Storm by Eric Jerome Dickey et al.

Storm

Collection published: 2007
Contents originally published: 2006
Acquired: September 2024
Read: October 2024

Writer: Eric Jerome Dickey

Pencilers: David Yardin & Lan Medina

Inkers: Jay Leisten with Sean Parsons

Colorist: Matt Milla
Letterer: Randy Gentile

One of the big components of Reginald Hudlin's Black Panther run was the relationship and eventual marriage between Black Panther and Storm—or, I guess, T'Challa and Ororo. But that wasn't just something that unfolded in the series, it was also something we were told predated it. Specifically, there were a number of references to the 2006 miniseries Storm, which expanded on Ororo's youth, especially her relationship with T'Challa. So probably it would have been helpful to read this before Hudlin's Black Panther, but I didn't know it existed until later, and ended up reading it afterward.

I'm not much of an X-Men person, so I know very little about Storm as a character. This focuses on a period where she's a street thief in Africa, her parents having been killed in a civil war. A group of hunters recognizes her weather-controlling powers, and tries to kidnap her at the same time a young T'Challa, travelling the world, finds himself captivated by her. I have no sense of how much of this would have been preexisting canon and how much of it was added by writer Eric Jerome Dickey.

In any case, it's a comic where all one can say, and I'm sorry, is that it's basically fine. There is, unfortunately in my opinion, a lot of emphasis on Ororo's relationship with T'Challa, who was her first lover. While I get that this is an important part of anyone's life, it seemed to me that I wasn't getting a lot of insight into her personality, her wants, her needs, other than her need for romantic companionship. She seems largely defined by other people's choices—and, to be fair, many people actually are—but I had little sense of how she reacted and built herself in response to these other people.

I was relieved to realize Ororo's hair looks terrible on purpose, because this is a wig. Shame about the eyebrows, though; I think some artists just can't make them work.
from Storm vol. 2 #1 (art by David Yardin & Jay Leisten)

The art is fine; I wouldn't give it an award but there's nothing wrong with it, though I sometimes lost track of all the various hunter characters. The issues are on the longer side, a little more than the usual 20-22 pages, and I feel like they could have been cut down to the standard length without really losing anything important, to be honest.

Check your privilege, T'Challa.
from Storm vol. 2 #4 (art by Lan Medina with David Yardin & Jay Leisten)

Most frustratingly in terms of continuity, the book ends with T'Challa and Ororo still together! How did they end up separated again? The Marvel Chronology Project informs me that chronologically, Storm is followed by flashbacks from Black Panther vol. 3 #26 and Black Panther vol. 4 #14, but I don't remember the details of these despite having read them! (Maybe I should go back?) I guess Storm doesn't have to provide the complete story, but it does have what feels like an odd stopping point, all things considered.

Okay, but what happens to T'Challa?
from Storm vol. 2 #6 (art by David Yardin & Lan Medina and Jay Leisten with Sean Parsons)

Anyway, I'm glad I read it in the end, and it's too bad I didn't read it between issues #9 and 10 of Black Panther vol. 4, which would be my recommendation. But though perhaps this is a consequence of the context in which I read it, it feels more important to T'Challa than Ororo, and I think that does the character and the series a disservice.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

Black Sun Rising (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 54)

Black Sun Rising: The Complete Doctor Who Back-Up Tales, Volume 2
by Mick Austin, Vincent Danks, Dave Gibbons, David Lloyd, Alan McKenzie, Mick McMahon, Steve Moore, Paul Neary, Steve Parkhouse, John Peel, Gary Russell, Geoff Senior, John Stokes, et al.

Collection published: 2024
Contents originally published: 1980-92
Acquired: September 2024
Read: November 2024

Unlike its predecessor volume, this contains only two strips that had been previously collected, and only one of them by Panini at that; Black Legacy was in the Cyberman Ultimate Collection, and Skywatch-7 in a volume of IDW's Doctor Who Classics series. So the amount of new-to-me material is much higher here, making it feel more worthwhile. But on top of that, I also found that the material here was more diverse and unusual than what was collected in the previous volume. 

The stories here come from an era where the back-ups went from a regular feature to a more sporadic one, before fading out entirely. The last couple aren't from DWM itself, but special tie-in issues, one from a decade after all the others, which date from 1980 to 1982.

As usual, I am only writing up stories I hadn't read before. On top of that, I did read all the stories in publication order, but here I am going to sometimes review them out of that order... you'll see why.

Yonder...the Yeti, from Doctor Who Weekly #31-34 (May-June 1980)
written by Steve Moore, art by David Lloyd

A group of hikers in the Himalayas end up encountering the robot Yeti and the Great Intelligence. Some DWM stories manage to cram a lot into a little space to good effect, but this one just felt crammed to me; I struggled to follow the art or copious plot twists. Maybe I was tired when I read it... maybe I'm just getting old!

Business as Usual, from Doctor Who Weekly #40-43 (July-Aug. 1980)
written by The Original Writer [Alan Moore], art by David Lloyd

This won't set your world on fire, but I found it an effectively creepy use of the Autons. Moore does a good job of extrapolating how an Auton story would go with no Doctor; David Lloyd's talents are put to good use with some of the more horrific moments.

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #47

Stardeath / 4-D War / Black Sun Rising, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #47, 51, & 57 (Dec. 1980–Oct. 1981)
written by The Original Writer [Alan Moore], art by John Stokes and David Lloyd

This trilogy of stories from Alan Moore chronicles some of the early history of the Time Lords, and is the first depiction of a "Time War" in the Doctor Who mythos. (The existence of a "Last Great Time War" of course implies earlier, less great Time Wars.) In Stardeath, Moore really dives into the history, showing the moment alluded to in The Three Doctors where Omega gets trapped in a black home; I think this is the first story to unite that idea with the fact that in The Deadly Assassin, the Time Lords use a black hole as a power source for their time travel operations. The hardware is beautifully drawn by John Stokes and, the story uses the same design for Rassilon that we would later see in The Tides of Time. On top of that, someone comes back in time to stop the Time Lords from becoming masters of time... and in doing so accidentally gives the Time Lords a key piece of time-travel technology. Timey-wimey, as we would now say.

Such temporal shenanigans are what drive the last two stories here, which focus on the Time Lord "Special Executive" trying to maintain Time Lord influence in the face of opposition from both contemporary and futuristic enemies. Moore is typically inventive, but I didn't find the agents of the Special Executive very Time Lord-y, to be honest. Cool concepts but I feel like they needed a bit more of a Doctor Who veneer.

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #48

The Touchdown on Deneb 7, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #48 (Jan. 1981)
written by Paul Neary, art by David Lloyd

This is a K-9 story. Like K-9's Finest Hour from the previous volume, the Doctor is in it a bit but it focuses on K-9; like K-9's Finest Hour, it's not very good. If there was some kind of explanation for the key plot point that K-9 is acting totally out of character, I missed it!

