The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8

The eighth volume of Neil Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year was released in 2024, collecting the best short fiction of 2022. (The series fell behind a year thanks to COVID and has unfortunately not managed to catch up yet.) As I usually do, I dipped in and out of it, reading a story every now and again between other books, stretching my reading across about five months.

The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8
edited by Neil Clarke

Collection published: 2024
Contents published: 2022
Acquired: September 2024
Read: October 2024–March 2025

As always I enjoyed the experience of catching up on the year's best short fiction, much of which I had not read. (I think there were just two Hugo finalists in here, even though, as always, much of what's here would have been quite competitive on a Hugo ballot in my opinion.) My very favorite story in the book I've already written up here: "If We Make It through This Alive" by A. T. Greenblatt. This tells the story of three women making a transcontinental road race in a postapocalyptic United States. Strong worldbuilding, great characterization. Other highlights included: (I will link to the story in question if it has a free and legal online version somewhere)

• "The Dragon Project" by Naomi Kritzer. About genetically engineering custom animals, this story is—like a lot of Kritzer's work—cute and light but effectively done.
• "Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist" by Isabel J. Kim. Neat metafictional piece about being the girlfriend of the main character in a cyberpunk dystopia, and the way she uses tropes to extend her own life. Stylishly told, cleverly written. My second encounter with Kim but hopefully not my last.
• "The Historiography of Loss" by Julianna Baggott. Sharp and creepy story about a technology where people can simulate deceased loved ones. Similar premise to "Proof by Induction," I guess, but goes in a very different but just as effective direction.
• "The Plastic People" by Tobias S. Buckell. I feel like I am always enjoying random stories by Buckell that I happen across; I probably should read a collection of them someday. Horrifying but great story about rich kids who adopt a climate refugee from the Earth's surface and are incapable of treating it like a human being.
• "Mender of Sparrows" by Ray Nayler. Hard to discuss this one without giving a lot away, but I thought it was beautifully told and went in some unexpected directions. Like Buckell, Nayler seems like someone I should seek out more. 
• "The Past Life Reconstruction Service" by Zen Cho. I always really enjoy Cho's short fiction, and this was no exception; a rich guy keeps exploring past lives to try to get over an ex-lover. Acutely observed characterization.
• "Solidity" by Greg Egan. Over on r/printSF, Egan is praised for the rigor of his hard sf, but this is one of those stories by him that demonstrates he has a more dynamic range than even his devotees often grant him. People start slipping between realities, but in subtle, uneasy ways; you can be replaced, but only by someone who could plausibly be in the same situation. So how do people hang on to reality, and to each other, in such a trying circumstance? What would you do if you could never find your loved one again?
• "Two Spacesuits" by Leonard Richardson. Many years ago, I read and very much enjoyed Richardson's novel Constellation Games, but have never read anything else by him. This was fun but weird. A guy's parents start doing weird stuff because of... alien YouTube videos?

Most years there's at least one story whose inclusion I find inexplicable, but I didn't experience that this time around; indeed, I was skeptical of "A Dream of Electric Mothers" by Wole Talabi going in, having read it before, but ended up enjoying it more this time around. Looking over the 2023 Hugo finalists again, I do think there are two notable omissions here (S. L. Huang's "Murder by Pixel" and Samantha Mills's "Rabbit Test") but both are in Clarke's 2021 recommended reading list at the back.

As always, if you like short sf, this is an indispensable read... at this point, it's the only sf best-of still going!

Where on (the Infinite) Earth(s) Are the Blackhawks?

As covered in several posts I've already made, the Blackhawks were originally published by Quality Comics from 1941 to 1956, taking their adventures from World War II and beyond. Then, they were published (not quite continuously) by DC from 1957 to 1984. As you might imagine, this causes continuity problems—did it really make sense that the 1976 incarnation of the Blackhawks had somehow been active since World War II? From 1957 to 1966 there's no sign of superheroes in the Blackhawk milieu, but then come 1967 they're hanging out with the Justice League.

In DC's pre-Crisis continuity, they dealt with continuity issues by relegating character to different Earths. But which Earth do different versions of the Blackhawks belong to? Here's what I can figure out; I'll start from most obvious to least obvious. 

Earth-One: The Mark Evanier & Dan Spiegle Run (1982–84)

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #256 (script by Mark Evanier, art by Dan Spiegle)

Earth-One was the original Earth of DC's Silver Age, the one the Justice League came from and the various superheroes associated with it: the Hal Jordan Green Lantern, the Barry Allen Flash, and the contemporary versions of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. In this timeline, superheroes emerged in the late 1950s.

That the 1980s Blackhawk revival is from Earth-One is very obvious, because the lettercol to issue #256 just tells you! Writer Mark Evanier claims that this is the never-before-seen Earth-One version of the Blackhawks, which means that there's no known endpoint for these characters. Evanier could kill off, say, Hendrickson and it wouldn't impact any stories written earlier but set later! I thought this was an interesting move, not the least because, as far as I know, there were no superheroes on Earth-One during World War II. For all intents and purposes, the Earth-One of WWII is our Earth.

That these comics were set on Earth-One is confirmed by DC Comics Presents #69, where the Earth-One Superman travels back in time and meets the Evanier Blackhawks during the war.

Earth-Two: The Original Quality Comics Run (1941–56?)

from Military Comics #16 (script by Bill Woolfolk, art by Reed Crandall)

Earth-Two was DC's home for its Golden Age heroes, the one the Justice Society came from and the various superheroes associated with it: the Alan Scott Green Lantern, the Jay Garrick Flash, and the contemporary versions of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. In this timeline, superheroes emerged in the late 1930s.

