Reading The Hungry Tiger of Oz Aloud to My Son

The Hungry Tiger of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill

Ruth Plumly Thompson may have recycled plots in her Oz novels, but of course she was just following in the footsteps of the master. Hungry Tiger of Oz is a lot like Cowardly Lion of Oz: the Hungry Tiger decides to eat someone so he can obtain his heart's desire, and he ends up captured by the cruel ruler of a small kingdom. Like the Cowardly Lion, he can't go through with it. And so now he must escape that kingdom, making his way back home with a small band of adventurers.

Originally published: 1926
Acquired: July 2022
Read aloud: August 2022

Much as Grampa in Oz felt like a dim reflection of Kabumpo, I found Hungry Tiger less effective than Cowardly Lion. It has its high points: the Hungry Tiger is well characterized, and Thompson gives him more to do in this book than Baum did in all of his put together. The set-up of Rash, a small country across the Deadly Desert from Oz, is a nice one: I like the idea of a villain who has so many prisoners he decides he needs to feed them to a tiger, and I think the Hungry Tiger being tempted has good potential.

It's nice to see Kaliko, the new Nome King, again, and Thompson has a good handle on his characterization. Some have complained that he's not as nice as he was in Tik-Tok... but Kaliko was only nice because he was forced to be so by the Great Jinjin, and we saw in Rinkitink what he would do if he felt he could get away with it. A Nome is a Nome (or rather, a Gnome, if you're Thompson), and if he sees a precious gem he wants, he will take it, even if it might hurt Betsy Bobbin. He's the right mix of obsequious and dastardly. (And I always like reading him out loud; my Kaliko is a slightly more sniveling version of Stephen Fry's Jeeves.) You can tell that Thompson reread Tik-Tok in preparation for writing this book: there are lots of references large and small, and she clearly also consulted its map carefully, as Ozma and Atmos even end up in the "Ripple Land" from Emerald City.

Ozma gets kidnapped here (more on that later) by a balloon man from the sky, named "Atmos Fere," and though the idea that time moves differently in the sky (two days go by very quickly) is obviously there so that the timelines sync up between the two plotlines, it's a nice trippy one. Immense City, the land of the giant Big Wigs, is probably one of Thompson's best thought-through magical communities thus far, with very Baumian problem-solving and imagery.

But... the Hungry Tiger's moral conflict doesn't really drive the story, and it doesn't pop thematically, either, as the Cowardly Lion's did in his book. Pretty quickly, the Hungry Tiger decides his conscience won't let him eat people. There's then this subplot about his shame running through the book—he doesn't want Betsy or Ozma to know he came to Rash willingly to do the eating—and it seems like this might be going somewhere... but, no, he just gets away with it! He does get humiliated when a Big Wig girl treats him as a kitten, and I think this meant to be comeuppance, but it doesn't have a thematic connection to his sin.

The book feels very aimless and jerky. The evil ruler of Rash tries to feed the rightful prince, Evered ("Reddy") to the Hungry Tiger, and his backstory is so tossed off that I think my son missed it even though it's ostensibly the plot of the novel. The Hungry Tiger, Reddy, Betsy, and Carter Green the Vegetable Man go off on a quest to find three rubies that will restore Reddy to the throne, and it's a complete coincidence that they find any of them! Parts of it read like Thompson abandoned ideas; the characters visit an underground community called "Down Town," and are on their way to another one called "Up Town"... but they just never get to Up Town for some reason. As to Down Town itself, it's ruled by a King Dad, and I didn't really get the joke. When the characters return to Rash to put Reddy on the throne, they actually only do this because they are lost, they don't go there on purpose!

Thompson has typically used Dorothy as her preexisting human Oz character (she's a co-protagonist in Royal Book, Grampa, and Lost King, three of Thompson's six preceding books), but here she uses Betsy Bobbin, who Baum introduced in Tik-Tok as a Dorothy substitute, but never gave a substantial role to again. Thompson gets Betsy's characterization pretty much spot on... but unfortunately, that's a tendency to sit there and do nothing and be swept along by events. She doesn't have the forthrightness of Dorothy or the gumption of Trot. And her best friend Hank the Mule doesn't even put in a token appearance! She never says or does anything clever or interesting. Similarly, I found Reddy a bit of a blank slate. The prince on a quest is definitely a Thompson trope, but Reddy never really has a personality, unlike Prince Pompa in Kabumpo or Prince Tatters in Grampa. Ozma is not well-done by, either; I liked her moral conflict over harming Atmos, but beyond that she demonstrates no initiative, no determination, no bravery, and no magic! This is not the fairy whose powers and morality Baum explored so well in Glinda of Oz. Carter the Vegetable Man is a fun character visually, and I love the gags about his ears of corn, but he doesn't really want or need anything; he's also just along for the ride. (He's kind of unusual, though, as a Thompson character who is enchanted but never gets disenchanted.)

Ultimately, these things add up to a book that has its moments, but is my least favorite Thompson thus far, except for Royal Book. I think my son (to whom I read it aloud, as usual) enjoyed it well enough, especially the stuff with the Big Wigs, but the Hungry Tiger's moral dilemma seemed to go over his head. Apparently he doesn't understand why it would be wrong for a tiger to eat a prisoner! Do I need to be more explicit in teaching morality to my four-year-old?

The Hungry Tiger of Oz came into the public domain in 2022, but as of July, there was not a SeaWolf Press edition of it, which is the publisher whose editions I used for the previous three Thompsons. (It came out in August, about a week too late! I only discovered it even existed when writing up this review.) So I had to switch to Del Reys. Del Rey put out mass market paperback editions of all fourteen Baum Oz books in the 1980s, and the majority of my Baum books as a kid were those editions. What I did not know at the time, and indeed, did not find out until a couple of years ago, was that Del Rey also reprinted all of Thompson's Oz novels (all of which but four were still under copyright then) in a similarly designed but slightly larger trade format.

