Justice Society of America: A Celebration of 75 Years

Justice Society of America: A Celebration of 75 Years

Collection published: 2015
Contents originally published: 1941-2012
Acquired: December 2019
Read: December 2019–September 2023

Writers: Gardner Fox, Robert Kanigher, John Broome, Dennis O'Neil, Paul Levitz, Roy Thomas, Len Strazewski, James Robinson, David Goyer, Geoff Johns & Alex Ross

Artists: Everett E. Hibbard, Martin Nodell, Bernard Baily, Howard Sherman, Chad Grothkopf, Sheldon Moldoff, Ben Flinton, Irwin Hasen, Joe Kubert, Alex Toth, Carmine Infantino, John Belfi, Frank Giacoia, Arthur F. Peddy, Bernard Sachs, Mike Sekowsky, Sid Greene, Dick Dillin, Joe Giella, Joe Staton, Rich Buckler, Jerry Ordway, Arvell Jones, Tony DeZuniga, Mike Parobeck, Mike Machlan, William Rosado, John Dell, Ray Kryssing, Stephen Sadowski, Michael Bair, Dave Meikis, Paul Neary, Rob Leigh, Alex Ross, Dale Eaglesham, Ruy Jose, Drew Geraci, Nicola Scott & Trevor Scott

When I began my JSA journey way back in December 2019, this 2015 volume had been put on sale on Comixology, so I picked it up; it contains a sampling of stories from across seventy-five years of the Justice Society, ranging from the first original story of the team in All Star Comics vol. 1 #4 (Mar./Apr. 1941) up to its then most recent incarnation in Earth 2 #6 (Jan. 2013). Some of it was redundant with material I was going to read anyway, but it was a good source for stories I would not have otherwise have read, and I sprinkled those among the other tales of my four-year Justice Society marathon. I'll review those ones here, but also point out where you can find my comments on the other inclusions.

All Star Comics vol. 1 #4, 37, & 55 (Mar./Apr. 1941–Oct./Nov. 1950)
These are three classic JSA stories. All Star #4 wasn't their first adventure—but it was their first adventure as a team. The first three issues of All Star had the JSA regaling each other with tales of solo adventures; this one has them all working together, though though do the traditional thing of splitting up to handle their own aspects of the case, and the individual parts are even drawn by each character's usual artist. All three are Golden Age comics: more interesting for what they do than the crude way in which they do it. But I did enjoy the sprawling nature of All Star #4 in particular; it's a whopping sixty pages!

from Justice League of America vol. 1 #82
(script by Denny O'Neil, art by Dick Dillin & Joe Giella)

Justice League of America vol. 1 #21-22, 30, 47, & 82-83 (Aug. 1963–Sept. 1970)
Of course, you couldn't have a Justice Society history collection without JLA #21-22, the story that reintroduced them as denizens of Earth-2 during the Silver Age. But I don't really get what the other ones are doing here; I didn't really enjoy them when I originally read them in the various Crisis on Multiple Earths volumes, and I didn't enjoy them here. It would have been better to use some of the stories that tap into the idea that the JSA has its own history where characters can really grow and change, like JLA #171-72.

Adventure Comics vol. 1 #466 (Nov./Dec. 1979)
This is the Silver Age version of the JSA's disbanding, which I already reviewed as part of All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever, and which was also included in Justice Society of America: The Demise of Justice.

from Justice League of America vol. 1 #193
(script by Roy Thomas, art by Rich Buckler & Jeremiah Ordway)

Justice League of America vol. 1 #193 (Aug. 1981)
This fourteen-page backup serves as a prelude to All-Star Squadron. It probably reads weirdly on its own, to be honest, but if you're going to read All-Star Squadron afterward (and I did), it provides excellent context for issue #1. If A-SS is ever collected, I imagine this will be included, but there's no sign of that thus far.

All-Star Squadron #67 (Mar. 1987)
The post-Crisis origin of the JSA, which I already reviewed as part of All-Star Squadron. I would have preferred to see an actual A-SS story, but this is fine.

Justice Society of America vol. 2 #10 (May 1993) / All Star Comics vol. 2 #2 (May 1999) / JSA #25 (Aug. 2001) / Justice Society of America vol. 3 #10 (Dec. 2007)
A number of modern age revivals and/or flashbacks that I've already reviewed: the 1990s one, an installment of The Justice Society Returns!, an issue of JSA (included in JSA by Geoff Johns, Book Two), and an issue of Geoff Johns's second Justice Society revival. For every single one of these series, I would have picked something else. I was glad to see the 1990s revival here, because it's often overlooked... but surely the first issue would make more sense than the last. The installment of The Justice Society Returns! included here doesn't even make sense in context, much less out of it; literally any other issue of the event would have been better. The JSA issue is part of a tedious crossover with Hawkman; there surely must have been a better option. And the last inclusion here is from another big event, Thy Kingdom Come; I would have picked Johns's last issue on the series, "Happy Birthday Stargirl!"

from Earth 2 #6
(script by James Robinson, art by Nicola Scott & Trevor Scott)

Earth 2 #6 (Jan. 2013)
I mean, I guess they had to include some issue of Earth 2 here, and someone must like it, but this just confirmed to me that everything I suspected about the series was true. This has character names from the JSA, but making them contemporary characters battling the apocalypse means they lose everything that makes the JSA interesting and enjoyable.