In that lettercol to Blackhawk #256, Mark Evanier suggests that all previous adventures of the Blackhawks were set on Earth-Two or Earth-X. (The lettercol also says the forthcoming twelve-part maxiseries The History of the DC Universe will answer this more definitively, but when this eventually saw print as Crisis on Infinite Earths, that was not the case.) There is one Blackhawk story we can definitively place on Earth-Two: The Brave and the Bold #167, where they team up with the Golden Age Batman, must be set there.

But if that Blackhawk story is set on Earth-Two, it means other ones certainly could be, and the original World War II run of the Blackhawks from Quality seems like the obvious candidate. I don't see any obvious reason to speculate that these stories are set on any other Earth; we also received confirmation that there were Blackhawks operating on Earth-Two from their guest appearance in All-Star Squadron #48-49. If there are Earth-Two Blackhawks, who could they be other than the Quality Comics ones? And if you include all the World War II stories, I don't see any reason to doubt that the postwar Blackhawk stories from Quality also take place on Earth-Two.

There is a bit of a wrinkle in this theory, though; see below.

Earth-X: ???

from Justice League of America vol. 1 #107
(script by Len Wein, art by Dick Dillin & Dick Giordano,
scan courtesy The Unofficial Blackhawk Comics Website)

In 1973, Justice League of America #107-08 established that the Quality Comics characters (by then owned by DC) existed on Earth-X. In addition to being home to a different set of superheroes than Earths-One and -Two, though, Earth-X had one key divergence: World War II had been won by the Nazis. With both Allies and Axis inventing the atomic bomb, the war had gone on until the late 1960s, when the Nazis developed a mind-control ray that allowed them to finally win. Only a small group of superheroes, the "Freedom Fighters," were immune.

I don't think there are any published Blackhawk stories we can definitively place on this Earth, however. JLA #107 has a one-panel flashback depicting the Blackhawks, which strongly implies they died during the extended version of WWII. All Quality Blackhawk stories published during World War II could be set on this world, but certainly none of the postwar ones (1946-56) could be, because on Earth-X, there was no postwar!

An extra wrinkle comes from All-Star Squadron #50. In A-SS, the Quality Comics characters had been depicted as existing on Earth-Two. I think until that point you could have simply assumed they existed on both Earth-Two and Earth-X, but A-SS #50 has the Quality Comics characters travelling from Earth-Two to Earth-X to help Uncle Sam battle the Nazis in that timeline. These characters include the Blackhawks! If we take this at face value, this means that there can't be any Blackhawk stories set on Earth-Two after April 1942, when issue #50 is set...

...but this would invalidate Brave and the Bold #167, which we know is set on Earth-Two in 1944! Oh, Roy Thomas, what was up with this needlessly complicated retcon? (Oh wait, you're Roy Thomas.)

My suggestion: A-SS #50 is set during the Crisis on Infinite Earths. Thus, it is neither pre-Crisis nor post-Crisis. The multiversal whatsit that allows for the crossover in #50 is because of the Crisis, so it couldn't have happened in the pre-Crisis multiverse! We can suggest that in the pre-Crisis timeline, the Earth-Two Blackhawks stayed on Earth-Two, and thus the Earth-X Blackhawks were separate characters.

This does mean that the only known Blackhawk appearance on Earth-X is that single panel in JLA #107... but pre–A-SS #50, at least, all the 1941-45 Quality Comics Blackhawk stories could have happened on Earth-X as well as Earth-Two.

Earth-B: The Original DC Comics Run (1957?–66)

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #232
(script by Bob Haney, art by Dick Dillin & Chuck Cuidera)

The obvious continuity error of "The New Blackhawk Era" (#228-41) is that they hang out with the Justice League in the opening story arc... but the Justice League is from Earth-One, and Evanier indicates only the 1982-84 Blackhawks come from Earth-One. But they can't come from Earths-Two or -X like he suggests other Blackhawk stories do, because there's no JLA on Earths-Two or -X.

(In the lettercol to issue #257, Evanier adds that he could write a story explaining how the JLA could guest star in a Blackhawk story even though he'd claimed there were no previous Earth-One Blackhawks... but he won't do it because that would be boring. This is an attitude toward retconning I totally approve of.)

Earth-B is a world that I don't think is ever actually referred to in a DC Comics story. It's only used in behind-the-scenes material to justify continuity errors. Basically, many Silver Age stories played it fast and loose with continuity in such a way that that couldn't "actually" take place on Earth-One. This article on Batman Universe lays it out pretty nicely:

By the late 1970s there were a handful of Silver Age DC stories that just seemed out-of-continuity no matter what. They just didn’t fit into Batman’s primary Earth (i.e. the DCU’s pre-Crisis Earth-1), violated characterization, had obvious continuity errors, or were just plain strange (even for Silver Age comics). Many of these stories in question were written by Bob Haney and E Nelson Bridwell and edited by Murray Boltinoff and Bob Rozakis. Thus, these out-of-synch tales retroactively became assigned to Earth-B. The assignment of the letter B came from the fact there were so many B names creatively-involved in the non-synchronous tales—Bridwell, Boltinoff, and two Bobs (three if you count Bob Hope)! Further reasoning for assigning the letter B was that many of these tales also took place in The Brave & The Bold. While it is rumored that Myron Gruenwald and Mark Gruenwald originally came up with the idea for Earth-B, the concept was first mentioned in a letters column by Rozakis in the 1970s.

Thus, Earth-B is a lot like Earth-One, but not Earth-One. It would indeed have a Justice League of America and all the other characters necessary to make the Junk-Heap Heroes! storyline work. And of course, the whole G.E.O.R.G.E. run is written by Bob Haney.

If issues #228-41 took place on Earth-B, then issues #242-43 did so as well, because they directly followed on from those stories. And probably so did many, if not most or all, of the pre-#228 Blackhawk stories published by DC, which got increasingly goofy as they went on even before the Blackhawks all became superheroes (and some of which were edited by Murray Boltinoff).

