bit too like Morris's audio drama Cobwebs, but Morris would reuse the idea as the central twist of his audio drama Cortex Ice anyway.
The typeface used in the Apotheosis logo is the one used the covers of all collections since The Crimson Hand.
Apotheosis is, alas, Rob Davis's last DWM contribution. I don't know what he's up to these days, but it seems a crime he never got a run of his own, or at least more stories. Like Dan McDaid, a great writer-illustrator double threat.
"YOU'RE JUST A TRACER" WATCH: Aside from making his pencilling debut for DWM, David A Roach works on eleven strips as inker, more than the two artists featured on the cover, Martin Geraghty (8) and Dan McDaid (5).

* I almost wrote Alan McKenzie, but in fact his run (#100-10, May 1985–Mar. 1986) entirely fits into the hiatus between Revelation of the Daleks Part Two and The Trial of a Time Lord Part One.

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

20 January 2023

Back from Break

It's been a minute, huh?

The first week of classes came to an end this week; today is my second day back. We had a good-if-busy break. The timing this year was such that the end of our semesters slammed right into Christmas (I usually have two weeks off before Christmas but got one; Hayley's last day was the 23rd!), so we didn't travel for Christmas as we usually do. We did Christmas at home with the kids, complete with real tree, then flew up to Ohio on the 28th. The kids had a great time, of course.

SON ONE: "I told Santa to bring me lots of cool things, and he did, he got me lots of cool things!"

Cleveland was good: we stayed with Hayley's brother and his wife for a few days, then an Airbnb. We got to see our new nephew for the first time, even though he's over a year old, and the kids enjoyed playing with their first cousin. Flying home is getting to be expensive, though, now that Son Two is too old to be a babe in arms! Unfortunately, Hayley's dad had COVID... for the second Christmas in a row! We haven't really seen him since early 2021, I think.

Completely by coincidence, it turned out that a Cleveland theatre was putting on a performance of a new musical based on the second Oz book, The Land of Oz, while we were going to be in Cleveland. Son One and I went... it was good stuff! Better than the book, to be honest.

Then back home and Hayley and the kids back to school while I try to get my life under control... only somewhat successfully. My parents flew down MLK weekend for their customary January visit, which was good if as always busy: my father comes with all sorts of home improvement plans for me, though I did get him to help fix my dishwasher.

The nicest thing of all was that my parents offered to watch the kids so Hayley and I could go on a date. Our first in I don't know how long? We went to a restaurant on the bay where you could watch the sun set. When we are home together we are always in parent mode; it was good to be in another context for once. (The food was fine.)

Back to the grind, I guess. This is my eighty-student semester, so we'll see how things go!

18 January 2023

Library of America: The Kairos Novels by Madeleine L'Engle: Many Waters / A House Like a Lotus / A Swiftly Tilting Planet / An Acceptable Time

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

As stated in this earlier post, I spent some time last fall reading Madeleine L'Engle's so-called "Kairos novels." For the Murray novels, they were all rereads, but all the O'Keefe novels were new to me. I was reading them in publication order, so that I could get a sense of L'Engle's development, and so that I could intersperse familiar books with unfamiliar; the Murray and O'Keefe novels alternate in publication, even if all the O'Keefe ones take place a generation after the Murray ones.

That said, I decided to make an exception, and I swapped Many Waters with A Swiftly Tilting Planet. I had a couple reasons for this. For one, I read the original three Meg books many times as a kid and only discovered Many Waters much later, so having read them in publication order to begin with, I was curious how they would work in chronological order. Second, I remember not liking Many Waters very much, while Swiftly Tilting Planet was my favorite as a kid, and I preferred that my reading of the Murray novels would end on a high note.

Many Waters (1986)
Meg and/or Charles Wallace are the protagonists of the three original Murray novels; Many Waters focuses on Sandy and Dennys, the "ordinary" twins between Meg and Charles Wallace in age. They accidentally travel back in time to the age of Noah's Ark...

