Category Archives: Words

Reaper’s Gale

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If you’re wondering where I’ve been all this time, it’s a fair question. I mean, I’ve been wondering too, and this is speaking as someone who knows! But to answer you, no, I don’t have an incredible backlog of stuff that I need to get out in a rush, before I forget every little remaining detail of all those books. This is because, quite simply, I don’t have any backlog at all. I’ve been behind this one Malazan book the entire time. And after all this time, the better part of a month, I don’t have a lot I can really say. Reaper’s Gale is the seventh book of a ten book series, and it’s not just that I’d be worried about spoilers (although I would), it’s that it’s really no longer possible to describe the plot in meaningful terms to people who aren’t fellow readers, and I know there are not very many yet.

What I can talk about is the gamut of emotions each new book brings.[1] First of all, there’s the vividness of it all. I can cackle at one scene, cringe at the next, and feel terrible at the (almost never overblown) pathos of the random vagaries of life in a third. I can watch a genocidal war prosecuted and not really hate any of the characters involved in it even while feeling the horror, not just at the fact of it but at the separate fact that the characters know what they’re doing. It’s not just that almost every character is likeable in his or her own way, it’s that the entire series is most heavily concerned with redemption, and it’s available to everyone who really wants it. Happiness is often fleeting and never guaranteed, victory is as changeable as the sands of the desert, and justice, well, it turns out that justice is out there, but since I would link it with redemption, that just makes sense.

At the end of each of these books, I am torn between wanting to dive ahead and knowing that I have to move on to something else, and frankly wanting that pretty badly too. But sometime in the next few years after I’ve finished the series and let it settle, I’m going to have to go back and read the whole thing in a row, even though it will take me half a year or better. Not because I don’t remember what happened, but because I want to see how things look in development when I know how they will end. If you had asked me, I think I would not have predicted being this attached to a doorstop fantasy series that defines itself by who has died.

[1] Or at least what this one brings; after all, it’s been a while since I read any of the others.

Astro City: Family Album

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An inevitable downside of reading books back to back[1] is that I’m forced to make comparisons that I might not make if there was a several-month gap in between, per the usual. In this particular case, I am forced to admit that Family Album does not have the strength of the first volume. …and, apparently that it is itself the third volume, not the second as I had believed? Note to self: stop borrowing graphic novels, as you are apt to read them out of order! (In everyone’s defense, there are no numbers on the covers or for that matter inside, so I can see how it happened.)

Well. That was disheartening. Anyway, the stories were a mixed bag. Even though they have been universally fun and well-drawn[2] throughout, I cannot help but notice overly intentional comparisons to familiar comic book heroes. And it’s not like these comparisons are badly created or even particularly derivative. The respectful homage is clear, it’s just that it pulls me a little bit out of the story when I catch myself saying, okay, yeah, that’s definitely the Fantastic Four, nice twist in the family dynamic here, I see what they did with the enemies there, and so on. And as that is certainly my biggest complaint for the book, you can see by its size that in general things went quite well. The big theme of the book, children in unusual family situations, covered three stories that simultaneously gave me a lot more background on some already familiar heroes. And of course there’s always something new around each corner.

It’s just… it didn’t have the bright shiny sense of wonder of the first volume, that feeling that, whoa, they’re really pulling this off. Instead, I’m already into the “What can you do for me next?” phase. Which is clearly my fault, but like I say, I would’ve been better off if I had just read it later than now.[3]

[1] This is a thing I am noticing, rather than a reason why I never do so; still my policy is clearly correct, as is now shown.
[2] Both ways
[3] And in the right order.

Astro City: Life in the Big City

Never let it be said that I do not leap to grant the wishes of my loyal readers! Or at least, that serendipity does, ’cause my semi-boss semi-randomly loaned me the first two volumes of the Astro City series within a day of when lots of people here recommended I read it soon. And I put loaner books on the top of my reading queue, as you do, which means I have already read one such, and the other is not all so far behind. Astro City has a thousand stories: Life in the Big City is a very episodic series of vignettes about six of them. And they’re really all quite good, but I think the whole exceeds the sum, because they are merely “quite good”, aside from the first one which is basically a meditative work of genius on the negative sides of being a hero.