Overall, a pretty mixed bag, to be honest. Some necessary inclusions, but some pretty questionable ones, too.

This post is the penultimate in an improbably long series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Power Girl Returns. Previous installments are listed below:

The Making of the Cities: Cincinnati by Lee Davis Willoughby

Americana: The Making of the Cities: Cincinnati
by Lee Davis Willoughby

The Making of America was a series of novels published from (according to LibraryThing) 1979 to 1987; there were an astounding fifty-six of them. They chronicled, as far as I can tell, the settling of the American West, but I don't think they had consistent characters or stories. The first few books are credited to a number of different authors, but beginning with book nine, they're all the work of Lee Davis Willougby... except that Lee Davis Willoughby didn't exist, it was a pseudonym for a variety of authors. LibraryThing lists six different authors known to have written under the name.

Published: 1990
Acquired: December 2022
Read: June 2023

In 1990, there was evidently an attempt to recapture the success of The Making of America with a new series of novels, Americana: The Making of the Cities. Three volumes were released, covering Cincinnati, Omaha, and Baton Rouge. These evidently were less successful, for these three were it, and thirty-three years later, I am the only person on LibraryThing to have logged any of the three novels. I picked up Cincinnati as part of my project to read novels set in my hometown of Cincinnati.

The novel focalizes the development of Cincinnati from the 1830s to the 1860s through a German immigrant, one of the first to come to Cincinnati. As the descendant of German immigrants myself (though they came over later, in the 1870s), I was particularly interested to read this take on it.

Alas, as you might have guessed of a pseudonymously written work of the type where you might pump out seven books in a year... it's not very good. I think my biggest problem is that despite the title, you don't get much of a sense of the city. Most of the book is given over to the melodrama of its protagonist's life, with the development of the city as a vague background. What is it like to walk around and live in Cincinnati in 1830? 1850? 1860? We only get glimpses. Facts about the history feel crowbarred in to prove the writer did their research; people will say things like, "Cincinnati has more people per square mile than any other city in the Union," or mention that Frances Trollope has visited the city for no real reason, or suddenly start talking about the creation of the Mount Lookout Observatory, and then go back to what they were supposed to be saying. There are a lot of neat aspects of Cincinnati history to be uncovered, but they aren't really integrated into the story.

The story in the foreground is pretty meh. The protagonist is a real piece of work, brutal in business, forceful and exploitative of women, callous toward people of color. Whoever Willoughby was in this case, their writing ability doesn't rise to the level of making this interesting to read about; our glimpses of the protagonist's mind are trite. As the book goes on, more and more of it is given over to this subplot about potential incest involving the protagonist's children. It goes on too long and it's just not very well written.

It's 372 pages long, but I blazed through it in less than two days. Before reading it, I was mildly curious about Omaha, but given the quality of this one, I won't be seeking out any other Lee Davis Willoughby... whoever they were.

Twenty Years of Reading Logs, Part 4: General Literature

My fourth post in my series about my reading since college covers the category "general literature." This is my catch-all term for what you might also call "mimetic fiction" (and also, say, poetry). That is to say, stories that take place in the world of the reader/writer. This definition obviously excludes science fiction and fantasy, but it does include some genre fiction, like mysteries and espionage. In a world where I read more mystery, I'd probably break it out, but I don't read enough of it to justify that.

	2003-07	2007-11	2011-15	2015-19	2019-23	TOTAL	PCT
T. Hardy	1	7	5	1	0	14	0.5%
C. Dickens	1	2	4½	2	4	13½	0.5%
G. Eliot	0	4	4	2	2	12	0.4%
E. Gaskell	0	3	5	0	0	8	0.3%
W. Collins	1	1	3½	2	0	7½	0.3%
C. Kingsley	0	1	3	3	0	7	0.2%
Other Victorian	8	9	32	17	0	66	2.3%
Horatio Hornblower	3	5	0	11	0	19	0.6%
Inspector Lynley	8	3	7	0	0	18	0.6%
James Bond 007	0	0	2	10	6	18	0.6%
F. H. Burnett	0	1	14	0	0	18	0.6%
V. Woolf	1	8	1	0	0	10	0.3%
A. C. Doyle	0	0	7	0	0	7	0.2%
L. Durrell	1	4	1	0	0	6	0.2%
J. Winterson	1	2	1	1	1	6	0.2%
S. Fry	5	0	0	0	0	5	0.2%
Other Literature	56	82	30	27	13	208	7.1%
TOTAL	86	132	120	76	26	440	15.0%
PCT	15.6%	21.7%	17.8%	12.3%	5.4%	15.0%

On average, general lit makes up 15% of my reading diet, but this has ebbed and flowed a lot over the years. It peaked 2007-11, which would be the period I had just come out of college (which substantially reshaped my reading tastes) and was beginning grad school (where I was of course taking a lot of seminars that required me to read a lot of literature). These days it's down to a mere 5%; doing the Hugos has me prioritizing genre reading and, well, something has to give.