Voyage to the Edge of the Universe / Crisis on Kaldor, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #49-50 (Feb.-Mar. 1981)
written by Paul Neary (with David Lloyd) and Steve Moore, art by David Lloyd and John Stokes

The idea of taking a group of Dæmons and sending them on a trip to the edge of the universe seems pretty random, to be honest, but if you buy that, this is a pretty good story, in that it really lets David Lloyd cut loose with some crazy visuals. The Kaldor story was less interesting to me (I have never really been into the cut-rate Asimov of most Kaldor stories), but it did have a very macabre twist ending. The main strip in this era, under writers Steve Moore and Steve Parkhouse, really loved its stories based on weird concepts that ended with a real downer, and these stories totally fit into that vibe.

from Doctor Who Monthly #64

The Greatest Gamble / The Gods Walk Among Us / Devil of the Deep / The Fires Down Below, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Monthly #56 & 59 / Doctor Who Monthly #61 & 64 (Dec. 1981–May 1982)
written by John Peel; art by Mick McMahon, David Lloyd, and John Stokes; letters by Elitta Fell

To be honest, I have never much rated John Peel as a Doctor Who writer (or, for that matter, a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine one, having suffered through Objective: Bajor, which seems to owe more to Jon Pertwee Virgin Missing Adventures than the tv show it's supposedly based on). His stories often have that fatal combination of being bad and dull, of being fundamentally misconceived in some unenjoyable way. So I was surprised how much I liked this run of tales, which brings in the Celestial Toymakers, the Sontarans, the Sea Devils, and the Quarks. What he's quite good at here is shifting into different genres; none of these feel like Doctor Who stories without the Doctor, but stories from other universes with Doctor Who monsters stuck in: a gambling parable, a tomb exploration story, a pirate story, a military thriller. This is exactly what I want out of the DWM back-up strip! He is helped, of course, by a stable of very strong artists who do a great job adapting themselves to each genre. I really enjoyed all of these.

from Doctor Who: A Marvel Winter Special 1981

Minatorius, from Doctor Who: A Marvel Winter Special 1981
written by Alan McKenzie (as Maxwell Stockbridge), art by John Stokes, letters by Elitta Fell

Like The Stolen TARDIS from the previous volume, this is branded as being from "Tales of the Time Lords"; there never were any more. Based on this, we dodged a bullet. I don't think McKenzie really gets Time Lords; why does the one in this story have a wise-cracking robot drone? John Stokes draws some great alien vistas, though.

The Fabulous Idiot / A Ship Called Sudden Death, from Doctor Who Summer Special 1982
written by Steve Parkhouse, art by Steve Parkhouse & Geoff Senior and Dave Gibbons

These two stories take some characters from the main strip's The Free-Fall Warriors and explore what they get up to when the Doctor's not around, part of that building of a coherent DWM universe that was going on during the Peter Davison strips. The first one is fun enough; I always enjoy a bit of Steve Parkhouse art, and there's some good jokes here about Doctor Ivan Asimoff. The second, about the Freefall Warriors, I found less interesting. There are too many of them in too little space. But you know, give me some Dave Gibbons anyday and I am a happy man.

from Doctor Who Magazine Holiday Special 1992

City of Devils, from Doctor Who Magazine Holiday Special 1992
written by Gary Russell, art by Vincent Danks, letters by Annie Halfacree

I do love Sarah Jane Smith, and Vincent Danks does great on art here, but like most Gary Russell–penned comics, this one is pretty pointless. Sarah and K-9 basically stand around while we go through the usual Silurian story. The story doesn't climax so much as just stop.

Stray Observations:

• Other included stories and what previous collections to find them in: (see below for links to my reviews)
• Black Legacy (in Cybermen: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection)
• Skywatch-7 (in Doctor Who Classics vol. 2 #13)
• Does the existence of "The Original Writer" imply the existence of "The Unoriginal Writer"? And if so, who is it? Anyway, I get it if Alan Moore doesn't want his name on the cover or credits page, but I do find it amusing when the behind-the-scenes material has to contort around giving his name. Like, can he really object to people relaying the fact that he wrote something?
• A couple years after this, Moore would introduce the Warpsmiths to his Marvelman comics, and I could imagine the Special Executive fitting right in there. The backmatter reveals they would be reused in his Captain Britain run; whenever I get around to reading my Captain Britain Omnibus, I look forward to encountering them again. If I'd known ahead of time, maybe I would have incorporated those comics into this project, as I did Transformers, Death's Head, and The Sleeze Brothers!
• Supposedly the Dæmon in Voyage to the Edge is the same guy who shows up running a bar in that really bad Gary Russell story from the McCoy-era strip (see The Good Soldier). God knows why, though.
• I am pretty sure I have read that DWM's The Betrothal of Sontar (2006) was the first use of "Sontar" in the Doctor Who mythos (1993's Pureblood used "Sontara"), but actually it's used in The Gods Walk Among Us way back in 1982.
• For those of us who love the DWM universe, surely the female UNIT commander in The Fires Down Below ought to have been Muriel Frost. Or rather, surely the female UNIT commander in The Mark of Mandragora ought to have been Major Whitaker! The story is set in 1984 and says that Lethbridge-Stewart is in charge of UNIT, which I have to imagine causes some problems but I try to not think about UNIT dating very much these days.
• Back when I wrote up Skywatch-7, I expressed some confusion about the "Maxwell Stockbridge" pseudonym that Alan McKenzie used for his back-up strips, in that it seems like a clear reference to The Stars Fell on Stockbridge et al., but not only predates that story, but DWM itself! The backmatter here goes into that; McKenzie says it was his pseudonym of choice, based on the house pen names used on The Shadow and The Spider (Maxwell Grant and Grant Stockbridge, respectively), and that Steve Parkhouse told him the creation of a DWM character named Maxwell from Stockbridge is a total coincidence!
• The Freefall Warriors went on to appear in a Captain Britain back-up in 1985. I am guessing rights issues mean this has never and will never be collected. These issues go for an average of $13 apiece on Mycomicshop.com; I imagine at some point I will give in and buy them to complete my DWM journey. If I do, you all will be the first to know!

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

My Kid and the Dragons Franchise

I haven't done a lot of parental blogging recently, so I thought I would write up what was honestly a pretty minor moment—but that is how I envision this blog, so there you go.

Last Wednesday, I picked up my six-year-old ("Kid One") from their aftercare program. Sometimes Kid One doesn't tell me anything  about their day, but this week, they were nice and chatty. Among other things, they informed me that they had come up with a new Dragons game. I later learned my wife knew about these games, but I didn't. The newest is the twelfth installment, Dragon Claws. When I asked if these were things they wrote or drew, they informed me that no, they just dreamed them up. There's the original Dragons (when I called it "Dragons 1" at some point, I was corrected that it was just Dragons), and then Dragons 2 through Dragons 11. Dragons 5 and 6 are "Dragons Mega" and Dragons 7 through 9 are "Dragons Mega Mega."