But taken as a whole, the book has to accomplish a lot of things in a very small amount of space. It introduces an entire world with decades of history, and, okay, since there are decades of comic history and everyone always starts these parallel worlds back in the late ’30s when the superhero comic was born, I suppose it’s fair to say that people have a frame of reference there. But in addition to the world itself, it introduces decades of heroes and villains, tragedies and triumphs, all of which I have learned only enough about to know for a fact that I want to learn more; and yet I will almost certainly never accomplish more than scratching the surface. This is the kind of depth you can’t always count on getting out of multiple volumes of doorstop fantasy series, and it’s just scattered around like leaves in the fall, underfoot and part of the landscape, barely remarked upon from one vignette to the next. And I guess this is why I’m so impressed, because it has the feel of a new author writing stories in a world that has actually existed with decades of continuity all along, this being just the current batch of events; except for how that continuity does not in fact exist. And then the stories themselves take you from the petty to the profound, the average to the alien, and obviously not to every stop along the way, because that would be stretching the metaphor and the praise both a little thin. But at the same time, I can’t help believing that if the series went on long enough, “every stop along the way” would be entirely possible.

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

A couple-few years ago, I saw the musical performance of Wicked in Dallas. It was a little heavy-handed with its pro-PETA message, but entertaining for all of that, plus at the time we were under a tornado warning (no shit) and the power actually went out briefly mid-show. The chick who was playing Elphaba? Good lungs, as she was able to joke at the audience until the power came back up, and everyone could hear her. So you see.

Sometime not long afterwards, I picked up a copy of the book that inspired all that, also named Wicked. Then, as is often the case, some years later I have read it, and my reaction is extremely mixed. On the one hand, I’m a little surprised to have liked it, even though I couldn’t say why. I mean, I liked its derivative work well enough, right? But still, I went into it expecting not so much, but with enough interest to understand why all the fuss. Instead, I got a pretty neatly put together series of five stories that probably could have been about five different people, even though they are not. The styles differ wildly (my favorite was the second part, at school, which reminded me constantly of Jane Austen) and the portrayals of our main character differ as well, due mostly to extensive passage of time between each section. I wouldn’t want to see it in a lot of books, but I kind of approve of Maguire’s choice to disregard continuity, perhaps in an attempt to give his audience more insight into the central point he is making about passing judgment without very many facts?

Which, right, I suppose I shouldn’t ought to assume everyone knows about the book. It is, basically, the other side of the story of the Wizard of Oz, in which our wicked Witch, Elphaba, went to college with Glinda, joined political resistance against a tyrannical usurper who styled himself the Wizard of Oz, and was eventually brought low by one Dorothy who frankly had no idea what was going on around her and was everyone’s pawn at every turn. And like I say, it’s a pretty entertaining story, with a lot of interesting character voices and structural choices. So why am I ambivalent? Because, at some point in the story, after her political agitations but before the arrival of her destined nemesis, Elphaba starts to reflect upon her legacy and quickly to fixate upon it, which gives Maguire an excuse to start dealing with everything through the prism of Literature, and Theme, and Essay Questions. And if there’s one thing I cannot stand, it is the 20th Century tendency toward intentional art. People should ought to create what they want to see, not what they believe other people will consider important. And that’s the worst part: this book is something I wanted to see. It just lost its way, somewhere along that yellow brick road.

Ultimatum: Requiem

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If you are anything like me, you are wondering: why did you read so many Marvel Ultimate comics in a row just now? Way more than usual, and also you were kind of pissed, right? Well, the thing is, despite my distaste for the handling, I really had no choice but to see how things worked out for Spider-Man after reading that issue, so finishing up was my only valid option. And here we are.