Unsurprisingly, the Victorians (the first seven rows on the chart) peak in 2011-15, the time when I read for my comprehensive exams. What did surprise me was to see that other than two books by Eliot and four by Dickens, I have read nothing by a Victorian for four years! Even worse, no Elizabeth Gaskell in eight! What must Tom Recchio think of me?

Some specific notes:

• Charles Dickens clearly benefits from my project to read one Dickens novel every Christmas. I only have a few more to go; I think I might open it up to all the Victorian novels I own but have not read at that point. So I will at least get one per year!
• Horatio Hornblower: I read most of the series just before grad school, but stalled out; I then returned to it years later, starting over, meaning it's the thing I've read more of than any other "literature" series.
• Inspector Lynley Mysteries: For a while, I was working my way through this series, but then I caught up and haven't read any since. Someday I will have to swing back to it and read everything that's come out since I left off.
• James Bond was the focus of my attention for a while, as I read one book every three months or so. Now I've read them all! That said, there's some comics I want to read (and I never did finish the movies), so I really must get back to that.
• Frances Hodgson Burnett: Who would have guessed she'd be one of my top authors!? Blame Tom Recchio, of course.
• Jeanette Winterson: Other than Dickens, Winterson is the only author represented in all five of my four-year segments. So I may not be moving through her work quickly, but I am doing so steadily.

I wish I had more non-sf&f in my rotation... but how I might do this and not shortchange all the other things I wish I read more of, I have no idea.

"Maybe you were too tough for the JUSTICE SOCIETY... but, mister, now you've got to fight the SUPER SQUAD!": JSA All-Stars

During Justice Society of America vol. 3 (see item #44 below), a particularly stupid subplot saw the JSA breaking up into two distinct teams: the original JSA relocated to Happy Harbor to keep doing their thing, while a group of offshoots led by Power Girl but instigated by Magog formed the "All-Stars," which were supposed to be proactive and militaristic. The result was an eighteen-issue spin-off series called JSA All-Stars published from 2010 to 2011,* written by Lilah Sturges (then known as Matthew) and mostly illustrated by Freddie Williams II. (Flashpoint and the New 52 would kill it off.)

Like... why? If the twenty-first century JSA has worked at all, it's worked when it's been about the team's long history, its "legacy." The All-Stars undermine this by siphoning the legacy characters away from the original ones; the team mostly consists of younger heroes like Power Girl, Hourman, Cyclone, King Chimera, Wildcat II, Damage, and Stargirl. These characters are mostly interesting when contrasted against the older heroes. On top of that, the whole instigating incident is quickly rendered pointless when in Justice Society of America Annual vol. 3 #2, set between issues #3 and 4 of JSA All-Stars, Magog leaves the team! Thus the new proactive, militaristic JSA groups loses the person who makes them proactive and militaristic. So why did they split exactly? (Power Girl herself actually lampshades this with a conversation in the Power Trip collection.)

Once you move beyond that supposedly-unique-but-pointless team set-up... there's not much to this. There are three big story arcs, plus a couple smaller stories, and all of them left me cold. A lot of "big" action—gods returning, people jumping timelines, journeys into other dimensions—but nothing that ever seems clever or interesting, nothing that elevates the title above fairly generic superhero punch-ups. There are good characters on this team... but who is Stargirl when she's not part of the real JSA? Who is the Rick Tyler Hourman away from his wife? (More on him later.) This overlaps with Amanda Conner's Power Girl, and the character here has basically nothing to do with the character there other than costume. At one point a sorceress joins the team, and no one ever even bothers to explain who she is or where she is from. (I think Victorian England? Would have been nice to know.)

The one good issue is probably the Blackest Night epilogue, where everyone mourns the death of Damage. Unfortunately, it makes you realize more was done with him in one issue after he died than in six issues where he was alive.

