31 December 2024

Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, Nos. I–IV (Chs. 1-13)

Every winter break, I read the most popular Charles Dickens novel that I haven't previously read. This year, that brings me to Dombey and Son, originally serialized in nineteen monthly parts from October 1846 to April 1848 under the title of Dealings with with the Firm Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation. Last year, I experimented with reading Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44) serially. Not across nineteen months(!), but rather alternating installments of the novel with parts of other books (or, in some cases, whole other books), and then writing up those installments as I went. I would say it was a successful experiment, in that instead of being forced to endure nothing but Martin Chuzzlewit for weeks, I got to alternate it with book that were actually good, so I decided to go for it again this year.

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1846-48
Acquired: December 2024
Installments read: December 2024

I should say, that going in, I literally knew nothing at all about this book, beyond what I gleaned from the introduction to my Penguin Classics edition. I feel like I've never heard anyone ever mention it, even in passing. A totally forgotten (or forgettable) Dickens novel? It doesn't bode well, to be honest, beginning a book that's nine hundred pages long and not even worth complaining about, but I tried to be open-minded.

No. I (Chs. 1-4)
Some Dickens novels begin ominously, a mode that Dickens excels in. Think of A Tale of Two Cities (1859) or Great Expectations (1860-61). But it seems to me that earlier in his career, perhaps because his big success was still the hijinks of The Pickwick Papers (1836-37), Dickens was much more likely to begin comically, even when his topic was tragic. He takes a similar mode here to that of David Copperfield (1849-50), beginning with the birth of a child, largely under sad circumstances, but mostly focusing on making jokes about it all. The first line is so funny I stopped immediately to read it aloud to my wife: "Dombey sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new" (11). And then the second line is also a joke: "Dombey was about eight-and-forty years of age. Son about eight-and-forty minutes. Dombey was rather bald, rather red, and though a handsome well-made man, too stern and pompous in appearance, to be prepossessing. Son was very bald, and very red, and though (of course) an undeniably fine infant, somewhat crushed and spotty in his general effect, as yet" (11).

What this all belies is that the opening of the book is quite sad! Dombey is the owner of the titular firm; he use to be the "Son" and now he is the "Dombey," but though he has been married ten years, he has only just got a "Son." He does have a daughter, aged six... who he doesn't care about at all, because a girl "was merely a piece of base coin that couldn’t be invested – a bad Boy – nothing more" (13). Dombey's lack of affection extends to his wife, who dies after giving birth to Son, and Dombey is more concerned about the logistical difficulties this will lead to in raising his Son. And though this bit is of course sad, Dickens also has a lot of jokes here, mostly from the dead Mrs. Dombey's sister-in-law, who keeps insisting she just needs to make an effort and she'll be fine: "It’s necessary for you to make an effort, and perhaps a very great and painful effort which you are not disposed to make; but this is a world of effort you know, Fanny, and we must never yield, when so much depends upon us. Come! Try! I must really scold you if you don’t!" (20-1)

I feel like Dickens pulls you in with the jokes in order to subsequently get you with the tragedy, but also the tragedy is perhaps a bit too muted, more abstractly understood than felt, but like I said, maybe the Dickens audience of 1846 didn't want tragedy, only comedy, so he had to understate it a bit. (This is after The Old Curiosity Shop and the death of Little Nell, though, so maybe I am overstating this point.)

After this, there's some comic hijinks as Dombey must engage a wet-nurse, excellent stuff, I really enjoyed it. So many great lines about the wet-nurse and her apple-faced family. But then Dickens is always very good at this sort of thing, and from here we move away from comedy a bit, as the wet-nurse (real name: Mrs Toodle, but called Mrs Richards when at work because it's more "ordinary" and "convenient") meets the daughter of Dombey for the first time, and realizes how isolated and alone and sad the poor girl is. After all this, I was fairly into the book; a much better opening installment than Martin Chuzzlewit, to be sure.

The fourth chapter is some blather about a shopkeeper and his nephew Walter, though, so you can't win them all, though again it had a couple good jokes. But then I got to take a break and go read something else. One installment down... eighteen to go!

No. II (Chs. 5-7)
It's interesting that two of the three chapter titles here center Dombey's son Paul—"Paul's Progress and Christening" and "Paul's Second Deprivation"—because it seems to me that the clear emotional focus of the chapters is Dombey's neglected daughter, Florence. Yes, Paul's christening is the event on which these three chapters hinge, in that it's there that the characters make some key decisions that end up having major repercussions. (Mrs Richards decides to go visit her son at his new school, which results in her and a couple others losing their jobs working for the Dombeys.) But the person who goes through trauma here is Florence; on her way back from the visit, she gets separated from her caretakers, and she is taken advantage of by "Good Mrs Brown," who steals her clothes and cuts her hair off and claims she will murder Florence if Florence rats her out! Poor Florence goes through some awful stuff here.

Still, we feel a bit distanced from it all. The things we're told about are quite awful to read, but I don't feel like we're totally in Florence's interiority the way Dickens sometimes brings us, like he did a few years after this with Little Dorrit in Little Dorrit (1855-57).

I didn't expect the whole thing with Mrs Richards and the Dombeys to fall apart like that so quickly, though, so I am curious to see where this all goes in the next installment.

No. III (Chs. 8-10)
'Girls,' said Mr Dombey, 'have nothing to do with Dombey and Son.' (153)

Here we get one chapter about Paul and two about a character I haven't discussed much so far, Walter. Back in no. II, Walter helped rescue Florence after her ordeal at the hands of Good Mrs Brown; here, he comes calling to Mr Dombey to seek help paying off the debts of his uncle, a ship's instrument-maker who has no customers.

I am a bit worried that Walter may be the character about which my friend Christiana said, "I can think of one character who I expect you to like," because I find that so far his sections substantially slow the narrative down with a lot of unnecessary detail. I'm loathe to say Dickens could have done something in fewer words... but I really think "nobody is buying anything at my shop" doesn't need as many words as he gives it.

On the other hand, I found chapter 8 very interesting; we've jumped ahead a bit here, and now Paul Dombey is almost five, and we actually get some insight into his psychology. Poor kid! But I like best of all the simultaneously sympathetic and scathing way that Dickens describes Mr Dombey himself: "But he loved his son with all the love he had. If there were a warm place in his frosty heart, his son occupied it; if its very hard surface could receive the impression of any image, the image of that son was there; though not so much as an infant, or as a boy, but as a grown man – the 'Son' of the Firm. Therefore he was impatient to advance into the future, and to hurry over the intervening passages of his history" (109).