Apparently they play these games at recess with their friend (whom I'll call "Connor"). When we got home, it was a little early, and they had missed the recess component of aftercare because I picked up Kid One a bit earlier than mom usually does, so I suggested we play a Dragons game outside. They said I could pick which one, but when I said start from the beginning, they said they didn't remember the original Dragons, so we played Dragons 2 instead.

In Dragons 2, there's a dragon and a warrior; I was the warrior, and they were the dragon. (When Kid One and Connor play, Connor is usually the warrior as well.) First I had to defeat the dragon, then I captured the dragon in my dragonball and registered it to my dragonphone. After that, we battled together against a number of threats (the ones I remember are the flying "Rampagers") and the dragon, originally named "Attacker," evolved a couple times.

Obviously you can identify what their inspirations are! I was struck how Kid One is very obviously my kid, in that they look at systems of narrative and break them down and figure them out. They have already figured out the structure of a game franchise! I love seeing them enthusiastic  and energetic and imaginative; I had to do very little prompting, they mostly told me everything that was happening and came up with all the ideas. I was pretty tired, so we left off once we finished Dragons 2, but I am promised that our progress and characters will carry over into Dragons 3 when we play it!

New! Blackhawk (#196–227)

In my previous post in this series (see item #4 in the list below), I had originally planned to cover up through issue #200, since I had bought issues #151 through 200 in one batch. But when I read issue #196 (May 1964), it was obvious that something had changed in the world of Blackhawk, and that issues #196 through 200 belonged with the run that followed, which would go up through issue #227 (Dec. 1966). (Issue #228, as I'll cover in the next post in this series, is the infamous Junk-Heap Heroes story that saw the Blackhawks reformatted as superheroes.)

In its early DC years, in my opinion, Blackhawk had settled into a rut. Really generic, really tedious stories of the Blackhawks fighting criminals or aliens or alien criminals, stories that drew in absolutely no way on the unique attributes of the Blackhawks of the things that actually made them appealing to begin with. But to a degree, isn't this inevitable? That's the question I'm exploring in this series. Unlike, say, Superman, I don't think the premise of Blackhawk is terribly adaptable outside of its original setting. Moving the characters outside of World War II is perhaps innately doomed to failure. DC's attempts to tell Blackhawk stories from 1957 to 1964 didn't take advantage of the unique attributes of the premise, and the kinds of stories they were telling would almost certainly have been done better with a different group of characters.

Back into action like in the old days!
from Blackhawk vol. 1 #196
(script by Arnold Drake, art by Dick Dillin & Chuck Cuidera)

As soon as you read issue #196 ("A Firing Squad for Blackhawk!"), it's clear something has changed. The story has the Blackhawks recruited by the mysterious "Mr. Cipher" (his face is a blank) from the United Nations, who sends them on a mission to do the kind of things they actually are good at—the taking down of dictators! To me, this does a good job of threading the needle of what makes the Blackhawks fun and interesting while still keeping them in the present day. It's essentially the kind of thing they used to do before America joined in on the Second World War, go places where there was tyranny but there couldn't be official intervention. I really enjoyed the issue; though like all previous DC issues it's illustrated by Dick Dillin and Chuck Cuidera, even the artwork feels fresh, probably because the script gives them something dynamic and exciting to draw for once.

Issue #197 isn't quite as good ("The War Between the Blackhawks"), but continues in the same line. Again, Mr. Cipher sends them on a mission, this time to stop a war between two neighboring countries in Southeast Asia; the Blackhawks split into two groups, each of which advises each side. There's some silly sci-fi stuff here (monsters or robots or robot monsters or monster robots), but it's used in the kind of plot that, once again, plays to Blackhawk's strengths as a premise. To go undercover on their mission, the Blackhawks need to don new uniforms, which at the story's end they decide to keep, red shirts with green pants. I wasn't very into them at first, but as I kept reading the run, I did come around on them, and I grew to like the fact that there were different uniforms for their wartime and postwar adventures. (More on that in a bit.)

Issue #198 does something new and different; it jumps back to the war. Obviously we got a Blackhawk origin of sorts in Military Comics #1 (see item #1 in the list below), and the text story in Blackhawk #50 gave us some more details (item #2), but "D-Day for the Blackhawks" is an issue-length story about how the Blackhawks were founded. It does not accord with the Military Comics run, though, depicting the Blackhawks as an official unit of the military, and not having them go into action until D-Day.*

All three issues are credited to writer Arnold Drake, but knowing what I do of the era, my guess is the changes are mostly down to editor Murray Boltinoff, who took over with issue #196 according to the Grand Comics Database... and unfortunately, #198 is his last issue. With #199 ("The Attack of the Mummy Insects," writer unknown), we're back to the same old crap as George Kashdan takes over as editor—though my guess is it might be an inventory story from the previous era.

The same is probably true of #200, though it's a landmark issue in some ways. "Queen Killer Shark" reads like a totally generic Blackhawk issue of the previous era, and I suspect it probably was, as it's written by Dave Wood, who was a prolific contributor in the previous era, but never penned another Blackhawk story again. Recurring Blackhawk nemesis Killer Shark uses poison or some shit to turn Lady Blackhawk into the evil Queen Killer Shark. To me, it reads like a totally normal one-off, except that at the end, she doesn't get turned back, and I wonder if the editor made a change to an existing script. By now, it's 1964, and the Silver Age of superheroes is underway at DC, with all kinds of recurring subplots—not the kind of things the Blackhawks usually went in for. So I think the editor (be it the outgoing Boltinoff or the incoming Kashdan) had the end of the story tweaked to bring it more in line with the kind of stuff contemporary superhero comics were doing.

There's one other format-busting issue here, "Operation White Dragon" in #203 (script by Bob Haney). Just as "D-Day for the Blackhawks" retold the origin of the Blackhawk team, this retells the origin of Chop-Chop. In the original Military Comics run, Chop-Chop is for some reason helping a nurse the Blackhawks meet in Nazi-occupied Europe and ends up following the team home; here, the Blackhawks meet Chop-Chop when they go to China to help liberate a town from the Japanese. Chop-Chop (real name: Liu Hang) is the nephew of a local lord that the Blackhawks are trying to convince to come over to the Allies. He turns out to be a secret badass working to undermine the occupying Japanese forces. It's a fun story, and a much better origin for Chop-Chop than what we originally got, though as far as I know it never really gets picked up on again. In general, Chop-Chop does much better in this run than in the previous, as he's more treated like a regular member of the team (he gets a uniform when everyone else switches) and not just an adjunct to Blackhawk.