Freddie Williams is a competent artist, and I seem to remember enjoying other work by him, but nothing from this title sticks out positively in my memory. There is a funny bit where a villain is using what is clearly the TARDIS console and control room from Doctor Who... and Williams (coincidentally, one assumes) draws the villain looking like Jodie Whittaker!

from JSA All-Stars vol. 2 #9
(script by Jen Van Meter, art by Travis Moore & Dan Green)

The one thing that does kind of work is the Liberty Belle and Hourman back-up, The Inheritance. Set before the team split up, this covers the adventures of the married couple as they travel around the world to track down a powerful artifact, competing against but sometimes working with Icicle and Tigress. It appears in ten-page installments from issues #2 to #11. It's kind of hard to follow at times—one has the feeling no one involved knows how to tell a story in ten-page chunks—but it's fun. I like Jen Van Meter's work on JSA Classified a lot, and it's good to see her writing these two villains again, and she does great by the superpowered power couple as well. Travis Moore acquits himself well on pencils, and it's always great to see the dependable Dan Green on inks. I don't know if these were collected, but it probably would have made a nice 100-page collection (maybe throw in the Liberty Belle/Hourman stories from the Justice Society of America 80-Page Giants), but I suspect no one other than me would buy it, alas.

This post is forty-eighth in an almost concluded series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Justice Society of America: A Celebration of 75 Years. Previous installments are listed below:

Reading Roundup Wrapup: November 2023

Pick of the month: Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold. Well, you know, everyone says the Vorkosigan books are good and it turns out they are right. I had actually read this one before but appreciated it much more this time around. More on it later, but it is a very good book about parenting!

All books read: 

1. The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
2. The Wonder City of Oz by John R. Neill
3. Elantris: Tenth Anniversary Author’s Definitive Edition by Brandon Sanderson
4. The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Two: Second Variety by Philip K. Dick
5. Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold
6. Once & Future: Deluxe Edition, Book One by Kieron Gillen and Dan Mora
7. Once & Future, Volume Four: Monarchies in the U.K. by Kieron Gillen and Dan Mora
8. Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters by Dennis Hopeless, John Warner, Stever Gerber, Juan Doe, Mike Vosburg, Sal Buscema, Val Mayerik, Alan Kupperberg, et al.
9. Once & Future, Volume Five: The Wasteland by Kieron Gillen and Dan Mora 

A number of books that are a bit on the long side (#1, 3, 4, and 5, plus the book I'm reading now) conspired to keep my numbers down despite some pretty steady reading and the benefit of a solo plane trip. Thankfully four comics came along at the end of the month!

All books acquired:

1. The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Two: Second Variety by Philip K. Dick
2. Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters by Dennis Hopeless, John Warner, Stever Gerber, Juan Doe, Mike Vosburg, Sal Buscema, Val Mayerik, Alan Kupperberg, et al.
3. Diplomatic Immunity by Lois McMaster Bujold
4. The Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
5. Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Volume 2 by Edmond Hamilton, John Forte, et al.
6. Liberation of the Daleks: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Alan Barnes and Lee Sullivan

Slightly higher than normal, I think. 

Currently reading:

• Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett
• The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 7 edited by Neil Clarke
• Doctor Who: Short Trips #19: Dalek Empire edited by Nicholas Briggs with Simon Guerrier
• Liberation of the Daleks: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Alan Barnes and Lee Sullivan 

Up next in my rotations:

1. Otherworld Barbara Vol. 2 by Moto Hagio
2. Adventures With the Wife in Space: Living with Doctor Who by Neil Perryman with Sue Perryman
3. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Long Mirage by David R. George III 
4. The Pelican History of England: 3. English Society in the Early Middle Ages (1066-1307) by Doris Mary Stenton
   

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 666 (no change)

Bernice Summerfield: In Time edited by Xanna Eve Chown

Bernice Summerfield: In Time
edited by Xanna Eve Chown

In Time was the last Bernice Summerfield book published by Big Finish in hard copy: evidently sales had diminished too much after this point to justify keeping the range going. By the time I went to buy my copy, you couldn't get one in hard copy even if you wanted to! There is not a hard copy to be had even on the secondary market, it was so rare. I had to settle for buying an ebook version, but I am keeping an eye out for a hardcover to complete my Benny books collection.

Published: 2018
Acquired: July 2023
Read: August 2023

The book was published in 2018, for Benny's twentieth anniversary at Big Finish, and it celebrates the complete run of the character, with stories set across the span of her life, from her young days at Space Academy to her time in the "Unbound Universe," and possibly even beyond that.

As a longtime fan of the character, I definitely appreciate the excuse for some nostalgia. Along those lines, my favorite story was certainly Simon Guerrier's "Benny and the Grieving Man," set during my favorite "era" of Benny, when she's based at the Braxiatel Collection, and indeed, set during one of my favorite Benny books, A Life Worth Living. The story is a human one, about Benny trying to help a man whose daughter died on the Collection... but is he all he seems? Like some of the best Benny stories, it engages in what it's like to live in a place that has undergone great tragedy and deal with the consequences, with the weight of histories, both public and personal.

