Review: The Transformers Classics, Vol. 2 by Bob Budiansky, Don Perlin, et al.

I just realized I've been neglecting to mention my work at USF the past couple weeks, which have seen four of my reviews materialize: The New Counter Measures: Who Killed Toby Kinsella? (Christmastime during the Three-Day Week), Doctor Who: Aquitaine (the Doctor meets a robot butler who can butle with the best of them), The Avengers: The Lost Episodes, Volume 6 (Steed and Keel fight crime in the streets of London, at a shipyard, and at a fun fair), and Doctor Who: The Peterloo Massacre (the Doctor visits North and South, only it really happened).

Comic PDF eBook, 284 pages
Published 2011 (contents: 1986-87)
Acquired August 2014
Read March 2016

The Transformers Classics, Vol. 2

Written by Bob Budiansky, Len Kaminski 
Pencils by Don Perlin, Graham Nolan, Herb Trimpe
Inks by Al Gordon, Keith Williams, Tom Morgan, Vince Colletta, Ian Akin and Brian Garvey
Letters by Janice Chiang, Bill Oakley, Hans Iv
Colors by Nelson Yomtov

Even within the bounds of what you can or should do with comic books based on a toyline, The Transformers is not and never will be great. There are just too many characters with too little personality to distinguish them from one another, and more are constantly being introduced, meaning you never get to know anyone long enough to care about them. Plus, Bob Budiansky's plots range from bizarre to far-fetched: this volume features a Decepticon plot to steal music from a rock concert, an out-of-work comic book writer hired by the government to pretend to be a terrorist controlling the Autobots and Decepticons, a group of Decepticons who go rogue to leave graffiti on human monuments, and Optimus Prime committing suicide when non-player characters are accidentally killed when he has a videogame duel with Megatron. This isn't great comics; it's not even great hokum.

I love the idea that Megatron is so convinced that Optimus is not dead, he kills himself to get one over on Optimus.
from The Transformers #25 (script by Bob Budiansky, art by Don Perlin and Ian Akin & Brian Garvey)

(You do, I think, have to give Budiansky credit for never settling into a repetitive status quo: the Decepticons are always shifting their leadership and plans throughout the series. I'd take Shockwave over Megatron as leader any day.)

Terrifying death by acid disintegration, that's what this kid's comic needs.
from The Transformers #17 (script by Bob Budiansky, art by Don Perlin & Keith Williams)

That said, every now and again, Budiansky hits it out of the park; each volume of The Transformers Classics usually has one story that sticks out above the rest, and vol. 2 actually has two. The first is "Return to Cybertron," a two-part tale that shows what life has been like on Cybertron since the Ark left three million years or so ago. In a word, it's completely terrible: it's a huge contrast between this and the kind of wacky hijinks this title is usually populated with. It's a gritty story of a world where the Autobots are barely hanging on under the cruelty of a Decepticon dictatorship, where most robots don't even have the energy or parts to resist. Characters can die here, and their deaths have real emotional consequences. If only Budiansky's run was always like this, it would have been incredible. (Though, perhaps, not very uplifting.)

This is definitely a euphemism for something sexual.
from The Transformers #20 (script by Bob Budiansky, art by Herb Trimpe and Ian Akin & Brian Garvey)

This volume actually has two very good stories, the other being "Showdown!" After a big Autobot/Decepticon battle, the Autobot Skids is left for dead, stuck in his vehicle mode (a van), where he's found by Charlene, a grocery store cashier who dreams of a better life, and who needs a new car. Charlene has Skids repaired, and, tired of war, Skids decides to lay low and just act as her van. Of course, circumstances force him to reveal himself to her-- but they decide they like the arrangement and become fast friends. It's a story of two different sides. In one sense, it's a cute slice-of-life tale. In another sense, it's the story of a wounded soldier trying to escape an endless war that has caused him nothing but pain and anguish. It's at once adorable and weighty, and it's probably Budiansky's second-best work on the Marvel Transformers title.

Next Week: The nadir and the peak of The Transformers, in Classics, Vol. 3!