No. IV (Chs. 11-13)
She was dry and sandy with working in the graves of deceased languages. None of your live languages for Miss Blimber. They must be dead – stone deadand then Miss Blimber dug them up like a Ghoule. (163) 

We're settling into a pattern here, I think: two chapters about Paul Dombey, and then one going elsewhere. The Paul ones are about how at first he and Florence go to the seaside and spend time with a terrible governess (she's not called a governess, I don't think, but she's essentially so), and then Dombey decides Son needs an education, so he gets packed off to a nearby terrible school. What Victorian does horrible systems better than Dickens? Great stuff about the terrible, terrible education Paul is beginning to get; lots of good jokes on this and other topics. I am not loving this book yet (still a bit long-winded, we're still a bit distant from Paul and Florence, I think) but certainly I am enjoying it more than Martin Chuzzlewit or The Old Curiosity Shop; I don't know this one isn't better know. I guess Dickens has got 750 pages in which he can screw it up.

The other chapter is about the doings at the firm Dombey and Son, a place we previously haven't gone despite it being the title of the novel! Most of the characters here are thus new, but there's a bit more about Walter, who is being sent to the West Indies. I remain open-minded, I suppose, but I am not sure where this strand of the novel is going. The best part, though, is this zinger between two new characters who are estranged brothers:

'Haven’t you injured me enough already?'
     'I have never injured you, James, wilfully.'
     'You are my brother... That’s injury enough.' (200)

Dickens has a good line in insult comedy. 

This is the first in a series of posts about Dombey and Son. The next covers installment no. v and beyond.

30 December 2024

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Titan: Fortune of War

late 2386
A cut scene from David Mack's Fortune of War, exclusive to Science's Less Accurate Grandmother:

Star Trek: Titan: Fortune of War
by David Mack

Published: 2017
Acquired: August 2024
Read: November 2024

I jest, of course, and I cheat by including some stories that aren't Titan ones even if they are Riker ones, but even so, this is the third Titan story in a row to sequelize a TNG episode (in this case, "The Survivors" from season 3). The original selling point of Titan was that it took a diverse group of characters into interesting new sfnal situations; Fortune of War, alas, does not really accomplish this. We have, on the one hand, a character focus mostly on Riker, Vale, and Titan's new XO, Sarai, and an action-adventure plot. Many people seem to think David Mack does these kinds of plots well, but Mack in action mode has never really appealed to me, and in any case, this isn't the kind of thing I come to Titan for.

Even within those confines, though, I didn't find much to enjoy here. I've repeatedly stated that while I think the promotion of Riker to admiral could be interesting, the novels that have followed The Fall haven't really capitalized on it. Fortune of War continues this trend; Titan is part of a fleet action here, which you think would be great for Admiral Riker... but weirdly, the character who does the most with this is Vale. I did appreciate the focus on Sarai, a character I enjoyed in Sight Unseen, but Mack's version reads a bit flatter than Swallow. The rest of the Titan crew don't get much focus that's very memorable or interesting. On top of that, a lot of time is spent on the various factions competing with Titan to get the Husnock artifacts, but I found these characters were almost universally one-dimensional and unpleasant.

Some of these TNG sequels have at least fleshed out the concepts in interesting ways (mostly Sight Unseen, I guess), but there's nothing interesting to be learned about the Husnock here. I find depictions of empire in sf fascinating, but the interminable glimpse we get of them makes them into snarling one-dimensional monsters.

This was a quick read, Mack always is, but other than that, I found this had little to recommend it. Competently done, but not what I want from a Titan book... which is a bit disappointing, as it's the final one. This series peaked back with Sword of Damocles, in my opinion; the post-Destiny run was too inconsistent and largely failed to tap into the series's original potential, installments by James Swallow aside.

Continuity Notes:

  • Vale claims that "[t]here is no precedent in interstellar law for your claim of annex to a territory not contiguous with your own." But surely this must happen all the time in the three-dimensional, mostly empty environment of space, and indeed, there are a lot of discontiguous nodes of the Federation itself according to Star Charts.
Other Notes:
  • I complain a lot about how all the captains in the Destiny-era fiction are parents; I think what makes it particularly grating is very few of the writers are. You can tell, because no one whose five-year-old had actually done ballet would ever write a sentence like "she had tears of joy in her eyes while she watched their daughter float like a sylph in time with a melody stolen from a dream." My (currently six-year-old) kid is very enthusiastic about ballet, but them and their classmates are lucky if they remember what they are supposed to be doing when they perform in a recital.
  • Having Pakleds and Nausicaans, two different alien species who apparently never discovered the article, in the same book ends up being a bit grating.
  • Admiral Batanides threatens Sarai with internment in a Starfleet Intelligence "black site." I just really hate this idea, which is part of a generally unpleasant way that Starfleet is depicted in Mack's fiction. Section 31 having "black sites" they deport unwanted people to, sure, I guess. But regular Starfleet? Ugh, no, I don't buy this at all, and I don't want to read Star Trek books where it can happen.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Section 31: Control by David Mack

27 December 2024

What Is Christmas? ("Any good thing to make us all merry")

On its face, the question posed in my title is absurd. We all know what Christmas is, the celebration of the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

But then... why do I celebrate Christmas, as someone who largely left behind my Christian faith around two decades ago now. Or rather, what is Christmas... to me? Because despite my lack of religious faith, I really do like Christmas. I like Christmas traditions, Christmas music, Christmas cookies, Christmas trees. Why do I like all of this? Do I just like cookies and presents? Or is there more to it than that?

I've said this before in various forms, but what gives Christmas resonance for me is the turn of the seasons—even living, as I do, in Florida where the seasons never turn. Christmas is the point when, as Steven Moffat put it in the Doctor Who story "A Christmas Carol," we are "halfway out of the dark." In the winter, the nights grow longer and the cold grows deeper, but we come together with family and loved ones to celebrate the fact that we are holding out against the cold, that we are making it into the promise of the new year. As Merle Haggard put it, "if we make it through December," that's something worth celebrating.

It's for this reason, I think, that the best Christmas stories and music always have those tinges of sadness to them. Last year, I wrote up five of my favorite Christmas albums, and more than one of them has a melancholy tone to them. I particularly like the work of Sting on his album If on a Winter's Night... and all three Christmas albums released by Over the Rhine. My favorite Christmas movie is It's a Wonderful Life, which is all about loss even if it is also about triumph.

It's a metaphor, of course. Christmas is the time that we celebrate our triumphs in the face of our losses, and the families and communities that let us experience them. I had a really tough year in some ways, but by December, I felt like I was getting through it, with the help of my wife and my kids and my friends who were there for me.

One of the songs on Sting's albums is called "Soul Cake"; it's about the English tradition of "soulling," where children and the poor go door-to-door offering to say prayers for the souls of the dead, in exchange for cookies called "soul cakes." I guess this is more of a Samhain tradition than a Christmas one, but it's still got that winter feeling, of thinking about our losses and pushing back against them together.

I've loved this song since I picked up the album back in 2021, but this year I finally did something I've been meaning to do for a while, and make the soul cakes. (This is the recipe I ended up using.) The Saturday morning after finals week, we  decorated the tree we'd picked up the previous weekend. Then, I spent late morning baking while my kids played and my wife got work done and the Christmas music played on my soon-to-be-dead iPod. I don't usually bake, to be honest, but I found it very satisfying. That evening, my older kid and I went to my department's board game night, and we shared the soul cakes I had made. I had a good day—I was the happiest I'd been in a while.