The origins of the Blackhawks in general and Chop-Chop in specific given in #198 and 203 aren't consistent with their original appearances in Military Comics, giving us further evidence that those stories take place on a different Earth than those stories, even if we do know (from various flashbacks) that the Earth-B Blackhawks did begin during World War II.

I haven't read it, but it would seem that JLA #144, which includes a cameo from the Blackhawks, also occurs on Earth-B, not Earth-One. Same for DC Challenge, which is another story including both the JLA and the Blackhawks. (Apparently, DC Challenge being set on Earth-B was confirmed by Crisis on Infinite Earths: The Compendium.)

Earth-Thirty-Two?: The George Evans & Steve Skeates Run (1976–77)

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #250
(script by Steve Skeates, art by Ric Estrada and George Evans & Frank Springer)

The one unaccounted-for run at this point is the brief revival of Blackhawk during the 1970s. The actual stories don't mention any wider continuity, but the text page in issue indicates the Blackhawks disappeared in the 1960s, they were rumored to have been superheroes, and that the Justice League exists.

Things we know:

• It's not Earth-One, according to Evanier's comments in Blackhawk #256.
• It's not any timeline where the Blackhawks were active during World War II, because the text page in #244 says they emerged in the 1950s: this thus disqualifies Earths-Two, -X, and -B.
• There is a Justice League, and possibly the Blackhawks were briefly superheroes.

I don't know what Earth that leaves us with: it needs to be one with the JLA (if we believe in the text page from #244, as they're not mentioned in the actual stories) but where the Blackhawks emerged later. Apparently, in the Crisis on Infinite Earths deluxe edition, John Wells split Earth-B into Earth-Twelve and Earth-Thirty-Two. So perhaps this run occurs on Earth-Thirty-Two to the previous run's Earth-Twelve?

(The other way to take this is that these stories could take place on the same Earth as the earlier DC stories, and any inconsistencies are just down to the usual "sliding timescale" approach to superhero comic books. We happily put, say, all pre-Crisis Legion of Super-Hero comics on the same Earth, even though twenty years of story time clearly do not elapse over twenty years of publication time. In which case, no need to come up with some "Earth-Thirty-Two" retcon.)

Closing Thoughts

I'm sure I've missed something here; in particular, I'm working from my memory of the All-Star Squadron issues because my copies aren't currently easily accessed. I hope I have at least a somewhat tenable set of theories here, and you can look forward to my even more complicated follow-up post, when I attempt to rectify everything we know about the post-Crisis Blackhawks!

What else this post makes me want to do is write a Crisis on Infinite Blackhawks story: what happens when the Earth-One Blackhawks meet the Earth-Two ones? That's probably not so dramatically different (except for Chop-Chop), but then chuck in the superhero Blackhawks of Earth-B and the mercenary Blackhawks of Earth-Thirty-Two and the beleaguered Blackhawks of Earth-X... and eventually, the cynical post-Crisis Blackhawks of the Howard Chaykin version. Forget Legion of 3 Worlds, why not Blackhawk of 6 Worlds!?

This is a supplement to a series of posts about the Blackhawks. The next installment covers Blackhawk: Blood & Iron. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Blackhawk Archives, Volume 1 (1941-42)
2. Military Comics #18-43 / Modern Comics #44-46 / Blackhawk #9 & 50 (1943-52)
3. Showcase Presents Blackhawk, Volume One (1957-58) 
4. Blackhawk vol. 1 #151-95 (1960-64) 
5. Blackhawk vol. 1 #196-227 (1964-66)
6. Blackhawk vol. 1 #228-43 (1967-68)
7. Blackhawk vol. 1 #244-50 / The Brave and the Bold #167 (1976-80)
8. Blackhawk (1982) 
9. Blackhawk vol. 1 #251-73 / DC Comics Presents #69 (1982-84)

Black Panther: Avengers of the New World, Part One by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Wilfredo Torres, Chris Sprouse, Karl Story, et al.

After my side-steps into World of Wakanda and Black Panther & the Crew, I'm back to Ta-Nehisi Coates's main Black Panther series with the first half of its second storyline, Avengers of the New World. His first storyline, A Nation under Our Feet, had felt somewhat overextended at twelve issues... this one is thirteen!

from Black Panther vol. 6 #13

Despite the title, this has nothing to do with the "Avengers"; following Wakanda's transition into a constitutional monarchy, the traditional gods of Wakanda, including the panther god Bast, have vanished—and entities are flooding into Wakanda through mysterious portals, as new religions begin to spring up.

Mysticism in comics is always a hard sell for me, I'm afraid, and Coates doesn't sell it. The idea of the gods vanishing all seems very abstract as a central conflict goes. Why should I care about this? The gods don't really have much of a day-to-day impact on the storytelling of Black Panther to begin with. It seems to me that having set up a major status quo change at the end of the last story arc, this one should explore the implications of it, but Wakanda's democratization gets a few token references; key character Changamire puts in just one small appearance. You could have told this story during any other Panther run, and that's a pity.

There's a subplot I don't totally get the relevance of, with Queen Divine Justice (an American member of the Dora Milaje from Priest's run) getting kidnapped; she is written so utterly different from her original appearances that I would not have even realized who she was if her original name hadn't been mentioned in the letter columns. (And the beginning-of-issue recaps say she knows T'Challa from his days in New York, which I am pretty sure is just factually inaccurate.) I'm glad to see Coates pulling from previous runs in theory,* but I'm not sure why he is bothering.

from Black Panther vol. 6 #17

Like the first story arc, it just feels like somehow so many issues go by with little happening; by the end of part 6, all we really know is that something mysterious is afoot and longtime Black Panther foe Klaw is involved. Surely we could have done this in two parts!