H. G. Wells at 150: H. G. Wells & Rebecca West

September might be over, but my celebrations of the 150th birthday of H. G. Wells aren't! I continue my investigations of the life of the man with

Hardcover, 215 pages
Published 1974

Acquired March 2009

Read June 2016

H. G. Wells & Rebecca West by Gordon N. Ray

Wells doesn't say a whole lot about the disintegration of his relationship with Rebecca West in H. G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography. West was one of three women who bore him a child (that he knew of). Wells couches the end of their relationship in terms of his concept of "the Lover-Shadow," the ideal lover of whom all actual lovers are only a reflection, and thus one perpetually seeks. After one of their separations, he reports, "I was secretly in intense misery and haunted to an extraordinary extent by the thought of Rebecca. At that time I was feeling too acutely to observe myself. But I see now that Rebecca had become for me the symbol of the Lover-Shadow and that I was unable to conceive of it in any other form than hers-- or exist without it. I began to see her on balconies, away across restaurants. Any dark-haired woman would become Rebecca for me. I felt I must at any cost get her back to me and get back to her. I sent her a telegram [...] suggesting we should [...] make another try at a life together. But Rebecca was now inflexibly in revolt."

Published ten years before Wells's take on the relationship in the Postscript was finally released, Gordon Ray's H. G. Wells & Rebecca West reconstructs the relationship between the two from the existing letters, supplemented by interviews with Dame Rebecca herself. Most of the letters that survive are those from Wells to West, leading to a necessarily incomplete account. Wells's perspective comes from the moment, as expressed in the letters, while West's comes in retrospect, meaning it is more considered. But it is what it is.

My impression is of two very intelligent people, drawn to each other yet unable to coexist for any length of time. I wish we had West's letters, because Wells often comes across as unpleasant and condescending, yet we don't have her words to judge his responses by. As the relationship goes on, things get worse and worse between them, and I feel like Wells wanted something West could never give him. Wells wanted another version of his second wife, Jane, a helpmeet who would help him execute his great work, except this one would also have sex with him. But the very things that drew him to West meant she could never supply him with that; she would never subjugate herself to his desires, even though biology and finances meant that she was the one who had to take care of their child together.

Wells actually uses that child as a weapon against her late in their relationship, alternately threatening to take him away from her and to stop seeing him altogether, depending on his whims. It's hard to blame her for being "inflexibily in revolt" given how much of an asshole he could be, and his reaction to feeling "intense misery" seems to be to make her feel that way, too. Wells was not always an emotionally mature man, to say the least.

Dinner party: H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Rebecca West, Mrs. Hardy
Thomas Hardy is just going on and on about "skellingtons" he found when he built his house; West can only go, "Lovely, lovely" in response. Mrs. Hardy is depressed.
(from H. G. Wells & Rebecca West, p. 95)

It's not all misery. There are cute doodles by Wells (I wonder if he called them "picshuas" as he did the doodles he drew for Jane), and they clearly were two intelligent people enjoying each others' intellectual, emotional, and sexual company when their relationship began. But I feel like the seeds of their relationship's disintegration were planted early, even if took them a while to realize it.

Next Week: I delve into the relationship between H. G. and Jane by unearthing The Picshuas of H. G. Wells!

The Problem with Prequels

In his history of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss discusses how the pleasure of sequels is innately different from the pleasure of original works. We can only ever go to Arrakis for the first time once. No subsequent Dune novel cannot capture that feeling. It's not that sequels are necessarily inferior, but just that they do something different than original works. If you want the pleasure of discovering the new, you cannot get it from a sequel, only the pleasure of recognition. (I'm going from memory here because my copy of Aldiss is on campus and I am not.)

That said, I would add that rarely is a sequel good if is precisely apes the original work. The best sequels are often repetition with variation, enough alike the original work to deliver the pleasure of recognition, but different enough to deliver the pleasure of discovery as well, even if less so than the original work.

As far as I remember, Aldiss has nothing to say about prequels, but there are obviously some related issues there. Recently, I watched a video recorded a couple years ago, where Rick Berman and Brannon Braga, creators and executive producers of Enterprise (later known as Star Trek: Enterprise) discuss the series some ten years or so on:

They talk about their reasons for doing a prequel for the fifth Star Trek series, which was feeling that the future of the future was not going to be distinctive enough from the future. I don't think this had to be true, but Rick Berman had worked on Star Trek since season one of The Next Generation in 1987, and been co-executive producer or executive producer of every season of Star Trek since 1988.