These have the original black-and-white illustrations, but at a smaller size to fit the scale of the books. However, they don't include the color plates, not even in black and white. Things like Thompson's note to the children and the illustrations from the endpapers (a delightful one of Carter Green growing miniature Vegetable Men) are also omitted. There are also a number of typos, including a really bad one where "Oz" is rendered as "Ox" in a chapter title! But what can you do if you don't want to pay a hundred dollars for a Reilly & Lee edition? The International Wizard of Oz Club has a large stockpile of some of the Del Rey Thompsons; I signed my son up for a membership and bought this (and the next one, Gnome King) directly from them. They were both first printings from 1985! But it took an awful long time for the books to come, hence why we had to read two non-Oz books following Lost King.

Next up in sequence: The Gnome King of Oz

Doctor Who: Blue Box by Kate Orman

Doctor Who: Blue Box
by Kate Orman

I've been reading BBC Books's Eighth Doctor Adventures and related books every three months since October 2019, starting with the novelisation of the TV movie: ones I owned but hadn't got to, supplemented by ones that had been rereleased. Trading Futures was the last of those, so now I'm on to some vaguely related books before I draw this project to a close. The first is Blue Box, a Past Doctor Adventure rereleased as an ebook; it has no link to the EDAs, but it's by Kate Orman, one of the very best Doctor Who novelists, so I made an exception.

 

Published: 2003
Acquired and read: December 2022

Blue Box features the sixth Doctor and Peri, seemingly some time in the run-up to The Trial of a Time Lord, in 1981 America. The novel is told in the form of a piece of long-form journalism by Chick Peters, who stumbles into a plot by a prominent D.C.-area hacker to acquire a piece of alien technology, and the attempts of the Doctor, Peri, and their friend Bob to stop her. It's got a lot going for it, and I really enjoyed it on the whole; surely one of the very best PDAs.

First, Orman as always has a good handle on characterization. Here we get some probing of Peri's tempestuous relationship with the sixth Doctor: why she likes him, why she wants to leave him, why she ultimately stays on. The sixth Doctor is in a bit of a different mode than normal (Orman perhaps channeling some of the seventh Doctor, with whom she cut her teeth as a Doctor Who novelist), but I could still imagine Colin Baker delivering his lines with gusto. (She does get him out of the coat, which was seemingly obligatory for PDA writers back in the day, though I did like the image of him wearing all black except for a rainbow cat tie.) The new characters, especially Chick, Bob, and the villain, Sarah Swan, all pop off the page. There's a pretty neat turn of events as regards Chick, one I wouldn't have excepted in a 2003 novel. Though it's not handled quite the way I would imagine for a 2023 novel, it was still pretty impressive.

Second, I really liked how the story was told. Peters writes in the first person from his perspective. Sometimes it's stuff he saw, sometimes it's stuff he reconstructed from his sources. It's a neat way to tell a Doctor Who story, and an effectively different way of getting into characters' heads. Orman does a good job of imitating the style of long-form journalism, like those occasional forays into people's backstories, the plucking out of their small idiosyncrasies, and beginning with a scene that occurs much later than most of the action. The book is able to give exposition in terms of both character and plot without it feeling belabored, and there is a nicely poetic recurring bit about someone riding a bull that wrong-foots the readers. As always, Orman reads smoothly and nicely. It feels like a novel, not a novelisation of a tv show, in the form of the story, too: the story here is about people, and the kind of action that is present, plays to the strengths of prose.

Third, I loved the topic. I watched War Games and Triumph of the Nerds a lot as a kid. I have a real fondness for the early computer era, an era where—as this book points out—individual people could still meaningfully comprehend and control computer programs and the emerging Internet. There are some good jokes about what was to come with computing, and lots of delving into the mechanics of hacking. I don't know if it was all plausible or not, but it felt plausible. (The "blue box" of the title is not the TARDIS but a real device that lets people manipulate phone lines.) I always get a kick out of this kind of thing, and Orman made it come alive.

Add to that a creepy concept and you have a winner. I don't know that I would give it "five stars" if I went around doing such things, but this seems to me to be the platonic ideal of a PDA.

(I read it a week before Christmas... and it actually takes place from December 23 to 26 or so. I guess I could have included in my readthrough of Doctor Who Christmas books. It's not very Christmassy, but no less so than, say, The Sleep of Reason.)

I read a post–New Doctor Who Adventures novel every three months. Next up in sequence: The Glamour Chronicles: Big Bang Generation

The Widow's Curse (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 32)

The Widow's Curse: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Rob Davis, John Ross, Jonathan Morris, Martin Geraghty, Dan McDaid, Roger Langridge, Ian Edginton, Mike Collins, Adrian Salmon, et al.

Collection published: 2009
Contents originally published: 2007-08
Acquired: January 2010
Previously read: April 2010
Reread: October 2022

This is my era! In spring 2007, I took a three-week trip to the United Kingdom. I was excited to get to see Doctor Who on the tv as it aired... but the person I was staying with didn't have a tv! I had to torrent it just like I was back home in the States.

But the thing I could do was pick up Doctor Who Magazine in any old shop. The three weeks overlapped with the on-sale periods of #382 and 383, if I remember correctly, and I picked up both in the bookstore while I was there. Once I was back home, I realized my local Borders carried the magazine, so I just kept going with it. Soon, I would switch to getting it through my local comic book shop, and I have continued to get the magazine ever since. (I am not sure where my first year's worth of issues actually is, though; the earliest one in my DWM boxes is #397. Did I... gasp... throw them away!?) For me, this was a real high period for the magazine. The covers from 2007 are fantastic; great publicity photos well used (#386 is iconic, I reckon), and I very much miss the in-depth set reports and episode features of this era. And Russell T Davies's "Production Notes" were so good!

