Legion of Super-Heroes: Before the Darkness, Volume Two
Collection published: 2022 Contents originally published: 1980-82 Acquired: February 2022 Read: October 2023
Writers: Gerry Conway, Roy Thomas, Paul Levitz
Artists: Jim Janes, Steve Ditko, Frank Chiaramonte, Bruce Patterson, Carmine Infantino, José Luis García-López, Dick Giordano, Howard Bender, Rodin Rodriguez
Containing Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 2 #272-83, this collection fills in the last part of the gap between the last of the Legion of Super-Heroes Archives and The Great Darkness Saga deluxe edition, meaning that DC has collected a full run of the Legion from 1958's Adventure Comics #247 to 1984's Legion of Super-Heroes #313, which is quite frankly astounding. (Now all I have to do is track down the last four archives I need...) As a friend of mine has pointed out, there's no series other than the Legion where DC kept going once the archives sputtered out.
What is less astounding is the actual stories collected here. While volume one had a certain madcap old-school sci-fi charm, thanks to that volume's main scripter Gerry Conway, this one was much more the typical pedestrian Legion of the 1970s. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of the typical Legion melodramatics here, including an extended storyline where Ultra Boy seemingly dies but actually loses his memory and becomes a space pirate. But I found it hard to care, you know? The characters seemed to lack the solid grounding that makes the best Legion stories sing. I found it really hard to care about Reflecto or the Time Trapper here. Perhaps part of the issue is that none of the regular artists are among the Legion greats, even when they've done good work elsewhere.
I always enjoy some Blok. from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 2 #272 (script by Gerry Conway, art by Steve Ditko & Frank Chiaramonte)
The one thing you can say in favor of this saga is that it does also explain away Brainiac 5's turn into villainy and murder way back in Superboy and the Legion volume two. Perhaps we'd have been better off ignoring that, to be honest, but I guess it's good for one of our heroes to not be murdering women in squalid apartments, even when insane. This volume has a lot of the slow-simmering background plotlines that would be perfected during the Levitz and Giffen era, but they aren't so effective here; eventually I started to wonder if there would ever be any movement on the "Colossal Boy's mother is president of Earth" and "maybe Timber Wolf is going to leave the team" threads that never seemed to go anywhere.
It works well to find out Wildfire's bluster is balanced out by deep-set self-loathing. from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 2 #283 (script by Roy Thomas, art by Howard Bender & Bruce Patterson)
My favorite story was a small one, and surprisingly the work of Roy Thomas. I mean, I enjoyed Roy's work on DC's Earth-Two stuff, but I don't feel like he has a particular aptitude for the Legion. But he gives a solid and keen look into the origin of Wildfire, showing the insecurities of the Legion's most blustering member. Nice stuff.
Pick of the month:Mistress Masham's Repose by T. H. White. Very delightful, very funny sort-of-sequel to Gulliver's Travels, from the perspective of a young girl with an evil governess. Pulled it off my wife's shelves and it gave me a couple charming days that I had not expected at all. The Adventures with the Wife in Space book was a very close second.
All books read:
Doctor Who Magazine: Special Edition #60: Action Figures: The Essential Guide, 1963-1996 by Alan Barnes, Marcus Hearn, and Jim Sangster
#3-9 were Christmas presents. Adding Martin Chuzzlewit to my LibraryThing brought my collection of physical books up to 3,000! But I've been meaning to do a purge, so hopefully that will go down a bit soon.
Currently reading:
Mighty Marvel Masterworks Presents The Black Panther, Volume 1: Collecting The Fantastic Four Nos. 52-54, 56, Tales of Suspense Nos. 97-99, Captain America No. 100, The Avengers Nos. 52, 62, 73-74 & Daredevil No. 52 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Roy Thomas, John Buscema, et al.
The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 7 edited by Neil Clarke
The Fit One: The Wife in Space, Volume 6 by Neil and Sue Perryman
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
Up next in my rotations:
The Court Jester: The Wife in Space, Volume 7 by Neil and Sue Perryman
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The Long Mirage by David R. George III
The Pelican History of England: 3. English Society in the Early Middle Ages (1066-1307) by Doris Mary Stenton
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
Books remaining on "To be read" list: 664 (down 2)
I doubt I have ever registered a decrease in December before.
Back when I wrote up Neill's first Oz book, I wrote that "the thing I like about
more than anything else is that it might be the first Oz book to give us
a sense of what it's like to live in Oz." From the author's note at the beginning of his second, one discovers that this was in fact his explicit intention:
Day by day stirring events happen in the Land of OZ which we are compelled to let pass. No one will ever know of them. It would be impossible to tell you all that happens in a whole year. This book is the record of less than a week.