By the time Enterprise came around in 2001, Berman had executive-produced twenty seasons of Star Trek in thirteen years.  Brannon Braga came to Star Trek as an intern on Next Generation in 1990. After taking various writer and producer titles on both Next Generation and Voyager, Braga became a co-executive producer on Voyager in 1997, and an executive producer in 1998. Someone else might have been able to envision a new twist on the Star Trek formula by going forward, but they could not.

So they went back. When you go backwards, you get the same thing, only different. And, maybe even better, you get to see how something different becomes the same thing. Ideally, the pleasure of discovery is the discovery of recognition in this case.

I even have a t-shirt with this slogan on it.

Now, it's a long video, and I'm not here to nitpick my way through it or anything, but they spend much of it defending Enterprise, but not always in a compelling way-- the problem of the show is not in its fundamental premise, but in how they went about it. (And in that it probably has the dullest main cast of any Star Trek series.) They talk about how the whole point of Enterprise was to show everything we were accustomed to from the earlier shows as new: phasers are new, warp drive is (kinda) new, beaming is new. But, they say, once these things are shown as new... they kind of stop being new.

It's like, Captain Archer goes, "I've never phasered someone before," he then phasers someone for the first time, and now there's no reason for him to treat a phaser differently than any other weapon. Same for transporters: "Oh no one's ever beamed a human before. Well that worked fine. Let's beam all the time."

In the video, Berman and Braga seem to use this as the reason Enterprise turned out to not be very distinct from the previous Star Trek shows, in a way that indicates they find the answer acceptable. After all, they seem to be saying, how many times could Archer say, "Wow phasers"? But when I watched the video, I found this part really frustrating, because it shouldn't be a shrug, oh well, what could we do? moment. The problem with Enterprise is that too much of it is just like what came later. It's a problem that Enterprise's "phase pistols" were the complete same as the ones on the original show, that they could always rely on the transporter when it mattered, that their "slow" warp drive still moved at the speed of plot. They took the setting of the prequel, and then told a lot of the same dumb Star Trek stories.

But they should have been rethinking and reexamining these core concepts of Star Trek. Their phasers should have been different-- or they shouldn't have had phasers at all, and whatever weapons they used should have actually been different in a way that would affect the storytelling. Like, the ship on Enterprise didn't have shields, but it could "polarize" its hull plating, and they treated this exactly like shields on The Next Generation and the later shows, down to the fact that characters would say nonsensical things like, "hull plating at 34%." Like, what could that even mean, because I can see in the exterior shots that 66% of the hull plating is not missing. Substituting new words into the same old stories is not actually making a prequel.

Enterprise should have been as different from the original Star Trek as The Next Generation was from it. Later in its run, it moved in this direction, with mixed results, but its first two seasons mostly failed to deliver on its premise. Like I said above, Berman had been behind twenty seasons of Star Trek already, and Braga had worked on eleven. They were clearly out of ways to tell Star Trek stories that were the same but different, that combined the pleasures of discovery and of recognition, but moving backwards instead of forward didn't somehow magically give this to them.

Plus the characters were mostly dull, and the actual episodes often misjudged, but that's a whole different blog post.

TIL it's impossible to find a picture of Captain Archer where he doesn't look like a doofus. Sorry, Scott Bakula, you really were excellent in Quantum Leap.

Review: Afterimage by Helen Humphreys

Trade paperback, 248 pages
Published 2009 (originally 2000)
Acquired October 2013
Read October 2014

Afterimage by Helen Humphreys

Long and immaculate descriptions of nothing happening, people with weirdly muted reactions to things happening around them. It just meanders into tedium, into details of weird people doing weird things, seemingly with no point and no end. I found it difficult to care because no one in the book seemed to care about anything either.

Then, on page 220 or so (out of 248), the fire happens, and the book becomes utterly captivating: Helen Humphreys' style suddenly has a point other than beauty for its own sake, and the imagery is gorgeous. But 28 pages from the end is a little too late to hook me.