...and it is so so boring. Like, inexplicably so. Unlike all the other books, there's nothing at stake. There's no reason for Sandy and Dennys to travel back in time, either from a narrative standpoint (there's no threat they're alleviating) or a personal one (all the Meg/Charles Wallace novels have her learning and growing through her actions, but the twins are just there). You could write a book about them coming to terms with their (supposed) ordinariness, or about them coming of age sexually, but this book doesn't really give you those things, it just hints at them.

I also agree with Mari Ness that the book's past era just doesn't convince: "somehow, perhaps because of the language, or because this culture does not fit in with either the Bible or archaeological evidence of any early society (and not just because of the unicorns), it never manages to feel quite real. [...] [I]t [...] serve[s] to reduce any suspense the novel might have had. It’s not just that I know the flood is coming anyway, but that I can’t bring myself to care about the complete destruction of a place that never feels quite real."

Bizarrely, even though it has the least going on of any of the Murray novels, it's also the longest. So it just keeps on going and going and geeze louise was I bored.

Collection published: 2018
Novels originally published: 1984-89
Acquired: July 2021
Read: September–October 2022

A House Like a Lotus (1984)
In my last post, I talked about how the first two "Polly O'Keefe novels" are anything but; A House Like a Lotus is the real first Polly O'Keefe novel. Narrated in the first person, it tells two parallel stories, one about Polly's friendship with an older woman, and one set later in Greece, as Polly enters into a romance and tries to come to terms with what happened to her. I've seen some complaints that this isn't the same Polly that we got in earlier novels... but, you know, she was a preteen in those, and here she's in high school, with all the changes in confidence that can bring. (Especially when, like Polly, you've gone from being part of your weird family's homeschool enclave to American public high school.) Unlike all these other novels, it basically has no sfnal elements: it's a pretty realist coming-of-age story.

I enjoyed it. As she was with Meg in A Wind in the Door, L'Engle is good at capturing the difficulties of growing up. The use of the first person is effective. I think as a teenager, especially if I was a girl, I might have found this captivating, but it works well enough—probably my favorite of the four Polly novels.

I felt validated by my reading order when reading this, as Sandy and Dennys have decent roles here, in a way that picks up on what we learned about them in Many Waters. In that book, they wanted to be a doctor and a lawyer; here, they're successfully engaged in those careers.

Collection published: 2018
Novels originally published: 1978-86
Acquired: July 2021
Read: September 2022

A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978)
The last Meg novel was my favorite as a kid. I guess I was a weird kid, because this is a weird book. Nuclear war is seemingly imminent on Christmas Eve, and Meg and Charles Wallace must stop it by using a unicorn to travel across time, untangling a family lineage that goes from Wales to Connecticut to South America with the help of a mystical Irish poem. While Meg remains in the present day, telepathically communicating with Charles Wallace, he subsumes his personality into historical figures to better understand what's going on and give the occasional nudge.

Rereading it as an adult, I was less into the time travel shenanigans—much more familiar to me as someone who has watched too much Steven Moffat Doctor Who—and a bit metaphysically bothered by the novel's idea that families could be doomed across time. But the book has some captivating chapters, in its vignettes across the years. The story of Calvin's mother is darkly tragic stuff.

The poem L'Engle uses to unify the narrative isn't her own composition, but is used in an utterly captivating way. Rereading it all these years later, I found it still contained the power I first found in it as a child. On the whole, I liked Wind in the Door more this time through, but I still found a lot to like here. Like L'Engle's best work, it hints at a strange cosmology beyond our comprehension, but also a universe where the most powerful force is ultimately our ability to listen to one another.

Also it's interesting to note that a big part of this book is a legend about a Welsh prince who came to North America before Columbus, and a year before this book came out, there was a historical novel about that same topic: Madoc, Prince of America by Bernard Knight. Now seemingly forgotten, but did L'Engle read it and get inspired?