Some of the stories are explicitly about Benny's history, instead of just set during it; this is particularly true of the two set in the Unbound Universe, traveling with David Warner's alternative Doctor (though of course he can't actually appear in this not-BBC-licensed anthology). "Legacy Presence" by Victoria CW Simpson has Benny meeting the ghost of someone from her time at Space Academy—in a universe where that person can't possibly have existed—and "The Death of Hope" by James Goss has Benny and the Mother Superior from the Unbound audios trying to see if there's any possibility of hope in a doomed universe. The former is so-so, much like the stories collected in True Stories (it could almost be a cut story from that book), but the latter is a strong piece of character writing, which gives us both nostalgia and its dangers.

Three stories I wanted to like more, but were just okay. Mark Clapham's "The Seventh Fanfic" (set during the Dellah years, shortly before Beige Planet Mars) has some neat ideas, but Benny feels mostly like an observer to them. I wish there'd been more recurring characters and such from the era; c'mon, where's Emile and Tameka? "The Bunny's Curse" by Doris V Sutherland (set during the Space Academy years) seems to give us the beginning of Benny's interest in archaeology, but that moment could have clicked more. "Old Ruins" by Peter Anghelides gives us an older Benny... but it's a dull story that goes on too long to too little effect, alas.

Two more were not very good at all. "Wurm Noir" by Antonio Rastelli fails to make much of anything interesting of Benny's time on Legion... but that's fair, neither could the writers of that actual era. Worst of all is Dave Stone's "Oh No, Not Again," which like much of his work (though not all!), is an unfunny joke stretched out far too much.

On the whole, it's not terrible, but it is one of the weaker Benny anthologies from Big Finish. This will remind you why you love the character (if like me, you do), but it won't make you love her. I'd have liked to have seen more stories like "The Grieving Man" and "The Death of Hope" that worked with the themes that really make Benny work, instead of adventures that just happen to be set during her past.

I read a post–New Doctor Who Adventures novel every three months. Next up in sequence: none!

---

Since August 2015, I've been working my way through a collection of Virgin New Adventures, BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures, and various adjacent books, mostly featuring Bernice Summerfield. That began with Bernice Summerfield: Genius Loci, and eight years and twenty-seven books later, it has finally come to an end! It's been an interesting journey through some excellent (and some non-so-excellent) books. I've loved getting a better understanding of the VNAs, and getting to see more of my favorite Doctor in action in prose.

I had thought that I would circle back around and plug in some more VNAs and EDAs that interest me, but I decided that instead of buying more Doctor Who books I should focus on reading ones I already own, so—for a while at least—I'm going to start working my way through them in purchase order. First up will be Short Trips: Dalek Empire, which I got way back in July 2008!

Reading Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz Aloud to My Son... and I Find My Childhood Oz Reading Log!

Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill

Ruth Plumly Thompson's last few Oz books (the stretch from Speedy in Oz to Silver Princess) seemed to show her cutting free of Baum's world and restrictions, fully embracing Oz as a land of her creation, focusing on her original characters and exploring new plot structures—largely, I think, to her benefit. But this book, her last contribution to the "Famous Forty," very purposefully returns to Baum's world and characters.

Originally published: 1939
Acquired: ~1996?
Read aloud: September–October 2023

Was this because she knew it would be her last, a sort of farewell tour? I don't think so, because the author's note at the beginning seems to very strongly imply she will be back for the next one! Rather, it was 1939, and something happened in the world of Oz that year that would change it forever... just not in the books. It was the year of the MGM film, and of course Thompson's publisher would want to have a tie-in edition on the shelves.

But they couldn't! While Reilly & Lee held the publishing rights to every Oz book from Marvelous Land onward, the publishing rights to the original Wonderful Wizard were held by Bobbs-Merrill. So Thompson and her publisher instead came up with a book that would be a direct sequel to the first, focusing on the main characters of that book. At the beginning, the Wizard has planned a special dinner for all the people involved in Dorothy's first visit to Oz: himself and Dorothy, of course, but also the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion, Jellia Jamb (the Emerald City maid who takes care of Dorothy, though she goes unnamed until Marvelous Land), and the Soldier with the Green Whiskers. (The Guardian of the Gates is invited, but declines to leave the gates; there's no mention of other key characters from the first book like the Queen of the Field Mice or the leader of the Winged Monkeys.) 

I would assume Thompson and her publisher had no idea exactly who from the first book would end up on screen, but were trying to get what they thought would be prominent film characters front and center in the book. Additionally, you'll see on the cover how "THE WIZARD OF OZ" is written quite big while "OZOPLANING WITH" is in smaller type; from a distance, it looks like a book called The Wizard of Oz. You liked the movie, now read the book! Kind of, anyway.

But it's hard for me to imagine anyone picking up this book on the strength of the film and enjoying it. One problem is the characters Thompson chooses to focus on. She gives the principal roles (for the first half of the book, anyway) to Jellia Jamb, the Soldier with the Green Whiskers, and the Tin Woodman. They accidentally blast off on one of the Wizard's new ozoplanes, and the other characters try to catch up with them on the other one. I assume this is because Jellia and the Soldier had never been focal characters in the thirty-two previous Oz books, and though Baum had reused the Tin Woodman a lot, Thompson had never given him anything to do in her eighteen previous ones.