Basically, strange things are constantly happening in Oz; it's not that the books we get annually are the only significant events, rather, they are but the tip of the iceberg. (This is a handy get out for seeming continuity errors, of course. Why is Ojo an elephant boy now? Why is Jack Pumpkinhead trying to make Scraps into a proper lady? Why is the Scarecrow ruler of the Munchkins? Well, presumably, very exciting adventures occupying the other fifty-one weeks of the year would answer all of these questions.) The people of Oz are constantly going through wacky adventures... and, of course, finding it all immensely fun. Wouldn't you, if you couldn't get hurt and you knew your fairy queen could sort out any real problem with her magic belt? Indeed, Scalawagons kind of provides an answer to a problem that plagued Ruth Plumly Thompson's novels, where Oz was always coming within moment of being conquered by honestly pretty pathetic outside forces. Why shouldn't Ozma let these folks get as far as they can get, when she know ultimately everything will turn out fine? If everyone everyone who's not her gets a chance to stop the villains, they get something to do!
The premise of Scalawagons is that the Wizard invents self-driving cars, which he calls "scalawagons," and sets up a factory to produce them on Carrot Mountain in the Quadling Country with Tik-Tok as superintendent. Unfortunately, a creature called the Bell-Snickle fills them up with flabbergas, making them do all kinds of crazy things and fly away, meaning the cars are no-shows at the party devoted to their reveal. Jenny Jump, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Sawhorse set out to recover them, but in the meantime the scalawagons have crossed the Deadly Desert and run into the Mifkits, a tribe of strange creatures from outside Oz. (The Mifkits are from Baum's non-Oz novel John Dough and the Cherub, though based on their location and the fact that they can throw their heads, Neill seems to be thinking of the Scoodlers from Road to Oz.)
Like Wonder City, the main sense this book gives is that we should wonder at the weirdness of Oz, for there's little actual danger or stakes. And we do get some fun stuff: the Lollies and their Pops, who are living lollipops; water fairies that can be used to clean floors; a living clock who torments people who are late to work; living medicine bottles that are so desperate to be used they'll break your leg so they can fix it; the Winkie Woods being a place that literally winks on and off; bell-men who are literally men with bells on their head, who fly through the air having lost their home of Boboland (from Rinkitink in Oz, clearly Neill was working from the map this time out); living forests that travel the countryside in search of water.
But though my son always seemed quite engaged (indeed, he rated the book four out of four stars), I found it often tedious and pointless. One feels like Jenny's attempt to find the scalawagons ought to be the spine of whole book, but Neill must have run out of ideas because she catches up to them about halfway through and bringing the wayward machines back home is remarkably easy. From there, a bunch of random small encounters pad out the book, such as a stray Mifkit (Scoodler?) popping up in Oz and being given gainful employment, and the return of the Bell-Snickle and its doomed attempt to capture the Emerald City of Oz with an army of trees. Two different chapters are made up of nothing more than the Sawhorse running dangerously fast for no real reason; at one point, the Tin Woodman freezes up and can't be saved because there is allegedly no oil in the whole Emerald City. A bunch of animals go on a rampage for the second book in a row.
The characters, especially in the second half of the book, keep telling each other how much fun they're having, Neill presumably hoping this will trick the reader into thinking they're having fun. As I alluded to above, Ozma doesn't intervene to stop the Bell-Snickle from attacking the Emerald City so that Dorothy, Trot, Betsy, Jellia, and Jenny can try to stop it... but they don't actually do anything, they just follow it around in their scalawagons.
And though Neill draws, as usual, some delightful images (the Soldier with the Green Whiskers holding the detached head of the Mifkit by the tongue was my favorite), I felt like there were fewer of them than in Wonder City. Altogether, the book is maybe a tad more coherent than Wonder City... which is probably to its detriment, as it was impossible to be bored reading Wonder City, but I was fairly often bored here.
But, like I said, my five-year-old son seemed to enjoy it throughout, so I guess Neill knew his target demographic. The only thing he didn't like was the Bell-Snickle's assault on the scalawagon factory. And, you know, I continue to be appreciative that Neill remembers many of Baum's characters that Thompson clearly forgot about, like Em and Henry, the Sawhorse, and Tik-Tok, while keeping hers in play too (Captain Salt and Sir Hokus both get a few good lines).
Longtime readers of my blog will know that every year since 2011, I have read a Christmas-themed Doctor Who book around Christmastime. I keep thinking I am done with this project. Last year, for example, I had no book to read, so instead I read a bunch of Christmas-themed Doctor Who short stories that had never been collected. But BBC Books keeps finding a way to extend the duration of this project; this year they released Ten Days of Christmas, a new short story collection (and early next year will release the novelization of the 2023 Christmas special, giving me something to read in 2024).