This means I would have joined the strip as a regular reader with part two of The Woman Who Sold the World. I was probably very confused! To be honest, though I love reading the strip in collected editions, I often struggle with it in the actual magazine. I find it hard to invest in a story that I read in ten-page segments stretched out across months. Still, I do remember some of the stories of this era from my first read, particularly, Time of My Life from #399. (I also have negative memories of Universal Monsters in the actual magazine, but I enjoyed it both the previous time I read this collection and this time. Maybe I was just not yet an Adrian Salmon devotee?)

It was kind of weird to read this right after watching The Power of the Doctor and seeing the 60th anniversary teaser trailer... Tennant and Tate nostalgia rules the land!

from Doctor Who Magazine #382

The Woman Who Sold the World, from Doctor Who Magazine #381-84 (May-July 2007)
script by Rob Davis, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

This I found a bit tough to get into at first. It's one of those weird Doctor Who stories where at first there's a bunch of disparate elements and it's not clear how they relate to each other; you're sort of relentlessly thrown from bit to bit. I particularly found it hard to track how I was supposed to feel about Sugarpea and Sweetleaf, the old couple in the flying chair. But by the end of the story I had come around and was totally into it: great characters, so many great concepts packed in here, good jokes, and a real emotional ending like something that might have been done on tv at the time. Only this is so much madder and more expansive! In the notes, editor Clay Hickman says they were trying to get the strip to be like the Mills & Wagner days, and I can totally see it: it has that non-stop breakneck feeling, only with more of a genuine character focus. Only thing that doesn't work for me is the kid who accidentally kills his dad. Felt a bit too gruesome and dark.

from Doctor Who Magazine #385

Bus Stop!, from Doctor Who Magazine #385 (Aug. 2007)
script by Rob Davis, pencils by John Ross, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

A one-off gag strip, but a decent one. The Doctor tries to preserve the timeline from rogue time travellers by riding on a bus with a soup made from the Mayor of London, but it's all (mostly) told from the perspective of a passenger (we do have a couple cuts to what Martha is doing on Mars). The narration of the passenger sometimes lays it on a bit thick but overall it's an enjoyable conceit, well executed.

The First, from Doctor Who Magazine #386-89 (Sept.-Dec. 2007)
script by Dan McDaid, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

The Doctor and Martha meet Shackleton... and of course aliens made of ice. This is solid: it didn't wow me, but it felt like a reasonably good pastiche of an RTD-era "celebrity historical." I found the ending a bit confusing and rushed, but I enjoyed the experience overall. Nice as always to see Martin Geraghty on the main strip.

Sun Screen, from Doctor Who Storybook 2008
script by Jonathan Morris, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

This story made me realize that I'm not sure one strip is really a good length for a Doctor Who comic if it's attempting to do the "traditional" Doctor Who story of the Doctor showing up somewhere, finding a bad thing, and fixing it. You can do a comedy story, you can do a character study, but eight pages for this kind of thing is so compressed that there's no interesting characters, no plot complications that aren't instantly resolved. Morris's other one-offs in this volume show better ways of handling it, though I guess a one-off adventure is what the context of the Doctor Who Storybook pretty much calls for.

from Doctor Who Magazine #390

Death to the Doctor!, from Doctor Who Magazine #390 (Jan. 2008)
script by Jonathan Morris, art and letters by Roger Langridge, colours by James Offredi

Indeed, here we go. This one is fun: a bunch of old but rubbish foes of the Doctor get together, and are undermined by their own incompetence. Probably my favorite gag was the Mentor, totally not a knock-off of the Master.

from Doctor Who Magazine #392

Universal Monsters, from Doctor Who Magazine #391-93 (Feb.-Apr. 2008)
story by Ian Edginton, art by Adrian Salmon, letters by Roger Langridge

Again, if not a great story, a very solid one. I like how the story plays into all the horror tropes in parts one and two, and then undoes them all in part three, but does so without feeling gratuitous or contrived. And of course giving this story to Adrian Salmon is a stroke of genius, one of the best-ever artists ever associated with Doctor Who, and this  plays perfectly into his wheelhouse.

One thing I do love about this story is how different it is in terms of tone. Since The Green-Eyed Monster in #377, I feel like the strip is reembracing that it is, well, a comic strip more. Though the two Rose volumes had some good and even great stories, I think the ones from #377 are more playful in tone and format in the way that only a comic strip can be. I don't think tv could do something like the shift from Death to the Doctor! to Universal Monsters to The Widow's Curse. Sure, you can shoot each episode like its own film (as the Moffat era did to good effect), but here you can even change how the characters look... but it's somehow all the same thing anyway.

from Doctor Who Magazine #398

The Widow's Curse, from Doctor Who Magazine #395-98 (May-Aug. 2008)
story by Rob Davis, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi

How good is this? Definitely the standout of this volume, except for maybe The Time of My Life. Great visuals, great concepts, great capturing of character. Westminster Abbey on a Caribbean island! Donna flying a Boeing 747! This is the stuff comics were born to do. On top of that, it's populated with a genuine cast of guest characters. This is actually something the strip doesn't do a lot, or doesn't do effectively; most stories I feel like just have one or two people in them who are fully developed. But we have a whole group of tourists and more here, each of which who gets a genuinely great moment. The way the title comes into play at the end is excellent. It's kind of weird to see DWM do such a close sequel to a screen story, but overall it works incredibly well. If Donna only got one multi-part story, I'm glad it was this one.