Also: isn't it a little weird that the book's whole premise is that it's based on real photographs of a real Victorian housemaid, images so strange that Helen Humphreys felt compelled to write a novel about them, yet the cover uses a contemporary stock photo?

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XXXII: The Sandman: Overture: The Deluxe Edition

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2015 (contents: 2013-15)
Borrowed from the library
Read April 2016

The Sandman: Overture: The Deluxe Edition

Written by Neil Gaiman

Art by J. H. Williams III
Colors by Dave Stewart

Letters by Todd Klein

There have been a lot of Sandman spin-offs over the years. This is the 32nd one that I have read, not counting independent ongoings like Sandman Mystery Theatre, Lucifer, or House of Mystery. But this is probably the only one people were ever really asking for: what was it that left Dream depleted and powerless enough to be captured by a human sorcerer before the events of issue #1 of Gaiman's series? Finally that story is being told.

Overture, first and foremost, is a beautiful book. J. H. Williams III is always a dependable artist, but it seems unlikely to me that he'll ever surpass the work he's done here:

This took me forever to work out, but the lights at the top spell out "FOUR" because J. H. Williams works the chapter number into the beginning of each chapter. For a while I saw "FOV" and didn't recognize the "R" at all.
from The Sandman: Overture #4

And it's not just beautiful, as Williams uses the layouts and form of his art to really tell a story:

Review: The Transformers Classics, Vol. 1 by Bob Budiansky et al.

Last year, I reviewed the components of IDW's Doctor Who Humble Bundle; IDW also has done a couple Transformers Humble Bundles, and I've downloaded the components of both of them and have been reading an issue a day over breakfast, on days where I don't have other comics to read. There are diverse range of comics on hand, and I'll be reviewing them in some semblance of continuity order, beginning with the first volume of the collected Generation One comics:

Comic PDF eBook, 315 pages
Published 2011 (contents: 1984-86)
Acquired August 2014
Read November 2015

The Transformers Classics, Vol. 1

Plots by Bill Mantlo, Jim Salicrup, Bob Budiansky
Scripts by Ralph Macchio, Jim Salicrup, Bob Budiansky
Pencils by Frank Springer, Alan Kupperberg, William Johnson, Ricardo Villamonte, Herb Trimpe, Don Perlin
Inks by Kim DeMulder, Ian Akin and Brian Garvey, Alan Kupperberg, Kyle Baker, Brad Joyce, Tom Palmer, Al Gordon
Letters by Michael Higgins, Rick Parker, Janice Chiang, John Workman, Diana Albers
Colors by Nelson Yomtov

I have a bit of a mixed relationship with The Transformers. I loved the two spin-offs of the original cartoon, Beast Wars and Beast Machines, both of which I followed devotedly in high school. But my attempts to return to the source material have done little for me: I don't care for any single episode of the original 1980s Transformers cartoon I have seen, aside from the 1986 film, which I like not so much for its quality, but for the sublimely unique experience that is watching it: toy robot advertisements meets mythological saga, featuring both Orson Welles and Weird Al. But I always like the idea of the Transformers-- how could you not?-- and with the cheapness of a Humble Bundle, I'm willing to give it another go.

Unfortunately, I think the opening volume of the 1980s Marvel Transformers comic betrays all the weaknesses of the format. While I think the Beast-era cartoons managed to put storytelling above toy-selling, this comic drowns in its toy-commercial roots, driven home by the giant panels where umpteen characters introduce themselves, their gimmicks, and potted explanations of their own personalities:

And, get this, this is only half of the spread! There are two whole pages of Autobots doing this, plus another whole page for the Decepticons earlier in the issue.
from The Transformers #1 (plot by Bill Mantlo, script by Ralph Macchio, art by Frank Springer & Kim DeMulder)

The worst part of it is that little of these introductions even matter! You never hear from most of these characters in any substantive way, and when you do, they're written completely generically-- the little bits of personality they deploy here never matter. This is probably unavoidable by the design of the comic; when you have eighteen good guy characters and eleven bad guy ones, and are constantly adding new ones as new toys come out, it becomes impossible for more than a handful of them, if that, to receive any kind of focus in a 22-page comic book!