As for the art... well, you know things are rough when the "next issue" box proudly announces the return of the guy (Chris Sprouse) who on the last story arc was the fill-in artist! I think Wilfredo Torres is supposed to be the arc's main artist, but he draws only one complete issue, needing assists on three more. I didn't care for his somewhat heavy style. Chris Sprouse is typically solid, but I found his work less good than normal; I presume he was rushed. The six issues here have four pencilers and seven inkers! It is always a shame when a run by a "star" writer has such little focus on matching them with a quality artist.

I guess we'll see where things go, but based on the arc so far and on the last one, I don't have high hopes for the last seven(!) parts. 

from Black Panther Prelude #2

I also read the two-issue Black Panther Prelude at this point; this was a Marvel Cinematic Universe tie-in that came out shortly before the 2018 film. It actually takes place ten years prior to the film, after the events of Iron Man, and as a result, it seemed to me that it didn't really set up anything interesting to do with the film. T'Challa has recently become Black Panther; his father T'Chaka sends him on a covert mission to rescue a couple Wakandan hostages, along with Okoye of the Dora Milaje; they do it. It's a pretty straightforward, pretty generic action-focused story that didn't really give any insight into the characters or world of the film it was setting up.

Parts 1-6 of Avengers of the New World originally appeared in issues #13-18 of Black Panther vol. 6 (June-Nov. 2017). The story was written by Ta-Nehisi Coates; penciled by Wilfredo Torres (#13-15, 18), Jacen Burrows (#14), Adam Gorham (#15), and Chris Sprouse (#16-18); inked by Wilfredo Torres (#13, 18), Terry Pallot (#14-15), Jacen Burrows (#14), Adam Gorham (#15), Karl Story (#16-18), Walden Wong (#16), and Dexter Vines (#16-17); colored by Laura Martin (#13-18) & Andrew Crossley (#13, 16-17); lettered by Joe Sabino; and edited by Wil Moss.

The Panther and the People originally appeared in issues #1-2 of Black Panther Prelude (Dec. 2017–Jan. 2018). The story was written by Will Corona Pilgrim, illustrated by Annapaola Martello, colored by Jordan Boyd, lettered by Travis Lanham, and edited by Mark Basso.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

* The Marvel Chronology Project informs me that issue #14 of Black Panther volume 6 in July 2017 was her first appearance in any comic at all since issue #63 of volume 3 in September 2003... almost fourteen years!

Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me (2009)

Every month where I am making good progress on my reading list, I pluck one interesting looking book at semi-random from my wife's collection; back in December (I am a bit behind on writing things up), that led me to this book, which I mostly went for because reviews on LibraryThing indicated it was in some way connected to A Wrinkle in Time.

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead

Published: 2009
Read: December 2024

It's a slim book, just under two hundred pages, and I blew right through it, both because it's a very easy read and because I very much enjoyed it. The book is about a young girl in 1970s New York living with her single mother, and I found it keenly observed and also funny. I was so into it that I found myself very tense with the last chapter, and emotional at the way it resolved. 

Reviews on LT will give you a good sense of what makes the book so good, so here I just want to highlight a couple things that stuck out to me. That said, if you think you might read this book, I  recommend skipping my next paragraph, because I will give something away that I think might work better as a creeping revelation... though I knew it going in and found my enjoyment was fine.

The first is, as probably many people have pointed out, the book is a response to A Wrinkle in Time. I always tell my students you need to look for those moments of metafiction in a book, those moments where a work draws attention to its own fictionality because in those moments the work is often (somewhat paradoxically) trying to stake a claim to being realistic. When You Reach Me does this by having a character draw attention to a lapse of time-travel logic in Wrinkle—a lapse you thus might not be surprised to realize that When You Reach Me does not commit itself. But it's not just time travel logic where When You Reach Me reads like a more realistic version of Wrinkle in Time, it's also in its depiction of young Miranda's social circumstances. Meg in Wrinkle is being raised by a single mother... but that's because her father is an astronaut on a space mission, and the kids all live in a big house with lots of accoutrements and opportunities. Miranda is the product of a one-off relationship and lives in a small apartment and is a victim of snobbery by classmates with more money. The critique clearly comes out of affection, but it is a critique of the original nonetheless.

The other thing that stuck out to me is an aspect of Miranda's psychology. Last summer, I learned about "attachment styles," a psychological concept that there are four different ways we relate to others. A couple online quizzes have informed me that I am "anxious": "People with an anxious attachment style can be consumed with concern that their loved ones will abandon them, and they may seek constant reassurance that they’re safe in their relationship." I am often preoccupied with the feeling that my loved ones probably don't love me back, that my friends might like me all right, but they probably don't really like me. In Miranda, I found one of the most thoughtful but also subtle depictions of anxious attachment; though secure in her relationship with her mother, Miranda constantly feels like her friends don't actually like her and worries that they will abandon her... even thought they never actually do! I don't know if this was intentional on Stead's part, but I found it a very powerful thread within the novel, even if it was only a small part of the tapestry.

Nineteenth-Century Studies Association 2025

NCSA is my traditional annual conference at this point; this year one of the board members asked me how long I'd been coming, suggesting it was something like three or four. This year was actually my seventh! I've been every year since 2017, barring the conference's two years going virtual for COVID.

This year was held in New Orleans, a city with a lot of nineteenth-century history. As always, I enjoyed the experience; my friend Christiana and Kim also presented as usual, and we met up with a couple other grad school friends who live in the area. I also got to reconnect with my old boss from UT, now at Tulane, and I convinced one of my own UT colleagues to come along. I do feel like all this socialization meant I was a bit less plugged into meeting new people (or even connecting with other conference regulars) this year! 