The Immortal Emperor, from Doctor Who Storybook 2009
script by Jonathan Morris, art by Rob Davis, colours by Rob Davis & Geraint Ford, letters by Roger Langridge

Like Sun Screen, this is pretty breakneck. It works a bit better, in that I love the stylized art of Rob Davis, and a bit worse, in that I'm a bit skeptical of the fact that in one of Doctor Who's rare forays into the history of a non-UK country, every significant character other than the Doctor and Donna is evil.

from Doctor Who Magazine #399

The Time of My Life, from Doctor Who Magazine #399 (Sept. 2008)
script by Jonathan Morris, art by Rob Davis, colours by Geraint Ford, letters by Roger Langridge

Again, how good is this? I love this style of storytelling, a number of quick one-page excerpts from unseen adventures that show off the Doctor and Donna at their best. Lots of great jokes and great concepts and beautiful moments. The page where they just have fun seeing the Beatles is probably the best, but they're all great. On top of that you get the amazing art and layouts of Rob Davis, which adds so much to each page.

In the past I kind of thought the early new series–era comics weren't very good... on this reread I haven't felt that way—they're good on the whole even if they're not great—but since #377 they've been on a definite upward trajectory, and I can't wait to see what happens next...

Other Notes:

• Mike Collins's design for the space bank here (a giant space pyramid) is basically identical to his design for the Redeemer spaceships in the Star Trek comic New Frontier: Double Time.
  
• My hypothetical "only-knows-Doctor-Who-from-the-strip" reader must have been very confused reading Death to the Doctor! "Who the heck is this lady in white? Where's Sharon!?" But it is nice to see Frobisher and Izzy again. I think this is the strip's first post-2005 reference to its pre-2005 history, right? Am I forgetting something? And then a few stories later we get the freakin' zyglots! Only thing that could have been better would be making the Dan Abnett–style space marines in Time of My Life the actual Foreign Hazard Duty.
• Here we're back to a run with neither a consistent writer (there are four different ones across nine stories) nor a consistent penciller (six different ones). But unlike past instances of this, the strip still feels coherent. I think this probably comes down to 1) strong editorial work from Clay Hickman/Tom Spilsbury and especially Scott Gray, and 2) strong capturing of the voices of the regulars, especially David Tennant. All these various creators seem to be on the same page despite their varied styles, unlike, say, the early McCoy-era strips collected in A Cold Day in Hell!
• Universal Monsters is Ian Edginton's only contribution to Doctor Who Magazine. He has, however, written a mediocre Big Finish audio drama, Shield of the Jötunn. Outside of the world of Doctor Who, he is a prolific comics writer: I know him best from his Star Trek work (an excellent run for Marvel on the Captain Pike series Early Voyages, plus an IDW one-off), but his best-known work is probably Scarlet Traces, a series of The War of the Worlds sequels.
  
• This collection skips over Hotel Historia from #394, because it makes more sense to collect it in the next volume, The Crimson Hand, as we'll see. I guess because of when it was published, I always think of that story as featuring Martha... but it totally does not!
• I usually read the strips in these collections in order publication order; this means I should have moved The Immortal Emperor to the end. (It would actually properly go between strips in the next volume by publication order.) But it was clearly sequenced here based on reading flow, and in this case, I made an exception and bowed to book's position, which was the right choice.



from Doctor Who Magazine #386


• Both Martha and Donna had been written out of the tv show by the time their first comic story came to an end. At five strips, Donna has one of the shortest runs of any multi-story companion, tying Olla the Heat Vampire (#130-34). This is exacerbated by the fact that, as a tv companion, she just blips into existence... though she actually does kind of get written out.
• Two of the writers here would go on to become the "main" writer of the strip in the future. Dan McDaid, writer of The First, would do the tenth Doctor and Majenta Pryce run (#400-20), while Jonathan Morris would do the eleventh Doctor and Amy run (#421-41). No offense to either writer, though, who have both turned out strong work, but the surprising thing to me—based purely on the quality of work in this collection—is that Rob Davis never got a run. Two excellent stories as a writer in this collection, one excellent story as an artist, and some other solid work as well. Able to do big stories and little stories in a variety of styles; knows how to crash weird things together in the best DWM tradition.
• "YOU'RE JUST A TRACER" WATCH: This collection has ten writers and artists. Nine of them get cover credit. The only one who doesn't? Inker David A. Roach, who works on thirteen of the nineteen strips. John Ross draws just one and still manages to snag cover credit. Indeed, he gets second billing!

This post is the thirty-second in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Crimson Hand. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Iron Legion
2. Dragon's Claw 
3. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume One
4. The Tides of Time
5. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Two
6. Voyager
7. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Three
8. The World Shapers
9. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Four
10. The Age of Chaos
11. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Five
12. A Cold Day in Hell!
13. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 1)
14. Nemesis of the Daleks
15. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 2)
16. The Good Soldier
17. The Incomplete Death's Head
18. Evening's Empire
19. The Daleks
20. Emperor of the Daleks
21. The Sleeze Brothers File
22. The Age of Chaos
23. Land of the Blind
24. Ground Zero
25. End Game
26. The Glorious Dead
27. Oblivion
28. Transformers: Time Wars and Other Stories
29. The Flood
30. The Cruel Sea 
31. The Betrothal of Sontar
    

JSA: Strange Adventures by Kevin J. Anderson, Barry Kitson, and Gary Erskine

JSA: Strange Adventures

Collection published: 2010
Contents published: 2004-05
Acquired and read: December 2022

Writer: Kevin J. Anderson

Penciller/Breakdowns: Barry Kitson

Inker/Finishes: Gary Erskine

Letterer: Rob Leigh

I think this might be the last "continuity insert" storyline of my Justice Society reading: that is to say, the last story set entirely in the "past" of the DC Universe relative to when it was published. Like Superman vs. Wonder Woman, Steel, the Indestructible Man, All-Star Squadron, The Young All-Stars, The Crimson Avenger, The Demise of Justice, The Justice Society Returns!, and All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant, this is entirely set during World War II, fleshing out the Golden Age in a modern style—which to me has become one of my favorite types of JSA story.