Other than that, issues #201 through 227 settle into a pretty predictable pattern. There's always a main story of around sixteen pages. Though they go back to the goofiness and sci-fi trappings of the pre-Boltinoff Blackhawk, I enjoyed these more. There's fewer stupid stories about aliens, or about generic criminals, more about supervillains. They're more stylishly told, too. Sure, they're silly, but there's a good sense of fun, a feeling that the writers (still usually uncredited) are having a good time, as opposed to knocking out something before lunch. I particularly enjoyed "Five Fears for the Blackhawks" from #215 (writer unknown), which doesn't really make any sense, to be honest, but really leans into the 1960s happening vibe in a way I found totally delightful. Many of the stories of this era are by Bob Haney, and I suspect it was his work I enjoyed the most; I was less into Ed Herron, who unfortunately takes over as regular writer with #223. (This is when the series starts a short-lived habit of crediting writers and artists, so we actually know this for a fact.)

Chop-Chop... ace pilot!
from Blackhawk vol. 1 #212
(art by Dick Dillin & Chuck Cuidera)

It's unfortunate that Boltinoff and Drake left, because I liked their approach a lot more, and also they were clearly setting up some kind of ongoing plot about Mr. Cipher, who (to me, anyway) seemed fairly suspicious as bosses went. But he never appeared again after #197, nor was the fact that the Blackhawks worked for the UN ever relevant again. (In the forthcoming "New Blackhawk Era" they work for the U.S. government.) The stuff about Queen Killer Shark is an intermittent recurrent thing; they sometimes temporarily cure her but she always ends her issues evil again. At the end of her last appearance, "The Revenge of Queen Killer Shark" in #225 (script by Ed Herron), both her and Killer Shark are taken into custody. It's also worth pointing out a lot of stories end with the narrator wondering if a particular villain will come back... but they never do.

The other part of each issue is an eight-page backup. These backups usually alternate between two features. One is the "Blackhawk World War II Combat Diary," which will tell a quick lost story of what the Blackhawks got up to during World War II. These I enjoyed a lot. They're not all great (one involves aliens for some reason), but most are solid, quick stories of Nazi-fighting shenanigans. I particularly enjoyed "Chained Enemies!" (#200), where Blackhawk and a Nazi get tied up together but have to survive; "Chop-Chop's Suicide Mission" (#212), where Chop-Chop goes undercover with Japanese kamikaze pilots but ends up having to kamikaze himself against his own squadron; "Rescue Riley's Rangers!" (#218), where how people write the number 7 turns out to be vital to the war effort; and "The Mystery Prisoner of Stalag 13!" (#226), where the Blackhawks try to infiltrate a Nazi prison only to find out they've been anticipated. There are no collections of Blackhawk vol. 1 aside from the one Showcase Presents Blackhawk volume, and to be honest, I can't blame DC for that, but I think a good collection of this era's WWII adventures wouldn't go amiss.

Always love a prison infiltration story.
from Blackhawk vol. 1 #226
(art by Dick Dillin & Chuck Cuidera)

The other regular feature is the "Blackhawk Detatched Service Diary," which are short stories focusing on single members of the team. This is the usual stupid stuff for Blackhawks of the era with aliens and dimensions and whatnot, just focusing on one member at a time. There's no sense of real personality here, they're just silly stories that make you roll your eyes.

(The GCD attributes all of these back-ups from #200 to 227 to George Kashdan, on the basis of a comment he apparently made in a fanzine: "In The Comic Reader #27 (July 1964), George Kashdan is credited with writing the Blackhawk fillers. Info per Nick Caputo." It seems a bit weird to me to use a bit of data from July 1964 to attribute stories all the way up to December 1966! The writing is variable enough, in terms of quality and style, that it's hard for me to believe it's all one person's work.)

For those of us who track these things, there's still no real hint if these stories take place in the DC universe, except that when a bad guy in #227 dons a supervillain outfit, he comments that people are doing this more and more these days. There's no indication, however, of the full-on integration into the DC universe that's about to come. More on that in the next installment of this series...

I was excited when this era introduced a letter column, but in most issues, it's just taken up by fans writing in to buy/sell issues of Blackhawk with other fans. I did skim to see if I recognized any names, and indeed I did, in #227 there's a letter from Craig Russell of Wellsville, Ohio; this is the comics artist we now know as P. Craig Russell. He would have been fourteen.

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #227

The same issue has a hilarious public service advertisement I've included on the right. What do you like less, alligators or Catholics?

("New! Blackhawk" is the branding used on issues #197 and 200-01; #198-99 have the slight variation "New Blackhawk." Of course, don't confuse this with subsequent branding iterations "The New Blackhawk Era" [#228-35] or "The New Blackhawk" [#244-45]! How many times can you be new?)

This is the fifth post in a series about the Blackhawks. The next installment covers issues #228-43 of Blackhawk vol. 1. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Blackhawk Archives, Volume 1 (1941-42)
2. Military Comics #18-43 / Modern Comics #44-46 / Blackhawk #9 & 50 (1943-52)
3. Showcase Presents Blackhawk, Volume One (1957-58) 
4. Blackhawk vol. 1 #151-95 (1960-64)
   

* This is of course the era of DC's multiple Earths. I'm sure lots of people have their own ideas, but mine is that the Military Comics stories are probably set on Earth-X (where DC put all the Quality characters) and the postwar stories up through the "Junkheap Heroes" era are Earth-B (where DC put all the goofy-ass shit that Bob Haney and Murray Boltinoff came up with). We'll see about later runs.

Teaching Notes: Public Health in Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith

I'm currently teaching a general education course here at UT, one focused on the medical humanities. That course and its design will probably merit its own post at some point (maybe not until next semester, though, after I reteach it), but for now I want to discuss the novel I assigned.

Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

Originally published: 1924
First read: January 2013
Acquired: June 2014
Previously taught: September 2014
Retaught: September 2024

Originally my thought was to play to my strengths by doing short science fiction about medicine. But as things were getting down to the wire, I wasn't sure if I would have enough short stories to teach without having to do a lot of research to prep the class... research I honestly didn't have time to do. But then I cast my mind back and remembered Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, a novel I taught a decade ago in a class on the novel post-1900. A whole 450-page novel about a doctor trying to find his way in the world! What could be better for using up a month of course time? But also giving us a lot of very relevant things to discuss.

So I put in my book order, and when the semester rolled around, I taught the book. In my link above, you can get a sense of the kind of things I was interested in last time around, and I did do some of that this time, too: Arrowsmith as bildungsroman, Arrowsmith as exemplar for the realist project.

But the big change in the world since the last time I taught Arrowsmith (other than the fact that college students can't cope with a 450-page book anymore, even across three weeks) is, of course, that we have all lived through a major public health crisis... and Arrowsmith is all about public health. Martin Arrowsmith spends a lot of time working in a public health department, trying to convince people to behave rationally in the face of scientific evidence... a struggle we have all now witnessed firsthand. 