The title Ten Days of Christmas has a double meaning: it contains ten stories of course (though really nine, as there's one story split into two parts), but also they are all stories about "Ten," i.e., they all feature David Tennant's incarnation of the Doctor. This means you have a bit less variety than in any other of BBC Books's Christmas collections; the main choice there is for the writer is which companion the Doctor will be traveling with. (There's two stories with Rose, one with Donna, and one with Martha, though some of the stories where the Doctor is alone feature other returning characters.)
The book also suffers from a lack of variety due to its single author. Now, the previous two Doctor Who Christmas books were also the work of a single author... but it should come as no surprise that Steve Cole is not Dave Rudden. Most of these are generic Doctor Who adventures compressed into thirty pages, with little of the tone, style, or theme to make them into any kind of meaningful Christmas story; usually, Christmas feels tacked on. Or, if not tacked on, forced. There's one set in a toy factory, so sure, that's Christmassy... but then it's not really about Christmas presents in any kind of meaningful way, and it turns out to be what every Doctor Who fan wanted for Christmas, a sequel to The Android Invasion!
Well, maybe not.
There were just two stories that worked for me. The first was "The Eternal Present," which didn't really have anything to do with Christmas, but was a well-told character-focused story about an Englishman before World War II who goes on an expedition into the South American jungle with the Doctor and Rose and ends up discovering something amazing and dangerous. (It is, for some reason, a tie-in to Black Orchid, but you can ignore that.) Good sense of voice and some creepy scenes. The best story in the book is "Saviours," about a human space colony where vampires crash on Christmas day. This is the one story that captures something of what I think of as the Christmas vibe, the feeling of holding back the darkness with our love for one another. It's also creepy and well told, alternating between a child protagonist and a mysterious narrator. If they'd all been this good it would have been an excellent collection but alas.
I'm not one of those mad people who starts listening to it in early October, but as soon as we're home from our Thanksgiving trip, I synchronize the iPod and load up my collection of Christmas music—416 tracks and counting. And it is my firm belief that if Christmas lasts twelve days, you ought to be able to keep listening to Christmas music until January 6th... though my wife strongly disagrees with that.
I don't know that I could articulate exactly what I like about it... joyousness, hope, redemption, certainly, but also cold, and a sense that we're keeping that cold at bay.
Every year I try to pick up one or two Christmas albums that I don't already own and add them to my rotation. Here are five Christmas albums that I've been enjoying recently:
Bing Crosby, Christmas Classics (2006)
I am a big fan of Bing Crosby's Christmas music; I own 45 different tracks by him. Mostly in two albums, this one and The Best of Bing Crosby: The Christmas Collection, but also some tracks by him on an album my family owned growing up, It's Christmas Time, which had a mix of stuff by him, Frank Sinatra, and Nat King Cole, and is what introduced me to him. His version of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" is definitive.
A few years ago I suddenly wondered if he had ever done "The Little Drummer Boy" because it seemed like one he would have done really well. Some poking around led me to this album, which collects sixteen of his Christmas songs, only three of which overlapped with ones I already owned. Not just "The Little Drummer Boy," but some others of my favorite Christmas songs like "O Holy Night" and "What Child Is This?" The most fascinating song on the album, though, is a second version of "The Little Drummer Boy," done intercut with an original song "Peace on Earth" sung by David Bowie. This was created for a Bing Crosby tv Christmas special.
Over the Rhine, Blood Oranges in the Snow (2014)
The first two Christmas albums of Cincinnati band Over the Rhine, The Darkest Night of the Year. (1996) and Snow Angel (2006), have been favorites of mine since introduced to me by my father. The first is a mixture of staples and original compositions, the latter is all original (I think). Like a lot of stuff on this list, they have a slightly melancholy tone that really captures the Christmas spirit for me. This year, it occurred to me that it's been seventeen years since Snow Angel, had they put out a third Christmas album? Yes... almost a decade ago!
All the tracks on this one are good of course, but one day my five-year-old was there when "Let It Fall" was playing and he started going, "No, don't let it fall!", which made me really pay attention to the lyrics to that one for the first time: "Whatever we’ve lost, / I think we’re gonna let it go. / Let it fall, / Like snow. / 'Cause rain and leaves / And snow and tears and stars, / And that’s not all my friend, / They all fall with confidence and grace. / So let it fall, let it fall." It's a good reminder that there are things we needs to let go of and let fall, we can't keep it all wound up inside ourselves.
Chris Standring & Kathrin Shorr, Send Me Some Snow (2011)
I first heard a song from this album at Panera Bread, actually, frantically getting some grading done the Saturday after finals week in 2019. I was instantly drawn to its "cool vintage style" and Shazamed it to discover it was the work of Chris Standring (who plays the guitar) and Kathrin Shorr (who does the singing). I think they're married? I believe he's an bestselling performer of... jazz or something.