Unfortunately it is not very good. It is a a long miniseries, at six 30-page issues, but less seems to happen in it than in many minis of four 20-page issues. Before I picked this up, I was reading Don McGregor's Jungle Action run, and it took me longer to read a 17-page issue of Jungle Action than a 30-page issue of this. Like, there are lots of boring fights and boring meetings; the characters have long conversations about things that aren't interesting and don't matter.

This story seems to think the Star-Spangled Kid was a JSA member for some reason.
from JSA: Strange Adventures #5

The characters themselves are fairly generic. In "continuity insert" stories like The Demise of Justice and The Justice Society Returns!, the writers and artists were able to express the depths and personality of these Golden Age characters, but there's barely any of that here. It wants to be a Johnny Thunder story, about his desire to be a writer, but this doesn't go anywhere interesting. Johnny befriends the real Golden Age science fiction writer Jack Williamson, and this could be fun and meta, but unfortunately, it makes for long boring scenes. I don't rate Kevin J. Anderson very much as a writer, so I was not surprised by any of this... I was however disappointed, because I was hopeful anyway. I did kind of think the usually excellent Barry Kitson might be able to save it, but if there's nothing interesting to draw, it doesn't matter how well you draw it.

This post is thirty-eighth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers JSA Classified. Previous installments are listed below:

1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
3. All-Star Squadron (1981-87)
4. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)
5. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)
6. Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)
7. America vs. the Justice Society (1985)
8. Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)
9. Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)
10. Infinity, Inc. #11-53 (1985-88) [reading order]
11. Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)
12. All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant (1999)
13. Steel, the Indestructible Man (1978)
14. Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two (1977)
• Wonder Woman: Earth-Two (1977-78)
15. Secret Origins of the Golden Age (1986-89)
16. The Young All-Stars (1987-89)
17. Gladiator (1930) ["Man-God!" (1976)]
    
18. The Crimson Avenger: The Dark Cross Conspiracy (1981-88)
19. The Immortal Doctor Fate (1940-82)
20. Justice Society of America: The Demise of Justice (1951-91)
21. Armageddon: Inferno (1992)
22. Justice Society of America vol. 2 (1992-93)
23. The Adventures of Alan Scott--Green Lantern (1992-93)
24. Damage (1994-96)
25. The Justice Society Returns! (1999-2001)
26. Chase (1998-2002)
27. Stargirl by Geoff Johns (1999-2003)
28. The Sandman Presents: The Furies (2002)
29. JSA by Geoff Johns, Book One (1999-2000)
30. Wonder Woman: The 18th Letter: A Love Story (2000)
31. Two Thousand (2000)
32. JSA by Geoff Johns, Book Two (1999-2003)
33. Golden Age Secret Files & Origins (2001)
34. JSA by Geoff Johns, Book Three (1999-2003)
35. JSA by Geoff Johns, Book Four (2002-03)
36. JSA Presents Green Lantern (2002-08)
37. JSA #46-87 (2003-06)
    

Reading Roundup Wrapup: December 2022

Pick of the month: A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett. It's been a long time since my previous Discworld novel, the first Tiffany Aching one, which I struggled with. So thankfully, not only did I enjoy the second one, I loved it! Good jokes, good characterization. What more does one want?

All books read:

1. The Yellow Knight of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill
2. Doctor Who Magazine: Special Edition #58: Directing Doctor Who edited by Marcus Hearn
3. In the Serpent’s Wake by Rachel Hartman
4. The Blood of Azrael: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Scott Gray, Mike Collins, Adrian Salmon, and David A Roach
5. JSA: Strange Adventures by Kevin J. Anderson, Barry Kitson, and Gary Erskine
6. The Hopes and Fears of All the Years and Other Doctor Who Christmas Short Trips
7. Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It by David M. Ewalt
8. Doctor Who: Blue Box by Kate Orman
9. The Eye of Torment: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Scott Gray, Martin Geraghty, Mike Collins, Jacqueline Rayner, and David A Roach
10. A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett
11. The Highgate Horror: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Mark Wright, David A Roach, Mike Collins, Jacqueline Rayner, Martin Geraghty, et al.
12. Doorway to Hell: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Mark Wright, Staz Johnson, Mike Collins, David A Roach, and John Ross
13. Daleks: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection, Volume 1: Collected comic strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Richard Alan, Steve Alan, Paul Cornell, Steve Dillon, Dave Gibbons, David Lloyd, Pat Mills, Steve Moore, Paul Neary, Lee Sullivan, John Wagner, et al.
14. The Phantom Piper: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Scott Gray, Martin Geraghty, Staz Johnson, Mike Collins, et al.
15. Daleks: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection, Volume 2: Collected comic strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Richard Alan, Alan Barnes, Paul Cornell, Martin Geraghty, Scott Gray, Robin Smith, and Lee Sullivan
16. The Clockwise War: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Scott Gray, John Ross, Alan Barnes, Adrian Salmon, Charlie Adlard, et al.

Back in November 2020, I started a project to read all the collected editions of the Doctor Who Magazine comics. I didn't think it would take me very long. Yes, there are thirty-one of them, and yes, I wanted to add some stuff that would bring it up to (as of now) forty-six total installments... but they're not very long, so surely I could read five or six a month? I'd be done in less than a year.

This was not true. Not because of the graphic novels themselves, but because of all the books I read between them, which usually resulted in me averaging one or two per month. But this month, as I neared the end, I finally cleared out a bunch of backlogged reading and blew through eight of them! Only one to go.