I remember making jokes to my class in 2014 about the inanity of the songs Martin's boss at the public health department comes up with to communicate public health messages. At the time, these seemed like goofy 1920s nonsense. But in the 2020s, we did all this! Martin's struggle to get people to put aside their petty prejudices in favor of collective action is something we all saw in real time. I realize now, of course, that Lewis must have been thinking (at least in part) of the Spanish flu, and a student pointed out to me that he was probably also inspired by "Typhoid Mary."

So there was a lot of fruitful material for discussion here. I paired a lot of our course texts with episodes of Radiolab as a way of letting my class get to interesting issues in detail without forcing me to assign a bunch of other reading. I paired Arrowsmith with three:

• "The Great Vaccinator" (3 Dec. 2020). This episode is about Maurice Hilleman and the creation of the mumps vaccine, the quickest created vaccine prior to COVID, as well as seven others routinely given to children today. I thought of Arrowsmith as soon as I first heard this episode back when it came out because it discusses some of the ethical issues of double-blind testing. When Hilleman did polio vaccine testing, he had to do so in the knowledge that he was letting some kids suffer who might have not suffered if they hadn't been given the placebo—the exact dilemma Martin faces at the climax of Arrowsmith when he can only give half the inhabitants of St. Hubert the bacteriophage that will save them from the plague.
• "Every Day Is Ignaz Semmelweis Day" (1 Apr. 2020). This episode is about Ignaz Semmelweis, who invented handwashing in a maternity ward in nineteenth-century Vienna. It's a neat episode about the development of something so commonplace now that most people know little about. Semmelweis reminds me a lot of Martin, in that I would argue the personality attributes that make him good at science are also the same attributes that made him bad at convincing other people to use his discoveries. Semmelweis alienated a lot of people when he tried to get them to adopt handwashing... but if he hadn't had that drive and arrogance, could he have discovered it to begin with?
• "Playing God" (21 Aug. 2016). This episode is about triage, going through three main stories: 1) the way triage decisions were made in a New Orleans hospital during Katrina, 2) an attempt to devise triage guidelines using citizen input, and 3) a medical reporter's failure to adhere to the guidelines. Arrowsmith isn't really about triage per se, but both triage and medical testing on humans (I would argue) come down to something Robert Krulwich says at the end of the episode: "what you've hit upon here is an impossible piece of human business. Rationing, triage, whatever you call it, is an inhuman act which humans are trying to do, but the fact of their humanity makes it impossible. We have a God role and nobody fits it." Arrowsmith is all about Martin's attempt to deny his humanity so he can fit that God role. This is both necessary to providing medical care (as "Playing God" highlights)... and utterly impossible.

I don't know that my students loved Arrowsmith, but I think it teaches very well in that it's got a lot of great medical issues in it that are very teachable. I don't know that I would teach the book every time I teach this class (I am toying with an alternative), but I definitely will reteach it when I teach the class again next semester at least.

Five Very Good Podcasts Now on BBC Sounds

Longtime readers around here will know that I am still a devotee of the iPod Classic, using it to listen to my music, podcasts, and audiobooks. Unfortunately, my iPod Classic has been having battery problems, meaning I can only use plugged in to power. So, it works in the car, but is essentially useless for listening to while doing house chores or working out.

This means I have been forced to listen to stuff like someone from the 2020s (or 2010s); that is to say, on my phone. The first thing I listened to this way was the podcast Doctor Who Redacted, because it can only be accessed through the BBC Sounds app. But once I listened to this podcast (highly recommended, by the way), I realized there was a whole wealth of material that I've been listening to on there, now for around a year I think. As an American, you can listen to whatever you want!*

There doesn't seem, alas, to be a way to view a list of everything you've listened to on the BBC Sounds app, so I am going to give you some recommendations from memory. Probably there is other good stuff I am forgetting.

• "Beethoven Can Hear You" (2020). Actual Deaf actress Sophie Stone plays a Deaf time traveller who travels back in time to meet Beethoven... and discovers that he is not in fact Deaf. Beautifully performed by Stone and Doctor Who's own Peter Capaldi, beautifully written by Timothy X Atack (who I know from the Doctor Who audio dramas), and beautifully sounding, with some interesting things to say about disability and identity.
• Two on a Tower (2021). There are a lot of Thomas Hardy (and other Victorian fiction) adaptations on BBC Sounds, but this has been my favorite of them so far, a genuinely moving adaptation of my favorite minor Hardy, a book that has otherwise gone unadapted. Captures the leads' uncertainty and passion in equal measure.
• Mrs Sidhu Investigates: Murder with Masala (2017). This is a fun mystery comedy, about a nosy Indian caterer who keeps sticking her nose into murders. Meera Syal is hugely funny as the lead, as is Justin Edwards, who plays her long-suffering police contact. My main complaint is that there was only one four-episode series, though it was later turned into both a tv show and a novel.
• Decameron Nights (2014). Ten installments of Boccaccio's Decameron are dramatized in 165 minutes. Lots of good actors in this, and lots of good jokes, really brings the sexual farce elements of the original to life with a lightly modern touch. Lots of familiar voices (Samuel Barnett is good value of course) but you haven't lived until you've heard Big Finish's Jane Slavin as a horny abbess.

• A Vindication of Frankenstein's Monster (2024). I'm not quite done with this, but I am loving it enough to confidently state it will be on my Hugo ballot next year. This story mashes up Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with her mother Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. What if the woman we now mostly remember as the mother of the mother of Frankenstein... kind of became Frankenstein's monster herself? Or, perhaps, she already was? Great science fictional exploration of monstrousness and gender.

* Except for, apparently, Numberblocks Tales, which is a great tragedy for us in the Mollmanns.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Headlong Flight

mid-2386
Parallel universes are, of course, an old standby of Star Trek in specific and popular science fiction in general. What can we learn by seeing the road untaken, other universes where people made different choices or things went different ways? This book sees the Enterprise-E returning to its mission of exploration, which eventually brings it into contact with the Enterprise-D from 2367... but an Enterprise-D from a reality where Picard died during the events of "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II" and Riker became captain; other differences include the continued existence of Tasha Yar, Pulaski still serving as CMO, and Wesley working as a civilian specialist on the Enterprise.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Headlong Flight
by Dayton Ward

Published: 2017
Acquired: January 2024
Read: November 2024

The book invites comparisons with any number of parallel universe stories, from TNG's "Parallels" onwards, but the one that jumped out at me was Peter David's Q-Squared, because Dayton Ward performs a similar trick to David. In Q-Squared, some clever work with pronouns makes it unclear during one of the book's earlier scenes that we're in an alternate timeline; we at first thing we're reading about Picard and Beverly Crusher when it turns out to be Picard and a still-living Jack Crusher. In an early E-D scene, Ward has the crew at a card game, and some vague references to "the captain" make you think Picard is the captain when in fact it's Riker.

