Faster than a DC Bullet: Birds of Prey, Part I: Black Canary/Oracle/Huntress

Comic trade paperback, 206 pages
Published 2002 (contents: 1996-97)
Borrowed from the library
Read January 2013

Black Canary/Oracle/Huntress: Birds of Prey

Writers: Chuck Dixon, Jordan B. Gorfinkel
Pencillers: Gary Frank, Stefano Raffaele, Matt Haley, Jennifer Graves, Sal Buscema
Inkers: John Dell, Bob McLeod, Wade Von Grawbadger, John Lowe, Cam Smith, Stan Woch

Colorists: Sherilyn Van Valkenburgh, Glora Vasquez, Dave Grafe

Letterers: Albert De Guzman, Phil Felix, Ken Bruzenak

One series ends, another begins. Having finished The Sandman and all its sundry spin-offs, I've decided to tackle another series, one I've heard about for many years, and heard a lot of good things about: Birds of Prey. This first volume, with the somewhat ungainly title Black Canary/Oracle/Huntress: Birds of Prey, collects a number of one-shots and miniseries that introduced the Birds of Prey. Despite the title, the Huntress isn't really a member yet, just being along for the ride in one of the stories. The focus here is squarely on Dinah Laurel Lance a.k.a. the Black Canary, and Barbara Gordon a.k.a. Oracle f.k.a. Batgirl.

At the time this story came out, both characters were at something of a loose end, as far as I know. Black Canary had been cut adrift from Green Arrow some time ago (and then the guy had died), and Oracle had never really had a starring role since taking on her new identity. In the first story, "One Man's Hell," written by Chuck Dixon and illustrated by Gary Frank and John Dell, Barbara recruits Dinah to be her field agent in investigating a series of terrorist attacks against some butthole's Third World development projects. The story moves a little abruptly at times (the destruction of a dam and flooding of an entire village gets like half a page), but it's a decent start, with action and sass. I've read a lot of Green Arrow comics, and Dinah plays differently placed in opposition to Barbara: she's a bit of a wild card and loose cannon. Which was probably always case, but basically everyone would look reserved standing next to Oliver Queen.

I like Frank and Dell's linework: it's thin and clear. The depiction of women is, of course, a key issue in a series that starred DC's first all-female superhero team, and I think they handle it nicely. Dinah and Barbara are drawn attractively, of course, but I don't think this crosses the line into the "male gaze" too much. I like Black Canary's new outfit. (I liked the old one too, in general, but not the way it always seemed to be drawn in the 1990s, including here.) I also really, really like Dinah's short blond hairdo; I wish that had stayed around by the time of Green Arrow and Black Canary.

The second story, "Revolution," kind of feels like the same as the first one over again: exploited people in the Third World under the thumb of a local dictator being saved by the timely and glamorous intervention of the Birds of Prey. The politics-- such as they are-- get a little confusing, and I'm a bit wary of any story that invokes the token of "white slavery." The breakup, such as it is, between Dinah and Barbara feels a little contrived, too. And the art by Stefano Raffaele and Bob McLeod is the weakest in the book: a few too many jutting butts and cocked hips, and a wonky sense of perspective in some panels.

"Birds of a Feather" is the book's only story not written by Chuck Dixon, instead penned by Jordan B. Gorfinkel and illustrated by Jennifer Graves and Stan Woch. Graves and Woch have a simpler style than some of the book's other artists, aided by more solid coloring, and I liked it a lot: clean and elegant. And Lois is even dressed like a real person in jeans and a t-shirt! Gorfinkel does a good job-- it's fun seeing Lois alongside other superheroes without Superman-- but it's the shortest story in the book, and both the explanations and the resolution shoot by too quickly.