All books acquired:

1. JSA: Strange Adventures by Kevin J. Anderson, Barry Kitson, and Gary Erskine
2. Pirates in Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill
3. Daleks: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection, Volume 2: Collected comic strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Richard Alan, Alan Barnes, Paul Cornell, Martin Geraghty, Scott Gray, Robin Smith, and Lee Sullivan
4. League of Dragons: The Final Temeraire Novel by Naomi Novik
   
5. The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wicker
6. Brothers in Arms by Lois McMaster Bujold
7. Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold
8. Novels & Story Cycles: The Martian Chronicles / Fahrenheit 451 / Dandelion Wine / Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
   
9. The Illustrated Man / The October Country / Other Stories by Ray Bradbury
   
10. Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga
11. Americana: The Making of the Cities: Cincinnati by Lee Davis Willoughby
12. Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with My Kids by Scott Hershovitz
13. Strange Adventures edited by Scott Nybakken

Obviously, mostly Christmas presents: #4-12. I do have to question the wisdom of my LibraryThing secret Santa, who picked the ninth book of a nine-book series where I have read no previous installments! #10-11 are both Cincinnati-set books picked by my sister, for my project to read books set in my hometown.

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 685 (up 1)

Wow, actually reading books from my list actually helps!

The Betrothal of Sontar (From Stockbridge to Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 31)

The Betrothal of Sontar: Collected Comic Strips from the Pages of Doctor Who Magazine
by Mike Collins, Gareth Roberts, Tony Lee, John Tomlinson & Nick Abadzis, Roger Langridge, Martin Geraghty, Jonathan Morris, et al.

Collection published: 2008
Contents originally published: 2006-07
Acquired: November 2008
Previously read: December 2008
Reread: October 2022

This collection spans the entirety of the tenth Doctor and Rose era of DWM, which initiated when "The Christmas Invasion" aired and ran all the way to "The Runaway Bride," and it also includes a (kind of) companion-free storyline from between "The Runaway Bride" and "Smith and Jones," making for a nice sizeable chunk of DWM. Like the comics collected in The Cruel Sea, these are definitely trying to ape the storytelling of the Russell T Davies era on screen, but I also felt there was a more concerted effort to play to the strengths of comics here: more stories that do things so big that they could never have been afforded on screen, or stories with lots of different locations. Overall, it's a pretty pleasing package.

I've read this collection before, way back in 2008 when it came out. This is (part of) what I wrote at the time:

Either way, this collection is a bit of a jumble. The title story by John Tomlinson & Nick Abadzis is fine for the most part, though the resolution is highly disappointing. Tony Lee's "F.A.Q." is an absolute mess, and the usually-dependable Mike Collins isn't up to scratch with "The Futurists"-- it has some nice ideas, but they don't really cohere. Jonathan Morris's "Opera of Doom!" is too slight to be effective. Morris's other effort, "Interstellar Overdrive" is quite fun and mostly faultless, but something always bothers me about stories where our protagonists would have died but for a convenient time loop that lets them do things over (as in Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Cause and Effect" or Deep Space Nine's "Whispers"). It's fun to see the Brigadier in Alan Barnes's "The Warkeeper's Crown", but as I write this review, I can't remember anything else about the story, good or bad. [...] The standouts of the collection are the two "comedy" one-parters: Gareth Roberts's "The Lodger" has the tenth Doctor moving in with Mickey for a week, with hilarious consequences, of course. And Nev Fountain's "The Green Eyed Monster" puts Rose on a reality television show exploring her jealousy of the Doctor's other women-- especially Jackie!

I was curious to see how much my impressions of some of these stories shifted this time around!

from Doctor Who Magazine #365

The Betrothal of Sontar, from Doctor Who Magazine #365-67 (Feb.-Mar. 2006)
story by John Tomlinson & Nick Abadzis, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

This sees the first appearance of the Sontarans in the DWM strip since 1993's Pureblood (and even reuses that story's title term); it's about a group of low-quality Sontarans who run a mining rig instead of getting glorious soldiering duty, a neat look into a different dimension of Sontaran society than we've ever seen on screen. The cosmic maguffin wasn't super interesting, but I liked the two principal Sontaran characters. I'm not sure why in my review above I called this story's resolution "highly disappointing." Like, rereading it I have no idea what my beef was at all.

from Doctor Who Magazine #368

The Lodger, from Doctor Who Magazine #368 (Apr. 2006)
story by Gareth Roberts, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

This was fun; you can see why Moffat picked it up to make it into a tv episode, and though being a 45-minute story gave it more room to breathe, this version has the benefit of pairing the Doctor with a familiar character—and not having to work in an alien threat of some kind. More of a series of vignettes than a story, but a very solid series of them, and the kind of thing that (somewhat ironically) only DWM could do, I think.

from Doctor Who Magazine #370

F.A.Q., from Doctor Who Magazine #369-71 (May-July 2006)
story by Tony Lee, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

I was dreading this one going in. I remembered my negative review from last time around, and having since suffered through Tony Lee's run on IDW's Doctor Who comic book, my opinions of Lee as a comic writer have only diminished. But... I actually kind of liked this? I wouldn't say it's a work of genius or anything—the stories on either side of it are better—but it's fun enough. It has the grounded sensibility of the RTD era, focusing on an ordinary family affected by alien powers, shades of "Fear Her" (a story that I really like). Rose gets some good spotlight moments. The main thing I don't like is the reveal about the teacher who didn't really exist, which seemed kind of pointless. Like, it's spooky, but it doesn't really seem to make a character or thematic point.

from Doctor Who Magazine #373

The Futurists, from Doctor Who Magazine #372-74 (Aug.-Oct. 2006)
story & art by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

I really don't know what I was thinking when I wrote my above review, because this story was on fire. Good ideas, great visuals, neat contrasts (black Romans in Britain vs. a fascist Italian state), fast pace—four different key locations in three installments!—nice themes, and above all, good characterization for Rose and some genuine laugh-out-loud jokes. Loved gags about the Silurians, how many people were in the resistance, the use of the resistance, and especially the clever use of the psychic paper. "But Darius... you can't read..." "Oh." I can imagine it playing out perfectly on screen. Rose leading the captured Silurian women in revolt is great, and her voice is captured very well. Exactly the kind of story the strip ought to be doing when the tv show is leading, and the volume's highlight. I don't know how I got it so wrong fourteen years ago.