David deploys the revelation to dramatic effect, dropping it in (if I recall correctly, it's been at least two decades since I read Q-Squared) at the end of a scene, upending the mental image you had built up over the preceding several pages.The problem here is that the next time we go to the alternative Enterprise-D, we're just told that Riker is captain; there's no drama to the reveal. So why defer it?

An inexplicable lack of drama is consistent through all the alternative timeline stuff. It takes absolutely forever before the two crews are even aware of each other; I felt like the first one hundred pages were just people scanning nebulas. And while in Armageddon's Arrow, Ward built in a lot of nice little moments and small arcs for the E-E crew, here I felt I was just reading about them doing their jobs in the most humdrum fashion. T'Ryssa Chen has a boyfriend... and that's it, nothing is at stake for her. Once the two crews meet, they do so without much drama or interest. Does the discovery of this other Enterprise do anything other than make the crew from the future nostalgic about the old LCARS format and bridge layout? Not really. It doesn't raise any questions for Picard about his life, or La Forge, or Worf, or anyone.

The closest we get is that the alternative Riker gets a bit of closure... but to be honest, why do I care if that guy gets some closure? Again, compare Q-Squared, where if nothing else, Jack Crusher undergoes an existential crisis from learning about his fate in the "Prime" timeline. At the end, Picard makes a potentially interesting decision in giving the alternative Enterprise-D metaphasic torpedoes, but this decision entirely happens off-screen, and its consequences seem to be limited to the fact that if he is found out, he will receive a sternly worded letter from a bureaucrat.

Outside of the alternative timeline stuff, there is unfortunately little going on in the novel. The main antagonists are Romulans from a century ago; unsurprisingly, they are little threat, even aside from the fact they mostly seem to sit around talking replaying beats from "Balance of Terror." I was not able to get worked up about the fate of the aliens in any way, shape, or form, and it's all resolved with surprising ease.

In both cases, information is often imparted to the reader in the least dramatic fashion possible. Rather than learn about the alternative Enterprise-D's history along with the Enterprise-E crew, it's simply given to us in exposition. Rather than have the Romulans dramatically decloak to make things worse, they simply pop up in a chapter from their viewpoint where they just sit around watching people. There's no dramatic reveals, no suspense mind from almost anything here. To be honest, I wasn't even sure what the book was going for. The basic premise seems to be "two alternative crews meet each other... and everyone is terribly nice about it." Perhaps it's a realistic take in a Star Trekky sense, but it hardly makes for interesting reading.

the USS Honorius?
poster by Matthew and Christopher Cushman

Continuity Notes:

• Picard thinks of the Briar Patch as a place that gave the Enterprise trouble years earlier... not months earlier!
• The ship class names for the Romulan ships in this book all come from the FASA RPG sourcebooks.
• Picard recalls that the Enterprise-E was originally called the USS Honorius while under construction, being redesignated after the crash of the Enterprise-D on Veridian III. While the origins of this name are obscure, its first mention in prose fiction came in the S.C.E. novella The Future Begins by... oh, how interesting. (Not, contrary to the claims of Wikipedia, in Diane Carey's Ship of the Line.)

Other Notes:

• In a bit about how Chen seems to do everything on the ship but her job as contact specialist, we're told that what she spends her time doing includes "composing... detailed analysis of whatever new species the Enterprise might encounter, and recommendations for next steps... with respect to a newly discovered civilization" (p. 27). But if composing such materials isn't part of the duties of a contact specialist, what even are the duties of a contact specialist?
• There is for some reason a totally irrelevant two-page recap of the events of "The Pegasus."
• There is also a whole page-long thing that establishes that Christopher L. Bennett is an in-universe professor at Starfleet Academy. He likes to talk a lot about time travel theories, spinning a lot out of very small comments by other people and unable to stop talking. Hard to imagine, to be honest.
• Doug Drexler's cover image is as undramatic and humdrum as the book it illustrates. And doesn't that Enterprise-D look a bit wonky to you?

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Titan: Fortune of War by David Mack

Black Panther: Dark Reign / Prelude to Doomwar by Reginald Hudlin, Ken Lashley, Paul Neary, et al.

After Black Panther volume 4 came to an end in 2008, it was almost immediately followed by volume 5. This was a twelve-issue series; I don't know anything about the behind-the-scenes of the era, so I don't know if it was planned as a maxiseries, or if it was supposed to be an ongoing that got curtailed or what. Maybe it was even planned as a six-issue miniseries and expanded?

from Black Panther vol. 5 #4

It has two distinct halves. The first six issues are a Dark Reign tie-in (I don't remember what Dark Reign was even though I have the Young Avengers installment) called The Deadliest of the Species that focuses—in theory, anyway—on Shuri becoming the Black Panther. The series opens with T'Challa injured and missing; in flashbacks, we find out he had encounters with both Namor and Doctor Doom. In the present, T'Challa has abandoned his responsibilities because of his injuries, meaning his mother and wife have to step in as rulers of Wakanda while his sister Shuri has to assume the mantle of the Black Panther. Of course, there's some kind of threat to Wakanda, some kind of ancient mythical bad guy.

To be honest, I never figure out what the bad guy was or why I should care. The story is supposedly about Shuri but I didn't feel we learned anything interesting about her, and the beats of the story are kind of tired. She's too cocky and has to learn to dial it down to be worthy... this seems to me to be the kind of thing that is more often associated with female superheroes than male ones. Has T'Challa ever been rejected by the panther god for his confidence? The charming character of the films has yet to emerge in the comics... if, indeed, she ever will. The rest of the story is pretty forgettable stuff, super-terrible bad guys defeated in super-terrible fights.

from Black Panther vol. 5 #2

The Deadliest of the Species was written by the same writer as volume 4, Reginald Hudlin; Hudlin cowrites the first issue of the second story, Power, with Jonathan Maberry, who then takes over as writer for the remainder of the series. Power jumps ahead a bit, with Shuri now installed as ruler of Wakanda, on a diplomatic mission to the United States, where she's also investigating a threat to Wakanda, particularly whatever injured T'Challa. Meanwhile, there's economic and agricultural failures in Wakanda, and a resurgent nationalist movement that will be familiar to anyone who's paid attention to politics over the last decade. The last three issues of Power are branded as a "Prelude to Doomwar" tie-in, Doomwar being a crossover miniseries that apparently picks up right from the end of Black Panther vol. 5. (It's the thing I will read next in this sequence.)