Anyway, this is an album of entirely original Christmas compositions that instantly feel timeless. They feel like something you could imagine coming out of the Big Crosby era of music... only he never sang any of these songs because they didn't exist yet. Shorr is a breathy, beautiful vocalist and really the person who makes the album soar. I like "Naughty or Nice" a lot, and the title track is excellent, but the one I've elected to share here is "Someone's Gotta Get Something for Christmas." Could that someone be me?
Sting, If on a Winter's Night... (2009)
When we regularly went home to Cincinnati every Christmas, my friend David would have us over for dinner. One year, this was playing and he revealed to me that it was by Sting of all people. (Admittedly, when it comes to Sting, I mostly think of him as the depraved Harkonnen nephew from Dune, but I'm reasonably certain most people don't think of him as the kind of guy who puts out Christmas albums.) There are few Christmas standards here; rather, it's an album of traditional English folk songs with lutes, guitars, trumpets, and so on. More than any other item on this list, it captures that idea I mentioned in my opening: it's a cold album, but what it celebrates is how we push back against it.
There are a lot of good tracks, but my favorite is "Soul Cake," about people going "souling" (door to door begging for a cookie-like food called a soul cake): "If you haven't got a penny, / A ha'penny will do; / If you haven't got a ha'penny, / It's God bless you." Sting's version mixes in some of the melody of my favorite Christmas carol, "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen," too. (Wikipedia tells me this owes a debt to a version by Peter, Paul, and Mary.)
Seth MacFarlane & Liz Gillies, We Wish You the Merriest (2023)
My choices can't all be original hipster nonsense, can they? When I was in grad school, a colleague—even more into Christmas music than me—was blaring some Bing Crosby-, Frank Sinatra-esque Christmas music in the program office. Who was singing, I asked, and I was astonished to learn that it was Seth "Family Guy" MacFarlane. I went home and picked up his album Holiday for Swing! (2014). He's no Bing Crosby, of course, but it's a pretty strong pastiche.
This year, he has a new one out, a set of duets with the former Disney Channel star Liz Gillies. The title track is strong, but my favorite is probably "Christmas Time All Over the World," where the two sing Christmas greetings from a variety of different languages. (Apparently this is originally a Sammy Davis, Jr. song, but as far as I know, this is the first I've heard it.)
Hopefully you've found something new here! This was fun to write up; maybe I'll do it again next year but with (somewhat) less pretentious picks.
Colorists:Marguerite Sauvage, Marissa Louise, Alex Guimarães
Letterer: Becca Carey
I had thought that I would wrap up my JSA journey (of almost four years!) with the Celebration of 75 Years collection, as I had no interest in the changes the New 52 wrought on the JSA characters (in addition to Earth 2, there was, for example, a World's Finest series co-starring Power Girl and Huntress) but while reading Amanda Conner's Power Girl run (see #47 in the list below), I bumped into some news about the character's recent revival, and saw that a collection was forthcoming. It had good reviews, so I thought, "why not?"
I'm not really in touch with DC continuity these days; I left off as a regular reader around the time of Convergence (which I never even finished), and that was over six years ago; I think the only things I've read since then have been someTomKingminiseries (are those even in continuity?) and N. K. Jemisin's Far Sector. So I didn't really have any context for this book; I think Power Girl's backstory has been rolled back to something approaching its pre-Flashpoint state, but I am not really sure. Mostly this doesn't matter to the story being told, but I didn't really know the status of the Super family, or why PG would feel excluded from them.
The premise of the book is pretty odd, to be honest. Some kind of event results in Power Girl obtaining psychic powers, so she and a new-to-me superhero with the not-very-heroic name of Ruin open a superhero counseling business. While Ruin talks to the heroes in the real world, Power Girl (physically?) journeys into their minds, helping clear away issues. I think probably there's a good story to be told about Power Girl adapting her often fists-first approach to something more nuanced, but this seemed to be more of a mediocre one. Like, it's not bad... but I also didn't find a lot to enjoy here. There's some neat puzzles to be solved, but Power Girl didn't totally ring true to me, and I would happily never see Johnny Sorrow in a JSA comic ever again—or, really, any kind of psychic manipulator trying to take down Power Girl.
The only convincing "explanation" for Power Girl's costume ever given, surely? Hopefully this means we can never bring it up ever again. from Action Comics vol. 1 #1052 (art by Marguerite Sauvage)
Power Girl ditching her civilian identity of Karen Starr and replacing it with "Paige" struck me as pretty pointless. Like, why do that? Would you suddenly have Batman declare that his name is Ryder now? No, of course not; it's the kind of desperate fiddling one only does to a second-tier character... but it's the kind of fiddling that never works because it just confirms to the reader that they're reading about a second-tier character. Give it a decade or two and I'm sure she'll be Karen again. On the other hand, I did like the reckoning between her and Supergirl, which had some nice moments.