Ultimatum: Requiem does about what a student of Latin would expect. That is, it sings a song for the dead. At least, that is kind of what it does. Although there are obituaries galore, at least one very moving and many of the rest little more than thinly veiled character histories, the bigger theme tying the three authors and stories together is aftermath. What will New York City be like with its self-appointed guardian Spider-Man presumed dead in the wreckage? Can the Fantastic Four survive the losses they have taken, to their families, to their mutual trust, to their innocence? Will the mutant community survive the knowledge that one of their own became, in one day, the most successful mass murderer in history? What could have been (and okay, in the case of the X-Men, was; you can’t win ’em all) not much more than an excuse to tie off loose ends before the brand changes to Ultimate Comics and new stories begin was instead a chance to acknowledge the wounds experienced by a whole world and put them in a human context. Superhero comics are always about wish fulfillment to some degree or other, but sometimes, they are more. Despite a deeply flawed execution of a tenuous premise, I figure a couple of authors were able to eke that out of even this situation.

(And I’m not just saying that because Joe Pokaski proved me wrong by in fact explaining to some degree what had happened to the Human Torch after all. I mean, it still wasn’t all that interesting, but at least he gets one of the two aftermath wins to make up for it.)

Ultimatum

jpegSo, Ultimatum, right? I’ve been talking about this for maybe longer in real time than Marvel did when they were gearing up for it in the first place. Due to some extremely poorly hidden spoilers that even show up in the titles of graphic novel collections, Magneto is finally sufficiently pissed off at humanity to do something about us once and for all, the major upshot of which is that Manhattan is devastated by an enormous tidal wave, in exactly the style you have seen so many times before. And then, shit goes down.

And the thing is, that sounds pretty okay to me as a premise. The whole world is affected, sure, but New York gets the lion’s share of focus, just as Marvel has always done. But then they screwed up my experience by dividing the story between the Ultimatum issues and the issues of the various series they had in progress at the time. Still, I think I could have been okay with that too, except that the actual event issues, even after I disregard the poor ordering, were… tawdry. Largely, they were a series of strung-together faux-shocking events, one after another, designed for maximum impact predicated upon minimum thought. And even that I could forgive, except that solid chunks of the events have no explanation at all. What really happened to the Human Torch? Did I miss something regarding Quicksilver’s fate, or was it presented as a fait accompli with no prior reference? Does Namor actually have any relevance to anything in the entire Ultimate universe? And since I’ve actually read the entire sequence now, it’s not like I can pretend to myself that these questions were answered or even acknowledged as valid.[1]

Essentially, there were a handful of characters that had a story arc in the Ultimatum event, and everyone else was only present to be trimmed down or because we knew they’d be supposed to be present during a global terrorist event. For the record, Wolverine, Magneto, Spider-Man, and J. Jonah Jameson actually had interesting stories to be told. Oh, and, to my very great surprise, Henry Pym. Iron Man and the Thing did okay. And that’s really all. For the climactic event of a ten year series, that is not nearly enough.

[1] I lie, as I have not completed Requiem yet. But I know I’m right. And even if I’m wrong, making stuff up and explaining it a few months later? Unsatisfying!

Ultimate Spider-Man: Ultimatum

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Okay, just to get it out of the way: the Ultimatum storyline is poorly collected across three or four books. (I am hoping across only three, and that the epilogue book will at least have continuity[1] again.) I have read each of the three books in question, so I can say this with authority now, not merely the speculation that marked my last review. As a result, even Spider-Man’s take on the Ultimatum event is kind of disjointed. But here’s what I liked about it. While the other authors were stumbling past each other trying to figure out who could tell which part of whose story and in what order, Bendis got past the actual event as quickly as possible so that he could tell a smaller, more personal story about the immediate aftermath, and not incidentally about the nature of heroism.

The final issue of Spider-Man’s Ultimate run, #133, had the fewest words I think I’ve ever seen in a single comic issue. It may also have been the most affecting I’ve seen. And just to repeat myself, this in the midst of what has otherwise been a useless mishmash of tangled and rarely more than half-complete storylines. But, y’know, I should save a little vitriol for the next review, since this one deserves basically none whatever.

[1] The literary kind, not the years-or-decades-of-plot kind.