Anyway, I found this muddled and hard to care about. Maberry gives Shuri a team of advisors, but it's a lot of characters who I didn't really care about, and I don't see why she needs this kind of supporting cast when T'Challa didn't. It takes the characters far too long to figure out that Doctor Doom is responsible, given the readers learned this way back back in issue #2. And I am tired of stories where the people of Wakanda rise up against their rulers for seemingly stupid reasons. (Though I guess this is realistic! And to be fair to Maberry, though this is a story that seems to happen a lot in Black Panther comics, I think it had actually been a fair amount of time since it was last done when he wrote this in 2008. Did it happen during Priest's? If not, then it hadn't happened since the 1990s.)

from Black Panther vol. 5 #11

But really I didn't find a lot to grab onto here as a reader. Probably my favorite part were the two talking heads from Wakandan media that we cut to occasionally. One of the really interesting things Don McGregor set up way back when was the conflict between traditional Wakandan values and the modernizing influences T'Challa was importing, and most subsequent writers haven't done a ton with this.

The majority of the art for this series is done by penciler Ken Lashley and inker Paul Neary. I am a fan of Neary from his Marvel UK days, but here he's just inking over pretty standard 2000s superhero pencils from Lashley. That said, I found them better than Will Conrad, who does the rest of the series and whose art is kind of confusing and does a bad job of depicting Shuri in particular.

The Deadliest of the Species originally appeared in issues #1-6 of Black Panther vol. 5 (Apr.-Sept. 2009). The story was written by Reginald Hudlin, penciled by Ken Lashley, inked by Paul Neary, colored by Paul Mounts, lettered by Cory Petit, and edited by Axel Alonso.

Power originally appeared in issues #7-12 of Black Panther vol. 5 (Oct. 2009–Mar. 2010). The story was written by Jonathan Maberry (#7-12) & Reginald Hudlin (#7), illustrated by Will Conrad (#7-10, 12) and Ken Lashley & Paul Neary (#11), colored by Pete Pantazis, lettered by Cory Petit (#7-10, 12) and Clayton Cowles (#11), and edited by Axel Alonso.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Prey: The Hall of Heroes

April 2386
Well, if you've been following my reviews of the Prey trilogy thus far, you'll know it hasn't set my world alight. Me on book 1: "But I wanted Picard, Riker, La Forge, and so on to do something interesting and clever, to figure something out. Hopefully that's what books 2 and 3 are for." On book 2: "This book feels like it's treading water for the people in it, even as the plot is always getting more complicated... Miller writes in a way that's fun and easy to read, I never dreaded this book or anything, but it doesn't feel like it has enough of a point to be three novels."

Star Trek: Prey, Book 3: The Hall of Heroes
by John Jackson Miller

Published: 2016
Acquired: July 2023
Read: September 2024

Well, unfortunately, a hundred pages into book 3 and I was dreading it. A hundred pages into this book and it seemed like almost nothing had happened. In the Enterprise plot, the crew scrutinizes a series of astronomical bodies looking for hidden ships; you know you're in trouble when Picard is complaining about how boring this is. Meanwhile, Worf and Kahless seem like they keep having the same conversation with the Unsung again and again; meanwhile meanwhile the Unsung themselves are just sitting in canyons hiding; meanwhile meanwhile meanwhile we keep cutting to what the very one-note Korgh is up to. It was tedious and very little sense of forward momentum.

Eventually the Kinshaya invade, but by this point I was too disengaged to care. And to be honest, whether the Kinshaya invade the Klingon Empire, whether they fall subject to Breen manipulations, I found it difficult to care about. It's all pretty political and pretty abstract in terms of stakes. As I repeatedly commented about the first two books, it never really feels like anything is at stake here for the characters. Why do these events matter to Picard, to Riker, even to Worf? I very rarely felt as if they did. Over one thousand pages is ultimately a lot of time and space to devote to something with no there there.

The shame of it is I felt like there could have been something really substantial to this, especially for Worf. Worf was discommendated himself on screen but I don't think he ever hit the point of actually questining the discommendation system, even if he himself was done an injustice. I think an arc about Worf at first thinking what was done to the Unsung was just, and then coming to reflect on what was done to him, and the limits of Klingon honor, could have been very interesting. But that's not here; even if the book ends with Worf proposing some changes to the system, it doesn't feel like the book does much to lead up to it. Or a book about Worf struggling to convince Kahless of this—now that sounds like an epic struggle. But mostly Worf just seems to chill out with Kahless and the Unsung, and then it all climaxes and ends.

I find it hard to say much about this series. Until this volume, which got pretty boring, I would have said it was competently written. As I've said before, Miller captures the voices of the preexisting characters well, but doesn't really give them interesting, characterful choices to make; his original characters could be interesting (I thought Shift had real potential), but are in practice fairly one note. It's weird, this is a thousand-page story in an era where Star Trek books can in theory do whatever they want... but it feels like the trilogy was written back in the late 1990s, with the goal of making sure all the characters and all the politics had to be end up back where they began so as not to upset anything the tv show might do.

a Kinshaya, from the old FASA Star Trek RPG
via Memory Beta

Continuity Notes:

• There are a lot of callbacks here to Typhon Pact: The Struggle Within, which I don't think had ever been referenced in any other books before. I did appreciate Miller folding the political upheaval in those books into a broader narrative about the Kinshaya, though I don't think most Star Trek writers have been capable of handling the Kinshayan theocracy in an interesting or compelling way, and Miller is no exception.
• One of the High Council members here was also in the Prometheus trilogy, a very minor sliver of continuity that connects those books to the English-language Destiny-era novels. It is very minor, though; I had to ask the author on the TrekBBS what the connection was, because I had read there was one but had not noticed it at all!
  

Other Notes:

• There's this whole exchange about the term "Unsung" on pp. 128-29 that makes no sense to me. Kahless asks if in Klingonese "Unsung" is rendered as lilIjpu' bomwI'pu' or ghe'naQDaj qonta' pagh, and then Worf tells him it was actually Hew HutlhwI'pu'. But... how are they having this conversation, if not in Klingon? Like, in what language is Kahless actually saying the word "Unsung"? How can he not know how the Unsung referred to themselves in Klingon if he must be talking to them all in Klingon? Did I miss some kind of reference indicating the Unsung are all speaking some other language? But even if they are, surely Kahless is speaking Klingon and communicating with them via the universal translator?
• As I did after reading Typhon Pact: Zero Sum Game, I continue to think that the Breen are an incredibly neat worldbuilding idea—solving continuity conundrums and creating cool story hooks—that books have never really done anything clever with, but this book comes the closest so far.
• The last scene where Riker hunts Korgh down is genuinely clever in its final line.
• I think Doug Drexler is very good at what he usually does... but cover art featuring characters is not what he usually does. What is going on with Worf's hair?

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: Headlong Flight by Dayton Ward

Reading Roundup Wrapup: October 2024

Pick of the month: Sheine Lende by Darcie Little Badger. I didn't read much this month, but this was clearly the best of what was otherwise a mediocre bunch. 