Lots of good food in New Orleans, of course. I particularly enjoyed eating beignets for breakfast, and I had some good jambalaya. 

This year's theme was "Fusions"; knowing academics, I knew there would be a lot of titles containing parentheses with words like "(in)fusions" and "(con)fusions." Thus I set myself a challenge of coming up with the worst use of parentheses at the conference, and looked up what the longest word containing "fusion" in the dictionary was. Hence, my paper was titled "The (Interdif)fusion of Women into Science in H. G. Wells's Ann Veronica"! But as my friend Christiana once told me, there's no difference between a bad title adopted ironically... and a bad title. I've been mining my never-completed book for conference papers for years now, and I think I am almost out of bits of I haven't presented. I can do Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent next year, but I am pretty sure I have nothing left after that! Does this mean I need to do... new research!?

Speaking of next year, NCSA is switching it up, doing a joint conference with two other organizations (INCS and INCSA, not confusingly at all) in Washington, D.C., in July as opposed to the usual March. Will it be weird? You can't just change things, I love the format and timing of NCSA!

Back to World War II (Blackhawk #251–73)

I've chronicled here DC's various attempt to keep the Blackhawks a going concern after World War II. They had them battle aliens (see #3 below), then supercriminals (#4); later they the made them into counterinsurgents (#5), superheroes (#6), and mercenaries (#7). Each attempt ended in failure, the Blackhawks being cancelled or reinvented yet again.

In 1982, though, the same new approach was taken twice over, which was to go back to an old approach. I've already written up the 1982 Blackhawk novel (#8 below), but at the same time that novel came out, the comics themselves were taking the same approach: going back to World War II.

But of course. What other approach was there? Some concepts are endlessly adaptable; Superman might have been devised during the Great Depression as an expression of populist sentiment, but he has worked and continues to work in different contexts. But other concepts are not. The Blackhawks are an expression of a particular time and place. They are about banding together to fight the Nazis... and though I can see some ways in which they might be made to work otherwise (I did like the brief run of the Blackhawks as counterinsurgents), by and large they become pointless if you have them do anything else.

So, even though the 1982-84 run picks up the numbering from where we left off in 1977, with issue #251, the story does not. Instead, we essentially have a total reboot.* Artist Dan Spiegle and writer Mark Evanier take us back to 1940, before the U.S. even entered the war, and the Blackhawks were an indenpendent organization of pilots battling the Nazis. The series's twenty-three issues cover June through September, predating even the timeframe of the original run from Quality Comics—but in a contemporary, 1980s style.

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #256 (script by Mark Evanier, art by Dan Spiegle)

To me, this is clearly the best that Blackhawk has been so far. And (even though I am hopeful I will enjoy future permutations of the concept) if you told me this was going to be the best it ever was, I would neither be surprised nor disappointed. This is surely the plantoic ideal of a Blackhawk comic, back in its original time and place but with modern stylings of character and plot. (Well, I guess the 1980s aren't modern anymore... in fact they're as old now as the original Quality comics were when this run came out! But to me, anyway, the 1980s and '90s are when superhero comics largely peaked in any case.) Evanier and Spiegle, in both writing and art, treat the Blackhawks as distinct personalities with real characters, and weave them into ongoing plotlines.

Missteps here are rare, but there are two particularly praiseworthy stories, in my opinion. The first is #253, "The Private War of Hendrickson." In this issue the Blackhawks learn that even though Hendrickson is always writing letters to his wife... she has in fact been dead for a year! And the letters bear little resemblance to reality, because in the letters he portrays himself as a respected elder of the squadron due to his experience in the First World War, but in reality while the other Blackhawks respect his sharpshooting, they have a tendency to treat him as an elderly fussbudget when he gives advice. Has Hendrickson lost his connection to reality? It's a great character-focused story with a solid twist at the end.

The other really good story is #265, "What's the Matter with Chop-Chop?" Evanier treats what you might call "the problem of Chop-Chop" (here named "Wu Cheng") head on. From the beginning, Evanier and Spiegle treat him as a real person; there's no queue or other visual stereotypes, and when he speaks with an accent, it's to deliberately fool racist Nazis into underestimating him. In the lettercol, Evanier opines he's not totally sure what to do with the character—but after he prints some letters praising him for moving away from the stereotype, a newspaper in Virginia actually ran an op-ed claiming that by attempting to not be racist, Evanier was being historically inaccurate! This very obviously gets Evanier's dander up, and in #265, Wu Cheng gets fed up with the way everyone else on the squadron treats him. Eventually his anger boils over and he demands to know why he doesn't wear a uniform... and no one is able to answer him! It's a good depiction how racism doesn't have to be sticking people into concentration camps, it can also be unquestioned assumptions driving your behaviors. He gets a real uniform and to use his real name.

(If the story has a downside, other than the ease by which the other Blackhawks recognize their own fault, it's that Wu Cheng then takes a leave of absence from issues #266 to 272, so we get to see very little of the new incarnation of "Chop-Chop" in the series.)

from Blackhawk vol. 1 #263
(script by Mark Evanier, art by Dan Spiegle)

Dan Spiegle is an artist previously unknown to me, but he's great. Good faces, good storytelling, good action. In fact, one of my few complaints about this series is that it clearly deserved better printing! This was the era of DC's beautiful Baxter series, like The Omega Men, Infinity, Inc., or Sun Devils, and I think Spiegle's work would have looked so good on that crisp white paper instead of with the blurry printing it sometimes gets here.

Other standouts include #258, "The Death of Blackhawk Island!", where a prototype Nazi atomic bomb destroys Blackhawk Island, complete with a Cold War–era frame decrying nuclear weaponry, and #271, "The Silent Treatment," where Gaynor, the Blackhawk substituting for Wu Cheng, reveals his true colors. There are lots of ongoing subplots; perhaps most prominent is the beautiful Nazi superspy Domino, who ends up having a thing for Blackhawk and vice versa... but is too far gone for any kind of love to every be realized. It's the kind of ongoing melodrama that I dig.