Collision Course

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As you may already be well aware, William Shatner wrote several entertaining-despite-their-self-indulgence novels about the future of James Kirk, who thanks to various authorial tricks is functionally immortal. You couldn’t take them as high drama, but except for the last one you could mostly like them. Anyway, another two and a half years have passed, which made me due for reading his Kirk prequel novel, Collision Course. The series it was evidently meant to be spawning is not in evidence anywhere, so I suppose that means the book didn’t do too well. I theorize that this is a result of the previous book’s badness rather than any particular flaw of the current one, because honestly it was exactly what you would expect it to be. Which is not to say it was without flaws: far from it. But there are enough of them out to have a pretty good idea of whether you like Shatner’s vision enough to make up for his excess, so nobody could really buy it not knowing exactly what they’d be getting, is my point.

As for said prequel, here’s what it does. It takes teenaged Jimmy Kirk and slightly less teenaged Spock and chronicles their first meeting and the start of their friendship. See, there’s a plot involving stolen dilithium, stolen Vulcan cultural artifacts, and an army of killer children, and they end up in the middle of it due to possible complicity from Spock’s father and Jimmy’s Academy girlfriend, non-respectively. Also, there is a link to Kodos the Executioner, so that’s nice for longtime fans. And as usual, he gets a lot of things right through his many years of time spent in Kirk’s head. The only thing he particularly gets wrong, in fact, is that it’s a little too perfect. All of the important protagonist and antagonist players are involved in the plot from start to finish. There’s no tightening web of intrigue, no choice to get involved. As a result, everything is too pat. Which didn’t make the storytelling less good, but it did constantly take me out of the story. Pity, as it was a quick, engaging read except for that.

Powers: Who Killed Retro Girl?

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Here’s the thing. Either I (via listening to my friends and Amazon recommendations, it’s true, but in this case also on my own merits, since I bought it used and un-recommended) am really good at picking graphic novel series that I will like, or else I am a sucker for the format and just like any of them that I read. I don’t wish to test the theory by picking up something I expect to dislike and seeing how it goes; apparently because my happiness trumps science.[1] I’m not exactly sure how to tell you to calibrate your expectations when I don’t know which of the options is the truth, but at least now you know the pain I go through on a daily basis in trying to bring you as objective of a report as possible.

Thanks to having completed and / or caught up on so many of my ongoing series, I have as implied started a new one: Powers, by Brian Michael Bendis. (Oh, so right, technically that made it kind of a known quantity? I still say my selection algorithm is probably superior!) The simple but fairly cool concept is one I’ve seen a lot of during my years of Marvel comics, only from the other side. In a world full of superheroes and supervillains, the cops still have to solve crimes, keep people safe, generally do their jobs. Who Killed Retro Girl? is a story about that, with the added twist that the big crime that defines the new partnership between police detectives Christian Walker and Deena Pilgrim is the murder of one of these superheroes. Aside from the mystery, it’s pretty much an introductory book in every way: to the world, to the characters, to their relationships, to their antagonists. So mostly, what your interest level will be come downs to whether you like them and their world or not.

I did.

[1] Science!

The Dresden Files: Welcome to the Jungle

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If you had never heard of Harry Dresden before and didn’t want to sink much time or effort into deciding how you felt about the idea of reading his series, Welcome to the Jungle would be an excellent jumping-off point. For one thing, it is a prequel to the first book, so it’s not like spoilers are really possible. For another, the short format-limits of a reasonably sized graphic novel make it a pretty small time investment, and the high ratio of art to dialogue (even counting Harry’s omnipresent first-person monologue) makes that investment even smaller. In point of fact, I read the majority of the story around listening to a friend’s disco cover band playing at an area strip club. There were distractions galore, is all I’m saying, and yet it went by with surprising quickness.

For the as-yet uninitiated, Harry Dresden is Chicago’s only freelance wizard. In practice, this means that he sometimes helps people with minor tasks that could usually be done non-magically just as well, but mostly he assists the Chicago PD when weird things happen that nobody can explain. Like a zoo groundskeeper being violently killed, purportedly by a gorilla who obviously couldn’t have done it except that people like that answer better than some kind of magic bugaboo as culprit. Mix in a hellhound, a damsel in distress, and a power-hungry mastermind and you’ve got the makings of a quick and dirty mystery that does a fine job of introducing our Harry to my hypothetical too-busy-to-read populace. Enjoy!