This leads to a number of problems. First and foremost, Jellia doesn't even make it into the film, and the Soldier is just barely in it. Second, Thompson seems unable to commit to Jellia as protagonist; while she leads the action in the first half of the book, she abruptly ceases to be the focal character in the second half, once the second group catches up, and the Wizard suddenly becomes the protagonist. Ideas seeded in the first half—Jellia being a maid forced to act the role of ruler—go nowhere.

Second, though Thompson writes a fun Soldier with the Green Whiskers (his obsession with pickles is an addition my five-year-old found hilarious), she forgets what little backstory Baum had given him. Though admittedly Baum doesn't state it outright, the character of Omby Amby in Ozma of Oz, Dorothy and the Wizard, and Emerald City is clearly meant to be the same person. But here, Thompson gives him the groanworthy name of Wantowin Battles! I changed it back to "Omby Amby" when reading aloud, though I did like the hints of backstory we get here: why would a Munchkin be a tall person with green facial hair? No wonder he left home and enlisted in the Wizard's army!

Third... is this the Tin Woodman? Thompson had not ever used him before—and reading this book, one is grateful she avoided the character so long. Thompson's Tin Woodman is an imperialist and a bully. The kindhearted man of the original novel is nowhere in evidence. It's impossible to imagine someone going from the movie (or the first book) to this one and recognizing him except in shape. (Thompson mostly calls him "Nick Chopper" in narration, causing my son to ask who that was. It's been so long since he's really been in a book, he'd forgotten his proper name! I then began editing it to "Tin Woodman" most of the time when reading aloud.)

But this is the plight of most of the characters from the original novel. The Scarecrow never does anything clever here, the Cowardly Lion has some good funny moments but never does anything brave. Worst of all, Dorothy just shrinks into the background rather than take charge as she usually does. And these are all characters that Thompson usually does well by! I don't know what happened, maybe the forced nature of this installment caused her to really phone it in, but the result is a book that totally fails to capture the magic of the one it's supposed to follow up. For me, at least, Thompson's final Famous Forty contribution is her worst book since her first one.

It has its moments; the assault of Strut of the Strat on the Emerald City is handled well, particularly the Tin Woodman's defiance of him; my son correctly guess what had happened to Ozma's safe when it seemingly exploded. The two deer characters are fun (though naming one "Shaggy" confused my son; does Thompson even remember the Shaggy Man?), and the Wizard does indeed get to be a bit clever. My son said he enjoyed it... though he was less likely to just ask to read more of it than he has been with the last few Oz books, and we sure dragged through the last few chapters especially.

Basically any of Thompson's previous five books would have made a better "finale" to her run than this one. That said, she later wrote two more Oz books, so we're not done with her yet. But before we get to those, we have the wares of John R. Neill, Jack Snow, and Rachel Cosgrove to sample...

* * *

As I have remarked around here before, I owned all of the Baum books as a kid, but only a few of Thompson's: just Silver Princess and Ozoplaning. What other Thompsons I read, I got through interlibrary loan. As I've reread them, though, nothing has really sparked a memory of reading them before, except I do remember "Ozamaland" from Captain Salt. So I've been wondering: which Thompsons did I actually read? All of them? Just some of them?

When cleaning out my office recently, I found the answer to this question. In a pile of papers dating back to the late 1990s, I found a printout of a spreadsheet I must have made circa 1997:

You'll see that it contains all of the Oz books I knew about then: most but not all of the Famous Forty (e.g., Merry Go Round in Oz is missing, though I did own that one as a kid; that must postdate this list), plus a couple quasicanonical ones (e.g., Runaway in Oz), "borderlands" books (e.g., Magical Monarch of Mo and Dot and Tot in Merryland), and many later continuation books, mostly those published by Books of Wonder (e.g., How the Wizard Came to Oz, The Glass Cat of Oz).

Plus, my own then-forthcoming magnum opus, The Bubble to Oz! I think I wrote the first two chapters of this; I wonder what happened to it. It was about my brother and sister traveling to Oz in a magic bubble like the ones from Road to Oz.

They're sorted chronologically, of course; the "Read" column indicates if I owned it ("O"), read it but didn't own it ("R"), or had no experience of it ("N"). From this, we can see that at the time I wrote the list, the Famous Forty books I had borrowed from the library were:

• The Royal Book of Oz
• Grampa in Oz
• The Purple Prince of Oz
• Ojo in Oz
• The Wishing Horse of Oz
• Captain Salt in Oz
• Handy Mandy in Oz
• The Magical Mimics in Oz
• The Shaggy Man of Oz
  

I would never have guessed. None of these books struck a chord of memory aside from Captain Salt. I guess this makes sense, as I read each one just the once... but still, I am surprised. I would never have thought I read Jack Snow's in particular!