I don't think I am in the clear yet... but I do feel like I am "halfway out of the dark." That's what Christmas is.

23 December 2024

The Fourth Doctor Novelisations: The Loch Ness Monster (1976)

As mentioned around here previously, I've been on a mission to read Doctor Who books I've owned along time but never gotten around to. Next up on that list is a Target novelisation, Doctor Who and the Ark in Space by Ian Marter. But when such a book on my list is a Target novel, I read through all the Target novels featuring that particular incarnation that fall into either of two categories: 1) I already own it, or 2) it was (re)published in the current century, and I read them in publication order. For the fourth Doctor, then, that sequence will be The Loch Ness Monster (1976), The Genesis of the Daleks (1976), The Pyramids of Mars (1976), The Ark in Space (1977), The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977), The Horror of Fang Rock (1978), [The Five Doctors (1983),] The Stones of Blood (2011), The Androids of Tara (2012), and Warriors' Gate and Beyond (2019). Quite a few! As I did with the first Doctor novelisations (see the sequence of posts starting here), I want to chart how the approach to novelising the show changed over time.

Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster by Terrance Dicks

Originally published: 1976
Acquired: August 2024
Read: November 2024

I begin with the novelisation of Terror of the Zygons, which went out under the title Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster. This wasn't the first fourth Doctor novel; that would be Doctor Who and the Giant Robot (1975), but that one hasn't got a modern reprinting. It is, however, the second, and I think that comes through in that the personality, the force of Tom Baker does not come through on the page. In fact, I usually found it easier to imagine Jon Pertwee delivering the lines!

I assume that on screen, Tom put his own spin on it all, but Terror of the Zygons is a story I have only seen once, probably a little less than twenty years ago, so I was very much dependent on the novel itself to conjure imagery and sensation. I don't think Dicks does a bad job of this, especially at the beginning; I like the sequences of Broton observing our protagonists from a distance as they scramble across the moors. But I also don't think he does a great job of it, either. The Zygons are one of Doctor Who's great visual creations, and their spaceship interior an interesting one (I think, but if not, it's the kind of thing that in prose could be), but there's not a lot of atmosphere here in these parts of the story.

What's interesting to me is that while many of those early first Doctor novelisations were clearly novels, this is clearly a novelisation; there's a lot of cross-cutting between different locations in the same scene (usually Dicks puts one location's prose in parentheses), which is much more of a tv move, and the kind of thing you might expect a prose version to move away from. But Dicks very much embraces the fact that this originally went out on screen. I think this probably makes it less interesting to the adult modern reader, but I imagine it probably works well with kids; this is one I can imagine to handing over to my six-year-old reader of chapter books who is (we might say) "Doctor Who curious," which isn't so true of, for example, The Daleks (1964) or The Crusaders (1966)! I might be the target audience of the 2012 BBC Books reprint I own, but I wasn't the target audience of the original.

My reprint, by the way, has an introduction by Michael Moorcock; it's fun enough, but I see little in it that indicates he has much appreciation for or has actually even read the book in question! He clearly likes the tv serial, though.

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks and Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars

20 December 2024

4-Dimensional Vistas: The DWM Comic Strip by the Numbers (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 56)

The Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, as I have chronicled extensively on this blog, has a very long history. Thus, we can compile all kinds of interesting numerical facts about it! Note that for all of these, I'm just focused on the "main" strip, not the back-ups.

Longest Runs by a Writer

Here, I'm looking at the longest runs as the writer of sequential strips. These runs have to be unbroken, either by a fill-in writer, or by the strip itself taking an issue (or more) off.

  • 1. Scott Gray on #512-52 (41 issues)
  • 2. Scott Gray on #442-80 (39 issues)
  • 3. Steve Parkhouse on #53-84 (32 issues)
  • 4. Scott Gray on #308-29 (22 issues)
  • 5. Scott Gray on #333-53 / Dan McDaid on #400-20 / Jonathan Morris on #421-41 (21 issues)
  • 8. Scott Gray on #284-303 (20 issues)
  • 9. Steve Moore on #35-82 (18 issues)
  • 10. Pat Mills & John Wagner on #1-16 and on #19-34 (16 issues)

Unsurprisingly to anyone who has been reading all this time, our man Scott Gray has five of the ten longest runs as the comics main writer! He racked up long runs during the McGann, Smith, Capaldi, and Whittaker eras. And if you read him, you'll know why; I don't think there's anyone else who has ever "got" what makes Doctor Who work as a comic better than him.

Longest Runs by an Artist

  • 1. John Ridgway on #88-133 (46 issues)
  • 2. Dave Gibbons on #19-57 (39 issues)
  • 3. Mike Collins on #355-76 / David A Roach on #359-80 / David A Roach on #467-88 (22 issues)
  • 6. Dave Gibbons on #1-16 (16 issues)
  • 7. David A Roach on #451-64 (14 issues) / Lee Sullivan on #584-97 (14 issues)
  • 9. Martin Geraghty on #244-55 (12 issues)
  • 10. Mick Austin on #73-83 and John Ross on #524-34 (11 issues)

Somewhat surprisingly, to be honest, John Ridgway's run as an artist is longer than any of the runs by a writer! He provided the art for every Colin Baker strip and then into the Sylvester McCoy era (and also returned a few times after that). Mike Collins and David A Roach have overlapping runs because Collins was penciller when Roach was inker.

Both of these rankings just cover the strips in the collected editions; I think both Barnes and Sullivan continue on the strip after #597, so they should climb a bit.

Most Strips by a Writer

But who has actually done the most overall, regardless of number of sequential strips?  

  1. Scott Gray (184 issues)
  2. Steve Parkhouse (46 issues)
  3. Alan Barnes (27 issues)
  4. Pat Mills & John Wagner (32 issues)
  5. Jonathan Morris (28 issues)
  6. Dan McDaid (26 issues)
  7. Dan Abnett (24 issues)
  8. Jacqueline Rayner (20 issues)
  9. Steve Moore (18 issues)
  10. Gareth Roberts (17 issues)

Impressively, Scott Gray has written four times as many strips as his nearest competitor! It's hard to imagine anyone overtaking his record in the near or even distant future. 

Most Strips by an Artist

  1. David A Roach (162 issues)
  2. Martin Geraghty (143 issues)
  3. Mike Collins (75 issues)
  4. Dave Gibbons (66 issues)
  5. John Ridgway (61 issues)
  6. Robin Smith (55 issues)
  7. Lee Sullivan (44 issues)
  8. John Ross (31 issues)
  9. Adrian Salmon (18 issues)
  10. Colin Andrew (14 issues)

Regular inker David A Roach dominates here; he's inked many Martin Geraghty strips and many Mike Collins ones, allowing him to surpass both pencillers. John Ridgway still does well here, landing in the top five. Robin Smith, a bit of a forgotten inker to be honest, is in sixth.