"Manhunt" is the longest story in the book, a four-chapter miniseries illustrated by Matt Haley, Wade Von Grawbadger, John Lowe, Sal Buscema, and Cam Smith. It's also the best story in the book: it's fast-paced, but unlike "One Man's Hell" or "Revolution," never moves so fast as to lose you. It's also fun, in the way that a story that teams Black Canary up with the Huntress and Catwoman just ought to be. There's a lot of mutual suspicion and differing motives in the group that keep the whole thing engaging on a level of character interaction, and it distracts from the repetitive "Stop being so reckless!"/"I'm the one on the ground!" interactions of Barbara and Dinah. There's even a Batman and Robin cameo, definitely worth it for how the Huntress and Catwoman react to seeing him speed by.

There's also good jokes, especially the one about the villain's butt. (I wish that being spurned lovers wasn't part of our heroes' motive here, even if it does seem to be a small one. I cannot imagine a Superman/Batman team-up where they teemed up to take down a woman who never called them after one-night stands. Nor even a Blue Beetle/Booster Gold one.) The art is good, too, even if there's a tendency to sexual posing (especially by Catwoman) starting to creep in here. The story sets up the idea of a team fairly nicely, so it's a little disappointing that in the next volume it goes back to being just Black Canary and Oracle once more...

Review: Tales from Super-Science Fiction edited by Robert Silverberg

Trade paperback, 393 pages
Published 2012 (contents: 1955-59) 
Acquired April 2012
Read January 2013

Tales from Super-Science Fiction
edited by Robert Silverberg

Robert Silverberg fixates a lot on the idea of "fun" in his introduction to this anthology, but I sense that he perhaps had more fun writing for Super-Science Fiction when it was published 1955-59 than I am having reading what got written. After all, who wouldn't like being able to sell three stories a month to a magazine that paid the best in the business?  Not Silverberg (and not Harlan Ellison^TM, none of whose stories are in this volume, unfortunately).

But with fourteen stories, this book has enough room to be good and be bad, and thankfully the good makes the bad worth it.  James Gunn turns in an almost prescient critique of a consumer economy gone mad (and how fortunate that I read this book at Christmastime, even if the story was set in the summer) in "Every Day is Christmas," with a suitably dark ending. I also enjoyed "Song of the Axe" by Don Berry: I didn't always get what had happened or why, but the details were intriguing enough that I didn't care; it's definitely the best fleshing out of an alien culture in this collection (where aliens are often just foils for Our Brave White Spacemen).

Robert Moore Williams's "I Want to Go Home" was maybe my favorite story in the collection: short and creepy, but seemingly universal. A great idea I wouldn't want to spoil one jot by explaining it.  Alan E. Nourse's "The Gift of Numbers," about a criminal who transfers his mathematical abilities to someone else, was also a delightful and clever idea. And big kudos to Tom Godwin for writing "A Place Beyond the Stars" and Silverberg for including the story: a very cool idea from a guy who deserves to be remembered for something other than "The Cold Equations."

Jack Vance's "World of Origin" was one of the worst ideas for a murder mystery I ever read-- it basically tromps all over Asimov's rules for sf mysteries, and not to good effect. A guy tries to solve a crime based on what planets the suspects come from, applying what he knows of the planets' cultures (a Space Father Brown, maybe?), but it turns out that this is very easy because in the future, every planet will have one easily-defined characteristic that tells you exactly how its citizens murder people. (On Planet Sprocket, you can only murder a man when riding a bicycle. On Planet Academia, you can only murder someone if you publish a monograph on it. On Planet Cricket, you can only murder someone with a cricket bat used to win the Ashes. These aren't real examples... but they could be.)

"The Tool of Creation" by J. F. Bone is boring because it sets up a nonsensical sf problem (why are all the planets formed like this?) and then answers it via coincidence. I don't care about the problem or the solution. And can we call for a retroactive moratorium on all sf stories that involve "twist" endings? Except for the good ones, of course.

I found Silverberg's own two contribution ("Catch 'Em All Alive" and "The Loathsome Beasts") dull and flat, typical sf tropes played out uninterestingly, but his introduction is great, and he even provides individual introductions to each story/writer, an anthology practice that I always enjoy, and am disappointed we don't see more often. This is a well-planned packaging of some forgotten sf, and while the stories might not be a fun to read as they were to write, they're fun enough to pick up and look through at the least.