All books read:

1. Sheine Lende: A Prequel to Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger
   
2. The Ozmapolitan of Oz by Dick Martin
3. Storm by Eric Jerome Dickey et al.
4. The Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters: A Science Fiction Anthology of Stories, Poetry, and Art edited by Anthony Francis and Liza Olmsted
5. The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer, and Public Intellectual by Roland Jackson [unfinished]
   

This was a tough month. There was, for example, a hurricane; that and other things conspired to knock me off my groove, and I only got back into my regular reading routine in the last few days of the month, just in time to finish The Neurodiversiverse. This was my worst month since February 2022, when I read three books. Hopefully next month is better!

All books acquired:

NONE!

Currently reading:

• Star Trek: The Next Generation: Headlong Flight by Dayton Ward
• The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8 edited by Neil Clarke
• Black Sun Rising: The Complete Doctor Who Back-Up Tales, Volume 2 by Mick Austin, Vincent Danks, Dave Gibbons, Alan McKenzie, Mick McMahon, Steve Moore, Paul Neary, Steve Parkhouse, John Peel, Gary Russell, Geoff Senior, John Stokes, et al.
• Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Brothers in Arms by Lois McMaster Bujold

Up next in my rotations:

1. Star Trek: Titan: Fortune of War by David Mack
   
2. The Pelican History of England: 3. English Society in the Early Middle Ages (1066-1307) by Doris Mary Stenton
3. The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction compiled by Michael Kelahan 
4. Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World by Michael Freeman

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 663 (down 1)

Unfinished: The Ascent of John Tyndall by Roland Jackson

In my eternally-in-progress book project about scientists in characters in Victorian literature, I often refer to real men of science as reference for the way science was really developing in the era. There are probably three I refer back to more than any others: Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, and John Tyndall. Darwin and Huxley are perhaps obvious touchstones; the most significant Victorian scientist of them all and then the man who professionalized science. Each has an excellent biography, which I read back when I was preparing for my Ph.D. examinations: Janet Browne's two volumes Voyaging (1995) and The Power of Place (2002) for Darwin and Adrian Desmond's From Devil's Disciple to Evolution's High Priest (1994) for Huxley. There are some good scholarly studies of Tyndall—particularly the book that turned me on to him to begin with, Ursula DeYoung's A Vision of Modern Science (2011)—there has never been a systematic biography of Tyndall.

The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer, and Public Intellectual
by Roland Jackson

Published: 2018
Half-read: June–October 2024

But in their own era, Tydnall was the equal of the other men. He was a prominent physicist, figuring out why the sky was blue; he also did a lot of work on heat and glaciers. He used to get in scraps with John Ruskin about whether glaciers moved. Ruskin trusted the results of his own eyes (he'd never seen a glacier move, and neither did anyone he talked to), while Tyndall made a model glacier out of ice cream. Tyndall gave a notorious speech called the Belfast Address, where he advocated for scientific materialism, and like Huxley he was one of proponents of the professionalization of science. His star has faded in a way the others' haven't, perhaps because he's not associated with a single big paradigm shift like evolution. And I guess because of this, there's hasn't been a biography of him. But he certainly deserves one, and as someone who I'm guessing has thought about Tyndall more than almost anyone else alive, I am squarely in the target audience for one.

So I was excited when last year I discovered that back in 2018, Cambridge University Press had finally published one. I finally picked it up this June, intending to read it along with a few other scholarly books I'd been meaning to around to before finalizing my book manuscript.

Four months later, the summer long over, I finally gave up on it. I normally don't count unfinished books for my statistics or review them on my blog, but I read 369 pages of it, which 1) is longer than many books I give myself credit for because I read all of them, and 2) seems like more than enough to make a fair impression of, given the book is 576 pages long including front- and backmatter.

A good biography doesn't just give you a chronological telling of a person's life, it gives you a sense of them as a person, as a personality; both Browne's Darwin and Desmon's Huxley are good examples of this, particularly the latter, a book I refer back to a lot in my own writing. Unfortunately, the only sense of Tyndall one gets here is of as a dull plod. Is this because he was a dull plod? There is perhaps necessarily something of the dull plod to all scientists, and Tyndall himself wrote as a young man in the 1850s that after three years of scientific study, "I lack the warm aspirations which I once felt, and I believe this is a necessary consequence of my pursuits: / Love is exiled from the heart / When knowledge enters in" (qtd. in Jackson 69). But I don't feel like the man who delivered the Belfast Address could have been a dull plod... right?

So, I suspect it's down to the writing of Roland Jackson that's the dull plod, not John Tyndall. We move from fact to fact to fact, all of which are extensively documented. Kudos to Jackson, and I mean it; he very clearly did the work to assemble everything Tyndall did. But one drowns in details here with little sense of the actual man who did all of these things. What were his passions, his conflicts, his drives? One doesn't really know... and this is the thing I really wanted out of the book, particularly a sense of how his radicalism in some senses—the Belfast Address, his promotion of scientific education—conflicted with his conservatism in others. Notoriously, Tyndall backed Governor Eyre's horrific actions in putting down the Morant Bay Rebellion. As Sarah Winter says, 

Tyndall advocated that clear racial distinctions should be applied to reach an appropriate understanding of which categories of British subjects were entitled to due process protections: “We do not hold an Englishman and a Jamaica negro to be convertible terms, nor do we think that the cause of human liberty will be promoted by any attempt to make them so.” Tyndall implies not only that the races are separate species, but also that Eyre’s violent suppression of the Morant Bay uprising was legitimate on that basis, as long as such impositions of martial law are restricted to Jamaica, and, by implication, other imperial territories with white minority populations. [...] In Huxley’s terms, Tyndall reveals his deepest political commitment to a social order based in human inequality, defined according to racial differences.

In Sarah's take, anyway, it seems to me there ought to be a lot packed in this incident that would give us insight into Tyndall. It strikes me, for example, that the scientific impulse to classify, to sort has led Tyndall to make some morally reprehensible choices... and indeed, Stephen Jay Gould has shown how the scientific project often reinforced white supremacy even at the cost of the careful observation that is supposedly the cornerstone of the scientific method! On top of this, Tyndall spent a lot of time in America, where it seems to be he no doubt must have made a lot of observations about people of color (which I'm guessing he didn't often encounter in Britain).

But even though there's a whole chapter called "Eyre Affair and Death of Faraday," all the insight Jackson gives us into this moment is that Jackson wasn't as liberal as Huxley (who supported the investigation into Governor Eyre, and also supported the North during the American Civil War, while Tyndall sympathized with the South). That's it? Other big moments like the Belfast Address seem similarly buried in a slew of facts about who Tyndall ate dinner with and what hikes he went on in the Alps. There's just too much detail here, and no sense of narrative.

As I said above, I'm basically the target audience for a Tyndall biography... but by September I had pretty much stalled out completely on this book, somewhere in the middle of chapter 13. It's got its nuggets of insights, and I think there are a few bits I will end up making use of in my book. But I also don't think it's worth my time trying to get through to the end. The magisterial biography of John Tyndall, alas, remains to be written.