Longest Gaps between Contributions

I think it was when John Tomlinson popped up as the writer of a David Tennant strip, having previously written one back during the Sylvester McCoy era, that I first got interested in this statistic. I am going to count people who came back for #500 but are otherwise not regular contributors outside of my ranking.

  • X. Dave Gibbons (431 issues between Stars Fell on Stockbridge and The Stockbridge Showdown)
  • X. John Ridgway (289 issues between Uninvited Guest and The Stockbridge Showdown)
  • 1. Lee Sullivan (267 issues between Children of the Revolution and Liberation of the Daleks)
  • 2. John Tomlinson (210 issues between Nemesis of the Daleks and The Betrothal of Sontar)
  • 3. Alan Barnes (204 issues between The Warkeeper's Crown and Liberation of the Daleks)
  • 4. Sean Longcroft (156 issues between A Life of Matter & Death and Mortal Beloved)
  • 5. Mike Collins (152 issues between The Good Soldier and The Nightmare Game)
  • 6. Adolfo Bullya (126 issues between Junk-Yard Demon and The Grief)
  • 7. John Ross (104 issues between Bus Stop! and Spirits of the Jungle)
  • 8. Alan Barnes (95 issues between TV Action! and The Warkeeper's Crown)
  • 9. Scott Gray (89 issues between The Flood and The Chains of Olympus)
  • 10. Lee Sullivan (78 issues between ...Up Above the Gods... and The Last Word

Tomlinson held onto that record for a long time, but the second David Tennant era finally saw him dethroned by the return of Lee Sullivan after a twenty-year absence. It's pretty amazing that the strip has been running so long some of the people who have contributed the most can also be on the list for longest gaps between contributions!

Longest Runs as Main Companion

This one I'm counting a bit differently. Instead of looking at individual strip appearances, I'm looking at how long each companion was the "main" one for the strip. So, for example, Izzy gets a point for Unnatural Born Killers in #277 despite not appearing in it because she was the main companion during that era (appearing in the strips immediately before and after it). Along those lines, I did not count one-off reappearances (e.g., Ace in Ground Zero, Rose in Monstrous Beauty) or reappearances where a former companion serves a different narrative role (e.g., Fey in The Clockwise War).

  1. Izzy in #244-328 (85 issues)
  2. Frobisher in #88-133 (46 issues)
  3. Yaz in #531-52, 559-62, 570-83 (40 issues)
  4. Clara in #462-99 (38 issues)
  5. Ace in #164-92, 203-10 (37 issues)
  6. Amy in #421-55 (35 issues)
  7. Sharon in #19-48 (30 issues)
  8. Peri in #104-29; Fey in #257-71, 318-28; and Ryan & Graham in #531-52, 559-62 (26 issues)

It was honestly surprising for me to realize how long of a run Yaz had, the longest of any tv companion.

This post is the fifty-sixth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers a reading order for the collected editions. Previous installments are listed below:

18 December 2024

Black Panther: Doomwar by Jonathan Maberry, Scot Eaton, Robert Campanella, Andy Lanning, et al.

Doomwar is a six-part miniseries (with a double-length first issue) published in 2010; even though it was not branded as belonging to a particular Marvel series, it is clearly a Black Panther story. Despite having guest characters from across the Marvel universe (e.g., the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, War Machine, even Deadpool), the story picks right up from the end of Black Panther volume 5 by the same writer, and the protagonists are definitely T'Challa and Shuri as they struggle to defend Wakanda from an invasion by Doctor Doom.

from Doomwar #5
As a result, I didn't expect to enjoy it very much, having not really enjoyed Jonathan Maberry's "Prelude to Doomwar"... but by the time I was partway through issue #2, I realized I was pretty into this! I had been afraid this would be a big generic Marvel event, but as I said, it's very much a Black Panther story about the characters of T'Challa and Shuri, and about the politics of Wakanda. It would fit right into, for example, Christopher Priest's run without a lot of tweaking. Though I still feel like Shuri isn't a very strong character, mostly just being an angry young woman, I felt Maberry had a good handle on T'Challa here, showing how dedicated he was to his country even in trying circumstances. And while I felt like the populist uprising in vol. 5 was kind of contrived, Maberry does a good job with its consequences here. 

On top of all this, I kind of groaned when Deadpool showed up (especially when they put him on the cover of issue #4, but he didn't appear until the very end, presumably so they could also put him on the cover of #5), but Maberry makes good use of him, and he doesn't derail the book like I was afraid he might.

from Doomwar #4
The story was aided by two other things. One is definitely the artwork; Scot Eaton (mostly inked here by Andy Lanning & Robert Campanella) is the best penciler assigned to Black Panther since Jefte Palo's Secret Invasion story in volume 4, with clear storytelling and good character work. (I think he was doing Ioan Gruffud for Mister Fantastic and Denzel Washington for T'Challa. Of course I approve of the former.) And John-Francois Beaulieu, who I really liked on the Marvel Oz comics, does a great job as the colorist. Bad coloring can muddy the storytelling, but I felt that even with dark colors, everything popped and was visually clear—even though he obviously uses a very different palette here than he did in Oz!

The other is Doom himself. I haven't read many Fantastic Four comics, so I don't have much of a handle on the character, but I really liked Maberry's take on him here, especially when we find out how Doom was able to overcome T'Challa's locks on the Wakandan vibranium vault. It plays out exactly how I expected... but was nevertheless perfectly done. A great depiction of a great villain.

from Doomwar #4
I found the ending both interesting and frustrating. The characters can kill Doom, but don't, so that they're "better" than him. While I believe that, say, Reed Richards would have this philosophy, it doesn't make any sense for T'Challa and Shuri, and surely it only happens this way because Doomwar is part of a wider Marvel universe, and can't be the story that kills off a key character. On top of this, T'Challa makes a very interesting choice: he destroys all Wakandan vibranium rather than let Doom make off with some of it, preserving Wakandan values but perhaps at the cost of Wakandan security. But this happens at the very end of the story, so we get no implications of his choice. This isn't so much an issue for Doomwar itself (though I think the way that the country's rebuilding gets a single panel is) but one that I am afraid future Black Panther stories will not really engage with. I guess we'll see!

Doomwar originally appeared in six issues (Apr.-Sept. 2010). The story was written by Jonathan Maberry; penciled by Scot Eaton; inked by Andy Lanning (#1-5), Robert Campanella (#1-6), Jaime Mendoza (#6), and David Meikis (#6); colored by John-Francois Beaulieu; lettered by Cory Petit (#1-5) and Joe Caramagna (#6); and edited by Axel Alonso. (Note that issue #2 is called "Part 1" and #6 "Part 5" on their title pages.)

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

16 December 2024

Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 1 by Otto Binder, Al Plastino, Jerry Siegel, John Forte, et al.

Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 1

Collection published: 1992
Contents originally published: 1958-62
Acquired: May 2024
Read: November 2024

Writers: Otto Binder, Jerry Siegel, Robert Bernstein
Pencillers: Curt Swan, Al Plastino, George Papp, Jim Mooney, John Forte
Inkers: George Klein, Al Plastino, George Papp, Jim Mooney, Sheldon Moldoff, John Forte

Having reached the maximum forward extent of the original Legion of Super-Heroes with the Five Years Later Omnibus, Volume 2, I now jump back to the beginning, to fill in with the Legion Archives I haven't yet picked up. The very first of these also happens to be the first very one full stop, which collects the Legion's legendary original appearance, a smattering of guest appearances across various titles, and then the beginning of its ongoing run in Adventure Comics. I had read a few of these stories before (their original appearance, the death of Lightning Lad) but not most of them, and as both a literary scholar and a continuity nut, what interested me here—far more than the actual contents of the stories to be honest—was the way in which the Legion concept evolved and mutated as it was first established. There was absolutely no intention, originally, of making it into an ongoing thing... and how that would come about is not very straightforward!

It all begins with Adventure Comics #247 (Apr. 1958), where Cosmic Boy, Saturn Girl, and Lightning Boy (as he was then) come back in time to invite Superboy to join the Legion of Super-Heroes. Because this in the 1950s, and these Superboy stories for some reasons love for the characters to be assholes, they set up an initiation test for him that they purposefully rig to fail. At the end, they say, "it proved you're a super-good sport, taking it all with a smile!" I once read this aloud to my six-year-old, and they didn't understand why Superboy just wouldn't say why he couldn't complete the initiation tests (he had a legitimate reason every time), or why the Legion would do this to them. 

Okay, but then who's the guy in red behind Brainiac? And the guy who we only see the back of his head?
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #247 (script by Otto Binder, art by Al Plastino)
Other members of the Legion appear in crowd shots, but only a couple are ever in focus, on the final panel of page 11. One seems to be Brainiac 5, but apparently he had white skin in the original printing of this story; the Grand Comics Database tells me this character was recolored to look like Colossal Boy when the story was reprinted in Superman Annual #6 (Winter 1962/63). It's not clear to me when he was first recolored to look like Brainiac 5; the GCD first mentions the recoloring in its entry on this volume, but I can see that in the interim, it was also reprinted in DC Special Blue Ribbon Digest #1 (Mar./Apr. 1980) and Adventure Comics #491 (Sept. 1982).

Anyway, it took over eighteen months for the Legion to reappear, in Adventure #267 (Dec. 1959). While their first story was written by Otto Binder, this one is by Jerry Siegel, and you can see that Sigel closely studied the first Legion story, in that once again, the three Legion founders turn up and act like assholes: they deliberately upstage Superboy so that he feels isolated and lonely and flies away from the Earth, enabling them to trick him into going to a planet with a kryptonite prison, where they lock him up so that he cannot commit crimes they saw him perform five years hence on the "futurescope." (Surely it should be the pastscope, because these events would occur 995 years earlier for the Legion!) Like a lot of comics stories from this era, once has the feeling Jerry Siegel made it up as he went along. Superboy escapes the prison because a trophy on the planet explodes, "launching an atomic chain reaction" the causes the collapse of the kryptonite prison; the chain reaction also releases the element "sigellian," which is poisonous to the Legionnaires, so Superboy shouts loud enough to change its molecular structure, rendering it harmless. At that exact moment, Saturn Girl happens to hear a radio transmission from Earth where the U.S. president releases Superboy from his oath of silence, allowing Superboy to finally explain that he didn't commit those crimes five years in the future but just then (the futurescope was miscalibrated), and they weren't really crimes, but things he was asked to do by the U.S. government! 

Superboy probably has an anxious attachment style.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #267 (script by Jerry Siegel, art by George Papp)

Like Jesus Christ, could this chain of events be any more contrived and nonsensical? There are repeated references to the planet being built by a group of superheroes along with the Legion, who we see in some crowd shots; I kind of think Siegel missed that the Legion was from the future because there's only one quick reference to a time-bubble, which I feel like could have been added by an editor. Anyway, it seems like the first Legion story was a success, but the perception was that what people really liked about it was the Legion being jerks to Superboy for contrived reasons, so they just told that same story again. I did really like the art by George Papp, though, which is more expressive than normal for the era.

The Legion wouldn't appear in another Superboy story for over another year, but in the interim they did pop up in a Supergirl story, in Action Comics #267 (Aug. 1960). Once again, it emulates the original story, this time by having the three original Legionnaires pop up to tease Supergirl that they know her secret identity, before bringing her to the future to undergo an initiation test, which she ends up failing. (Here because red kryptonite causes her to turn into an adult, rendering her too old for Legion membership; rather than, say, help her, the Legion just dumps her into the past, where luckily she soon de-ages.)

Convenient, I guess... and oddly specific.
from Action Comics vol. 1 #267 (script by Jerry Siegel, art by Jim Mooney)

The story is the first to give us new, named Legionnaires: Colossal Boy, Invisible Kid, and Chameleon Boy. What's also noteworthy here is a fact that later stories would eventually ignore: the Lightning Lad, Saturn Girl, and Cosmic Boy who meet Supergirl here are in fact the children of the ones Superboy met; I guess the idea was that the Legion was always travelling exactly one thousand years into the past, and while Superboy is Superman when he was a boy, Supergirl was the adult Superman's contemporary, and thus from a generation later. Eventually, though, this would be streamlined and retconned away, so that these were the same three Legionnaires Superboy originally met, and indeed, my understanding is that at some point it was established that from the Legion's perspective, Action #267 actually preceded Adventure #247, so that the Legion actually recruited Supergirl first. I am not sure when or why this was done.

A tumble!? Wow, Lana is pretty horny for a 1940s girl.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #282 (script by Otto Binder, art by George Papp)
After this, we get a string of minor appearances, lacking the full Legion. In Superboy #86 (Jan. 1961), Lightning Lad cameos in a story about Superboy battling Lex Luthor, seemingly just there to point out that he is yet another "L.L." in Clark Kent's life. Then in Adventure #282 (Mar. 1961), we get the first story that actually substantively uses a new member of the Legion, when Star Boy chases super-criminals back in time, and Lana Lang decides to date him in a failed attempt to make Superboy jealous. We spend a lot of time here on Star Boy's home planet of Xanthu in the future, which I don't remember seeing much about in later stories. It has two noteworthy aspects: it's first story to really expand on the Legion's future world, and it also deviates from the Adventure #247 formula, so clearly writer Otto Binder was putting some thought into what people liked about the Legion stories. But also it has Chamelon Boy as a Legion member in Superboy's time, so Binder seemingly missed that Chamelon Boy was from a generation later according to Action #267. Or, I guess, this Chameleon Boy is that Chamelon Boy's parent! Either way, the confusing nature of having two Legions both a millennium hence but a generation apart is pretty obvious, and is already causing problems.