I do have a couple complaints. The first is that while we have those two issues focused on Hendrickson and Wu Cheng, the other characters rarely get that kind of focus. Evanier always gives them stuff to do, but most issues focus on Blackhawk himself, not any of the others. And I must admit that I do kind of miss the vibe of those early Quality issues, where the rogue status of the Blackhawks meant that even Allied command was rarely happy to see them; here, they're taking orders from Allied and palling around with Winston Churchill, and I miss that harder edge. The other thing is... not enough dogfights! C'mon, give me just one tense plane-on-plane battle!

The last highlight of the series is the "Blackhawk Detached Service Diary" entries. Many issues have a sixteen-page main story about the whole team followed by an eight-page back-up focusing on just one character; what makes these particularly enjoyable is that they are drawn by many great comic artists: Dave Cockrum, Alex Toth & Frank Giacoia, Joe Staton, past Blackhawk artist Pat Boyette, and even future Blackhawk writer/artist Howard Chaykin. Two issues (#260 and 268) are even entirely made up of "Detached Service Diary" entries with a slight frame story. Lots of solid stories here, but my favorites were probably "The Funny Man!" (#260, art by Dick Rockwell), where Hendrickson meets a stand-up comic who dares to criticize his superiors; "The Big Dealer!" (#265, art by Pat Boyette), where André's plane is stolen by a black market racketeer who sells it for parts; and "The Aritst!" (#272, art by Ken Steacy), where Hendrickson is taken hostage by a Nazi assassin and only a painter of "good girl" nosecone art can save him.

(Oh, and as I've tried to highlight in my post here, some truly excellent covers. Striking stuff.)

I also read an issue of DC Comics Presents, DC's Bronze Age Superman team-up title. In #69 (script by Mark Evanier, art by Irv Novick & Dennis Jensen), Superman travels back in time to World War II to find out why Perry White received a medal for war reporting when he doesn't remember being a war correspondent! The answer involves a Nazi plot to replace Olympic athletes and use Albert Einstein to create supersoliders. It's a bit silly, to be honest; Superman doesn't really get to team up with the Blackhawks. (Note that DCCP #69 came out the same day as Blackhawk #270, but in the lettercol, Evanier indicates it occurs between issues #259 and 261.)

Like I said, I overall very much enjoyed this. In some ways, the 1980s are my favorite era for superhero(-adjacent) comics, applying more sophisticated storytelling techniques and characterization than in the Silver Age, but not yet lost to decompression, gratuitous darkness/violence, and the eternal chasing of "events." Going back to World War II in the 1980s gives us the best Blackhawk of both worlds.

This is the ninth post in a series about the Blackhawks. The next installment is a supplement covering their pre-Crisis continuity. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Blackhawk Archives, Volume 1 (1941-42)
2. Military Comics #18-43 / Modern Comics #44-46 / Blackhawk #9 & 50 (1943-52)
3. Showcase Presents Blackhawk, Volume One (1957-58) 
4. Blackhawk vol. 1 #151-95 (1960-64) 
5. Blackhawk vol. 1 #196-227 (1964-66)
6. Blackhawk vol. 1 #228-43 (1967-68)
7. Blackhawk vol. 1 #244-50 / The Brave and the Bold #167 (1976-80)
8. Blackhawk (1982)

* It boggles my mind that in 1982, if you were reviving a title that was five years dead and starting a totally new continuity in the process, it was still considered better to number it #251 than #1!

The Pelican History of England #4: The Late Middle Ages (1307–1536)

I'm totally but unproductively fascinated by the paratext of these books. My copy of volume 4, which mostly covers the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is a 1974 printing of the 1971 eighth edition. Why did volume 4 take only twenty years to get up to eight editions, when volume 1 only got its third edition after forty years? From Worldcat, though, I can see that the eighth edition was the final one, lasting up until it went out of print after 1991. (Presumably this is because Myers died in 1980, leaving him unavailable to do any more updates.) And why aren't the titles consistent? Volume 3 was "English Society in the Early Middle Ages" followed by a date range, while volume 4 is just "England in the Late Middle Ages" with no date range. I demand answers!

The first three volumes of this series were very much social histories, giving details about kings and such almost incidentally, and preferring to emphasize social arrangements. Myers somewhat rails against this concept in his foreword: "To limit history to 'dates and kings and battles' was a mistake; but equally mistaken is the recent tendency to exclude politics and war as much as possible from the now fashionable social history" (7). I will say that I have struggled a bit with the social history emphasis of this series, which often leaves me feeling adrift; in volume 1, in particular, I felt like I got told a lot about what Roman houses in Britain looked like but not, say, why the Romans turned up to build houses to begin with. (To be fair, I do think volumes 2 and 3 handled this somewhat better.)

The Pelican History of England: 4. England in the Late Middle Ages
by A. R. Myers

Eighth edition published: 1971
Originally published: 1952
Acquired: April 2013
Read: March 2025

While previous volumes had about five or six chapters covering broad topics across the entire time period in question, Myers uses a very different arrangement here for volume 4. The book is divided into three parts covering 1307-99, 1399-1471, and 1471-1536 respectively; each part is then divided into five chapters. In each case, the first chapter of each section covers the politics of the era in question, especially who had the kingship, and the other four chapters always have the same titles: "The Government of the Realm," "Economic and Social Developments," "Religious and Educational Movements" (or "Change" for part III), and "The Arts."