(Wait... fourteen years ago!?)

from Doctor Who Magazine #375

Interstellar Overdrive, from Doctor Who Magazine #375-76 (Nov.-Dec. 2006)
story by Jonathan Morris, pencils by Mike Collins, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

I do love time loop stories. They're one of my favorite sf subgenres. TNG's "Cause and Effect," Groundhog Day, SG-1's "Window of Opportunity," Discovery's "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," Russian Doll season one, Palm Springs, I love them all. I am a total sucker for them. I even love the chronic hysteresis bit in Meglos.

Um, except this one. I think it's a noble attempt. But it has two things going against it, I reckon. One is that the repetition just isn't as interesting when it's solely visual. Here the scenes are all shown from a different angle, but that means you don't really get that uncanny echo that makes these kind of things work on screen. The second is that since it's only two parts, the loop only repeats once, and so it's less a time loop story, and more a story where something happens once, and then the characters get a do-over. It feels cheap, I guess, if it's that easy to get out of the loop. Seeing the iterations is what makes these kind of things fun!

But there are some good jokes and the part one cliffhanger is a good one.

from Doctor Who Storybook 2007

Opera of Doom!, from Doctor Who Storybook 2007
story by Jonathan Morris, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

This story is a delight. Quick, fun, good gags. A little too quick, maybe—the fact that people were disappearing into the alien opera house maybe should have been set up better—but I really enjoyed it. The really terrible musician who becomes amazing is a fun character with lots of good jokes.

The Green-Eyed Monster, from Doctor Who Magazine #377 (Jan. 2007)
story by Nev Fountain, art & letters by Roger Langridge, colours by James Offredi

Rose's last appearance in the strip is a good one, bringing Mickey back again and also marking Jackie's only strip appearance. It's a kind of contrived story about an alien jealousy monster and a talk show, but it's all worth it for the incredible sequence where Rose thinks that the Doctor has settled down with her mother. The ending gag of Jackie wanting a second kiss is delightful.

The Warkeeper's Crown, from Doctor Who Magazine #378-80 (Jan.-Mar. 2007)
story by Alan Barnes, pencils by Martin Geraghty, inks by David A. Roach, colours by James Offredi, letters by Roger Langridge

Rose of course stopped appearing on screen way back in July 2006, but DWM seems to have considered "The Runaway Bride" her official cut-off point as the current companion—the first episode without her as a lead, I guess. So here we get a companion-less story to bridge the gap before Martha, and DWM brings back the Brigadier to serve as a temporary companion. Though the Brigadier appeared in the "past Doctor" early of the early 1990s, I think this is his first present-day appearance since The Mark of Mandragora.

from Doctor Who Magazine #380

It's okay. I liked the first part all right, which pulls the Doctor, the Brigadier, and the wrong Mike Yates together; I liked the last part, where the wrong Mike Yates tries to remake Britain. The middle part, though, lost me in the complicated exposition about the relations on the alien planet, and the whole story suffered as a consequence. I didn't really get the ending, for example. It seemed like things ought to have been simplified. The idea of the Doctor meeting the Brigadier for the first time after he himself fought in a war seemed squandered in a single panel. (Shades of Big Finish's own attempt to do this story, Way of the Burryman, which I read Warkeeper's Crown in the middle of, coincidentally.)

Other Notes:

• #367 is one of the rare issues from this era I actually do own; I picked it up to get the free Big Finish CD that came with it. I have no memory of reading The Betrothal of Sontar part three on its own, but I have to imagine it made no sense.
• John Tomlinson previously wrote for DWM way back in 1989, scripting Nemesis of the Dalek. (He also wrote two Who strips for The Incredible Hulk Presents and a prose story from the collection Abslom Daak: Dalek Killer.) At 210 issues, that's the longest gap between contributions for any DWM writer/artist as of 2014's strips. His cowriter here, Nick Abadzis, would go on to the primary writer of Titan's The Tenth Doctor comic.
  
• From #363 to 368, we have three stories, two of which were by Gareth Roberts and got adapted for television! Plus The Love Invasion inspires a scene in "The Unicorn and the Wasp" on screen. Quite a hit rate for him. The Lodger is, however, his last contribution to the DWM strip.
• I was all prepared to admit I was too hard on Tony Lee as a writer, and then I read his behind-the-scenes I comments. I don't know how one manages to write a bad creator's commentary, but somehow he does. Lots of very belabored jokes, with the kind of self-deprecating humour that comes across as false modesty.
• Jonathan Morris gives an incredible amount of detail in his creator's commentaries, down to entire lost scenes from both his stories. I can't think of another DWM graphic novel with this level of detail. Though I enjoyed Opera of Doom! the lost joke about the very slow gondola chase would have been amazing.



from Doctor Who Magazine #377


• The Green-Eyed Monster opens with a caption reading "Quite a while ago...", which confused me at first, but I guess it's meant to indicate that this goes between "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "Rise of the Cybermen," which was broadcast many months prior. Placement notes aren't really the kind of thing DWM typically goes in for, and it didn't even occur to me we weren't going in chronological order prior to that, since I think every strip here could comfortably fit between "Tooth and Claw" and "School Reunion."
• At the time I read this volume, The Warkeeper's Crown was seemingly Alan Barnes's last contribution to the strip, but he is the writer of the current fourteenth Doctor strip, Liberation of the Daleks, that began in issue #584. In between these points, he wrote one million Doctor Who audio dramas for Big Finish and script-edited ten million.
  
• David A. Roach works on literally every story in this volume except for one ten-page strip, more than any other writer or artist... and somehow does not deserve cover billing!