I did find my childhood ratings pretty interesting. My 10/10 Oz books were:

• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
• The Emerald City of Oz
• The Patchwork Girl of Oz
• Rinkitink in Oz
• The Lost Princess of Oz
• The Magic of Oz
• Ojo in Oz 
• Handy Mandy in Oz
• Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz
• The Magical Mimics in Oz
• The Shaggy Man of Oz

Though I would still rate Wizard and Patchwork Girl highly, many of the other ones on this list do not hold up for me as an adult. Emerald City and Ozoplaning, really!? I guess I will soon see if Jack Snow's two books hold up.

On the other hand, the only "7" I gave to a Famous Forty novel was to the very next one we are reading... John R. Neill's Wonder City of Oz. Uh oh.

Next up in sequence: The Wonder City of Oz

Power Girl: Power Trip by Geoff Johns, Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, and Amanda Conner

Power Girl: Power Trip

Collection published: 2023
Contents originally published: 2005-10
Acquired and read: August 2023

Writers: Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Geoff Johns, Amanda Conner

Artist: Amanda Conner
Inker: Jimmy Palmiotti

Colorist: Paul Mounts

Letterers: John J. Hill, Rob Leigh

When I reread the "Power Trip" arc of JSA Classified (see item #39 in the long list below), I was reminded of how awful Geoff Johns's writing was... but also what a brilliant artist Amanda Conner was, and what a good fit she was for the buoyant, expressive Power Girl. So I decided to pick up this collection, which contains all twelve issues of her run on Power Girl vol. 2. (Unfortunately, it also includes that terrible JSA Classified story, but I skipped it rather than suffer through it a third time. Note that Geoff Johns gets first billing on the cover for writing just four of the seventeen issues included here, whereas Amanda Conner—the only person to work on all seventeen and the volume's clear star—is down in fourth. Must be nice to be the former president of DC!)

The twelve issues of Power Girl collected here run concurrently with Justice Society of America vol. 3 #29-40 and JSA All-Stars vol. 2 #1-6, taking place during the time when Power Girl is leading the JSA. (When the volume opens, the team seems to be unified still; by the time of the closing arc, it has split up, and Magog has left.) But the story's focus is on the fact that despite what's happening with the Justice Society, Power Girl is no longer frustrated at her lack of a clear origin, and just trying to be herself—whoever that may be. So for the first time in a long while, she's reactivated her civilian identity of Karen Starr, and is using it to build a technology company while she moves out of the JSA brownstone into an apartment of her own. She develops friendships, and builds up her own supporting cast. There's even her cat from her JLI days.

I would not have guessed Wonder Woman was great with cats... except to the extent that she's great at everything, I suppose.
from Wonder Woman vol. 1 #600 (script & art by Amanda Conner)

It's one of those runs that you can't point to a single issue and say "this is an amazing comic book" but where you can point to the whole and say "this is what a superhero comic book should be." It's funny, it's charming, it's goofy, it has a unique personality all its own. Sometimes Power Girl is battling the Ultra-Humanite and his former lover Santana, but sometimes she's stopping alien girls gone wild and a virile alien warlord who wants to repopulate his sterilized planet, sometimes she's helping out a teenage boy by going comic book shopping with him. Writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti have admittedly produced some real shit in their time at DC, but this plays to their strengths—or at least to Conner's, who is surely in the Top Ten of superhero comics artists, and consistently elevates any material she is given.

Bring back Vartox.
from Power Girl vol. 2 #12 (script by Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti, art by Amanda Conner)

In Conner's hands, comedy, action, and emotion all get good play, letting the whole story come alive. Sometimes the main conflict of one of these stories will end halfway through an issue, and the rest will just be about Power Girl chilling with her sidekick/new friend Terra—and it is always a delight. Conner hits the perfect note with PG's physical appearance, giving us a woman who is attractive but not objectified. I mean, Gray and Palmiotti definitely write in gratuitous moments, but they feel natural and part of the story. (Which is not always the case with Power Girl; shortly before writing this review, I read JSA All-Stars #1, where PG's costume gets strategically torn in such a way as to reveal her entire midriff, and where her boobs are always hanging in "attractive" unnatural positions... bleh.)

My favorite Atlee moment, though, is probably the bit where she pretends to be from Australia.
from Power Girl vol. 2 #3 (script by Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti, art by Amanda Conner)

Like many great runs, the worst thing about it is that it wasn't longer; I gladly would have read another twelve issues from this team. I felt that the supporting cast at Karen's new company barely got started in what they could do, and I want more Kara and Atlee bonding in New York City. But even though this comic lasted another fifteen issues, Judd Winick took over as writer and it became (to my understanding, anyway) a Brightest Day tie-in; neither the writer nor the change of focus appeals. That said, it did make me interested in picking up PG's newest series... the journey never ends, does it?