I guess I can see why Myers did this, but I didn't find it very effective in practice. The end result is that there's not a lot of continuity, and it's not easy to follow the story of each topic across the course of the book. You get a bit about, say, growing antipapalism on p. 74, then more on p. 165, and then it comes to a climax on p. 236, but there are big gaps in between where you don't hear about it at all. And despite his claim to not be downplaying the political history as much as some other volumes in the series, I felt like major events like the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) and the War of the Roses (1455-87) were just kind of mentioned in asides rather than explained. So, other than the Roman volume, I found this one the most frustrating so far.

Still, I continue to trace the various prisms through which the authors of this series attempt to explain their periods. Myers very much emphasizes the changing fortunes of the kingship throughout: basically the king goes from a position of being politically and financially constrained by the lords to being much more secure in his power even as limits were applied to it. This wasn't quite absolute, though; Myers claims that when Edward IV died, "[i]f he had been succeeded by an able, grown-up son, England might have taken a road towards an absolute monarchy, wealthy enough to dispense with parliamentary rights, strong enough to keep order, and basing its claims on the indefeasible divine right of hereditary kingship" (201). Things didn't go this way, as Edward V (one of the "Princes in the Tower") was only twelve, but by the time of Henry VII, the king was financially independent.

Myers argues that the increasing importance of a council of lords in the latter part of this period actually shows how much power the king had; he could afford to delegate it without threatening his own position. This ends up culminating in Henry VIII's break from Rome, which was kind of about who Henry wanted to marry, but not just about that: "It is an absurdity to assert that the breach was due to Henry's lust for Anne Boleyn" (209). You wouldn't upend an entire country's organized religion over that! The Reformation also pays off a running thread about Lollardy throughout the book, which I found quite interesting. 

As Myers points out, if it was just about Henry's own whims, it "would have imperilled his throne if there had been widespread and organized resistance. Henry's almost unopposed success must have been due to something deeper than his own will" (237-8). Myers argues that popular anti-papal sentiment had their roots in growing Church corruption, but also growing English nationalism, the rise of the merchant classes (less dependent on the old order), and increasing education. But the consequences of this were quite drastic: a king not beholden to a pope "br[ings] out the unmedieval idea that the king was supreme in every sphere of life, and that England was a self-sufficient empire, with Henry as its emperor, subject to no other authority on earth" (211). But as that's not a medieval idea, it is an idea that means this book has come to an end!

Serialization and Strategy in Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son

When I read Dombey and Son (1846-48), I noted that it seemed to demonstrate a much higher level of planning than the prior Dickens novel I had read, Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44). The structure of Chuzzlewit very much demonstrates (to me anyway) that Dickens must have been making it up as he went along, with its diversion to America and the fact that Martin (a damp squib if there ever was one) pretty much stops being the protagonist of the novel that bears his name.

Dombey and Son, on the other hand, is very obviously planned. It ran nineteen monthly installments, the last of which was double-length, making for twenty in total. At the end of every fifth installment, something of great significance happens: the death of a main character, the marriage of a main character, the flight of a main character. It's like watching the season finale of a modern serialized streaming show. I was curious about this, and reading the introduction to my Penguin Classics edition suggested that Alan Horsman's 1974 Clarendon edition of the novel would provide a detailed account of novel's composition, so I ordered it through interlibrary loan.

In his introduction, Horsman cites Dickens's friend and biographer John Forster, who had "stressed the contrast between Martin Chuzzlewit and subsequent books like this one which showed Dickens 'more bent upon constructive care at the outset'" (xv). Horsman argues that Forster is exaggerating a bit, as we know that Dickens had Chuzzlewit's ending in mind from the beginning. But I think (to put it awkwardly) that Horsman is exaggerating Forster's exaggeration. Sure, Dickens had his plot twist in mind the beginning... but clearly he did not have the beats and pacing in mind from the beginning in the way he did in Dombey and Son. Had he precisely planned everything in Dombey? I don't think so, based on the evidence Horsman cites, but we do often see evidence of him working ahead a bit. For example: "On 6 December [1846] he was occupied with the first chapter of Number IV. 'Paul, I shall slaughter at the end of number five'" (xxvi). And later: "As one would expect, the planning of Number V is very careful" (xxviii).

That said, things do get a bit looser later on. Dickens had a broad-strokes idea, but didn't have the precise planning worked out from the beginning: "The problem which the memoranda for Number VI emphasize is to continue throughout the remainder of the novel…. February letters show that he found it 'very difficult to fall into the new vein of the story'" (xxix). Perhaps this why I found my interest in the novel diminished as it went! It seems like Dickens had a lot he knew he wanted to get done by the end of no. v, but having crammed this all in, was less certain about where he was working toward for the remaining fifteen installments: "The second marriage [of Dombey] has now to sustain the greater part of the novel… he was to warn himself 'To bring on the marriage gradually'" (xxxi-xxxii). Horsman chronicles how Dickens thought of other aspects of the novel to pull into the foreground, but also how Dickens wasn't unlimited in what he could do; there were things he planned on that just didn't pan out.

Horsman doesn't mention those big turning points I identified in nos. x and xv in the same way, so it seems likely these weren't planned quite so rigorously in advance as the ending of no. v was. But it is clear that Dickens was being deliberate in his pacing in a way he had not been in Chuzzlewit, even if this ultimately undermined (I would argue) the success of the novel as a whole.

Forster said that, "for Dickens, 'the interest and passion of [the story], when to himself both became centred in Florence and in Edith Dombey, took stronger hold of him, and more powerfully affected him, that had been the case in any of his previous writings, I think…'" (xxxii). Again, Horsman seems a bit skeptical of Forster's claim, calling him "defensive" (xxxii), but I agree—going in publication order, for me this is Dickens's first novel to have some genuinely emotional moments, even if he would get better at this later on. And Forster also says the second half "seemed to many to have fallen short of the splendour of its opening" (xxxii)—and again, I agree. Because Dickens had to get to that twentieth installment, much like how a modern streaming show has to get its season out to ten episodes no matter what, the later parts of the novel are less dense with incident than what came before. 

It's also fascinating to learn how down-to-the-wire Dickens's composition could be; there were times Dickens had to send in each chapter of an installment as he finished it to have enough time to be typset. There were even times that a chapter had to be broken up by pages so different typesetters could do different pages simultaneously! In such a down-to-the-minute environment, I suppose the more planning you can do in advance, the better.

The Fourth Doctor Novelisations: The Androids of Tara (2012)

The success of The Stones of Blood (2011) engendered The Androids of Tara, another David Fisher–penned renovelisation of a tv story originally novelised by Terrance Dicks.

If you've read The Stones of Blood, you won't be surprised by the approach that Fisher takes here. The story is largely what we saw on screen with bits of backstory expanded and fleshed out, particularly the society on Tara, explaining how they became a feudal world dependent on androids. Like in Stones, many of the characters get these added bits of backstory spelling out who they are and where they came from, particularly Madame Lamia and the family of Count Grendel.

Doctor Who: The Androids of Tara
by David Fisher

Originally published: 2012
Acquired: January 2025
Read: February 2025

It's funny, though—if you'd asked me about the tv stories, I would have said that The Androids of Tara was the funner one, and it's definitely the one I have fonder memories of. Like I said, the swerve into hyperspace in the middle of Stones didn't really work for me, but Androids is one of those tv stories where I feel like writing, direction, and performance are all on the same page, creating a wonderfully coherent vision that delights.

Perhaps because of this, the novel just isn't as fun. It's nice to have the bits of backstory, but there's no Tom Baker, no Mary Tamm, no Peter Jeffrey to make the dialogue sing here. Not to say this is bad, I enjoyed the experience of reading it a lot, but certainly not as much I did the experience of reading Stones. I did really like the ending, though, with the Doctor getting his fishing license finally. (I don't think this bit of business is in the screen version? It has been a long time!) I do see the audio was read by John Leeson; having heard his enthusiastic reading of other stories, I can imagine he turned this into a thumping good time and lifted it off the page.

The Target novel has an afterword by editor Steve Cole, discussing the process of how the novelisation was originally commissioned as an audio and then adapted to the page. I was a bit disappointed by this; Cole discusses how his edits restricted the point-of-view of the narrator, for example taking a reference to a "horse" out of a scene from Romana's point-of-view, as she wouldn't know what a horse was. Cole's argument is that this works on audio—where you are literally being told a story—but not on the page. I don't really see why this should be the case. Why does a novel have to be told in a third-person limited perspective? I think this has increasingly become the convention in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, but I don't see why we can't have an omniscient narrator who knows what Romana is thinking and what a horse is. As I read these books, I've been listening to some other Targets on audio, most recently Doctor Who and the Giant Robot (1975) and Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion (1976),* and those stories don't seem afraid to slide back and forth between perspectives within a scene as needed. In the latter, we even have scenes from the perspective of dinosaurs, but those scenes also let the dinos know what, for example, a "car" is! Cole's edits go so far as to add a bit explaining why Romana and the Doctor split up, allowing Grendel's men to capture Romana. I'm glad he disclosed all these changes in the afterword, but I feel like overall I'd rather have read the unfiltered David Fisher version; why get the original writer to employ his distinctive voice if you're just going to file those bits away?

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who: Warriors' Gate and Beyond

* I thought about doing a series of posts reviewing these too, but decided that I have probably committed myself to enough self-imposed writing projects at the moment. I do have actual work to do!

Reading Roundup Wrapup: March 2025

Pick of the month: Lake of Souls by Ann Leckie. I got this collection of Ann Leckie's short fiction last year, and finally read it this past month; I very much enjoyed the experience. I've enjoyed her novels, of course, but there's something about how a short fiction collection broadens your understanding of an author that I really enjoy.

All books read:

1. The Pelican History of England: 4. England in the Late Middle Ages by A. R. Myers
2. Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
3. Uniquely Human: Updated and Expanded: A Different Way of Seeing Autism by Barry M. Prizant with Tom Fields-Meyer
4. Lake of Souls: The Collected Short Fiction by Ann Leckie
5. Doctor Who: Warriors’ Gate and Beyond by Stephen Gallagher
6. The Emerald Wand of Oz by Sherwood Smith, illustrated by William Stout
7. The Pelican History of England: 5. Tudor England by S. T. Bindoff
8. Self-Reg: How to Help Your Child (and You) Break the Stress Cycle and Successfully Engage with Life by Stuart Shanker with Teresa Baker
9. Low-Demand Parenting: Dropping Demands, Restoring Calm, and Finding Connection with your Uniquely Wired Child by Amanda Diekman
10. The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8 edited by Neil Clarke

All books acquired:

1. The Pelican History of England: 5. Tudor England by S. T. Bindoff
2. The Lost Light Notebooks: Vol. 5 by James Roberts
3. The Lost Light Notebooks: Vol. 6 by James Roberts
4. More than Meets the Eye, Vol. 1: Elegant Chaos by James Roberts
5. Lost Light, Vol. 2: The Everlasting Voices by James Roberts
6. The Pelican History of England: 6. Stuart England by J. P. Kenyon

Currently reading:

• The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction compiled by Michael Kelahan
• Raising Kids with Big, Baffling Behaviors: Brain-Body-Sensory Strategies That Really Work by Robyn Gobbel
• The Pelican History of England: 6. Stuart England by J. P. Kenyon

Up next in my rotations:

1. Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World by Michael Freeman
2. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Available Light by Dayton Ward
3. American Gods by Neil Gaiman 
4. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
   

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 669 (down 1)