People just love unsolicited life advice from estranged family members! from Action Comics vol. 1 #1053 (art by Marguerite Sauvage)
I like Maurgerite Sauvage's art style. She draws two-thirds of the book and has a distinctive, character-driven approach... but man, what is up with those thick black lines around everyone's eyes? It makes everyone look demented and ruins what would otherwise be a good effect.
Surely the real highlight of the book is the covers—and I say this as the kind of person who normally doesn't get very excited about comic book covers. I'm not very into the Stanley Lau cover for Power Girl Special #1 that was chosen for the collection cover (his stuff never looks very naturalistic to me), but the Warren Louw cover for Action Comics #1051 and the Will Jack covers for Action Comics #1053 and Power Girl Special were excellent, beautiful work. Plus, of course it's fun to get Amanda Conner back even if just on a variant (for Power Girl Special again) and I did like the David Nakayama variant for Power Girl Special, which features PG with her old Justice League International teammates Fire and Ice... though it seems a bit misleading DC used this on the back cover, given neither character appears in the actual book! My kids saw me reading this book and kept asking me about the characters, and now my five-year-old not only knows who Fire and Ice are, but can tell you that Fire used be called "the Green Flame" and Ice "Icemaiden"!
So, yeah, I do love Power Girl, but while this is a perfectly serviceable comic, it doesn't capture what I love about the character. Surely PG at her best will remain the Amanda Conner ongoing, as well as her old JLI/JLE appearances.
Almost four years on since All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever, this marks the end of my JSA journey! There is a new ongoing coming, I think, but I have no interest reading a third Geoff Johns–helmed revival; surely someone else out there has an idea for how to do the team. He's done his thing, let someone else do theirs. It's been twenty years since his first run! I might make some kind of summative post, but also I might never get around to doing so. We'll see.
My next comics reading project will hopefully be much shorter!
Cybermen: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection: Collected comic strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Alan Barnes, Andrew Cartmel, Mike Collins, Steve Dillon, Martin Geraghty, Scott Gray, David Lloyd, Alan McKenzie, Mike McMahon, Steve Moore, Grant Morrison, Paul Neary, Steve Parkhouse, John Ridgway, Adrian Salmon, et al.
Collection published: 2023 Contents originally published: 1979-2005 Acquired: September 2023 Read: October 2023
As with the Daleks collections, I obviously had to read this out
of sequence based on when it came out. Like with those, I just read the
new-to-me stories. If I was integrating this into my marathon from the
beginning, I'd just do the backup strips and read it after Dragon's Claws, saving the Doctor-focused strips for reading in the main volumes.
Deathworld, from Doctor Who Weekly #15-16 (Jan. 1980) script by Steve Moore, art by David Lloyd
Some Ice Warriors get attacked by some Cybermen. David Lloyd draws the
hell out of an Ice Warrior for the most part (somewhat less convinced by
his spindly Cybermen), but this—like a lot of monster-focused DWW
back-up strips to be honest—reads to me like the kind of thing that
would be thrilling if you were ten, but is more of an interesting
curiosity if you come to it as an adult.
Black Legacy, from Doctor Who Weekly #35-38 (June-July 1980) written by The Original Writer [Alan Moore], art by David Lloyd
Look, okay, maybe it's by Alan Moore, but I just can't take a Cyberman story where one shouts "What? Who... No! Blood of my ancestors, NOOOOOOOOO...." seriously. Like, this just isn't how it works.
from Doctor Who Weekly #16
Stray Observations:
New-to-me strip content: a whole sixteen pages! But also we get some new commentary by Paul Scoones on Junk-Yard Demon, Exodus/Revelation!/Genesis!, and The World Shapers. I particularly liked getting to hear from Grant Morrison about The World Shapers
(in an archival interview from 1987), and David Lloyd is always
interesting. Kind of funny they can't even say "Alan Moore" in the
commentaries. Does he appear like Voldemort if you say his name?
As a complete package, though, it's fairly
attractive; I like getting one bumper volume better than the two slim
Dalek ones. And there have been some great Cyberman strips in DWM history. I'm not sure I would count The Glorious Dead
as a Cyberman strip even though it's got Kroton in it, but I guess it
would be odd to leave it out of a book containing literally every other Kroton
strip. The best one remains, of course, The Flood.
List of all other stories and what collections they were previously printed in: (see links below to read my reviews)
Junk-Yard Demon (in Dragon's Claw)
Exodus / Revelation / Genesis! / The World Shapers (in The World Shapers)
The Good Soldier (in The Good Soldier)
Throwback: The Soul of a Cyberman / Ship of Fools / Unnatural Born Killers / The Company of Thieves / The Glorious Dead (in The Glorious Dead)
The Flood (in The Flood)
The Cybermen / Junk-Yard Demon II (in The Clockwise War)
This post is the fiftieth in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment covers Liberation of the Daleks. Previous installments are listed below:
After Ruth Plumly Thompson made her (sort of) last contribution to the Oz series with Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz, publisher Reilly & Lee invited longtime illustrator John R. Neill to write the Oz book for 1940 himself. At that point, he had been illustrating Oz for thirty-six years—surely there was no one else more qualified?
Well, the resulting book has a pretty terrible reputation. Everyone out there seems to dislike it; when I recently found the list of Oz books I had read as of 1997, I learned I had rated it the lowest of the Famous Forty. Even Reilly & Lee infamously disliked it, as upon receiving the manuscript, they tasked an editor to basically rewrite the whole thing. Eric Shanower informs us, "You have to read to at least chapter six of the published book before you reach a sentence that JRN actually wrote." As he admits, "Not that JRN’s original manuscript is any great shakes. It displays all
the reason[s] that the editors at Reilly & Lee thought it needed an
overhaul. However, I’m not sure it needed THIS overhaul."
But, perhaps this book more than any other shows the benefit of reading the Oz books aloud a chapter or two at a time to a five-year-old. Because when you do this, The Wonder City of Oz is hugely enjoyable!
The protagonist of Wonder City is Jenny Jump, a sixteen-year-old (I think) girl who lives by herself in New Jersey. She catches a leprechaun stealing her pepper cheese and transfixes him with her glare, which means he has to grant her a wish. She wishes to be turned into a fairy, but halfway through the process she blinks, meaning she's only half fairy (one fairy foot, one fairy eye, eight fairy fingers, and so on). When she stamps her fairy foot, she's propelled through the air to Oz, crashing down in the middle of Ozma's birthday parade. Soon, she's running a style shop and running in an "ozlection" to replace Ozma as ruler of Oz and helping fend off an invasion of shoe-eating sinister sponges from the Deadly Desert and going on an expedition to a chocolate star in an ozoplane with Jack Pumpkinhead and Scraps and much more.
Neill's Oz (or maybe his editor's Oz, but let's just say Neill's) is a weird, madcap place. If you're not careful, you can sew your mouth shut with magic thread; when you cry, your tears are candy; if you throw your cap into the air but forget to let go, you'll go up into the air with it; you might meet a voice that has lost his man; houses are alive enough to pick residents and battle each other and defend themselves from attack; you can train shoes to perform music; it's a legitimate worry that if someone wins an election in a landslide, the landslide could be strong enough to destroy a city. Though substantially more madcap, it does remind me a bit of the way things were back in the first book, before Baum had codified the rules of Oz so much and a Scarecrow could just come to life with no explanation. It's all the kind of thing that might annoy an older reader, but made my five-year-old cackle in delight.
The book technically has an overaching plot in the ozlection, but it's not really the point. It also has one in terms of Jenny's temper coming under control, though that one reads pretty badly to modern readers—first, the Wizard and the leprechaun conspire to de-age Jenny so that she's nicer (and regresses to before she obtained her fairy gifts), and then at the end, the Wizard removes a lot of Jenny's personality traits to make her nicer! The first intervention genuinely upset my son, and the second I edited out. He was also really upset when Jenny lost the ozlection (he really wanted her to beat Ozma!) but that nicely paralleled Jenny's own anger; she goes on a rampage and ends up releasing a bunch of ferocious plant-animals (e.g., tiger-lilies, foxgloves) on the city. I changed it so that seeing the results of her rampage caused Jenny to realize she had to manage her anger more productively—a lesson our five-year-old needs to learn, at least. (Though when I asked him, "do you ever get really angry when things don't go your way?" he claimed not!)
One of the weird things is that the Wizard suddenly has a penchant for disguises in this book; the commenters at the "Book of Common Focus" on Pumperdink point out that this is probably Neill being inspired by the MGM film of the previous year, where Frank Morgan plays several Emerald City characters, all of whom might be the Wizard in disguise. And it does kind of fit with things the Wizard does in Wonderful Wizard, Dorothy and the Wizard, and Little Wizard Stories. Here, he disguises himself as a customer at Jenny's style shop, as a broom man in Ozma's palace, and a doctor; seemingly, this is all to check out Number Nine, Jenny's Munchkin assistant who, by the time of the next book, is the Wizard's own assistant. That said, it comes across as a weird obsession; at one point he apologizes for not having enough time to put on a disguise, and when General Jinjur recognizes him, he teleports her back to her farm so she can't give him away.
Speaking of Jinjur, one of the delights of the book is that Neill (or his editor) seems to have remembered a lot of characters that Thompson either forgot about or abandoned. Jinjur has only a brief appearance but it's her first one since Tin Woodman, I think. We get dialogue for Uncle Henry and Aunt Em for the first time since Baum died. The Guardian of the Gates and the Wogglebug get a few meaningful scenes. We even get a pair of excellent scenes for Sir Hokus, Neill totally ignoring (wisely in my opinion) the really boring fate to which Thompson sentenced him in Yellow Knight. Here, he is just having fun chasing a two-headed dragon around the Emerald City, but he and the dragon pause their game to help Number Nine rid Jenny's style shop of an infestation of Nomes.
Of course, Neill always draws great pictures, but these are his best since the color plates were dropped, in my opinion. Clearly he starts from the pictures and then works out story events to justify them—and what better way could there be for him to work? How else would we ever get a two-page spread of Jack Pumpkinhead as conductor to a choir of shoes? I don't care how flimsy the justification is if I get to see pictures like this.
It's a wacky book, but probably the thing I like about more than anything else is that it might be the first Oz book to give us a sense of what it's like to live in Oz. Jenny travels to Oz, but beyond that, she doesn't do the usual Oz thing of questing somewhere. The whole book is set in or near the Emerald City, and just highlights the crazy, bizarre things that seemingly happen there on a daily basis. Life in Oz is a constant parade of delightful strangeness.
Justice Society of America: A Celebration of 75 Years
Collection published: 2015 Contents originally published: 1941-2012 Acquired: December 2019 Read: December 2019–September 2023
Writers: Gardner Fox, Robert Kanigher, John Broome, Dennis O'Neil, Paul Levitz, Roy Thomas, Len Strazewski, James Robinson, David Goyer, Geoff Johns & Alex Ross
Artists: Everett E. Hibbard, Martin Nodell, Bernard Baily, Howard Sherman, Chad Grothkopf, Sheldon Moldoff, Ben Flinton, Irwin Hasen, Joe Kubert, Alex Toth, Carmine Infantino, John Belfi, Frank Giacoia, Arthur F. Peddy, Bernard Sachs, Mike Sekowsky, Sid Greene, Dick Dillin, Joe Giella, Joe Staton, Rich Buckler, Jerry Ordway, Arvell Jones, Tony DeZuniga, Mike Parobeck, Mike Machlan, William Rosado, John Dell, Ray Kryssing, Stephen Sadowski, Michael Bair, Dave Meikis, Paul Neary, Rob Leigh, Alex Ross, Dale Eaglesham, Ruy Jose, Drew Geraci, Nicola Scott & Trevor Scott
When I began my JSA journey way back in December 2019, this 2015 volume had been put on sale on Comixology, so I picked it up; it contains a sampling of stories from across seventy-five years of the Justice Society, ranging from the first original story of the team in All Star Comics vol. 1 #4 (Mar./Apr. 1941) up to its then most recent incarnation in Earth 2 #6 (Jan. 2013). Some of it was redundant with material I was going to read anyway, but it was a good source for stories I would not have otherwise have read, and I sprinkled those among the other tales of my four-year Justice Society marathon. I'll review those ones here, but also point out where you can find my comments on the other inclusions.
All Star Comics vol. 1 #4, 37, & 55 (Mar./Apr. 1941–Oct./Nov. 1950) These are three classic JSA stories. All Star #4 wasn't their first adventure—but it was their first adventure as a team. The first three issues of All Star had the JSA regaling each other with tales of solo adventures; this one has them all working together, though though do the traditional thing of splitting up to handle their own aspects of the case, and the individual parts are even drawn by each character's usual artist. All three are Golden Age comics: more interesting for what they do than the crude way in which they do it. But I did enjoy the sprawling nature of All Star #4 in particular; it's a whopping sixty pages!
from Justice League of America vol. 1 #82 (script by Denny O'Neil, art by Dick Dillin & Joe Giella)
Justice League of America vol. 1 #21-22, 30, 47, & 82-83 (Aug. 1963–Sept. 1970) Of course, you couldn't have a Justice Society history collection without JLA #21-22, the story that reintroduced them as denizens of Earth-2 during the Silver Age. But I don't really get what the other ones are doing here; I didn't really enjoy them when I originally read them in the various Crisis on Multiple Earths volumes, and I didn't enjoy them here. It would have been better to use some of the stories that tap into the idea that the JSA has its own history where characters can really grow and change, like JLA #171-72.
from Justice League of America vol. 1 #193 (script by Roy Thomas, art by Rich Buckler & Jeremiah Ordway)
Justice League of America vol. 1 #193 (Aug. 1981) This fourteen-page backup serves as a prelude to All-Star Squadron. It probably reads weirdly on its own, to be honest, but if you're going to read All-Star Squadron afterward (and I did), it provides excellent context for issue #1. If A-SS is ever collected, I imagine this will be included, but there's no sign of that thus far.
All-Star Squadron #67 (Mar. 1987) The post-Crisis origin of the JSA, which I already reviewed as part of All-Star Squadron. I would have preferred to see an actual A-SS story, but this is fine.
Justice Society of America vol. 2 #10 (May 1993) / All Star Comics vol. 2 #2 (May 1999) / JSA #25 (Aug. 2001) / Justice Society of America vol. 3 #10 (Dec. 2007) A number of modern age revivals and/or flashbacks that I've already reviewed: the 1990s one, an installment of The Justice Society Returns!, an issue of JSA (included in JSA by Geoff Johns, Book Two), and an issue of Geoff Johns's second Justice Society revival. For every single one of these series, I would have picked something else. I was glad to see the 1990s revival here, because it's often overlooked... but surely the first issue would make more sense than the last. The installment of The Justice Society Returns! included here doesn't even make sense in context, much less out of it; literally any other issue of the event would have been better. The JSA issue is part of a tedious crossover with Hawkman; there surely must have been a better option. And the last inclusion here is from another big event, Thy Kingdom Come; I would have picked Johns's last issue on the series, "Happy Birthday Stargirl!"
from Earth 2 #6 (script by James Robinson, art by Nicola Scott & Trevor Scott)
Earth 2 #6 (Jan. 2013) I mean, I guess they had to include some issue of Earth 2 here, and someone must like it, but this just confirmed to me that everything I suspected about the series was true. This has character names from the JSA, but making them contemporary characters battling the apocalypse means they lose everything that makes the JSA interesting and enjoyable.
Overall, a pretty mixed bag, to be honest. Some necessary inclusions, but some pretty questionable ones, too.
This post is the penultimate in an improbably long series about the Justice Society and
Earth-Two. The next installment covers Power Girl Returns.Previous installments are listed
below:
Americana: The Making of the Cities: Cincinnati by Lee Davis Willoughby
The Making of America was a series of novels published from (according to LibraryThing) 1979 to 1987; there were an astounding fifty-six of them. They chronicled, as far as I can tell, the settling of the American West, but I don't think they had consistent characters or stories. The first few books are credited to a number of different authors, but beginning with book nine, they're all the work of Lee Davis Willougby... except that Lee Davis Willoughby didn't exist, it was a pseudonym for a variety of authors. LibraryThing lists six different authors known to have written under the name.
In 1990, there was evidently an attempt to recapture the success of The Making of America with a new series of novels, Americana: The Making of the Cities. Three volumes were released, covering Cincinnati, Omaha, and Baton Rouge. These evidently were less successful, for these three were it, and thirty-three years later, I am the only person on LibraryThing to have logged any of the three novels. I picked up Cincinnati as part of my project to read novels set in my hometown of Cincinnati.
The novel focalizes the development of Cincinnati from the 1830s to the 1860s through a German immigrant, one of the first to come to Cincinnati. As the descendant of German immigrants myself (though they came over later, in the 1870s), I was particularly interested to read this take on it.
Alas, as you might have guessed of a pseudonymously written work of the type where you might pump out seven books in a year... it's not very good. I think my biggest problem is that despite the title, you don't get much of a sense of the city. Most of the book is given over to the melodrama of its protagonist's life, with the development of the city as a vague background. What is it like to walk around and live in Cincinnati in 1830? 1850? 1860? We only get glimpses. Facts about the history feel crowbarred in to prove the writer did their research; people will say things like, "Cincinnati has more people per square mile than any other city in the Union," or mention that Frances Trollope has visited the city for no real reason, or suddenly start talking about the creation of the Mount Lookout Observatory, and then go back to what they were supposed to be saying. There are a lot of neat aspects of Cincinnati history to be uncovered, but they aren't really integrated into the story.
The story in the foreground is pretty meh. The protagonist is a real piece of work, brutal in business, forceful and exploitative of women, callous toward people of color. Whoever Willoughby was in this case, their writing ability doesn't rise to the level of making this interesting to read about; our glimpses of the protagonist's mind are trite. As the book goes on, more and more of it is given over to this subplot about potential incest involving the protagonist's children. It goes on too long and it's just not very well written.
It's 372 pages long, but I blazed through it in less than two days. Before reading it, I was mildly curious about Omaha, but given the quality of this one, I won't be seeking out any other Lee Davis Willoughby... whoever they were.
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