An Acceptable Time (1989)
In some editions, An Acceptable Time is published as the fifth "Time Quintet" novel. This is clearly a bogus attempt to market the book by tying it into the more popular Meg novels;* though it returns to their setting and includes some of their features and characters, it's a Polly novel through and through, following up on the events of House Like a Lotus. Why would anyone care about this book without that one? I have read a lot of reviews from people who bounced off it, and definitely part of the reason is that the publishers try to get you to read it without the three books that come before it!

Anyway, this is a lot like Many Waters in that it's slow and dull and nothing much seems to be at stake for Polly. I feel like the return of Polly to the location of the Meg novels ought to feel significant, but it doesn't really. The "series," such as it was, ends with a fizzle.

Also note that the book refers to the present day of Polly as the twentieth century, but as I discussed in my last post, the evidence would seem to indicate that A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet are set in the twenty-first century, much less this book a generation later!

* That said, my wife's edition of An Acceptable Time (Laurel-Leaf, with a Cliff Nielsen cover) has a 1997 introduction by L'Engle where she calls it part of the "Time Quartet." Was she counting Acceptable Time but not counting Many Waters? I've never seen that particular configuration anywhere else. It does seem so, because when she lists the characters, she focuses on Meg, Charles Wallace, Polly, and Zachary, but doesn't mention Sandy and Dennys.

16 January 2023

The Crimson Hand (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 33)

The Crimson Hand: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Dan McDaid, Martin Geraghty, Mike Collins, et al.

Collection published: 2012
Contents originally published: 2008-10
Acquired: July 2014
Read: October 2022

With issue #382 (collected in The Widow's Curse), we entered the period where I was reading the strip in the magazine as it came out. Well, with #400 we enter the period where I haven't reread any of the strips. Prior to this project, my last DWM graphic novel was The Widow's Curse in April 2010, so from this point on, I might have read every strip before, but only in the context of reading ten pages a month. Kind of. As an American, DWM has never been easy to get ahold of. Issues could be late, out of order, or just skipped when arriving at an American comic shop. So even though I've read most of this material in theory, it feels new to me. And even if I got it all in order and on time, it's different to read a twenty-one-issue story in three days than in twenty months! By the time I got to The Crimson Hand on the original read, did I even remember details seeded in Mortal Beloved or The Age of Ice? Seems doubtful.

So anyway: The Crimson Hand. This marks a return the "old" way of doing DWM—original companion, linked storytelling—that went away when Paul McGann did. On top of that, Dan McDaid writes twenty-one strips in a row, the first writer to rack up a run more than five strips long since Scott Gray's run from #333 to 353 (The Power of Thoeuris! to The Flood). This basically covers the whole Tennant specials year, from just after the broadcast of "Journey's End" up to just before the broadcast of "The Eleventh Hour," an enormous canvas for DWM to once again draw its own destiny.

from Doctor Who Magazine #394

Hotel Historia, from Doctor Who Magazine #394 (Apr. 2008)
story & art by Dan McDaid, lettering by Roger Langridge

This is a nice little one-parter that sets the stage for the whole run, though that wasn't its intention at the time; Dan McDaid makes his DWM debut as an artist for a story he also writes, and really, McDaid's expressive, dynamic, cartoony style is what makes this story stand out so much. Lots of great panels and great dynamic colors and strong sense of characterization for both the Doctor and Majenta Pryce. You can see why they wanted to bring her back—if they hadn't made her into a companion, surely she would have become a Dogbolter if nothing else! My only complaint is the fact the Majenta is running a time-travel hotel almost feels incidental; that idea seems like it could have some fun implications, but the story's just not long enough to do anything with them. It's a shame McDaid didn't have the time to do any more double-duty stories in this volume, though he would return as an artist during the Matt Smith run.

Space Vikings!, from Doctor Who Storybook 2010
story by Jonathan Morris, art by Rob Davis & I. N. J. Culbard, letters by Will Lucas

This is the volume's only story with no Dan McDaid and no Majenta. It's a bit of a goof but fun enough, and of course Rob Davis is one of those artists who can only enhance such a story with his dynamic storytelling style.

from Doctor Who Magazine #401

Thinktwice, from Doctor Who Magazine #400-02 (Oct.-Dec. 2008)
story by Dan McDaid, pencil art by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

And Majenta debuts as a companion. This story is mostly here to make that work, and to set up the story arc, but it's all very well done. There are some good jokes, the characters are strongly done (the Doctor pretending to be a doctor is great), and the part two cliffhanger—where Majenta uses her last breath to complain that the Doctor's ruined her life—is excellent. I found the villain a bit perfunctory, but he's not really the point.

from Doctor Who Magazine #403

The Stockbridge Child, from Doctor Who Magazine #403-05 (Jan.-Mar. 2009)
story by Dan McDaid, pencil art by Mike Collins, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

It seems to be a DWM tradition at this point. When the strip begins having story-to-story continuity again, you also need to explicitly link back into the early days of the strip, making clear that not only is it a big story, but it's just one big story. When The Mark of Mandragora pulled together threads from the preceding year or so, it also included a cameo from an Iron Legion villain; when End Game began a new ongoing era, it went back to Stockbridge and Maxwell Edison from the Steve Parkhouse–Dave Gibbons days. So too does The Stockbridge Child: aliens are up to no good in Stockbridge, and the Doctor needs the help of Maxwell Edison to stop them.

It doesn't quite have the weirdness of Parkhouse's own Stockbridge stories, and I got a bit lost with some aspects (what were the parents up to exactly?), but this is an effective use of Maxwell Edison as a character. McDaid complains in the commentary that he gave Max too much angst, but I disagree; this builds on aspects of the character we saw in Stars Fell on Stockbridge and End Game, and also "new series"-ifies him. That is to say, this story treats him the same way "School Reunion" did Sarah Jane. It's got good callbacks without being nostalgic, and it looks forward to the future. Good stuff.

from Doctor Who Magazine #406

Mortal Beloved, from Doctor Who Magazine #406-07 (Apr. 2009)
story by Dan McDaid, art by Sean Longcroft, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

I thought this was a delightful story, sort of off-kilter and unhinged in only the way a Doctor Who comic can be. The Doctor and Majenta end up at the mansion of Majenta's fiancé—whom she doesn't remember. The mansion is built on an asteroid adjacent to a massive space storm. In parallel stories, the Doctor interacts with a self-aware hologram of the dead fiancé, while Majenta finds out he kind of hangs on to life. There's ghosts and monster cyborgs wearing bowties and corpses on a corporate board of directors. Sean Longcroft had drawn two previous strips, but this is his first "serious" one, and he knocks it out of the park with atmosphere, as does James Offredi on colours. Surprising pathos here, to be honest.

from Doctor Who Magazine #408

The Age of Ice, from Doctor Who Magazine #408-11 (May-Aug. 2009)
story by Dan McDaid, pencil art by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

I remembered not liking this one. I never like those kind of stories that basically come down to "whoa, dinos in the modern age!" Well, that was only a small part of this highly effective contemporary UNIT story. I wouldn't mark this as my favorite strip of the run, but it's perfectly done: good dialogue, good jokes, good characterization, especially for Majenta, some nice twists. It's a good riff on "The Sontaran Stratagem"-style storytelling, except that I thought McDaid managed to create some instantly likable UNIT characters in Colonel McCay and Captain Braxton. Seems a shame neither popped up again; they would have made good recurring characters for the strip. Majenta makes some interesting but very plausible moves here. And Martin Geraghty always excels that kind of high-energy stuff, whilst never losing the characters' essential humanity. My only real complaint is that derived of their drive to be "the first," returning aliens the Skith come across as kind of generic, but McDaid does eventually link them into the ongoing "Crimson Hand" plot in an effective way.