Review: The Hobbit, or There and Back Again by J. R. R. Tolkien

Mass market paperback, 287 pages
Published 1971 (originally 1937)
Borrowed from Hayley
Read December 2012

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (Revised Edition)
by J. R. R. Tolkien

I first read The Hobbit in fifth grade, when my mother bought me the box set of it and The Lord of the Rings. I liked it. I had a good friend we used to call "Bilbo" because he looked like Bilbo as rendered on the cover of my edition. I then tried to get into The Fellowship of the Ring. I don't think I even made it out of the Shire. The dense prose was something I didn't even know how to deal with.

So, one year later, I decided to try again. I reread The Hobbit first. I liked it. I then started into The Fellowship of the Rings. I think I made it about a third of the way through before I gave up. When I was a kid, I never gave up on books once I started them. (I still don't.)

Two years later, I gave The Lord of the Rings one last shot. I reread The Hobbit first. I liked it. And then, miracle of miracles, I made it through all of The Fellowship of the Ring. Once you've done that, you've committed: I crawled my way through The Two Towers and The Return of the King. I think it took me weeks to read the whole thing, in an era where I never spent more than a couple days on one book. Having finally conquered them, I resolved never to read them again.

When the Peter Jackson movies came out when I was in high school, I enjoyed them a lot (especially The Two Towers), but I advised all my friends whose interest was piqued by the films to give the books a wide berth. I'll stick with the achievable versions, thank you very much.

Ten years later, though, and I started to reconsider. In the interim, I'd read The Silmarillion and thought it okay. More importantly, I now read Victorian novels on what you might call a professional basis. Surely anyone who could read and love George Eliot couldn't be taken down by J. R. R. Tolkien? My decision solidified when I acquired the "Millennium Edition" box set of The Lord of the Rings for merely the price of shipping. Six chunks instead of three? It was beginning to sound achievable. I decided to reread it, pacing the books out, and slotted it onto my reading list, and waited-- and of course, The Hobbit floated to the top at the time the first film adaptation was in theaters, so now everything will think I'm just cashing in.

But anyway. What about The Hobbit? Having just seen The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, I was most struck by the difference between Bilbo's character arc in the two versions. The novel Bilbo very much wants to just sit at home and not be bothered: unlike in the film, where he decides to rush after the departed dwarves, he is practically pushed out the door by Gandalf! He does get a big moment of heroism, as in the film, but it comes a bit later-- instead of foolishly rushing out to save Thorin, he calculatedly uses his ring and Sting against the spiders of Mirkwood. My favorite part for Bilbo (aside from "Riddles in the Dark," of course) was when Bilbo orchestrated the escape from the Mirkwood elves. Smart thinking! I also really liked the way Bilbo handled himself once they got to the Lonely Mountain, both with Smaug and with Thorin. He's a canny chap, our Bilbo, and it's good development without being overwrought. I did quite sympathize with poor Bilbo the whole way through. Guy just wants to stay at home and eat lots of breakfast, and who can take exception with that?

I was surprised at the way that Thorin turns out; it's been over ten years, after all, and I forgot what happened to him in the end. It's a rather sad fate for the old chap, and I wonder how Peter Jackson will adapt it for the third film, as it doesn't really seem to play into the character arc that he's setting up for Thorin. I was also surprised at how little there is for most of the dwarf characters; I'm not sure why Tolkien would write in so many, if he barely uses any of them or gives them notable (or even unnotable) characteristics.

The world of The Hobbit is a bit more whimsical than I remember the world of The Lord of the Rings turning out: there are ton of talking animals (Beorn is awesome), for example, and more references to the modern world. (One of my favorite jokes is the one about the invention of golf, and I was completely surprised but quite happy that that made it into the film.) Overall, it's quite a fun book, and I can see why (beyond completism, of course) every time I read The Lord of the Rings as a child, I always reread The Hobbit first. I've rarely met a fantasy travel narrative that I didn't like, and this is no expection.

It certainly has the most musical numbers of any book I've ever read.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Prose Fiction #4: Superman: Last Son of Krypton

Mass market paperback, 238 pages
Published 1978
Borrowed from the library
Read December 2012

Superman: Last Son of Krpyton
by Elliot S. Maggin

It was this novel's good reputation that prompted me to begin my entire sub-undertaking of journeying through prose fiction based on superhero comics. Well, I'm happy to report that it's as every bit as good as everyone says, and definitely up there with the best Superman stories in any medium. Elliot Maggin just gets Superman and everything about him.

I was a bit skeptical about the book's opening, which begins with the destruction of Krypton and prophecies of doom from Jor-El-- we've seen all that a million times by now, not the least in the only previous Superman novel. Thankfully, this is only a small part of the novel, and it turns out to be necessary, because then we get three chapters of Clark's life in Smallville being set up by a very unlikely person. I thought it was goofy when I first figured it out, but I soon came to love the idea. And that person's influence turns out to be key to the plot of the second half of the novel.

The plot actually takes its time showing up, but that's okay, because I was having such a good time in the interim. Superman is portrayed how I love him best: a really good guy trying to do his best because he believe the best of everyone, bothered but not overly so by his inability to do everything for everybody. Clark is a bit of a wimp, but not overly so, and the interactions with Steve Lombard show how to carry that kind of thing out perfectly: you'd like Clark even if you didn't sympathize with him because Steve Lombard is such a jock.

Though everyone, down to Jimmy Olsen (as goofy as ever) and Lois Lane, gets their moment, Lex Luthor is the other standout character here. There is a lot of interspersed backstory here about Clark and Lex growing up together in Smallville, which is something I normally dislike because it turns Superman into someone whose presence is harmful and Lex into someone too obsessed with a single vendetta to be interesting. But Maggin does a great job with here, all because his character-work is very fine: the presence of Superboy is just one of many incidents working on Lex's mind, and though Lex might not have become a supervillain without Superboy, he didn't become one only because of Superboy, either.

What really makes it work, though, is all the stuff Luthor gets up to in the present. He's still in his Silver Age "mad scientist" phase here, but he's verging into being the corporate mogul: he has quite the criminal empire here. Maggin's Luthor is usually the smartest man in the room, but he also always knows what to do when he's not. My favorite passage is definitely this one, about when Luthor is in prison, allowed only a ballpoint pen and pad of legal paper:

One night, in a loose moment, Luthor figured out how to melt the plastic cap of the pen, let a certain amount drip into the ink refill, extract a substance from the glue that bound the legal pad, wrap it all in half a sheet of yellow paper and make an explosive powerful enough to blast out a wall of his cell. Luthor would never do that, of course. If he did, the next time he was in jail the warden wouldn't give him his pen and pad. (138-39)

Hilarious and genius. Perfect Lex.

It's not all about Luthor, though, as Superman just manages to keep his counterpart from stealing the show. There are some fantastic depictions of Superman's powers in action; sometimes you might think he's got too many of them, but as in All-Star Superman, who cares? What keeps Superman grounded isn't his powers (or lack thereof), it's his ethos. (The epilogue is particularly good in this regard.) My favorite moment is a late one in the book, so I won't spoil it, but suffice it to say that while Superman is trusting and always willing to give a second chance, he's nobody's chump... and he knows how to scheme with the best of them.

I can't wait to read Maggin's other Superman novel, Miracle Monday; this was a book of sheer joy.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XXX: The Sandman Companion

Trade paperback, 274 pages
Published 1999
Borrowed from the library
Read December 2012

The Sandman Companion

by Hy Bender

This is it: the last Sandman spin-off out there, until Sandman: Year Zero finally comes out. Hy Bender's book looks back at Neil Gaiman's series, breaking it down by story arc, and providing plot summaries and analysis, with box outs on art. I don't get the reason for the summaries: if you didn't read these stories already, you wouldn't care; if you have, you'd get bored. It was over two years ago that I read The Sandman, and I still remembered enough to find these boring. There are occasional nuggets of insight in them, but that makes it all the worse, because you know you're missing out!

Aside from that, this was a pretty good book. The analysis is definitely driven by Bender's extensive interviews of Gaiman himself, and Gaiman remembers a surprising number of small details. Lots of great bits about what Gaiman was thinking, and Bender asks some good questions. (Though a couple of them feel like obvious setups.) If you're that into The Sandman, or you're just a completist like I am, it's worth picking up.

It did make me think that there's not really a lot of comics guidebooks out there, like there are for TV shows. (I have ones about Blake's 7, The Prisoner, Sapphire & Steel, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Torchwood, not to mention tons and tons of Doctor Who ones.) I wonder why that is? Would no one buy a guide to all (for example) Green Arrow comics?

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XXIX: Delirium's Party: A Little Endless Storybook

Hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2011
Borrowed from the library
Read November 2012

Delirium's Party: A Little Endless Storybook

by Jill Thompson

I liked this than I liked the original The Little Endless Storybook, I think because it had more interactions between all the different Endless. Or maybe it's because Barnabas is the greatest, and the last book was about him being lost, while in this one he's here all the time. Or maybe it's because I read this one like I should have done the first one: aloud, to someone else. In this case my wife, who enjoyed it, despite being largely sans any knowledge of Sandman. It would be hard to be not charmed by Delirium, I think.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XXVIII: Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?: The Deluxe Edition, With other tales of the Dark Knight

Comic hardcover, n.pag
Published 2009 (contents: 1989-2009)
Borrowed from the library
Read November 2012

Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?: The Deluxe Edition, With other tales of the Dark Knight

Writer: Neil Gaiman

Artists: Andy Kubert, Scott Williams, Simon Bisley, Mark Buckingham, Mike Hoffman, Kevin Nowlan, Bernie Mireault, Matt Wagner
Colors: Alex Sinclair, Nansi Hoolahan, Tom McCraw, Joe Matt

Letters: Jared K. Fletcher, John Costanza, Agustin Mas, Todd Klein

This is close to the end of my Sandman spin-off runthrough. It's also stretching the definition of "Sandman spin-off," though no moreso than when I included Gaiman's early DC work like Black Orchid and Legend of the Green Flame. Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? actually teases you with an appearance of someone who might be Death... but turns out not to be. (Or so I think, anyway. Some evidently disagree!) The story takes place after Batman's death in Grant Morrison's Batman R.I.P. and Final Crisis, with all of his old allies and enemies gathering in Gotham to pay homage to him. Only... everyone thinks they did it. So we get a succession of stories told, by Catwoman, Alfred, the Mad Hatter, Joker, Robin, Clayface, Superman, each telling completely contradictory stories about something they did (or did not do) that lead to the death of Batman.

The stories range from a few pages to a panel or two to just dialogue, but each of them manages to be completely and utterly Batman. It's the greatest hits of Batman deaths, if he was allowed to have more than one. There are a lot of nice details-- my favorite part is the guy outside the club where the funeral is being held who watched the villains' cars-- in both the (beautiful) art (by Andy Kubert) and the writing. It's the perfect tribute to the Batman, the man who never gave up, no matter how crazy he seemed.

The whole funeral is overlaid by two people talking in caption boxes, who turn out to be Batman and not Death ("I don't think death is a person, Bruce."), and Batman passes from the funeral, from life, into something greater and beyond reality. Here, Bruce gets a chance to reflect on who he was and why he did everything he did. There are a lot of great lines, my favorite being, "Do you know the only reward you get for being Batman? You get to be Batman." And then he's done... or as done as Batman can ever be, because he's apparently got to pass on somewhere else. I know that when Darkseid kills Batman in Final Crisis, Batman actually goes tumbling into the past, so I assume this is all tied into that, but it works on its own as a story about the endurance and struggle of Batman, too.

The still-thin book is padded out by everything else Gaiman wrote related to Batman, which amounts to a weird set of stories. "A Black and White World" is about what Batman and the Joker do "off-panel" in their comics, but Simon Bisley's art is just a little too "gritty 1990s" to work for me. Check out those ears on the Batman! And those R. Crumb-style women. "Pavane" is about a Suicide Squad agent trying to recruit Poison Ivy, giving her origin story-- pretty good stuff. "Original Sins" and "When is a Door" are two linked stories about a news team visiting Gotham to do a feature on supervillains.

I like the frame a lot, being filled with big and small character moments, and jokes at the Penguin's expense, but "When is a Door," the teams encounter with the Riddler, ended up being a long metafictional rant about the death of fun in superhero comics. Well, Neil Gaiman, go write some fun superhero comics then. This is your world; as I was just reminded, Batman and the Riddler just live in it.

Reading Roundup Wrapup: December 2012

Pick of the month: Middlemarch by George Eliot. It couldn't have been anything else, obviously, which was quite unfair to everything else.

As far as I know, I've never read this many books in one month in my life! Exam reading will do that to you, I suppose. It will also make sure that you do not have the time to write any of them up, however. (My previous record was 24 in March, but I read considerably fewer comics this time around.)

All books read:
1. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction by George Levine
2. Huxley: From Devil’s Disciple to Evolution’s High Priest by Adrian Desmond
3. Under the Management of Mr. Charles Dickens: his production of “The Frozen Deep” by Wilkie Collins, edited by Robert Louis Brannan
4. The Sandman Companion by Hy Bender
5. Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science by Srdjan Smajić
6. The New Adventures: Walking to Babylon by Kate Orman
7. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction by Gillian Beer
8. Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Jonathan Smith
9. Superman: Last Son of Krypton by Elliot S. Maggin
10. The Medusa Effect: Representation and Epistemology in Victorian Aesthetics by Thomas Albrecht
11. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre by Darko Suvin
12. Doctor Who: Short Trips #27: Christmas Around the World edited by Xanna Eve Chown
13. A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy
14. ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science by Barri J. Gold
15. The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture by Susan Bordo
16. Caustic Comedies: Plays For The Stage by Robert Shearman
17. Middlemarch by George Eliot
18. Scientific London by Bernard H. Becker
19. Deucalion: Collected Studies of the Lapse of Waves, and Life of Stones by John Ruskin
20. The View from Nowhere by Thomas Nagel
21. The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (Revised Edition) by J. R. R. Tolkien
22. The New Republic, or Culture, Faith, and Philosophy in an English Country House by W. H. Mallock
23. Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative by Lisa Zunshine
24. Science and Culture and Other Essays by Thomas Henry Huxley
25. The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
26. Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century by Laura Otis
27. The Creed of Science: Religious, Moral, and Social by William Graham
28. Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine by Regina Markell Morantz-Sanchez

All books acquired:
1. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction by Gillian Beer
2. 52 Omnibus by Geoff Johns, Grant Morrison, Greg Rucka, Mark Waid, and Keith Giffen
3. Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century by Laura Otis
4. The Fixed Period by Anthony Trollope
5. Young Avengers Presents by Ed Brubaker, Brian Reed, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Paul Cornell, Kevin Grevioux, and Matt Fraction
6. 52 Aftermath: The Four Horsemen by Keith Giffen
7. Legion of Super-Heroes: 1,050 Years of the Future edited by Anton Kawasaki
8. Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes by Geoff Johns
9. Captain Britain Omnibus by Alan Moore and Jamie Delano with Dave Thorpe, Paul Neary, Steve Craddock, Mike Collins, Alan Davis, Chris Claremont, and Mike Carlin
10. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
11. Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold
12. BBC VFX: The Story of the BBC Visual Effects Department, 1954-2003 by Mat Irvine and Mike Tucker
13. William Wells and Maconaquah, White Rose of the Miamis by Julia Gilman

A seemingly small yield, perhaps, but I have a number of books on order that have probably reached my house by now... only I'm not there. We'll see soon enough.

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 476

Reading Roundup Wrapup: November 2012

I'm getting further and further behind in my book reviews all the time. Gotta step it up! In the meantime, though, exam reading continues apace.

Pick of the month: Delirium's Party: A Little Endless Storybook by Jill Thompson. Okay, so it it only took me fifteen minutes to read this to my wife, but they were an enjoyable fifteen minutes-- and she hasn't ever even read another Sandman story!

All books read:
1. The Sandman: The Dream Hunters by Neil Gaiman and P. Craig Russell
2. What Came Before He Shot Her by Elizabeth George
3. English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture by Francis Galton
4. Of the Plurality of Worlds: A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1853; Plus Previously Unpublished Material Excised by the Author Just Before the Book Went to Press; and Whewell's Dialogue Rebutting His Critics, Reprinted from the Second Edition by William Whewell
5. Comte's Philosophy of the Sciences: Being an Exposition of the Principles of the Cours de Philosophie Positive of Auguste Comte by G. H. Lewes
6. Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850-1930 by Stefan Collini
7. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning by Sally Shuttleworth
8. The Victorian Scientist: The Growth of a Profession by Jack Meadows
9. Cousin Phillis and Other Stories by Elizabeth Gaskell
10. The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices by Tabitha Sparks
11. Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?: The Deluxe Edition, With other tales of the Dark Knight by Neil Gaiman
12. Dr Thorne by Anthony Trollope
13. Delirium’s Party: A Little Endless Storybook by Jill Thompson
14. The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
15. The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby by Charles Kingsley

All books acquired:
1. The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby by Charles Kingsley
2. Star Wars: Tales from the Clone Wars: Webcomic Collection, Season 1 by Pablo Hidalgo
3. Star Wars: The Clone Wars: The Enemy Within by Jeremy Barlow
4. Star Wars: The Clone Wars: The Starcrusher Trap by Mike W. Barr
5. Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Strange Allies by Ryder Windham
6. Star Wars: The Clone Wars: The Sith Hunters by Henry Gilroy and Steven Melching
7. Star Wars: Dark Times, Volume Four: Blue Harvest by Mick Harrison
8. Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Forgotten History by Christopher L. Bennett
9. Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Brinkmanship by Una McCormack
10. Ahistory: An Unauthorised History of the Doctor Who Universe (3rd edition) by Lance Parkin & Lars Pearson
11. The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment by Graham Greene
12. One Human Minute by Stanislaw Lem
13. Star Trek: Burden of Knowledge by Scott & David Tipton
14. Under the Management of Mr. Charles Dickens: His Production of "The Frozen Deep" by Wilkie Collins, edited by Robert Louis Brannan
15. The Annotated Sandman, Volume Two: The Sandman #21-39 by Neil Gaiman, edited by Leslie Klinger
16. Lex Luthor: The Unauthorized Biography by James D. Hudnall
17. Quinx, or The Ripper's Tale by Lawrence Durrell
18. Captain Britain by Alan Davis and Jamie Delano with Steve Craddock and Mike Collins
19. Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 12 by Jim Shooter, Cary Bates, and Paul Levitz
20. Star Trek, Volume 1 by Mike Johnson
21. The New Adventures: Walking to Babylon by Kate Orman
22. Doctor Who: The Age of Chaos by Colin Baker
23. Star Wars Omnibus: Quinlan Vos: Jedi in Darkness by John Ostrander with Pat Mills
24. New Grub Street by George Gissing
25. The Beetle by Richard Marsh

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 469

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XXVII: The Dream Hunters

Comic hardcover, 126 pages
Published 2009 (contents: 2008-09)
Borrowed from the library
Read November 2012

The Sandman: The Dream Hunters

Original words by Neil Gaiman

Graphicplay and art by P. Craig Russell
Coloring by Lovern Kindzierski

Lettering by Todd Klein

I expected to love The Dream Hunters, P. Craig Russell's comic adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Yoshitaka Amano's The Dream Hunters. After all, the original was excellent, and Russell's last adaptation of a Gaiman prose original, Murder Mysteries, had also been excellent. But The Dream Hunters somehow, despite typically strong artwork from Russell, never takes off. Perhaps it's that after Amano's amazing imagery, even P. Craig Russell pales in comparison? This isn't bad, but it's not sufficiently better or different than the original to justify its own existence, sadly. But maybe I went in with too-high expectations-- it's had to imagine what a work as good as The Dream Hunters original and Murder Mysteries combined would have been like.