A very fast courtship.
from Action Comics vol. 1 #276 (script by Jerry Siegel, art by Jim Mooney)

Supergirl goes into the future again in Action #276 (May 1961); this is the story that sees her gain Legion membership, alongside Brainiac 5, in his first appearance. Is Brainiac 5's appearance here the reason for retconning Supergirl to predate Superboy in the Legion, so as to line up with Brainiac 5's appearance in the reprints of Adventure #247? Anyway, this story is pretty dumb but I guess you have to hand it to Jerry Siegel for coming up with a clever spin on a villain with Brainiac 5.

I don't think this is really consistent with later stories of the "Adult Legion," but I'm willing to be told I'm wrong.
from Superman vol. 1 #147 (script by Jerry Siegel, art by Curt Swan & Sheldon Moldoff)

I'm not totally going story by story here, but Legion lore develops in a really significant way with Superman #147 (Aug. 1961), the first story where the adult Superman meets the Legion. In this story, Lex Luthor reaches out into the future to discover that just as there's a Legion of Super-Heroes, there's also a Legion of Super-Villains. I hadn't realized that the LSV (do people call them that?) first appeared in a Superman story—but that's the reason they're adults, I guess, because they come from one thousand years in Superman's future, and thus the era where the Legionnaires are grown up. The Legionnaires appear here, too, and since they're relatively contemporary to Superman, they are also grown up.

Nothing I love more than a plot that hinges on a previously unmentioned critical fact.
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #290 (script by Robert Bernstein[?], art by George Papp)

The collapsing of the two Legion eras into one somewhat happens in Adventure #290 (Nov. 1961), which establishes how Sun Boy joined the Legion—we saw him get rejected at the tryouts in Action #276, a Supergirl/Superman-era Legion story, but now he's in the Superboy-era Legion. Was this on purpose? Was the unknown writer just confused? (I should also note that many of these early Legion stories indicate only one person can join the Legion per year, but later timelines would indicate all of these happened over the first year of the Legion. Which makes sense as a retcon; there are so many members now that the founding members couldn't be teenagers if there really was one new member per year!)

(One should also note that for many of the stories here, the Legion is said to be from the twenty-first century, not the thirtieth. Not sure why this happened, except maybe carelessness. In one of the stories to mention the twenty-first century, we're also told evolutionary processes have happened since Supergirl's time. I mean, I know one thousand years isn't enough for that, but certainly one hundred aren't!)

Saturn Girl knows what she wants, I guess, and is not afraid to cross the line. But the best thing in this sequence of panels is probably Supergirl's assumption that Phantom Girl is probably pathetically single as an adult.
from Action Comics vol. 1 #289 (script by Jerry Siegel, art by Jim Mooney)

I think the last story to clearly have the two different Legion time eras is Action #289 (June 1962). This is a deeply weird story where Supergirl decides Superman needs a woman worthy of him; among the things she tries is taking him to the time of the adult Legion, to see if Saturn Woman could be it. (She's not, because she's married to Lightning Man... that says, she allows Superman to give her two really deep kisses anyway!) This story has Superman and Supergirl devise the flying belts that replace the rocket packs the Legion used in earlier stories... but the flying belts continue to appear in Superboy-era Legion stories after this.

We also get the first Legion of Super-Pets story in Adventure #293 (Feb. 1962); I hadn't realized that in Comet the Super-Horse's original appearance, he was picked up from Supergirl's relative future, as he hadn't actually been introduced in the Supergirl stories yet! 

Look, who among us hasn't accidentally downed an entire bottle of a bizarre chemical formula instead of soda pop?
from Adventure Comics vol. 1 #301 (script by Jerry Siegel, art by John Forte)

After appearing once in 1958, once in 1959, once in 1960, five times in 1961, and four times in early 1962, the Legion got an ongoing feature in Adventure #300 (Sept. 1962), the first six installments of which appear here. Adventure #301 (Oct. 1962) is the first Legion story with no Supergirl or Superboy or Superman, the first to purely take place in the future era, indicating that DC saw what the appeal of these characters really was. Adventure #302 (Nov. 1962) is the first where there's no specific reason for Superboy coming to the future, he just zips in to hang out with the Legion.

That the Legion was on ongoing concern is very clearly demonstrated by the second-last story collected here, Adventure #304 (Jan. 1963), where Saturn Girl is elected Legion leader and Lightning Lad dies. Here we see that adventures can have real, meaningful consequences. Also, this is the establishment of Saturn Girl's practical, ruthless side—she is one of my favorite Legionnaires. Manipulating her way to become Legion leader so she can save everyone else's life! Amazing. Along the same lines, we do get the saga of Mon-El, who first appears in a non-Legion story included here, Superboy #89 (June 1961), where he is trapped in the Phantom Zone, and then reappears in Adventure #300, where he temporarily gets out, and then he permanently gets out in #305. Disconnected from the need of superhero comics to be in an eternal present, the Legion can develop and change over time.

These stories, as my comments probably indicate, are generally not very sophisticated, in either art or story, though I did generally appreciate the work of George Papp. But there are a multitude of character and concepts here that would provide fertile ground for what has been sixty years of stories thus far. I am glad to finally dive back into these earliest tales, and I look forward to seeing the Legion continue to develop when I get to volume 2.

I read a Legion of Super-Heroes collection every six months. Next up in sequence: Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 2

13 December 2024

Reading The Hidden Prince of Oz Aloud to My Kid

My six-year-old and I are rapidly running out of "quasi-canonical" Oz books. Unlike previous books published by the International Wizard of Oz Club, The Hidden Prince of Oz has no connection to any Royal Historian; rather, the Oz Club ran a competition to find a book manuscript to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

The Hidden Prince of Oz by Gina Wickwar
illustrated by Anna-Maria Cool

Published: 2000
Acquired: May 2024
Read aloud: October
–December 2024

This is probably the reason for a (pretty minor) bit of backstory about the Wicked Witch of the East and the Tin Woodman; the novel takes place one hundred and one years exactly after she passed away. Aside from that, though, Hidden Prince reads much more like a Ruth Plumly Thompson pastiche than a Baum one: we have a small kingdom with comedy advisors, an orphan propelled to Oz in somewhat contrived circumstances, a nonhuman character who turns out to be another character under an enchantment, and a climax that features a wedding (various examples of these tropes: Kabumpo, Grampa, Giant Horse, Yellow Knight). As a Thompson fan, I don't mind this... but I found this book to be a drag. 