from Doctor Who Magazine #412

The Deep Hereafter, from Doctor Who Magazine #412 (Sept. 2009)
story by Dan McDaid, art by Rob Davis, colours by James Offredi & Rob Davis, letters by Roger Langridge

Now this is my favorite comic of the run, a madcap, hilarious riff on Golden Age detective comics. A dying private eye passes his hat and his charge onto the Doctor, who slips right into the role of investigating a list of bizarre characters, all suspects in a planet's greatest-ever crime, the theft of a world bomb. The Doctor hams it up in the part; Majenta, delightfully, disdains all of it: "If you're going to talk like that the whole time we're here, then I want nothing more to do with you." All the characters are great: the femme fatale who turns out to be a robot driven by "Tiny Danza," Half-Nelson the man where half of him got away in a transmat.. and half didn't, a beleaguered Centaurian lawyer who just wants to retire. Tremendous fun from writing to Rob Davis's pitch-perfect art to the colours that add so much to the atmosphere. Alpha Centauri was made for comics (there's a pinch of Zoidberg there, I feel), and the best part—other than the resolution—has got to be when Majenta threatens to drown Tiny Danza in whisky. Oh, and when he makes his surprise reappearance!

from Doctor Who Magazine #415

Onomatopoeia / Ghosts of the Northern Line, from Doctor Who Magazine #413-15 (Oct.-Dec. 2009)
stories by Dan McDaid, art by Mike Collins & David A Roach and Paul Grist, colour by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

Onomatopoeia is one of those stories I admire more than enjoy; maybe I am a philistine, but I always struggle with comics where it's all about the images, not the words! That the characters lose their voices is a neat idea, but I struggled with the action a bit. Mike Collins is good at conventional tv tie-in comics, but I wonder if he was the right choice here, and if someone with a more fluid style might have done better. But I have to give kudos to this era's experimental run, which began in Deep Hereafter and continues into Ghosts of the Northern Line, a delightfully grounded (undergrounded?) ghost story with atmospheric art by Paul Grist. You can see that by this point, McDaid has got the tenth Doctor/Majenta partnership down to an art. They have great banter and Majenta some genuine character moments; the tenth Doctor gets in a nice bit of late-period self-loathing. The stuff about the ghosts is all so well done. Unfortunately, this is it, but thankfully it went out on a high...

from Doctor Who Magazine #419

The Crimson Hand, from Doctor Who Magazine #416-20 (Jan.-Apr. 2010)
story by Dan McDaid, pencil art by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A Roach, colours by James Offredi, lettering by Roger Langridge

In his many years on the strip, Scott Gray raised the "season finale" to an art form with stories like Ground Zero, Wormwood, The Glorious Dead, Oblivion, and The Flood. Dan McDaid revives that tradition and does it proud with Gray's consistent collaborator Martin Geraghty back yet again. Lots of drama here, good surprises (I did not expect the return of a character from Thinktwice), nice explanation of the backstory, and a climax that really works, plot-wise and emotion-wise. One last double-cross from Majenta is the perfect way to wrap the whole thing up! My favorite part is the bit where Majenta and the Crimson Hand have won, and the Doctor is trapped in a pocket universe. It's sort of cribbing from those bits of The Glorious Dead where the Doctor is missing and Izzy is all alone... except in this case, it's the companion's own fault! A solid conclusion to a solid run.

Overall, I really enjoyed this volume. Even if there wasn't an ongoing story to hold everything together, it would still be a strong run for showing off the versatility of the strip at its best. Add Majenta—the kind of companion character who plays to the strengths of comics and adds something to every story in which she appears—and you get what is certainly the best run since the Scott Gray years, even if Rose/Martha/Donna years were solid too.