The human characters are few and distinctive enough to pop, though not always for the best. There's a kid who's an obvious reader surrogate, "Buster" Witwicky, son of a mechanic but with no mechanical aptitude himself, but I find myself gravitating more toward his single father, "Sparkplug", a grizzled Vietnam vet who is scared by these strange alien robots but still has a heart of gold.

Surprisingly serious stuff, actually.
from The Transformers #4 (script by Jim Salicrup, art by Frank Springer and Ian Akin & Brian Garvey)

I also found myself liking Ratchet, the ambulance Transformer who is the Autobot's mechanic, but I think that might be because I imagined him voiced by Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Jeff Combs, who voiced Ratchet in the 2010-13 cartoon Transformers: Prime.

Initially, the first four issues are written by three writers (Bill Mantlo, Ralph Macchio, and Jim Salicrup), but after that, the long-serving Bob Budiansky takes over. I've of two minds about Budiansky's work. He obviously doesn't want things to be stale. While on television, The Transformers was about Autobots led by Optimus Prime and Decepticons led by Megatron fighting an unchanging war, Budiansky is constantly adjusting the status quo. The logical Shockwave assumes control of the Decepticons, and manages to subdue and capture most of the Autobots. The Shockwave-Megatron throwdown is probably the best sequence in this whole volume, but other than that, the old status quo had so little time to bed in, that seeing the Autobots scattered and leaderless isn't all that effective an upset, and the Autobots don't end up with a whole lot of focus.

That said, this is a pretty great issue-ending image.
from The Transformers #5 (script by Bob Budiansky, art by Alan Kupperberg)

Budiansky likes to sprinkle in tales that put some focus on the human element, with mixed results; the trucker whose trailer is stolen by the Decepticons has some potential; the man who finds his life of crime enhanced by his possession of a Megatron locked into handgun mode is much more entertaining. So there's obviously potential here, but thus far I feel like Budiansky and his very varied artistic collaborators aren't really delivering on it.

(One last note of complaint: two issues here feature Marvel-owned characters, Spider-Man and Circuit Breaker, in issues #3 and #9. IDW actually did get the rights to reprint them in hard copy, which was, I believe, a first, but apparently not electronically. I understand that these things happen, but the e-book version of this collection doesn't explain their omission, just cutting from issue #2 to #4, and from page 55 to page 81, without a single comment!)

Next Week: Bob Budiansky does his best-ever work on The Transformers, in Classics, Vol. 2!

Reading Roundup Wrapup: September 2016

Pick of the month: The Marvelous Land of Oz by Eric Shanower and Skottie Young. I read some great books this month, foremost among them being all the Shanower/Young comic books adapting L. Frank Baum's Oz novels. This was probably my favorite of the six, because Marvelous Land's large cast of bizarre characters (Jack Pumpkinhead, the Sawhorse, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, Professor H. M. Wogglebug, T.E., the Gump) gave Skottie Young the most to play with. But really, they're all quite good. Shout outs must also go to Last Stand of the Wreckers (the best Transformers comic I've read so far), and the first volume of Doctor Who: In Their Own Words (an oral history of the making of the programme).

All books read:
1. The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers by Nick Roche & James Roberts
2. Redshirts by John Scalzi
3. The World of Flashpoint featuring the Flash by Scott Kolins, Adam Glass, and Sterling Gates, with Sean Ryan
4. Doctor Who Magazine: Special Edition #12: In Their Own Words, Volume One: 1963-69 compiled by Benjamin Cook
5. R.E.B.E.L.S.: The Coming of Starro by Tony Bedard
6. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Eric Shanower
7. Legion of Super-Heroes: Enemy Manifest by Jim Shooter
8. The Food of the Gods, and How It Came to Earth by H. G. Wells
9. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl
10. R.E.B.E.L.S.: Strange Companions by Tony Bedard
11. Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct by Paul Di Filippo
12. Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press by Will Tattersdill
13. The Marvelous Land of Oz by Eric Shanower
14. Ozma of Oz by Eric Shanower
15. Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by Eric Shanower
16. Top 10: The Forty-Niners by Alan Moore
17. Road to Oz by Eric Shanower
18. The Emerald City of Oz by Eric Shanower
19. R.E.B.E.L.S.: The Son and the Stars by Tony Bedard
20. The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum
21. R.E.B.E.L.S.: Sons of Brainiac by Tony Bedard
22. Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson
23. Flashpoint by Geoff Johns