The fundamentals are good. In one subplot, the illegal magician Zeebo disappears, and his two faithful pets, the parrot Beak and the teacup poodle Penny (complete with magical teacup, of course) must set out to rescue him; in the other, the American orphan Emma-Lou winds up in the Oz kingdom of Silica along with a living wooden Indian from the porch of an Arizona trading post. Two small animals against the fearful world seems like fertile ground for an Oz plot; I really like Oz books where seeming underdogs go on dangerous quests and prove themselves (e.g., Wonderful Wizard, Patchwork Girl, Kabumpo, Merry Go Round). But Penny and Beak quickly get lost in a slew of characters that join their quest; Ketzal the feathered boa is a fun idea, but there's also a completely pointless bit about a leperchaun. In the other plotline, you barely get to know Emma-Lou and Chief Thundercloud because they're joined by Bungle the Glass Cat, Princess Vitria of Silica, and her cousin Vitrix. More and more characters are piled on, until by the end of the novel we also have the Tin Woodman, the Wizard (though he leaves before the climax), Smithereens the third assistant glassworks keeper, Venté the passenger pigeon, Polychrome the Rainbow's Daughter, and the Saw-Horse. And I think I am probably forgetting someone else! Any one of the added characters are fine on their own, there's just not enough space for them here. Wickwar should have saved them for another book!

None of the characters gets the space to do anything interesting or clever or memorable, and it seems like in many cases they just get a line of dialogue or bit of action per chapter so you don't forget about them... but that often seems outside their scope or personalities. (Penny and Venté, for example, carry bags of gold, which seems unlike for two characters with no hands!) The cores of the book (in my opinion) ought to have been 1) Penny and Beak's devotion to their master, who frankly doesn't deserve it, and 2) Emma-Lou's finding of a place in the world, probably with Thundercloud. The two animals should have stayed on their own; Emma-Lou and Thundercloud should have gone on their quest with just Bungle at most. But these things are buried under a piling-on on incident and characters, and Emma-Lou weirdly ends up adopted by Zeebo, a character 1) she only just met, and 2) who has displayed nothing but dubious moral character the entire novel! She should have become a princess with Cyan and Vitrea! And why does Vitrea have to give up her kingdom for a man, anyway?

Anna-Maria Cool illustrates, and proves herself a solid mid-tier Oz artist. She's no John R. Neill or Eric Shanower... but then, who is? She's good at bringing characters to life in particular; her faces have a real liveliness to them that really helps with the book's storytelling.

On top of all this, I don't think the book is longer by word count than a typical Oz book, but it's got thirty chapters instead of the usual twenty-something; this means that if you read a chapter aloud on alternate nights (as I do), the book does seem to drag on, taking over a month to get through. (Reading it back to back with Ozmapolitan revealed that I use the same voice for Eurkea and Bungle, a sort of "southern belle" accent. I guess it just seems right for cats.)

All that said, though, when I asked my six-year-old if they liked it, they said yes, and when I asked what, they said, "All of it." I think they particularly liked the unusual characters like Penny and Ketzal, so it's a shame they didn't have more to do.

Next up in sequence: Toto of Oz

11 December 2024

Star Trek: Asylum by Una McCormack

Strange New Worlds is by far my favorite of the Paramount+-era Star Trek shows, and Una McCormack is by far my favorite of the current stable of Star Trek novelists. Put these two together, and let's say that I was predisposed to like this book.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Asylum
by Una McCormack

Published: 2024
Acquired and read: November 2024

So thankfully, I did. The book has two parallel narratives; in one, the Enterprise is assigned to Starbase 1 to assist with negotiations with a race of catlike aliens. These aliens turn out to 1) have a racial minority that they oppress, and 2) have been encountered by Una ("Number One") in her Academy days. As the novel goes on, the negotiations are complicated by mysterious acts of vandalism on behalf of the oppressed minority. In the other, we follow Una during her Academy days as she befriends those aliens, but also struggles with balancing all the other aspects of life she wants to participate in, including a Gilbert and Sullivan production and the maintenance class taught by the Enterprise's future chief engineer, Pelia ("The Broken Circle"). At the same time, she also meets Christopher Pike for the first time, as he returns to the Academy to give a lecture series for cadets in the midst of a personal crisis of his own.

I zipped through this on a plane ride during my Thanksgiving vacation, beginning it before the plane took off and finishing it before it touched down. McCormack's novels are always easy to read, but in a pleasurable, rewarding way: there's a real depth of characterization here missing from most tie-in fiction, which typically just aspires to make sure you can imagine that the actors are reading the lines. Una is the novel's standout, McCormack deftly using her backstory as someone who must "pass" in a society that discriminates against her to bring out the complexities of such an undertaking. How can Una advocate for other people to be who they are when she herself must deny who she is in order to survive? McCormack was in higher education for many years, and her depiction of Una draws on that to show off a very real type of person from academia, the one who wants to do everything but soon finds themself hitting their limitations.

On top of that, unlike many tie-in novels, it's thematically rich, dealing with the complexities of cultural oppression and cultural resistance. There are sfnal metaphors here for the kinds of things that have happened and continue to happen in the US, the UK, and around the world when majority groups confront minority groups, and it all feels very real. I know many tie-in writers don't like it when I say things like this, but every time I read a Star Trek book by McCormack, typically the only thing I don't like about it is that it means McCormack hasn't written the great original sf novel about cultural clash that I truly believe she has within her! I read this at a rough time in my life, but like Bujold's Brother in Arms (which I read around the same time), it reminded me of what I needed to do: fulfill my obligations, both to myself and others, as ethically as possible.

I have some quibbles—Una has to make a mistake I really don't buy to set off the novel's present-day events, the Federation ambassador negotiating with the aliens seems to know curiously little of them—but there's a lot to like here. So far there's only two SNW novels, and I don't know how many more there will be in the long run, but I am willing to wager that this will be the best, unless of course McCormack writes another. (Shame about the incredibly bland cover.)

09 December 2024

The NEW Blackhawk Era!: From Junk-Heap Heroes to the Return of the Black Knights (#228–43)

To a certain type of comics fan, the story of "The New Blackhawk Era" is a familiar one. The Blackhawks were in continual publication from 1941 to 1967; despite having been designed as World War II heroes, they had survived the end of the war and even a change of publishers, going from Quality Comics to DC, and moving on from battling dictators, to battling criminals, and later aliens, and later nascent supervillains. But as the 1960s continued, the Silver Age of comics was in full swing, and a group of war characters was out-of-date. There was one attempt to rejig the Blackhawk concept with 1964's issue #196 (see item #5 in the list below), but it didn't last.

Still, clearly something needed to be done. I don't actually have any behind-the-scenes insight here, but a comic doesn't undergo a creative change like this one if everything is working fine. In the three-part The Junk-Heap Heroes! storyline (issues #228-30, written by Bob Haney, art by Dick Dillin and Chuck Cuidera), the Blackhawks go an a mission where things go horribly wrong—and suddenly the President of the United States has called in the Justice League to evaluate the Blackhawks.* Their assessment?

In the words of Batman, "They just don't swing!" (It was the 1960s. Try to imagine Kevin Conroy saying that.)