This post is the thirty-first in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers The Widow's Curse. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Iron Legion
2. Dragon's Claw 
3. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume One
4. The Tides of Time
5. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Two
6. Voyager
7. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Three
8. The World Shapers
9. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Four
10. The Age of Chaos
11. The Transformers Classics UK, Volume Five
12. A Cold Day in Hell!
13. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 1)
14. Nemesis of the Daleks
15. Death's Head: Freelance Peacekeeping Agent (part 2)
16. The Good Soldier
17. The Incomplete Death's Head
18. Evening's Empire
19. The Daleks
20. Emperor of the Daleks
21. The Sleeze Brothers File
22. The Age of Chaos
23. Land of the Blind
24. Ground Zero
25. End Game
26. The Glorious Dead
27. Oblivion
28. Transformers: Time Wars and Other Stories
29. The Flood
30. The Cruel Sea
    

Reading L. Frank Baum's Queen Zixi of Ix Aloud to My Son

Queen Zixi of Ix; or, the Story of the Magic Cloak
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by Frederick Richardson

My son and I tend to read "borderlands of Oz" books when we're stuck waiting for Oz books. Unfortunately, it took much longer than I expected to get The Hungry Tiger of Oz, and The Master Key alone was not enough to cover the gap. After not particularly enjoying Master Key or The Enchanted Island of Yew (which we had read to cover the gap between Grampa and Lost King), I wasn't looking forward to reading a third borderlands book in quick succession.

Originally published: 1904-05
Read aloud: July 2022

I only had two more borderlands book: Dot and Tot of Merryland (1901) and Queen Zixi of Ix (1904-05). I don't really remember either from my own childhood, but I knew Dot and Tot is short, but not considered to be very good, while Queen Zixi was longer, but many consider it one of Baum's best. Did I want to read a bad book and get back to Oz quickly? Or take longer to get back to Oz, but potentially enjoy the experience more? Eventually I decided I was tired of reading books I didn't enjoy very much, and picked Queen Zixi.

Queen Zixi was one of Baum's last attempts at a non-Oz fantasy, but you can tell by the title how he was attempting to cash in on Oz's success, with a country name not too far off Oz in form. Like some of Baum's other early work (e.g., Magical Monarch of Mo) it feels less American and less modern. It opens in the Forest of Burzee (previously established in Life and Adventures of Santa Claus), where a group of fairies under Queen Lulea weave a magic cloak that can grant a mortal bearer one wish; one fairy is then sent into the country of Noland to give it to someone sad.

Meanwhile, a pair of children named Timothy and Margaret (but usually called "Bud" and "Fluff") are orphaned, and travel with their Aunt Rivette to the capital city, Nole. There, the king of Noland has recently died without heir, meaning the forty-seventh person to come through the city's east gate will become the new monarch. On the way, Fluff is given the magic cloak and she wishes to be happy; Bud ends up being the forty-seventh person, making him king and Fluff princess. The book has three distinct parts: 1) Bud and Fluff becoming and settling into the roles in the palace, 2) Queen Zixi's attempts to steal the magic cloak from Princess Fluff, including war, and 3) the invasion of Noland by the strange Roly-Rogues.

I don't think Noland and Ix quite have the sparkle of Oz, they are pretty generic vaguely medieval magic kingdoms, but overall this book might be Baum's most successful non-Oz fantasy. Two ordinary children (I used country accents for both) becoming rulers of a country is fun idea. There's some good fantasy humor when the magic cloak is passed through the various denizens of the palace who, ignorant of its power, keep wishing for different things, meaning that Bud and Fluff's aunt gets wings, and the lord high general (who has a short man complex) ends up ten feet tall, and the lord high executioner obtains an extendable arm, and so on. This is pretty fun stuff, and it's nice to have protagonists for whom something is actually at stake—arguably the biggest difference between Baum's good fantasies (e.g., this, Oz, Sky Island) and his ones I have not enjoyed (e.g., Master Key, Yew, Sea Fairies).

Similar things go for Queen Zixi's attempts to capture the magic cloak and the invasion of the Roly-Rogues. The latter are nicely imaginative creatures, and they pose a real threat to Noland. Zixi is one of Baum's more interesting witch characters: she's given herself a long life and ruled wisely, but in a mirror, she looks her real 683 years, and thus when she hears of a magic cloak, wants to wish for being able to deceive mirrors, too. So the normally kind ruler becomes a harsher one, but by the end of the novel she learns her lesson.

(That said, like in a lot of Baum novels, there are a lot of hinted-at geopolitics. Zixi has lead her people in hundred of battles, and there is some kind of preexisting enmity between Noland and Ix that means Zixi can't just ask for the cloak. On the other hand, Zixi has never lost a battle, so surely all those hundred battles can't be against Noland. Later maps would place Ix between Noland and Ev, the country where Ozma takes place, so has Ix fought a number of wars with Ev? Or maybe Ix has faced sea raids from places like Regos and Coregos; this novel does establish that Ix has a merchant fleet of some kind. In my reading, I turned Queen Lulea into Queen Lurline, the fairy queen from Burzee mentioned in many Oz novels. It's interesting to note that this novel establishes that fairies have a dislike for witch magic, given how much in the Oz novels the fairy Ozma depends on the magic of Glinda, a witch.)

I think my son liked it; he was particularly into the comedy about what the people did with the cloak, while he as usual didn't like hearing about bad things like Zixi stealing the cloak. Overall, I enjoyed it. It doesn't quite have the sparkle of weirdness than an Oz novel does, but it's fun, it has good jokes, and if it doesn't have a unified plot, it does have three individual ones. Baum never returned to any of the lands he established in his non-Oz fantasies, and this is one of the rare times I wish he did. I'd like to see King Bud grow up a bit, and for him, Fluff, Aunt Rivette, Zixi, and their various advisors face down some other kind of threat—and this time with no magic cloak to help!

Next up in sequence: The Hungry Tiger of Oz