This post is forty-seventh in an ever-expanding series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers volume 2 of JSA All-Stars. Previous installments are listed below:

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

As a science fiction fan who attended a Jesuit high school, I am a big fan of the "Jesuits in space" subgenre of science fiction, and so I was delighted to receive this as a SantaThing gift a few years ago (and appropriately enough, I received the subgenre's other most prominent example, James Blish's A Case of Conscience, from the same program way back in its first year).

Originally published: 1996
Acquired: December 2021
Read: January 2023

I wouldn't say I loved this, but I liked it a lot. (It's too brutal for "enjoyed" to be the right word.) It bounces back and forth between the planning for and the aftermath of a terrible Jesuit expedition to the first known inhabited extraterrestrial planet. Russell is a very methodical writer, laying down her characters and themes and background in great detail, and I in particular enjoyed her rich character work here. All the people here really come to life, and you are very much invested in every step they take.

Brother Guy Consolmagno, S.J., the Jesuit astronomer and sf fan, tore into the book, saying, "the real crime of this novel is that the Jesuit characters take themselves far too seriously. Our real reaction to soul-shattering events is, more often than not, to laugh at ourselves and our predicament." It is a very serious book... but I actually think that's an unfair assessment of the characters, who have very well-developed senses of humor. But though I have been around many Jesuits (my high school and college best friend is one now), I am not one, so maybe that gives him a different perspective.

Terra by Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, and Amanda Conner

Terra

Collection published: 2009
Contents originally published: 2007-09
Acquired and read: August 2023

Writers: Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti

Penciller: Amanda Conner
Inkers: Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner

Colorists: Rod Reis, Paul Mounts

Letterers: Rob Leigh, Travis Lanham, Sal Cipriano, Swands

After I read Justice Society of America vol. 3, I moved onto Power Girl: Power Trip, which collects a Power Girl ongoing that overlapped with it. But a few issues into it, I was starting to wonder what the deal was with "Terra," Power Girl's sidekick and friend, who comes from a hidden nation of subterranean people. Well, it turned out the answer was in this book by the same creative team of writers Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti and artist Amanda Conner, so I paused reading Power Trip to delve into this long out-of-print collection.

Terra is a bit frustrating in that much of the time, we view this new character from the outside; we don't get much of her own struggle. What are her stakes? This is never really clear. The first issue here teams her up with Supergirl, in one of her particularly selfish periods; Terra's perky selflessness serves as a contrast. Then she meets up with Power Girl and Doctor Mid-Nite, then (groan) Geo-Force. Her deal is that she tries to take care of collisions between the surface world and the subterranean one, protecting the underground ecosystem from human intervention and humanity from subterranean creatures. She comes from a whole thriving underground world with a myriad different kinds of life. It's a neat set-up for stories potentially, but one the volume on its own ultimately doesn't make a ton of use of—and since Terra never got another series, I'm guessing was never really used in future stories, either.

Like, I wanted to know more about her relationship with her dad.
from Terra #3 (art by Amanda Conner)

Alongside this, there's a subplot about a guy digging underground who accidentally turns himself into a living diamond. This culminates in him attacking Terra's people, and she and Geo-Force team up to defeat him. It's pretty perfunctory stuff, I feel like more could have been made of the bad guy. (There's also some stuff about this Terra's place as the... third, I think, superhero of that name, but I don't know anything about the Teen Titans, so it was all underexplained gibberish to me. For some reason, Geo-Force's memory has to be erased even though he learned that someone was impersonating his dead sister; seems a bit mean. How his dead sister can be from underground, I don't really know.)

Not hard to be more of a hero than this version of Supergirl.
from Supergirl vol. 5 #12 (art by Amanda Conner & Jimmy Palmiotti)

Then in a half-issue coda, Terra goes back to the surface and bumps into Power Girl again. This made me very glad I paused Power Trip to read this, because it's basically a set-up for that series, pushing Kara into the decision to resume living her civilian identity and lead a normal life.

Terra and Power Girl did not get off to a great start, to be honest.
from Terra #2 (art by Amanda Conner)

So writing wise, it's basically fine. Decent idea, but mediocre execution—which honestly feels par for the course for Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, who are hacks (meant in the nicest possible way, of course) if ever there were any; they did, after all, write Infinite Crisis Aftermath, Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters, parts of Countdown, and what is probably the worst superhero comic ever. But what elevates it is their collaboration with one of superhero comics' best-ever artists, Amanda Conner. Conner's art is fun, bold, sexy, and above all, character driven. You get a sense of personality from her faces that mostly fails to come across from the writing. It's delightful, I knew I would love it, I did love it, and it's the whole reason I bought this book as opposed to just reading the issues on DC Universe Infinite, and it was worth it. Get Amanda Conner to draw every comic book, please.

This post is forty-sixth in an ever-expanding series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Power Girl: Power Trip. Previous installments are listed below: