Review: Vixens, Vamps & Vipers: Lost Villainesses of Golden Age Comics by Mike Madrid

Comic trade paperback, 248 pages
Published 2014 (contents: 1940-50)

Acquired July 2014

Read September 2015

Vixens, Vamps & Vipers: Lost Villainesses of Golden Age Comics
compiled and annotated by Mike Madrid

Mike Madrid's follow-up to Divas, Dames & Daredevils, which I've read but not yet reviewed, focuses on female villains of the Golden Age of Comics. Its array of characters feels a lot less diverse than the female heroes of the previous book-- I suppose there's only so many criminal plots in the Golden Age model one can come up with-- but it's still pretty enjoyable at times.

Some of these comics are terrible, of course, but some are genuinely good: it's obvious why Will Eisner (Espionage starring Black X: "Night of the Living Bombs") and Jack Cole (Plastic Man: "The Figure") are the artists we still know today, because they stand out head and shoulders above the other ones collected here. Even in 1940, Eisner is already starting to do cool stuff with panel borders and the conventions of the medium, and Cole's figure work is just fun. I don't remember DDD having any contributions by latterly-famous artists, so it's a nice touch on Madrid's part. Shame about the actual story of the Black X installment, though!

Once you get beyond the stereotypical superhero tales (especially the World War II-influenced ones), there's some good stuff here. "Crimebuster meets He She" (by Charles Biro) has a half-man, half-woman as a villain, though their means of operation is completely implausible: at one point, they swindle a woman of her fortune by marrying her, which requires He She to make sure the woman never sees their left side! There are a lot of smart and active women here-- you have to be both to be a villain, after all-- which as Madrid points out, defy some of our expectations of Golden Age comics women, mostly formed (I suspect) by the girlfriends in superhero comics. Some just seem evil, some are jealous, and many turn to crime when society leaves them little choice.

The section on race features a diverse range of villains-- Nepalese, African, Indian, Japanese-- though of course some of them are pretty distasteful, such as Merlin the Magician's adventure "Temple of the Man-Eating Spider" by Fred Gaurdineer, where Merlin (evidently a modern British adventurer who knows magic, not the Actual Merlin) semi-randomly decides to steal a Nepalese diamond so he can give it to Churchill to fun the war effort; for the offense of trying to stop him from stealing from them, he blows up their temple. Rulah the (white) Jungle Goddess versus Maya the (black) Nazi sympathizer in "Bloodstained Fangs!" (by Matt Baker) primarily seems to be an excuse for some woman-on-woman bath-wrestling action.

The best stories here are definitely the "true crime" ones, all collected from a 1948-51 series called, delightfully, Crimes by Women. These are the most lurid, are the most fun, and feature the most interesting villains. "Belle Guness: The Monster of Laporte," by the mysterious one-named Carter, is about a woman who kills her abusive husband in a moment of frustration... and then realizes how much money one can make by killing husbands over and over. "Madame Muscle: Maid of Steel" (move over, Supergirl!) is about a circus strongwoman who's manipulated into going bad, but then turns the table on her manipulators with a series of increasingly audacious heists; she's so ridiculous, you have to love her, I think. At one point she wrenches the door off the car she's in and throws it at a pursuing police car!

Best of all is "Mable Reine: Queen of the Jungle" (unlike with Rulah, it's a metaphor), about a girl raised by train-jumpers... until one of the train-jumpers is killed by the police, and she decides to start a societal revolution and raises an army. She loses, of course, but atta girl! You can see why these true crime stories were so popular, and these small doses of them definitely hold up today. If the rest of Crimes by Women is this fun, I'd definitely read a whole collection of just that!

Fans of the DC universe should note that this volume actually contains four stories that I think would have been (or could have been) in continuity during the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths/pre-Flashpoint era, when many of the Golden Age comics later acquired by DC were considered to have actually happened when they were published. The first of the many Manhunters, Dan Richards, faces "Red-Haired Kate" in a 1943 story by Al Bryant. The original Doll Man takes on "Beauty and Her Beasts" (her plan is to kill or disfigure all women more attractive than her) in a 1946 story also by Al Bryant. A postwar Blackhawk Squadron is beset by "Madame Butterfly," a Japanese spymaster out for revenge for the death of her lover during the war in a 1949 story by Bill Woolfolk, Reed Crandall, and Chuck Cuidera. And Plastic Man faces "The Figure," a woman with a great figure who's great with figures in a 1950 tale by Jack Cole. There's no reason these Golden Age tales couldn't fit into the pre-reboot DCU as far as I can see!

(Cheese) Coney (Islands)

the cheese coney in its natural habitat

A couple months ago, I used the phrase "cheese coney" to the consternation of those around me. This surprised me; as a Cincinnati native, I know that my people's distinct form of chili is not known everywhere, but where in the world does the chili dog not exist? What I did not realize is that even though the chili dog is ubiquitous across America, the term "cheese coney"-- or, more properly, "Coney Island hot dog"-- is not. From my involved research on the subject (i.e., reading some Wikipedia articles), it is unclear to me if the terms "chili dog" and "Coney Island hot dog" are synonymous, or if the cheese coney represents some kind of subset of chili dog (and if so, what distinguishes it). Obviously, in Cincinnati your cheese coney will have Cincinnati chili on it, but you can have a cheese coney other places with other kinds of chili on it, right?

I sort of forget about all this until I recently came across the following infographic (from The Food Republic):

click to enlarge

The coney is about one-third of the way down, ensconced between the Montreal, the Italian, and the Kansas City. (Is that right? Should their names be preceded by definite articles?) Only upon seeing the coney surrounded by geographically named hot dog variants did it occur to me to ask, after 30 years of eating cheese coneys, What on Earth does a cheese coney have to do with the place of Coney Island? This quickly led to a second question I'd never thought to investigate before, either: Why is there a place in Cincinnati called "Coney Island" which is not on an island, and does it have anything to do with delicious food?

Things I Learned about Cheese Coneys:
Like all foods, no one agrees on who invented the cheese coney or where. Wikipedia claims (I know, but I'm writing this blog entry in 30 minutes, and you're getting what you're paying for):

In 1913 the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce in New York had banned the use of the term "hot dog" on restaurant signs on Coney Island, an action prompted by concerns about visitors taking the term literally and assuming there was dog meat in the sausage. Because of this action by the Chamber of Commerce, immigrants passing through the area didn't know the sausage in a bun by the American moniker "hot dog." Instead, the handheld food would have been known to immigrants as a "coney island." 

But it also says the Coney Island hot dog may have been first served in Fort Wayne, Indiana, or Jackson, Michigan. Not sure why Coney Island itself is not a contender!

the two Coney Islands
courtesy Google Street View

There are also restaurants called Coney Islands, which I did not know. They're primarily in Michigan, I guess. In this case we do know the original: two Greek-American brothers created a restaurant called "Coney Island" in Detroit in 1914, and because they didn't trademark the name, they had many emulators. The best part is that their many emulators included themselves; in 1917, a business dispute led them to split into two separate, adjacent establishments on Lafayette Street: American Coney Island and Lafayette Coney Island. They're still both there!

Things I Learned about Coney Island, the Place in Cincinnati, Not New York:
I don't know when I learned Coney Island was not originally a place in Cincinnati-- for me that's still the primary association. We used to go every summer when I was in Boy Scouts, for the Dan Beard Council Family Jamboree. I don't think I've ever ridden on one of the park's amusement park rides, but I have spent the night many times, and handed out samples of freshly cooked Dutch oven cobbler! (Our specialties in Troop 641 were peach, apple spice, and, best of all, chocolate cherry.) I still remember watching The Incredible Mr. Limpet, and when its cartoon fish protagonist declared he was going to swim to Coney Island, thinking he had an awful long and circuitous route to follow given he was starting in the Atlantic Ocean!*

Coney Island in 1965

The answer to the mystery is relatively pedestrian. An 1870s apple farmer on the Ohio River used to rent out his farm for events, and soon realized he made more money from that than apple farming. He built a bowling alley, a dining hall, and a dancing hall as his popularity grew, and eventually sold it; the new owners dubbed it "Ohio Grove, the Coney Island of the West" in 1886. By 1887 they officially changed the name to just "Coney Island"! A brazen piggybacking on a more popular brand, I guess, but it apparently worked. It was apparently known as "Cincinnati's moral resort," which is totally the kind of thing Cincinnatians would be really into.

I have no clever ending to tie all this information together, but man, I could totally scarf down three Skyline cheese coneys (onions, no mustard) right now.

* I hadn't thought about this film for decades until composing this blog entry. Reading the Wikipedia entry, it sounds absolutely awful.

Review: Star Wars Adventures: Boba Fett and the Ship of Fear by Jeremy Barlow and Daxiong

Comic digest, 76 pages
Published 2011
Acquired May 2012
Read December 2014

Star Wars Adventures: Boba Fett and the Ship of Fear

Script: Jeremy Barlow

Art: Daxiong
Lettering: Michael Heisler

Boba Fett vs. idiots, Boba Fett wins. Another slick and enjoyable installment in the vastly underrated and too-short Star Wars Adventures series. This is what I want from my tie-in comics!

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Gotham, Part VI: Batman: Four of a Kind

Comic trade paperback, 207 pages
Published 1998 (contents: 1995)
Borrowed from the library
Read September 2015

Batman: Four of a Kind

Writers: Alan Grant, Chuck Dixon, Doug Moench
Artists: Brian Apthorp & Stan Woch, Kieron Dwyer, Bret Blevins & Mike Manley, Quique Alcatena
Colorists: Linda Medley, Richmond Lewis, Stu Chaifetz

Letterers: Ken Lopez, Albert DeGuzman, Willie Schubert

Year One, November - December
This book collects four "Year One" annuals from 1995, each chronicling Batman's first encounter with one of his famous foes: Poison Ivy, the Riddler, the Scarecrow, Man-Bat. I wasn't expecting much from these, actually, my suspicions being they were cheap cash-ins on the "Year One" brand in a year of cheap cash-ins on the "Year One" brand (I think every DC annual in 1995 was a "Year One" story). So imagine my surprise when all four stories turned out to be very enjoyable!

from Batman: Shadow of the Bat Annual #3

First up is "Poison Ivy: Year One" by Alan Grant and Brian Apthorp & Stan Woch. Though Grant's story is fine-- it's one of those typical Batman stories where a villain interrupts a rich person's gala to get some quick cash-- what really makes it shine is the artwork by Brian Apthorp and Stan Woch. (Honestly, for a view of what makes Poison Ivy tick, you'd be better off with Neil Gaiman's Secret Origins tale.) Woch I've heard of, but I was amazed that I hadn't Brian Apthorp. His work is incredible! Good storytelling, good capturing of the "Year One" aesthetic established by David Mazzucchelli without being derivative, and most importantly, an attractive and seductive Poison Ivy. She is one of these characters where it's important to get that right, as part of her whole schtick is being attractive. Apthorp nails that, but not via the typical comic book approach of butts and boobs, but through facial expressions: her face is just inviting. It's really well done, and I'm surprised the world hasn't seen more from him, though I did note he went on to do a 1997 Batman: Poison Ivy one-shot. I'll have to pick that one up!

Next is "The Riddler: Year One: Questions Multiply the Mystery" by Chuck Dixon and Kieron Dwyer, which takes the form of the Riddler narrating his early days while in a cell in Arkham Asylum. Like Apthorp, Dwyer captures the "Year One" aesthetic well without being derivative, and again, I'm surprised I haven't heard of him before. The Riddler is honestly a villain I hadn't thought about very much before-- he usually seems to turn up as a tangential figure in Batman stories I read, like when he weighs in on who the Holiday Killer is in The Long Halloween-- but he was very entertaining here, a man tormented by how easy things can get when you cheat, leading to his increasingly convoluted schemes to put some excitement back in his life. An enjoyable tale.

Doug Moench and Bret Blevins & Mike Manley provide "Scarecrow: Year One: Masters of Fear" (not to be confused with the Year One: Batman/Scarecrow miniseries from a few years later that was collected in Batman: Two-Face and Scarecrow: Year One, which we'll get to in a few weeks). Though Doug Moench seems to have no idea how academia works (I think Scarecrow goes from undergraduate to professor in the space of a year, and an open tenure-track position has a mere seven applicants!), this story does a good job of utilizing both the scarecrow and Sleepy Hollow parts of Jonathan Crane's conceit, and building a compelling backstory for someone who's almost an anti-Batman in the way he approaches fear. Again, Scarecrow is a character who often features as a sideshow in other villain's tales (including Moench's own Prey), but this brought him to life for me. The art of Bret Blevins and Mike Manley make the Scarecrow's spindliness a source of fear as well.

Finally, there's "Man-Bat: Year One: Wings" by Chuck Dixon and Quique Alcatena. Man-Bat has always struck me as one of Batman's lesser villains, seemingly devised by someone going, "What if Bat-Man fought... a Man-Bat!? Genius!" As far as I know, Spider-Man has never fought a Man-Spider, nor Animal Man a Man-Animal, so we've been spared the dubious continuations of this line of thought. But Man-Bat turns out to be pretty cool in this story (which also details the creation of Batman's Bat-Glider), not a villain but a man who took a crazy chance and had it backfire on him horribly, more a tragic overreacher in the Frankenstein mold than anything else. The only other Man-Bat comics story I can remember was one by Marco Palmieri where he meets Oracle, and that had a similar tragic tone. So count me won over, and I hope I encounter the character again.

Next Week: We revisit Batman's earliest days in Shaman... Merry Christmas, Batman!

Review: Doctor Who: The Hypothetical Gentleman by Andy Diggle, Mark Buckingham, Brandon Seifert, and Philip Bond

Comic PDF eBook, 100 pages
Published 2013 (contents: 2012)
Acquired May 2014
Read October 2014

Doctor Who, Volume I: The Hypothetical Gentleman

Written by Andy Diggle and Brandon Seifert

Art by Mark Buckingham and Philip Bond with Ilias Kyriazis
Colors by Charlie Kirchoff
Lettering by Shawn Lee and Tom B. Long

Despite continuing with the same Doctor and same companions as the last, this volume restarts the numbering, I guess because of the arrival of superstar writer/artist team Andy Diggle and Mark Buckingham. Well, like too many superstar teams on IDW comics, they don't last long-- all of two issues! And to be honest, it's neither's best work. Diggle's writing is not flooded with continuity references like previous Who scripter Tony Lee, but it shares Lee's lack of depth. And Mark Buckingham can do great work, but I find his tie-in work distractingly over-referenced at times.

It's the second story here, "The Doctor and the Nurse," by Brandon Seifert and Philip Bond, that's delightful. Amy forces the Doctor and Rory to undertake some male bonding, but they hate the idea so much they jump into the future to finish early-- only the TARDIS misses its destination. Meanwhile, Amy gets embroiled in the hijinks of the previously-unknown-to-me-but-delightfully-real-except-that-some-people-actually-died-in-it Great London Beer Flood. Seifert's writing nails the characters and humor, and I loved Bond's Dan McDaid-esque art, cartoony but very reflective of the characters' personalities. It's a shame these two didn't take over the title. (I feel like I say that a lot. I guess a lot of the "guest" contributions on IDW's Doctor Who stuff are often better than the "actual" ones!)

Next Week: The return of Lady Christina in The Eye of Ashaya!

Review: Deerbrook by Harriet Martineau

As per usual, I have a review up at Unreality SF this weekend, though it's something of an oddity this time: Double Zero, the last release in the Judge Dredd Crime Chronicles, the first two of which I reviewed many years ago. Maybe someday I'll grab hold of the third one and complete the set!

Hardcover, 618 pages
Published 2004 (originally 1839)

Borrowed from the library

Read August 2015

Deerbrook by Harriet Martineau

Like Charles Kingsley's Two Years Ago and Eliot's Middlemarch, this is a tale of an English country doctor carrying out sanitary reform written by a Victorian author responding to Positivism. There's a chapter of my dissertation about Two Years Ago and Middlemarch, so maybe, I thought, I ought to read this book too.

Well, I shouldn't have. Martineau comes across as a sub-Eliot, or perhaps less anachronistically, a sub-Austen. I'm not even a book Austen fan and I can tell that this book lacks her wit and insight. Take a look at this sentence: "It is a fact which few but the despisers of their race like to acknowledge, and which those despisers of their race are therefore apt to interpret wrongly, and are enabled to make too much of—that it is perfectly natural,—so natural as to appear necessary,—that when young people first meet, the possibility of their falling in love should occur to all the minds present." C'mon, narrator, whatever insight that obviously-imitative sentence might have had has been buried in a blizzard of completely unnecessary clauses.

Martineau is one of those writers who can stretch a small village tiff out into hundreds of pages for the maximum effect of boringness; I could not have cared less about who did what after slogging through the first 200 pages of it, but it kept on going on and on and not even a plague piqued my interest.

Serialized Storytelling in 1990s SF Television (that just means I've been watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine recently)

My wife and I have been watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for what I think is a year now-- I believe we started at the beginning of academic year 2014-15, and we're now a week into 2015-16. For me, this is kind of a third watch of the show. Though I had seen scattered episodes earlier, when it was originally airing, I came on board sometime during Season 5 (with "In Purgatory's Shadow," I think) and watched it through to the end-- I remember coming home my eighth grade graduation dance and watching the recording I'd made of the series finale. Later, my parents bought me the series on DVD, and I watched each set as I received it. This is my wife's first time seeing any of it (bar "Trials and Tribble-ations"), and indeed, her first time watching any Star Trek show systematically. Garak is her favorite.

Attention, Bajoran workers!

We've just hit the end of Season 5/the beginning of Season 6 (on Wednesday night we watched episode 6x02, "Rocks and Shoals"). I have to say, I'd forgotten how much I like this show. Of all the Star Trek series, I think this one has the best ensemble cast-- there's not a main character I don't like. You don't groan like you do when you're watching The Next Generation and realize you're about to hit a Crusher episode. And that's before you even get to the extended cast of recurring characters: Dukat, Rom, Nog, Weyoun, Kai Winn, Morn, they're all great.

Most of all, though, I like its approach to serialized storytelling. I like how it mixes standalone episodes with "arc" ones, and that the arcs get heavier and heavier the further you get into the series, but every episode still feels like it has a distinct middle and end. We've also been watching Downton Abbey off-and-on the past couple years (usually more "off" than "on"), and one thing that drives me nuts about that show is how little ever seems to happen in any one episode. Series 1 was mostly  standalones, but once the Great War kicks in, it feels like Julian Fellowes just has three story ideas per series and stretches them out artificially across a run of thirteen episodes.

Deep Space Nine gives you a lot of standalones, and I like that: you get to know these people and the place they live in. There is a status quo, so when it gets upset, it actually means something. Some shows never have a status quo, and I think that makes it difficult to get invested-- everything is always changing, seemingly arbitrarily. But in Deep Space Nine, you know the way their world works, so when everything changes you feel it as much as the characters do. The last couple episodes of Season 5 and first couple of Season 6 really drive this home.

cellular entertainment:
the key to immortality

"In the Cards" (the second-last of S5) is a light Jake-and-Nog story, but the arc gives it weight and undercurrents: while Jake tries to track down a baseball card, Sisko and Kai Winn spar with Weyoun. You know something big's about to happen while Jake and Nog try to elude the soulless minions of orthodoxy. Then, in "Call to Arms," everything really does fall apart-- when the Starfleet characters abandon the station and everyone splits to the nine winds, you really feel the import of it.

This means the beginning of Season 6 feels like a completely different show... in a good way. Sisko and company are in a war show, and in a different one than we saw during the Federation's brief S4-5 war with the Klingons. They're being forced to approach things a completely different way: one of the things I really liked about "Rocks and Shoals" was that those normal Starfleet methods of problem-solving don't apply anymore in wartime. In a previous season they might have found a way out of the situation they were in with little violence; now that war has broken out, they have no choice but to kill the enemy.

a different kind of Mirror Kira

Even better is the arc of Kira, Odo, Jake, Rom, and all the other left behind on the station. Deep Space Nine has been about occupation and colonization and resistance, and that's one of my favorite parts of it, but often in really distant ways: the Cardassian Occupation of Bajor and subsequent decolonization all happened before the series began, and the Maquis question was always pretty abstract, since we're never really invested as viewers in any of the various Maquis characters. But now instead of hearing Kira talk about the Occupation, we're seeing her live through one. Kira's journey from freedom fighter to member of the system is one of the big arcs of the series, and it's interesting for this season to suddenly place such a negative spin on it. Kira has become a member of the establishment, and that is wrong. "Rocks and Shoals" is one of the best episodes of the series, because of the way it builds on what's gone before but also upsets what we think we know about these characters by putting them into new situations.

Rewatching with my wife at my side has been instructive: so much of S1-5 were known to me before I saw them, that it's great to get a feel for what the twists and turns were like to someone who, for example, didn't realize Eddington would turn out to be a traitor. (It's pretty fascinating, actually; Season 3 is always making you suspicious of Eddington, but then Season 4 backs off from that by making him just be there in lots of episodes, and then all of a sudden BAM! My wife declared that "For the Cause" was the first time she hadn't been suspicious of him.)

Additionally, two websites have provided me with some interesting critical perspectives. Tor's Deep Space Nine Rewatch by Keith R.A. DeCandido has pointed out a lot of trivia, and the comments are usually pretty entertaining. Even better, however, has been Zack Handlen's commentary at the A.V. Club. Zack is an excellent, thoughtful reviewer, able to bring out nuances that make me realize why I like what I like the way a good reviewer out to be able to. The comments there have much less content than the ones at Tor, but they do have Rapping Jake Sisko's own recaps of his dad's adventures as well as lots of jokes about Gowron's bug eyes, so there's that.

Review: Escape by Manjula Padmanabhan

Trade paperback, 419 pages
Published 2008
Acquired February 2015
Read May 2015

Escape by Manjula Padmanabhan

I read this as part of my ongoing investigation into Indian speculative fiction; Padmanabhan is one of a few Indian authors currently writing sf in English. Escape is set in a sort of Handmaid's Taleesque dystopic future India-- except where an evil General has carried out a near-complete femicide. One of the book's two protagonists is one of the last (maybe the last) woman left alive, but she's been kept on drugs and in ignorance, so she doesn't know she's different from the uncles who shelter her. Only the older she gets, the more rumors creep out, and the uncles realize they need to get her out of India, so the youngest of them accompanies her on a desperate trip.

What follows is a very bleak travelogue of sorts. Padmanabhan's future India is horrifying, but also fascinating. Without women, clones are used for reproduction-- but also clones with limited mental acuity ("drones") are created for the purposes of labor. And society has to adapt and to change to deal with the lack of women; there are some very twisted men as a result, men who cannot indulge the desires they have. The book is interspersed with maxims from the General's books, with titles like A Manual for Bold Soldiers, The Vermin Tribe: An Analysis (the "vermin tribe" is what they call women), and The Generals: A Plural Life. As that last title indicates, the General is actual more than one person; he too has cloned himself again and again, his intelligence almost functioning like a program in the cloud. Like future India, the General is both horrifying and fascinating, and I really enjoyed the interjections into the narrative of an interview with home done by an outside newscaster.

At the same time, our poor young protagonist has to adapt to a horrifying world in which she is literally the only one of her kind. Meiji's journey gets pretty intense at times, but is there's any complaint to lob at this book, it's that she occasionally disappears from it; much more of it is about Youngest protecting Meiji than it is about Meiji herself. What kind of sacrifices-- both physical and moral-- will Youngest make to protect his niece? There's a lot of commentary embedded in here, about how society treats women, how society treats other social classes, about the disposability of human life, and like the best sf it's as much a mirror of today as a potential future. Some of humanity's worst desires get brought to the surface, and the book has a very bleak take on sex throughout, perhaps unsurprisingly. It's an engrossing read, and I hope the sequel that the ending indicates ought to happen really does come to pass, though seven years later, I have my doubts.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Gotham, Part V: Batman: The Man Who Laughs

Comic trade paperback, 141 pages
Published 2008 (contents: 2003-05)
Borrowed from the library
Read November 2014

Batman: The Man Who Laughs

Writer: Ed Brubaker
Pencillers: Doug Mahnke, Patrick Zircher
Inkers: Doug Mahnke, Aaron Sowd, Steve Bird

Colorists: David Baron, Jason Wright
Letterers: Rob Leigh, Todd Klein

Year One, November - Year Nineteen, May
Ed Brubaker collaborated with Greg Rucka on Gotham Central: Jokers and Madmen, which is the best Joker story in my opinion, so I was looking forward to seeing his take on the character's first meeting with Batman here. Unfortunately, the slim story told here doesn't really impress. It would be fine as one of any number of confrontations between Batman and the Joker, but I came away with no insight into their dynamic. What makes the Joker the greatest of the Batman's foes? From this story, I have no idea; it doesn't seem like he'd leave any more of a mark than Hugo Strange or the Scarecrow. It comes across as a fannish box-ticking exercise that was left better off unticked until someone had a better idea.

To fill out this volume, there's also "Made of Wood," a three-issue Detective Comics tale set almost two decades later, about Batman, Gordon, and Alan Scott, the first Green Lantern. Not amazing, but a competently-executed, thoroughly-enjoyable procedural. I don't know why it was collected with The Man Who Laughs, but I guess I'm glad it was.

Next Week: Three of Batman's greatest foes plus Man-Bat emerge on the Gotham scene in Four of a Kind!

Reading Roundup Wrapup: August 2015

So far this new rotation thing seems to be working out! Maybe I will clear out my backlog of unreviewed books someday.

Pick of the month: Genius Loci by Ben Aaronovitch. This was a tough one, because both this book and volume one of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes were excellent. But I ended up siding with this book because of how new it felt-- whereas as good as Calvin and Hobbes is, I've read it before! Aaronovitch manages to capture of a lot of different facets of what it's like to enter into adulthood, combined with some compelling worldbuilding. No small achievement.

All books read:
1. Fort Freak: A Wild Cards Mosaic Novel edited by George R.R. Martin with Melinda M. Snodgrass
2. Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor: Spore by Alex Scarrow
3. Bernice Summerfield #8: Genius Loci by Ben Aaronovitch
4. Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance by Joe Casey
5. Deerbrook by Harriet Martineau
6. Final Crisis Aftermath: Ink by Eric Wallace
7. Final Crisis Aftermath: Escape by Ivan Branon
8. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Book One: 1985-1987 by Bill Watterson

All books acquired:
1. Bernice Summerfield #8: Genius Loci by Ben Aaronovitch
2. Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings by George Eliot
3. Legion of Super-Heroes, Volume 1: Hostile World by Paul Levitz with Walter Simonson
4. Bernice Summerfield XIV: Present Danger edited by Eddie Robson
5. Bernice Summerfield: The Weather On Versimmon by Matthew Griffiths
6. Everyone's Just So So Special by Robert Shearman
7. Superman: Return of Doomsday by James Robinson with Steve Lyons, Dan Didio & Philip Tan, and Jeff Lemire
8. Wonder Woman by George Pérez Omnibus by George Pérez and Len Wein with Greg Potter
9. Collected Seventh Doctor Comic Strips, Volume 3: The Good Soldier: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Andrew Cartmel, Dan Abnett, Gary Russell, Paul Cornell, and John Freeman
10. Collected Eleventh Doctor Comic Strips, Volume 4: The Blood of Azrael: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Scott Gray

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 611
Books remaining on "To review" list: 164