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #238
(script by Bob Haney,
art by Dick Dillin & Chuck Cuidera)
Over the course of the story, the Blackhawks are disbanded, they split up, they each come up with new "superhero" identities, and then they reform. The identities include such winners as Olaf getting a mechanical costume that lets him jump really far as "the Leaper," Andre displaying a previously unmentioned penchant for building machines and becoming "M'sieu Machine," Chop-Chop getting his hands encased in metal so he can be "Dr. Hands," and Chuck wearing pyjamas covered in ears because he is now "the Listener."

Okay, say that you buy the Blackhawks needed a makeover... but did they need this makeover? Surely not! Look at Hendrickson as "the Weapons Master"... is this guy supposed to look more cool? He looks dumb, surely they even thought so in the 1960s!

(That said, I did kind of like how Chop-Chop mixes "ancient Chinese wisdom" with "happening 1960s slang" in this iteration.)

One of the things that fascinates me about superhero comics, especially minor ones, the whole reason I undertake projects like my Justice Society one, like my Green Arrow one, is how they get reinvented over time, how the premise warps and mutates to accommodate what is popular. Superman and Batman can set the trend, but Green Arrow responds to it. The Blackhawks, it seems to me, are a particularly vulnerable case of this, as their original premise is so closely rooted to the context of World War II. Can you update the Blackhawks to be relevant to the 1960s without also losing what made them the Blackhawks to begin with?

Not if you do it this way, at least. Nothing of what mad Blackhawk enjoyable in his original incarnation is to be found in the adventures of "Big Eye."

So far, so familiar; I'm not saying anything lots of comics critics haven't said before. Lots of comics fans know the story of "The New Blackhawk Era" and have judged it as a colossal mistake. And surely it was.

(There's a bit in issue #232 where Blackhawk asks, "Is this the New Blackhawk Era or a clown convention?" You're just tempting fate with a question like that!)

But... what about the stories?

I don't think I've ever read a review of this era that actually discusses the actual stories told about this version of the Blackhawks. Like, I've heard about the premise a million times, but that's just the first three issues. What about all the other ones?

The new Blackhawks work for G.E.O.R.G.E., the "Group for Extermination of Organizations of Revenge, Greed, and Evil"; they have a boss with a blank face (much like Mr. Cypher from the previous era) named Delta; they go on James Bond–style missions against S.P.E.C.T.R.E.-style global criminal organizations. For all the fact that they've been reinvented as superheroes visually, the actual stories owe a lot more to Cold War spy-fi. Gone are the airplanes, but now they are leaping into action in strange locales across the globe.

And do you know what else? They are actually kind of fun. Because, you know, they are written by Bob Haney, and Bob Haney is the kind of comics writer who lives the insanity. You say, "Bob Haney, the characters you have been treating as serious crimefighters are now goofy superheroes," and Bob Haney says, "Bring it." The stories crackle with energy and invention. Put aside how dumb the premise is—and I've never seen a commentary on this run do that—and they are actually kind of enoyable. The Junk-Heap Heroes! is full of energy, but I enjoyed even more the first full adventure of the new era, a three-part story running across issues #231-33 ("Target: Big-Eye"/"With These Rings I Thee Kill!"/"Too Late, the Leaper!"). I couldn't begin to explain to you why the Blackhawks are in space, but I enjoyed it a lot. On art, Dick Dillin and Chuck Cuidera prove they can pretty much do anything, responding well to the vim and vigor of Haney's scripts.

Well, anything except make the new costumes look good. Most comics creators struggle to come up with one good superhero design, and unfortunately, they had to think up seven.

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #232
(script by Bob Haney, art by Dick Dillin & Chuck Cuidera)
That said, you can tell Haney was making his stories up as he went along, and he doesn't always get away with it. In "The Terrible Twins"/"A Coffin for Blackhawk" (#234-35), we lurch from complication to complication, and what began as a Cold War thriller ends with the Blackhawks learning that the circus owner was a G.E.O.R.G.E. agent all along, who can just solve all their problems for them... presumably because Bob was out of pages. "Melt, Mutant, Melt!" (#236) is similarly rushed, but I did really enjoy "The Magnificent 7 Assassins"/"The Walking Booby-Traps!" (#237-38), where the Blackhawks discover they may have caused the death of a fellow G.E.O.R.G.E. agent... only he's still alive? And... evil!? And... an android?!? Go for it, Bob Haney, why not. Again, it kind of fumbles the ending, but when the journey is such a pleasure, I don't really care.

(Also, Lady Blackhawk is accidentally restored from her Queen Killer Shark identity in #228... and the proceeds to stand around making tea for the remaining issues. Is this really my Zinda Blake? I'm not sure why they bothered.)

Alas, this is clearly the point where DC realizes the series can't be saved. With issue #237, it goes bi-monthly; with issue #240, the main stories drop from twenty-four pages to sixteen, with an eight-page reprint to pad it out. (#240 reprints 1957's "The Perils of Blackie, the Wonder Bird" from #111; #241 reprints 1961's "The Phantom Spy" from #160.) Issue #241 marks another important change; the editor begins apologizing. (GCD says Dick Giordano took over from George Kashdan with #242, but Giordano clearly did at least the lettercol for #241.) Sorry, they say, the new Blackhawks are stupid.

And then in #242 ("My Brother–My Enemy!"), the New Blackhawk Era is quite definitely ended. While the Blackhawks are on vacation, literally everyone in G.E.O.R.G.E. is killed. Since they left their new costumes at the G.E.O.R.G.E. base, the Blackhawks must readopt their OG WWII-era uniforms to fight the villain, who turns out to be Blackhawk's Nazi-brainwashed brother. The story is plotted by Marv Wolfman, but still scripted by Bob Haney! I tell you, the man can do anything, even completely reinvent the characters he just completely reinvented eighteen months prior, and casually dismiss the entire premise he'd spent fourteen previous issues building up.

This is the first story to tell us Blackhawk's real name, and unfortunately, it's "Bart Hawk," but other than that, I found it pretty solid, especially thanks to the stylish, dark artwork of Pat Boyette. Good use of the series's WWII roots, though I think the origin for Blackhawk doesn't fit what we learned in Military Comics #1 or Blackhawk #198.

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #243
(script by Bob Haney, art by Pat Boyette)
I also enjoyed #243 ("Mission Incredible"), again by Haney and Boyette, a largely grounded spy thriller about the Blackhawks having to evacuate a little girl from the other side of the Iron Curtain. It seemed to me that the creative team was working out a space for Blackhawk in the spy-fi era... but even though the lettercol in issue #243 promises more to come, it never did. Blackhawk was finally cancelled after a run of eleven years and 136 issues at DC, not to mention its previous sixteen years at Quality.

But cancellation at issue #243 doesn't mean there's no issue #244. Stay tuned for next time!

This is the sixth post in a series about the Blackhawks. The next installment covers Blackhawk vol. 1 #244-50 and The Brave and the Bold vol. 1 #167. 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) 
  5. Blackhawk vol. 1 #196-227 (1964-66)

* This is the first explicit indication that the Blackhawk stories take place in the DC universe. In the pre-Crisis cosmology, this surely must be Earth-B.