All books acquired:
1. Legion of Super-Heroes: Enemy Manifest by Jim Shooter
2. Top 10: Beyond the Farthest Precinct by Paul Di Filippo
3. Top 10: The Forty-Niners by Alan Moore
4. Road to Oz by Eric Shanower
5. The Emerald City of Oz by Eric Shanower
6. Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson
7. The Omega Men: The End Is Here by Tom King
8. Talkback: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Doctor Who Interview Book, Volume One: The Sixties edited by Stephen James Walker
9. The Life of H. G. Wells: The Time Traveller by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie
10. Solaris Rising 3: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction edited by Ian Whates
11. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence: After The Long Goodbye by Masaki Yamada

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 624 (down 7)
Books remaining on "To review" list: 79 (up 3)

I'm readin' 'em faster than I can review 'em!

Loss

Within eleven days, I lost two things that were part of my life: my gallbladder and my wife's granny.

I've never had surgery before, not really. I had a broken arm once, I had stitches twice. I never even had my wisdom teeth out. But now I was losing a part of my body.

It's because part of my body had turned on me: I'd had three episodes of terrible abdominal pain, two of which sent me to the emergency room, where I was diagnosed with gallstones, little deposits of fat in your gallbladder that can block a duct if they end up in the wrong place. Mine did; that's what causes the pain. It's the worst pain I've ever been in. After the second attack, I was on the fence about surgery; after the third, which put me out of joint for the next forty-eight hours, I knew it had to go. In the meantime, I was on a low-fat diet, not that it always worked-- the last attack was triggered by a tofu bahn mi, which feels grossly unfair.

In one of my writing courses this semester, I'm having my students write papers about various forms of violence, often papers about how violence is written about. Once they were supposed to bring in writing where someone advocated for or justified violence, like a declaration of war. One brought in a general piece on self-defense, that argued self-defense was like surgery. You cut off a limb to preserve a body; you hurt a person to preserve the social body. I flipped the analogy around-- was it self-defense to destroy my gallbladder? Was it a form of violence?

The actual surgery was pretty anticlimactic, thanks to anesthetic. Anesthetic is weird, it's not like falling asleep. One second I was in the surgery room as everyone busied themselves getting ready, the next second I was somewhere else, in pain, and I no longer had a gallbladder. A part of me was gone, in less than a moment of time.

Some people say that when someone close to you dies, it's like losing a part of yourself. I'm not so sure. I've lost a part of myself. I destroyed a part of myself in self-defense. Watching my wife mourn, and remembering the two times I lost a grandparent, I'd rather lose an organ than a loved one. My gallbladder, according to the pathology report, was a small one, 6.5 by 2.4 centimeters. (Not to mention, "irregular [and] somewhat distorted.") A loved one leaves a much bigger hole. A hole that's possibly bigger than your own self.

Loss of a loved one can be anticlimactic. My wife's granny wasn't gone as quickly as my gallbladder, but she was gone fast. A few hours passed between when my wife got the text that her granny was on her way to the hospital and when she got the call that her granny hadn't made it. (By contrast, my grandfather died across the period of several weeks.)

But even a sudden death lingers. A passing thought (she said, she'll never get to know our children), a visit to her home (it feels strange to enter a space that so markedly belonged to someone, and know they'll never enter it again), seeing her body at the funeral home (I always find bodies weirdly lifelike, because of course they are our lives), can all spark the loss again. The only way the loss of my organ lingers emotionally is in the sense of joy I experience when I bite down into a hamburger again.

The loss of an organ occurs in a moment, and heals pretty quickly (my last steri-strip fell off the same day we heard about her granny), but the loss of a loved one remains an open wound much longer. And the hole that's left behind is the size of a lifetime.

H. G. Wells at 150: The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells by Steven McLean

One last H. G. Wells-related text in my massive backlog of unreviewed books for my continuing celebration of Wells's 150th, this one not by the man but about him:

Hardcover, 242 pages
Published 2009

Borrowed from the library
Read January 2013

The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science
by Steven McLean

Steven McLean is part of a group of Victorianist literary scholars of serial publication. When discussing the writings of H. G. Wells, for example, he doesn't consider them as sort of Platonian ideal objects, but as products of the nineteenth-century periodical press. This necessitates not just reading Wells's novels in their serial versions (where relevant), but also reading what other material appeared in those periodicals, and reading what H. G. Wells was publishing elsewhere. There's so much, largely ephemeral, material out there that can illuminate the world in which these novels were being written and read. He charts three stages for Wells's early science fiction: 1895-96: pessimistic Darwinian fables (The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau), 1897-98: recognizable social settings (The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds), and 1901-05: future directions for humanity (The First Men in the Moon and A Modern Utopia).

What you get from all this is a very solid monograph, one that shows how Wells was interested in what science could say about society: whether society was evolving (and how), how science could be used to shape a better society, what role scientists had to play in society, could eugenics improve society, what did evolution have to do with imperialism, and so on. This is a set of well-articulated perspectives on six H. G. Wells novels, the kind of thing that can be a very helpful grounding when you go off to write about those novels yourself. I should cite it more!

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Houses of Mystery and Secrets, Part XVIII: House of Secrets Omnibus

Comic hardcover, 733 pages
Published 2013 (contents: 1996-2001)
Borrowed from the library
Read April 2016

House of Secrets Omnibus

Writer: Steven T. Seagle

Artists: Teddy Kristiansen, D'Israeli, Guy Davis, Duncan Fegredo, Christian Højgaard, Dean Ormston, The Pander Bros.
Colorist: Bjarne Hansen

Letterer: Todd Klein

About two years ago, I read Foundation, the collection of the first five issues of the 1990s revival of House of Secrets. At the time, the omnibus of all 25 issues plus assorted extras had recently come out but I was unable to source it via interlibrary loan, but on this pass back through Sandman tie-ins I was able to finally secure it. It's a mammoth work: at 733 pages of story, plus unnumbered behind-the-scenes pages, you could really do damage to someone else with this book. Or to yourself if you carry it around in a backpack.

There's a lot to take in here, so probably this review will spiral out of control; I'll begin by not reviewing the opening arc Foundation again, since I already have. (Click on the link in the first paragraph if you care.) I should note that the issues are reordered from publication order here, apparently hitting some kind of ideal reading order, and I read them in the order they're placed here. As a result, book opens not with Foundation, but with what was originally issue #7, "Blueprint: Elevation A," which chronicles the building of the house that eventually became the House of Secrets, intertwining tales of the architect who designed the house, the actual builder of the house and the owner's wife, the House itself, an Indian tribe who used to own the land it was built on, and the blueprint. As you might imagine if you've ever read a 1990s Vertigo comic, they're all dark stories that end in tragedy, but they entertain in a sort of macabre Twilight Zone fashion.

The story rotates through each story, one half-page panel at a time, each with its own distinctive style of lettering.
from House of Secrets vol. 2 #7 (art by Teddy Kristiansen)

Foundation is followed by The Book of Law, a six-part story that fills in the backstories of the dead souls who make up Rain Harper's fellow members of the Juris, the mysterious court in the House's pantry who judge people for the secrets they hold. These are Digol, a Babylonian warlord-turned-court-official; Ruby, a black woman from the 1960s South who gets involved with a white man; Pfaultz, a Middle Ages charlatan who exploits fears of the plague to get money and sex; NiAn, the wife of a dead Japanese warlord suspected of his murder; Clius, a young Roman who gets sexually involved with the Emperor; and the concept of the number five. I liked most of these stories on their own merits-- each draws a nice, one-issue tragedy, some about sweet characters (Ruby) and some about genuinely awful ones (Pfaultz). Though Teddy Kristiansen drew most issues of House of Secrets, The Book of Law lets some guest artists step in to enhance each story with its own distinctive tone, most successfully, Guy Davis (of Sandman Mystery Theatre fame) on Ruby's story. But it was a little weird for the narrative to swerve into covering five side characters after only five issues of the series's regular characters. I think these would have worked better interspersed throughout the series (like the "Times Past" segments of Starman) as opposed to all at once.